Which didn’t sit well with Everett Hamlyn, Adam Kohl, or their attorneys. There were grumblings for a while there that usually reached me on cotton-bond stationery bearing the letterhead of Hamlyn and Kohl’s attorneys, or occasionally on the stationery of Hamlyn and Kohl themselves. But I’d never signed anything or given them even a verbal indication that I planned to join their firm, and when my own attorney, Cheswick Hartman, noted this on his stationery (which was a very attractive mauve linen bond), the grumbling ceased appearing in my mailbox. And somehow I built an agency whose success exceeded even my own expectations by working for a clientele that could rarely afford Hamlyn and Kohl.

But recently, shell-shocked I suppose by our exposure to the raging psychosis of Evandro Arujo, Gerry Glynn, and Alec Hardiman—an exposure that cost Angie’s ex-husband, Phil, his life—we’d closed the agency. We hadn’t been doing much of note since, unless you count talking in circles, watching old movies, and drinking too much as doing something.

I’m not sure how long it would have lasted—maybe another month, maybe until our livers divorced us by citing cruel and unusual punishment—but then Angie looked at Trevor Stone with a kinship she’d shown toward no one in three months and actually smiled without affectation, and I knew we’d take his case, even if he was so impolite as to kidnap and drug us. And the fifty grand, let’s admit it, went a long way toward helping us overlook Trevor’s initial bad form.

Find Desiree Stone.

Simple objective. How simple the execution of that objective would be remained to be seen. To find her, I was pretty sure we’d have to find Jay Becker or at least follow his tracks. Jay, my mentor, and the man who’d given me my professional maxim:

“No one,” he told me once near the end of my apprenticeship, “and I mean, no one, can stay hidden if the right person is looking for him.”

“What about the Nazis who escaped to South America after the war? No one found Josef Mengele until he’d died peacefully and free.”

And Jay gave me a look I’d become accustomed to during our three months together. It was what I called his “G-man look,” the look of a man who’d done his time in the darkest corridors of government, a man who knew where bodies were buried and which papers had been shredded and why, who understood the machinations of true power better than most of us ever would.