I, Alex Cross

Chapter 1

I CELEBRATED MY birthday with a small, very exclusive, very festive and fun party on Fifth Street. It was just the way I wanted it.

Damon had come home from boarding school in Massachusetts as a special surprise. Nana was there, acting large and in charge of the festivities, along with my babies, Jannie and Ali. Sampson and his family were on hand; and of course Bree was there.

Only the people I loved most in the world were invited. Who else would you want to celebrate another year older and wiser with?

I even made a little speech that night, most of which I forgot immediately, but not the opening few words. "I, Alex Cross," I began, "do solemnly promise – to all those present at this birthday party – to do my best to balance my life at home with my work life, and not to go over to the dark side ever again."

"Nana raised her coffee cup in salute, but then she said, "Too late for that," which got a laugh.

Then, to a person, everybody did their best to make sure I was aging with a little humility but also a smile on my face.

"Remember the time at Redskin stadium?" Damon cackled. "When dad locked the keys in the old car?"

I tried cutting in. "To be fair -"

"Called me out of bed past midnight," Sampson said, and growled.

"Only after he tried breaking in for an hour because he didn't want to admit he couldn't do it," Nana said.

Jannie cupped a hand around her ear. "'Cause he's what?" And everyone chorused back, " America 's Sherlock Holmes!" It was a reference to a national-magazine piece from a few years ago that I will apparently never live down.

I swigged my beer. "Brilliant career – or so they say – dozens of big cases solved, and what am I remembered for? Seems to me, someone was supposed to have a happy birthday tonight."

"Which reminds me," Nana said, somehow taking the bait and cutting me off at the same time. "We've got a piece of unfinished business here. Children?"

Jannie and Ali jumped up, more excited than anyone. Apparently, there was a Big Surprise coming for me now. No one was saying what it was, but I'd already opened a pair of Serengetis from Bree, a loud shirt and two minis of tequila from Sampson, and a stack of books from the kids that included the latest George Pelecanos and a biography of Keith Richards.

Another clue, if I can call it that, was the fact that Bree and I had become notorious plan cancelers, with one long weekend after another falling by the wayside since we'd met. You might think that working in the same department, same division – Homicide – would make it easier for us to coordinate our schedules, but it was just the opposite most of the time.

So I had some idea, but nothing really specific, about what might be coming.

"Alex, you stay put," said Ali. He'd started calling me Alex lately, which I thought was all right but for some reason gave Nana the creeps.

Bree said she'd keep an eye on me and stayed back while everyone else snuck off to the kitchen.

"The plot thickens," I muttered.

"Even as we speak," said Bree with a smile and a wink. "Just the way you like it."

She was on the couch, across from where I sat in one of the old club chairs. Bree always looked good, but I preferred her like this, casual and comfortable in jeans and bare feet. Her eyes started on the floor and worked their way up to mine.

"Come here often?" she asked.

"Once in a while, yeah. You?"

She sipped her beer and casually cocked her head. "Want to get out of here?"

"Sure thing." I jerked my thumb toward the kitchen door. "Just as soon as I get rid of those pesky, um -"

"Beloved family members?"

I couldn't help thinking that this birthday was getting better and better. Now I had two big surprises coming up.

Make that three.

The phone rang in the hall. It was our home line, not my cell, which everyone knew to use for work. I also had a pager up on the dresser where I could hear it. So it seemed safe to go ahead and answer. I even thought it might be some friendly soul calling to wish me a happy birthday, or at the very worst, someone trying to sell me a satellite dish.

Will I ever learn? Probably not in this lifetime.

Chapter 2

"ALEX, IT'S DAVIES. I'm sorry to bother you at home." "Ramon Davies was superintendent of detectives with Metro, and also my boss, and he was on the line.

"It's my birthday. Who died?" I asked. I was ticked off, mostly at myself for answering the phone in the first place.

"Caroline Cross," he said, and my heart nearly stopped. At that very moment, the kitchen door swung open and the family came out singing. Nana had an elaborate pink-and-red birthday cake on a tray, with an American Airlines travel folio clipped on top.

"Happy Birthday to you…"

"Bree held up a hand to quiet them. My posture and my face must have said something. They all stopped right where they were. The joyful singing ended almost midnote. My family remembered whose birthday this was: Detective Alex Cross's.

Caroline was my niece, my brother's only daughter. I hadn't seen her in twenty years; not since just after Blake died. That would have made her twenty-four now.

At the time of her death.

The floor under my feet felt like it was gone. Part of me wanted to call Davies a liar. The other part, the cop, spoke up. "Where is she now?"

"I just got off the phone with Virginia State Police. The remains are at the ME's office in Richmond. I'm sorry, Alex.

I hate to be the one to tell you this."

"Remains?" I muttered. It was such a cold word, but I appreciated Davies not over-handling me. I walked out of the room, sorry I'd said even that much in front of my family.

"Are we talking homicide here? I assume that we are."

"I'm afraid so."

"What happened?" My heart was thudding dangerously. I almost didn't want to know.

"I don't have a lot of details," he told me, in a way that instantly gave me a hint – he was holding something back.

"Ramon, what's going on here? Tell me. What do you know about Caroline?"

"Just take one thing at a time, Alex. If you leave now, you can probably be there in about two hours. I'll ask for one of the responding officers to meet you."

"I'm on my way."

"And Alex?"

I'd almost hung up the phone, my mind in splinters. "What is it?"

"I don't think you should go alone."

Chapter 3

RUNNING HARD, AND using my siren most of the way, it took less than an hour and a half to get down to Richmond.

The Department of Forensic Science was housed in a new building on Marshall Street. Davies had arranged for Detective George Trumbull from the State Police CI Bureau to meet us there – Bree and me.

"The car's been towed to our lot up at division headquarters on Route One," Trumbull told us. "Otherwise, everything's here. The remains are downstairs in the morgue. All the obvious evidentiary material is in the lab on this level."

There was that terrible word again. Remains.

"What did you bag?" Bree asked him.

"Troopers found some women's clothing and a small black purse wrapped in a mover's blanket in the trunk. Here. I pulled this to show you."

He handed me a Rhode Island driver's license in a plastic sleeve. The only thing I recognized at first was Caroline's name. The girl in the photo looked quite beautiful to me, like a dancer, with her hair pulled back from her face and a high forehead. And the big eyes – I remembered those, too.

Eyes as big as the sky. That's what my older brother Blake had always said. I could see him now, rocking her on the old porch glider on Fifth Street and laughing every time she blinked up at him. He was in love with that baby girl. We all were. Sweet Caroline.

Now both of them were gone. My brother to drugs. And Caroline? What had happened to her?

I handed the driver's license back to Detective Trumbull and asked him to point us toward the investigating ME's office. If I was going to get through this at all, I had to keep moving.

The medical examiner, Dr. Amy Carbondale, met us downstairs. When we shook hands, hers was still a little cool from the latex gloves she'd been wearing. She seemed awfully young for this kind of work, maybe early thirties, and a little unsure of what to do with me, what to say.

"Dr. Cross, I've followed your work. I'm very, very sorry for your loss," she said in a near whisper that carried sympathy and respect.

"If you could just give me the facts of the case, I'd appreciate it," I told her.

She adjusted her glasses, silver wire rims, working up to it. "Based on the samples I took, there was apparently a ninety-six percent morselization of the body. A few digits did survive, and we were able to get a print match to the name on the license that was found."

"Excuse me – morselization?" I'd never heard the word before in my life.

To her credit, Dr. Carbondale looked me right in the eye. "There's every reason to believe a grinder of some sort was used – likely a wood chipper."

Her words took my breath away. I felt them in my chest. A wood chipper? Then I was thinking: Why keep her clothes and driver's license? As proof of Caroline's identity? A souvenir for the killer?

Dr. Carbondale was still talking. "I'll do a full tox screen, run a DNA profile, and of course we'll sieve for bullet fragments or other metals, but actual cause of death is going to be hard to prove here, if not impossible."

"Where is she?" I asked, just trying to focus. Where were Caroline's remains?

"Dr. Cross, are you sure right now is the time -"

"He's sure," Bree said. She knew what I needed, and she gestured toward the lab. "Let's get on with it. Please, Doctor.

We're all professionals here."

We followed Dr. Carbondale through two sets of swinging doors into an examination room that resembled a bunker. It had a gray concrete floor and a high tiled ceiling, mounted with cameras and umbrella lights. There were the usual sinks and stainless steel everywhere, and a single white body bag on one of the narrow silver tables.

Right away, I could see something was very strange. Wrong. Both.

The body bag bulged in the middle and lay flat against the table at the ends. I was dreading this in a way I couldn't have imagined beforehand.

