“So where is she?” he asked again.

“Safely in our hands,” Kitteredge answered.

Peter Hathaway dropped the metalevel.

“I’m the client, right?” he asked petulantly, brushing a shock of black hair from his forehead. “I want to know.”

Kitteredge looked to Ed.

“It’s like this,” Ed explained. “If you knew where Polly Paget was, you might inadvertently say or do something that might lead to her discovery.”

John Culver, sitting in the back of a van parked on the street outside, chuckled at the truth of this statement.

“I’m not a child! I’m not stupid!” Hathaway yelled.

Keep your voice down, Culver thought as he eased the headset away from his ears.

“Nobody said you were,” Ed said. We were just thinking it, he added to himself. “It’s just that you’re not a professional at this kind of thing, and we are, so why don’t you let us handle it?”

Kitteredge added, “We are continuing our investigation of Mr. Landis. When that inquiry has… matured… and Miss Paget has progressed to a point where we feel she can successfully negotiate the media and the legal process, we will contact you.

Hathaway sank back into his chair and sulked.

I’m a professional, he thought. All right, the rape was sheer luck, but I was professional enough to contact Paget, bring her into our orbit, create a media sensation… and now this nineteenth-century throwback and his pet bear refuse to tell me where she is!

“I gave her to you!” Hathaway argued.

“Would you like her back?” Kitteredge asked.

No, Hathaway admitted to himself. I wouldn’t know what to do with her. The slut is a disaster. If she opens her mouth in public one more time, Jack Landis will have the world thinking that she raped him.

“Excuse me,” Peter said. “I have to visit the little boys’ room.”

Please, Culver thought, leave the briefcase here. I didn’t go to all the trouble of breaking into your office and planting a bug in your new Haliburton for the dubious pleasure of listening to you urinate-at best.