The Darker Side

1

DYING IS A LONELY THING.

Then again, so is living.

We all spend our lives alone inside our heart of hearts. However much we share with those we love, we always hold something back. Sometimes it's a small thing, like a woman remembering a secret but long-gone love. She tells her husband she's never loved anyone more than him, and she speaks the literal truth. But she has loved someone as much as him.

Sometimes it's a big thing, a huge thing, a monster that cuddles up next to us and licks us between the shoulder blades. A man, while in college, witnesses a gang rape but never steps forward. Years later that man becomes the father of a daughter. The more he loves her, the worse the guilt, but still, still, still, he'll never tell. Torture and death before that truth.

In the late hours, the ones when everyone's alone, those secrets come knocking. Some knock hard and some knock soft, but whispering or screeching, they come. No locked door will keep them out; they have the key to us. We speak to them or plead with them or scream at them and we wish we could tell them to someone, that we could get them off our chest to just one person and feel relief. We toss in bed or we walk the halls or we get drunk or we get stoned or we howl at the moon. Then the dawn comes and we shush them up and gather them back into our heart of hearts and do our best to carry on with living. Success at that endeavor depends on the size of the secret and the individual. Not everyone is built for guilt. Young or old, man or woman, everyone has secrets. This I have learned, this I have experienced, this I know about myself. Everyone.

I look down at the dead girl on the metal table and wonder: What secrets did you take with you that no one will ever know?

She's far, far too young to be gone. In her early twenties. Beautiful. Long, dark, straight hair. She has skin the color of light coffee, and it looks smooth and flawless even under these harsh fluorescents. Pretty, delicate features go with the skin: vaguely Latin, I think, mixed with something else. Probably Anglo. Her lips have gone pale in death, but they are full without being too full, and I imagine them in a smile that was a precursor to a laugh; light but melodic. She's small and thin through the sheet that covers her from the neck down. The murdered move me. Good or bad, they had hopes and dreams and loves. They once lived, like all of us, in a world where the deck is stacked against living. Between cancer or crashes on the freeway or dropping dead of a heart attack with a glass of wine in your hand and a strangled smile on your face, the world gives us plenty of chances to die. Murderers cheat the system, help things along, rob the victims of something it's already a fight to keep. This offends me. I hated it the first time I saw it and I hate it even more now.

I have been dealing with death for a long time. I am posted in the Los Angeles branch of the FBI and for the last twelve years I have headed up a team responsible for handling the worst of the worst in Southern California. Serial killers. Child rapists and murderers. Men who laugh as they torture women and then groan as they have sex with the corpses. I hunt living nightmares and it's always terrible, but it's also everywhere and inevitable.

Which is why I have to ask the question.

"Sir? What are we doing here?"

Assistant Director Jones is my longtime mentor, my boss, and the head of all FBI activities in Los Angeles. The problem though, the reason for my maybe-callous query, is that we're not in Los Angeles. We're in Virginia, near Washington, DC.

This poor woman may be dead, the fact of her death may touch me, but she's not one of mine.

He gives me a sideways glance, part thoughtful, maybe a little bit annoyed. AD Jones looks exactly like what he is: a veteran cop. He exudes law enforcement and leadership. He's got a square-jawed, strong face; hard, tired eyes; and a regulation haircut with no nod to style. He's handsome in his way, with two past marriages to prove it, but there's something guarded there. Shadows in a strongbox.

"Command performance, Smoky," he says. "From the Director himself."

"Really?"

I'm surprised by this on a few levels. The obvious is simple curiosity: Why here? Why me? The other is more complex: AD Jones's compliance to this unusual request. He has always been that rarity in a bureaucracy, someone who questions orders with impunity if he feels it is warranted. He said "command performance" but we wouldn't be here if he didn't feel there was a valid reason for it.

"Yeah," he replies, "the Director dropped a name I couldn't ignore."

The door to the morgue swings open before I can ask the obvious question.

"Speak of the devil," AD Jones mutters.

FBI Director Samuel Rathbun walks in alone, more strangeness; Even before 9/11, FBI Directors traveled with an entourage. He walks up to us and it's my hand he reaches out to shake first. I comply, bemused. Looks like I'm the queen of this ball. Why?

"Agent Barrett," he says in that trademark, politically handy baritone. "Thank you for coming on such short notice."

Sam Rathbun, otherwise known as "sir," is a tolerable mix for an FBI Director. He has the necessary rugged good looks and political savvy, but he also has real experience behind him. He started as a cop, went to law school nights, and ended up in the FBI. I wouldn't go so far as to call him "honest"-his position precludes that luxury-but he lies only when he has to. This is integrity incarnate for a Director. He's reputed to be pretty ruthless, which would not surprise me, and is supposed to be a health nut. Doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, no coffee, no soda, jogs five miles in the morning. Hey, everyone has their faults.

I have to angle my head to look up at him. I'm only four-ten, so I'm used to this.

"No problem at all, Director," I say, lying through my teeth. Actually, it was a problem, a big fucking problem, but AD Jones will catch any fallout I generate by being difficult. Rathbun nods at AD Jones. "David," he says.

"Director."

I compare the two men with some interest. They're both the same height. AD Jones has brown hair, cut short in that way that says "I don't have time for this." The Director's is black, flecked with gray and styled, very handsome-older-man, mover-and-shaker. The AD is about eight years older than Director Rathbun and more worn around the edges for sure. The Director looks like the man who jogs in the morning and loves it; the AD looks like he could jog in the morning, but chooses to have a cigarette and a cup of coffee instead and fuck you if you don't like it. The Director's suit fits better and his watch is a Rolex. AD Jones wears a watch that he probably paid thirty dollars for ten years ago. The differences are notable but really, in spite of all of this, it's the similarities that strike me. Each has the same tired look to the eyes, a look that testifies to the carrying of secret burdens. They have card-players' faces, continually holding things close to the vest.

Here are two men that would be hard to live with, I think. Not because they're bad men, but because they'd operate on the assumption you knew they cared, and that would have to be enough. Love, but no flowers.

Director Rathbun turns to me, again.

"I'll get right to it, Agent Barrett. You're here because I was asked to bring you by someone I'm not prepared to say no to."

I glance at AD Jones, remembering his comment about how the Director had "dropped a name."

"Can I ask who?"

"Soon." He nods at the body. "Tell me what you see."

I turn to the body and force myself to focus.

"Young woman, in her early twenties. Possible victim of homicide."

"What makes you say homicide?"

I indicate a series of bruises on her left upper arm.

"The bruises are red-purple, which means they're very recent. See the outlines? Those bruises were caused by a hand. You have to grip someone pretty hard to cause bruising as defined as that. She's cool to the touch, meaning she's been dead at least twelve hours, probably more like twenty with the visible bruising. Rigor hasn't left the body, meaning she's been dead less than thirty-six." I shrug. "She's young, and someone grabbed her arm hard enough to bruise it not long before she died. Suspicious." I give him a wry smile. "Oh yeah, and I'm here, which means she probably didn't die of natural causes."

"Good eyes, as expected," he says. "And you're correct. She was murdered. On a commercial airliner as it headed from Texas to Virginia. No one knew she was dead until after the plane was empty and the flight attendant tried to rouse her."

I stare at him, certain he's pulling my leg.

"Murder at thirty thousand feet? Is that a joke, sir?"

"No."

"How do we know she was murdered?"

"The nature of how she was found made it clear. But I want you to see it all fresh, with no preconceptions."

I turn back to the body, truly intrigued now.

"When did this happen?"

"Her body was discovered twenty hours ago."

"Do we have a cause of death yet?"

"The autopsy hasn't been done." He glances at his watch. "In fact, we're waiting for the ME now. He's probably held up signing nondisclosure forms."

This oddity brings me back to my original question, and I ask it again. "Why me, sir? More appropriately-why you? What is it about this woman that warrants direct involvement from the Director of the FBI?"

"I'm about to tell you. But first, I want you to see something. Humor me."

Like I have a choice.

He goes over to the body and lifts the sheet away from her chest. He holds it up.

"Take a look," he says.

AD Jones and I move to the head of the table so we are looking down her body from top to bottom. I see small breasts with brown nipples, a flat stomach. My gaze travels down her young form, arriving at her pubic area with impunity, one of the many indignities of the dead. And there I stop, shocked.

"She has a penis," I blurt out.

AD Jones says nothing.

Director Rathbun lets the sheet fall back. He does this with gentle care, an almost fatherly gesture.

"This is Lisa Reid, Smoky. Does that name mean anything to you?"

I frown, trying to make the connection. I can only find one that accounts for the Director's presence here.

"As in Texas congressman Dillon Reid?"

"That's right. Lisa was born Dexter Reid. Mrs. Reid asked for you specifically. She's familiar with your-ah-story."

I'm amused at his discomfort, but I hide it.

Three years ago, my team and I were hunting a serial killer, a true psycho by the name of Joseph Sands. We were very close to catching him when he broke into my home one night. He tied me to a bed and raped me again and again. He used a hunting knife on the left side of my face, carving himself into me, stealing my beauty and leaving me with a permanent relief map of pain.

The scarring starts at my hairline in the middle of my forehead. It goes straight down to between my eyebrows, and then it rockets off to the left, an almost perfect ninety degree angle. I have no left eyebrow; the scar has replaced it. The puckered road continues, across my temple, arcing in a lazy loop-de-loop down my cheek. It rips over toward my nose, crosses the bridge of it just barely, and then turns back, slicing in a diagonal across my left nostril and zooming one final time past my jawline, down my neck, ending at my collarbone. There is another scar, straight and perfect, that goes from under the middle of my left eye down to the corner of my mouth. This was a gift from another psychotic; he forced me to cut myself while he watched and smiled.

Those are just the scars that are visible. Below the neckline of whatever blouse I happen to be wearing, there are others. Made by Sands's knife blade and the cherry-end of a burning cigar. I lost my face that night, but that was the least of what Sands stole from me. He was a hungry thief, and he only ate the precious things. I had a husband, a beautiful man named Matt. Sands tied him to a chair and made him witness my rape and torture. Then Sands forced me to watch while he tortured and murdered my Matt. We screamed together and then Matt was gone. It was the last thing we ever shared.

There was one final theft, the worst of all. My ten-year-old daughter, Alexa. I'd managed to get free and had come after Sands with my gun. He yanked Alexa up as I pulled the trigger and the bullet meant for him killed her instead. I filled Sands up with the remaining bullets in the gun and reloaded, screaming, to do it all again. I would have kept firing until the end of the world if they'd let me. I spent six months after that night teetering on the knife-edge of suicide, wrapped in insanity and despair. I wanted to die, and I might have, but I was saved because someone else died first. My best friend from high school, Annie King, was murdered by a madman for no other reason than he wanted me to hunt him. He raped Annie with abandon and gutted her with a fisherman's skill. When he was done, he tied Annie's ten-year-old daughter, Bonnie, to Annie's corpse. Bonnie was there for three days before she was discovered. Three days cheek to cheek with her hollowed-out mother. I gave the madman his wish. I hunted him down and killed him without a twinge of guilt. By the time it was all over, I just didn't feel like dying anymore.

Annie left Bonnie to me, as it turned out. It should have been a doomed relationship; I was a rickety mess, Bonnie was mute as a result of the horrors she'd witnessed. But fate is funny sometimes. Curses can blossom into blessings. Apart, we were broken; together, Bonnie and I helped each other to heal. Bonnie began speaking again two years ago, and I'm happy to be alive, something, at one time, I thought would never happen.

I have learned to accept my disfigurement. I've never considered myself beautiful, really, but I used to be pretty. I am short, with curly, dark hair down to my shoulders. I have what my husband used to call

"bite-sized boobs," along with a butt that's bigger than I'd like but which seems to have its own appeal. I had always been comfortable in my own skin, at peace with the physical hand dealt me. Sands's work had made me cringe every time I looked into the mirror. I had kept my hair brushed forward after the attack, using it to obscure my face. Now I keep it tied back in a ponytail and tight against my head, daring the world to look and not giving-as my dad used to say-a "good God damn" if they don't like it.

All of this-my "ah-story" as the Director had put it-had appeared in various papers, and it had given me a grisly celebrity with people both good and bad.

It had also established a ceiling for me at the FBI. There was a time when I was being considered for the Assistant Director's job. Not anymore. My scars gave me a good face for a hunter, or even a teacher of hunters (I'd been offered a teaching position at Quantico, which I'd turned down), but as far as being the administrative face of the FBI?

Photoshoots with the President? Not going to happen. I'd come to terms with all of this years ago. I won't say that I enjoy my job- enjoy is not the right word-but I am proud of being good at what I do.

"I see," I reply. "Why did you agree?"

"Congressman Reid is friends with the President. The President is nearing the end of his second term. Reid is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, as I'm sure you're aware."

"President Allen's party," AD Jones says, observing the obvious for me.

The puzzle pieces fall into place. The name the Director had dropped, the one that AD Jones couldn't ignore, had been the President's. And Dillon Reid was not just the President's friend, he was potentially the next President himself.

"I didn't know that," I muse.

