“So here I sit.” French mumbled under his breath, shifting on the hard, plastic chair. “Goddamn it.” He was in a conference room on the third-floor headquarters of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, Capital District, one of a hundred city cops from across the state attending a seminar on cross-jurisdictional cooperation. An hour in, and he’d already slipped out three times to borrow a phone and call friends at the station back home. The desk sergeant. A junior detective who owed him a favor. They didn’t know anything, or wouldn’t tell him. He found Burklow on the third call. “Sit tight,” he’d said. “If something breaks, I will track you down. In the meantime, have faith.”

But faith was for rookies and civilians. French knew too much about bad cops, bias, sloppy work.

He looked at his watch.

Eighty-three minutes since he’d first sat down.

It had to be longer than that!

For another twenty minutes, he cooled his heels as some state plebe droned on about the architectural hierarchy of a multi-jurisdictional investigation as might be used in pursuit of a purely hypothetical, cross-county, serial rapist. “If you’ll turn to the diagram on page twelve of your manual…”

“No. Just no.”

He was in the wrong city, doing the wrong thing.

French left the conference room without looking right or left, his steps loud in the hall as he stalked past the outer offices of the Professional Standards Division, en route to the elevator bank. He was almost past the double doors before a young woman interrupted his thoughts. “Excuse me, Detective?”

It was the same pleasant young woman who’d allowed him to use the phone on her desk. “Yes, Agent…?”

“Foil,” she said. “You have a call.”

At her desk, she handed him the phone, and moved away to give him privacy. Four agents stood at a conference table across the room; no one at the adjacent desk. Only Burklow had this number. “Ken?”

“What’s the last thing I said to you?”

There were background sounds. Men in the squad room. Orders. Activity. French’s hand tightened on the phone. The call would not have come without good reason. “You told me to have faith.”

“Shit. No. What was the second-to-last thing I said?”

“That you’d track me down if something major broke.”

“That’s the one. So you give those state cops a nice thanks-for-your-time, then get your ass home, fastest. ’Cause I’m telling you, brother”—a rustle on the line as Burklow shifted the receiver from one ear to the next—“shit down here just went sideways.”