The remains.

Dr. Carbondale stood across from us and pulled back the zipper. "The heat sealing is ours," she said. "I closed it back up after my initial exam earlier."

"Inside the body bag there was a second bag. This one looked like some kind of industrial plastic. It was a frosted white translucent material, just clear enough to show the color of meat and blood and bone inside.

I felt like my mind shut down for a few seconds, which was as long as I could deny what I was seeing. It was a dead person in that bag but not a body.

Caroline but not Caroline.

Chapter 4

THE DRIVE BACK to Washington was like a bad dream that might never end. When Bree and I finally got home, the house was starkly quiet and still. I thought about waking Nana, but the fact that she didn't get up on her own told me she was out cold and needed the rest. All of this bad news could wait until later in the morning.

My birthday cake sat untouched in the refrigerator, and someone had left the American Airlines folio on the counter. I glanced at it long enough to see two tickets for Saint John, an island I'd always wanted to visit in the Caribbean. It didn't matter; all of that was on hold now. Everything was. I felt as though I was moving in slow motion; certain details had an eerie clarity.

"You have got to go to bed." Bree took me by the hand and led me out of the kitchen. "If for no other reason than so you can think clearly about this tomorrow."

"You mean today," I said.

"I mean tomorrow. After you rest."

I noticed she hadn't said sleep. We dragged ourselves upstairs, took off our clothes, and fell into bed. Bree held my hand and wouldn't let go.

An hour or so later, I was still staring at the ceiling, hung up on the question that had been dogging me ever since we left Richmond: Why?

Why had this happened? Why to Caroline?

Why a goddamn wood chipper? Why remains instead of a body?

As a detective, I should have been thinking about the physical evidence and where it could lead me, but I didn't exactly feel like a detective, lying there in the dark. I felt like an uncle, and a brother.

In a way, we'd lost Caroline once before. After Blake died, her mother didn't want anything more to do with the family. She'd moved away without so much as a parting word. Phone numbers were changed. Birthday presents were returned. At the time, it seemed like the saddest possible thing, but since then, I'd learned – over and over – what a staggering capacity the world has for misery and self-inflicted wounds.

Somewhere around four thirty, I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and sat up. My heart and mind were not to be eased.

Bree's voice stopped me. "Where are you going? It's still night."

"I don't know, Bree," I said. "Maybe the office. Try and get something done. You should go back to sleep."

"I haven't been asleep." She sat up behind me and put her arms around my shoulders. "You're not alone on this. Whatever's happening to you is happening to me."

I let my head hang and just listened to her soothing voice. She was right – we were in this together. It had been like that ever since we'd met, and that was a good thing.

"I'm going to do anything it takes for you and for this whole family to get through this," she said. "And tomorrow, you and I are going to go out there and we're going to start to find out who did this terrible thing. You hear me?"

For the first time since Davies's phone call, I felt a warm spot in my chest – nothing like happiness or even relief, but gratitude, anyway. Something to be glad for. I'd lived most of my life without Bree, and now I couldn't imagine how.

"How did I find you?" I asked her. "How did I get so lucky?"

"It's not luck." She held on to me even tighter. "It's love, Alex."

Chapter 5

IT SEEMED BOTH appropriate and ironic to Gabriel Reese that this odd, almost unprecedented middle-of-the-night meeting take place in a building originally built for the State, Navy, and War Departments. Reese lived by a deep sense of the historic in everything he did. Washington, you could say, was in his blood, in his family's blood for three generations.

The vice president himself had called Reese, sounding more than a little tense, and Walter Tillman had run two Fortune 100 companies, so he knew a thing or two about pressure. He hadn't given details, just told Reese to be at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, now. Technically, this was the VP's ceremonial office, the same one where veeps from Johnson through Cheney had welcomed leaders from every quadrant of the globe.

More apt and to the point, it was away from the West Wing and whatever eyes and ears this secret meeting was clearly designed to avoid.

The doors to the inner office were closed when Reese got there. Dan Cormorant, head of the White House's Secret Service detail, was stationed outside with two other agents farther down the hall in either direction.

Reese let himself in. Cormorant followed and closed the heavy wood doors behind them.

"Sir?" said Reese.

Vice President Tillman stood with his back to them at the far end of the room. A row of windows reflected the glow of half-lit globes on an elaborate gasolier overhead, a reproduction. Several glass-encased ship models gave a more specific reference to the building's history. This office had been General Pershing's during World War Two.

Tillman turned and spoke. "We've got a situation, Gabe. Come and sit down. This is not good. Hard to imagine how it could be much worse."

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Chapter 6

AGENT CORMORANT WALKED forward and took a standing position next to the vice president. It was an odd move, and Reese's gut tightened another notch. He was chief of staff – there was very little that the Secret Service should know about ahead of him. But they clearly did in this case. What in the name of God had happened? To whom had it happened?

The vice president nodded for Cormorant to go ahead and speak.

"Thank you, sir. Gabe, keeping what I'm about to tell you to yourself probably constitutes a felony. You need to know that before I -"

"Just spit it out, Dan."

Gabe Reese liked Cormorant well enough, just not the way he pushed the bounds of his position. Tillman had brought both of them along, all the way up from the old days of Philadelphia politics, so there was some leeway to be expected here. It was just that Cormorant always seemed to make a little more of it than Reese thought he should. Then again, Cormorant probably thought Reese lived with a stick up his ass.

"Have you ever heard the name Zeus mentioned in any work-related context?" the agent asked. "Zeus, as in the Greek god."

Reese thought for a moment. Secret Service had revolving code names for all protectees, but that certainly wasn't a familiar one, and, of course, it would have to be a higher-up. He shook his head. "I don't think so. Should I have?"

Cormorant didn't answer the question, merely continued. "Over the past six months, there have been a series of missing-persons cases, all over the mid-Atlantic region. Mostly women, but a few men too, and all of them in a certain profession, if you follow me, which I'm sure you do. So far, nothing's connected them."

"Until now," Reese inferred aloud. "What the hell is going on?"

"Our intel division has three separate communications intercepts linking this tag, Zeus, to three separate cases. Last night, it came up again, but on a known homicide this time." He paused for emphasis. "All of this is classified, of course."

"Reese felt his patience slipping fast. "What does this have to do with the vice president? Or the president – since you've called me in? I'm not even sure we should be having this conversation."

Tillman spoke up then, cutting through the bullshit as usual. "This Zeus, whoever it is, has some kind of connection to the White House, Gabe."

"What?" Suddenly Reese was up and out of his chair. "What kind of connection? What are you saying – exactly? What the hell is going on here?"

"We don't know," Cormorant said. "That's the first part of the fucking problem. The second is shielding the administration from whatever this is going to be."

"Your job is covering the president and vice president, not the entire administration," Reese shot back, his voice rising.

Cormorant stood firm, both arms folded across his chest. "My job is to investigate and prevent any potential threat -"

"Both of you, please shut it!" Tillman's voice rose to a shout. "We're all together on this or the meeting is terminated right now. You got that? Both of you?"

They answered in unison. "Yes, sir."

"Dan, I already know what you think. Gabe, I want your honest opinion. I'm not at all sure we should keep this quiet. It could very easily come back to bite us, and we're not talking about censure or a slap on the wrist here. Not with this Congress. Not with the press either. And surely not if this actually involves murder."

Murder? Dear God, Reese thought.

He ran a hand through his hair, which had been silver since his midtwenties. "Sir, I'm not sure that an off-the-cuff answer to a question like this is in your best interests, or the president's. Is this a rumor? Are there hard facts to substantiate it? What facts? Does the President know yet?"

"The problem is that we know very little at this juncture. Goddamnit, Gabe, what does your gut tell you? I know you have an opinion. And no, the president doesn't know. We know."

Tillman was big on gut, and he was right; Reese did already have an opinion.

"Going public is a bell that can't be unrung. We should find out what we can, within a very limited time frame. Say two or three days. Or until you specify otherwise, sir," he added for Agent Cormorant's benefit. "And we'll need an exit strategy. Something to distance ourselves when and if any story comes out before we want it to."

"I agree, sir," Cormorant put in. "We're way too much in the dark right now, and that is unacceptable."

Tillman took a deep breath that Reese read as both resignation and assent. "I want you two working together on this. No phone calls, though, and for God's sake, no e-mails. Dan, can you assure me that absolutely none of this goes through the Crisis Center?"

"I can, sir. I'll have to speak to a few of my men. But it can be contained. For a while."

"Gabe, you mentioned exit strategies?"

"Yes, sir."

"Think dimensionally here, all possible scenarios. Anticipate everything. And I mean everything."

"I will, sir. My mind is going at about a million miles an hour right now."