The Director raises his eyebrows. "You didn't know Dillon Reid was a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination? Don't you watch the news?"

"Nope. It's all bad, so why bother?"

The Director is staring at me in frank disbelief.

"It's not like I don't vote," I add. "When the time comes, I find out who the candidates are and what they're about. I'm just not that interested in all the stuff that comes before."

AD Jones smiles a little. The Director shakes his head.

"Well, now that you do know, listen up," he says. Introductions are over, time has come to hand out the orders.

"At no time in this investigation are you to let politics or political considerations keep you from doing an honest investigation. You are expected to be considerate and to exercise discretion. I'm going to fill you in on some important facts. You're going to keep these facts to yourself. You're not going to write them down anywhere, not a note, not an e-mail. You're going to relay these facts to the members of your team that need to know, and you're going to make sure they keep their mouths shut. Understand?"

"Yes, sir," I reply.

AD Jones nods.

"A transsexual child is political dynamite for anyone, but especially so for a Democratic congressman in what's historically a Republican state. The Reids dealt with this by essentially cutting ties with their son. They didn't disown him, but whenever they were asked, they made it clear that Dexter wasn't welcome at home as long as he insisted on pursuing a transgender path. It got its fifteen minutes and that was pretty much that."

"But it was bullshit, wasn't it?" AD Jones says. I glance at him, surprised. Director Rathbun nods.

"The truth is, the Reids loved their son. They didn't care if he was gay, transgendered, or Martian."

And now I understand.

"They helped pay for the sex-change, didn't they?"

"That's right. Not directly, of course, but they provided money to Dexter whenever he needed it, knowing it would be used for sexchange necessities. Dexter has also secretly attended every Reid family Christmas."

I shake my head in disbelief. "Is the lie really that important?"

The Director's smile at me is the smile you give a child who's just charmed you with their naivete. Her so cute!

"Haven't you seen the culture war going on in this country? Well, magnify that by ten when you hit parts of the South. It could be the difference between being President or not. So yeah, it's important."

I consider this. "I understand," I say, "but I don't care about any of that."

Director Rathbun frowns. "Agent Barrett-"

"Hold on, sir. I'm not saying I won't keep the confidence. What I'm saying is that I won't keep it because the congressman wants to be President. I don't give a rat's ass about that. I'll keep it because a family that lost a son wants me to." I nod toward the body of Lisa. "And mostly, because Lisa seemed content to keep it herself."

The Director stares at me for a moment. "Fair enough," he replies, and continues. "Mrs. Reid is going to be the family contact. If you have to speak to the congressman, she'll arrange it. Any permissions needed in terms of searching Lisa's condo-anything-she's the one you'll talk to. Stay away from the congressman unless it's absolutely necessary."

"And what if this ends up pointing at the congressman?" I ask. His smile is mirthless. "Then I know I can count on you to ignore political necessity."

"Who's going to handle the press on this?" AD Jones asks.

"I'll deal with that. In fact, I don't want any of you speaking to the press, period. No comment and that's it." He glances at me. "That goes double for Agent Thorne, Smoky."

He's referring to Callie Thorne, a member of my team. She's known for saying what she wants when she feels like it. I grin at him. "Don't worry, sir. She's got other fish to fry."

"How's that?"

"She's getting married in a month."

He does a double take. "Really?"

Callie is somewhat infamous as a serial non-monogamist. I'm getting used to the disbelief.

"Yes, sir."

"Wonders never cease. Give her my best. But keep an eye on that mouth of hers." He glances at the Rolex. "I'm going to take you to see Mrs. Reid now. The ME should be arriving shortly. The autopsy results go to me and your team and that's it. Any questions?"

AD Jones shakes his head.

"No, sir," I say, "but I think I should see Mrs. Reid by myself. Mother to mother."

He frowns. "Explain."

"Statistically, men are more ill at ease with transsexuals than women. I'm not saying the congressman didn't love his son, but if Lisa had a champion, someone she was really close to, I'm betting it was the mom." I pause. "Also, I think there's another reason she asked for me."

"Which is?"

I look down at Lisa. She represents a new secret now, one the dead reveal, the old know, and the young will always ignore: life is too damn short, however long it is.

My smile at him is humorless. "Because I've lost a child too. It's a members-only club."

2

I WATCH AS THE CAR PULLS UP BEHIND THE MORGUE. IT'S black of course; preferred color of the government and its employees, almost comforting in its continuity. The back windows are tinted to prevent anyone outside from looking in.

It's half past four in the afternoon, and dusk is beginning to make itself known here. This part of Virginia huddles close to DC while still retaining its own identity. It is quieter than the capital and whether true or not, feels somehow safer. There is a mix of suburb and city that provides an illusion of comfort. Like so many places in the East, it has a certain weight to it, a unique blend of character and history. It's late September here in a way I'll never see on the West Coast. The air has teeth, a bite that promises a winter with snow. Not as bad as, say, a Buffalo, New York, winter, but not one of those wussy California winters either. There are trees everywhere, young and old. Their sheer volume tells me they are cherished by this city, and I can see why. Fall is an actual season in Alexandria, Virginia. The leaves are on the turn and, well-it's pretty spectacular.

The car stops, the side door opens, and I climb inside. Time to focus on why I'm here. I'd been given the basic facts about Rosario Reid by the Director.

"She's forty-eight years old. She had Dexter when she was twentysix, a year after she married the congressman. They've known each other since high school but waited until a few years after they finished college to marry.

"Her great-grandfather came to the U.S. from Mexico, and built a small cattle empire back when that was a difficult thing for a Mexican in Texas to do. He seems to have passed his gumption along to his progeny-Mrs. Reid is one tough cookie. She's a Harvard-trained lawyer and she has a taste for the jugular. While Mr. Reid was building up a head of political steam, Mrs. Reid was busy championing the underdog. She won a number of high-profile cases, none of which I have the details on, all of which basically stuck it to various corporate bullies. When Mr. Reid decided to run for Congress, she rolled up her tents as a lawyer and managed his campaign." The Director had shaken his head in admiration. "People in Washington who know better are afraid of crossing her, Smoky. She's one of the nicest women I've met, but she can be ruthless if you mess with her husband."

I find all of this intriguing, even admirable, but high-profile people can become mythological fast if you let them. I want to get a sense of Rosario Reid for myself, because understanding the mother will help me understand the child. I need to figure out if and how much she's going to lie to me, and if she does lie, for what reasons. Love for her child? Political expedience? Just because?

MRS. REID NODS TO ME as I close my door. She knocks on the partition window for the driver to go and pushes a button that I surmise turns off the intercom. The car starts driving and we take a moment to appraise each other.

Rosario Reid is undeniably attractive. She has the classic lines of an intelligent Latin beauty; sophisticated, yet sensuous. As a woman, I can tell she's taken measures to tone this beauty down. Her hair is short and all business, and she's allowed strands of gray to remain untouched. There's no mascara thickening her lashes. Her son got his full lips from her, but she's used liner to make less of the cupid's bow. She's wearing a simple white blouse, a navy jacket, and matching navy slacks, all tailored to perfection but sexually muted. These superficial things highlight her political savvy and tell me a lot about her loyalty to her husband. Rosario is doing the opposite of what most women do. She's playing down her native sensuality, leavening her beauty with understated professionalism. Tweed, not silk. Why? So that she remains palatable to the congressman's female constituency. Powerful women can be attractive, but never sensuous or sexy. I don't know why this is so, but it is, even for me. I trust a woman in a position of power who looks like Rosario more than I would one who looks like a Victoria's Secret model. Go figure.

She's strong too. She's keeping herself composed, but the intensity of her grief is obvious when I look into her eyes. She won't weep in public. Grief is private to this woman, another thing we share in addition to our dead children.

She breaks the silence first. "Thank you for coming, Agent Barrett." Her voice is measured, quiet, neither low nor high. "I know this is unusual. I've made a point, over the years, of not using my family's political position for personal favors." She shrugs, and her grief gives it a terrible elegance. "My child is dead. I made an exception."

"I'd do the same in your position, Mrs. Reid. I'm very sorry for your loss. I know that's a cliched thing to say and I know it's inadequate under the circumstances, but I am sorry. Dexter-" I stop, frown. "I'm not familiar with the etiquette here, ma'am. Should I say

'him' or 'her'? Should I use Dexter or Lisa?"

"Lisa spent her life wanting to become a woman. The least we can do is treat her like one now that she's dead."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Let's do away with the titles in private, shall we, Smoky? We're just two mothers of dead children here. No men around with their peacock worries or chest-puffing." She pauses, fixes me with a fierce gaze. "We need to put our heads together and do some dirty work, and that requires first names and no pleasantries, don't you agree?"

We women, we're the ones who bury the children, the ones who drag the hems of our dresses through the cemetery dirt, that's what she's saying.

"Okay, Rosario."

"Good." I see her eyes appraising my scars. "I read about what you went through. In the papers and so on. I've been an admirer of yours for years."

Her gaze remains level as she says these words to me. Her eyes don't flinch at the scars on my face, not even a little. If she's at all uncomfortable, she hides it better than the Director did. I've inclined my head to Rosario in acknowledgment.

"Thank you, but there's nothing all that admirable about being the one who wasn't killed."

She frowns. "That's very uncharitable. You went on. You continued to do the job that put you in harm's way. You continue to do that job well. You continue to live in the house where it happened-which I understand, by the way. I'm sure many don't, but I do." She smiles a sad smile. "Your home is your tree, the place where your roots are buried. It's where your daughter was born, and that memory is more powerful than all the painful ones, yes?"

"That's right," I reply, quiet.

I find myself taken by this woman. I like her. She is honest. Her insightfulness speaks to her character. This is someone who understands: family is home, family is the roof against the world. Love may be the glue, but the string of moments shared, that's the soul of things.

We're driving at a leisurely pace, a big circle with the morgue at its center. My eyes are drawn to the turning leaves again; it's as if the trees are on fire.

"Like you," Rosario says, continuing to look out the window, "I married the man I kissed in high school. Have you seen pictures of my Dillon?"

"Yes. He's handsome."

"He was then too. And so young. He was my first love." She gives me a sideways glance, a small grin. It makes her seem eighteen for a moment, a brief, bright flash. "My first everything."

I smile back. "Matt was for me too."

"We're a dying breed, Smoky. Women who marry their high school sweethearts, who can count their lovers on just a few fingers. Do you think we're better off, or worse?"

I shrug. "I think happiness is the most personal thing there is. I didn't marry Matt to make a statement about chastity or anything. I married him because I loved him."

Something about what I just said shakes that composure, a little. Her eyes get wet, though tears don't fall.

"What an excellent way to put it. Yes. Happiness is a personal thing. That was certainly true for my daughter." She turns in the car seat so that she is facing me. "Did you know that it's more dangerous to be a transgendered person than any other discriminated minority?

You're more likely to be a victim of a violent hate crime than a gay or a Muslim, a Jew or an African-American."

"Yes, I did know."

"And they are aware of this, Smoky. The boys and men who become women, the girls and women who become men-they know they're going to be shunned and reviled, maybe beaten, maybe even killed. Still, they do it. Do you know why?" Her hands shake and she grips them in her lap. "They do it because there's no other way for them to be happy."

"Tell me about Lisa," I prod her.

Because that's what she really wants to do. That's why I'm here. She wants to make me see Lisa, to care for her. She wants me to understand what's been lost, and to feel it.

She closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them, I can see the love. This is a strong woman, and she'd loved her child with all of that strength.

"I'll use the name Dexter first, because that's how he started. Dexter was a kind, beautiful boy. I know all parents think their children walk on water, but Dexter really did not have a mean bone in his body. He was small and slight, but never weak. Gentle, but not naive. You understand?"

"Yes."

"I suppose the stereotype would have him as a momma's boy, and that was true to a degree, but he didn't hide behind my skirts. He spent his time like any boy-outside, in the sun, getting into various types of trouble. He played in Little League, started learning the guitar when he was ten, got into a fight or two with bullies. No reason to think or assume he was going to do anything other than grow up to be a wonderful man. I rarely had to use his first, middle, and last name at the same time."

She assumes I know what she means, and she's right. It's universal mother-speak. Every child knows, when Mom uses your first and last name together, you're in trouble. First, middle, and last? That particular triumvirate is reserved for the worst offenses, the greatest angers. Duck, cover, and hold.

She looks at me. "How old was your daughter when she died?"

"Ten."

"That's a great age. Before they start keeping secrets from you."

She sighs, but it's more wistful than sad. "I thought I knew Dexter inside and out, but of course, no mother really knows her son once they hit puberty. They begin to get distant. Horrified by the idea that Mother might know they masturbate about women-Mother is a woman after all. I was prepared for that, it's the way of things, but Dexter's secrets were different than my assumptions."

"How did it come about? Realizing he had a problem?" I stop myself. "Sorry-is it wrong to call it a 'problem'?"

"That depends. To those who oppose the whole concept of a transgendered person, it's the change that's the problem. To the transgendered, the problem is that their body doesn't match their interior sexual identity. Either way, I suppose 'problem' is accurate enough. To answer your question, Dexter probably felt ill at ease as a boy for a very long time. He first started. . experimenting when he was fourteen."

