Cross My Heart

CHAPTER 46

I left work around six that Tuesday evening with little to show for ten hours of work. It was as if we’d come to a standstill on every case on our desk. At least there had been no new murders in DC that day, and I gave weary thanks for that as I got into my car to head home.

My cell rang halfway down Pennsylvania Avenue. A miracle. Damon was calling in for the second day in a row.

“Dad?” Damon said in an agitated voice.

“Hey, kiddo. What’s up?”

“One of the school security guards, Dad, he got killed out in the woods behind my dorm last night.”

“Killed?” I said, shocked. The Kraft School was an idyllic place in the middle of nowhere. It was part of why we’d sent him to school there, far away from the street influences that can take a boy down before he’s even started. “How?”

“I don’t know,” Damon said. “Some of the cross-country kids found his body. They said his head was, like, bashed in.”

“Police there?”

“All sorts of them. They’re talking to everyone in the dorm, you know, asking did we hear or see anything.”

“Did you?”

There was a pause before he replied, “Not really. I mean, I thought I heard, like, someone yelling ‘Hey, D-top,’ but I thought it was in my dreams.”

“Hey, D-top?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Damon said, sounding miserable.

“Male? Female?”

He thought about that. “Male, I guess. I just woke up for a bit.”

A murder on the Kraft campus and my son might or might not have heard a male yell “Hey, D-top.” My initial impulse was to go straight there, but I couldn’t. I had no jurisdiction, and my own murder caseload was overwhelming.

I said, “You want me to put in a call to the police up there?”

“No. It’s not like that or anything. It’s just that …”

“What, son?”

“I dunno, Dad, I guess I’m not that used to people dying around me, like you are.”

I sighed, said, “I’m sorry it happened. You knew the guard?”

“Carter. Everyone knew him. Carter was a good guy.”

“That makes it worse,” I said sympathetically, and despite my concern, or maybe because of it, tried to change the subject. “How’d the calculus test go?”

“It was physics, and it went fine,” he said, distracted now. “Listen, I gotta go. Dinnertime.”

“Looking forward to seeing you next week.”

“I am, too, Dad,” he said, and hung up.

I drove the rest of the way home in silence, feeling my skin prickle with worry, wondering why in God’s name someone would want to bash in the head of a security guard at my son’s school.

And what the hell did “Hey, D-top” mean?

CHAPTER 47

The following day, a Wednesday, I was drinking coffee and scanning the newspapers when Sampson tossed an envelope on the desk that looked like a lunatic had written it.

Postmarked the day before, addressed to me, no return address, and the fonts on the envelope were random, the letters multicolored. The same was true of the letter inside, which made the words hard to decipher at first sweeping glance. The margins were covered in strange and troubling cartoonish doodles.

One lurid caricature appeared to depict me holding a magnifying glass to my eye like Sherlock Holmes, and possessing an enormous penis on which birds were perched. Feeling rightfully disturbed by that, I was about to toss the letter and chalk it up to being in the public view from time to time and therefore a target of ridicule by the mentally ill. But there was something about it. Forcing myself to deal with the strange font sizes, styles, and colors, I read the letter.

I read it twice more, seeing things like that phrase: “In my considered opinion …” That’s the kind of language an expert testifying at a murder trial might use in response to an attorney’s question. So Mr. Mulch was smart, well educated, and — if the stuff about similar mass killings proved true — an amateur sleuth who knew what he was doing.

But why the crazy typefaces? Why draw me like that?

Was Mulch the killer? I’d had serial murderers taunt me over the years, but in those cases the killer was up-front, making it a game of him against me. In this case, however, Mr. Mulch was calling me an idiot from the sidelines.

Or was he? There was clearly something way off about the guy, as if he had a chip on his shoulder, calling me Bungler and talking about my thick skull. And the penis?

Who are you, Mr. Mulch?

Turning to my computer, I ran the name Thierry Mulch through Google. I got fifteen hits.

The first lived in Santa Clara, California, and appeared to be some kind of social media entrepreneur. Another Thierry Mulch was a regional sales manager for Kirby vacuums based in Nebraska. A third was involved in the feed, seed, and fertilizer business in southern Kentucky. The closest any of them got to Washington, DC, was Thierry Mulch of Covington, West Virginia, but according to a brief obituary in the local paper, he’d died in a car crash sixteen years ago at the age of eighteen.