"Good man. Any other questions?"

Reese had already started scanning his memory for historical or legal precedent, more out of habit than anything. There were no questions of loyalty here. His only reservation was situational. Good God Almighty – if there was a serial killer connected to the White House? Any kind of killer?

"Sir, if there's word out on this, what's to keep anyone else – God forbid a reporter – from picking up on it?"

Cormorant looked offended, but he let the vice president answer.

"It's the Secret Service, Gabe. We're not talking about an open-source intelligence here." Cormorant stood down and Reese tensed.

"But that's not the kind of insurance I'm going to depend on either. I want this done fast, gentlemen. Fast and clean and thorough. We need some real facts. And clarity. We need to find out who the hell Zeus is and what he's done, and then we have to deal with it like it never happened."

Chapter 7

THE PUNCHES KEPT coming, hard ones. Despite the Rhode Island driver's license, Caroline had been living in Washington for the last six months, but she'd never tried to make contact with me. She had an English-style basement apartment on C near Seward Square – less than a mile from our house on Fifth Street. I'd jogged by her building dozens of times.

"She had nice taste," Bree said, looking around the small but stylish living room.

The furniture and decor had an Asian influence, lots of dark wood, bamboo, and healthy-looking plants. A lacquered table by the front door held three river stones, one of them carved with the word Serenity.

I didn't know if that felt more like a taunt or a reminder. Caroline's apartment was nowhere that I wanted to be right now. I wasn't ready for it.

"Let's split up," I told Bree. "We'll cover the apartment faster that way."

I started with the bedroom, forcing myself to keep going. Who were you, Caroline? What happened to you? How could you die the way you did?

One of the first things that caught my attention was a small brown leather date book on a desk near her bed. When I grabbed it, a couple of business cards fluttered out and onto the floor.

I picked them up and saw they were both for Capitol Hill lobbyists – though I didn't recognize the names, just the firms.

Half of Caroline's date book pages were blank; the others had strings of letters written on them, starting at the beginning of the year and going about two months ahead. Each string was ten letters, I noticed right off. The most recent, from almost two weeks before Caroline had died, was SODBBLZHII. With ten letters.

The first thing I thought of was phone numbers, presumably coded or scrambled for privacy.

And if I asked myself why at that point, it was only because I was putting off an inevitable conclusion. By the time I'd gone through the big rosewood dresser in her walk-in closet, there was little doubt left about how my niece had been affording this beautiful apartment and everything in it.

The top drawers were filled with every kind of lingerie I could imagine, and I have a good imagination. There was the more expected lacy and satin stuff, but also leather, with and without studs, latex, rubber – all of it neatly folded and arranged. Probably the way her mother had taught her to organize her clothing as a kid.

The bottom drawers held a collection of restraints, insertive objects, toys, and contraptions, some of which I could only guess about and shake my head over.

Separately, everything I'd found was no more than circumstantial. All together, it got me very depressed, very quickly.

Was this why Caroline had moved to DC? And was it the reason she'd died the way she did?

I came out to the living room in a fog, not even sure I could talk yet. Bree was down on the floor with an open box and several photos spread in front of her.

She held one up for me to see. "I'd recognize you anywhere," she said.

It was a snapshot of Nana, Blake, and me. I even knew the date – July 4, 1976, the summer of the Bicentennial. In the picture, my brother and I were wearing plastic boaters with red, white, and blue bands around them. Nana looked impossibly young and so pretty.

Bree stood up next to me, still looking at the photo. "She didn't forget you, Alex. One way or another, Caroline knew who you were. It makes me wonder why she didn't try to contact you after she came to DC."

The picture of Nana, my brother, and me wasn't mine to take, but I put it in my jacket pocket anyway. "I don't think she wanted to be found," I said. "Not by me. Not by anybody she knew. She was an escort, Bree. High-end. Anything goes."

Chapter 8

BACK AT THE office, which was buzzing with activity and noise, I got word from Detective Trumbull down in Virginia. Prints on the stolen car matched up to a John Tucci of Philadelphia, now at large.

I played some fast connect-the-dots – from Trumbull in Virginia, to a friend at the FBI in Washington, to their field office in Philly and an agent, Cass Murdoch, who threw down another piece of the puzzle for me: Tucci was a known but small-time cog in the Martino crime family organization.

That information cut both ways. It was a specific lead early in the case. But it also suggested that the driver and the killer might not be the same person. Tucci was probably part of something bigger than himself.

"Any guesses what Tucci was doing all the way down here?" I asked Agent Murdoch. Bree and I had her on speakerphone.

"I'd say he was either reassigned or else moving up in the organization. Taking on bigger jobs, more responsibility. He'd been arrested but never served time."

"The car was stolen in Philadelphia," Bree said.

"So then, yeah, he was working from home, emphasis on the was. My guess is he's probably dead by now, after a screwup like that, whatever the hell happened out there on I-95."

"How about possible clients in Washington?" I asked. "Does the Martino family have any regular business down here?"

"Nothing I know of," Murdoch said. "But there's obviously someone. John Tucci was too small-time to have drummed this up on his own. He probably thought he was lucky to get the assignment. What an asshole."

"I hung up with Murdoch and took a few minutes to scribble some notes and synthesize what she'd told us. Unfortunately, every new answer suggested a new question.

One thing seemed pretty clear to me, though. This wasn't just a homicide anymore, and it was no individual act. Maybe it involved a sex-and-violence creep – but maybe it was a cover-up? Or both?

Chapter 9

THERE WAS MORE, of course, lots more, the kind of upsetting detail that keeps certain stories in the news for months, and some of it came right away for a change. Dr. Carbondale reached me in my car on the way home. Bree was driving her own car. "Toxicology shows no known poisons in Caroline's system," Carbondale told me. "No drugs of any kind, other than a.07 blood alcohol level. She couldn't have been more than tipsy at the time of death."

"So Caroline hadn't been on drugs, and she hadn't been poisoned. That wasn't much of a surprise to me. "What about other causes?" I asked Carbondale.

"I'm more and more certain that's going to be an unanswerable question. All I can do is rule out certain possibilities. There's no way of determining, for example, if she was beaten or strangled or -"

She stopped short.

The words came out of me like bile. "Or put right into that machine."

"Yes," she said tightly. "But there is one other thing to tell you."

I gritted my teeth and wanted to hit something with my fist. But I had to listen.

"We've isolated the remaining fragments. There's some indication of antemortem bite marks."

"Bite marks?" I looked around for a place to pull over. "Human bite marks?"

"I think so, yes, but I can't be certain at this point. Biting can look almost identical to bruising, even under the best of circumstances. That's why I'm bringing in a forensic odontologist to consult. What we're working with is bone fragments where some of the tissue survived, so I can only see -"

"I'm going to have to call you back," I said.

I pulled to the side of Pennsylvania Avenue and just let people honk their horns and go around me. This was too much – the unfairness, the cruelty, the violence, all those things I'm usually so good at dealing with.

I threw back my head and cursed at the car ceiling, or God, or both. How could this be allowed to happen? Then I laid my head against the steering wheel and I started to tear up. And while I was there, I said a prayer for Caroline, who didn't have anyone with her when she needed it most.

Chapter 10

EDDIE TUCCI KNEW he had screwed up really bad this time. Unbelievable! It was a terrible mistake to give that job – or any job – to his nephew Johnny. Not for nothing did they call the kid Twitchy. Now he'd gone AWOL and Eddie had spent the past three days waiting for the rest of the shitstorm to hit the fan.

Even so, when the lights in his bar went out just after closing on Wednesday night, Eddie didn't think too much about it. The building was going to shit, the whole neighborhood. Breakers popped all the time.

He slid closed the register drawer and walked out from behind the bar in the dark. Through the swinging door to the back room. If he could manage to find it, there was an electrical box on the wall.

Eddie didn't get that far.

Out of nowhere, a bag came down over his head. At the same time, something hit his right knee from the side, hard. Eddie heard the joint pop just before he went down, moaning from the pain.

His moans didn't stop them. Somebody put him in a powerful headlock, while someone else tied his ankles. He couldn't even get off a punch, a kick, nothing. He'd just been hog-tied.

"You fuckers! I'm going to kill you. You hear me? You hear me?"

Apparently not. They hoisted him up onto the big table in back and cuffed each hand to the wooden legs underneath. Eddie yanked at the cuffs, but they only cut into his wrists. Even if he could get up, his knee felt like it was never going to work right again. He'd be a cripple now.

Then a faucet was turned on – full force.

What was that about?

Chapter 11

WHEN THEY PULLED the bag off his head, the lights were back on. That was good, right?

