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“I very much appreciate your telling me this, Mr. Young.”

“Frank, please. What the hell, we have different badges, but we’re both cops, right?”

I really would like to believe that. I wonder why I don’t?

Young looked at his watch.

“Gotta get moving,” he said, and offered Matt his hand.

When Matt followed him back into the living room, Matthews was holding the Queen of a set of green jade chess pieces Matt had been given for his fifteenth birthday.

“Interesting set,” Matthews said. “Do you play much?”

“Some.”

“We’ll have to have a game sometime.”

“Anytime. I’ll be here.”

“I might surprise you, and just come knocking some night.”

“I wish you would.”

TWENTY-THREE

“How are you, Inspector?” Lieutenant Warren Lomax greeted Peter Wohl cheerfully, offering his hand. “What can we do for you?”

Lomax was a tall, quite skinny man in his early forties. He had been seriously injured years before in a high-speed chase accident as a Highway Patrol sergeant, and pensioned off.

After two years of retirement, he had (it was generally acknowledged with the help of then Commissioner Carlucci) managed to get back on the job on limited duty. He’d gone to work in the Forensics Laboratory as sort of the chief clerk. There, he had become fascinated with what he saw and what the lab did, actually gone back to school at night to study chemistry and electronics and whatever else he thought would be useful, and gradually become an expert in what was called “scientific crime detection.”

Three years before he had managed to get himself off limited duty, taken and passed the lieutenant’s exam, and now the Forensics Lab was his.

Wohl thought, as he always did, that Lomax looked like a sick man (he remembered him as a robust Highway sergeant), felt sorry for him, and then wondered why: Lomax obviously didn’t feel sorry for himself, and was obviously as happy as a pig in mud doing what he was doing.

“How are you, Warren?” Wohl said, and handed him the cassette tape from Matt Payne’s answering machine with his free hand.

“What’s this?” Lomax asked.

“The tape from Officer Matt Payne’s answering machine. Payne told me that Chief Coughlin wanted to run them through here. And as I had to come here to face an irate mayor anyhow, I brought it along.”

“Christ, Carlucci even called me, wanting to know if I had heard anything about the—what is it—the Islamic Liberation Army.”

“Had you?”

“The first I ever heard of them was in the newspapers. Who the hell are they, anyway?”

“I wish I knew,” Wohl said. “You come up with anything on Payne’s car?”

Lomax turned and walked stiffly, reminding Wohl that the accident had crushed his hip, to a desk and came back with a manila folder.

“My vast experience in forensics leads me to believe a. that the same instrument was used to slice his tires and fuck up his paint job, and b. that said instrument was a pretty high quality collapsible knife, probably with a six-inch blade.”

“How did you reach these conclusions, Dr. Lomax? And what is a collapsible knife?”

“A switchblade,” Lomax said, “is like a regular penknife, the blade folds into the handle, except that it’s spring loaded, so that when you push the button, it springs open. A collapsible knife is one where the blade slides in and out of the handle. Some are spring loaded, and some you have to push. You follow me?”

Wohl nodded.