The others were spread from Maine to Arizona, a cross-section of men who did not stand out and scream “smart crazy bastard” in any way whatsoever. I ran the name through Facebook and found much the same list. There didn’t seem to be that many Thierry Mulches in the world.

I put on latex gloves, got an evidence sleeve, and slid in the letter and the envelope. My fingerprints were on the letter, but maybe Mr. Mulch’s prints were there as well. It was certainly worth a shot, anyway.

Sampson returned from the cafeteria with two cups of coffee. I showed him the letter. He scanned it, looked at me, and said, “That supposed to be you with the big, uh, physicality?”

“Evidently.”

“So he understand something about you I don’t?” Sampson said, laughing.

“Read the letter, wise guy,” I said, turned away, and started searching for killings in massage parlors in Tampa and Albuquerque.

It didn’t take long to find them.

CHAPTER 48

Two Aprils before, a hooded killer had attacked Sensu Massage in Tampa, killing two Korean women, a male customer, and the guy working security at the front desk. All were shot at relatively close range. Bullet placement — head and chest — had in all cases ensured a quick but violent death.

I soon reached Steven Hall, one of the Tampa detectives charged with investigating the slayings. Hall said that the killer in Tampa had left little if any evidence, though he’d neglected to take the security tapes with him.

“You never see his face,” Hall said. “Very smart about it. But you see him taking the third girl.”

“Third girl?”

“Esmeralda Felix, twenty-year-old Cuban-American coed at Florida State, working her way through school.”

“This sounds like the same guy,” I replied. “We’ve got a missing Vietnamese female from George Washington University who worked in the spa.”

“Hope she doesn’t turn out like Esmeralda,” the Tampa detective said before explaining that the student’s body had turned up on a remote beach south of Naples, Florida, sixteen days after the massage parlor killings in Tampa. “She’d been dead for three days, strangled with a strip of green terry cloth. Before the sicko throttled her he cut off her nipples with pinking shears.”

I tasted something foul at the back of my mouth, asked Hall to e-mail the file to me in the morning, and told him we’d be in touch if we got any significant leads.

Arlene Lavitt, the detective overseeing the massage parlor killing in Albuquerque, was less forthcoming when I reached her at her desk. Then I told her I used to work FBI behavioral science with Gabriel Rodriguez, the current chief of the Albuquerque police department.

“I’m sorry,” Detective Lavitt said. “We’re just swamped here.”

“You haven’t heard about the murder rate in DC?” I asked.

She sighed. “I can’t even imagine.”

“Just tell me what I need to know and I’ll be out of your hair.”

Detective Lavitt was all business then, and shared the following with me: Four Aprils prior, a hooded male opened fire in the Empress Spa on a desolate stretch of Highway 85 south of Albuquerque. A Korean girl working there was shot in the head. So was an older woman at the front desk. A third female was shot in the chest in the locker room. A fourth was kidnapped.

“Let me guess,” I said. “She turned up dead, mutilated?”

“Strangled but not mutilated,” the detective replied. “Fifteen days after she disappeared, a hiker found her body up on US Forest Service land east of the city. She’d been dead two days.”

“Pick up any terry-cloth fibers on the body?”

“As a matter of fact. Green terry cloth.”

I considered the two cases. “Some of his ritual appears set and some of it is evolving, Detective.”

“You’re saying you think he’s a serial killer?”

“A mass serial killer. Albuquerque might have been his first go. Certainly the first one we know of, anyway. I’ll have the Tampa files sent to you.”

She promised to send me a copy of the file on her case as well. I hung up and told Sampson everything I’d learned.

The big man looked sober, sipped his coffee, but then shook his head slowly as if swallowing a bitter pill. “He’s evolving. He doesn’t torture the girl in Albuquerque before strangling her. But two years later he mutilates the student in Tampa before he takes her out. Hate to say it, but makes me wonder what sick new ritual he’s got planned for Cam if we don’t find her first.”

My stomach soured completely, and I put my coffee down. Nodding grimly, I picked up the bizarre letter that had begun my day. “But somehow I keep coming back to Thierry Mulch. Who is this guy?”

