I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing back. It only encourages him otherwise. "So, you saw his wife, did you?"

Carlos said, "Yeah. She looks awful. Like death warmed over."

I checked the lockbox on the door. It appeared to be the electronic kind requiring a magnetic keycard. "Anyone working on getting us a key?"

Spinelli answered, "Tried. There's a sign on the office door that reads, BE BACK IN FIFTEEN MINUTES. One of the guests said it's been there an hour already."

"Did you call for backup?"

"Got black and whites on the way. ETA two minutes."

I checked my watch. "Okay look, We're not waiting. We're going in."

Carlos said, "You can't break down the door, Tony. It's solid steel. We'll need a battering ram."

"Not going to." I holstered my weapon and stepped out in front of the door."

"What are you doing?"

"Lilith is always telling me I need to use more witchcraft." I pointed at the door with both hands and parted the way with a sweeping gestured to each side. "So, I'm using witchcraft. Step back. This could go badly."

"Cool," said Dominic.

Carlos echoed the sentiment.

I adjusted my stance. Legs spread. Knees bent slightly. My palms were sweaty, so I wiped them against my pant legs. I saw Carlos and Spinelli do the same. I held my right hand out, palm up and steady. "You guys ready for this?" I asked.

The two only nodded. Never blinking.

I focused intently on the energy building in my hand, remembering keenly the lesson learned when Ursula lost control of her zip ball in the living room.

"This takes some concentration," I told them. "If it gets away, it can hurt."

"Should we step back further?" Carlos asked.

I nodded. "You might want to."

Neither did.

I puckered my lips and blew into my hand softly, as if fanning the smoldering ambers of a dying flame. At once, a small blue energy sphere appeared. It sparkled in nervous flickers with snaps of white lightning like tiny flash bulbs dancing in my palm. I blew again and the sphere began to spin. After it got going, I was able to keep it moving by pushing it along with just my finger. Soon it was spinning in a blur, crackling and throwing off electric blue sparks like tiny shooting stars. I rolled my hand back over my shoulder and positioned it as if carrying a serving tray.

"Get ready," I said. "I'm going to launch it.

This time Carlos and Spinelli did step back. Spinelli about four steps. Carlos six. I eased away from the door myself, suggesting the two have their weapons drawn and ready to charge. Then I hauled back and let the zip ball fly. It hit the lock box in a shower of sparks. A white light as bright as a wielder's arc discharged with a bang, destroying the box and sending shredded bits of burnt metal everywhere.

I fell back, stunned by a shard of hot shrapnel that caught my face below my eye, tearing a gash in my cheek two inches long. Carlos and Spinelli pushed pa.s.sed me in their rush for the door, spinning me around and knocking me to the ground.

"You all right, Detective?" I heard someone say.

I looked up and saw Corporal Olson. She stopped to help me to my feet while her partner ran in to back up Carlos and Spinelli.

"I'm fine," I told her. "I lost my balance. Go on. I'll catch up."

She brushed my cheek with a clean hanky. "You always say that, Tony." And then she gave it to me. "After all these years, you still say that."

I pressed the hanky to my wound. She winked and sprinted away. Two more units screeched to a stop in the parking lot. By the time I joined the party, we had half the precinct squeezed into Howard Snow's room. I hiked my thumb up over my shoulder and kicked everyone but Carlos and Spinelli out.

Snow sat on the edge of the bed, still in his underwear, his hands already cuffed. His wife, clad only in a hospital gown, occupied a stuffed chair in the corner. The boys had not cuffed her. Didn't need to. She seemed as inanimate as the chair she was sitting in. Her eyes, glazed over white, stared blankly at the floor. Drool dripping down the side of her mouth collected on her left breast, saturating a patch of gown the size of a grapefruit. Her skin looked paler that pale. Carlos said earlier that she looked like death warmed over. I could not see it. Nothing about her looked warm to me.

