“No. Starbucks. She was painting a picture on an iPad.”

“If you’d ordered a takeout, we wouldn’t be here today.” Victor stood at the kitchen counter, leaning into a laptop.

“A couple of tables were between us,” Thackrey said. “I couldn’t see much of her, just the tablet’s screen. But even at a distance, it was amazing. She wasn’t making the picture in a linear, additive way, with elements drawn one by one. The painting looked like it was exploding outward, with animals and faces and pennant-like things all tumbling on top of each other. It was like Chagall on steroids.”

“Speaking of your girl…” Russell rapidly worked the keyboard. “I’m into her office computer. I found her work files and emails. You want me to erase it all?”

“No. Just delete the work she did for me. It’ll be under a file with my name.”

“And the emails?”

“Just mine.”

“Consider it done,” Russell said.

Thackrey sat up, leaning on an elbow, and drank some of the wine. “In one corner of the screen, a palette kind of thing held a wheel of colors and tints. She touched it with a finger and used her fingertip like a brush. And she worked at this twitchy, high speed, her finger zooming back and forth across the screen.”

“You saw all this from a couple of tables away?” Victor asked. He had an earbud in one ear, with his phone dialed to the Velvet Underground and loud enough for the others to hear.

“Yeah. Couldn’t take my eyes off her screen. I was staring. I think it made the people at the next table uncomfortable, because they left. After that, it was easier to see.”

“If you’re interested, I’m inside the Santa Rosa Police website,” Victor said. “The city firewall was crap, but Violent Crime has its own firewall, and whoever made it has some intelligence.”

“Her face, or at least as much as I could see, had this blank expression,” Thackrey said. “It was as if she was just observing what was happening. Then she must’ve felt me watching, because she turned around. She looked for a second and went back to the tablet and worked on the images coming out of the screen. A minute later she looked back, and this time she smiled and shook her head, as if she knew I’d be staring at her.”

Victor stopped typing. A new window opened on his screen. “Oh, come on, you little fuck,” he said to the screen. “You’re driving me crazy. Maybe we need to listen to some Clash.” He tapped his phone.