His name was John Panno, at least according to his driver's license and the business card he showed us when we got into our suite. The license had been issued by the State of Maryland. The business card had come from a firm calling itself Phoenix Resource Consultancy. Apparently, Phoenix Resource Consultancy didn't have a street address, just an e-mail address and a phone number. I didn't recognize the area code on the phone number.
"Another fucking contractor," I said, handing the card back to him. In my other hand, I was holding the photograph of Natalie.
"PRC is not Gorman-North," he said, easily.
"No, it's the People's Republic of China. You might want to change your name."
"Eight fucking months I've been watching Cape Fear Marine and Yachts. Eight months waiting for one of you to make contact with Louis Woodburn. Eight. Fucking. Months. You couldn't have maybe connected the dots a little sooner?"
I turned the photograph of Natalie in my hand. It had a date written on the back in script, and it wasn't Natalie's handwriting. If my memory was right, the date would've been roughly around the time we'd gone into business together. I flipped it around once more, examining the picture. It was a candid, reduced to walletsize, caught while she was grinning at someone who wasn't the photographer.
I set the photo on the antique coffee table in the center of the sitting room portion of our suite, then stared at Panno, seated on the couch beyond it. He returned the stare evenly, as if telling me that whatever I might have thought of myself, he wasn't impressed.
"The picture got you in the door," I said. "Doesn't get you farther than that."
"How far do I need to go?" he asked. "Considering that you've got most of the law enforcement in the country coming down on your ass at this very moment, I mean."
Alena, seated to the side in one of the high-backed easy chairs, leaned forward. "You've been waiting eight months, you say. Why here?"
"It's where he told me to look." Panno hadn't moved his gaze from me.
"Who?"
"Who do you think?" He flicked his eyes to the photograph, then back to me. "Her father."
From the corner of my eye, I saw Alena look to me for verification.
"It's possible," I told her. "Elliot Trent was Secret Service before he started Sentinel. He even worked the presidential detail at one point. He has connections in D.C.-intelligence, military-and I'd be surprised if some of them weren't at a high enough level that they could have dug up the protocol for him."
Panno shook his head slightly. "You don't know anything about him, do you?"
"I know enough."
"Trent was Army Intelligence before he went to Treasury. He's got more connections than you have hairs on your ass."
I glanced at Alena. "See, it's the sophisticated level of conversation you get from soldiers that makes me miss the Army most."
"He wants to talk to you," Panno said.
"Me alone or the both of us?"
"You, specifically, though the conditional was that, if she was with you, she was to come along."
"He retired," I said. "Trent. He sold Sentinel, packed it in."
"Last year. He had another heart attack. He's had three since she died. He's not going to run much longer."
The news bothered me, more than I would have expected. There was no love lost between me and Elliot Trent; there never had been, and I knew that there never would be. But the knowledge that he was dying brought a deeper sadness than I'd have imagined. He'd lost his wife, he'd lost his daughter, he'd given up his business. What else was there for him to do now but die?
Except, apparently, hire a contractor from an organization I'd never even heard of before to watch Cape Fear Marine and Yachts in the hopes that we would, one day, show up. If Panno wasn't exaggerating, if he'd really been on the job for eight months, that was quite a feat; someone should have noticed him, and if no one had, he'd done it very well, indeed.
I decided he had to be exaggerating, and turned away from him and Alena, running a hand over my mostly bare scalp. New hair was already coming in, and it felt like needles against my palm.
"Mr. Trent wants to talk to you, Kodiak. I'm supposed to take you to him."
"What does he know?" I asked, turning back and pointing to the picture of Natalie, resting faceup on the coffee table. "About how she died?"
"Almost all of it," Panno said. "It's taken him the better part of three years, but he's got almost all of it, now, from Gorman-North on up."
"He knows who bought it? Who put it into motion?"
"He knows that you were involved." John Panno tilted his head slightly to include Alena. "Her, too."
None of us spoke for a second.
"He hates your guts," Panno added. Then he smiled a smile that said based on that endorsement alone, he was going to, as well. "I mean, he really hates your guts."
"Yet he still wants to talk to me."
"Like I said."
"About?"
"That's for him to say."
"Where is he now?"
"He's got a house near Peden Point, maybe ten, fifteen miles away. He came here about a month after sending me down to watch for the two of you. Wanted to be close by if you finally showed up."
Panno waited a moment, to see if either Alena or I had any further questions, though I suspect, if we'd had, he wouldn't have answered them. Then he leaned forward, scooping the photograph in his right hand, making it vanish beneath the breadth of his palm. There was damage to his knuckles, scarring from one or more punches that had hit teeth, perhaps, rather than jaw. He slid the photograph carefully back into the inside pocket of his jacket, then got to his feet.
"I'll take you to him," John Panno told us.
Alena was staring at a point on the carpet, her brow furrowed. She glanced up to him, then moved the look to me, and I could see she was more puzzled than curious. Her association with Trent was negligible, and her only dealings with the man had left her unimpressed. It was Natalie she had bonded with. It was Natalie who might have become her friend if she had lived.
"Come on," Panno said. There wasn't impatience in his voice, just the command. "He knows you're here. I've already called him. He's expecting you."
"All right," I said, giving Alena my hand and helping her out of the chair. "Let's go see just how much Elliot Trent hates me."