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it.”
    â€œYou’re a friend. I need more.”
    â€œFine,” Jack says, with a steely edge to his voice.
    â€œNow please explain the discrepancy,” she suggests.
    â€œWhat discrepancy?” Jack says, all innocence.
    â€œYou rendezvous with your buddy Randall Shane at 7:00 a.m. and yet you don’t show up here until 8:30 a.m.Kendall Square is at most fifteen minutes from this location. Where did you go? What did you do?”
    Jack sighs. “We attempted to break into a motel.”
    â€œA motel located where?”
    â€œThe Residence Inn off Kendall Square. Shane thought it likely that he’d been lured to the victim’s home so that evidence could be planted in his room.”
    â€œThat’s his theory.”
    â€œYes.”
    Silence. Everybody fidgets, including Jack. Uncomfortable moments accumulate. Finally I stick my oar in and go, “Um, attempted to break in?”
    â€œI know,” Jack says with a sigh. “Embarrassing. Two former special agents, and we couldn’t manage to break into a motel room. We had the key card, so it wasn’t even a break-in, technically. My only excuse, the place was being staked out by state police detectives, and they happened to be good.”
    â€œThey must have been very good,” Naomi suggests.
    â€œMore stubborn than good, but still. The plan was, Shane creates a diversion, I slip into his room and check it out for planted evidence.”
    â€œWhat kind of diversion?”
    â€œAn exploding vehicle just around the corner from the motel. Specifically a small GMC pickup truck with a full tank of gas.”
    â€œFailed to explode?”
    â€œOh, it exploded,” Jack says with some satisfaction. “The cab went fifty yards in one direction, the chassis in another, mostly straight up. Produced a very impressive fireball and a really nice mushroom cloud of black smoke. But the damn Staties didn’t move. It was like they were expecting a diversion and determined not to budge.No way I could get into the room undetected, which had been the whole point.”
    Dane stirs, says, “Hey, I don’t get it. How’d they know to stake out Shane’s motel room less than an hour after the crime was reported? How did they even know he was involved at that point? The Cambridge cops had barely taken possession of the scene, let alone been in a position to identify suspects, or pass it on to the state police.”
    â€œGood question,” Jack says. “Shane told me the motel must have been under surveillance before he called 911. He gets back to the vicinity of the motel ten minutes after he makes the call, the state police were already in place, well established. That’s when he knows for sure he’s being set up and that’s when he calls me.”
    â€œAnd you responded, even though you may have been assisting in the commission of a felony murder.”
    â€œDamn right. I’ve known the guy since the Academy. No way did he murder a client.”
    â€œAnd did detectives recover a murder weapon?”
    Jack shakes his head. “Not yet, and not from the motel room.”
    â€œSo your working theory was mistaken and nothing was planted to incriminate Shane?”
    â€œI didn’t say that. The detectives found a bloodstained shirt under the bathroom sink in his room.”
    â€œAh. You’re assuming that’s the forensic link. Shane’s DNA on the shirt, blood matched to the professor?”
    â€œThat’s my assumption.”
    â€œBut the murder weapon is still out there.”
    â€œSo far.”
    Naomi announces, “Excellent case briefing.”
    To an outside observer she might seem inordinately pleased, considering the subject matter, but that’s the way she rolls. “We’ll assume for now that Shane is alive andbeing held in some unknown location for purposes of interrogation, pretty much as he predicted. If they’d wanted to