"Look where it got Kyle," I said and smiled.

"Exactly," Betsey said and winked. "Let's go."

I had read and reread Joseph Petrillo's file. It stood out from the others. Every week for the past two years, the chairman of Citibank in New York had received an angry, even vicious letter from Petrillo. He had worked in security for the bank from January of 1990 until two years ago. He'd been fired because of budget cuts that affected every department in the bank, not just his. Petrillo didn't accept the explanation, or anything else the bank tried to make him go away.

There was something about the tone of the letters that alarmed me. They were well written and intelligent, but the letters showed signs of paranoia, possibly even schizophrenia. Petrillo had been a captain in Vietnam before he worked for the bank. He'd seen combat. The police had been to see him about the crank mail, but no charges had been filed.

"This must be one of those famous feelings of yours," Betsey said as we rode to the suspect's house on Fifth Avenue.

"It's one of those famous bad feelings," I said. "The detective who interviewed him a few months ago had a bad feeling too. The bank refused to go any further with the complaint."

Unlike its namesake in New York, Fifth Avenue in DC was a low-rent area on the edge of gentrifying Capitol Hill. It had originally been mostly Italian-American, but was now racially mixed. Rusted, dated cars lined the street. A BMW sedan, fully loaded, stood out from the other vehicles. Probably a drug dealer.

"Same old, same old," Betsey said.

"You know the area?" I asked as we turned on to the street where Petrillo lived.

She nodded and her brown eyes narrowed. "A certain number of years ago, that number not to be disclosed at this time, I was born not far from here. Four blocks to be exact."

I glanced over at Betsey and saw a grim look on her face as she stared out the windshield. She had let me in on a little piece of her past: She'd grown up on the wrong side of the tracks in Washington. She didn't look like it.

"We don't have to follow up on this hunch,"I told her. "I can check it out later. It's probably nothing, but Petrillo lives so close to the field office."

She shook her head, shrugged. "You read a lot of files today. This is the one that popped out for you. We should follow up on it. I'm fine being here."

We stopped in front of a corner store where local kids had probably been hanging out for the past few decades. The current group looked a little retro in their choice of loose-fitting jeans, dark T-shirts, slicked-back hair. They were all white.

We crossed the street and walked toward the end of the block. I pointed out a small yellow house. "That's Petrillo's."

"Let's go talk to the man," she said. "See if he's robbed any banks lately."