Langer raced her toward the van where Jimmy Chang, the man Jean-Marc Lespasse had christened “Wiki,” waited near the open hatch. He called to her, waving his hand frantically, his eyes wide.

A black town car bounded toward the loading dock.

She knew it was someone connected to Sindhu Power. The company might be defunct but the people who wished to keep its secrets were alive and well.

The detective said, “Here’s where we say goodbye, Connie.”

“What?”

“Don’t think my jurisdiction includes wherever you and your people are going to follow up leads in this case. The best thing I can do is play defense here. Now get moving!”

He pulled out his SIG and turned to face the oncoming Lincoln.

The car slowed.

“Langer . . . ”

“Go!”

“Thank you.”

Chang jumped out and lifted Carson from the gurney, her injured body stiffening in his arms. He bundled her inside and the van took off, roaring toward the exit.

“Hey, you look great,” Chang said as he settled into a seat.

Carson could only imagine how she looked standing there with no makeup, a huge bathrobe, bare feet. She felt a tingling in her right arm.

“I mean, you’re just like your picture. I mean, you’re pale but otherwise . . .”

The van’s bay was converted to a cross between an ambulance and a computer lab, a workspace for Wiki that came complete with a cot. Along one side, three glaring widescreen LCD monitors and a couple of gooseneck work lamps nested on a long shelf twined with cables. Small green lights pulsed.

Chang said, “Do you want to get into bed? Dammit, that sure didn’t come out right. What I mean . . . I mean, there’s a cot . . . Because of your operation. Your arm must hurt like hell.”

“I’m glad to see you, Wiki.” He looked like his photo, too, not at all like his glamorous well-muscled Second Life avatar. In person, Chang was like an elongated twelve year old, with a round face, oversized spectacles and a bad haircut. “Whatever you did to that cop, you turned him into a pussy-cat. I thought he was gonna arrest me as soon as I revived.”

“Langer’s not bad. His people were keeping an eye on the industrial park, the one—”

That blew up. The one where Jean-Marc died.

Chang seemed to hear her thought. “Yeah, Tampa PD had information that one of the outfits in the park was a front for a bunch of Mexican narco-traffickers from the Juarez cartel. They had it under surveillance. The department even put someone on the front desk.”

An image of Jean-Marc danced before Carson’s eyes. “Too bad the man didn’t—”

“The operation was shut down months ago, before Sindhu Power and Electric cleared out. The Tampa cops say Sindhu seemed like an ordinary business.”

“But if they had someone on the front desk, they must have noticed something.”