The question was asked as if Seattle were on the other side of the planet, not just two hours by road.

“At least there’s no traffic once you’re south of Tacoma.

Olympia had already rolled up the sidewalks when I went through. I had a late meeting. Work, you know.”

“Yeah, can’t live with it and can’t eat without it.” Sherry busied 26


herself at the carousel where homemade pies were gleaming with sugar and glazes.

“We have a few minutes. Let me show you a basic move to break someone’s grip on your arm.”

Sherry was a quick learner. Kip enjoyed their impromptu lesson. Enjoyed, too, the warm human contact, especially with a woman. Hopping up onto her bar stool again when her dinner was served, she admitted that her batteries were just about run dry, and her social life had to be a wasteland when putting a chokehold on Sherry was the closest thing to a hug she’d had in months. And there was little hope that would change.

Fall mornings dawned crisp and clean on the Olympic Peninsula. Seventy-foot pines swayed in the light wind, and the thin roar greeted Kip as she opened her eyes. It could almost be the sea. She could almost be on vacation. No work, no ex-girlfriends, no regrets.

She rolled out of the loft bed and pulled on her robe and socks. The wood floor was cold and she knew from experience that it was hard to climb down the ladder from the loft if she was shivering. Had she not arrived so late last night she’d have left a fire banked in the stove to help take some of the chill off. Instead, she’d only managed to get the groceries and boxes brought in before crashing.

The sky outside was dotted with puffed clouds against the blue, but the light was darkening. Rain later, perhaps. Now was the perfect time for the hike she couldn’t afford to take. She felt the urge to pummel something. Sure she was flattered by Tamara Sterling’s request, but a day she’d planned to spend in the dogged pursuit of nothing at all was now wall-to-wall work.

She loved her job. There was no job she’d rather have. Well, no job she’d rather have that she could have. Secret Service and its simulators be damned.

27


Pulling on an old sweatshirt and jeans, she went outside for wood. The cold morning air snapped her awake better than any coffee ever could. After reheated filet for breakfast she decided that work or no work, there was not enough split wood ready for winter visits.

She felt a lot better after a half hour of swinging an ax. The rhythmic thump of ax into wood, punctuated with the crack of splitting pine, became its own kind of music. She pictured the face of the supervisor who had told her she could either take a routine Justice Department job or resign the Service altogether.

He’d just been delivering the news. It wasn’t his policy. No final score on the simulator, no career.

She drove the ax into the image of his face and grimaced.

After all these years, it still hurt, apparently. Tamara Sterling’s questions had poked the scar.

Breathing hard, she stopped to stack for a while, letting the ache in her shoulders ease. She was out of shape from a job that had too much time at a desk.

She did love her work. The bigger the investigation, though, the more paperwork. Preparing for testimony was time-consuming. Few people thought about the painstaking effort it took to catalog work papers and itemize evidentiary statements.

Sure, a trainee could do part of it, but it was still a big pain in the ass. She pictured her boss’s face on the next log as she prepared to swing the ax. She liked Emilio, a lot. It felt really good to chop him to bits.

Too much paper. Too much documenting.

Not enough thinking, puzzling, solving.

Not enough laughing, not enough fun, not enough jogging, sailing or tae kwon do. She was dull. Dull and boring. A bad friend, most of the time. A bad daughter, a distant sibling—well, that wasn’t entirely her fault.

And lonely. She pushed that unwelcome thought away.

She pictured Tamara Sterling’s face, the woman who had ruined her first weekend off in months. What an arresting, 28


intriguing, dominating, driven, self-assured, brilliant, annoying woman. She planted the image of that chiseled face on the log and drove the ax into it as hard as she could, splitting the chunk of pine evenly in two.

Showered and sated with peanut butter and jelly, which tasted all the better for the exercise and mountain air, Kip unpacked the first of the boxes from her trunk. In short order the small dining area was covered with folders and paperwork. She gave the sofa a longing look. It was positioned perfectly for reading, dozing and gazing out the window at the forest. The tartan throw folded on one end had been a fine nap companion more than once. But not today.