"Experimenting how?"

Those hands, shaking again, finding each other in her lap. She doesn't speak for a moment, and I see the struggle.

"I'm sorry," she says, "it's just. . Dexter's personality, the things I loved so much about him, were so evident in the way he handled his first forays into exploring his gender identity. It was bras and panties, you see."

"Wearing them?"

"Yes. I found them one afternoon in the bottom of his underwear drawer, buried and hidden. My first assumption was that they were mine, but they weren't, which is what I mean about his personality. You see, we gave Dexter an allowance, and he also did odd jobs in the neighborhood. Mowing lawns and so on. He took his own money and bought his own underthings. Do you understand? He was fourteen, he was conflicted about what was happening, I know from later conversations that he felt guilty, dirty-but he simply didn't feel it would be right to steal my things. He felt the only honorable thing to do was to take his money, walk into a Kmart or some such and buy them himself. He was very embarrassed about it, he told me that later, but he was stubborn with himself when it came to right and wrong."

I can see it in my mind. A young, slight boy, buying a pair of panties and bra, cheeks burning as he did it. Doing it because it just wasn't right to steal from his mother.

I picture myself at fourteen. Would I have been that straight arrow, if I'd been him? Embarrassment before dishonor?

Uh-uh. Hell, no. Mom would have lost a set of underwear.

"I understand," I tell Rosario. "What happened then?"

She grimaces. "Oh God. Three terrible years, that's what happened. You have to understand, I come from a Mexican-American family. Catholic, very conservative. On the other side of that, I was a lawyer, used to rules and structure-and keeping secrets. The first thing I did was keep this between Dexter and me."

"Understandable."

"Yes. It took me some time to pry it out of him, and to be fair, it was pretty formless for Dexter. He was confused, still sorting through what was happening himself. He told me that he felt 'weird' sometimes, like when he looked in the mirror, he wanted to see a female body, not a male. I was scandalized. I confiscated the underwear and the bra and sent him packing to a psychologist."

"But things continued to change."

"The psychologist said that Dexter had gender dysphoria, also known as gender identity disorder. Fancy words meaning that Dexter strongly identified with the opposite sex."

"I'm familiar with the subject. It can range from a light obsession to a certainty the individual is the opposite sex trapped in the wrong body."

"That's right. He 'treated' Dexter. He wanted to use psychotropics as a part of his therapy, but I forbade it. Dexter was bright, considerate, alert, kind, he was a straight-A student who'd never been in trouble with the law-why in the world would I let him be drugged?" She waves a hand. "It was all useless. Treatment boiled down to assigning the label and working with him to 'behave against the compulsion.' It changed nothing."

"When did he decide to go the route of sexual reassignment?"

"Oh, he told me about it when he was nineteen. But I imagine he'd decided before that. He was simply trying to figure out how to do it so that it would hurt his father and I the least. Not that we made it easy, regardless." She shakes her head. "Dillon went ballistic. We'd kept this from him for so many years, and he was enjoying the political game so much. It blindsided him in the worst way."

"How did Dexter handle that?"

She smiles. "He was calm. Calm and ordered, with that quiet certainty." She shrugs. "He'd decided and that was that. His father's strength."

Yours too, I think to myself.

"Go on."

"He told us that he understood this was going to be a problem for us, particularly for his father, and that his solution was that we publicly disown him. He said that it was important to him that his decision impact us as little as possible. Can you imagine?" Her voice is full of grief and amazement. "I remember, he said: 'Dad, what you do is valuable. You help a lot of people. I don't want you to have to give that up for me. But I'm not going to give this up for you either. This is the best compromise.' I think that's what got through to Dillon. That his son was willing to be publicly castigated so that his father could continue doing what he loved. I'm not saying it was smooth sailing, but. ."

"Dexter got through."

"Yes." She looks at me, and all I see now is a deep, deep pain tinged with regret, maybe a little bit of self-loathing. "The details aren't important. What's important is that like the good political family we'd become, we did exactly what Dexter proposed. We set up a trust, and he moved out. When he began to actually live as a woman-do you know about that part of the process?"

"Part of the procedure for getting approval for the surgery is living for a year as the sex you are becoming-something like that?"

"Exactly like that. You don't get to have any surgical alterations done until you've lived as a woman or a man for a full year. For Dexter that meant attending work dressed as a woman, going out in public, etc. It's designed to ensure that you're certain."

"Makes sense."

"I think so. So did Dexter, for that matter. Anyway, when that began, we gave our wonderfully perfectly worded statement. About how we still loved our son but couldn't agree with his choices. It was a masterpiece of deception." She pauses, searching for words. "You're not from the South, Smoky, so I don't think you can truly understand how deep the differences run. Don't misunderstand, there are plenty of liberal intellectuals in Texas, but I would not put them as a majority."

"Sure."

She shakes her head. "No. You have an idea of it, perhaps a stereotype. There's no way you can appreciate the truth of it unless you grew up there. You probably imagine tobacco-chewing rednecks with gun racks in their trucks. We have those, it's true, but the more complex picture is of a well-educated, very intelligent, likeable individual who preaches that homosexuality is an abomination without blinking. That person will have a friend, a best friend, someone he grew up with, who thinks gays should have more rights. The two can still be friends across this divide-still be good friends." She lifts an eyebrow.

"But if the liberal friend was actually gay? Oh no. And transsexuals?

Oh my. Freaks of nature, perhaps to both of the friends in that example. We've made great strides in the South, and I love the place. It's my home. But it's a creature of habit, resistant to great changes."

"I get the picture."

"Meanwhile," Rosario continues, "as you know, Dexter still came for Christmas, but on the sly." She pauses. "Horrible, don't you think?

Giving up our child for professional ambition?"

I think about this. This woman deserves a real answer, not something trite and clever.

"I think," I say, cautious, "that anything else would have hurt Dexter. He felt that he had to do what he was doing, but he was worried about how it would affect your husband's career. I mean, he said 'publicly disown.' Did he ever seem to expect that either of you would actually disown him?"

She's startled by this concept. "No. No, I don't think so."

"So he was secure in being loved by you. I'm not saying it excuses everything, but it's certainly not nothing, Rosario."

Grief is sometimes simple, but often complex. It encompasses self-doubts, what-ifs, if-onlys. It resembles regret, but is more powerful than that. It can disappear in an instant or settle in till death. I see versions of all these things run across Rosario's features, and I'm happy for it, because it means I've given her a truth. Lies can hurt, but nothing moves us like truth.

It takes her a moment to get herself under control. Still no tears.

"So, Dexter got through that year, and that year was the end of Dexter. A son died, a daughter was reborn. Such a beautiful daughter too. Lisa blossomed, both inside and out. She'd always been a happy child, but now she seemed to glow. She was. . content. Contentment is hard to come by, Smoky."

I notice how easily she's slipped into using "Lisa," "she," and

"her." Dexter became Lisa, not just to himself, but to his mother.

"How did the congressman adjust?"

"He was never really comfortable with it. But I don't want to paint a picture of him as a stereotypical intolerant, Smoky. Dillon loved Dexter and he was trying very, very hard to love Lisa. He considered any difficulty in doing so to be his failing, not Lisa's."

"I'm sure Lisa saw that too."

Rosario nods and smiles. "She did. She was-happy. The hormones took very well, and she was wise with her breast augmentation, fitting it to her frame, not going too big or too small. She took to makeup like a fish to water, walked like a woman without any real effort, had a good sense of style. Even her voice lessons, which can be the most difficult for some, went easy for her."

Men have lower voices because their vocal cords elongate during puberty. This elongation is not reversible, requiring that men who transition to women learn how to pitch their voices higher.

"Was she planning on. . going all the way with it?"

Not all transsexuals elect to change their genitalia.

"She hadn't decided."

"Why was Lisa in Texas?" I ask. "I understand she lived here, in Virginia. Was she visiting you?"

"She came down for her grandmother's funeral. This was Dillon's mother."

"Did you and the congressman attend the funeral?"

"Yes. It was small and private. We're not in the middle of a campaign right now, so there was no media. We held the service and Lisa left the next day to go back home. She was supposed to be working tomorrow."

"What did she do?"

"She ran her own travel agency. A one-woman show, but she did fine. She had a very profitable niche, coming up with vacations designed for the gay, lesbian, and transgendered community."

"Are you aware of any enemies she had? Anyone she might have mentioned bothering her?"

"No." Emphatic. "I'm not brushing off the question or operating in denial, Smoky. It's the first thing I considered, and nothing came to mind."

But you might be surprised, I think.

All those late night secrets, the big and the small, the ones that come knocking when the moon goes behind a cloud-children have them too, and the parents are usually the last to know.

"What about you or the congressman? I realize you both have enemies, all high-profile people do, but is there anything specific, anything recent or in the recent past that stands out?"

"I wish I could say so. Dillon gets the occasional crazy letter, and I read them all before passing them on to the Secret Service. The last one like that came in six or seven months ago. Some kook threatened to kill Dillon with his mind or some nonsense. We're not straddling any contentious issues on the moral front at the moment. Rarely are, truth be told. Avoiding that type of confrontation is how Dillon's managed to hold a Democratic seat in Texas."

I search for more to ask her, but can't think of anything at the moment.

I choose my next words with care. "Rosario, I want you to know that I'm going to do everything I can to find the person responsible for this. I can't promise I'll catch them-I learned not to make promises like that a long time ago-but my team and I are very, very good. We are going to need access in order to do our jobs. I'll bow to a certain amount of political decorum, but in the end, I'm not working for you or for your husband, I'm working for Lisa."

"Lisa is all that matters."

"I'm not trying to be insensitive. I just want to ensure I make it clear what my priorities are."

"Your priorities are reassuring." She reaches into her jacket pocket and hands me a slip of paper. "All of my numbers. Contact me any time of the day or night for the smallest thing."

I take the paper from her. She knocks on the partition again, a signal to return us to the morgue. The sun is setting and the blood in the sky mingles with the fire-trees of fall.

Winter is coming. Winter here is still, like death.

"Can I ask you a question, Smoky?" Rosario says.

"You can ask me anything you want."

She looks at me, and I see, finally, the tears. Not a sobbing grief, no hysteria here, just a stream from the corner of each eye, evidence of the deepest ache.

"Do you ever get over it?"

Truth, truth, nothing but truth, that's what this woman deserves. I give it to her.

"Not ever."

3

"CALLIE, ALAN, AND JAMES ARE ON THEIR WAY HERE," AD Jones tells me. "They should arrive in a few hours."

We're outside the autopsy room, watching through a pane of glass as the medical examiner disassembles the body of Lisa Reid in order to help us catch her killer. It's the final outrage. There's no soul to an autopsy, just the reduction of a human being to their lowest common denominator: meat.

It's now after seven o'clock and I am beginning to feel the disconnection from home.

"Pretty weird to be here," I remark.

"Yeah," AD Jones replies. He's silent for a moment. "My second wife and I actually talked about moving out here once."

"Really?"

"You saw those trees? They have four real seasons here. White Christmas, things coming to life in the spring." He shrugs. "I was into it. Then the marriage went south and I forgot about it."

He goes quiet again. This is the story of our relationship. He doles out personal information at unexpected times in little dollops. They're often bittersweet, as now. He'd loved a woman and they'd talked about moving someplace where they could rake fallen leaves and build snowmen. Now he is here because of a corpse. Dreams evolve, not always for the better.

"Dr. Johnston is a strange one," I mutter, changing the subject.

"Yeah."

Dr. Johnston, the ME, is in his mid-forties and he is huge. Not fat-muscular. He's got biceps it would take both of my hands to fit around. His legs are so big he probably has to get his pants tailored. His hair is bleach blond and shaved close to his head. His face is square jawed and brutal looking, with a big nose that's bent from past breaks and a vein that throbs away in his forehead like a living metronome, mesmerizing. He could be a professional bodybuilder or a mob knee-breaker.

He's all business with Lisa, putting those muscular arms to good use as he cuts through her rib cage. Even through the window, the sound is unsettling, like someone stepping on a series of Styrofoam cups. I can't hear what he's saying, but his lips are moving as he dictates his findings into the microphone that hangs above the table.

"How did it go with Mrs. Reid?" AD Jones asks me.

"Fine. Terrible."

I fill him in.

"You were right. About why she asked for you."

"Yep."

Johnston is leaning forward to peer into Lisa. Looking inside her. I've seen much worse, but for some reason this makes me queasy.

"What's your take on this so far, Smoky?"

I know what he's asking me, what he wants. He wants me to do what I'm best at. To exercise my gift.

I do what I do because I have an ability to understand the men I hunt. It's not immediate, and it's not clairvoyant, but give me enough data and a picture will form. It will have three dimensions. It will have emotions and thought processes. Above all, it will have hungers. Hungers I can almost taste inside my own mouth, dark flavors so tangible I can almost swallow them. I have worked with talented men, AD Jones among them, who helped me to hone this gift. I came to understand that the crux of it is my ability to do the most unnatural thing; I look closer when normal people would turn away.

