to be helpful. There was no sign of the cars they were looking for.
Maria was at the wheel. As McCaskey watched familiar storefronts and offices slip by, he had a troubling thought. A century ago, the booksellers, diners, attorneys, government offices, and banks would have been especially vulnerable to fire. Today, it was a new kind of fire that could destroy them. The kind that had crippled Op-Center. He wondered if there would ever be a time when people did not have to fear life as much as they feared death.
Not the way we do things now, he told himself.
Funds to fight these dangers were allocated by political need instead of by threat assessment. People like himself, Maria, and Detective Howell could not do the job America was counting on them to do.
'Do you think the killer might have rented a car?' Maria asked.
McCaskey looked at his wife. 'I'm sorry?'
'The killer,' Maria repeated slowly. 'Do you think she might have rented a car?'
'I would be very surprised if she did,' he said. 'Assassins don't like to leave a paper trail.'
'This assassin did not expect to be exposed,' Maria pointed out.
'That is true.'
'And she certainly would have gone in with a fake ID,' Maria went on.
'An experienced killer would have several, I'm sure.'
'I suppose we can try that search if this doesn't get us anywhere,'
McCaskey said. 'But there have got to be hundreds of rental facilities in the D.C. metro area. It will take days to visit them all, and what do we tell them when we do?'
'We show them pictures of all the women and see if they look familiar.
Or better yet, we can see if any of them show up on security cameras.
None of those women would have had a reason to rent a car.'
'Yes, we could do that,' McCaskey said.
That was another difference between today and his days as a rookie G-man. Twenty-odd years ago, at least a dozen agents would have been assigned to a case like this. Now there were two.
'Darrell, were you all right a minute ago?' Maria asked.
'Sorry?'
'You went away from me.'
'Yes,' her husband said. 'I was thinking, that's all.'
'What about?' Maria asked.
'The pork barrel,' he said with a little laugh.
'Is that a restaurant?'
'In a manner of speaking,' McCaskey replied. He loved his beautiful, sweet, Spanish wife. She was so worldly, so tough, and so very linear.
'A person of influence takes a lunch tray to his senator and gets plates full of federal funds. It's another name for patronage.'
'I see,' Maria said. 'It is the same as what bookmakers in Madrid call el roulette del amigo.'
'That's exactly what it is. The roulette wheel of a friend,' McCaskey said. 'The fix is in, the outcome predetermined.'
