Searching for one of the acid-toting drones.

And once again the amateur guards were looking everywhere but the place they should be looking.

Climbing from the vehicle, he donned the hard hat — yellow like the other workers wore — and zipped his Carhartt overalls up tight at the neck. He walked to the back, raised the liftgate and pulled out the heavy backpack.

He made his way to the tunnel and began to shimmy through. At the end, some fifty feet away, he climbed the steel rungs set into the concrete as a ladder and emerged near the crane’s base. Above him the jib loomed. The wind was up and there was a faint whistle as it streamed through the yellow tubing and black support wires. The operator had released the clutch so that the jib weather-vaned safely.

He examined the base of the mast. The drone was resting in peace, but his plan didn’t call for that anyway. Nor was any of the lovely HF acid involved.

This crane incident would be different.

In a few minutes, the packages had been delivered and he returned to the tunnel and made his way back to the car.

In the driver’s seat he tossed the helmet into the back, began the drive back to his safe house on Hamilton. As he left, he examined the site once more.

He supposed that this particular crane, while towering, garnered less attention than others. The area around it had been completely cleared in a four-hundred-foot circumference. So if, for some reason, the terrorist, or pyscho, sabotaged it, there were no apartments or office buildings to crush.

Which didn’t mean there was no target within the crane’s reach.

The most important one in fact of his whole project.

51

Detective Lyle Spencer — a full foot taller than Ron Pulaski — stood at the door. He wore a black suit and white shirt, no tie. Pulaski looked up and shook the man’s meaty hand.

They stepped into the living room, and Ron introduced the detective to Jenny. They too shook hands.

The children, at the Dog-opoly board, looked up. Jenny said, “And our children. Martine and Brad. This is Detective Spencer.”

“You’re big.”

“Brad!” she said.

Spencer laughed. “Not a worry.” The detective’s eyes looked around the comfortable room: affordable furniture, pictures, vacation souvenirs, sports uniforms, family relics going back generations. Then the accessories that make a dwelling a home: video game cartridges, magazines, recipe cards, soccer and softball gear, mismatched running shoes, pretzel and potato chip packets.

Jenny cast her husband a playfully exasperated look, and he realized he’d forgotten to tell her there’d be a houseguest calling.

“We’ll be out back.”

“The game!” Martine called.

“I won’t be long.”

“Coffee? Beer?”

Both declined Jenny’s offer.

Brad called, “Detective Spencer? Were you like Special Forces?”

“SEALs.”

“Man... Team Six?”

“No.”

“But did you do secret missions?”

“Oh, you bet. But I can’t talk about them.”

“Cool!”

Ron nodded to the kitchen and the two men walked through it, and onto the back porch. The covered rectangle, unscreened, overlooked a patch of lawn ringed with planting beds in which nothing had been planted. They were weed free, though, and filled with fragrant mulch, which Ron and the children had spread themselves. It was not that long ago — less than a month — though that pleasant Saturday afternoon might have been a decade ago.

Ron noted the big man’s somber expression, not present when he’d arrived.

They looked over the grass.

Filling the silence, Spencer asked softly, “When did it happen?”

It...

“Or we can move on. Just wanted to ask.”

“No. It’s okay. A few years. How’d you know?”

“Your wife said ‘our children.’ Not ‘two of our children.’ And I met an older boy and a younger girl. But there were pictures on the mantel of Brad and an older girl.”

The man was, after all, a detective.

And looking at the face, big and tough, but tinted with pain, Ron Pulaski knew another fact about Lyle Spencer. They had something in common.

Ron said, “Cancer. Happened fast. Man, you do everything... and sometimes everything isn’t enough.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Over the years we must’ve had a hundred people over, Jenny and me. Probably looked at that same picture. Nobody made the leap. Maybe they wondered and didn’t want to ask. But I don’t think so. They just didn’t notice. And your situation?”

Looking out over the yard, the man said, “Wasn’t that different. We had a daughter too. Then... It was an orphan disease.”

Ron shook his head.

“Term of art, our doctor said. A rare disease. In the U.S., the definition is less than two hundred thousand people have it.” He gave a dim laugh. “I told Lincoln. And you know him. He said the word ‘orphan’ comes from the Greek. And it doesn’t mean just a child without his parents. It can mean a parent who’s lost a child.

“There’re sometimes drugs to treat orphan diseases, but the companies don’t develop them on scale. Not profitable. A single pill might cost a quarter million dollars.”

“No!”

“That’s what she needed. I was upstate, at a small sheriff’s office. I helped myself to some drug money to pay for it.”