I walked over to Howard Snow and took a seat on the edge of the bed opposite his. Our knees nearly touched. He looked spent. Deflated. I said to him, "You all right, Mister Snow?"

His eyes appeared fixed on the TV screen. It was not on, but the charcoal images in the gla.s.s reflected the movement of police uniforms outside. Still, I doubted he saw it. I doubted he saw anything.

"Mister Snow. Do you want to tell me what is going on here? Why is your wife here?"

He raised his head. His gaze followed a path to his wife as if tethered on a string. "My wife?" he said, and nothing more.

"Yes, Mister Snow. Your wife. You told us she was dead. What happened?"

He shook his head slowly. "They told us we were working on a cure."

"They?"

He nodded.

"You mean Biocrynetix Laboratories?"

His lips were dry and chapped. They barely parted when he spoke. "Cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. We were going to change the face of modern medicine."

"Mister Snow. Did you take the compound? Did you take the QE647?"

"It was the government, you know. They funded the project. They didn't want us finding out what it was. We worked in separate groups. Only Ferguson knew. And even he didn't have all the pieces. But I figured it out. I put the pieces together."

He rolled his eyes up at me. They looked tired and bloodshot, like he had not slept in days. He tried to smile, but his cracked lips prevented that.

"We were working on a secret military project," he said in a hush. "A project researching bio-reanimation in complex life forms."

"And you succeeded," I said. "Didn't you."

He nodded faintly. "We succeeded, Mark, Rick, Melvin, Jake and me. We made QE647 a reality."

"You took it, too. Didn't you? You took the compound and gave it to your wife."

His eyes wandered back across the room to her. "Yes. I gave it to her." He shook his head. "She was too far gone. She had been dead an hour. You can reanimate the tissue, but the brain...." His eyes fell away again. "The brain must be fresh. Look at her. She's a zombie. She doesn't know where she is, who she is."

He dropped his head into his hands and buried them in his lap. "Dear G.o.d. What have I done?"

I didn't know what to say to him. I looked up at Carlos and Spinelli. They didn't know either. I put my hand on his bare shoulder. He felt cold, maybe as cold as his zombie wife. After a bit of silent sobbing, Howard Snow raised his head, sniffed through the tears and asked me, "What now?"

"Now?" I took my hand off his shoulder. "For starters, you can give back the research material you stole."

He looked at me, puzzled. "No. I didn't take the research material."

"But you said"

"I said I took the compound, and only a small amount of it, but I never touched the research."

"You didn't?"

"Detective, when I left the laboratories, all the doc.u.ments, data and samples were intact."

"Then who took them?"

He gave me the look Lilith gives me sometimes when the answer is staring me right in the face and I am too stupid to see it. "The government, of course. The same people who are out to kill me."

"Mister Snow, listen."

"No. You listen. They want you to think Williams and Delaney deaths were accidental, along with Brookfield's, Gerardi's and McSweeney's. They were not. Mark Williams called me just hours before he fell from his balcony. He told me men from the government were coming to see him, and that he was scared. As well he should have been. This was after Brookfield's supposed accident on the escalator and Gerardi drowning in his pool.

"After Williams called me, I called Rick Delaney. I was on the phone with him when he stopped at that railroad crossing. The man was in a panic. He told me someone in a van was behind him, trying to push his car onto the tracks."

"What did you do then?"

"I told him to get out of the car and run. Next thing I knew, the phone went dead. That's when I slipped back into the research center and stole some of the compound. I was not looking to sell it or anything. I only wanted to get my wife, make her better and then get the h.e.l.l away from here. Start a new life together. You can understand that, can't you?"

He looked at his wife. Carlos Spinelli and I did the same. We all knew she would not be starting over with him anytime soon. Least not in this world.

"I blew up my house," he said, warranting our full attention again. "I knew they would come looking for me next."

His gaze returned to the TV screen. Two of the black and whites had already left. In their place, an ambulance. We let the paramedics in to look at Mrs. Snow. Her lack of a detectable pulse had them chattering like monkeys. Howard Snow continued.