Well, not exactly. Eddie saw two upside-down faces looking at him, a white guy and a brown one, maybe Puerto Rican. They were dressed right for the neighborhood, but their short haircuts and the way they operated marked them as suits or military, maybe both.

And Eddie knew right then just how scared he ought to be. This thing, his nephew's screwup, had obviously gotten way out of hand.

"We're looking for Johnny," the white guy said. "Any idea where he is?"

"I haven't heard from him!" It was the God's honest truth. These were not people to screw around with. He was sure of that much.

"That's not what I asked you, Ed. I asked if you knew where he was." The voice was cool, the two of them watching him like he was a specimen in a lab.

"Hand to God, I don't know where Johnny is. You gotta believe me on that."

"Okay, I hear you." The dark one nodded. "I believe you, Ed. Let's just be sure, though."

Eddie's heart jumped into his throat before they even moved on him. The white one put him in another powerful headlock, grabbed his jaw, and forced the handle of a screwdriver into his mouth. Then he pinched Eddie's nose closed with two fingers.

The other dude came back into view, holding the running end of a green rubber hose. He held it over Eddie's face and let the water pour into his mouth.

Eddie gagged hard. This was bad! The water was coming too fast to swallow. He couldn't breathe; he nearly bit through the screwdriver handle trying to spit it out.

Pretty soon, his chest began to burn and his lungs were pulling for air. He bucked on the table, but the cuffs yanked him right back down. Pressure was building behind his eyes and nose, and he realized suddenly that he was going to die.

That's when the panic really took over. There was no pain anymore, no sound of him choking – just overwhelming fear. It was worse than any nightmare he could imagine, because this was real. It was happening in the back room of his own gin mill in Philly.

Eddie didn't even know that the water had stopped at first. The white guy tilted his head to the side, pulled out the screwdriver, and let him hack it out for a minute. It felt as if he were going to cough up a lung.

"Most people last a couple of minutes before they cave. Of course, these are soldiers I'm talking about." One of them patted him on the belly. "That doesn't quite describe you, Ed. So let me ask you again. Do you know where Johnny is?"

Eddie could barely talk, but he choked out a fast answer. "I'll find him. I swear to God I will!"

"See, this is what I hate about the mob." The voice came a little closer to his left ear. "You people just say whatever you need to say, whenever you need to say it. There's no integrity. Nothing you can depend on."

"Give me a chance! I'm begging you!"

"You don't get it, Ed. This is your chance. You either know where Johnny is or you don't. Now, which is it?"

"I don't know!" He was blubbering, half out of his mind. "Please… I don't know."

They broke a couple of teeth getting the screwdriver back in his mouth. Eddie clenched his jaw and thrashed and begged for his life, but only until the torrent of water cut him off again. It didn't take long before he was right back where he'd been a minute ago, absolutely convinced he was about to die.

And this time he was right.

Chapter 12

THE BIZARRE MURDER case was spreading out like spidery legs around me, but one question hung over the rest: Were there others who had died like Caroline? Was that a possibility? A probability?

Obtaining a credible account of missing persons in DC is harder than it might seem. After speaking with someone at the Youth Investigations Bureau, which has a centralized database, I had to go district by district, personally talking with detectives all over the city. Incident reports are public information, but what I needed were PD252s, which are private case notes.

That's where I could start to filter for students, runaways, and above all, anyone with a known or suspected history of prostitution.

I brought home the files I'd gathered and took them to my office in the attic after dinner. I cleared off one entire wall and started tacking up everything – pictures of the missing, index cards with case vitals that I'd written up. Plus a DC street map, flagged everywhere that victims had last been seen.

When all that was done, I stood back and stared, looking for some kind of pattern to reveal itself.

There was Jasmine Arenas, nineteen, two priors for solicitation. She worked Fourth and K, where she'd last been seen getting into a blue Beemer around two a.m. on October 12 of last year.

Becca York was just sixteen, very pretty, an honor student. She'd left Dunbar High School on the afternoon of December 21 and hadn't been seen or heard from since. Her foster parents suspected she'd run away to New York or the West Coast.

Timothy O'Neill was a twenty-three-year-old call boy who had been living with his parents in Spring Valley at the time of his disappearance. He drove away from the house around ten p.m. on May 29 and never came home again.

It wasn't like I actually expected any kind of connect-the-dots pattern to jump out at me. This was more like building the haystack. Tomorrow, we'd start looking for the needle.

That meant fieldwork, and lots of it, following up on every one of these tawdry files. If just one of them showed a connection to Caroline, it could be huge. This was the kind of homicide that used to make me wonder why I keep coming back for more, year after year. I knew that on some level I was addicted to the chase, but I used to think that if I figured out why, then I'd stop needing it so much, maybe even turn in my badge. That hadn't happened. Just the opposite.

Even if Caroline hadn't been my niece, I still would have been standing in my attic at two in the morning, staring at that terrible board, as determined as ever to find out who had killed her and maybe these other young people – and why.

Remains.

That was the single word, or maybe the concept, that I couldn't get out of my head, couldn't shake if I wanted to.

Chapter 13

I FELL ASLEEP hard that night and woke up the same way, diving into sleep and having to be ripped out of it. I ate breakfast with Nana, Bree, and the kids, but when I left the house I still wasn't completely awake. It didn't augur well, if you believe in auguring.

The one appointment I needed to keep that day was my meeting with Marcella Weaver. Three years earlier, the breakup of her high-priced escort service had made national headlines and earned her the nickname "Madam of the Beltway." An alleged client list had never surfaced but still had power brokers all over town shaking in their Florsheims.

Since then, she'd bounced back Heidi Fleiss-style, with a syndicated radio show, a couple of lingerie boutiques, and a speaking fee reported to be five thousand. An hour, ironically enough.

I didn't care about any of that. I just wanted her insight into the possible murders of escorts. Once I'd agreed to have her lawyer present, she said she'd meet with me at her apartment.

The place was a gorgeous duplex not far from Dupont Circle. She answered the door herself, looking casual and refined in jeans and a black cashmere sweater. She also wore diamond earrings and a diamond-studded cross.

"Is it Detective or Dr. Cross?" she asked.

"Detective, but I'm impressed that you asked."

"Old habits die hard, I guess. I'm careful. I do my research." She smiled easily, way more laid back than I'd expected her to be. "Come on in, Detective."

"In the living room, she introduced me to the lawyer, David Shupike. I recognized him from a couple of high-profile cases around town. He was a dour, balding stereotype of a lonely guy; it was easy to imagine how he and Marcella might have met.

She poured me a tall glass of Pellegrino, and we sat down on a leather couch with a view of the city.

"Let me get this out of the way." I slid a picture of Caroline across the coffee table. "Have you ever seen her before?"

"Don't answer that, Marcella." Shupike started to push the picture back, but Ms. Weaver stopped him. She stared at it, then whispered something in his ear until he nodded.

"I don't recognize her," she said to me. "And for whatever it's worth, if I had, I wouldn't have taken David's advice. I really do want to help if I can."

She seemed sincere to me, and I chose to believe her.

"I've been trying to figure out who Caroline was working for when she was killed. I wonder if you could point me in any direction," I said.

She pulled her small bare feet up onto the couch while she thought about it.

"How much rent was she paying?"

"About three thousand a month."

"Well, she certainly wasn't making that on the street. If you haven't already, you should check and see if she had a profile with any of the services. Almost all of them are posted online now. Although, if she was truly higher end, it will be that much harder."

"Why is that?"

She smiled, not impolitely. "Because not everyone caters to the kind of clientele who use Google to find their girls."

"Point taken. I've checked out the services already, though." I liked this woman, in spite of her job history. "What else?"

"It would help to know if she was working in-call, out-call, or maybe both. Also, if there was any kind of specialty that she had. Dominant, submissive, girl on girl, massage, group parties, that sort of thing."

I nodded, but this wasn't easy for me, and it was getting worse. Every turn of the case reminded me of something else I didn't want to know about Caroline. I took a sip of mineral water.

"What about the girls themselves? Where are they coming from?"

"I'll tell you this – college newspapers were my gold mine. These kids think they can handle anything. A lot of them already despise men. Some just want an adventure. I advertised in a lot of places, but you'd be surprised." She pointed at the pocket where I'd put away Caroline's picture. "She might have been paying her way through law school. Even medical school, believe it or not. I had a future surgeon as one of my very best girls."

She stopped then and leaned toward me to see into my eyes. "I'm sorry, but… did this girl mean something to you? If you don't mind my asking. You seem… sad."

Normally, I might have minded, but Marcella Weaver had been nothing but helpful and open with me so far.

"Caroline was my niece," I told her.

