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you to leave,” he said to McGregor.
    “Oh, we on a schedule here?” Then he too noticed Beth had her head lowered and was sobbing. Tears were tracking down her cheeks, spotting her gray hospital gown. He smiled and shook his head. “Well, it appears our patient’s having a relapse.”
    Carver tightened his grip on his cane. McGregor took a step toward him, suitcoat held open to reveal his gun.
    “Please give it a try,” McGregor said. “Go ahead and swing that cane.”
    “Ring for the nurse,” Carver told Beth, without looking away from McGregor.
    She pressed the button pinned to her sheet. Neither Carver nor McGregor moved.
    Beth stopped sobbing.
    When the nurse entered, she stopped and stood still also. She was the same serious nurse with the shockingly mirthful smile who’d been in the room yesterday. She looked at Beth, then at Carver and McGregor.
    “We think it’s time for Lieutenant McGregor to leave,” Carver said.
    There was no hint of the smile on the nurse’s face. “Time for both of you to go,” she said.
    “No,” Beth said. She pointed at Carver. “Not him. Please.”
    The nurse glared at McGregor. “That leaves you odd man out,” she said in a voice that would have made Dirty Harry proud.
    McGregor grinned, snapped his note pad closed, and slid it and the pencil into his shirt pocket.
    “I was leaving anyway, sweet cakes,” he said to the nurse. “I’ve had my health fix for the day.”
    He strode over and pushed out through the swinging door, leaving behind only the lingering scent of his cheap deodorant.
    “That is a man,” the nurse said, wrinkling her nose, “who is not very nice.”
    “Like cancer isn’t a cold,” Carver said.

7
    C ARVER DIDN’T LIKE THE feel of McGregor’s dead certainty that Norton was the bomber. This was a high-profile case, and a successful rush to judgment would be beneficial to McGregor’s career. It wouldn’t concern him at all if an innocent man was imprisoned for murder. Why should it? He figured there were no innocent men.
    Not that Carver was feeling any particular sympathy himself right now for Adam Norton. Especially if he really was the bomber. Carver’s concern was in seeing that whoever was responsible for what happened to Beth and their unborn child would be caught and punished. He wanted revenge. Not so much justice as revenge. His pursuit of his unborn child’s killer wasn’t simply a job, like McGregor’s. It was a mission.
    He parked the Olds outside Vinny’s on Egret Road. Vinny’s was a lounge where off-duty Del Moray police hung out. It had in a previous incarnation been a hardware supply warehouse and was a narrow but long building of cinderblock needlessly painted a dirty gray, about the color of cinderblock. Its garish red-and-green neon sign featured tilted champagne glasses with bubbles rising from them to spell VlNNY’s, but Carver was sure champagne was never served there. Vinny himself was Vincent Carbello, a retired Del Moray vice detective. He ran an impeccably clean and honest operation, or at least was experienced and clever enough in his corruption that he wasn’t suspected of misdeeds.
    One of the regulars at Vinny’s was Paul Geary, a cop promoted to detective first grade after a recent shoot-out with drug traffickers in which he’d apprehended two suspects while bleeding from a bullet wound in his arm. A couple of years ago Carver had helped Geary’s daughter out of a problem concerning a manslaughter charge. Geary owed him, and Geary hated McGregor. When Carver phoned and asked for a meeting, Geary suggested Vinny’s. Carver liked that. It was very possible that if the two men met and talked at Vinny’s, someone would carry news of their meeting to McGregor, Geary’s superior. Geary obviously didn’t give a damn.
    Vinny’s was cool after the noon heat outside. It was filled with a soft buzz of voices against the background noise of a country-western song coming from the speakers mounted behind the