It's like diving into oil; you can't see through the murk while immersed, but you can feel its slickness covering you. Sometimes, I dive too deep. Sometimes, this scars me on the inside, and gives me secrets all my own.

Five years ago I was hunting a man who murdered only young, beautiful brunette women. None of them were over twenty-five, and all of them were striking. Even in death, and even to me, as a woman, they were lush and beautiful. Made to cloud men's minds. The man killing them felt the same way. He raped them and then he killed them with his fists. He beat them to death slowly, methodically with focused dedication. It's an intimate, personal way to kill another human being. I stood over one of those victims and I looked. I looked and I saw him. The killer. I kept looking until I felt him. He was a man in a frenzy, an overwhelming mix of sexual desire and anger. In the end, I realized, he wanted his sex with them to shake the moon loose from the sky.

I'd stood up, dazed, and had found to my horror that I was a little bit wet between the legs. I had dived too deeply, felt what he felt too strongly.

I found the nearest bathroom and puked my guts out. Bad as that was, it helped. I knew we were looking for a man who was organized and smart, but who couldn't control himself if the right trigger occurred.

We caught our man, we had DNA, but because of my deep dive, we got a confession as well. Stacy Hobbs was a new agent in the LA office, and she was exactly what I needed. Twenty-four, brunette, a distraction to all the men in a thousand-foot radius. I had her dress as the women he killed had dressed, had her make herself up. I told her how to stand in the corner, how to stare at him, how to cock her hip and smile seductively. I told her she wasn't to say a word.

His name was Jasper St. James, and he couldn't take his eyes off her. I watched his fists clench. Watched as his mouth fell open, just a little. His lips actually plumped up before my eyes, like the lips of a vampire. He began to sweat and he muttered under his breath.

"Bitch. Bitch." Over and over.

In prior interviews, he'd been cool as a cucumber. I crossed my legs, a signal to Stacy. She did what I'd told her to do: she looked right into Jasper's eyes and licked her lips, long and slow, smacking and obscene and wet-sounding. Then she turned, abrupt, and left without a word.

Jasper actually screamed with frustration when that happened. It was just a single screech, a high-pitched keen, as if someone had squeezed his balls with a pair of pliers. I leaned forward over the interrogation table.

"It must have felt so so so so so so good," I said, pitching my voice low and breathy, "to watch them realize they were going to die."

I remember his look. Horror and fascination and hope. Could almost hear his thoughts. Could she actually understand? Was it possible?

It was, God help me, though not in the way he thought. I felt it, I understood it, but in the end, my understanding was synthetic. I was unfaithful; only Jasper's love was pure.

He blabbered and blathered and sweated and shook and he talked. He told me his secrets. He was happy to share, grateful to finally have an audience. I listened and nodded and pretended empathy. It occurred to me that Jasper had probably used false empathy to lure those women. Did this make him my victim? Our aims weren't that much different. He wanted to destroy those women; I wanted to destroy him. The difference between us is that he deserved it. None of these thoughts had shown on my face. I'd given him my full attention. At one point, I even held his hand when he cried. Poor Jasper, I had whispered. Poor, poor Jasper.

I went home that night and soaked in the tub till the water turned cold.

AD Jones is asking me to dive into that oil, to begin the process, to start feeling the man who did this.

"I don't have enough data yet," I say. "No emotional component. The act itself is incredible. Audacious. That has meaning to him. It's either a message or it heightens the excitement, or both."

"What kind of message?"

It pops into my head from nowhere, a shallow dive. "I'm perfect. Or the reason for what I'm doing is perfect."

AD Jones frowns. "How's that?"

"It's like. . murder in a locked room. He killed her midair. He was trapped and surrounded by witnesses. I think he killed her early in the flight too, so he could sit there next to the body and feel that excitement. It would have been tantalizing. Would someone notice? If they did, there was no way out. Only someone who was perfect could do this, could have the courage, could master that fear. He felt protected, either by his own ability, or because what he was doing was right."

"What else?"

"He's very smart, very organized, capable of long-range, meticulous planning. He'll be older, but not too old. Late forties."

"Why?"

"He's too confident to be young, too practiced." I sigh. "We'll interview the other passengers, but I can almost guarantee any description we get will be inaccurate."

"You think he used a disguise?"

"Yes, but it will have been subtle. Hair color, tinted contacts, things like that. The greatest difference will be personality. He'll have adopted a characteristic that will stand out in the witnesses' memories, something that caught their eye and drowned out other observations."

"What makes you sure about this?"

"Anything less wouldn't be perfect. Only perfection would do."

JOHNSTON BEGAN TO PEEL LISA'S face down from her skull so he could open her head and get to her brain. I decide this is a good time to do something else. I place a call to Bonnie. It's almost eight-thirty here, which means it's dinnertime in California. She answers the cell phone I'd gotten for her on the first ring.

"Hi, Smoky!"

"Hi, sweetheart. How are you?"

"I'm fine. Elaina made macaroni and cheese."

Elaina Washington is the wife of Alan, a member of my team. She's one of my favorite people, a Latin woman who was born to provide love and support to those in her life. Not in some sugar-sweet, overly sentimental way; Elaina can love you as much by chastising you when you need it as by hugging you. She was the first to come visit me in the hospital after Sands's attack. She held me in her arms and got me to cry, and I'll always love her for that. Elaina watches Bonnie when work situations like this one pop up. She also homeschools my adopted daughter.

"That's great, babe."

"Alan left. Does that mean you're going to be away longer?"

"It looks like it. I'm sorry."

"You need to stop doing that, Momma-Smoky."

Bonnie has been aged well before her time, both by circumstance and her own gifts. Her mother's murder and what came after scarred her inside, gave her a terrible emotional maturity. Her gifts lie in her art-she is a painter-and in the depth of her insight. But "MommaSmoky," the title she bestows on me when she tries to comfort me, or sometimes for no reason at all, never fails to make me smile inside. It's evidence of a younger heart, the voice of a child.

"Doing what, babe?"

"Apologizing for something you can't control anyway. People don't get murdered on a schedule, you catch people who murder, so your life isn't on a schedule. I'm fine with that."

"Thanks, but some Momma-things just don't bow down to logic. I'm still sorry for being away."

I hear the sound of AD Jones's shoes against the tile and turn to see him looking at me. He nods his head toward the observation window.

"I have to go, sweetheart. I'll call you tomorrow, okay?"

"Smoky?"

"Yes?"

"Is Aunt Callie really getting married?"

I grin.

"She really is. Good night, honey."

"Night. I love you."

"I love you back."

DR. JOHNSTON POINTS TO A pan containing Lisa Reid's heart.

"Her heart was punctured. The hole was small, on the right side of her rib cage." He points this out to us. As he said, the hole isn't very big, but the bruise it created is the size of both of my hands put together. There are vertical slits above and below the hole. I'd missed the wound earlier in my shock at finding out Lisa was Dexter.

"That makes sense," AD Jones says. "Lisa had a window seat and her killer was seated on her right."

"What could do that?" I ask.

"Anything long, cylindrical, and sharp. The killer would need strength, determination, and some basic knowledge of anatomy." He makes a fist and pumps it once by way of demonstration. "One clean thrust, through the lung, up into the heart, and it's done."

"She'd have to be drugged for him to do that on a plane," I murmur.

Johnston nods his massive head in agreement. "Yes. Death would be very quick, but it would be very painful too. It would have been to his benefit to anesthetize her in some way."

I consider this. "He would have wanted something he could administer orally," I say. "Nothing that would have required a hypodermic, nothing that would induce seizures. Any theories?"

"GHB, ketamine, or Rohypnol would all work, but they all pose problems. All can bring on vomiting. Ketamine can induce convulsions." He crosses his gi-normous arms. "No, if I were him, I would have gone old school. Chloral hydrate."

"Mickey Finns," AD Jones opines.

"It works best with alcohol, and I smelled some in her stomach contents. It's fast, and he could have given her an overdose amount to induce unconsciousness quickly."

"True," I say. "He wouldn't have been worried about her dying of an overdose. You'll check for all of this on tox?"

"Yes. I'll rush it through. I should have it tomorrow afternoon, along with my findings."

Something else occurs to me. "I wonder how the hell he got whatever he stuck her with onto the plane?"

Dr. Johnston shrugs. "Not my department, sorry."

I give him my cell phone number. "Call me when the findings are ready and I'll send someone to come get them. Make a single copy for yourself and put it in a safe place." I look him in the eye. "This is a federal case for three reasons, Dr. Johnston. One, because it happened while flying the friendly skies. Two, because it involves a congressman and could be a precursor to an attack on Dillon Reid himself. Three, because it could be a hate crime. But the cloak-and-dagger is a courtesy to the Reids, not a cover-up. I want you to know that. My priority is catching whoever did this."

His smile is a little tired. "I appreciate the candor, Agent Barrett, but don't worry. I'm not conspiracy-minded. I've dealt with three other politically connected deaths, including one that involved a powerful man and a male prostitute. I'm familiar with the territory."

It occurs to me that Dr. Johnston is pretty damn competent. I shouldn't be surprised; most of those I've met who deal with the dead take what they do very seriously.

"I appreciate that." I look down at Lisa Reid, lying on what we still call a slab, though it's been made of steel for a very long time. "Anything else probative?"

"Oh yes. Something very, very unusual. I was just getting to that."

He grabs another pan and holds it out. "I found this inserted into her body. He widened the wound on her right side. You noticed the cuts?"

"Yes."

"He was smart; he cut her postmortem, after the blood flow had stopped. Then he stuck this inside her."

I peer into the pan and see a medium-sized, silver cross.

"Where are your gloves?" I ask.

He nods to a box of latex gloves on a nearby counter. I grab a pair and slip them on. I reach into the pan and pick up the cross.

"It's heavy," I say. "Dense. Probably a silver alloy."

The cross is a humble one, simple. It's approximately two inches tall and one inch wide. I turn it over in my hand and squint. There appears to be an engraving on the back, but it's far too small to read with the naked eye.

"Do you have a magnifying glass?"

Johnston finds one and hands it to me. I place it over the cross. I see a symbol, very small, very simple: a skull and crossbones, patterned after the universal sign for poison. It's been engraved into the back of the head of the cross. Along the crosspiece are some numbers.

"Number one forty-three," I say out loud.

"What the fuck does that mean?" AD Jones asks.

"I don't know." I place the cross back in the pan. "Let's make sure we withhold this particular detail, Doctor, if anything does end up getting to the media."

"Of course."

"Anything else?"

He shakes his head. "Not at the moment."

AD Jones glances at his watch, points a finger at me. "Then let's head to the airport. Your team should be arriving shortly and I need to get back to California."

We say our good-byes to Dr. Johnston and head down the hall toward the front of the building. Our shoes click-clack on the linoleum, eerie in the context of our surrounds.

"What's your game plan?" AD Jones asks.

"The basics. Forensics on the plane where Lisa was killed, interviews of the passengers, start working up a profile. From there. ." I pause. "From there we need to get on to identifying other potential targets as quickly as possible."

I don't state the obvious and most worrisome thing: A death's-head and "#143"-there's only one thing a killer would count. Leading, of course, to the next concern: how high will the counting go?

4

IT'S PAST ELEVEN O'CLOCK AT NIGHT, AND IT'S FREAKING cold. I hate the cold.

The wind isn't fierce, but it is steady and it blows across the tarmac in short gusts that have numbed my cheeks. The moon is huge and bloated in a sky devoid of clouds. It has that look to it, the look that says it's the same moon that shone on the cavemen: it was here before me, it'll be here long after I'm gone. It took us about an hour to make our way to this private airport near Washington, DC. It's small and lonely, just a single hangar and a landing strip. My team and I will make our way from here to Dulles International Airport, where the plane Lisa died on awaits. I hug myself as we watch the private jet taxi on the runway. It's a white Learjet and I've been on it many times.

AD Jones seems unmoved by the temperature. He's smoking, a habit I gave up but still miss, particularly when I see someone smoking my old brand, as he does. I had been loyal to my Marlboros and in return they had always been there for me. They gave me comfort, I gave them years off my life. It was an equitable arrangement until it wasn't.

"Listen, Smoky, I need to talk to you about something." He sucks in smoke, holds it, blows out a cloud. I watch and wait and envy. "I want you to keep me in the loop. Daily. This is a different playing field than you're used to. Rathbun is decent enough for a Director, but in the end, he'll cover himself and feed you to the lions if it will help him." His gaze is penetrating. "Don't be fooled. You're expendable to him."

"I can take care of myself, sir."

"I know. Keep your eyes open anyway."

"Aye, aye." I click my heels and give him an exaggerated salute. He's unamused. "This isn't a joke, Smoky. People at the DC level make a career out of hanging each other out to dry. You're a gifted agent, and God knows you're tough enough, but you're inexperienced on that playing field."

"Okay, okay. I understand."

"The area where he can really help you out is with the media. Do exactly what he says-don't answer any of their questions and refer them all to the Director. You've dealt with the media before, I know, but if this leaks it will be huge. The FBI has people that live for that shit, let them handle it."

"Scout's honor."

