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nervy but connected. Very connected. Who could get the FBI to show up at two in the morning to take a case away from the Arlington cops?”
    “Is that a rhetorical question?”
    “At this point, no.”
    “So what are your next steps?” Dillon asked.
    “I’ll see if I can figure out who Messenger is. I’m checking missing persons reports and watching to see who shows up dead in the next few days.”
    “Good. What else?”
    “I’ll get a copy of Russo’s autopsy and learn more about the FBI agent who was dispatched to the scene. And I’ll find out everything there is to know about Mr. Russo himself. All I know at this point is that he was a nurse.”
    “A nurse? Why would someone want to kill a nurse?”
    “Wrong question, Dillon. The question is: Why would someone who has access to encrypted radios and possibly military personnel, and who is able to make the FBI take away a case from the local fuzz in the middle of the night, want to kill a nurse?”
    “I stand corrected, my dear. Keep me apprised.”
    DeMarco called his mother in Queens and told her Paul had been killed. She spent a few minutes saying things like “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. He was so young. He was so sweet.” She cried a bit and talked about how Paul had looked when he was a child. “Like an angel he was, with all that curly hair, those big blue eyes.”
    Then, being a practical person, she got down to business.
    “Well, Joe, you’re going to have to take care of the funeral. And you better find out where he lived and take care of his things, too.”
    Aw, for Christ’s sake. He was sorry Paul was dead but he hardly knew the guy, and he could already see that dealing with his death was going to eat up a lot of time—time he had allotted for playing golf.
    “What am I supposed to do with his things?” he whined to his mother.
    “I don’t know. Give them to the Goodwill or something. And maybe he had a will. You need to see what his wishes were.”
    Yeah, a will. A will was good. If Paul had appointed an executor, the executor could deal with all this shit.
    “But didn’t he have any other relatives?” DeMarco said. “I thought Aunt Vivian had a sister—Tina, Lena, something like that.”
    Aunt Vivian was Paul’s mother, and although she wasn’t literally DeMarco’s aunt, that’s what he’d always called her.
    “Joe, what’s wrong with you!” his mother snapped. “Lena’s eighty-seven years old. You can’t burden her with this. It’s your responsibility. It’s the right thing to do.”
    Sheesh .
    “Agent Hopper, my name’s Joe DeMarco. I’m calling about Paul Russo.”
    Hopper didn’t say anything.
    “Agent, are you still there?”
    “Yeah, I’m here. How did you hear about Russo, Mr. DeMarco?”
    “The Arlington cops told me about him. They said they found a card in his wallet identifying me as the person to contact in case of an emergency. In fact, I’m kinda surprised you didn’t call and tell me he’d been murdered.”
    “Well, we must have overlooked the card. Or maybe the Arlington cops removed it from his wallet when they found the body.”
    Overlooked the card? This was the fucking FBI. They were supposed to be able to find gnat DNA on the head of a pin. How could they have overlooked the card? But DeMarco didn’t say any of this. All he said was, “I just want to know when I can claim the body.”
    “Why would you want to claim the body?”
    “Because I’m Paul’s cousin and his only living relative.” That was a lie but he didn’t want to go into a long complex explanation of his relationship to Paul and the fact that Paul’s real closest living relative had one foot in the grave herself.
    “I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” Hopper said, “but his body was cremated.”
    “What?”
    “Yeah, I apologize, but we don’t have a lot of room in the morgue we use, and when we found out Russo’s parents were dead and he didn’t have any siblings, after the autopsy, we—”
    “You