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parking lot out of boredom. “Same man?” she asked.
    “It looks like it.” He walked over to check the timer being used to control the room lights. “Six p.m. on, 10 p.m. off?”
    “A few minutes off the hour, and the radio in the bedroom comes on about ten thirty.”
    “All your clients have something similar?”
    “Yes. I’ve double-checked locks, set lights on timers, made sure drapes were drawn.” She paced over to the window. When she had first arrived, she had pushed open the doorway, juggling her briefcase and the mail she picked up for Tyler. She had glanced in the living room and felt like someone had punched her. “Are you sure it’s not related to my clients?”
    “I’ve run all your clients’ addresses and didn’t find a pattern. This looks like another target of opportunity. Have you called the insurance agent yet?”
    “He’s coming.”
    “Then go get yourself a cup of coffee at the corner deli, take a walk, and blow off the stress while you let me do my job. There was nothing you could have done to prevent this.”
    She turned from the window. “I suppose.”
    “Why don’t you tell Bruce?”
    She’d tell Wolf before she’d tell Bruce; her brother would just overreact. “No.”
    “He has a right to know this is going on.”
    “He’s overseas. He can’t do anything about it from there, and I don’t want to add this kind of worry.”
    “Brothers are supposed to worry.” Scott pulled out his notebook and a pen. “It would be good for you to start taking a few precautions. Bring Bruce’s Labrador to work with you when you visit clients’ homes.”
    “Is that necessary?”
    “Dogs sense trouble. Do it for a few weeks while we figure out who this guy is.”
    She nodded, accepting she needed to do something. Three burglaries were three too many when she was the one discovering them. She missed Bruce; she missed Grace. And Wolf—she’d never realized how big a hole his absence would make in her life until he wasn’t around.

Five
     
* * *
     
    USS GEORGE WASHINGTON (CVN 73)
    M EDITERRANEAN S EA OFF THE C OAST OF T URKEY
    The stateroom was hot. Grace shed her flight suit and pulled on a T-shirt and shorts. It was a small room for six women to share, three bunk beds on one wall, lockers and small desks on the other. Her roommates were two pilots and three electronic countermeasure specialists who flew in the Prowler’s backseats to handle the intricacies of navigation and electronic jamming. By combining personal effects, the six of them had been able to squeeze in a semblance of a bookshelf and a music collection.
    Grace stretched out on the lower, middle bunk, her one spot of personal space for this six-month deployment. She had two feet of clearance to the bunk above, enough to turn over without hitting her head if she was careful and a width that meant she would tumble onto the floor if she woke and turned without realizing where she was. The mattress could hardly be called comfortable, but exhaustion changed her definition of acceptable. Whenever possible she tried to catch a few minutes of quiet time before a mission in order to separate everything that had gone before during the day from the reality of what was coming.
    Out of long habit she set her watch alarm for twenty minutes before she settled her head back. At this point in a sea tour, making the assumption she wouldn’t fall asleep the moment her body relaxed was a mistake. The pillow had a new pillowcase and it still smelled faintly of Downy. She had brought six pillowcases, folded and sealed in plastic bags, so that she would have a new one not washed in shipboard laundry available for each month.
    There was an inch-wide red ribbon stretched taut under the frame of the bunk above her. A letter she was writing to Jill was tucked under the ribbon on the left side. A white envelope addressed to her with a scripted B in the return address corner was tucked on the right. It was from Bruce. It had taken three weeks for