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no mole.”
    Correct. No mole. She was telling the truth. “But she has other markings on her face, does she not?”
    Bernice wet her lips. “You sure you’re not going to kill me?”
    “I have told you. I am forbidden.”
    She swallowed. “There’s a scar on her forehead.”
    Mulazim was thrilled. He tried not to show it. “Here? At her hairline?” He touched himself again. “This scar goes straight across side to side?”
    “She wears her hair to cover it. But, yes, I’ve seen the scar.”
    Mulazim felt transported. He was in another place. Other than the unusual color of her eyes, it was the one detail of the Black Angel’s description that most accounts of her agreed on. A wound from a knife fight. Some say a straight razor. Some say a bounty hunter was about to take her scalp when she managed to rip him crotch to chest. Which is true? Doesn’t matter. The scar is the main thing. It’s her. He had no doubt. She’s Elizabeth Stride, the Black Angel.
    But what now, though? What’s first? Think this out.
    The proof would be the scars. A pair of hands would not suffice. Nor would even her head because some might dispute it. They might say, “Not enough. Not worth the whole million. A few thousand maybe. Don’t complain.” But delivered alive? Forget the one million. They would gladly pay twice that and more. And only he, Mulazim, knows where she has gone or at least where she went from this island. She’s gone north to New England with four Muslim runaways, one of whom is none other than the princess.
    Mulazim rubbed his hands. This gets better and better. And we haven’t even gotten to the best part. It’s this thing the princess took that makes her so important. The sheik wouldn’t say what, but it could do great harm. “More harm than you could possibly imagine,” he said. One assumes that she still has it, but look who has her. It’s the woman at the top of the most wanted list. A woman who would gladly do great harm.
    Should he use one of his cell phones to make a report? The Americans claim that they monitor such calls, but in truth they intercept maybe one in five hundred and they translate maybe one in five thousand. Fewer still for calls made to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis always get kid glove treatment.
    No, he would wait until he knew more. Even then, he won’t say anything about the Black Angel. If he did, the sheik might send many fighters, each one claiming a share of the bounty on her. Well, to hell with them. Finders-keepers.
    He was envisioning the Stride woman tied up like this one, him causing her more pain than she’d ever known. One cut for each of her victims, but none fatal. Him delivering the young princess in the bargain. Her and whatever she took.
    In this other place where his mind had gone, he was barely aware of what his hands were now doing. From behind, they had seized this Bernice by the throat. Her chair was bouncing. She was bucking and kicking. Ice cubes clattered on the floor. She was trying to suck air, but it had no place to go. Before long she was quiet. She went limp.
    Too late, he realized that he should have waited. He’d forgotten about her laptop computer. He might need her help with its workings. He put his fingers to her throat. He felt no pulse. She was finished.
    He sat before the screen. He saw the icon for documents. Among them was her address list. He spent twenty minutes browsing through these. There was not a single name that he recognized. Friends and family, probably, almost all from this area. Also some doctors and a dentist. He spent another twenty minutes on her other documents. He did a word search in each for Nasreens and then for Stride. He also tried Rasha, even Martin.
    No results. Nothing. Not even a mention of the tennis school. Her office computer might contain something useful, but she’d probably been cautioned against taking files home. Near the bottom of the screen he saw the icon for the internet. He took a deep breath, not daring