The Night Crew

combination on a faded Persian carpet in front of the only window. The window looked over the parking lot, and from there over a high fence into a residential back yard. Something in the back yard may have interested Harnett, because a pair of 10 × 50 binoculars sat on the windowsill.
    A door led off to the right. It was unlocked, and when Anna pulled it open, she found a closet with a raincoat, a box of shirts, a suit in a plastic wrapper, several rolls of Christmas gift-wrapping paper, a shoe-shine kit in a cardboard box, and two empty suitcases.
    The main surface of his L-shaped desk was a heap of business paper—envelopes, faxes, trade magazines, clippings—that flowed across, and in and out of two in and out boxes. The short leg of the L held a Gateway P5-90 tower computer and a Vivitron monitor, with cables to a Hewlett- Packard laser printer. A short butcher-block table held a Panasonic fax machine and a Canon copier. A large-screen TV sat in a wooden cabinet in the corner, and the lights of two different videotape players glowed from beneath it. The desk telephone had five buttons.
    ‘‘Busy guy,’’ Anna said. A cup on his desk held a spray of yellow Dixon pencils like a bouquet, and Anna took them out and handed them to Harper and Norden. ‘‘Move stuff with these.’’
    Anna and Harper used the pencils to probe the paper on the desk, and go through the Rolodex, while Norden explored the file cabinets. At one point, she said, ‘‘Hmm,’’ looked around, found a box with a half-dozen reams of laser paper still in it, dumped the paper on the floor and carried the box to the file.
    ‘‘What’re you doing?’’ Harper asked.
    ‘‘All kinds of correspondence,’’ Norden said, dumping paper into the box. ‘‘Interesting stuff. I might be able to use it . . .’’
    Anna said, ‘‘Look at this.’’ She’d gone back to the closet as Harper continued working through the desk with the pencils, and pulled out the two suitcases. They were empty, but they both had trip labels on them. ‘‘Home addresses,’’ she said. ‘‘Even phone numbers.’’
    As Anna copied the address, Norden opened a file cabinet full of videotapes, and another one stacked with skin magazines and a few old reels of 16mm film. ‘‘Look at all this shit,’’ Norden said. ‘‘Think how many women are in this.’’
    ‘‘Let’s go,’’ Anna said. ‘‘We got what we need.’’
    ‘‘Been here too long,’’ Harper said.
    ‘‘I’m taking the Rolodex, too,’’ Norden said. ‘‘What a jerk.’’ She threw the Rolodex into the box full of correspondence and followed Harper to the door. Anna stopped, then turned around.
    ‘‘C’mon,’’ Harper said.
    ‘‘One minute.’’
    Anna went back, picked up a sheet of paper from the laser printer, went to the cabinet full of videotapes and started dumping piles of them on the floor. Then she chose a tape with one of the more elaborate labels, stuck it into the tape player, used Harnett’s remote control to turn on the TV and the player.
    ‘‘What’re you doing?’’
    ‘‘Shhh . . .’’
    The tape started with a woman—a porn consumer’s idea of a classy businesswoman, in a suit, with long, shoulderlength hair, and a skirt that ended a quarter-inch below her hips—approaching the stoop of a New York brownstone. From the look of it, the plot would be thin. Anna fastforwarded for ten seconds or so, getting the woman on her knees, giving head to a man with what appeared to be a hair transplant on his chest.
    ‘‘All right,’’ she said. ‘‘Just checking.’’ She ran the tape back to the start, let it run, and said, ‘‘Let’s go—and leave the lights on and the door open. And let’s leave the door open downstairs.’’ ‘‘What was that all about?’’ Harper asked, when they were back in the car.
    ‘‘Well, we wanted a look at Harnett,’’ Anna said. ‘‘Now we’ll get a look.’’
    She punched a number into her cell phone and said, ‘‘I want to report a burglary in progress, in Burbank, yes, right now . . .’’
    When she finished, she hung up and said, ‘‘Okay, so now the cops’ll come. They’ll find the break-in, and the tape going, so they’ll stay a while.’’
    ‘‘And now we call Harnett,’’ Harper said.
    ‘‘Exactly.’’
    ‘‘Better let me,’’ Harper said. ‘‘If he’s the guy, he’ll know your voice.’’
    Harnett answered on the third ring, sounding sleepy. Harper said,