CHAPTER 49

The following morning, Marcus Sunday smiled at the woman at the front desk at Sojourner Truth School on Franklin Street. But she was looking suspiciously at his flaming-red Abe Lincoln beard, white pants, white shirt, purple shoes, and violet suspenders.

“Thierry Mulch, here to see the principal,” he said, handing her a flawless forgery of a California driver’s license that featured a photo from Preston Elliot’s school ID doctored up with a red wig, red eyebrows, and the Lincoln beard.

The woman took the fake ID and ran it under a lamp to check the blue-light watermark, which was right where it was supposed to be. She handed it to him without any change in expression and gestured over his shoulder, saying, “Ms. Dawson’s waiting for you down the hall there. First double doors on your right.”

“Love it,” he said, winking at her. “And thank you.”

Sunday turned and strolled down the hallway, enjoying the reflections of himself he caught in the glass cases that lined one wall. With this getup, he was one step shy of a cartoon character. Just about perfect for his intended audience.

The writer sniffed. What was that smell? Burgers frying in the school lunchroom? Had to be. Was there anything more elementary school than that?

He neared the double doors and heard the excited chatter of children. A tall African American woman dressed in a blue business suit came out. She beamed at him, said, “Mr. Mulch?”

Sunday reacted as if overjoyed. “Principal Dawson?”

She grabbed his hand, pumped it, said, “You don’t know how much your offer to come speak to our children means to me.”

“Giving back,” Sunday said modestly. “It’s the least I can do.”

“Well, I know they’ll appreciate it.”

“Not as much as I will.”

She opened the door and let him pass inside.

The auditorium was packed with second and third graders, who erupted into cheers and laughter when Sunday started grinning and waving with wild exaggeration, as if he were some escapee from Ringling Brothers.

The writer responded to their amusement by punching at the sky and skipping sideways up onto the stage, where he stopped and looked about brightly, searching for someone in particular.

The principal followed uncertainly and went to a podium. Waving her hands to calm the churning crowd of seven- and eight-year-olds, Ms. Dawson called into the microphone, “Quiet down, now. As fun as Mr. Mulch seems to be, I hope you listen closely to what he has to say.”

She paused, waiting for the last goofballs and whisperers to stop their squirming antics and fall silent.

“Thank you,” she said. “Mr. Mulch is the founder of a website like Facebook that is going live later in the year and is dedicated to kids your age. He’d like to tell you a little about himself, his life, and the site. Mr. Mulch?”

Sunday didn’t respond at first. Amid the clapping children, he’d spotted the one he was looking for, over there, third row, at the end on the right.

“Mr. Mulch?” the principal said again.

The writer cocked his head, shifting his focus off his quarry and smiling at the principal. “Glad to be here, Ms. Dawson.”

Sunday stepped to the podium, let his eyes roam over the kids looking up at him with the sort of immediate attention given to a man well over six feet tall with a shock of flaming-red hair.

“You’ll hear this again in your lives,” he began. “But Mr. Mulch is here to tell you that you can do anything you want, be anybody you want to be. When I was a little boy about your age, I lived on a pig farm. And now look at me.”

CHAPTER 50

Sunday twisted his face until he had the boys laughing, and most of the girls, except for a few who were crinkling their noses and whispering, “Eeeuuw, like a real pig farm?”

Perfect, he thought, glancing at the one he’d come to see, sitting forward, watching, waiting.

“We lived in central Appalachia, up a holler in West Virginia,” the writer went on, laying on a little southern charm. “I tell you, children, we were as poor as poor can be. Raising pigs was the only way my mama and daddy knew to make money, so it’s what they did.”

Sunday paused, seeing he still had most of them but determined to have all of them. “My house stank,” he said, doing his best to look revolted. “My yard smelled worse, especially in the summer when it was hot. Them pigs would poop everywhere and lay in it and just grunt and grunt. All happy and such.”

The children started to giggle and clap their hands over their mouths. He’d known they would, and glanced over at Ms. Dawson, who was frowning.

“I had to feed the pigs,” the writer went on. “Sometimes I had to wash them and shovel out their sty.”

That simultaneously grossed out the children and glued their attention on him. “I hated it,” Sunday continued. “Just hated it.”

