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TWENTY-SEVEN

AGENT BLAIR TAKES THE elevator to the fourth floor, shows his credentials at the front desk, and heads down the hallway. Rebecca Crandall is on the phone when he walks in. She gives him a surprised-happy look when she sees him and motions for him to sit.

“Well, don’t I feel honored!” she says, hanging up the phone, pushing herself out of her chair, and giving Blair a hug. “A visit from no less than Special Agent Francis Xavier Blair.” She pats him on the chest. “How ya doin’, Frankie?”

“Never had it so good,” he says, his standard line.

Blair goes way back with Becky Crandall, back to their days together at the Bureau, before Becky moved over to a different part of the alphabet-soup club, becoming a supervisor in the criminal division of the IRS’s Chicago office.

They play some quick catch-up. Becky’s on her second marriage and has three kids, all in their teens. Blair’s personal life, on the other hand, is not much of a story — one divorce, nobody since, and no kids to show for it.

“You’re still in OC, I hear,” she says.

Blair makes a face. “Yeah, but I got roped into a task force with Customs. Cargo theft. Real exciting stuff. Anyway, OC isn’t the Organized Crime it used to be. Now it means street gangs and drugs, maybe a few small-time extortion rings.”

“No more Michael Cagninas. Hey, you know,” she says, snapping her fingers, “I thought of you — what, five, six months ago? — when Cagnina got sprung.”

Blair makes a face. “What a world, right? Thirteen years he gets. All the rackets he ran, the people he terrorized and killed — not to mention killing the three witnesses who would’ve nailed him on all that. And all he goes down for is a paper crime.”

Becky nods, gets serious, checking him out. “Somebody needs to let the past go,” she says. “Yeah, he only went down for tax evasion, but that’s something, at least. That’s thirteen years inside.”

Every damn person says that. But Blair can’t let it go. He won’t let it go.

“That’s why you’ve stayed in the Bureau, in Organized Crime, no less, all this time,” says Becky. “Am I right? I mean, you’re the only one left. Everyone else on that team moved on from the Bureau after that debacle with the witnesses. Not you, though. What, you’re hoping Cagnina will reopen for business so you can catch him?”

Blair waves her off. “Nothing like that. I’m just a glutton for punishment is all.”

Becky isn’t buying it. She gives him a sidelong glance, a smirk on her face. “Seriously, Francis Xavier — get Michael Cagnina out of your head.”

She drops her hands on the desk. “So why the visit? Looking to move over to Revenue so you can see my smiling face every day?”

Blair tosses a file on her desk. She picks it up.

“Let me guess,” she says. “You want the IRS to give you the what — to dig up whatever we can on some person of interest — but you won’t give us the why.”

Blair smiles. “That about covers it. Sorry; it’s sensitive stuff.”

“So who’s the lucky person of interest?” She opens the file. “Bowers,” she reads. “Hemingway Grove?”

Blair nods. “And I need it right away,” he says.