"Mr. Kurtz." She gestured him to his usual chair.

"Agent O'Toole." He took his usual chair.

"We have an important date coming up, Mr. Kurtz," said O'Toole, looking at him and then down at his folder.

Kurtz nodded. In a few weeks it would be one year since he left Attica and reported to his parole officer. Since there had been no real problems—or at least none she or the cops had heard about—he should be visiting her once a month soon, rather than weekly. Now she asked her usual questions and Kurtz gave his usual answers.

Peg O'Toole was an attractive woman in her late thirties—overweight by current standards of perfection but all the more attractive in Kurtz's eyes for that, with long, auburn hair, green eyes, a taste for expensive but conservative clothing, and a Sig Pro 9mm semiautomatic pistol in her purse. Kurtz knew the make because he'd seen the weapon.

He liked O'Toole—and not just for helping him out of the frame-up a year ago this coming November—but also because she was as no-nonsense and non-condescending as a parole officer can be with a "client." He'd never had an erotic thought about her, but that wasn't her fault. There was just something about the act of imagining an ex-police officer with her clothes off that worked on Kurtz like a 1,000-cc dose of anti-Viagra.

"Are you still working with Mrs. DeMarco on the SweetheartSearch-dot-com business?" asked O'Toole. As a felon, Kurtz couldn't be licensed by the state of New York for his former job—P.I. — but he could operate this business of finding old high school flames, first via the Internet—that was his secretary Arlene's part of it—then by a bit of elementary skip-tracing. That was Kurtz's part of it.