Blood Orchid (Holly Barker 3)

“You’ll remember that my house was broken into and my phone tapped?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we found the guy who did it.”

“Good for you.”

“Not so good: We found him in the Indian River with a bullet through the head.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. We IDed him as Carlos Alvarez, a locksmith from Fort Lauderdale.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“No reason why it should; he has a clean sheet.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Why?”

>

“Well, you’d normally expect somebody with the proficiency to do your burglary and wiretapping to have some sort of record, at least an arrest or two.”

“I thought proficient people were the least likely to get caught.”

“Yeah, but they don’t start out proficient, and they usually screw up early in their careers.”

“If you say so. Anyway, I went down to his shop today and talked with his partner and cousin, Pedro Alvarez, broke the news to him. He was shocked, said he didn’t know what Carlos was into, but I don’t believe him.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“Wiretapping’s a federal crime, so I thought maybe you might be able to investigate this for me. I don’t have the resources to send people all over the state to conduct interviews, and I don’t want to go through the red tape with the state.”

“I don’t know, Holly. What with our push on terrorism, I don’t have a lot of agents to put on stuff with a low priority. I mean, some tech gets himself wasted, that’s not really our problem.”

“You’ve got enough people to send a guy to my jurisdiction, haven’t you?”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“Suppose this is connected to what your man is working on?”

“How would you know that? You don’t know what he’s working on.”

“No, I don’t, but you do, and if there’s a connection to be made, you can make it.”

Harry was silent.

“I hope you’re thinking.”

“I’m thinking.” He went silent again.

“Just tell me when you’re finished, Harry.”