Gregg Hurwitz - Last shot

"Well," Tim said, "then I'll have to find something else."

Dean smiled, white teeth against tan skin. "Happy hunting."

Tim walked over and rested a hand on the paper shredder. Still warm. "I can have a warrant for Dolan faxed here in minutes. If I get it, we're searching the entire house."

It was a bluff, but one Dean wouldn't want to call with his paper shredder still throwing off BTUs.

Dean studied Tim a few minutes, then said, "I'll call him in."

"No," Tim said. "We'll talk to him alone."

Dean said, "He's in his room. I don't think you'll find him informative."

Tim and Bear made their way through the mansion to the second floor of the south wing. A guard stood at the door to the Kagan brothers' rooms like a bouncer, arms woven across a massive chest. A vein squiggled through the ball of his biceps, a firework's dying flare. He wore a benign expression, but there was no question he was blocking the door. He didn't move as they approached.

Bear said, "Out of the way."

Prudently, he stepped aside. Tim threw open the door. Dolan was sitting on the pool table, feet drifting in circles as if stirring water.

Bear said, "You're coming with us," and grabbed him by the arm, steering him out. Dolan whined and fired questions all the way to Bear's rig but didn't figure out simply to tell Bear to let go of him. Bear threw him in the front seat, and he and Tim climbed in on either side of him. The dashboard clock, at 1:32 A.M., had fallen back to an hour slow.

Bear drove a few blocks and pulled over on the quiet, dark street. He bent down, reaching beneath the floor mat. Dolan's concern changed to fear. He recoiled, practically scaling the bench seat, but there was nowhere to go.

Bear tossed the confidential report into Dolan's lap. Dolan took a moment to thaw. He looked at the top sheet, then turned a few more pages, rapidly, his interest growing. "Where did you get this?"

Tim told him.

Dolan held his stomach and leaned over as if contemplating throwing up. He said, "How do I know you didn't generate this yourself?"

"Because we don't know what the hell it is. We can't analyze this kind of scientific data."

"This isn't science."

"Then what is it?"

"It's accounting." Dolan flipped through the pages, zeroing in on a few abbreviations with his finger-L12-AAT mapped for comparison beside X5-AAT.

Tim noted his change in focus. "What?"

"These are the trial names for the latest generation of viral vectors I created. Lentidra and Xedral. Lentidra was back-burnered."

Bear said, "The permanent-cure vector? That was far along in the pipeline, right? Tess was all over it, had a bunch of info gathered on her hard drive. Early trials, the press release about the animal study going south, all that."

Tim recalled Tess's notation in the margin of the Xedral report stuffed into her bookshelf-Why Lentidra fall off map? Tim found himself, now at last, caught up to her inquiry. "Why was it back-burnered?"

"They ran into problems during animal trials. I looked at the data, but…"

"What?"

"The trial data are all outside my lab."

Tim imagined that such a vague answer from Vector's senior scientist would only have further fired Tess's imagination.

"And they withhold it from you?" Bear asked. "It's your company."

Dolan cupped sweat off his forehead. "They gave me the data. In a variety of formats, actually. I'm just not certain how…complete it was. It's something I've been looking into."

Tim said, "Are they similar? Lentidra and Xedral?"

Dolan adjusted his glasses with a little lift. "You're thinking if there was some problem with Lentidra, a design irregularity, something, it could reflect on Xedral, too? It's possible." He flipped to the next page. "But this looks more like-"

His cell phone rang, Bach's familiar Gothic trills. He caught himself, his shoulders rising in a half cringe.

"What were you saying, Dolan?" Tim said. "What do you think this report is?"

"I…I don't know."

"Bullshit," Bear said. "These are your inventions, Dolan. You can read this."

Dolan tilted his head down so his chin wrinkled. He looked scared, and much younger than his thirty-two years. The phone finally stopped ringing. "Take me back, please."

"Listen-"

"Take me back." Dolan shoved the document out of his lap. "Arrest me or take me back." Bear started to say something, but Dolan cut him off: "Then let me out!"

Bear tugged the gearshift down into drive, and they coasted smoothly back across the wide Bel Air streets. They pulled up to the estate, and Tim got out.

Dolan scooted across the seat, knocking the report onto the curb, and climbed out. He stood frail and bent; whatever he'd glimpsed had eaten away at his posture. At the end of the long walk, the giant house loomed, a few illuminated rooms granting it an uncanny vitality. He stared up at the house's impressive mass as if awed by it. Tim waited for him to move, but he didn't.

Dolan turned back to them. "I'm not like them. I'm weak."

Tim stooped and picked up the report from the gutter. He rolled it and pressed one end to Dolan's chest. "Don't be."

After a few moments, Dolan took the pages and stuffed them into his waistband. He pulled his shirt down, hiding them, and shuffled toward the porch that just four nights before had been the stage for Ted Sands's murder.

Morgenstein stepped out of the shower with a shaggy bath mat wrapped around his waist, a stopgap towel that ended midthigh. He weaved a bit in front of the cracked mirror and took another pull from his fresh bottle of Bombay Sapphire. A used condom, infused with streetwalker-preferred strawberry flavor, stuck to the futon mattress behind him. He'd had a hell of a night, and still had seven hundred bucks of the snitch money hiding under the cap of his Speed Stick.

He shook his head, throwing flecks of water onto the stained mirror, then traded the square blue bottle for a Q-tip. He'd just inserted the cotton tip into his ear when a shadow flashed from the open closet to his left and struck his elbow.

He sagged back against the wall, a grasping arm knocking over toiletries and dirty glasses, the bath mat falling. He felt no pain, just a loud, constant rush, a seashell pressed to his left ear.

A revolver came into focus first, then Walker behind it.

Morgenstein's fingers scrabbled up his left cheek, growing sticky, and then he unscrewed the bent Q-tip from his ear canal. Blood ran through the fingers of his cupped hand.

He picked up the bath mat from the floor and secured it around himself, an incongruous act of modesty given what was at stake. The marks of his fingers were rendered on the cloth in crimson.

They'd told him Walker was going to come. He wasn't sure if he hadn't believed them or simply hadn't cared.

Grim comprehension hit him, a cold, chest-high wave. He cleared his throat, but it still felt coated with gin and phlegm. He couldn't hear himself well over the white noise permeating his skull. "Your father would never harm me."

Walker cocked the hammer with a thumb, the gun doing a tiny tilt and bob. "I'm not my father," he said, and squeezed.

I heard you got shot."

Bear took a turn too hard, and Tim braced against the door, almost dropping his cell phone. "Shit, Dray, I'm sorry. I just got grazed. Coupla stitches."

"For a few stitches I wouldn't have bothered staying awake worrying." Despite her tone, her voice was uneven. She blew out a shaky breath. "I figured if you were dead, Guerrera wouldn't have mentioned it so nonchalantly."

In the background Tim heard Tyler fussing. "He's not asleep?"

"Same story." She sounded exhausted. "This case goes on much longer, I'm filing for hazardous-duty pay."