She sat back again with a manicured hand over her mouth. "I never even saw the slightest violence against any of my girls. Whoever did this deserves to die a painful death, if you ask me."

It seemed like I'd said enough already, but if that lawyer hadn't been sitting there, I probably would have told Marcella Weaver that I felt exactly the same way.

Chapter 14

I COULD FEEL some positive movement on the case, but the rest of the day was all dreaded missing-persons follow-up. Sampson hooked up with me for the afternoon, and we interviewed one distraught family member after another.

By the time we got to Timothy O'Neill's parents, the only thing I felt we'd accomplished for sure was stirring up bad feelings.

The O'Neills lived in a brick-and-stone colonial in Spring Valley. It was modest for the neighborhood but still seven figures, I was pretty sure. Like a lot of people up here, the O'Neills were part of the Washington machinery. They struck me as a "good" Irish Catholic family, and I wondered how that jibed with the story of their missing son.

"We love Timothy very much" was Mrs. O'Neill's first response to my questioning. "I know what his file says, and I'm sure you'll think we're naive, but our love for Timmy is unconditional."

We were standing in their living room, next to a baby grand with family photos spread out over the top. Mrs. O'Neill held on to one of Timothy, a larger version of the same picture I had on my bulletin board at home. I hoped for their sake he had just moved away from Washington.

"You said he was working as a bartender?" Sampson asked.

"As far as we knew," Mr. O'Neill said. "Tim was saving up for his own place."

"And where was that job?"

Their eyes went to each other first. Mrs. O'Neill was already in tears. "That's what's so very hard," she said. "We don't even know. It was some kind of private club. Timothy had to sign a confidentiality agreement. He said he couldn't tell us anything about it – for his own protection."

Mr. O'Neill picked up for his wife. "We thought he was being a little grandiose at the time, but… now I don't know what to believe."

I think he did know what to believe, but it wasn't my job to convince the O'Neills either way. These people were desperate to have their son back. I wasn't going to begrudge them whatever it took to get through a difficult interview with two police detectives.

Finally, I asked to see Timothy's room.

We followed the two of them back through the kitchen and attached laundry room to what I assumed had once been a maid's quarters. There was a separate entrance from the back hall and a bedroom with its own bathroom – small but with lots of privacy.

"We haven't touched anything," Mr. O'Neill said, and then he added almost affectionately, "You can see what a slob he was."

My first reaction was that messes are good for hiding things in. The room had as much strewn on the floor as anywhere else. Timothy had never really grown up, had he?

There were clothes piled everywhere – on the bed, over the easy chair, on top of the desk. Some of it was just jeans and T-shirts, but there was a lot of expensive-looking stuff, too. The one thing he seemed to keep hung up was a collection of suits and jackets, and three leather coats. Two of them were Polo, one Hermès.

That's where I found the haystack needle. Sampson and I had been sifting for about fifteen minutes when I pulled a piece of paper out of one of the blazer pockets.

It had a string of ten letters written on it – like the ones from Caroline's date book. This one said AFIOZMBHCP.

I held it up for Sampson to see. "Check this out, John."

Mrs. O'Neill stepped back into the room. She'd been waiting outside the door. "What is it? Please tell us."

"Could be a phone number, but I'm not sure," I said. "I don't suppose Timothy left his cell phone behind."

"No. He was attached to that thing twenty-four/seven. I mean, who isn't these days?"

She tried a weak smile, and I tried one back, but it was hard. All I could think about was how much more likely it had just gotten that she would never see Timothy again.

Chapter 15

JOHNNY TUCCI HAD stuck to a rigid system for survival since the trooper car stopped him on I-95. For starters, he never traveled in the same direction for two days in a row and never spent more than twenty-four hours in any one place. In fact, if the skinny girl working the register at the 7-Eleven in Cuttingsville hadn't been such an easy, willing young thing, or if he could even remember the last time he'd gotten laid, he probably would have been long gone by now.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda, he was thinking.

He was in the middle of his second time around with the register girl when the flimsy door to room 5 at the Park-It Motel opened. Two men in gray suits strolled in like they had a key or something. How the hell had they gotten in the door? Whatever. They were in.

Johnny jumped about three feet off the bed and pulled the sheet up to cover himself. So did the girl. Liz? Lisl?

"Johnny Tucci? The Johnny Tucci?"

One intruder – the speaker – was a white guy, the other Hispanic. Maybe Brazilian? Johnny had no clue who they were, but he sure knew why they'd come to the motel. All the same, he gave it his best. "You got the wrong room, man. Never heard of John whatever-you-said. Now, please get out!"

The Hispanic guy fired before Johnny even saw he had a gun in his hand. He flinched hard and almost had a heart attack on the spot. When he looked, the girl, Liz/Lisl, was sitting cockeyed against the headboard with a hole in her forehead and blood seeping down to the tip of her nose, then onto her breasts.

"Jesus Christ!" Johnny fell off the bed more than got off, and then crab-walked himself back into a corner. He'd never actually been shot at before.

"Let's try this again. Johnny Tucci?" said the white dude. "The Johnny Tucci?"

"Yeah, yeah, okay!" He kept his hands up, one of them at the side of his face so he wouldn't have to see the girl lying there dead and leaking blood. "How'd you find me? What do you want? Why'd you hurt her?"

The two guys looked at each other and laughed at his expense.

These guys obviously weren't Family. They were too "white" for that, even the dark one. "What the hell are you? CIA or something?"

"Worse for you, John. We're former DEA. Less paperwork, if you know what I mean."

Johnny was pretty sure he did. They weren't going to write up what had happened to poor Liz or Lisl. What – like she'd tried to pull a gun on them from her pussy?

The white guy crossed the floor in a couple of fast steps and kicked him a swift one in the groin. "That doesn't mean we like wasting our time running after pathetic garbage like you, though. Let's go. Get your pants on."

"I… can't. Where are we going?" Johnny was doubled over, with his hands on his crotch, only wishing he could hurl. It felt like his stomach had turned inside out. "Just… shoot me and get it over with."

"Yeah, you'd like that, wouldn't you? Join your little girlfriend in the everlasting. Afraid it's not going to be that easy, my friend."

The two guys leaned over and started wrapping him in the motel bedsheet. They pulled the corners up all around, tied them tight. Johnny couldn't even take his hands off his meat to do anything. Then they dragged him out the door like he was a bag of dirty laundry.

That's when he would have started screaming, if he'd had the air for it, because Johnny Tucci had just figured out where they were going, and what was going to happen next.

Chapter 16

WHEN CAROLINE'S MOTHER pulled the black Chevy Suburban into the parking area at Rock Creek Cemetery, it was the first time I'd seen her in over twenty years. We'd spoken on the phone about funeral arrangements, but now that it was here, I didn't know what to expect or really what to say to her.

I opened the car door myself. "Michelle, hi."

She looked the same to me, still pretty, with the same long wild hair, shot through with gray now, half-tamed in a braid twisting down her back.

It was her eyes that were different. They'd always been so alive. I could see she'd been crying, but they were dry now. Dry, red around the rims, and so very tired.

"I forgot how much you looked like him," she said.

She meant Blake; he and I had always been unmistakably brothers, at least physically, especially in the face. Blake was buried here at Rock Creek too.

I held out my arm and was a little surprised that she took it. We started walking toward St. Paul 's, with the rest of the family not far behind.

"Michelle, I want you to know that I'm handling Caroline's case myself. If there's anything you need from me -"

"There's not, Alex."

It came out quickly, a simple statement of fact. When she spoke again, her voice started to shake. "I'm going to lay my baby to rest…" She stopped to take a steadying breath. "And then I'm going to go back home to Providence. That's as much as I can handle right now."

"You don't have to go through this alone. You can come stay at the house. Nana and I would like that. I know it's been a long time -"

"A long time since you turned your back on your brother."

So there it was. Twenty years of misunderstanding coming out, just like that.

Blake's addiction had done a lot of the talking for him near the end. He'd cut me out when I got aggressive about rehab, but that was obviously not what he told Michelle, who was using heroin at the time too, even while she was pregnant with Caroline.

"It was actually the other way around," I said to her as gently as I could.

For the first time, her voice rose. "I can't, Alex! I can't go back to that house, so don't ask me to."

"Of course you can."

We both turned around. It was Nana who'd spoken. Bree, Jannie, and Ali were there too, coming up on either side of Nana, her honor guard, her protectors.

Then she walked right up to Michelle and put her arms around her.

"We lost sight of you and Caroline a long time ago, and now we've lost her for good. But you are still a part of our family. You always will be."

Nana stepped back and put a hand on Jannie's shoulder. "Janelle, Ali, this is your aunt Michelle."

"I'm very sorry for your loss," Jannie said.

