He couldn’t whistle his way past this any longer! Someone had come in here since he had left this morning. Someone had been here before Liz Becker pushed her note under the door. Until now Devlin had felt this, if at all, only in the distance—no panic that he was handling well enough to congratulate himself for. Now that it was close enough for Devlin to shrink from the heat of its breath, Devlin’s pulse raced. He could feel his blood pressure rising in his teeth.

He wanted to sit down. He was tied to Brennan, Lopez, and Antonucci. He had been sent out of town right after Brennan’s murder, minutes after, then drawn in to witness Lopez’s murder by Antonucci—and while that had been happening, someone had come in here to remove the only evidence, however thin and faint, that anyone but Devlin was responsible for his actions over the past twenty-four hours. Less than eighteen hours, actually. No Cummings. What about the Quinns? Involved in this was someone who knew Devlin well enough to proceed with everything else in the plan on the basis of a call to Devlin from the nonexistent Captain Cummings. The last eighteen hours were only what Devlin could see. The plotting went back—how far? Months?

Involving at least one person who knew him better, perhaps, than he knew himself.

Very few people knew him at all, he was thinking, when he suddenly asked himself about Liz Becker. Liz Becker, for instance, for example: did she remember him so well? How many Liz Beckers were there in his life, people who had come and gone? People now in the middle distance?

And who among them hated him so much, considered him so low, as to position him in the middle of Jack Brennan’s killing? And for what purpose? Devlin was nothing to anyone outside of his own immediate circle; he didn’t even think like “Nightclub” Devlin anymore. He had been a different man for years. When he had gone to A.A., he had thought he was happily turning himself into a nobody. No. He hadn’t known it at the time, not the way he knew it now, but he had been turning himself into a human being, the one he was today.