Okay, she had to hand it to Sterling. The worksheet she’d started was plain as day as to where she’d left off and what accounts she’d already checked. Kip had to check them herself again, but the paperwork was tagged and arranged by the SFI book, making the task easier.

Rain dripped, then drummed on the shingle roof as the laptop’s drive spun on. She’d timed her outdoor chores well.

Some people would no doubt think it strange that she was in the remote woods, listening to the rain and working on a laptop computer no heftier than a magazine. It wasn’t the first time, though. She was grateful for the technology that let her work so far from home. Of course that same technology made the very crimes she tracked down all the easier to commit.

Win some, lose some, she thought. Meanwhile, the solitude of the trees, the steady patter of the rain...it felt very, very good.

The cabin had no phone land line, and with a delicious sense of being bad, she switched off her cell phone and didn’t launch her e-mail program. There. Alone at last.

With a regretful sigh, she opened her electronic diary and made a few summary comments about the assignment, the times and places she’d met her client—Sterling was just another client—

29


and recorded the paperwork she’d received. Keeping such a log was an SFI requirement and she was making a concerted effort to treat this assignment like any other. Her summary made, she turned to the actual work. First she had to discern the scope of the problem. Then she’d work on ETO—eliminating the obvious.

She’d been at it only a half-hour when she found another account that was missing funds. Sixty thousand dollars and some change. The copy of the bank statement had been expertly doctored, but a ghost of ink betrayed the effort, and a close-up look at the staff auditor’s initials revealed that they, too, were likely forged. She munched away at a pile of carrot sticks while she methodically examined the staff auditor’s work. To her, it looked as if the staff auditors were comparing the print version of the bank statements to the online record, which verified that the printed version was in fact authentic. After they initialed the comparison, someone was substituting fake statements so that the reconciliation staff thought they had the real ones, and everything balanced.

It was actually a lot to keep track of—the embezzler was essentially running his or her own set of books to falsify the statements going back two months to avoid detection for as long as possible. Ultimately, the thief would miss something in the minutiae and alarm bells would sound. Sterling had found it early, and so far the thief had no clue. That meant they had a good shot at recovering the funds.

By late afternoon, she had found another four accounts and the total cash missing was taking an alarming turn. Sterling had found a half-million missing, and she had found at least six times that, and most of it from the SFI investment accounts and some from pension accounts.

Increasingly anxious, she turned to the largest of the trust accounts. Bad enough their own and their employees’ funds were missing—a client’s money would be the death knell for SFI’s unparalleled reputation.

As she worked, grateful to turn over page after page and finding nothing amiss, the rain stopped and watery sunlight 30


peeked in through the windows. Hunger made her leave the pile of paperwork for a northward drive to tiny Brinnon where a bona fide, greasy spoon, full fat with bacon burger was calling to her. She was a long way from the city, no reason to check her rearview mirror or worry about her billfold visible on the seat of the car. She ate at a splintery picnic table, watching the daylight fade on the other side of the Sound. Just to the north a cluster of lights marked the naval base where Trident submarines launched, but otherwise, this finger of Puget Sound was quiet as dark approached.

The evening was so peaceful she decided to drive further north to her favorite vista point at Seal Rock on Dabob Bay. She owed herself some fresh air and her work would be the better for it.

It was her favorite time of an autumn day. The ancient pines were falling into winter shadows of steel gray. The sun had dipped below the mountains of the Olympic National Forest. Streaks of pink- and orange-painted clouds stretched toward Seattle. If she’d had a whole day to herself she might have hiked on the Mount Baker glacier in the morning and spent the afternoon walking through the Hoh Rain Forest. Only the Olympic Peninsula offered such extremes in a single day’s drive.

She rolled down the windows to let the crisp air whip around her ears, inhaling the rich salt brine coming off Dabob Bay. She should spend her next vacation someplace where she could sail.