"It seemed obvious they intended to kill everyone a.s.sociated with QE647," he said. "It's the Kennedy a.s.signation all over again. You know that every key witness in that investigation died a sudden and untimely death."

"It's the conspiracy theory," I said.

"Yeah, well it's too coincidental to be coincidental if you ask me. That's why I blew it up."

"The house."

"Yes."

"Last time we spoke, you said they blew it up."

Of course I did. What else could I tell you? You would have brought me in if I told you the truth."

I thought about it. He was right. I would. "We could have offered you protection, Mister Snow."

He shook his head. "There is no protection from them. That's why I had to make them think I was dead, so they would stop looking for me."

"But they knew better."

He nodded. "Yes. They always know better. My mistake was dragging poor Lenny into this."

"Lenny?"

"Dwyer," said Spinelli.

"Right. The roommate."

"I didn't know they would kill him. All I know is I spotted these two staking out the house," he gestured toward Carlos and Spinelli. "I thought they were Feds. Lenny figured he could throw them off my trail. He put my raincoat on and ran out to my car. He was going to lead them on a goose chase around the neighborhood while my wife and I slipped out the back door, taking his car to the motel." He shook his head and buried his face in his hands again. "Poor Lenny. Poor Lenny."

I said to Snow, "I talked to one of the government men. He told me they don't have the compound or the research doc.u.ments. Ferguson said he doesn't have it either."

"Someone has it," he said, and he gestured a sweep of his hand around the room. "Look around if you like. You will see I don't have it."

"Maybe a fourth party took it."

He shook his head. "Maybe."

"You know, if they have to start all over, they will need you. You are the only one in the world who can put all the pieces together. It is all up there in your head. We can put you in a witness protection program, you and your wife. And maybe with more research, you can help your wife get better. What do you say? Will you work with us?"

Snow raised his head. His eyes were dry, but for the lack of tears, I knew the pain he felt was real.

"Yes," he said. "I'll work with you."

"Good." I stood and motioned for Carlos to help me get Snow on his feet. "Dominic, why don't you see if the paramedics have an extra blanket for Mister Snow?"

"Got it, Tony."

They were just finishing loading Mrs. Snow in the ambulance when Spinelli returned with the blanket. I wrapped it around Howard and started him toward the door. Carlos volunteered to go back and gather Howard's clothes while Spinelli ran ahead to open the rear door on the cruiser.

A crowd of onlookers had gathered across the parking lot. Some pointed at Howard and me as we stepped from the room. The sun hit my eyes then, washing the faces of the spectators away in a wave of orange and yellow. I squinted tightly, raised my hand to shade my eyes and nudged Howard in the direction of the car.

I did not hear it. Not at first. I only felt it. A kick to the chest so hard it knocked me back into the room. I fell onto the floor. Howard Snow fell to the pavement outside the door. Screams from across the parking lot told me something awful had happened. I looked out onto the sun-drenched walkway. Spinelli was there, his weapon drawn. He had a.s.sumed a shooter's stance, though clearly he did not know where to steer his aim. Corporal Olson and her partner had also taken cover behind the ambulance, their weapons drawn on the dispersing crowd, unable to isolate the threat.

I started to rise, when Carlos scooped me under the arms and dragged me away from the open doorway.

"You all right, Boss?" he said. I felt him patting my chest looking for a wound. "I see blood. Where are you hit?"

"I'm all right," I said. "I'm wearing a vest. That's Snow's blood. Go help him."

He slapped my chest, which hurt like h.e.l.l, and scurried in a crouch to the door. I managed to my feet, drew my weapon and offered him cover. He dragged Howard Snow into the room, but we both could see it was too late for him.

We scuttled out the door and took up a defensive position behind the ambulance with Spinelli, the paramedics, Olson and her partner. "Where did the shot come from?" I asked.

"There," said Olson, pointing to a warehouse rooftop across the marshy flats on the other side of the railroad tracks. "I think it came from there."

"The warehouse?"