Nana went on. "Whatever happened before today, or whatever happens tomorrow, doesn't mean a thing right now." Her voice was filling with emotion, and I could hear shades of the southern Baptist heritage coming through. "We're here to remember Caroline with all the love we have in our hearts. When those good-byes are over, then we'll worry about what comes next."

Michelle seemed conflicted. She looked around at each of us, not speaking a word.

"So all right, then," Nana said. She patted her chest a few times. "Lord, all this grief has given me an awful feeling. Michelle, take my arm, would you?"

I knew Nana's heart was breaking too. Caroline was her granddaughter, though she never really got to know her, and gone forever now. Meanwhile, there was someone else here who needed her help. Maybe that's where I get it, I thought. Sometimes the best, or only, way to take care of the dead is to take care of the living.

Chapter 17

MICHELE DID GO back to her home in Rhode Island that night. I put her on a plane to Providence myself, but I made sure she had my numbers and told her that I hoped we'd hear from her – when she was ready.

The next morning, I was right back at it, the investigation of her daughter's awful murder, and possibly the murders of others.

The first thing I tackled at the office were the phone numbers we'd found at Caroline's apartment and in Timothy O'Neill's bedroom.

My backup plan was to hit up the Bureau for help, but I had a feeling about these numbers. If there was a key to unlocking them, it was probably something that Caroline or Timothy O'Neill could use on a regular basis. I was betting I could do this myself.

I started by writing out all the lettered strings I had on a piece of paper, just to get them rolling around in my head.

A simple A-to-Z, one-through-twenty-six substitution didn't seem right, since anything above J, or 10, wouldn't apply to a phone keypad.

But what if it came off the keypad itself?

I opened my cell on the desk and wrote down what I saw.

ABC – 2

DEF – 3

GHI – 4 (I = 1?)

JKL – 5

MNO – 6 (O = 0?)

PQRS – 7

TUV – 8

WXYZ – 9

The one and the zero keys didn't have any letters of their own, of course, but the I and O seemed like intuitive substitutions.

That still left G and H for number four, and M and N for number six.

When I used that logic to translate the first string, BGEOGZAPMO, it gave me 2430492760. Then I took the first three digits and Googled them as an area code. But 243 came up invalid.

It felt too soon to abandon the idea, so I kept going with it. I translated the rest of my list into numbers and lined them all up in a column on the page to see if anything jumped out at me.

It sure did. Nearly half the numbers started with a two.

It didn't take long from there to see that all of those numbers had a zero in the fourth position and another two in the seventh.

202 is Washington 's area code.

I went back to the first number and underlined.

2430492760

Things were starting to come together. When I looked at the same positions in the non-202 numbers, all but three gave me either 703 or 301, which are for areas of Virginia and Maryland close to DC.

The final three codes turned out to be from Florida, South Carolina, and Illinois – out-of-town customers, presumably.

Again, I went back to the first string. If positions one, four, and seven were an area code, didn't it make sense to look at positions two, five, and eight for the exchange? I started scribbling again.

2430492760 = 202

2430492760 = 447

2430492760 = 3960

202-447-3960

Next question – was 447 an actual DC exchange? I grabbed the phone book and found out that it was.

This was starting to feel like the first good day of my investigation. A very good day.

Once I'd deciphered everything I had so far, I called a good friend at the phone company, Esperanza Cruz. I knew that the reverse directories we used at work were only good for listed numbers. It took Esperanza maybe fifteen seconds to find the first listing.

"Okay, now you've got me curious," she said. "This one is for Ryan Willoughby, unlisted. What's he done? Other than being a walking, talking stiff."

I was surprised but not shocked. Ryan Willoughby was the six o'clock anchor for a network TV affiliate here in the Washington area.

"Esperanza, if you and I were actually having this conversation, I could tell you, but given as how we never spoke today -"

"Yeah, yeah, story of my life, Alex. What's the next number?"

In a few minutes, I had a list of fifteen names. Six of them were familiar to me, including a sitting congressman, a professional football player, and the CEO of a high-profile energy-consulting firm in town. This thing was starting to bubble over, and not in a good way. When I thought about how these men knew Caroline, it made me sick, physically ill.

My next call was to Bree. She recognized two more of the names. One was a partner at Brainard & Truss, a political PR firm on the Hill; and it turned out that Randy Varrick, who was the mayor's press secretary, was a woman.

"Things are about to get real nasty around here," Bree said. "These are high-resource people, and I'm afraid they're going to push back hard."

"Let them push," I said. "We'll be ready for them. In fact, I'm going to make my first call right now. In person."

Chapter 18

HIGH-RESOURCE PEOPLE, and apparently a lot of them were involved. What was this about, and how had it led to the death of Caroline Cross? Where else would it lead?

It took me less than fifteen minutes to get from the Daly Building on Indiana up to Channel Nine's offices on Wisconsin. By the time I got there, I hadn't cooled down one bit. My badge got me past the guard in the lobby, then up to a receptionist on the third floor. A big number 9 hung on the wall behind her, along with poster-sized head shots of their news team.

I showed my badge and pointed at the wall. "I'm looking for him."

She pushed a button without taking her eyes off me. "Judy? I've got a police officer out here for Ryan?"

She covered the receiver and spoke to me. "What is this regarding?"

"Tell him I'll be happy to share that information with anyone who wants to listen if he and I aren't face-to-face in the next two minutes."

"About ninety seconds later, I was ushered past reception, past the news studio entrance, and into a hall of windowed offices someplace in the back. Ryan Willoughby was waiting for me, looking like his tie was a little too tight. I'd seen him dozens of times delivering the news, but now all that polished blond congeniality of his was nowhere in sight.

"What the hell is this about?" he asked me, after he closed the door. "You come barging in here like Eliot Ness, or Rudolph Giuliani back in his prosecutor days."

I held up a picture of Caroline. "It's about her," I said in the quietest voice I could manage.

It took him a second, but I saw a flash of recognition on his face, then a fast recovery. He was brighter than he seemed.

"Pretty girl. Who is she?"

"Are you saying you've never seen her before?"

He laughed defensively, and a little more of the anchorspeak came into his voice. "Do I need a lawyer here?"

"We found your phone number in her apartment. She was murdered."

"I'm sorry about that, the girl's murder. A lot of people have my number. Or they can get it."

"A lot of call girls?" I asked.

"Listen, I don't know what you want with me, but this is obviously some kind of mistake."

Whatever he was publicly, this guy was nothing but a scumbag to me now. It was clear he didn't care about Caroline and what had happened to her.

"She was twenty-four," I said.

I held up the picture again.

"Someone took bites out of her. Probably raped her before they killed her. Then they put her body through a wood chipper. We found what was left of her – the remains – in a plastic bag being transported by a mob guy."

"What are you… Why are you telling me this? I don't know the girl."

I looked at my watch. "I'm going to offer you a deal, Ryan. The terms are good for the next thirty seconds. You tell me how you found out about her, right now, and I leave your name out of my investigation. Unless, of course, you're guilty of something a lot more damaging than procuring."

"Is that a threat?"

"Twenty seconds."

"Even if I had any idea what you were talking about, how do I know you are who you say you are?"

"You don't. Fifteen seconds."

"Excuse me, Detective, but you can go to hell."

My hand was cocked, but I caught myself. Willoughby flinched and took a step back.

"Get out of my office, unless you want me to have you thrown out."

I waited until the full thirty seconds were up.

"I'll see you on the news," I said. "Trust me, you won't be the one delivering it."

Chapter 19

TWENTY MILES OF thick, old-growth Virginia forest separated Remy Williams's cabin from pretty much everything else in the world. It was a pristine bit of wilderness with all the privacy he could ever want. A person could scream all night long out here and never be heard.

Not that there ever was much screaming or carrying on out here. Remy appreciated efficiency, and he was good at what he did.

Disposal.

The thing he didn't like was surprises – like the bright headlights that raked back and forth over his cabin window just after darkness fell that night.

In a few seconds, he was out the back door with one of the three Remington 870 shotguns he kept around for exactly this reason – uninvited visitors. He hustled over to the side of the cabin and took up a position with a perfect view of the dark-colored sedan that was just coming to a stop out front.

He saw that the vehicle was a Pontiac sedan, either black or dark blue.

Two men got out. "Anybody home?" one of them called. The voice was familiar, but Remy kept the Remington on his hip anyway.

"What are you doing out here?" he yelled to them. "Nobody called ahead."

Their shadows turned toward him in the dark. "Relax, Remy. We found him."

"Alive?"

"At the moment."

Remy slowly came around to the porch and traded the shotgun for a battery-powered lantern, which he lit.

"What about the other one? The girl who run off?"

