Now that they were finally back at the NYC precinct, Sam surveyed Kerry's crew. The agents looked beat and demoralized. From the unshaven faces and rumpled clothes, it was clear no one had slept in days. Gone was the frenetic but focused beehive of activity; in its place was aimless wandering, some of the wanderers failing to blink or look where they were going, bumping into one another, into desks, or into walls. They had to spill hot coffee on each other when bumping into one another other to break the trance and return to full waking consciousness, if just for a moment.  

"Don't tell me we didn't get anything off the satellite cameras?" Sam said, leaning over from his swivel chair in Kerry's direction. 

Kerry scooched the large brown paper grocery bag on the floor toward him with her foot. It was overflowing with pictures. Sam thumbed through the ones at the top. "These are all the young, sexy couples in champagne Boxsters in and around or leaving the Las Vegas area?" 

She nodded without looking up from her knitting. 

"There's got to be a way to narrow these down." 

"I'm guessing the first one to hit densely tree lined roads that go on forever, say Mendocino country, or rural Tennessee is our couple. They can remove their needle from one haystack and insert it in another." 

Sam sighed. Seeing his coffee cup was empty, and realizing it was time for a refill, he glanced over at the coffeemaker. One of the team members at the coffee machine had come up empty; he stared at his cup as if he didn't know what to do. He was distracted from his grief by the mad laughter emanating from Ms. Pierce.  

Turning to take in the reason for the disruption, Sam noticed she was still knitting-the quilt now the size of Kansas. Her laughter just built and built until she was finally up and out of her chair.  

All eyes held on her as she exited into the hall. 

Sam and Carter followed behind her, watched her sashay down the hall, laughing madly. 

"Sometimes I think that lady isn't wound nearly as tightly on the inside," Carter said, his head tilted sideways to get a better picture of Ms. Pierce's ass and legs. 

"Where were you during the Casino business?" 

"Working my way through Dead Man Walking's data files. Figured while he was away from his desk..." 

"Anything?" 

Carter shook his head. "Not yet anyway. I'm going to have to take my weaseling to whole new levels to keep up with these government payroll scum bags." 

Sam ran after Kerry, grabbed her arm. "Clue us." 

She freed her arm and continued her mad cackling as she strolled down the hall. Finally, she shouted, "He's using the wife for cover. It's her m.o. we have to decipher." 

"How long will that take?" Sam shouted after her. "We can't afford to keep this many men tied up another..." 

"Already done. There is no pattern to her crimes. That's her m.o."  

She disappeared around the corner. 

Sam mumbled, "Well then, our job's nearly done!" He slapped his thigh with a rolled up magazine-then stomped back into the room full of agents. 

He grabbed a chair, put his feet up on the desk, and unfolded his Playboy magazine. "If she thinks she's just going to tease me all day and night without any kind of outlet, she's sadly mistaken." 

* * *

They were still trying to get used to the extremely ritzy home in the deeply forested mountains with a spectacular view of the valley and hills beyond. The floor-to-ceiling windows had clearly been built to appreciate every drop of the scenery. 

Delaney sprawled on an Eaves Swivel Lounger with her legs up, her jaw dropped over the sight out the window.  

Zinio, on the other hand, outfitted in just his boxer shorts, couldn't get his eyes off the fifty-inch TV. Although to face the TV he had to face the window as well. The window may as well have been a lead wall-he was that absorbed in the tele. 

"I tell you, the world is going to hell," he said. "Do you believe those bastards on Wall Street? Tanking the entire world economy-why? Greed!" 

Shelling another peanut, and throwing the castaway into an oil-drum filled with empty peanut shells, he droned on. "Greed-plain and simple. It's not enough to make ten cents on the dollar. No, they have to make ten thousand dollars on the dollar. They ought to throw every last one of them in jail. Bastards!" 

Still unable to stop staring out the window, she said, "We just bought a two million dollar house cash on stolen money."  

"Oh, don't put that on me. I would have been happy to hang out with Mason and what's his name? I'm a man of the people." 

Shoving his fist into the peanut drum, and pulling out a handful of peanuts, he said, "The people who put these assholes in charge of the world... Did I give up on them? Oh no, because I'm a saint!" 

He stood up, padded to the front door, and continued his nervous eating by taking a slice of pizza out of the top box. The accumulated boxes were now stacked on the floor to chin level. 

The pizza was going down well when he resumed his perch on the Eames Swivel lounger, only to find Mason plastered on the news, his missing arm practically spotlighted by the photographer. "This man lost his arm because of Zinio and Delaney, lest you harbor any romantic notions about our bank robbers and wish to do anything but turn them in." The text under the FBI agent of Italian descent doing the talking said Milos Castaneda. The image behind him changed to one of Grizzy, stretched out on Uncle Ernie's sofa. "And this innocent woman, kidnapped and held captive against her will, was also shot in the process of committing a crime, all so Zinio and Delaney could enjoy the easy life, get a few cheap thrills." 

