hit on your own. Your boss told you to do it.”
“I don’t have a boss. I’m freelance.”
“Somebody still pays you.” She risked more pressure, not with the
points of her nails but with the flat surfaces, although Rasmussen was
so swept away by a rapture of fear that he might still imagine he could
feel those filed edges gradually carving through the delicate shields of
his eyelids. He must be seeing interior starfields now, bursts and
whorls of color, and maybe he was feeling some pain. He was shaking;
his shackles clinked and rattled. More tears squeezed from beneath his
lids.
“Delafield.” The word erupted from him, as if he had been trying
simultaneously to hold it back and to expel it with all his might.
“Kevin Delafield.”
“Who’s he?” Julie asked, still holding Rasmussen’s chin with one hand,
her fingernails against his eyes, unrelenting.
“Microcrest Corporation.”
“That’s who hired you for this?”
He was rigid, afraid to move a fraction of an inch, convinced that the
slightest shift in his position would force her fingernails into his
eyes.
“Yeah. Delafield. A nut case. A renegade. They don’t understand
about him at Microcrest. They know he gets results for them. When this
hits the fan, I won’t be surprised by it, blown away. So let go of me.
What do you want?”
She let go of him.
Immediately he opened his eyes, blinked, testing his vision then broke
down and sobbed with relief.
As Julie stood, the nearby elevator doors opened, and Bobby returned
with the officer who had accompanied him down stairs to Ackroyd’s
office. Bobby looked at Rasmussen, his head at Julie, clucked his
tongue, and said,
“You’ve been naughty, haven’t you, dear? Can’t I take you anywhere
“I just had a conversation with Mr. Rasmussen. That’s all.”
“He seems to have found it stimulating,” Bobby said.
Rasmussen sat slumped forward with his hands over his eyes, weeping
uncontrollably.
“We disagreed about something,” Julie said.
“Movies, books?”
“Music.”
“Ah.”
Sampson Garfeuss said softly, “You’re a wild woman Julie.”
“He tried to have Bobby killed,” was all she said.
Sampson nodded.
“I’m not saying I don’t admire will sometimes… a little. But you
sure as hell owe me on this one.”
“I do,” she agreed.
“You owe me more than one,” Burdock said.
“This guy’s going to file a complaint. You can bet your ass on it.”
“Complaint about what?” Julie asked. “He’s not marked.”
Already the faint welts on Rasmussen’s cheek were faint Sweat, tears,
and a case of the shakes were the only evidence of his ordeal.
“Listen,” Julie told Burdock, “he cracked because I just happened to
know exactly the right weak point where I could give him a little tap,
like cutting a diamond. It worked because scum like him thinks everyone
else is scum, too, thinks we’re capable of doing what he’d do in the
same situation. I’d never put out his eyes, but he might’ve put mine
out if our roles were reversed, so he thought for sure I’d do him like
he would’ve done me. All I did was use his own screwed-up attitudes
against him. Psychology. Nobody can file a complaint about the
application of a little psychology.”
She turned to Bobby and said, “What was on those diskettes?”
“Wizard. Not trash data. The whole thing. These have to be the files
he duplicated. He only made one set while I was watching, and after the
shooting started he didn’t have time to make backup copies.”
The elevator bell rang, and their floor number lit on the board. When
the doors opened, a plain-clothes detective they knew, Gil Dainer,
stepped into the hallway.
Julie took the package of diskettes from Bobby, handed them to Dainer.
She said, “This is evidence. The whole case might rest on it. You
think you can keep track of it?”
Dainer grinned.
“Gosh, ma’am, I’ll try.”
FRANK POLLARD-alias James Roman, and George Farris-looked in the trunk
of the stolen Chevy found a small bundle of tools wrapped in a felt
pouch tucked in the wheel well. He used a screwdriver to take the
plates off the car.
Half an hour later, after cruising some of the higher and more quiet