“Me?” he said.

“You.”

He smiled and looked away, slightly embarrassed. “Books.”

“Books?” Oscar laughed.

He turned on him. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, nothing. Go on, Agent Bolton. You the man.”

“What kind of books?” Angie said.

“The great ones,” Bolton said, a little sheepish. “Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Shakespeare, Flaubert.”

“And if they were outlawed?” Angie said.

“I’d break the law,” Bolton said.

“You wild man,” Devin said. “I am appalled.”

“Hey.” Bolton glared at him.

“What about you, Oscar?”

“Food,” Oscar said and patted his belly. “Not health food, but real tasty heart-attack food. Steaks, ribs, eggs, chicken-fried steak and gravy.”

Devin said, “What a shock.”

“Damn,” Oscar said. “Just went and made myself hungry.”

“Devin?”

“Cigarettes,” he said. “Booze probably.”

“Patrick?”

“Sex.”

“You,” Oscar said, “are a whore, Kenzie.”

“Fine,” Angie said. “These are the things that get us through, make life bearable. Cigarettes, books, food, cigarettes again, booze, and sex. That’s us.” She tapped the stack of flyers. “What about him? What can’t he go without?”

“Killing,” I said.

“That’d be my guess,” she said.

“So,” Oscar said, “if he’s been forced to take a vacation for twenty years—”

“No way he’d make it,” Devin said. “No fucking way.”

“But he hasn’t been calling attention to his kills,” Bolton said.

Angie lifted a stack of flyers. “Until now.”

“He’s been killing kids,” I said.

“For twenty years,” Angie said.

Erdham came in at ten to report that a man wearing a cowboy hat and driving a stolen red Jeep Cherokee had blown a red light at an intersection on Wollaston Beach. Quincy Police had given chase and lost him on a steep curve of 3A in Weymouth, which he maneuvered and they didn’t.

“Chasing a fucking Jeep on a curve?” Devin said in disbelief. “These Mario Andrettis slide out, but a somersault machine like a Cherokee holds the curve?”

“That’s the size of it. Last seen heading south over the bridge by the old naval yard.”

“What time was that?” Bolton said.

Erdham checked his notes. “Nine thirty-five on Wollaston. Nine forty-four when they lost him.”

“Anything else?” Bolton said.

“Yeah,” Erdham said slowly, looking at me.

“What?”

“Mallon?”

Fields stepped into the kitchen holding a stack of small tape recorders and at least fifty feet of coaxial cable.

“What’s that?” Bolton said.

“He bugged the entire apartment,” Fields said, refusing to look at me. “The recorders were fastened by electrical tape to the underside of the landlord’s porch. No tapes inside. The cables fed into a junction port up on the roof, mixed in with the cable TV and electrical and phone lines. He ran the cables down the side of the house with the rest of the wires and you’d never notice unless you were looking for it.”

“You’re shitting me,” I said.

Fields gave me an apologetic shake of his head. “’Fraid not. By the amount of dust and mildew I found on these cables, I’d say he’s been listening to everything going on inside your apartment for at least a week.” He shrugged. “Maybe more.”