"Still working on it," said the cocky one, the white guy. Remy didn't know either of their names and didn't want to. He knew the spic was the smart one, though, and the most dangerous. Silent but deadly all the way.

He walked to the back of the car and thumped on the trunk with his lantern.

"Pop it."

Chapter 20

THE YOUNG PUNK inside was naked as a newborn, half-wrapped in a soiled bedsheet with a double dose of duct tape twisted across his mouth. As soon he as laid eyes on Remy, he started scrambling around like there was somewhere inside that trunk he could go and hide.

"Why in hell's he not wearing anything? What's the point in that?"

"He was banging some girl when we found him."

"And she's -?"

"Been taken care of."

"Awww, you should have brought her to me for safekeeping too."

Remy turned back to the kid, who'd gone still again – - except for the eyes. Those never stopped moving.

"He's a funny little gerbil, isn't he?"

He reached down and pulled the boy up, then spun him around so the punk could see the twenty-year-old wood chipper in the car's headlights.

"Now, you know why you're here, so I won't quibble on the details," he said. "I just need to know one thing from you, and I want you to think real careful about this. You ever tell anyone about this place? Anyone a'tall?"

The kid shook his head way more than he needed to – no, no, no, no, no.

"You're real sure about that, son? You wouldn't lie to me? 'Specially now?"

The head changed direction and went yes, yes, yes.

Remy laughed out loud. "You see that? He looks like one of those stupid bobbleheads. For your dashboard?" He bent his knees to be face-to-face with the kid, and palmed his skull. Then he started rocking it up and down and side to side, laughing the whole time.

"Yes, yes, yes… no, no, no… yes, yes, yes…"

Then, just as fast, he twisted the head halfway around with a crisp snap and let the boy fall to the ground like a broken toy.

"That's it? Break his neck?" one of the other two asked. "That's what we wanted him alive for?"

"Oh, it's jus' fine," Remy told them, pushing the accent a little. "I got an intuition about this stuff." They both shook their heads like he was some ignorant redneck, which Remy took as a compliment to his acting abilities.

"Hey, you fellas want to stick around for a drink? I've got some good stuff out back."

"We've got to keep moving," said the dark-skinned ghost. "Thanks for the offer. Maybe some other time, Remy."

"Suit yourself. No problema."

In truth, there wasn't a drop of alcohol anywhere on the property. The only thing Remy drank besides bottled water, which he bought by the case, was the sun-brewed iced tea he sometimes made from it. Alcohol was poison to the system. He just liked letting these sanctimonious pricks think what they wanted to think about him anyway.

They were typical government issue, those two, the way they saw everything and nothing at the same time. If they looked a little closer, they'd know when they were being tested, and what they were up against.

"One other thing," he added. "No more pickups." He prodded the dead boy with his foot. "That part ain't been working out so well, you know? I'll do the disposals, starting with him."

"Agreed. He's all yours."

They drove off without even a good-bye wave. Remy waved, then he waited until he couldn't hear the car anymore, and got to work.

The kid was just skin and bones, and it didn't take any more cutting to get him ready than it would have for a girl. Two at the knees, two at the hips, two at the shoulders, one at the neck. Then one long swipe down the middle of his skinny little torso. It was messier with the knife than it might have been with a chainsaw or an axe, but Remy liked wet work, always had.

Once that was done, it took only about ten minutes to get the Philly Flash through the machine and into a plastic bag. It was amazing how light the bags always felt – as if it was something more than just foam and residue that got left behind inside the chipper.

He took a shovel and a flashlight from the cabin and threw the bag into a wheelbarrow. Then he started walking into the woods. It didn't matter which way. Wherever this kid landed, he was going to disappear forever.

"Never to be seen or heard from again," Remy muttered to himself. He bobbled his head up and down and side to side as he walked, and started to laugh. "No. No. No. No. Never. No. No. No. No."

Chapter 21

A LOUD NOISE woke me in the middle of the night. Something had fallen and broken downstairs. I was almost sure of it.

I looked at the clock. Saw it was just after four thirty. "Did you hear that?"

Bree raised her head off the pillow. "Hear what? I just woke up. If I'm awake."

I was already out of bed and pulling on a pair of sweats.

"Alex, what is it?"

"I don't know yet. I'll go see. I'll be right back."

Everything seemed quiet from where I stopped to listen in the middle of the stairs. I could just see the sky going to blue outside, but it was still dark in the house.

"Nana?" I called in a voice barely louder than a whisper.

There was no answer.

Bree was up now too, and at the top of the stairs, only a few feet away. "I'm right here."

When I came down into the front hallway, I could see straight back to the kitchen.

The refrigerator door was open, and there was just enough light from it that I could see Nana lying on the floor. She wasn't moving.

"Bree! Call 911!"

Chapter 22

NANA LAY THERE on her side, in her favorite old robe and slippers. The pieces of a mixing bowl were on the floor around her, and her face was contorted, as if she'd been in terrible pain when she fell.

"Nana! Can you hear me?" I said as I hurried into the kitchen.

I knelt down and felt for her pulse.

It was weak, but it was there. My own was spiking like crazy.

Please, no. Not now. Not like this.

"Alex, here!" Bree ran in and handed me the phone.

"Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?"

"My grandmother has just collapsed. I found her unconscious on the floor." My eyes scanned her face, her arms, her legs. "There's no sign of injury, but I don't know what happened before her fall. Her pulse is very weak."

Bree started timing Nana's pulse off the kitchen clock while the operator took my name and address.

"Sir, I'm dispatching an ambulance to your house right now. The first thing you want to do is make sure she's still breathing, but try not to move her. It's possible she injured her spine when she fell."

"I understand. I won't move her. Let me check."

Nana's face was angled toward the floor. I leaned down and held the back of my hand to her mouth. At first – it seemed like forever – there was nothing, but then I felt a faint movement of air.

"She's breathing, but barely," I said into the phone.

A soft rattle came from Nana's chest.

"Please hurry. I think she's dying!"

Chapter 23

DISPATCH TALKED ME through something called a "modified jaw thrust" to help open Nana's airway. It was all nightmarish and surreal, in the worst way I could imagine. I took hold of the curved part of her jaw and pushed it forward and up, using my thumb to keep her lips open.

Her breathing picked up, but only slightly, and not a regular cadence.

Then Ali's voice came from behind me, soft and scared. "Why is Nana on the ground like that? Daddy, what happened to her?"

He was standing in the kitchen door, holding on to the frame as if he didn't want to be pushed any farther into the room than that.

Bree put a hand over mine on Nana's cheek. "I've got her," she said, and I went to talk to Ali.

"Nana's sick and she fell down. That's all it is," I told him. "An ambulance is going to come and take her to the hospital."

"Is she going to die?" Ali asked, and tears flooded his gentle eyes.

I didn't answer, but I kept my arms around him, and we stood in the doorway to the kitchen. The one thing I couldn't do right now was leave Nana. "We're going to stay right here, and we're going to think about how much we love Nana. Okay?"

Ali nodded slowly without taking his eyes off her.

"Daddy?"

I turned and saw Jannie in the hall. She was even more shocked and wide-eyed than her brother. I motioned her over, and we all waited together for the ambulance to arrive.

Finally, we heard a low siren outside. In a strange way, it seemed to make everything worse.

Once the EMTs got there, they took Nana's vitals and started her on oxygen.

"What's her name?" one of them asked.

" Regina." The word almost stuck in my throat. Nana's name means queen, of course, and that's what she is to us.

" Regina! Can you hear me?" The tech pushed a knuckle into her sternum, and she didn't move. "No pain response. Let's get a heart rhythm."

They asked me a few more questions while they worked. Was she on medication? Had her condition changed since we called 911? Was there any history of heart trouble with her or in the family?

I kept a hand on Ali the whole time, to let him know I was there, but vice versa too. Jannie stayed right by my side as well.

Within minutes, the EMTs had started a saline lock. Then they slid a collar around Nana's neck and put a backboard under her. Jannie finally buried her face in my side, sobbing quietly.

That got Ali crying again. And Bree too.

"We're a mess," I finally managed. "That's why she can't leave us."

They lifted Nana's tiny body onto a stretcher, and we followed them through the dining and living rooms, then out the front door. The familiarity of the surroundings seemed both sad and scary.

Bree had disappeared for a minute, and now she came up from behind, handing me my cell, a shirt, and a pair of shoes. Then she took Ali from me and put an arm around Jannie. Their faces were like mirrors of everything I was feeling.

"Go with Nana, Alex. We'll follow you in the car."