Suddenly Zinio was choking on the pizza. He lifted the ficus tree next to his chair off the water collection dish beneath the pot, and washed down the pizza with the runoff water from the well-watered plant. It tasted like dirt, being as it was mostly topsoil, but right now, he felt like dirt. "Don't let them get to you," he said, his face twisted bitterly. "They're playing psy-ops games, hoping to get us to turn ourselves in." 

"I'm good with how things went down. We brought more light into their lives than darkness. You're the one who has no sense of proportions." 

He took a deep breath and glared at her.  

The doorbell rang. Zinio begrudgingly climbed out of the chair, hating to interrupt his glowering at her. 

"Don't forget to relax that face on your way to the door," Delaney said, ignoring his temper tantrum, "or you'll scare whoever it is to hell." 

Zinio opened the door. His mouth stretched into a smile. Delaney walked up, grabbed the cheesecake out of the hands of the octogenarian woman with the blond polyester wig, the fake boobs post a radical mastectomy, and the plastic pearl necklace, and slammed the door in her face, putting an end to the one thing about her that was genuine-her smile. 

She handed him the dish.  

He stomped over to the kitchen, his mood fouled, and set the cheesecake down on the counter. "Honestly, it's very practical cheesecake, no waste in the presentation, the right gift for a first introduction."  

Turning the rich tart to appreciate it from another angle, he said, "I thought she was being very practical in being so neighborly. I mean, you just don't know who your neighbors could be. Bank robbers? Felons? You can't blame the woman's curiosity. It's practically what any sane person would do." He mumbled, "Not that we'd know what sane is at this point." 

He stuffed himself with cheesecake, using his bare hand to shovel the pastry into his mouth. 

In the living room, Delaney changed the channel. Zinio could see from the kitchen that the other news stations were all running with the "poor sidekicks story," flashing images of Mason and Grizzy every chance they got. Zinio bent over the kitchen pail and heaved the contents from his stomach.

* * * 

Without getting up from the seat, Sam wheeled his desk chair over to Kerry. Holding the sheet of paper in his hands, he said, "You want me to go through the list of unrelated crimes again?" 

"No. I like the casino raids for a 100K each, and the ten year supply of Hot Pockets." She couldn't say that last part without chuckling.  

"Technically the poker winnings were legitimately earned." 

"Not if one of them was counting cards." 

Sam sighed. "And why, pray tell, did you choose to link these particular crimes?" 

"The casino thing? That was just her mixing it up to throw us off the scent." 

"Why do you say her?" 

"Because nothing she's done is particularly high tech. It's not in her skill set." 

"And the Hot Pockets?" 

"Something Carter said. She's a health nut, trying to get him to turn the corner with his eating habits. I'm thinking she's at her rope's end with that, and she's force feeding him the stuff until he's so sick he has no choice but to see the light and relent." A laugh escaped her lips. "Oh, and let's not forget to add the Oxycontin heist to the list." 

"Again, why?" 

"You forgetting about the Walgreens scandal a while back? They were sued for defrauding Medicaid with their billing system." 

Sam nodded. "Ms. Social Causes herself couldn't let that get by her." 

Laughing madly, she said, "I see what he likes in her." 

She weaved in another ball of yarn to the quilt in progress, taking no notice of the agents trying to step around it and giving her queer looks. They made sure to look busy throughout the command center; though Sam knew they were all awaiting her next orders. 

* * * 

Dead Man Walking leaned into his computer monitor, snickering. He smiled and waved at the frustrated Carter who couldn't see past the privacy screen he had added since catching wind of Carter's little ploy to walk past his desk as often as possible, ostensibly to get to the coffee machine. The coffee maker had curiously been relocated, presumably just to facilitate the walk-bys. 

Having calculated the money earned at all three casinos by Zinio and Delaney playing poker ($300,000.00), and added that to the figure earned from selling the Oxycontin (a cool $2,000,000.00, or one quarter of street value), and subtracted the cost of the Hot Pockets, just to be anal ($30,000.00), he'd arrived at a much more precise figure than what Kerry Pierce had to work with for the couple's latest haul ($2, 270,000.00). (Kerry's figure was closer to $6,000,000.00) She didn't have his drug dealer connections, so was working off a much cruder estimate of the Oxycontin winnings (at $4,000,000.00). As to Kerry's calculations on the couple's slice of the casino robbery haul ($2,000,000.00), DMW had it on good authority that they kept none of those earnings. While they couldn't pin anything on any of the ones in on the casino heist, because Zinio had drilled them on how to conceal their winnings, and the bank manager had been pressured into holding his tongue before the authorities, DMW applied some pressure of his own to Tranny, suggesting the footage he had on her going down on the senator in the casino bathroom some weeks back might be enough to get her killed.  

