Persuader

room. There were computers and phones. There was a coat rack in the corner with a woman's raincoat hanging on it.
    We crossed the hallway to the fourth door. The third room. Villanueva kicked the door and I rolled around the jamb. Empty. Another ten-by-ten square. No window. A desk, with a big cork notice board behind it. Lists pinned to the cork. An Oriental carpet covering most of the linoleum.
    Four down. Two to go. We chose the back room on the right. Villanueva hit the door. I went in. It was empty. Ten-by-ten, white paint, gray linoleum. Completely bare. Nothing in it at all. Except bloodstains. They had been cleaned up, but not well. There were brown swirls on the floor, where an overloaded mop had pushed them around. There was splatter on the walls. Some of it had been wiped. Some of it had been missed altogether.
    There were lacy trails up to waist height. The angles between the baseboards and the linoleum were rimed with brown and black.
    "The maid," I said.
    Nobody replied. We stood still for a long silent moment. Then we backed out and turned around and hit the last door, hard. I went in, gun-first. And stopped dead.
    It was a prison. And it was empty.
    It was ten-by-ten. It had white walls and a low ceiling. No windows. Gray linoleum on the floor. A mattress on the linoleum. Wrinkled sheets on the mattress. Dozens of Chinese food cartons all over the place. Empty plastic bottles that had held spring water.
    "She was here," Duffy said.
    I nodded. "Just like in the basement up at the house." I stepped all the way inside and lifted up the mattress. The word justice was smeared on the floor, big and obvious, painted with a finger. Underneath it was today's date, six numbers, month, day, year, fading and then strengthening as she had reloaded her fingertip with something black and brown.
    "She's hoping we'll track her," Villanueva said. "Day by day, place by place. Smart kid."
    "Is that written in blood?" Duffy said.
    I could smell stale food and stale breath, all through the room. I could smell fear and desperation. She had heard the maid die. Two thin doors wouldn't have blocked much sound.
    "Hoisin sauce," I said. "I hope."
    "How long since they moved her?" I looked inside the closest cartons. "Two hours, maybe."
    "Shit."
    "So let's go," Villanueva said. "Let's go find her."
    "Five minutes," Duffy said. "I need to get something I can give to ATF. To make this whole thing right."
    "We haven't got five minutes," Villanueva said.
    "Two minutes," I said. "Grab what you can and look at it later." We backed out of the cell. Nobody looked at the charnel house opposite. Duffy led us back to the room with the Oriental carpet. Smart choice, I thought. It was probably Quinn's office. He was the kind of guy who would give himself a rug. She took a thick file marked Pending from a desk drawer and pulled all the lists off the cork board.
    "Let's go," Villanueva said again.
    We came out through the front door exactly four minutes after I had gone in through the bathroom window. It felt more like four hours. We piled into the gray Taurus and were back on Route One a minute after that.
    "Stay north," I said. "Head for the city center." We were quiet at first. Nobody looked at anybody. Nobody spoke. We were thinking about the maid. I was in the back and Duffy was in the front with Quinn's paperwork spread over her knees. Traffic across the bridge was slow. There were shoppers heading into the city. The roadway was slick with rain and salt spray. Duffy shuffled papers, glancing at one after another. Then she broke the silence. It was a relief.
    "This all is pretty cryptic," she said. "We've got an XX and a BB."
    " Xavier Export Company and Bizarre Bazaar," I said.
    "BB is importing," she said. "XX is exporting. But they're obviously linked. They're like two halves of the same operation."
    "I don't care," I said. "I just want Quinn."
    "And Teresa," Villanueva said.
    "First-quarter spreadsheet," Duffy said. "They're on track to turn over twenty-two million dollars this year. That's a lot of guns, I guess."
    "Quarter-million Saturday Night Specials," I said. "Or four Abrams tanks."
    "Mossberg," Duffy said. "You heard that name?"
    "Why?" I said.
    "XX just received a shipment from them."
    "O.F. Mossberg and Sons," I said. "From New Haven, Connecticut. Shotgun manufacturer."
    "What's a Persuader?"
    "A shotgun," I said. "The Mossberg M500 Persuader. It's a paramilitary weapon."
    "XX is sending Persuaders someplace. Two hundred of