The woman on the team coughed to cover a laugh, while her male partner stood as solemnly as if he’d been embalmed.

“It’s not a crime, if it really happened.” He showed his row of little pike’s teeth in a vindictive smile.

“If it really happened? Sergeant, I trust you have a tech unit on the way here to take prints, because if you don’t I am going to be raising a serious complaint with the police review board. And if you accuse me in front of witnesses of dealing in drugs, then I will also sue you as a private citizen for slander.”

“You do that, Warshki, but I have a red–hot tip that you’ve got a half kilo of powder right here on the premises. And you schmucks can stop grinning behind your hands and search this office. Now.”

For the next twenty minutes, seven uniformed people turned my office over. The papers that the original invaders hadn’t tossed joined the landfill in the middle of the room. I sat with my arms crossed, my lips tight with anger—and my heart thumping erratically. What if I had missed a niche? I hadn’t climbed a ladder to deal with the ceiling fixtures—I’d only checked the lower ones, the spotlights and lamps that I’d installed when I moved in.

I was fuming with an impotent rage, wishing I could get him on film, when I remembered the surveillance camera in my briefcase. I picked it up from the floor next to the couch and pulled the glasses out. Lemour watched me closely, but when he saw I was only putting on glasses he turned his head away. In that brief moment I reached into my case and fumbled with the battery pack. After two nights in the dark roads of Luella County I could load it blindfolded. I put in a new tape and started recording, following the team’s destructive swath through the room, but focusing mostly on Lemour.

Lemour himself went to my printer and pulled out the cartridge. When he didn’t find the bag of powder he dropped the cartridge, leaving a sooty trail on the floor, and banged the printer on its side. Twelve hundred dollars of Hewlett Packard’s best work. I hoped it would survive mauling.

Scowling with fury, he marched to the couch and yanked me to my feet. He ran a hand underneath, found the slit in the bottom, fumbled inside it. When he came up empty he bared his pike’s teeth in an ugly grimace. He ordered two of the uniforms to turn the couch over. He ripped the fabric completely off the bottom and started prodding the interior.