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“Think Alex fucked him?” Harry asked.

“Not sure if it matters, McGlade.”

“Maybe it does. What if there was some sixty-nine action going on?”

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“A lot. If she was on top, she could have written the letters upside-down.”

I accessed the picture on the cell phone, then rotated it one hundred and eighty degrees.

How about that?

“I bow to your deviant mind, Harry. Try all the searches again using PZ.”

“Way ahead of you, Jackie. Got twenty-seven million hits. Some scientist named PZ. A punjabi site. An ID3 tag editor.”

“What’s that?”

“It helps you catalog your music collection if you appropriate MP3 files on the Internet.”

“Appropriate? You mean stealing.”

“File sharing isn’t stealing. If I stole your bike, you lost property. That’s theft. But if I copied your bike, you still have the bike.”

“Then I’ve lost my right to sell the bike. How can I sell the bike if everyone is copying it?”

I bet myself twenty bucks McGlade was rolling his eyes.

“What if I already have the music on vinyl? Can’t I download an MP3 of a song I already own?”

“Downloading music for free is illegal, Harry.”

“No it isn’t. Ask Phin.”

“I’m not asking Phin.”

“Ask Phin what?” Phin asked.

I sighed. “This really isn’t something we need to discuss right now. Or ever.”

I hit the button for speaker phone anyway and repeated Harry’s question.

“It’s illegal,” Phin said. “You’re taking money away from the artist. That’s what intellectual property laws are for.”

“So downloading an out-of-print album is bad, but it’s okay to rob a bank?”

“That’s illegal too,” Phin said.

“We need to stick to finding Lance,” I said.

“Phin, you ever see that brass clown video?”

“Yeah. It was horrible.”

“Lance,” I said, holding up the picture. “He’s going to die soon. Remember him?”

“Remember that cup scene?” Harry said.

“Yeah.”

“I can’t eat corn anymore because of that.”

“I had to give up Greek food for a while.”

“Why Greek? Oh…oh yeah. You know, the last Greek I ate was a sorority girl.”

I was going to tell them, more forcibly this time, to stay on task, but the word Greek stuck in my head and bounced around like a pinball. I looked at the PZ again.

“Harry, do a search for Greek alphabet.”

“She was a physical therapy major, Phin. Had an incredibly strong grip. I used to fake injuries.”

“Harry! The search!”

“Okay! Sure! Greek alphabet! Done! You happy?”

“What do P and Z stand for?”

“P is rho. Z is zeta. Rho zeta?”

“Row zayta. Row zeta. Rosetta?”

I flipped the Yellow Pages open to Motels and searched the Rs. No Rosetta Motel, or anything even close.

Harry chuckled softly. “Damn, Alex is smart.”

“You got something?”

“I did a search for Rosetta plus Milwaukee plus lodging. First hit is for the Rosetta Stone-that old rock with all the languages on it. But farther down the page is the Old Stone Inn. If PZ is Greek for Rosetta, the Rosetta Stone was certainly an old stone. And the Old Stone Inn is near the Milwaukee airport.”

I checked my watch. Lance had less than fifteen minutes to live. The clues fit, but that might have been because we were tired and hopeless and wanted them to fit.

“Where’s the address?” I asked Harry.

“It’s on Whitnall.”

Phin started the truck. “Ten minutes, if we push it.”

I didn’t see we had any choice.

“Push it,” I told him.

We peeled out of the parking lot.

CHAPTER 28

ALEX WAKES to the ringing of the hotel phone and the homey smell of copper pennies. She gives the receiver a quick up and down, stretches, and pads over to the bathroom. Apparently Cyn had more life left in her than Alex thought, because she managed to pull herself out of the bathtub to curl up and die under the sink. There’s a good amount of blood browning on the floor, and Alex watches where she steps-it’s not wise leaving bloody footprints up and down the hotel hallway.

After using the facilities, Alex puts on a pair of fresh pan ties from Cyn’s suitcase, and also liberates some sweatpants and a Hootie and the Blowfish tee. Cyn’s shoes are too small, and the cop’s black leather shoes look stupid with sweats, so Alex heads out the door in only socks.

Sunrise is still over an hour away, and outside it’s cool and crisp with a wind that threatens winter. Alex digs her laptop out of the Hyundai and takes it back to the lobby, where complimentary continental breakfast is being served. Even this early there are three people milling about, reading papers, drinking coffee, pouring milk into bowls of cereal. Alex keeps her head down, bangs covering her face, and snatches a bagel and a small container of cream cheese without being acknowledged.

Back in the room she sets up at the desk and accesses the hotel’s WiFi, charging it to Cyn’s account. Then she activates the cell phone program and enlarges the window to the size of the laptop screen, which shows a live view of Lance at the Old Stone Inn.

Poor Lance is sleeping. He’s made quite a mess of the bed-even in the close-up Alex can see the mattress is off-kilter and the sheets under him have twisted around. She zooms the camera out, and sees the duct tape is still holding him tight, but it has bunched up on itself so it looks like gnarled gray rope. The secret to binding someone with tape is to make it as tight as possible; it stretches, and sweat and blood work against the adhesive. Lance has more than a little blood around his wrists. He fought hard. Alex feels strangely proud of him.

She zooms out farther, and sees that the rest of Lance hasn’t held up so well.

“Ouch.”

The rubber band has transformed Lance’s once proud manhood into something resembling a rotten banana, all brown and droopy. If Jack arrives in time, it’s unlikely that part of him can be saved.

Alex smiles with half of her face, using her finger to apply cream cheese to half the bagel, imagining macho Lance living out the rest of his days as a chaste monk in some Tibetan monastery. Certainly his wife wouldn’t keep him around. Infidelity can be forgiven. Having no dick would put an unrealistic strain on even the healthiest of marriages.

She zooms in, getting a close-up of the Greek letters burned into Lance’s chest, and uses her screen capture to save a JPG. Then she checks the time. Twenty minutes after five. Lance has thirteen minutes to live.

Alex transfers the picture to her cell, then sends it to Jack Daniels. At this late stage in the game, it’s unlikely Jack knows where Lance is. But there’s one clue left to give, and Alex wants to make sure Jack has every possible opportunity to figure it out and save him, so she feels even worse when she fails. Alex texts:

STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN.

Simple. Clever. Elegant. After entering the message she tucks her legs under her in the desk chair, licks cream cheese off her fingers, and waits for the big bang.

CHAPTER 29

“HOW’S OUR TIME?” Phin asked.

I checked my watch. The pigstick was set to go off at 5:33 a.m. It was 5:24.

“Not good. How close are we?”

“I’m not sure. A few miles.”

My eyes locked on the speedometer. We were already doing sixty mph in a thirty mph zone, and I stopped counting all the red lights we’d blown through.

“Go faster.”

Phin nodded. The veins on the backs of his hands bulged out from holding the wheel so hard, and I noticed my legs were braced and my fingers had death grips on the armrests. As if that would help if we crashed.