Kerry also didn't know how much the couple had paid the driver for the Hot Pockets, because DMW hadn't shared the information. All he needed to get the facts out of the driver was a small drive past the Immigration office to discuss his close friends. He was legal, but his friends weren't; and they'd come over on his invitation. As to how DMW had made the connection between the Hot Pockets driver and his friends, since their relationship was all off-grid... Well, that was a piece of analytics of which he was rather proud. The driver had been using the Semi-Trailer to bring over friends and family, hiding their weight by the number of Hot Pockets subtracted from the amount he was supposed to be hauling, and then paying the grocery stores receiving the merchandise twice as much for the missing items. DMW had caught on to his little con by checking the weights at the weigh stations for the semi-trailers along the freeways the Hot Pockets driver frequented. The difference in weight between the actual Hot Pockets and the humans taking their place was always negligible; the guy was good; he was just no analyst when it came to precise figures.  

And now on DMW's screen were images of safe houses that could be purchased for the precise amount of money the couple had, minus just enough to lay low for quite some time. The selection was broad in the at-or-just-under two million dollar range. So he had to narrow it further by factoring in for Delaney's social causes. That got the list down to about a half dozen candidates spread throughout the US. But the prizewinner by far was the guy selling his house for two million even in the sierra foothills of El Dorado in California, and promising to give all the money to Greenpeace. He had moved that cause to the top of her list when, having surveyed the couple in a high end Manhattan restaurant, caught on video, fishing a twelve-inch shark out of the display aquarium meant for aesthetics, not consumption, he was prompted to ask himself, why go to so much trouble? That's when he found out that the restaurateur had served Delaney whale meat-a mammal on the endangered species list. Of course, he'd only stumbled upon the two at the high end restaurant because he was snooping on Kerry Pierce, trying to get the goods on her. By now she would have realized the couple she was chuckling over in her compact mirror was indeed Zinio and Delaney. He had considered rubbing the incident in her face, but was glad he had thought better of it. After all, there was a lot more information to be gleaned from those restaurant tapes, would she ever think to look at them. And there was no point in putting that idea in her head. 

Carter aimed the jeweler's eye piece and the item he was studying in his hand heavenward as if trying to fight with the overhead lighting to get the right angle. Dead Man Walking stared at him until he decided the activity was harmless enough, and then went back to the covert ops he was running on his computer against Kerry.  

He gazed up from his monitor when he heard Kerry say: 

"Let's look for multimillion dollar home purchases made in cash in the last few months," she said.  

"Oh shit," DMW mumbled, killing the feed on his computer. 

"Why multimillion dollar homes?" Sam said. DMW thought to himself, Let's hope the fool's scoffing at the idea will be enough to throw her off the scent. 

"Not any multi-million dollar safe house, Sam. Just the ones that fit her price range with the proceeds from the Casino heist. And, more importantly still, the ones that fit her demographics of social causes." 

DMW realized he still had time. Time enough perhaps to erase the digital trail he'd followed to the Promised Land. Hell, time to tell Zinio and Delaney to move their asses and find some other hideout before all hell rained down on them. He tried to resist the temptation to get moving on that long enough to follow the rest of Kerry's conversation.  

"And people who never seem to leave the house, order in a lot," she said. "Don't forget to add that to the profile. Let's not forget a walk-in fridge for those Hot Pockets!" She reprised her mad laughter. 

"Wouldn't she put that money in a bank," Sam asked, "a pension fund, something, rather than squandering it all on a house?" DMW sighed overhearing the remark. You go, Sam. 

"Draw too much attention. This way she can just do a reverse equity on it. No one would question that, just as no one would question rich people paying in cash. No, he isn't slumming with her-in more ways than one."  

Sam raised his voice to the agents, "You heard the lady!" The itinerant, mad-woman, bag-lady, he thought, eying her brown bag with crocheting threads, who just happens to be in charge of the finest police force in the world out of some sense of evening the odds. Eying her dress, he thought, Wouldn't be surprised if she got that get-up at a thrift on Park Avenue so as not to blow her cover as a homeless mad woman. She was starting to look nearly as unkempt; like the rest of them, not sleeping, not eating. Only the rest of them went home after one shift; she continued to burn through three shifts, cat-napping like Jack La Lane, fifteen minutes every four hours, in order to keep going around the clock.