“No, I’m not,” I said. “But you might. You’re going to call the manufacturer and find out if there have been any recalls for this reason. And then you’re going to call me to bring the car back in and check to see whether the on-board diagnostic computer registers such hacking.”

I left Hal glaring at Phil, waiting for me to be out of earshot so he could start yelling about lawsuits. Poor Phil.

Now, if my job hadn’t made me sort of a suspicious person to begin with—not talking paranoia—I would have ignored this angle, simply hoping that it wouldn’t happen again. As it was, I thought about the other car that had been on the road down the mountain with me, the only person within a mile, a driver who could have been the one to put my brakes out of commission temporarily. Who drove off in a hurry when he thought I was getting out of my car. Who was that man?

With the evidence in hand, that someone had staged a burglary at my house looking for some information … the strong possibility that someone had tried to kill me on the mountain … I could only reach the conclusion that someone was after me.

After me. Goddammit, isn’t that the conclusion anyone would come to?

Thirty–one

They didn’t have everything that I needed at Home Depot, so I ordered the rest online and had it shipped two-day. I also made an appointment with a company that could replace the windows in the back of the house with unbreakable ones.

Because I had my contacts but no control over priority, it also took that long to get a callback from David Weiss. Weiss was a forensic psychologist who would retire from the profiling division of the FBI in another year or so. We had those nicknames for each other that can only develop when you’ve known another person for decades. He called me Stinger.

“Hey, Sigmund,” I said.

Turns out it was a clean print, and it wasn’t Gloria Bentham’s.

“I was able to have the print you sent me run against IAFIS,” he said without preamble, how’s life and all that. That’s how Weiss is, not high on the emotional intelligence spectrum.

“Anything interesting?”

“It matches to the booking print of a Jeremiah Beaufort. Precisely three bookings, as a matter of fact. He was one of those poor shmucks who were part of the Three Strikes and Life deal that Clinton signed during the war on drugs.”

“So what’s he doing out of prison?”

“That new thing they were doing for nonviolent criminals with overlong sentences. He was commuted and released.”

“Are you able to track him to Tucson?”