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By Root 363 0

other job, the role he’d been playing for twenty-five years. Since Phil Wilkins had died, most of the group’s enthusiasm had waned—not least because everyone was getting older. Life starts to seem complicated enough without screwing with the basic rules. But not Warner. He wasn’t going to give it up, and that was the problem. He was by far the wealthiest of them. Grew up locally, left and founded his computer-games company on the West Coast, sold it at the right time. Moved back to Sarasota, started dabbling in condo development, turned out to be good at that, too. Good at money, good with women. Good-looking. Broken inside.

Every year Barclay had said it was time for them to quit. It had been Warner who’d turned him around—just like he’d turned around the others. Not through reasoned argument, either. Barclay couldn’t even claim that in his defense, though Warner was a very convincing guy when he put his mind to it. No, he’d been compromised by simpler means. Cold cash, sometimes. Also, getting invited to the kinds of events a cop wouldn’t normally get near—not to mention being introduced to the kinds of women who could be encouraged to attend that style of house party, for whom the proximity of wealth (and a big bowl of cocaine) operated like an access-all-areas skeleton key. Warner’s house operated a strict what-happens-in-Vegas policy. It was actually kind of amazing what a couple of nineteen-year-old girls would countenance with a grizzled middle-aged man with a gut, and when you knew the girls had been flown in for the event and would be on a plane back to Hicksville the next morning (never having learned anyone’s names, and not caring), it was easy to indulge yourself. Everybody has a price. It’s never so very high. It’s always paid in the same currencies.

The tech led him along a wood-paneled corridor and through a door that led to a set of stairs. Barclay knew where they went—a large, temperature-controlled wine cellar built into a concrete bunker excavated beneath the house. When they’d tramped down the stairs, Barclay saw the other two techs and Hallam standing to one side.

Barclay noticed that a section of the limestone floor had a sheen to it, as if it had been recently cleaned. Hallam detached himself from the group and went to a bank of the racks on the far side of the room. He took hold of a section loaded with expensive-looking bottles and gave it a tug. It didn’t move.

“Wouldn’t have found it at all if one of these guys hadn’t been going beyond their remit,” he said. He looked at one of the techs, a weedy, sheepish-looking guy. “Got a little too interested in what vintages were in the racks, lifted a bottle. And dropped it.”

Hallam lowered himself to his knees, pointed at the lowest section of the rack. “Mopping up the mess, he noticed a handle in here.”

He reached into a space that looked like nothing more than a gap for another bottle of wine, and Barclay heard a businesslike clunk, presumably a lever being turned. His heart sank.

Hallam stood back up, tugged at the rack again. This time it swung away from the wall, a four-foot section pivoting soundlessly.

There was a wide metal door on the wall behind, with a recessed handle. Hallam looked at his boss, evidently feeling that Barclay would want to take it from here.

Barclay wasn’t sure he did. He believed, on balance, that he’d rather walk back up the stairs and get into his car and drive somewhere else. Maybe Key West. Or Brazil. He stepped forward, however. That’s what being a cop is about. You’re the guy who has to take that step, who has to open the doors that all the other people don’t even want to know exist.

Behind the door, however, was another door. This was nearly a foot back from the first, suggesting a very thick wall. Barclay turned the handle, and was relieved when it didn’t open.

“Locked,” he said, but he knew that wasn’t going to be enough. He knew they were now into a period where they tried to locate keys for the door, and couldn’t; tried to establish whether the lock was tied into the security system and under its control;