Glenn was surprised. Not a word from the guy for over a year. Then a phone call, a visit, and a second call in the space of a week.

“Lo and behold,” he said. “Knew I should have explained my picking up the tab the other night was a one-time deal—”

“I need help.”

Glenn’s face suddenly became serious.

“What is it?”

“Something you maybe don’t want to take on,” Ricci said. “Might not even want to know about, because just knowing puts you in it to where you have advance knowledge.”

“As in the sort of knowledge that might not be any good for my job status?”

“Could be,” Ricci said. “Could be that won’t be the worst of it. You say good-bye right now, it’s fine. You decide to take a pass, I’m okay with that, too.”

“How long do I have to think about this?”

“Till I hang up the phone,” Ricci said. “If you’re in with me, you have to be up here tonight. Early as possible.”

Glenn thought it over a few seconds, the receiver cradled against his shoulder, his eyes wandering toward the high, reliable cranes framed by his window.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Let me hear it.”

A country route near Portola State Park, half past eleven at night, a ground mist spreading over the roots of the oaks and madrones. Under a low roof of clouds the sky was moonless and starless.

The shingle outside the square, flat, single-story brick building read PARKVILLE VETERINARY CLINIC, KENNETH W. MOORE, D.V.M., PH.D., but there was scarcely enough light seeping from the windows on the clinic’s north side—and from the dashboard of the police cruiser parked out front—for someone even a yard or two away to see the sign with his unaided eye. Discerning the doctor’s name and credentials would be almost impossible.

In the thick woods that belted the clinic’s parking lot, Ricci would have known what the lettering said without having to use his portable night-vision binoculars—the vet’s name being one among many details he’d marked while driving past the clinic with Rollie Thibodeau almost twelve hours earlier, doing a canvass for reasons he’d kept to himself. Still, he found the definition with which it appeared in the high-mag, IR-boosted illuminator tubes exceptional. A clear, close, fully stereoscopic image. It was not so many years ago that night vision optics gave you green ghosts moving among ghost-objects and a poor sense of their spacial relationships. The ability to read a sign in pitch darkness at fifty yards and judge its distance was an asset he would have coveted as a SEAL, and later as a Beantown homicide cop. He did not take it for granted.