He paused dramatically before adding, “I used that hate to drive myself at school so I wouldn’t have to live on that pig farm anymore.”

Sunday went on in this vein, now telling a largely fabricated story about studying until late at night so he could win a scholarship to college, where he majored in computer engineering and learned to write code.

He told them how he’d worked for a computer game company for a while before he’d come up with the idea of a website for elementary school kids.

“When I was growing up, I didn’t have friends,” Sunday said. “There wasn’t a girl that would give me the time of day. I mean, would you be friends with a kid who smelled like pig poop?”

He waited until their laughter died, continued, “So I came up with this website idea so kids like you could have friends far away from home. Like all around the world. Doesn’t that sound cool?”

Kids clapped. Others shouted, “Yes!”

Sunday pointed at his head, said, “I’ll tell you more about the site in a second, but it’s important that you know that I did all this by being positive. As a kid, I used to hate that pig farm, but now I kind of like the fact that I grew up there. Makes my story even more interesting, don’t you think?”

Sunday saw that the one he was interested in was nodding, and he smiled right at the child, said, “I used to hate my parents, but now I actually like the fact that they were pig farmers.”

The writer snatched the microphone from its stand and walked across the stage, saying, “Do you get it? You can use the things you don’t like about your life to change it.”

He climbed down the stairs, knowing that he was beginning to lose some of them. “I’ll prove it,” he said, and walked straight toward the kid on the far right end of the third row.

“What’s your name?” Sunday asked, and tilted the mike at him.

The boy looked embarrassed. “Me?” he said.

“Why not?”

“Ali Cross,” the boy said, sniffing and curling his nose.

“Ali Cross,” Sunday said as if the name were a marvelous thing. “How old did you say you are?”

“Seven.”

“Second grade?”

Ali nodded, sniffed and curled his nose again.

“What do your parents do?”

“My father’s a police detective,” Ali said proudly. “He used to be with the FBI. He catches killers and, like, bad guys. So does my stepmom.”

The writer found the answer irritating but managed to look very impressed. “Well,” he said. “No pig farm and pig poop for you, then.”

The other children laughed, but Ali looked serious as he shook his head.

“No,” Sunday said. “Nothing you hate about your life?”

Cross’s son shrugged, said, “No. Not really.”

“Well, then,” Sunday said. “Maybe you aren’t the best example, Ali. Great life you’ve got, great crime-fighting mom and dad and all. But remember, life can change like that.” He snapped his finger. “You understand that, don’t you, Ali?”

The boy looked confused at first but then nodded. “Like someone in your family becoming a zombie or something?”

The kids around Cross’s son laughed nervously.

But the writer thought about that and found the idea pleasing. “Yes,” he said, patting the boy on the shoulder. “Exactly like that.”

CHAPTER 51

I got home before Bree that night, heard voices around the back of the house first, and saw that Nana Mama was out there inspecting the day’s work. The contractors had cut out the kitchen wall and covered the gaping hole with plastic sheeting. They’d started to frame up the addition as well.

“The wall was there when I went over to the school and gone when Ali came back an hour later,” my grandmother said, shaking her head in wonder.

“They said it will go fast now,” I replied, putting my arm around her tiny shoulders. “Before you know it, we’ll have a whole new house.”

She frowned. “I don’t want a whole new house.”

“You know what I meant.”

“I guess. Let’s go on in now, and I’ll get you dinner.”

“Kids already eat?” I asked as we walked out front.

“Nope, Ali’s waiting on you. He’s in there watching some cockamamie show about a dysfunctional family that makes duck calls.”

“Jannie?”

“Still at track practice.”

We came around the corner of the house and spotted Bree trudging up the walk past the Dumpster, looking as spent as I’ve ever seen her.

“Someone looks like they need a little love,” Nana Mama murmured. “I’ll get dinner on the table.”

I nodded and went to my wife. We hugged and I rubbed her back for a while and put my nose in her hair, the scent reminding me I had so many good people in my life. “Want to tell me about it?”

“Beer first,” she said, collapsing into a chair on the porch.

I went and got us both cold Brimstone beers from the fridge in the garage. I sipped mine, waiting until she unwound enough to tell me about a depressing visit to the Branson family late that afternoon.

