“Done and you’re welcome, Gayle. Once you get hold of her passport info or anything else, get on the horn A-sap.”

“Done and you’re welcome. I’ll give your regards to Hal.”

“He takes your calls, does he?”

“Must be my feminine mystique.”

Sean Binchy was dispatched to pick up the computers.

Moe Reed answered his page, alert and focused. “I’m right across the street, my source came to work this morning but she was with a bunch of other girls and I couldn’t isolate her. She’s due out soon for lunch.”

Milo said, “Don’t waste time on subtle, Moses, just pull her aside. What I need to know is how sure she is about the Swedish thing. Even if she says she is, ask her could it be ‘Swiss.’”

He explained why.

Reed said, “Blond is blond, huh? I’ll nab her as soon as I see her, Loo.”

A search using ggi alter privatbank Zurich gemein helga, and family as keywords, paid off.

Embedded among German-, French-, and Italian-language business sites was a single photo, dated six years ago. One of many snapped at a fund-raiser for the Kraeker Gallery’s exhibit of outsider art, featuring well-fed, well-groomed people in black tie and gowns.

One thumbnail off to the right. Milo enlarged it two inches square: Banker George Gemein, his wife, Ilse, daughters Helga and Dahlia.

Both parents, bespectacled, ramrod-straight, unsmiling. Helga matched their stance, the obedient child. Even with a honey-colored schoolgirl bob and a baby-blue gown trimmed in lace, she came across grim, disapproving.

Dahlia Gemein appeared several years younger than her sister. Shorter and curvier than Helga, she sported a conspicuous tan, a headful of ash-blond waves, a saucy grin. Defying the family commitment to good posture, she cocked a hip and slouched forward, threatening to spill ample bosoms out of her blood-red, skintight sheath. Bejeweled fingers held the stem of a cobalt-blue cocktail.

The only Gemein caught drinking, she’d separated herself physically, standing half a foot apart.

The clan. The mutation.

Milo switched to NCIC, ran a search on dahlia gemein, pulled up nothing there or on the Doe Network, any MP or crime file. But the Web spat back another photo dated the same year as the Kraeker gala, snapped at the record launch party of a rapper named ReePel. Malibu party house, Broad Beach. I’d heard about the place. Closed down after a torrent of neighbor complaints.

In that one, Dahlia Gemein wore a pink string bikini and stood flanked by two men in flowered bathing shorts: the guest of honor, obese and cornrowed, and a baby-faced, muscular Asian man identified as Teddy K-M.

Milo shot a fist into the air. Flipped through his pad and shouted, punched the air harder. “Dig this, Alex: K-M as in Tariq Ku’amah Majur. Something real.”