"Keep a gag on Callie."

"I can control her."

The look he gives me is doubtful. He flicks his cigarette into the night.

"Plane's done taxiing. Let's go."

"GOOD GOD, HONEY-LOVE, IT'S TOO cold here," Callie complains the moment her high-heeled feet hit the tarmac. "Why are we here and not back in a place with civilized weather planning for my upcoming wedding?"

I smile, as always. I'm never immune to Callie. I don't think many people are.

Callie is a tall, skinny, leggy redhead, with model looks that only seem to deepen with age. She just turned forty, and if anything, she's more attractive now than she was five years ago.

Callie is aware of her beauty, and she's not above using it to her advantage, but appearance is unimportant to her in the larger scheme of life; it's her mind she's honed the sharpest. She holds a master's degree in forensics with a minor in criminology and has been hunting killers with me for the last decade-plus.

Callie has a sense of humor that not everyone appreciates or understands. Her use of "honey-love," for example, a favored phrase, is a total affectation. It comes from the South; Callie comes from Connecticut. I imagine she adopted it to poke fun at herself and annoy others, emphasis on the latter. Local legend says that she has a reprimand on file for calling the Director of the FBI, Mr. Rathbun himself, honey-love. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. Callie's humor isn't mean-spirited. It simply says: If you take yourself too seriously, you'll have a hard time around me, so lighten up- honey-love.

Then there is the other side of Callie, a darker part, the side the criminals get. She is ruthless in her search for truth, because truth is everything to her. If I were to commit a criminal act, Callie, who loves me, would hunt me. She might grieve as she did it, but she'd take me down. To do otherwise would be to deny her basic self and that's one thing Callie is not about.

She's set to marry Samuel "Sam" Brady, the head of the LA FBI SWAT. It's a move that's caught everyone by surprise. Callie has been chasing men for years and enjoying them to their fullest for the pleasure they could give her, a kind of female Lothario. Emotional longevity has never been a part of the picture. Callie is intensely private about the serious goings-on inside her, but I know some of her secrets. Like her current addiction to Vicodin, the legacy of a spinal injury she got two years ago that nearly crippled her. Like the fact that she hadn't allowed herself to be close to a man for so long because she got pregnant when she was fifteen and was forced to give up her child. She's since reconciled with her long-lost daughter, and maybe that's a part of this sea change inside her. I don't know. I only have glimpses of her secret self, small treasures she's entrusted me with over the years.

Callie's greatest gifts to me have been her unswerving demand that we enjoy the moment, the now of life, and the invulnerable constancy of her friendship. I can count on her. It was Callie who found me in the aftermath of Joseph Sands, Callie who took my gun away and pulled me to her without a second thought, Callie who held me as I shrieked and screamed and ruined her perfect suit with my blood and tears and vomit.

"Political hoo-hah," I say in response to her questions. "And I don't like the cold either."

"It's not so bad," a low voice rumbles. "Least there's no snow. I hate snow."

Alan Washington is the oldest member of my team and the most seasoned. He didn't go straight into the FBI, but spent ten years working homicide as a member of the LAPD.

Alan is African-American. He's a big man, as in the startling "big"

of a linebacker or a great oak, the kind of man who might make you cross to the other side of the street if you saw him coming your way late at night. His form hides the truth: Alan is a deep thinker with a big heart and a meticulous nature. He can sift through details for days, patient, never getting exasperated, never looking for shortcuts, sticking with it until he's broken a complexity down into its component parts. He's also the most skilled interrogator I know. I've watched him reduce the hardest of the hard to quivering, blubbering messes. The best testaments to the soul of Alan are that he's married to Elaina and that he loves her so obviously, so unashamedly, with a mix of wonder and pride. I was loved that way by Matt; it's nice, and it speaks to the character of the man who does it.

Alan smiles at me and tips a nonexistent hat.

"Thank God for small favors," I reply, smiling in return. The next voice I hear is sour with disapproval.

"Why are we here?"

This question comes from the last member of my team. The tone of it-blunt, unfriendly, impatient-irritates me, as always. James Giron is brilliant, but he is about as unlikeable as a human being can be. We sometimes refer to him as Damien, after the son of Satan from The Omen. He has no social veneer, no interest in softening the blow, no visible regard for the feelings of others. He takes the concept of thoughtlessness to new heights.

James is a book of blank pages. I don't know if he even has a personal life. I've never heard him talk about a song or movie he enjoyed. I don't know what TV programs he watches, if any. I'm not aware of any personal relationships he's had. James doesn't bring his soul to work.

What he does bring is his mind. James is a genius in the fullest sense of the word. He graduated high school at fifteen, got a perfect score on his SATs and finished college with a PhD in criminology by the time he was twenty. He joined the FBI at twenty-one, which had been his goal all along.

James had an older sister, Rosa, who was murdered by a serial killer when James was twelve. He decided what his path would be the day they buried her. The fact of this is the only real evidence I have of James's humanity.

In most ways, James and I grate against each other, two positive poles repelling, a zero attractant. There is one exception: he shares the ability I have, to peer into the minds of those who murder for pleasure.

"Because someone's dead and someone with the power to do so has ordered us to deal with it," I answer him.

He frowns. "This is out of our jurisdiction. It's not our job to be here."

I glance at AD Jones. He's glaring at James with a mix of resignation and mild disbelief.

"Stop whining," Callie tells James, "or you're not invited to my wedding."

He sneers. "Is that supposed to be a threat?"

"I can see how you might not consider it to be one, but"-and at this Callie smiles-"your mother would be very disappointed. We had a wonderful talk on the phone, Damien, and she's looking forward to meeting the people you work with."

James scowls at her. "Don't call me that."

I hide a smile and allow myself some secret satisfaction at Callie's end run around James. I've never met his mother, but I know he visits Rosa's grave with her every year on Rosa's birthday, so in theory they are close.

"You want to brief us here?" Alan asks, cutting through the banter.

"Hold that thought," AD Jones says. He turns to me. "Remember what I said. Keep me in the loop."

"Yes, sir."

One nod and he walks away without another word.

"We have a car waiting over there," I say. "Let's get inside and fire up the heater and then I'll brief you."

It's a big Crown Vic, a little battered but serviceable. Alan takes the driver's position, with me riding shotgun. James and Callie squeeze into the back.

"Heat, please," Callie says, rubbing her arms and giving off an overdramatic shiver.

Alan starts the car and puts the heater on high. The big engine rumbles on idle as the heated air blasts out from the vents like wind from the mouth of a cave.

"How's that?" Alan asks.

"Hmmmm," Callie purrs. "So much better."

Alan gestures to me. "Floor is yours, then."

WHEN I FINISH TALKING, EVERYONE is silent, thinking. James looks out the window in the back. Callie, next to him, taps her front teeth with a red-painted fingernail.

"Pretty theatrical," she says after a moment. "Killing that poor woman mid-flight."

"A little too theatrical," Alan replies.

"Yes," I muse, "but he pulled it off. He killed her on the plane-"

"Her?" Alan snorts.

I frown. "Legally, yes. It says 'female' on her driver's license. What's the problem?"

He reaches his hands up, grips the steering wheel on either side, and squeezes, once. Blows air out of his mouth, a noisy sigh.

"Look," he says, "I don't like transsexuals. I think it's unnatural."

He shrugs. "I can't help it. I dealt with a few tranny murders when I worked in the LAPD, and I did my job and I felt for the families-a person is a person-but it doesn't change the truth. They disgust me on some level. Sometimes it slips out."

I gape at my friend, shocked. Absolutely, one hundred percent poleaxed. Am I really hearing this from Alan? Outside of an interrogation room, Alan is the calmest, fairest, most tolerant person I know. At least I've always thought so.

"My, my, my, where have those clay feet been hiding?" Callie asks, echoing my own thoughts.

"He's a homophobe," James says, the venom in his voice surprising me. "Right? You don't like fags, do you, Alan?"

Alan rotates in his seat so he can look at James. "I'm not a fan of seeing guys kiss, but no, I'm not a homophobe. I don't care who you screw. There's a big difference between that and cutting off your breasts or chopping off your cock." He scowls. "This is my 'thing,'

okay? I'm not saying it's right or that it makes sense, and frankly, I don't want a bunch of crap about it. Elaina's given me a piece of her mind on the subject already, and it just doesn't seem to change. It won't affect how I do my job."

"Tell us the truth," Callie says, her voice solicitous. "Was it a woman you picked up one time? Lots of tongue-kissing and then you reached down and found sticks and berries?"

Alan groans. "Fuck this. I shouldn't have said anything."

"You're right," I say. "You shouldn't have. If you let that kind of comment slip around the family. ."

He nods, chastened. "Yeah. I'm sorry."

"Not homophobic, huh?" James says.

I glance at him, surprised. His face is angry. He's not letting this go.

"I already said I wasn't."

"Bullshit."

Alan looks ready to get angry, but sighs instead.

"Fine. Don't take my word for it. Doesn't make it less true."

James stares at Alan. He's scowling and shaking. I have no idea what's going on here.

"Really? Then tell me. ." He stops, hesitating, breathing deeply, in and out. "Then tell me what you think about this: I'm gay."

Silence fills the car. I can hear the heater blowing and the sounds of breathing.

"Oh boy," Callie says. She mimes eating from a bag of popcorn.

"Go on, don't stop now, honey-love."

For myself, I'm speechless.

James, gay?

It's not the revelation itself that shocks me. It's the fact that he's revealing anything at all. It's just too personal. It would be as disconcerting if James told me what his favorite flavor of ice cream was. I am, on some level, surprised at how well he's managed to hide it. We've dealt with gay victims before. He's never let the slightest hint or opinion slip.

Of course, neither had Alan.

"Why are you telling us this now?" Alan asks.

"I don't know!" James snarls. "Stop stalling. Answer the fucking question."

Alan gives James a long once-over. The slightest smile tugs at his lips. "Then I'd say. . I still don't like you."

Callie snorts and begins to giggle. She sounds ridiculous. Some of the anger drains away from James's face. He scrutinizes Alan, looking for deception.

"And that's all you'd have to say?"

"That's it."

Something happens that rocks me. Alan reaches his arm out over the seat and places a hand on James's shoulder. It's a gentle gesture, full of reassurance. What shocks me though is James's reaction. No twitch or flinch or turning away. I see a hint of something else, a kind of. . what?

Relief, I realize, amazed. It's relief. What Alan thinks matters to him.

"Really, son," Alan says again, his voice as gentle as the gesture. The moment hangs. James shrugs off the hand. "Fine," he replies. He glares at Callie and me. "I don't want to hear anything more about it, okay?"

I hold my fingers up in the "scout's honor" salute. Callie nods, but slides herself across the seat, putting as much space between her and James as possible.

"What the hell are you doing?" he asks, suspicious.

"Don't worry, honey-love," she says, "I have no problem with you being gay, really I don't. But I'm getting married soon, and, well-they say those gay cooties can be catching. Better safe than sorry."

I manage to keep the smile off my face. James gives her a speculative look before sighing and saying: "You're an idiot."

Again, there's a certain relief there. Callie is treating him the same as ever and this annoyance is comforting to James in the wake of his revelation.

What about me? I wonder. What did he expect from me?

I glance his way, but James is staring out the window again. He seems relaxed.

I realize he wasn't worried about how I'd react. James knew I'd accept him. This makes me feel good.

"Now that we've gotten the Jerry Springer moment out of the way," Callie says, "can we get back to the business at hand? Let's not forget our priority: planning my wedding."

"What does the business at hand have to do with that?" I ask, bemused.

Callie rolls her eyes at me. "Well, it looks like we have to catch a killer first. So, chop-chop."

I grin at her. She's not actually worried about her wedding. This is Callie's way; she lives to lift the somber, to light the dark.

"Let's head to Dulles," I say. "They're holding the plane for us. We can talk on the way."

Alan gets the car moving and I reflect that this is the thing about life that's so different from death. Life is in motion. It's always happen- ing, always going somewhere, forcing its way through the cracks, moment-opportune or not. Alan's unexpected ugliness regarding transsexuals, James's sudden reveal, good or bad, both mean alive, and the often uncomfortableness of living is always preferable to the always tidy peacefulness of dead.

5

IT TOOK US ABOUT FORTY-FIVE MINUTES TO NAVIGATE OUR way to the airport. A local cop who'd been waiting got our car hurried through a security checkpoint and pointed us in the right direction. It's after midnight now, but like all international airports, Dulles lives off the clock. As Alan drives, I can see planes taking off, jumping from a sea of light into the night sky.

The plane Lisa was killed on had been moved to a maintenance hangar. The hangar is large, made of metal and concrete, which means it's cold. The temperature is continuing to drop and I realize I'm really not dressed for this weather.

Lights are on in the hangar, big and bright. The late hour and the stark utility of the place combine with the cold to create a feeling of solitude.

"Guess we're supposed to just drive right in," Alan mutters, and does so.

"Who's that?" Callie asks as we pull up.

We're being met by a blonde woman I've never seen before. She's about my age, and she's wearing a black jacket, black slacks, and a white shirt. Simple, but it fits her too well to be off-the-rack. She's neither tall nor short, about five-five, pretty without being beautiful. Her face, which is a study in blankness, frames intelligent blue eyes.