“I went out there to tell them things would be okay,” Bree said. “I knew it wasn’t true.”

“How’s that?”

My wife shrugged. “Been a week since that woman took Joss.”

“Hope you’re not giving up on her, or the Lancaster kid, or Ava.”

Her eyes flashed. “Not a chance on any of them.”

“That’s my lady,” I said, and then told her about the letter from Thierry Mulch and the massage parlor killings in Albuquerque and Tampa. “Mulch was right. Because of Mad Man’s involvement, I never looked for other mass murders at massage parlors.”

Bree thought for several long moments. “You know, I haven’t looked to see if there’ve been baby kidnappings like these in other cities, either.”

I tipped my beer toward her, said, “There you go.”

Jannie came home then, full of funny stories from school and practice. Banneker is known for track, and it was interesting to hear how the school approached the sport. Nana called us all in to eat pan-fried pork chops and kale stir-fried with garlic and sea salt. Of course, she apologized for serving such a simple meal, and we all told her it was fit for a king and his family.

“How was school for you today?” Bree asked Ali as he ate his ice cream.

“Pretty good,” he said. “We got out of social studies to listen to some guy with really red hair. He said you can be anybody you want to be.”

“The man with the really red hair is right,” Nana Mama said. “Anything you can dream, you can become.”

“Yeah,” Ali said. “Like that.”

“What was his name?” I asked.

He thought about that, his nose wrinkled, and then he shrugged. “I can’t remember, but he started some website for kids.”

Bree and Jannie got up and started clearing the table. Jannie said, “I got this, Bree, you look tired.”

“You want to wash them in the bathtub by yourself?”

“It’s not that bad.”

My wife looked at me, said, “Can I use your office for a bit?”

“Sure.”

“Maybe we could go for a drive later?”

“That, too.”

She smiled, got her computer bag, and disappeared upstairs.

“Dad?” Ali said. “Wanna watch the first episode of The Walking Dead with me? I recorded it.”

Zombies weren’t really my cup of tea, but given that my grandmother had succumbed to the show’s charms, I agreed.

Sitting on the couch a few moments later with the DVR cued to play, Ali said, “You’re gonna love this, Dad. It’s based on comic books.”

He said it so earnestly I had to laugh and rub his head.

Okay, I had to admit. It was good. If you haven’t seen the show, it starts with Rick Grimes, a sheriff’s deputy, waking up from a coma only to discover that the world has been taken over by “walkers,” or zombies. The actor who plays Grimes is very convincing and you buy into the situation right away. But it wasn’t until I learned that Grimes’s family had survived and were living with other nonwalkers outside the city that I really got hooked, and—

“Alex?”

My wife stood in the doorway to the dining room, holding a sheaf of papers and staring at it in total disbelief.

“What’s the matter?” I said, getting to my feet.

She shook her head. “You’re not gonna believe what I found.”

CHAPTER 52

Captain Quintus and John Sampson gazed at Bree and me skeptically around ten the next morning. A Friday. We were in the conference room. The homicide supervisor and my partner had only just arrived.

“Wait,” Quintus said. “You’re saying they’re connected?”

“Yeah,” Sampson said. “Run that one by me again.”

I held both palms out toward my wife, who said, “I went on the Internet last night, searching for news stories about baby kidnappings in other cities. It’s horrible to say this, but it’s more common than you think.”

Quintus nodded. “Every couple of years, some wacko tries to steal a kid.”

“Some succeed,” Bree said. “And if the parents are from a lower socioeconomic class, the stories don’t get big play.”

Sampson said, “But how are the killings and the kidnappings connected?”

“The cities,” Bree replied. “And the dates.”

During her research, Bree had found references to the kidnapping of five-month-old Juanita Vicente and seven-month-old Albert Tinkler in Albuquerque, in April four years before. The connection didn’t dawn on her until she discovered two separate abductions in Tampa, in April two years later, a boy and a girl, four months and eight months old.

“It’s virtually the same time frame as the massage parlor shootings in those cities,” I said.

We showed them stories from April four years prior in the Albuquerque Journal and others published April two years ago in the Tampa Tribune, which referenced the massage parlor killings, the missing prostitutes, and the baby kidnappings on the same day but not in the same articles.

