An NYPD TARU tech had already spliced recording equipment onto the Dunnings’ line. The phone company had been contacted and was ready with something called a time-stop trace. Its billing computer would zip through its millions of circuits that were operational at the exact second the Dunnings’ phone rang and find the one calling the apartment.

All we had to do now was the hard part. To sit and wait until four o’clock. Sit and wait and pray.

My heart rattled like an alarm clock in my chest cavity when the phone rang at three-thirty. It took me a long second to realize that it wasn’t the apartment phone but the building’s intercom buzzer in the kitchen.

Armando, the butler, rushed to answer it.

“There’s an FBI agent in the lobby, sir,” he called to Donald Dunning.

What?! I thought. Who called the FBI?

“Send her up,” Dunning said. Turning to me, he added, “Did I forget to tell you? I called the Justice Department when I was down at Jacob’s dorm. The attorney general, Fred Carroll, dated my sister in college. He’s sending in his best, he told me. You can work together with the FBI, right?”

“Sure,” I said, exchanging uncertain glances with Detectives Ramirez and Schultz, the other members of my team. We had everything ready to go. Now the Feds were here? What did that mean?

We exchanged much happier looks as a tall, auburn-haired woman came through the door two minutes later. Good-looking women, even ones who were turf-invading FBI agents, were always a pleasant surprise.

She spoke to Donald Dunning and his wife briefly in the foyer before stepping into the study.

“Emily Parker,” she said, offering her hand. She had a slight southern or maybe midwestern accent. “Mike Bennett, is it? I can see by your surprise that no one told you I was coming. Of course not. My boss is calling your boss or something.