“I didn’t swipe it. I forgot I had it in my hand.”

“Un-huh. So why don’t you tell me about the Mexican numbers?”

“Nothing to tell.”

“I don’t believe that for a second. And I don’t believe you’re putting all this effort into finding Kenny because you’re a good family person.”

“You have a reason for your doubts?”

“I have a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.”

Morelli grinned. “You can take that to the bank.”

Okay. Different approach. “I thought we were a team.”

“There’s all kinds of teams. Some teams work more independent of each other.”

I felt my eyes roll back in my head. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “What this comes down to is that I share all my information, but you don’t. Then when we find Kenny you spirit him off for reasons as yet unknown to me and cut me out of my recovery.”

“It’s not like that. I wouldn’t cut you out of your recovery.”

Give me a break. It was exactly like that, and we both knew it.

Morelli and I had done battle before with only short-lived victories on both sides. I suspected this would be another war, of sorts. And I figured I’d have to learn how to live with it. If I went head-on with Morelli, he could make my life as a bounty hunter difficult to impossible.

Not to say that I should be a total doormat. What was important was that I look like a doormat at appropriate moments. I decided this wasn’t one of those moments and that my demeanor now should be angry and offended. This was an easy act to pull off, since it was true. I peeled out of the police lot, pretending to know where I was going when in fact I didn’t. It was close to four, and I had no more stones to turn in the hunt for Mancuso, so I headed home, driving on autopilot, reviewing my progress.

I knew I should go see Spiro, but I couldn’t muster a lot of joy over the project. I didn’t share Grandma’s enthusiasm for mortuaries. Actually, I thought death was just a bit creepy, and I thought Spiro was downright subterranean. Since I wasn’t in all that good of a mood anyway, procrastination seemed like the way to go.

I parked behind my building and skipped the elevator in favor of the stairs since the morning’s blueberry pancakes were still oozing over the top of my Levi’s. I let myself into my apartment and almost stepped on an envelope that had been shoved under the door. It was a plain white business-size envelope with my name printed in silver paste-on letters. I opened the envelope, removed the single piece of white paper, and read the two-sentence message, which had also been formed from paste-ons.

“Take a vacation. It will be good for your health.”

I didn’t see any travel agency brochures stuck in the envelope, so I assumed this wasn’t a cruise advertisement.