"Smells like an exec to me," Alan mutters.

She walks right up to me as I get out of the car. "Agent Barrett?"

"Yes? And you are?"

"Rachael Hinson. I work for the Director."

"Okay."

"You have the plane for up to twenty-four hours," she says, skipping any preamble. "No one will be allowed in this hangar until then. You won't be bothered." She points to a rolling cart near us. "Forensic field kits are there, including cameras, evidence bags, and the file created by the police before we took over. I'll be supervising."

I thought this might be coming.

"No," I say, keeping my voice mild.

Hinson turns to me with a frown. "I'm sorry?"

"I said no, Agent Hinson. This is my investigation. My team and I will be the only ones on that plane."

She steps close to me, very close, using her height advantage to try and intimidate me. It's a smart move, but an old move, and I'm unfazed.

"I'm afraid I'll have to insist," she says, glaring down at me with those blue eyes.

She's fairly scary looking, I'll give her that.

"Call the Director," I say.

"Why?"

"Because he's the one who can resolve this. This isn't a power play, Hinson. Okay, maybe it is a little. But the truth is, you'll just be in the way, and your motives for being there would be a distraction. We don't need someone looking over our shoulders right now."

She doesn't so much step back as shift her weight onto her right leg. I can see her considering what I'm saying, weighing whatever directive she'd been given regarding keeping an eye on us against the wisdom of bugging the Director. She's not worried, she's thinking it through. Hinson is used to exercising her own discretion.

"Look," I say, to help her along, "You know I'm not here just because the Director ordered me to be."

"Functionally, you are."

"Functionally, but not actually. I'm here because the congressman's wife asked for me."

The smallest of smiles ghosts her lips, a slight softening of that all-business blankness. It's a smile of respect, an appreciation of my not-so-subtle name-dropping.

"Fine, Agent Barrett," she says, stepping back now. She reaches into her inside jacket pocket, giving me a glimpse of a weapon held by an under-the-armpit shoulder holster. She produces a simple white business card and gives it to me. The card says: Hinson in black type, followed by a phone number and e-mail address. Nothing else. I glance at her. "We're into brevity, I see."

She shrugs. "I can count on two hands the number of times I've handed that card out. Please call if you need anything. You can reach me twenty-four seven."

She turns and walks off without another word, pumps clacking against the cold gray concrete of the hangar.

Round one to me, but I remember AD Jones's warning and I'm sure now he was right to give it.

"Hm," Alan rumbles, "how do you describe someone like that?

Scary? Tough? Both?"

"Describe her as she lives to be," I murmur.

"Which is?"

"Useful. Useful is her higher power. Now let's check out our crime scene."

"I'VE NEVER BEEN ON A totally empty plane before," Callie says. "It's odd."

"Too quiet," Alan observes.

They're right. Under normal circumstances, planes have their own noise, a kind of murmuring crowd sound. This one is a tomb.

"What is this, a seven twenty-seven?" Alan asks.

"This is a seven thirty-seven eight hundred," James replies.

"Medium-sized, narrow body, seats one hundred sixty-two passengers in a two-class layout-which is what this plane has. It's one hundred twenty-nine feet long with a wingspan of a hundred twelve feet. It weighs ninety-one thousand pounds empty, can travel over three thousand nautical miles fully loaded, and has a cruising speed of roughly mach point seven."

Alan rolls his eyes. "Thanks, Encyclopedia Brown."

"Where was she seated?" I ask.

Alan consults the file. "Twenty F. Window seat."

I frown. "One question to ask: How did he ensure he had a seat next to her? That requires prior knowledge of her seating arrangements. We need to find out how she booked her flight."

"There are too many variables here," James says. I glance at him. "Meaning?"

"Look, the way he killed her required that she have a window seat."

He pulls the file from Alan's hands and removes a photograph. "He left her leaning up against the window, with a blanket pulled over her, like she was asleep. He wouldn't have been able to do that if she was sitting in the middle seat, much less an aisle."

"So?"

"My point is, there's various ways he could have found out what her seating assignment was. He could have bribed someone, or hacked into the system. From there, he could have requested the seat next to hers, or talked the person who was originally supposed to sit there into giving it up to him, any of a number of things. But post nine eleven, there's virtually no way he could have guaranteed she'd have gotten a window seat. No way to plan or arrange that."

I understand now what James is saying. "Killing her on the plane wasn't a given."

He nods. "Right."

It's a tiny thing, but, as always, it is a piece of the overall puzzle, a part of seeing the man who did this.

He started out with the decision to kill Lisa Reid, not the decision to kill her on a plane. He stalked her, watched her, gathered information about her life. He found out she was going on a trip, found out somehow that she had gotten a window seat, and only then planned and arranged killing her here. If events hadn't fallen into place the way he needed them to, he would have killed her somewhere else.

"Location interested him," I murmur, "but it was an aside, a novelty, a 'see what I can do.' She was the most important factor, not the location. Lisa was the key."

"Wait," Callie says. "There's another possibility, yes?"

"Which is?"

"That it was a random killing. Perhaps the location was the key factor for him. He got himself a middle seat and planned to kill whoever was unlucky enough to be sitting next to him, and that just happened to be Lisa. Maybe he has a problem with this airline, or air travel in general. I've wanted to kill off an obnoxious fellow passenger myself once or twice."

"Possible and definitely disturbing," I allow, "but unlikely. The fact that it was Lisa Reid-transgendered person and offspring of a congressional family?" I shake my head. "That's not a coincidence. He likes planning and control. Victim choice would be an integral part of that. I could be wrong, but. . this doesn't feel random to me."

Callie considers this, nods in agreement. "Point taken."

We move down the single aisle. The 737–800 has the classic seating arrangement, rows of three seats on either side. The air is cool but not cold yet. Airplanes hold heat well. We arrive at 20F.

"How far did their Crime Scene Unit get, Callie?" I ask. She flips through the file. "Full photographs, with good coverage both before and after removal of the body. They collected her luggage, which is down there in the hangar. That's about it."

"Someone jumped on this one fast," Alan observes. I take a moment and look. Nothing fancy, nothing psychic. This is it, right here, the place where one human being murdered another. A life ended in that seat by the window. If you believe in the soul, and I do, this is the location where the essence of the who of Lisa Reid disappeared forever. I'm struck, as always, by how inadequate the location of death is when compared to the truth of death itself. I saw a pretty young woman once, staked out in the dirt. She was naked. She'd been strangled. Her tongue lolled from her swollen, beaten mouth. Her open eyes stared at the sky. She still had some of her beauty, but it was fading fast, being eaten around the edges by the coming entropy. Dead as she was, she still put the dirt to shame. There was no forest, no ground, and no sky, there was only her. No canvas exists that can really add to an ended life; death frames itself.

"I see blood on her seat cushion," Callie observes, jarring me from my thoughts. "Easiest thing to do will be to just take the whole cushion. Take hers, take his, then search for prints. That's a good avenue. It would have stood out if he'd worn gloves. Then vacuum everything for trace. That's pretty much going to be it."

"I think he would have taken something," James notes. I turn to him. "What?"

"A trophy. He left something in her, the cross. He's into symbols. He needed to take something."

Not all serial killers take trophies, but I agree with James. It feels right.

"Could have been anything," Alan says. "Jewelry, something from her purse, a piece of her hair." He shrugs. "Anything."

"We'll go through her belongings, see if something obvious is missing," I say.

"It's only getting colder, so what's the game plan, honey-love?"

Callie's right. I've started to get the smell of him but there's nothing else here that's going to help me.

"You and James are going to stay here and finish processing the scene. Call me when you're done. Alan, I want you to drop me off at Lisa's place, and then I want you to interview the witnesses. Flight attendants, passengers, anyone and everyone. Follow up on how he bought his ticket as well. Did he use cash? A credit card? If he used a credit card, it was probably a false identity. How'd he make that happen?"

"Got it."

Callie nods her assent.

I take a final look at the window Lisa had died next to, turn, and walk away from it forever. It'll fade eventually, I know. Someday I'll be sitting at a window seat on an airplane and I won't even think of Lisa Reid.

Someday.

6

ALAN AND I ARE ON THE FREEWAY HEADING BACK TO ALEXandria. We don't have much company on the road; just a few other night-drivers who, like us, probably wish they were in bed. Alan is silent as he drives. We have the heaters blowing full tilt to deal with the cold. Darkness has really settled in, darkness and silence and still.

"What is it about the cold that makes things seem more quiet?" I wonder out loud.

Alan glances over at me and smiles. "Things are more quiet. You're used to Los Angeles. Doesn't get cold enough there to drive people and animals inside, usually. It does here."

He's right. I've experienced this before. Between the ages of six and ten, before my mom died of cancer, we used to take family driving trips. Mom and Dad would synchronize their vacation time and we'd spend two weeks trekking halfway across the U.S. and back. I remember the hard parts of these trips; the unending sound of the wheels on the road and the world rushing by, the intense, almost painful boredom. I also remember playing car games with my mom. I-spy, counting "pididdles" (cars with only one headlight working). Raucous, off-tune car songs. Most of all, I remember the destinations. In a four-year period, I saw great parts of Rocky Mountain National Park, Yellowstone, Mount Rushmore. We crossed the Mississippi in a few places, ate gumbo in New Orleans. We rarely stayed in hotels, preferring to camp instead. One year, Dad got especially ambitious and drove us all the way to upstate New York in the fall. He wanted us to see the Catskill Mountains, where Rip Van Winkle was supposed to have snoozed. It was an unbearably long trip and we were worn out and cranky by the time we arrived. We pulled into the campground and I got out of that car as fast as I could.

The trees were incredible, either evergreen or with leaves on the turn, short and tall, young and old. It was cold, cold like it is here, and I remember the bite of it on my cheeks, my breath in the air.

"Not only do I have to pee in the woods," my mother had groused,

"but I have to get goose bumps on my ass while I do it."

"Isn't it beautiful, though?" my dad had said, a little bit of awe in his voice, oblivious to her anger.

That was one of the things I loved about my dad. He was eternally young when it came to viewing the world. My mom was more careful. Like me, she had a cynical edge. Mom kept our feet on the ground, which was important, but Dad kept our heads in the clouds, which had its own value.

I remember her turning to look at him, ready with some smart quip that died on her lips when she saw the actual joy on his face. She'd pushed her grumbling away and turned to look as well, finally seeing what he was seeing, getting infected with his wonder, stumbling into his dream.

"It is," she'd marveled. "It really is."

"Can I explore?" I'd asked.

"Sure, honey," Dad had replied. "But not too far. Stay close."

"Okay, Daddy," I'd agreed and had bounded off, heading into the trees.

I'd kept my word and stayed close. I didn't need to go far; fifty steps and I had found myself alone, more alone than I'd ever been. I'd stopped to take this in, not so much afraid as interested. I'd arrived in a small clearing, surrounded by a number of tall trees with dying leaves that hadn't given up the ghost just yet. I'd spread my arms and tilted my head all the way back and closed my eyes and listened to the stillness and the silence.

Years later I'd find the body of a young woman in the woods of Angeles Crest and remember that stillness and silence and wonder what it was like to be killed in the middle of nowhere, to have that solitude as a cathedral for your screams.

I was ten years old on that trip to New York, and it was the last trip we took before my mom got sick. When I think of my parents, I always think of them then, at that age, just thirty and thirty-one, younger than I am now. When I think of being young, I remember those trips we took, I-spy and pididdle and are-we-there-yet and my mother's complaints. I remember my father's wonder, my mother's love for him, and I remember the leaves and the trees and the time when stillness held beauty instead of the memories of death.

LISA'S CONDO IS NEW CONSTRUCTION, located near the center of Alexandria. The buildings are nice, but don't really fit their surrounds.

"Kind of like California in Virginia," Alan observes, putting voice to my thoughts.

The condo is brown wood and stucco on the outside, with its own small driveway. No one has entered yet; there's no yellow crime scene tape on the door. We pull in, exit, and walk up to the front door. Alan will clear the condo with me before leaving to go chase up on witnesses. We'd swung by the morgue so I could grab Lisa's keys. I am fiddling with them in the bad light from the streetlamps to find the one we need.

"Probably that one," Alan notes, indicating a gold-colored key. I fit the key into the deadbolt lock and it turns with a click. I put the key ring into my jacket pocket and we both pull our weapons.

"Ladies first," Alan says.

THE CONDO HAS TWO BEDROOMS, one of which doubles as a home office. We clear these as well as the guest half-bath and the master bathroom before holstering our guns.

"Nice place," Alan observes.

"Yeah."

It's decorated in earth tones, muted without being bland. Catches of color appear throughout, from maroon throw pillows on the couch to white cotton curtains with blue flower trim along the edges. It's clean and odorless, no smell of pets or dirty clothes or food left out. She didn't smoke. The wooden coffee table facing the couch is covered in a happy disarray of magazines and books. Lisa was tidy but not fastidious.

"Okay if I go?" he asks.

