Once inside the doors, we found ourselves funneled into a line through a portable metal detector and a wand-wielding guard.

“My bag?” sniffed a matron at the front. “No, you may not paw through my bag, young man.”

The queue ground to a halt.

“Oh, come on,” I muttered. “They’re not worried about the flask you stuffed in there.”

Jack craned his neck to see around the mob. After a moment, a guard took the woman and her party aside to let others pass though.

“Unbelievable,” huffed a diamond-dripping woman about my age. “It’s opera, not a rap concert.”

“There’s a whole industry getting rich off this terrorism nonsense,” said the gray-haired man at her side. “Did I tell you what happened on my flight to Tokyo last week? They body-searched first-class passengers. First-class! As if any of us…”

He continued to bitch about the injustices visited on the upper classes, but I turned my attention to mentally reexamining Quinn’s blueprints of the opera house. One front entrance, one staff entrance, one delivery door and three fire exits. Easy to guard and, according to Quinn, guarded they were, with no one allowed in or out any way but the front door tonight.

According to Quinn’s source, even staff had needed to pass through those main doors earlier, with the metal detectors and bag search. That would likely be the ruse the killer would use—pretending to work here. With a new business, employees would still be accustomed to seeing unfamiliar faces and wouldn’t question one more. If that was his plan, he’d have found himself out of luck. There had been a manager at the door, ticking off names, and if a new or replacement worker showed up, the Feds had turned him away.

We made it through security without incident. We weren’t armed. Too risky. The Feds would probably have wand-waving agents inside, too. Not having a gun made me uneasy, but I knew the killer wouldn’t have risked bringing one in, either. He wouldn’t need to. A real pro doesn’t need a traditional weapon to do his job.

Once inside, we veered left. Quinn said the Feds were setting up base in a storage room behind the bar, so that’s where I wanted to go first. Get an insider’s feel for security precautions, and we’d see where the holes were.

It took some wrangling, but we found a spot where we could, with the help of listening devices provided by Felix, hear what was going on in the FBI’s control room. We arrived just as they received a call from the front door, about a woman refusing to let them search or scan her evening bag. It could have been the same woman we’d seen, but I suspected they’d been dealing with similar complaints all night.