“They were thought of and treated as separate crimes,” Bree said. “We believe they’re all part of the same series of crimes perpetrated by the same two people, a man and a woman working together.”

Studying the reports intently, Quintus mumbled, “Jesus H. Christ.”

“It gets worse,” I said, putting the last of the stories from both papers on the captain’s desk. “In Albuquerque and in Tampa, the babies were found several days after the dead prostitutes. Drowned. But here’s the thing. When we compared the autopsy reports, we saw that the babies and the hookers died at roughly the same time.”

“So let me get this straight,” Captain Quintus said. “Every two years this couple hits a massage parlor, kills everyone except for one prostitute, whom they take hostage, and then they kidnap two babies, girl and boy.”

“Correct,” Bree said. “And then the prostitutes are strangled and the babies are drowned. And then they’re dumped apart.”

“They died at roughly the same time, right?” Sampson asked.

I nodded. “Give or take an hour.”

“Any other timetable to this?” Captain Quintus said.

“I don’t follow,” Bree said.

“Parallels as far as time sequences,” he replied a little testily. “I haven’t had as much experience with ritualistic killings as Alex has, but here you have two years between each of the events, which always occur in April. There have to be other consistencies like that.”

I agreed and started going through the files, looking at dates and times, while Bree, Sampson, and Quintus continued to analyze what we already knew, looking for more connections we might have missed. Ten minutes later, they were speculating on what could possibly have driven a man and a woman to mass murder, kidnapping, and infanticide, when I saw another parallel.

“Thirteen days and seventeen or eighteen hours,” I said, interrupting them. “In both Albuquerque and Tampa, the babies and the prostitutes were murdered in the early evening thirteen days after the massage parlor was attacked.”

“You’re sure?” Quintus said.

“Positive,” I replied. “Which means—”

“Cam Nguyen, Joss Branson, and Evan Lancaster are all dying this coming Wednesday night,” Sampson said.

CHAPTER 53

Almost forty excruciating hours passed with no significant gain in any of the investigations we were running. The entire time, I was aware of the clock ticking on the lives of the coed and the two babies. I kept thinking about my own kids, how gut-wrenching this all had to be for the Branson and Lancaster families. More than once, I bowed my head and prayed that we’d get some kind of break.

Around four thirty on Palm Sunday, we did.

I was at home, upstairs in my office after attending Mass with Nana Mama, when I got a text from Detective Brefka. It had taken almost ten days for a tech at the FBI computer lab at Quantico to debug the files from the city’s closed-circuit television cameras in the blocks around the Superior Spa the night of the mass killings. Brefka had spent the weekend going through them all and sent a report on what he’d found to my departmental e-mail.

I forwarded the file to Sampson and called him at home. I got Billie, who turned testy when I said John needed to download the file and then call me back. Billie reminded me curtly that he had not had a day off in three weeks. I replied that I hadn’t had a full day off in four weeks, and that it shouldn’t take long.

“Alex, you really know how to handle my wife,” Sampson said when he called back about twenty minutes later.

“Really?” I said.

“No,” he replied.

“Got the file up?”

“Right here.”

Brefka’s report noted that the street camera closest to the massage parlor had been on the blink and caused most of the corruption in the data files. But street cameras to the north and south of the Superior Spa showed a few things he thought we’d want to see. He gave a URL to click on.

I did. My screen jumped, and a video began to buffer and display snatches of CCT footage along with a running time stamp.

At 5:45 the night of the killings and soon after Blossom Mai saw her, Cam Nguyen walked by a camera two blocks south of the Superior Spa, wearing a yellow Windbreaker, sweatpants, and running shoes. She carried a Prince tennis bag and was heading toward the massage parlor.

At 6:40 p.m. a businessman in his fifties passed in front of a camera a block east of the massage parlor, heading toward the spa.

At 7:02, a street camera three blocks north picked up a figure walking south. Of better-than-average height and build, the figure carried a backpack and wore baggy jeans, Nike basketball shoes, and a Redskins sweatshirt with the hood up, shielding his face but not his hands. He was Caucasian.

At 7:06, the businessman rushed past that same camera. He had a contented smile on his face.