I glance at my watch. It's now 5:00 A.M.

"Sure. Before you get on to chasing down witnesses or following the money, get a search going for murders with a similar signature."

"The cross, you mean?"

"The cross, or just the symbols he left on the cross. I don't think we're going to find any really old crimes, but we might find some new ones."

He frowns. "You think he's been operating for a while and only just decided to come out into the open?"

"I do."

"Bad idea on his part."

"Let's hope so."

ALONE NOW. I LEAVE THE lights off. The dawn has arrived and I want to see the living room as Lisa would have seen it. I sit down on the couch, brown microfiber, a couch like a thousand others, except that this one had been hers. She'd sat here, time after time. I'm able to pick out her favored spot, a cushion that's just a little bit more worn than the others.

A medium-sized flat-screen TV faces the couch, placed a comfortable distance away. I imagine her sitting here, lights out, shadows dancing on her face. I see a bottle of nail polish on the coffee table and smile. Watching TV while painting her nails. I find a book on a side table, a silly romance novel. Guilty pleasures, maybe reading while her toenails dried.

This place was a sanctum, a refuge, and I'm going to root through it with impunity. I reflect that in this way, I'm very like the killers I hunt. I will move through this home and open her drawers, read her e-mail, peer into her medicine cabinet. Cross all boundaries of privacy until there's nothing left to find.

Once upon a time, Lisa could turn the lock and keep the world outside from finding out her secrets, but not anymore. The killers I hunt are empowered by this concept.

My motives are purer, obviously, but I learned a long time ago that I won't survive doing what I do if I am dishonest with myself, and the truth is, I feel just a little hint of that power when I go through a victim's home, the slightest thrill of the voyeur. I can look where I want, touch what I want, open any door I want. It's heady and I can understand, just a little, why it has such a draw for psychopaths. I get up and move into the kitchen. It's small but functional and very clean. Brown granite countertops. Stainless steel refrigerator with matching over-the-counter microwave, stove, and dishwasher. I open a few cabinets and peer inside. White china, neatly stacked. The refrigerator is nearly bare. I see a note/shopping list posted on the refrigerator door. It says, Need bottled water, napkins, mac and cheese. Never going to happen now, I think.

The kitchen drawers reveal nothing. Silverware, a phone book, some pens and Post-its. I'm not really surprised. Lisa was someone used to having to hide in public. She wouldn't keep her secrets out here where a guest could find them by accident.

I move to the bedroom. It's medium-sized, with a lush beige carpet. The bed dominates the room, a California king. The earth tones continue here. Lisa had found her own sweet spot in terms of decor; feminine without being girly.

I move to the common repository of secrets for women: the nightstand. I open the top drawer and am not disappointed. There's a plastic bag of marijuana with some rolling papers. I also see some baby oil and a magazine filled with photographs of well-muscled naked men. I glance around, note the CD player.

I can imagine Lisa, putting on a CD, lighting up a joint and inhaling while she flipped through the pages of the magazine to find the right visual spark. Finding it, lying back, grabbing the baby oil. . And that's where we part ways, Lisa.

My fingers, when they travel down there, arrive at a different tactile experience. I've never had a penis, never wanted one, but I've held them in my hands. I know what they feel like, smell like, taste like, but I don't know what it's like to hold one and feel it being touched at the same time.

Did that bother you? You were attracted to men, you longed to be a woman. When your hand found a penis, was it alien? Did you transform it in your fantasies to something else?

I strain to arrive there, to feel it as she would have felt it, but the experience eludes me.

I close the drawer and open the one below it, find only some paperbacks.

I move to her dresser and rummage through the drawers. I could be looking through my own. There are no male items here at all. Bras, panties, some T-shirts and jeans. The closet reveals the same, a mix of dresses, slacks, and a ton of shoes. She had good taste, just to the left of classy, a muted flair. Hinting at mischief without giving away the store.

I leave the room and enter the bathroom next to it. Again, I'm struck by the fact: this is a woman's place. Makeup, loofah, lavenderscented soap. Bath beads, pink razors, a hand cream dispenser. Even the toilet seat is down. Did she sit to pee, or stand?

The medicine cabinet belongs to a healthy person. I see aspirin, bandages, the basics. No antidepressants or prescription painkillers. In fact, no medication of any kind, which puzzles me until I work it out. She would have taken her medication with her on her trip to Texas.

The area under the sink provides another contrast. No tampons there in that easy-to-reach-while-sitting-on-the-toilet position. Just a hand cloth and some tile cleaner.

There's a digital scale on the floor, and I step onto it out of habit, still trying to be Lisa. I ignore its lies, as I imagine she would have. A last pause and look around and I leave the bathroom to go check out her home office.

The office is decorated in the same earth tones as the rest of the condo. There's a desk placed under the window. She'd have been able to look outside when she felt like it, but her flat-screen computer monitor would have been protected from the sun's glare. The desk itself is made of dark wood, neither substantial nor rickety, something in between. Lisa liked wood, I think. I've seen very little metal in the furniture here.

There's a file cabinet next to the desk. A six-foot high bookshelf leans up against an opposing wall, more dark wood. I glance at the titles on the book spines. They're almost all travel guides with a gay/

lesbian emphasis. Gay Travel in Italy, Madrid-Simply Fabulous, stuff like that.

A check of the file cabinet reveals nothing of immediate interest. We'll have to go through it all, but that's not why I'm here right now. I'm looking for something, anything, that jumps out, that could help put us on the right path.

I examine the desktop. It's clean, just a slate cup-coaster and a pen. I close my eyes, try to imagine her morning routine. I slip off my shoes, because that's how she'd have walked around in here, that's why she had these plush carpets.

I imagine her waking up, walking to the coffeepot, pouring a hot cup of coffee and heading over to sit, bleary-eyed, in front of the computer. .

No, that's wrong.

There had been a crucial difference between Lisa and me. When I wake up in the morning, my hair might be a mess, I may have bags under my eyes, I might even think I need to wax my upper lip, but I never have to worry about someone coming to the door unannounced and finding out I'm not a woman. Lisa would have had that worry, a constant concern. I close my eyes, and retrace my mental steps.

I imagine her waking up. First stop would have been the bathroom. Shower, shave her legs if needed, brush her teeth. Do her hair. Do her makeup-nothing fancy, just making sure that it is a woman's face looking back at her. We're all slaves to the mirror in some fashion, but it would have had a whole new dimension for Lisa. Clothes could have remained casual, a T-shirt and sweatpants were fine, but she would have done her face before getting her coffee. She would have woken up and prepared for the possibility of being seen by the world.

Now the rest of it feels true; cup of coffee, walking into this office in her bare feet.

I sit down in the chair and start up her computer. Her wallpaper is a striking photograph of the pyramids of Egypt silhouetted against a cloudless blue sky.

I open her browser and look through the history to see what sites she visited. It's a mix of business and shopping. I find her own website, Rainbow Travels. There's a photograph on the first page. Lisa, smiling, beautiful. I'd never know, from this picture, that she hadn't started her life as a woman.

Pictures. .

I stand up, walk out of the office, and go back through the living room, the bedroom. I was right-there are no photographs on her walls. No pictures of her family, of Rosario or Dillon, or even of herself. There's a Picasso print and an Ansel Adams black and white, but that's it.

I wonder about this. Why no photographs? Had the idea of seeing her parents' faces every day been painful to her? Or was it simply a continuation of her protecting them from her life, of keeping visitors from making the connection?

I walk back into the office and continue going through her computer. I check out her e-mail. Lots of business e-mail, e-mail relating to online purchases, but again, the oddity-nothing personal. It's the cyberspace version of no family photos.

I'm starting to get an idea here that belies Rosario's vision of Lisa's contentment. The condo was nice, Lisa ran her own business, she had her flat screen and her weed and baby oil and that was all great, but I think this was a place of solitude, of daily routine and loneliness. I don't see any e-mail to or from friends, any visits to dating sites, no evidence of any outreach at all.

I sigh and lean back in the chair. I feel dissatisfied. Where is Lisa in this place? Where's her soul?

My foot kicks against something underneath the desk. Frowning, I move the chair back, crouch forward, and pick it up. When I see what it is, my heartbeat speeds up a little.

It's a brown leather book, embossed with the gold letters Journal on the front.

"Now we're talking," I murmur.

The first entry is dated about a week ago. Lisa has nice handwriting, a looping, legible script. I read. I'm not sure why I keep these journals. Maybe to record my own loneliness. I don't know.

It helps, I guess, just to sit here every now and then and write the words: I'm lonely, I'm lonely, I'm so damn lonely. I was reading Corinthians yesterday in the Bible. I read it and started weeping. I cried and cried and cried. I couldn't help it. Here's what it said:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always pro- tects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

I read that and I felt for a moment like I couldn't breathe. Like I hurt so hard I'd fly apart.

It was the question, you see, that it brought to my mind: Will I ever have someone to say those words to? Will I? Will anyone ever feel that way about me?

Is there a man out there who's going to kiss me and find out what I am and keep kissing me anyway and forever? And if there is, will I rec- ognize him when he appears?

I know, I know, I'm on a journey, and it's a marathon, not a sprint. But sometimes, I doubt. I doubt myself, I doubt my decisions. Some- times, I'm ashamed to say, I even doubt God. How could I doubt God? God is the only one who's always been there for me.

I'm sorry, God.

Sometimes I just get so damn lonely.

I finish this passage and clear my throat. I move to the next, written two days after the first one. Nana's dead. No surprise, but still, it hurts. Nana was a racist, Nana wouldn't have accepted me the way I am now, but I loved her anyway, I just can't help it. After all, Nana always kept my secret. THE secret. She kept on loving me even after that terrible thing I did, the most shameful act I ever committed, when I frown. It ends there. I run a finger along the inside and realize that pages of the journal have been removed, ripped out. I flip through the later pages.

Then I see it.

And I freeze.

My hands tremble a little bit as I open the journal wider to look, to make sure I'm seeing what I'm seeing.

At the top of one page, a hand-drawn symbol.

A skull and crossbones.

Below that, a single line:

What do I collect? That's the question, and that's the key. Answer it soon, or more will die.

I drop the journal onto the desktop. My heart is racing. Him. He'd been here. The man on the plane.

The man who killed Lisa.

Alan phrases it as a statement, and not a happy one.

"And he's set a clock. Catch me or I kill again."

The moment I know, for certain, that a killer is serial, everything stops. It's a moment of total silence, an indrawn breath. The earth stops rotating and a low hum fills my head and thrums through my veins.

It's a terrible pause, a necessary minute where I accept the burden of my profession: until I catch him (or her or them), the killing rolls on. Anyone who dies now is my responsibility.

It's one thing to know that they don't stop until we catch them. It's another thing entirely for them to say outright that they're already homing in on the next victim. A whole different level of pressure.

"Fuck." He sighs. "I sure get tired of these guys. Don't they know they'll never be original?"

"It's always new to them."

"Yeah. What do you want to do?"

I'd called Alan first, without really giving it too much thought. I'd needed to talk to someone, to tell them what I'd found. The shock of adrenaline is fading now.

"What are you working on?" I ask.

"He used a credit card to buy his plane ticket. It's a valid card, turns out it was issued a few years ago. I got an address and I'm headed over there now."

My heart sinks.

"What was the name on the card?"

"Richard Ambrose."

"The real Ambrose, whoever he was, is dead, Alan."

"Yeah."

If our perp had manufactured this identity from whole cloth, the credit card would have been issued recently.

"He probably found a guy that came close to his own physical description," I muse. "That will help, at least."

"You want me to continue with what I'm doing, or come to you?"

"Get over to Ambrose's place. I'm fine here. It was just a shock."

"Ned and I will take a look and I'll call you."

When Alan was being trained for homicide, his mentor told him that a notepad was a detective's best friend and that a friend should have a name. Alan gave his pad the name Ned. It's stuck to this day. I've seen many incarnations of Ned pulled from an inside jacket pocket. Ned's been a faithful friend.

"Okay."

"You sure you're fine?"

"I'm sure. Keep doing what you're doing."

"MY, MY, MY," CALLIE MUSES after I fill her in. "Our very own crazy Hansel, leaving us a trail of bloody bread crumbs."

And James had been right, I think. He is taking something from his victims. He told us he is.

"How is it going there?" I ask.

"We finished vacuuming for trace. I won't know how helpful that is until I get it back to a lab. I haven't found any prints, but I did find some smudged areas on the arm rest where prints should have been."

"He probably wiped them down."

"Not a stupid Hansel, but then, we expected as much."

"I bet it means he's in the system."

"Why?"

"He's leaving us clues, Callie. He wants us to know he's there and that we should chase him. Why bother wiping his prints? I think it's because he knows they would lead us right to him."

"Hm. If so, it's not immediately probative, but helpful. It means he either has a criminal record, is a government employee, or has been in the military or law enforcement."

"It's something. What else?"

"Nothing, yet. We're about to remove the seat cushions. I still need to print the overhead luggage compartment and then we're done."

"I want you to come over here next. We need to process this condo."

An overdramatized, long-suffering sigh. "No rest for the brideto-be, I see."

