I asked him to expand on the radical rhetoric, or what they’d found in the room Benjamin had rented with a Pakistani family after his uncle died, but they refused to provide more detail: they knew what they knew.

“I see,” I said. Really, though, I didn’t see-anything. It didn’t sound like a catalog of evil, but I didn’t know what “radical rhetoric” covered. Death to Israel? Death to America? Death to abortion providers? Radical or patriotic, depending on your viewpoint. If Benji advocated all three, then I’d have to rethink covering up for him. But I’d wait for Father Lou to finish interrogating him before I turned him over to these guys. My own judgment might be at fault, but I sure didn’t trust any of the people at the table more.

Bobby said if I would just explain how I’d spent the afternoon, they’d wrap up the meeting.

“I returned phone calls. I ran errands. I ran my dogs. I ate dinner.” “No one saw you run your dogs,” the Cook County attorney said. “The fact that you staked out my building is sufficiently depressing without you boasting about it. You have a record of my phone calls, too?” The look that Derek and the U.S. attorney exchanged told me all I wanted to know about that. “I was at a TechSurround outlet on Fullerton. You can probably get a record of my transactions by raiding their cash register, or hacking into their computer, or whatever you feel you can do in the name of protecting the country.”

Schorr wanted to bluster more about what I’d really done last night, but everyone else seemed as worn out as I was. Or maybe I’d embarrassed them into silence, just a little.

Bobby broke the silence, turning to look at the woman with the recording equipment. “Sissy, we’re done for the night. You can collect your things and go.”

Sissy? That didn’t seem like a very imposing name for a police officer. Sissy said “Yessir,” switched off the system and labeled her disks.

The DuPage attorney stood up, saying he had a long drive, but he’d call Bobby as soon as he knew the status of Marcus Whitby’s body. That effectively broke up the meeting. Derek and the U.S. attorney left at once, along with the two county attorneys. Schorr threatened me with grievous bodily harm, or a month in prison, or maybe both if I crossed him again-I wasn’t paying a lot of attention by that point.

“Can one of your team give me a ride home?” I said to Bobby when the room had cleared. “As you know, I didn’t drive myself down.”

Bobby nodded. “Finch, go find someone to give Princess Grace here a lift.”

That was what Bobby called me when he thought I was being a nuisance. It wasn’t exactly a term of endearment-but he would never have used it in front of the DuPage and federal officials.

When Terry had left to find me a driver, Bobby told me to join him at the head of the table so he wouldn’t have to shout. `Jack Zeelander is a pain in the behind,” he commented. “All the Feds these days are chasing shadows. They’re so upset at missing the obvious last summer that they grab at every straw the wind blows by ‘em, hoping it’ll lead them someplace. I can understand that-we’ve had murder investigations here where the heat was so high we burned ourselves and never caught the perp. But Zeelander wants to be in Washington so bad you can smell the ambition on him and it doesn’t make him a trustable colleague.”