Now he lowered himself gingerly to the couch and tried not to think about the shambles his life had become. He felt for the remote under his right buttock and clicked on the TV. The plane in Oklahoma, smoking in the darkness now, reminded him cruelly that Ness wasn’t the only woman he’d let down today.

And Chris Stern’s widow? a mean little voice in his head taunted. Tom was annoyed at the voice. He hadn’t let Vee down today, for Chrissakes! Letting Vee down was just an ongoing situation that would probably never be resolved.

When the mean little voice tried to bring Sylvia Alvarez into it, Tom rebelled and rolled off the couch with a wince.

It was three a.m., six a.m. in DC. He picked up his landline phone and thumbed through a barely used address book. Sometimes old technology was the best.

He found the number he wanted scrawled in pencil in a margin. He hadn’t used it in a long while but he punched it into the handset now before he could think too hard about it.

To his relief, Kitty was awake. She told him that Lenny Munro was lead on Oklahoma.

‘Great. Just what I needed.’

‘Sorry, Tom.’

‘Ah, fuck it.’

‘You okay? It’s, like, three a.m. there.’

‘Yeah, I’m fine. Can’t sleep.’

‘You should take a pill or something.’

‘Has that dick got a prelim cause?’

‘Gee, Tom, it’s only sixteen hours old!’

Was it really only sixteen hours? Lucia’s call seemed like a hundred years ago.

‘Off the record.’

‘Off the record, it’s only sixteen hours old.’ Kitty lowered her voice: ‘You know I’d tell you.’

‘Thanks.’ He sighed. ‘You got any jobs lined up for me? Pete’s car sprung an oil leak? A grease fire at McDonald’s?’

‘Tom …’

‘Figures.’

‘Are you okay?’

He hated the note of concern in her voice. ‘Fucking great. Never better.’

Again the silence.

‘Thanks, Kitty.’

‘’Bye, Tom.’

Tom hung up feeling worse than he’d felt before he called. He would have swallowed what was left of his pride and called Munro anyway, if he’d thought for one second it would do any good. He wondered how long Lucia had waited for him – how long she had trusted he’d come through for her – before she’d given up and started calling the helpline herself, dealing with Sandy.

By now, he thought, Lucia must know one way or another. He hoped for the best for her – and feared the worst.

He flicked through the channels until he found a documentary on whales and watched humpbacks migrate, hoping it would help his mind stop picking relentlessly over the events of the day.

Ness had seen him weak. He hadn’t been able to help her or himself. He’d made empty threats of outlandish vengeance. He went hot as he thought of the desperation and helplessness that had forced them from him.

The whales had swum all the way from the South Pacific to northern California, dodging orcas all the way, before Tom cleared the self-pity and emerged at the brutal remembrance that he wasn’t that good at poker.

And if he wasn’t that good at poker why did they care so much if he played?

Surely they had a dozen other players of his calibre who would bite their arms off to earn money at their dissolute hobby.

Why him? Why threaten him? What was in it for them? What would make it worth their while to kidnap a federal officer and rough him up?

Then there was the Oklahoma crash. Another 737. Another faulty fan disc? Lenny Munro on lead was going to make it almost impossible for him to find out. Would Pete feed him information? Would Kitty? He remembered her tongue in his mouth and wondered how much leverage that still gave him. If any. Sex was a volatile currency.

Sex led him back to Ness. She knew Stanley – she’d told him way back while he watched butter glisten on her chin. She knew him, but he’d still hit her. Why?

Questions spun pointlessly in his tired mind as the humpbacks completed their journey, then turned and headed south again – as if any of them knew what the hell they were doing.

*

The throbbing of Tom’s leg roused him twenty minutes after he’d fallen into a fitful sleep on the couch. He woke thinking of Lucia, wondering if she’d gone to Oklahoma, whether her family were with her, whether Candice and Carlo had been found, whole or in the little shreds of road-kill meat he had seen at crash sites, identifiable only by DNA testing. Was Lucia giving blood at this very moment to discover which dribble of ground beef was her sister? Or had Candice worn a watch bought for a birthday? A pendant with an inscription? A bridge from a Savannah dentist who’d be woken to check his records?

Not for the first time, Tom wondered how he’d be identified if he met a sudden, dismembering death. It always depressed him to think that, unless he somehow stayed united with his credit card, there wasn’t much to mark him out from the crowd. Cheap watch, no wedding ring, all his own teeth. He had a short white scar beside his left eye – a humiliating reminder of crashing his car while he was in the middle of his driving test – and he’d broken his leg in two places playing basketball in college, so he supposed someone somewhere might still have the X-rays. He hoped so. He doubted his appendectomy scar would make him an instantly recognizable corpse.

Tom wished he could make amends; wished there was something he could do for Lucia and her family. He toyed briefly with the idea of asking Pete to send him to Tulsa to help with the investigation but knew he’d be as welcome there as a red-headed stepchild.

New TV pictures had come in from Oklahoma and Tom rolled himself upright to see them properly aligned.

The plane had gouged a brutal crater in a ripe corn crop. What hadn’t been pulverized or driven into the Oklahoma soil hulked and smoked like a truculent teenager.

The high corn masked any view of the ground around the wreckage and he felt a grudging nudge of sympathy for Lenny Munro. The site was a bitch. You wouldn’t be able to see ten feet through the corn; agents would have to walk between the tall rows, marking debris, flagging body parts, charting mayhem. Investigators would only ever be able to get a proper look at the pattern of the crash from a helicopter, and from carefully gridded maps that would take days to complete.

Even so, a tingle ran up his neck and the backs of his ears prickled with realization. From this new angle, he didn’t need a map or a close-up to see that Flight 823 had suffered at least one major breach where the fuselage joined the leading edge of the starboard wing.

In a sudden motion that made him wince as his feet hit the floor, Tom moved to his desk and impatiently jabbed his computer into life.

He suppressed the guilty image of Ness crying, silver tape hanging from her bruised cheek, as he ran through his favourites – an eclectic mix that included NTSB.gov, PokerStars.com and Slutz.net.

The NTSB site drily informed him that the crash of Flight 823 was already under investigation. Standard stuff.

Slutz.net told him that 36DD Suzy wanted to suck him dry. Standard stuff.

The Boeing website was apparently ignorant of the loss of Flight 823. Standard stuff.

Nothing.