I chuckle. "Relax. Marilyn is still working on the wedding logistics, right?"

Marilyn is Callie's daughter.

"It's not Marilyn I'm worried about. It's her helper."

I frown. "Who?"

"Kirby."

I raise an eyebrow. "Beach bunny Kirby?"

"Is there any other?"

Kirby Mitchell is an eccentric bodyguard I'd hired a few years back to help protect a potential victim. She's in her early thirties, about five-seven, blonde, with all the plucky personality and chipper talk you'd expect from a California stereotype. The truth of Kirby is something a little different, however. Kirby is ex-CIA "or something like that" as she likes to say. The rumors are that she spent many years down in Central and South America as an assassin for the U.S. government. I have zero doubt about this. Kirby, for all her thousandkilowatt smiles and "gee-whiz" exclamations, is as deadly as they come.

She's also loyal and funny and has managed to insinuate herself into the lives of the team.

"Why'd you pick Kirby?"

"She's got wonderful taste for a killer, Smoky. Exquisite, actually."

"I see."

"But she needs supervision, you know?"

"Oh yeah, I know."

Kirby is unapologetic about satisfying her impulses, and her moral compass needs a little nudge sometimes.

Callie sighs. "Oh well, I'm sure it'll be fine. I told her not to hurt anyone too much if they tried to overcharge me."

" 'Too much'?" I query.

I can almost hear Callie's smile. "What's the use of having an assassin help with your wedding planning if you can't use her to scare the vendors a little?"

I PLACE A CALL TO Rosario Reid and fill her in on what I found. She's silent for a moment.

"He-he was there? The man who killed my Lisa?"

"Yes."

More silence. I know what she's feeling. Grief, rage, violation. An impotent desire to destroy the man who did this, who not only took her child from her, but walked through Lisa's condo, Lisa's life, with impunity.

"Rosario, I have to ask-do you have any idea what Lisa was talking about in her journal? The big secret she mentions?"

"I haven't the slightest, I really don't."

Is that true? Or are you lying to me?

I let it go, for now.

She sighs. "What are you going to do now?"

"When my team is done with the plane, they'll be coming over here. They'll be processing the condo from top to bottom."

"I see." Yet more silence. "Thank you for keeping me up-to-date, Smoky. Please call me if you need anything."

She hangs up, and I realize that she hadn't asked me what else Lisa had written in her journal.

Perhaps you're capable of dishonesty after all, Rosario. Maybe you know you'll find that Lisa wasn't as happy as you told yourself she was.

I can't blame her for this. I want to remember my Alexa as perfect too.

My phone rings. Alan.

"Not only is Richard Ambrose dead," he begins without preamble,

"his body is still here."

I curse to myself. This is getting out of hand.

"Give me the address," I say. "I'll find a cab and meet you there."

8

IT'S NOW NEARING TEN IN THE MORNING, AND I'M STARTing to feel like someone who has missed a night's sleep. My eyes are gritty, my mouth tastes bad, and I have aches I'm not usually aware of.

I concentrate on the weather and the sky to shake myself awake. The cold has cleared the air and the sky is incredibly blue. When I step out of the cab the wind bites into me, not unpleasant. The sun burns cold, nothing more than a source of light.

Richard Ambrose lived in a medium-sized older home. It's built with the sloping roof houses have in places that get snow. The exterior is mostly gray stone, lightened in places by blue and white trim. It sits on a large yard that's covered with the leaves of fall. It's a quiet neighborhood, very charming. I have visions of hot apple cider on Halloween, kids raking those leaves into a pile so they could jump into them. I'm not one of those Californians who think California is superior, or the only place to be. I can understand the draw of a place like this, the character of it. I could even consider living here, if it weren't for the snow. I don't do snow.

I pay the cabbie and send him on his way. I crunch through the leaves until I reach the concrete porch, noting the neighbor on the left peeking through a curtain. The front door is cracked. I open it and am assaulted by the sweet and sour smell of death.

"Jesus," I mutter. I swallow hard, forcing down something wet and gooey that's trying to climb up my throat.

I force myself to enter, closing the door behind me. The inside of the home is warm-warmer than it should be, like the heat has been cranked up.

Is this a little present you decided to give us? Turn the house into a sweat lodge so that the body would get nice and stinky?

I breathe in deeply through my nostrils, fighting the urge to gag as I do. I don't have a mask to put on or any menthol to rub under my nose. This is another trick; draw the scent in deep and overwhelm the olfactory receptors. Nothing really works one hundred percent, other than a gas mask. The smell of death is too profound. The inside of Ambrose's house matches the outside, rich in its oldness. I see dark hardwood floors everywhere, and although the wood shines, it's scuffed and worn in a way that makes me think it's original. The walls are actually plaster and the light fixtures are old enough to be authentic as opposed to tacky.

"Alan?" I call out.

"Upstairs," he answers.

The stairs to the second floor face the front door. They're narrow, walled on each side. I walk up, clacking and squeaking all the way, more of that old wood. The smell of rotting flesh keeps getting stronger.

I reach the top landing and find myself facing a wall. A hallway stretches to the right and the left.

"Where are you?" I ask.

"Master bedroom," he calls out, his voice coming from the left. I turn left and listen to the wood protest being walked on. It sounds like a cranky old man, or maybe a mother laying on a guilt trip. I pass a print on the wall, a Picasso sketch, a study of Don Quixote on his horse.

I reach the master bedroom and turn in.

"Wow," I say, grimacing.

Alan is standing at the foot of the bed, staring down at something that used to be a living person.

Ambrose was laid on his back, his arms arranged next to him. He's past the point of being bloated. His skin has a creamy consistency in some places, is black in others, and body fluids have run over the mattress on both sides to drip onto the floor. The smell in here is overwhelming. I struggle to keep my mouth from filling with saliva. Alan seems unaffected.

"State of decay, he's been dead between ten and twenty days," Alan notes.

I nod. "Alone too. No insect activity to speak of means this house has been locked up tight. Any obvious cause of death?"

Alan shakes his head. "I don't see any bullet holes, and there's been too much slippage and decomp to tell if he was strangled or had his throat cut."

"This was purely functional," I murmur. "There's no joy here. The killer needed his identity, that's all."

"Speaking of that, check this out."

Alan hands me a photograph in an eight-by-ten frame. I see a good-looking man in his mid-forties with dark hair and an easy smile. Ambrose was not movie-star handsome, but I doubt he had many problems attracting women. Most interesting, however, is the fact that he sports a full moustache and beard. I hand the photo back to Alan.

"He chose Ambrose because they're roughly the same age, height, and appearance," I say. "He knew he'd be on a plane, in an enclosed environment. He couldn't afford to get too clever or complex with his disguise. I'm betting he went clean shaven to the airport and used Ambrose's driver's license. He'd tell security personnel that he'd just shaved the moustache and beard." I shrug. "If he was confident and charming enough, and the basic physical similarities were there, he could pull it off."

"I don't know. Seems risky. What if he got a really alert attendant, someone that did a double take?"

"He killed on a plane, mid-flight. I don't think risk is an issue for him."

"Good point."

"Besides, the truth is, with adequate social engineering, it's just not that hard."

The problem with decent people is that they are decent people. They tend to assume decency in others by default. If he says he's a plumber and he's in a pair of coveralls, then he's a plumber, not a serial killer in disguise. Ted Bundy wore a cast on his arm and asked a girl for help moving a couch into his van. He was handsome, charming, and she, being decent, helped him without a second thought. He, being evil, killed her without a second thought. I'm sure she still couldn't believe it, even as it happened.

The funny thing is, people assume we're more careful now, that Bundy's broken arm trick wouldn't work today. They're wrong. It would work today, and it will work a century from now. It's just the way we are.

"What's the plan?" Alan asks.

I sigh. "We're getting spread too thin. We have the plane as a crime scene, and now Lisa's condo and this house. Callie and James aren't going to be able to handle it all." I shake my head. "I'm calling AD Jones."

"IT'S TIME TO START PLAYING this by the book, sir," I tell him.

"We've got three crime scenes now. Legally, the Ambrose murder belongs to the locals. If I try and contain it I'm not only getting into sketchy legal territory, I'm putting the need for confidentiality above the need for a speedy investigation. I can't do that."

Investigation of murder is a full-court press, always. It's a blitz, no finesse. You pull out all stops, use every resource available, because if you don't come up with something in the first forty-eight to seventytwo hours, it's unlikely you're going to come up with anything at all. I had remembered this as I stared down at the rotting corpse of Richard Ambrose and realized I was solving someone else's problem. Like I told Rosario-I work for the victims. Not her, not her husband, certainly not political expedience.

I hear AD Jones sigh. "Any other way around this?"

"Not ethically, no, sir. We've got a murder scene here, a pretty big one. The whole house needs to be gone through. We've got identity theft, interviews still to be done of plane passengers, ticket counter personnel, flight attendants. Not to mention the distinct possibility that other past victims are going to pop up and his promise to kill again until we catch him. If we're going to do a good job of this, we need to bring in local law enforcement."

A long pause. "Agreed. But we hold on to the Lisa Reid murder directly. We have legal reason to do so. I don't want anyone else in her condo, and I want the ME report to continue being suppressed. If the details about the cross leak, it'll impair your investigation."

"Right."

"Before you call in the cavalry, though, I want you to arrange a little air cover, Smoky."

"Such as?"

"Call Rosario Reid. Explain to her that keeping this in-house is no longer practical or feasible. Get her to understand that it'll impede finding Lisa's killer. Appeal to her as a mother and the wife of a politician. I'll deal with the Director."

"Yes, sir."

"You made the right call on this, Smoky."

I'M IN THE FRONT YARD, leaves blowing around my ankles, that crisp, cold wind numbing my cheeks and hands. I welcome it for now; it's clearing the smell of death from my nostrils.

"I trust your judgment, Smoky," Rosario tells me. "I meant what I said in the car-Lisa is your priority."

"I appreciate that. I didn't think otherwise, but you deserve a heads-up. Also. ." I hesitate.

"Yes?"

"To be honest, it would be helpful if you conveyed your confidence in my decisions to the Director."

"I'll talk to him personally."

"Thanks. I ran into his assistant, and she made me a little nervous. I'm not used to this particular playing field."

"Rachael Hinson?" She sounds amused. "She's formidable, true, but so am I. And I have ten years on her. Do whatever you need to."

"I will."

She disconnects and I turn to Alan, who's waiting on the front porch, hands in his jacket pockets. I nod. "Call in the locals."

9

I'M BACK AT LISA'S CONDO WITH CALLIE AND JAMES. ALAN IS coordinating with local law enforcement at Ambrose's home. I don't feel a need to be there. Ambrose was used and thrown away; he wasn't important to the killer. As callous as it sounds, that means he's not immediately important to me.

James is walking through the condo. Doing the same thing I had done, I imagine, soaking in Lisa's personality. She was important to our madman. Know the victim, know the doer.

Callie looks tired. I watch as she pulls a bottle of Vicodin from her jacket pocket and pops a pill dry.

"Yummy," she says, rolling her eyes in faux joy and rubbing her stomach with exaggerated motions.

"How are you doing with that?"

"Still addicted," she quips. "But then, that's something you're going to help me with before my wedding. You and I locked in a room together, sweat and barf."

"Sounds fun."

"Monkeys, barrels of them. So, what do you want me to do?"

I explain about the diary, what I'd found.

"He spent time here, Callie. I think he stole some pages from her diary. I want you and James to go through this place with a fine-tooth comb."

"Do you think we'll find anything?"

I hesitate, then shrug. "I don't know. Maybe. He wanted us to know he was here, and he left the cross in Lisa's body as a clue. He's pulling us down a trail, but he hides his fingerprints. ." I shake my head. "I can't quite pin him down. I don't have enough to work with yet."

James has reappeared and has been listening.

"I agree," he says. "All I can really tell about him, so far, is that he's older, he's organized and accomplished, fearless without being insane about the risks he takes, and that he wants us to know he's out there."

And that he's going to kill again, soon, I don't add.

"Anything else from the plane?" I ask.

"No," Callie says. "We still have to go through the trace we vacuumed up, and we have the bloody cushions, but that's all."

"The most telling evidence then," James says, "continues to be the fact that he wiped down his prints. He's in a database somewhere."

"Yes. That and his behavior are the best leads we have." I sigh.

"Which isn't saying much."

"Pish," Callie says. "We're only twenty-four hours in. He's already made the biggest mistake of all-he attracted our attention."

James shakes his head. "Yes, but it's not looking like we'll catch him before he kills again."

Callie shrugs. "Not under our control. This is. So let's get to work."

I'm about to chime in with agreement, but my phone rings. Alan.

"Bad news," he says.

"What?"

"Remember you told me to put out a search for similar crimes?"

My heart sinks. "Uh-huh."

"I did that before I went to Ambrose's place. We've already got a hit. Get this-it's a fresh crime. Happened ten days ago."

"Are you kidding me?"

"Wish I was. He's on the move. Man with a plan."

I close my eyes, rub my forehead. This bad news seems to bring all my exhaustion crashing down on me.

"Give me the details," I say.