Eight-year-old Ivy Chen shouted the warning three seconds before Dominic Vale’s driver pressed the ignition button.

“Don’t start that car!”

The words cut across Atwells Avenue and stopped five grown men in place.

Rain glimmered beneath the streetlights.

Diners crowded beneath restaurant awnings.

A delivery van hissed through a puddle at the corner, but outside Bellini House, Dominic heard only the small girl standing across the sidewalk in a yellow school jacket.

She pointed beneath his black SUV.

“There’s something under it.”

Dominic Vale had survived long enough by believing that fear was information.

He never ignored it, even when it came from a child.

His driver, Luca Mercer, lowered the key fob.

Two security men shifted automatically toward the vehicle.

“Stop,” Dominic said.

They froze.

Dominic crossed toward the girl alone.

She looked about eight, maybe nine at most.

Dark hair escaped from a loose ponytail.

Her backpack was decorated with faded planets, and her untied shoelace dragged through the rainwater.

She was terrified.

But she had stayed.

That interested him almost as much as the warning.

“What’s your name?”

“Ivy.”

“Why shouldn’t we start the car, Ivy?”

She looked toward the SUV.

“Because a man put something underneath it.”

Dominic’s attorney, Elena Ward, had just emerged from Bellini House.

She heard the answer and immediately stopped everyone from moving closer.

“Nobody touches the vehicle,” she said.

Luca frowned.

“Could be nothing.”

“Then nothing will still be there when professionals examine it.”

Dominic kept his eyes on Ivy.

“What man?”

Her answer came quietly.

“A policeman.”

That changed the temperature of the night.

Dominic had spent decades expecting trouble from criminals, competitors, informants, angry employees, federal agents, and ambitious politicians.

A policeman planting something beneath his car belonged to a different category.

“Uniform?”

Ivy shook her head.

“No.

I know him from television.”

“Do you know his name?”

“Rourke.”

Elena looked sharply at Dominic.

Lieutenant Aaron Rourke commanded Providence’s organized-crime task force.

For three years he had made Dominic Vale the centerpiece of his public career.

Whenever a reporter asked why Dominic remained free, Rourke gave the same answer: patience.

He claimed he was building a case that would “end an era.”

Dominic had always assumed the lieutenant was ambitious.

He had never assumed he was foolish.

“Tell me exactly what you saw,” Elena said.

Ivy hugged her backpack tighter.

Three nights earlier, she explained, she had been waiting for her mother to finish work at Chen Alterations, two blocks away.

Bored with her homework, she had watched the alley through the front window.

A dark sedan pulled in.

Rourke got out with another man.

The second man removed a flat magnetic container from the trunk.

Rourke crouched beside a parked crossover, reached underneath, and attached the container to the frame.

The following morning, Ivy saw the same car on television.

Police had arrested its owner after allegedly finding stolen narcotics beneath the chassis.

“Did you tell anybody?” Dominic asked.

“My mom.”

“What did she say?”

Ivy lowered her eyes.

“She told me not to talk about it.”

Dominic understood why.

People with businesses, rent, children, and no powerful friends often survived by pretending they had not seen what they had clearly seen.

“And tonight?”

“I saw the other man again.

He was by your car.”

“Rourke’s partner?”

“I