All Night Long

single road toward the exit at the far end.
    A moment later the compact bounced and jolted back out onto Lakefront Road. She floored the accelerator. The compact’s suspension system was never going to be the same, she thought.
    When she dared to glance into the rearview mirror she saw no sign of the SUV It was still back in Ventana Estates, licking its wounds.
    The only consolation was in knowing that the driver of the SUV was going to pay a price for that display of road rage. The windshield had to be a maze of chips and spiderwebs. In addition, the flying gravel would have caused a lot of damage to the shiny silver finish.
    She eased her foot off the accelerator. It was probably not a good idea to drive too fast when you were shaking from head to foot, she thought.

Thirty-Seven
    He met with Ken Tanaka in a small cafe located on a narrow street off Union Square.
    Ken claimed that the little hole-in-the-wall served the best pastries and baked goods in San Francisco. After a couple of bites of the croissant he had ordered, Luke concluded that he was right.
    Ken slathered butter on his own croissant and angled his head at the page of handwritten notes he ha ut in front of Luke.
    “You see why I didn’t want an e-mail trail leading to either one of us?” he said.
    “Sure do,” Luke agreed.

    He contemplated Ken, who was sitting on the other side of the table. He had never consciously thought about what a private investigator was supposed to look like, but somehow Ken didn’t fit the profile.
    Then again, Tanaka didn’t look like a man with a degree in forensic accounting, either.
    It was easy to underestimate Ken. His quiet, friendly, reassuring manner made people lower their guard. He had been very good at questioning civilians unlucky enough to be caught in a war zone. More than once he had obtained information from a small boy or a frightened woman that had prevented Luke and the rest of the team from walking into an ambush.
    No doubt about it, Ken was good at handling people. But his greatest talent was his almost preternatural instinct for following the money. His firm specialized in corporate security, but Luke knew that the feds came knocking when they wanted Tanaka’s expertise to help track drug and terrorist funds.
    Luke looked at the notes. “Give me the short answer.”
    Ken took a bite of the flaky croissant. “In the past four months there have been four large sums o oney transferred into an offshore account that I traced back to Hoyt Egan.”
    “How’d you do that?”
    Ken raised one brow. “You don’t want to know.”
    “Right. Go on.”
    “In my humble opinion, either Egan is taking payoffs from an unknown source for an unknown reason,
    or he’s collecting blackmail. My gut tells me we’re looking at a series of extortion payments.”
    “Big bucks here.” Luke drank some coffee. “He’s got something on the senator, doesn’t he?”
    “I’d say that’s the most likely scenario under the circumstances. Guy running for president probably has things to hide. But there are other possibilities.”
    “The fiancee? Alexa Douglass?”
    Ken reached for the jam. “I checked around. She and Webb started dating about six months ago. From

    all accounts, Alexa Douglass is an ambitious woman who is determined to marry Webb. If Egan discovered something in her past that would cause Webb to call off the wedding, it’s conceivable tha he might be paying him to keep quiet.”
    “Egan is playing with matches and probably out of his league. Blackmail is a dangerous line of work.” Luke sat back in the booth. “Wonder where Pamela Webb fits into this thing.”
    “Starting to think she really was murdered?”
    “The dots are connecting.”
    Ken applied more jam to the croissant. “You were always pretty good with dots.
    What now?”
    “I’m going to have to think about that for a while. I need to talk to Irene. This is her mission. I’m just assisting.”
    Ken smiled. “I’m looking forward to meeting this Irene. She sounds interesting.”
    “You’ll like her.”
    “Almost forgot.” Ken reached inside his hand-tailored jacket. “Here’s that key you asked me to get for you.”
    “I’m suitably impressed.” Luke reached across the table to pick up the key. “I didn’t give you much notice.”
    Ken managed to appear highly offended. “It’s an apartment complex. One bored guy on duty in the manager’s office. How hard do you think it was to create a little distraction