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detoured to her left, avoiding a party of eight and walking right next to Ferguson’s table. As she passed, he moved his chair back and bumped into her.
     
    “Scusi, scusi, ” he said in Italian, jumping to his feet. “I’m sorry.”
     
    “It’s nothing,” she said, pushing away.
     
    “I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
     
    “Mi ammazzi ,” she said. “You kill me.”
     
    Thera went into the foyer, grabbed her coat from the rack, and then left the restaurant.
     
    “I thought you were going to eat,” said Guns when she found him in the car down the block.
     
    “I didn’t feel like it.” She pulled a pair of rubber gloves from the glove compartment and opened her pocketbook, where Ferguson had tucked Arna Kerr’s wineglass when he accidentally bumped into Thera.
     
    “Think we got prints?”
     
    “We’d better. I’m not going back in there.”
     
    Thera put her hand inside the glass and then wrapped what looked like a thin electric blanket around it. Instead of an electrical plug, the blanket connected to a USB port in the team’s laptop, which was under the foot mat in the car. After fiddling with the sensitivity setting, she got an image of the glass on the screen. There were two smudges, a thumbprint, and what looked like the print of a middle finger.
     
    It figures, she thought.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    F
    erguson suggested they go back to Arna’s room, but she preferred his.
     
    “You don’t even know where it is,” he told her.
     
    “It’s not at the Borgia?”
     
    “I was there to see a friend. Who turned out not be in. Luckily for me. Or I wouldn’t have met you.”
     
    “You look like the kind of man who would have a nice room. Sauna, right?”
     
    “No sauna,” said Ferguson. “The marble sink is on the large size, though.”
     
    “That sounds nice.” She brushed his cheek with her finger.
     
    “Then let’s go,” said Ferguson, rising.
     
    Arna Kerr ran her hands across his back as they waited in the lobby for the taxi, making sure he didn’t have a gun.
     
    Maybe he was what he seemed—an attractive, well-off but somewhat lonely man about her own age. Maybe he’d seen her in the lobby of the Borgia and decided he wanted to sleep with her. Or maybe something else. She couldn’t be sure; the way he looked at her didn’t quite suggest lust.
     
    She had never once been made while on a job. Would it go down like this? Would Interpol send some smooth Irishman—or whatever he was—to romance her?
     
    No—that happened in movies. In real life, they arrested you. Or shot you.
     
    Most likely shot you.
     
    Which he might be planning to do when he got her to his room.
     
    The wine she’d drunk was making her take chances she shouldn’t, Arna Kerr thought. She should just tell him good night, go up to her room.
     
    But part of the attraction was the danger, or its potential.
     
    “Here we go,” said Ferg as the cab pulled up. “Are you with me? You’re so quiet you might be sleeping.”
     
    “I’m awake,” she said, and leaned up to kiss him.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    A
    fter Rankin planted his video bug, he left the hotel and walked around the block to a building subdivided into apartments. He reached for one of the buttons, as if he were going to ring to be buzzed in. Instead, he pushed a thin plastic card into the jamb near the lock. The door opened easily.
     
    Inside, the place smelled of boiling greens; the pungent, spinachlike smell reminded Rankin of his childhood, but not in a good way—he used to gag at the smell of spinach.
     
    The building was five stories high. Rankin trotted up the steps to the top, stopping at the top landing to make sure no one was around. Then he moved quickly down the hall to a window that looked onto the side alley. He reached to the top, making sure the latches he had checked yesterday were still undone- then pushed the window up and stepped out onto the ledge.
     
    When he’d done this the night before, the moon had been out and