Chapter 7

The drive out of Nevada took three hours, through a landscape of scrub and hard-pan that turned to neon and fading stucco at the Clark County line. Rucker drove the silver sedan a JAG acquaintance had loaned him — a civilian kind of car with no plates that carried any attention badly. Whitlock sat in the back, a baseball cap pulled low over eyes that missed nothing. Marisol rode shotgun, her scar pointed at the windshield, an unspoken question hanging in the air between the three of them.

It was close to 18:30 when they made the Vegas city limits. The strip-mall office was off a side road behind a dollar store and a tattoo parlor, the bright sign reading "Cole Medical Associates" in cheerful blue script. A single window glowed with the flat light of a desktop lamp.

"She's expecting someone," Whitlock said from the back. "She just doesn't know who."

Marisol opened her door, and the heat hit her like a wall. The parking lot was nearly empty. At the far end, near a dumpster that held the ghost of fried food, an old pickup with a camper shell sat alone, its windows dark.

Rucker wiped his palms on his trousers. "You two go. I'll wait."

"No." Whitlock's voice was flat. "The whole point is that we look like we're trying to make a problem disappear. Corporal Rucker is the front door. You're the dead woman he's warning her about." He got out, straightened his civilian windbreaker, and jerked his head toward the office. "You both go in. I'll be listening."

The walk across the parking lot was the longest forty feet Marisol had walked since the refinery. Each step carried the phantom smell of smoke, the memory of heat, and the weight of a death certificate in her name. She pushed the door open with the flat of her hand.

Inside, the office was decorated in a way that said "recovery" and meant nothing. A potted plant. A couch in a shade of green that didn't exist in nature. A receptionist's desk with a computer screen showing a screensaver of a beach at sunset.

Dr. Ingrid Cole sat behind the desk, an open folder in front of her, a pen in her hand. She was small, sixty, with a helmet of silver hair and rimless glasses, and she looked up when the door opened with the unalarmed curiosity of a woman who has spent thirty years being the smartest person in the room.

She did not look at Marisol. For one second, she looked at Rucker's face, examined him the way a buyer examines a shipment of goods.

Then her eyes slid past Rucker. They landed on Marisol's scar. And they stopped.