I heard the words, but my mind was elsewhere. If I had to guess, I’d say that Ramon was embarrassed at having the Secret Service foisted on him, probably by the chief himself. He’d never spoken to me like this before, but I decided to bite my tongue until I had a chance to see what Cormorant was all about.

The meeting ended pretty soon after that, and I walked out with Cormorant, back toward my office.

“How long have you been with the presidential detail?” I asked him. “That’s some rarefied air.”

“I’ve been with the Service for eight years,” he said, not quite answering my question. “Philadelphia PD before that, and for what it’s worth, I know how much you don’t want me here.”

Rather than getting into it, I asked, “So where are you guys on Tony Nicholson at this point? Where is he now? If I can ask that kind of question.”

He smiled. “How much do you already know?”

“That he was in Alexandria until eleven o’clock Friday morning, and now he’s nowhere to be found. At least not by Metro.”

“Then we’ve got the same information,” Cormorant said. “That’s part of why I’m here. This is a big mystery, Detective Cross. And a dangerous one.”

He struck me as a little looser than a lot of the guys I knew at the Service, although that’s all relative. And the question remained—was he here to legitimately pursue this case or to bury it?

In my office, I took out the latest disk from Nicholson and handed it to him. “Most of the physical evidence is with the Bureau, but this is new.”

He turned it over in his hands. “What is it?”

“Is the name Zeus already familiar to you? I’m guessing it is.”

He looked at me but wouldn’t answer.

“Cormorant, do you want my help or not? I would actually like to help.”

“Yes, I’ve heard the name Zeus,” he said.

“Supposedly, this is him. On the disk.”

“Supposedly?”

“It’s a homicide. White male assailant with a distinctive ring on his right hand. I’m not going to make any assumptions, and you shouldn’t either.”

It’s comments like that last one I should really work a little harder at keeping to myself. I saw Cormorant stiffen right up.

“What else do you have?” he asked. “I need to hear everything, Detective.”

“I need a little time to pull my notes together. But I can get you whatever I have by tomorrow,” I told him.

“What about copies?” He held up the disk I’d given him. “How many of these are floating around?”

“That’s the only one I know of,” I said. “It came out of Nicholson’s safe-deposit box. He was using it to bargain. Of course, if we could find him—”

“Okay, then.” He shook my hand again. “We’ll talk soon.”

After he was gone, I ran over the conversation in my head and wrote down everything I could remember. How many lies had Cormorant told me already? And by the same token, other than the one I’d just told him about copies of Nicholson’s disk, how many more would I have to tell before this was over?