“Hey, Glyn!” Younger called from across the test cell, his voice echoing off the metal walls. “Come on over here, I want to show you something.”

Glynis pulled free of Jake’s hand, gave him a perfunctory smile, and turned to hurry over to Younger, her boots clicking on the concrete and the coat in her arms dragging along the floor.

Jake stood there, worried, fearful, angry—and alone.

*   *   *

He drove straight to Tomlinson’s campaign headquarters, calling Amy on his cell phone as he drove. A state highway patrol cruiser nosed alongside him on the interstate. Jake glanced at his speedometer, then realized that the cop was tapping his ear as he frowned at him from behind his mirrored sunglasses. He doesn’t like me using the cell phone while I’m driving, Jake realized. There was talk in the capitol of making that illegal, but so far no law had been passed. Jake clicked his cell phone shut and put it on the seat beside him. The patrolman nodded once, then sped on up the highway.

Keeping just below the speed limit, Jake drove into the city and parked behind the former supermarket where Amy and the rest of Tomlinson’s people were working.

The place was bustling with volunteers, people talking, phones ringing. A teenager pushing a cart piled high with Tomlinson posters nearly ran Jake over. He sniffed the odor of spicy food; sure enough, nearly a dozen empty cartons from a nearby Mandarin restaurant littered one of the long work tables.

Amy was in a huddle with a group of publicists at the far end of the big, cluttered room. She looked up as Jake approached, excused herself from the group, and led Jake through the rows of desks to one of the cubicles set up in the rear of the area, where it was a little quieter.

Once he had told Amy of Glynis’s report on the FBI’s inaction, Amy’s first reaction was, “You see a lot of her, don’t you?”

Jake felt his cheeks redden. “She works with the MHD guys,” he temporized. “She and Tim Younger are going together.”

“Are they?” Amy perched herself on the edge of the steel desk and eyed Jake with an arched eyebrow.

“Never mind her,” Jake said. “What can we do to goose the FBI?”

Amy shrugged. “I don’t know. I can ask Franklin’s father about it, maybe he can put some pressure on them.”

Jake glanced at the molded plastic chair in front of the desk, but remained standing. “Leeds could come out and claim that the FBI investigation confirms the Vernon police findings.”

“That wouldn’t be good.”

“So?”

Thinking out loud, Amy said, “It wouldn’t do us much good to accuse the FBI of dogging it. On the other hand, we’d benefit if they found some genuine links between Leeds and the crooks.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Jake admitted.