Chapter 24

GABE REESE WAS pacing with his arms folded tightly, just inside the West Wing lobby doors. He wasn't used to this kind of uncertainty, the total lack of information, the fucking mystery of it all. He had plenty of resources at his disposal – he just couldn't use most of them on this. Not until he was sure what they were dealing with.

He was waiting for the vice president, and the subject was Zeus, of course, and what had been found out so far, and what kind of unprecedented scandal this could turn out to be. Tillman was scheduled to address the National Association of Small Business Owners from 12:30 to 1:00 at the Convention Center. It was less than a mile and a half away, which meant maybe five minutes in the car. Reese was going to need every second.

At exactly 12:20, the vice president strode into the lobby with the Secret Service's Dan Cormorant on one side and a deputy director of communications on the other.

Two scheduling assistants and another Secret Service agent trailed behind. The usual kind of entourage, trappings of power and arrogance.

Tillman looked surprised to see Reese standing there, holding his trademark fedora in one hand.

"Gabe, you're coming to this thing?"

"Yes, sir. Wouldn't miss it. Not a word. Not an arching eyebrow."

"Okay. Okay. Let's go, then."

They continued outside, where the vice president's Cadillac limo, two black Suburbans, and three motorcycle police waited with motors running. As the vice president stepped into his car, Reese put a hand on Cormorant's shoulder.

"We need some privacy, Dan."

"The senior agent squinted in annoyance, then turned to his number two. "Bender, take the staff car. I've got this covered."

"Yes, sir."

"You know that has to go into the log," Cormorant said as soon as the other agent was out of earshot.

"No, it doesn't," Reese told him. There was more than enough precedent for this kind of request, even from Reese himself. Once Reese and the vice president were in the car, Cormorant got in. Then he radioed the go-ahead, and the motorcade pulled out toward 15th Street.

Chapter 25

WITH THE PARTITION up and tinted bullet- and soundproof glass on all sides, this was as private a meeting as they were going to get today, given the vice president's busy schedule.

Reese took a quick breath, then he started right in on what he'd found out. For one thing, the FBI and Metro police were both pursuing the case – at least as a murder investigation. Apparently prostitutes were involved, male and female. Zeus hadn't been indentified yet. If there actually was a Zeus.

"I just heard that we've got another problem." He turned to face the Secret Service agent on the jump seat. "Dan, do you know who Alex Cross is?"

"MPD detective, specializes in major cases – homicides, serials. He's working on a certain murder in question?" Cormorant hadn't missed a beat. "We're aware of Cross's involvement. We're watching him."

"And I'm finding out about this on my own, why?"

Cormorant ticked off the vice president's wishes on two fingers. "No phone, no e-mail, remember? I'll get information to you when I can get it to you, Gabe. We're talking about one homicide detective here."

"Hang on," the vice president cut in. "Where are we on Zeus, Dan?"

"Quickly, please," Reese added. They were already coming up on K Street, which was less crowded than usual – unfortunately.

"It's complicated. There are a lot of avenues to go down. We've had some SIGINT on a private club out in Virginia. Very discreet place for meetings. It's a sex club, sir. It's possible that Zeus has been there. It's likely he has. The White House, actually the Cabinet, keeps coming up, but that might be because of the code name, Zeus. I hope it's no more than that."

Tillman's expression darkened as he leaned in toward the Secret Service man. "And that's it? That's all you have?"

"This is a murder investigation. They usually don't solve themselves. The club is called Blacksmith Farms. We have the names of several clients. The owners are mob."

Tillman snapped. "Why can't we find out who Zeus is?"

"I'm sorry, sir, but I can't turn over too many rocks without attracting more attention than we want. We're not even sure if Zeus actually used the club in question. There are all these swirling rumors but nothing solid."

Reese didn't like Cormorant's tone with the vice president any more than he did with himself. "Swirling rumors. Who else knows about this?" he asked.

"Two senior agents in the Joint Operations Center, one intelligence officer, but it's all being contained. No links to the OVP at all."

Cormorant gave Reese another one of his squints. "You need to calm down. It's not helping. We're moving as fast as we can and there's lots to check. The circumstances couldn't be worse."

The words fuck you ran through Reese's mind, but he was too savvy to lose it in front of Tillman. Still, this situation had the makings of one of the biggest bombshells to hit Washington in years. A serial killer involved with the Cabinet – or attached to the White House?

"Sir, I'm going to recommend you designate all Secret Service logs from your detail as sensitive compartmented information – until further notice."

"Sir, any SCI order puts your thumbprint right where you don't want it," Cormorant interjected.

"But simultaneously puts that information completely out of reach," Reese answered back. Tillman had the authority to bypass not just the White House Security Office on this one, but the Freedom of Information Act.

"Okay." Tillman nodded agreement with the chief of staff. It was done. Then he asked, "What about this detective, Cross? How worried do we need to be about him?"

Cormorant thought for a moment. "It's hard to know until he turns something up. If he does. I'm keeping my eye on it, and if anything changes at all, I'll update you -"

"Not me." Tillman said firmly. "Go through Gabe. Everything goes through Gabe from now on."

"Of course."

Reese found he was repeatedly running a hand through his hair without even realizing it. They were just arriving at the Convention Center; the pressure was on to wrap this discussion up somehow.

Quickly he said, "Anything else I should know? Anything else that you've been keeping to yourself? Like who the hell Zeus is?"

Cormorant's face reddened, but all he said was "We're here, sir."

Chapter 26

NANA WAS ALIVE. That's what mattered; it was all I cared about right now. But I did wonder why it was that when you lose someone, or are about to lose someone important to you, they become more precious than ever.

It was hell waiting for her to come back from tests at the hospital. I had to sit for hours in a sterile, fluorescent-lit corridor, while my mind ran through every possible worst-case scenario, a bad habit of mine from work. I tried to fill my head with memories of Nana, going all the way back to when I was ten and she had replaced my parents in life.

When they finally wheeled her out, it was a gift just to look into her eyes. She'd been unconscious when we arrived, and there had been no guarantee I would ever see her alive again.

But here she was, and she was talking.

"Gave you a little scare there, did I?" Her voice was weak and wheezy, and she looked even tinier than usual sitting up on the gurney, but she was alert.

"More than a little scare," I said. It was all I could do to keep from squeezing the life right back out of her. I settled for a lingering kiss on the cheek.

"Welcome back, old woman," I whispered in her ear – just to make her smile, which it did.

"Good to be back. Now, let's get out of here!"

Chapter 27

ONCE WE GOT Nana settled – in a hospital bed – the cardiologist on call came in to meet with us. Her name was Dr. Englefield, and she looked about fifty, with a compassionate face but also the kind of professional detachment I've seen with a lot of specialists.

She worked off Nana's chart while she spoke.

"Mrs. Cross, your general diagnosis is congestive heart failure. Specifically, your heart isn't pumping enough blood into your system. That means you're not getting enough oxygen or nutrients, and that's most likely why you collapsed this morning."

Nana nodded, not showing any emotion. The first thing she asked was "How soon can I leave the hospital?"

"The average stay for something like this is four or five days. I'd like to adjust your blood pressure medication and see where we are in a few days."

"Oh, I'll be at home, Doctor. Where will you be?"

Englefield laughed politely, as if she thought Nana was joking. As soon as she was gone, though, Nana turned to me.

"You need to speak with someone else, Alex. I'm ready to go home."

"Is that so?" I asked, trying to keep it light.

"Yes, that's so." She wagged her hand, trying to shoo me out of the room. "Go on. Make it happen."

This was starting to get uncomfortable for me. I'd never called any shots for Nana before, and now, suddenly, I had to do just that.

"I think we should go with the doctor on this one," I said. "If a few nights in the hospital means we don't have to repeat this morning, then I'm all for it."

"You're not listening to me, Alex." Her voice had changed in a beat, and she grabbed my wrist. "I am not going to spend another day in a hospital bed, do you hear me? I refuse. It's my right to do so."

"Nana -"

"No!" She let go and pointed at me with a shaking finger. "I will not have that tone, either. Now, are you going to respect my wishes or not? I'll get right up and do it myself if I have to. You know I will, Alex."

It was an awful feeling, standing there on the other end of that finger of hers. Nana was insisting, but she was also pleading with me to listen to her wishes.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned in so that my head was right next to hers. When I spoke, it was with my eyes closed.

"Nana, I need for you to get serious about this recovery. Slow down a few miles an hour here and let this happen. You must. So be smart." The latter was something that Nana had been saying to me since I was ten years old. Be smart.

It was totally quiet in the room except the sound of her leaning back against the pillow. When I opened my eyes, there were tears on her cheeks. "That's it, then? This is where I die?"

I pulled up a chair and sat down next to the bed. Later, I'd sleep in that same chair. "Nobody's dying in here tonight," I said.