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money. I’m just letting you know because I’m gonna have Gus take care of the guy.”
    Once again all Ted heard was McGruder breathing into the phone, sounding like those steam irons they use in Chinese laundries. Finally, he said, “I want Delray to go with Gus.”
    “Aw, that’s okay. Gus is already up in Portsmouth and he doesn’t need any help with this guy.”
    “I wasn’t asking you, Ted. I was telling you. Delray’s going with your boy.”
    Ted was smiling when he hung up the phone.

4
    “Kay Kiser is possessed,” Sawyer said.
    Randy Sawyer worked for the SEC and DeMarco knew that for him to talk about an ongoing investigation, particularly one this politically charged, meant that Mahoney had either called in a huge favor or had leaned on someone very hard. Or maybe not. Maybe Sawyer had volunteered to help because he was one of those ambitious civil servants who wanted to go from anonymous bureaucrat to presidential appointee. This was Washington: motives were endless—and almost always self-serving.
    Sawyer told DeMarco that he was a deputy commissioner in the enforcement division at the SEC, which meant he outranked Kay Kiser. He was a short, chubby-cheeked guy in his forties with a prominent overbite and nervous brown eyes—eyes that kept darting about to see if anybody was paying any attention to him and DeMarco. With his buckteeth, he reminded DeMarco of a paranoid squirrel.
    They were at Arlington National Cemetery, walking between two of the seemingly endless rows of white markers. They were there because Sawyer took the metro from D.C. to his home in Falls Church, Virginia, and he’d told DeMarco to meet him at the cemetery metro stop. He said he didn’t want to meet in the District—like he was an instantly recognizable celebrity instead of a government pencil pusher.
    So they walked between the graves. PFC Harlan Johnson 1899–1918; Corporal Elgin Montgomery 1948–1971; Sergeant Marlon O’Malley 1924–1944. O’Malley, DeMarco noticed, had died on June 6, 1944. A D-day casualty? The headstone didn’t say. The headstone just said that O’Malley had lived only twenty years. DeMarco had always thought the cemetery was beautiful and poignant—and a vast, stark reminder of the cost of freedom.
    “What do you mean, she’s possessed?” DeMarco asked.
    “I mean she works about eighteen hours a day. She’s not married and, as near as anyone can tell, doesn’t have a social life. Or a sex life. All she does is work. It’s like she wants to hang every white collar criminal on the planet before she dies. Molly Mahoney is in big trouble if Kiser has her in her sights. She’s smart, she’s tough, she never quits, and she’s hardly ever wrong. In fact, I can’t remember her ever being wrong.”
    Great. It sounded like Molly had pissed off Supergirl.
    “What made her investigate Molly in the first place?” DeMarco said. “I don’t buy that she just happened to spot Molly buying ten thousand shares of stock out of the trillion shares being traded every day.”
    “She wasn’t investigating Molly. What she was doing was watching Reston Technologies. We—the SEC—have been watching them for years, before Kay Kiser was even hired.”
    “Why?”
    “Because there have been three previous insider trading scams involving Reston—three that we know of—and one goes back to twenty years ago and we never caught the people involved.”
    “Really!” DeMarco said. This was good news. “What were the other cases?”
    “First of all, do you understand what Reston Tech does?”
    “Not really. All I know is that Molly’s an engineer who works for Reston, and Reston worked with another company called Hubbard to design some super battery the Navy likes. I didn’t even know submarines used batteries. I thought they were nuclear powered.”
    “They are nuclear powered, but they use the ship’s battery when they have to shut the reactor down. And reducing the size is a big deal. When you think