When he’d hung up, I produced the thermos. “This was in the front seat, spilling out bourbon.”

“You took that?” Conrad was annoyed. “What the hell you think you’re doing, removing evidence from a crime scene?”

“It looked like the thermos I gave Morrell,” I said. “I didn’t want the bottom-feeders who were taking the car apart to walk off with it.”

Morrell limped over to look at it. “I think it is mine; that’s where the i came off when I was shot at. I told Marcena she could borrow it while she was doing her late-night jaunts—I assumed, somehow, for coffee, not bourbon. Are you impounding it, Rawlings? I want it back.”

“Then you shouldn’t have let her take it to begin with,” I said, and then I remembered her lying in a coma, a quarter of her skin missing, and felt immediately ashamed.

“We’ve been in so many war zones together,” Morrell said. “She’s my comrade-in-arms; you share your stuff with your comrades, Vic. Like it or lump it.”

Conrad looked at me, as if daring me to push one more relationship to the limit. I shook my head and changed the subject, asking who the guy at the helicopter had been.

“Colleague of yours, broadly speaking,” Conrad said.

My forehead wrinkled while I figured it out. “A private eye, you mean?”

“Yep, with Carnifice Security. That was their chopper.”

Not Scarface. Carnifice. The biggest player in the international private security business. They do everything, from kidnap protection in Colombia and Iraq to running private prisons, which is where I first met them—I almost died in their custody a couple of years back.

According to Conrad, someone in the Bysen operation had figured out the same thing I’d told Billy last week—that his cell phone contained a global tracking signal. “The kid’s father got fed up with old Mr. Bysen butting in, going down to that church, whatever it was he did. So the father decided to hire Carnifice to use their tracking equipment to find his kid’s phone, which they traced to the pit. When the gumshoe didn’t find Billy, he wanted to take off again—they hadn’t been hired to save extraneous lives.”

“Thank you, Conrad,” I said awkwardly. “Thank you for showing up, and saving my life, and saving Marcena, too.”

He gave a twisted smile. “We serve and protect, Ms. W., even the undeserving.”

He took out a tape recorder. “Now, the part I need on the record. What was the Love woman doing down on my turf?”