“Who’re you?”

Dane came to his feet and extended his hand. “I’m Dane Carver. You called me last night about my brother.”

“Oh yeah, right.” He rose, shook Dane’s hand. “I’m Vincent Delion.” He sat again, waved Dane to do the same. “Hey, I’m real sorry about your brother. I called you because I knew you’d want to hear what was going on.”

The brothers had been close, Delion knew from Carver’s sister, Eloise DeMarks. And Delion wasn’t blind. The man was hurting, bad. He was also a Fed. All the Feds Delion had ever met hadn’t seemed to feel much of anything. They all just wanted to press their wing tips down hard on his neck. Of course, he’d never seen a Fed in this situation before. Murder of a family member-something very personal, something over which he had no control at all. It couldn’t get tougher than this.

Dane said, his voice effortlessly calm and compelling-it was a very good interview voice, Delion thought-“Yes, I appreciate that. Tell me what you have.”

“I’m really sorry about this, but the first thing we need to do is go over to the morgue and you need to identify the body, not that there’s any doubt, just procedure, you know the drill. Or maybe you don’t. You ever been a local cop?”

Dane shook his head. “I always wanted to be an FBI agent. But yes, I know the drill.”

“Yeah, I hear that’s usually the way the thing works. Me, I always wanted to be local. Okay, Dr. Boyd did the autopsy this morning, and yeah, I was there. Your brother died instantly, like I told you last night. Boyd also says that was the case, if it’s any comfort. I’ve spoken to your sister. She wanted to come up today, but I told her you would be here to handle things, that you’d fill her in. I’ll need to speak to her, but in a day or two. I figured you’d rather take care of things.”