“You came to me,” I reminded him. It was why I’d come back to clear things up with him. Most of the people on his books were aboveboard applicants who were recruited via his website: usually they were soldiers returning from war with no hope of going back to a humdrum civilian lifestyle. After Wetherby put them through a rigorous selection process, he sent them off to a training camp that he ran in the Everglades. Those that passed the course were shipped off to be close-protection bodyguards to businesspeople or minders to celebrities. But then there were other contracts that Wetherby negotiated—for these he sought and recruited specialists. Basically he was pimping murderers. It was this arm of his business that I’d taken umbrage with.

“Contrary to what you think, I don’t deal with criminals,” Wetherby said. “When I found out about Rickard, I immediately severed all communication.”

“He’s that bad?”

“And then some.”

I shared a glance with Rink. Returning my attention to Wetherby, I asked, “So how is it that no one seems to have heard of him?”

“He’s that good at what he does.”

Imogen Ballard had thwarted him twice, and now so had his wife. “So why’s he making all these mistakes all of a sudden?”

“I can’t begin to imagine why,” Wetherby said.

“Tell me about him.”

Wetherby didn’t have to rack his brains very much and I wondered if he’d been considering Rickard as the shooter the first time we were here. If he’d said so then maybe a couple of his men wouldn’t have needed a few days off to recuperate.

“First off, he’s not really named Luke Rickard. That’s an assumed identity.”

I’d already come to that conclusion. “So who is he?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “No idea.”

“How did you hear about him?”

“Some of the other men were talking about him. They’d heard stories from out in the field. It seems that Rickard is a freelance assassin who works for those willing to pay the highest fee.”

I thought about a man I’d killed last year. Dantalion: a freak who went by the name of a fallen angel. He had been a freelance assassin too. He didn’t work through the usual channels either.

“What’s his background?”

“I’d guess that he was military.”

“His prints aren’t on record, so that rules that out.”

“Assuming that he’s an American, you mean?”

He had a point. Both the FBI and CIA had been concentrating on their own databases. I made a mental note to have Harvey cast the net farther afield. “From what you were able to dig up on him, who are the people he’s worked for in the past?”

“You know how difficult something like that is to substantiate. I can only tell you about the rumors . . .”

“So tell me.”