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sat waiting for a word from me. "On the face of it," I said, "they look pretty safe. They made their play and carried it off without giving you a clue who they are. If they left tracks anywhere, they haven't shown up yet. It's possible someone at the supermarket or the place onAtlantic Avenue recognized one of them or caught a license number, and it's worth an intensive investigation to try to turn up such a witness, but he's no more than hypothetical at this point. The odds are that there won't be a witness, or that what he saw won't lead anywhere."
    "You're saying we got no chance."
    "No," I said. "That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying an investigation has to do something besides work with the clues they left behind. One starting point lies in the fact that they got away with almost half a million dollars. There's two things they could do, and either one could spotlight them."
    Kenan thought about it. "Spend it's one of them," he said. "What's the other?"
    "Talk about it. Crooks talk all the time, especially when they've got something to brag about, and sometimes they talk to people who'll happily sell them out. The trick is to get the word out so those people know who the buyer is."
    "You've got an idea how to do that?"
    "I've got a lot of ideas," I admitted. "Earlier you wanted to know to what extent I was still a cop. I don't know, but I still approach this kind of problem the way I did when I carried a badge, turning it this way and that until I can get some kind of grip on it. In a case like this one I can immediately see several different lines of investigation to pursue.
    There's every chance in the world that none of them will lead anywhere, but they're still the approaches that ought to be tried."
    "So you want to give it a shot?"
    I looked down at my notebook. I said, "Well, I have two problems.
    The first one I think I mentioned to
    Pete on the phone. I'm supposed to go to Ireland the end of the week."
    "On business?"
    "Pleasure. I just made the arrangements this morning."
    "You could cancel."
    "I could."
    "You lose any money canceling, your fee from me'd make that up to you. What's the other problem?"
    "The other problem's what use you'll make of whatever I might turn up."
    "Well, you know the answer to that."
    I nodded. "That's the problem."
    "Because you can't make a case against them, prosecute them for kidnapping and homicide. There's no evidence of any crime committed, there's just a woman who disappeared."
    "That's right."
    "So you must know what I want, what the point of all this is. You want me to say it?"
    "You might as well."
    "I want those fuckers dead. I want to be there, I want to do it, I want to see them die." He said this calmly, levelly, in a voice with no emotion in it. "That's what I want," he said. "Right now I want it so bad I don't want anything else. I can't imagine ever wanting anything else.
    That about what you figured?"
    "Just about."
    "People who'd do something like this, take an innocent woman and turn her into cutlets, does it bother you what happens to them?"
    I thought about it, but not for very long. "No," I said.
    "We'll do what has to be done, me and my brother. You won't have a part of that."
    "In other words I'd just be sentencing them to death."
    He shook his head. "They sentenced themselves," he said. "By what they did. You're just helping play out the hand. What do you say?"
    I hesitated.
    He said, "You've got another problem, don't you? My profession."
    "It's a factor," I said.
    "That line about selling crack to schoolchildren. I don't, uh, set up shop in the schoolyard."
    "I didn't figure you did."
    "Properly speaking, I'm not a dealer. I'm what they call a trafficker.
    You understand the distinction?"
    "Sure," I said. "You're the big fish that manages to stay out of the nets."
    He laughed. "I don't know that I'm big particularly. In certain respects the middle-level distributors are the biggest, do the most volume. I deal in weight, meaning I either bring product