Thirty-two minutes later, at 7:38, the figure in the Redskins sweatshirt passed a camera two blocks south of the Superior Spa. Head down, hood up, you never saw the face. But you could see Cam Nguyen clearly. She wore the same tennis outfit from earlier in the evening and walked very close to the guy in the Redskins hoodie.

“There’s our killer and kidnapper,” I said.

“Redskins sweatshirt?” Sampson said. “We’re not dealing with a psychotically disgruntled fan, are we?”

“How would he know Mad Man was in the Superior Spa?” I asked. “No, this was about Cam and the hookers. Francones just got in the way.”

“Where is Mad Man?” Sampson replied. “He’s not on the tape at all.”

I thought about that, said, “He got there by taxi? Stopped right out front where the camera was on the blink?”

“Possible.”

“I say we get a still shot of Mr. Redskins and Cam Nguyen out to the media. See if anyone recognizes her or the shooter’s hoodie and backpack.”

“I have a better idea,” I replied, rewinding the file and stopping it a few seconds later. “We’ll put out video of the guy in the suit. You can see his face clearest, coming and going.”

“Okay, but why that guy?”

“The Redskins fan passes the camera at seven oh two, heading south on the way to the massage parlor, and the businessman comes back the other way at seven oh six, leaving the massage parlor,” I said. “Unless I’m terribly mistaken, sometime in those four minutes this happy and lucky customer of the Superior Spa came face to face with our suspect.”

CHAPTER 54

The following evening around eight, Abigail Barnes whipped an almost-empty bottle of Chianti Classico past me and Sampson. The bottle missed her intended target — a sandy-haired fifty-something guy in an Armani suit — and shattered the face of an antique mariner’s clock that hung on the living room wall. Wine spattered across the tan rug.

“You pig, Harry!” Abigail Barnes raged. “You goddamned pig! Do you know what this will do to me?”

Harry Barnes gaped at his wife, turned pissed off, and shouted, “That was Grandmother’s clock, Abby! What the fuck is—? Who the hell are these—?”

Abigail Barnes went ballistic. With a crazed look, she shot across the living room of their million-dollar home in Chevy Chase, screeching like a banshee, her ruby-red fingernails leading, as if she intended to scratch her husband’s eyes out.

She was wearing a ruby-colored sweat suit emblazoned with the logo of the Chevy Chase Country Club. Sampson grabbed her by the nape of the jacket and stopped her before she could attack. She jerked to a halt, struggled.

“Let me go, Detective!” she screamed.

“That won’t help things, Mrs. Barnes,” Sampson said.

“Detective?” said her husband, who looked baffled and then worried.

“Washington DC Metro Homicide,” I said, showing the man my badge.

“Murder?” Barnes said, paling. “Abby, what’s—”

His wife wrenched so hard against Sampson’s grip that I heard fabric tearing before she went off on Barnes again. “I saw you, you pig, on tape!” she yelled. “So pleased with yourself after God knows what debauchery!”

“Tape?” he said, genuinely confused and looking at me.

Before I could answer, Abigail screeched, “You were leaving that sleazy massage parlor on Connecticut Avenue where Mad Man Francones was murdered! They have it on tape. They’re showing it everywhere! Betsy Martin saw it on the television in the bar at the club and showed me! At the club!”

She broke down weeping and sagged. Sampson caught her and walked her to a wingback chair.

Harold Barnes’s skin had lost all its color. His hand sought his mouth and he staggered out of the room, choking, “My God, what have I done?”

That seemed to revive Abigail Barnes, because she interrupted her crying to start screaming after him again, “You’ve ruined us, that’s what you’ve done! I’ll be the laughingstock of … of everything!”

“Mr. Barnes?” I called, hustling after him.

But by the time I reached the hall, he’d dodged into a powder room, shut the door, and started gagging. I stood there listening to his wife crying back in the living room, and him retching, and frankly felt bad that my instincts had been correct and my idea had worked.

Right after I’d spoken with Sampson I’d called Captain Quintus and convinced him to release the footage of the man in the business suit leaving the area of the Superior Spa.

“Gonna be a shitty wake-up call for some poor bastard and his wife,” Quintus had told me after agreeing to the plan.

Leaning against the hallway wall, suffering the sounds of a fracturing marriage I’d helped break, I had to agree.

CHAPTER 55

Harold Barnes was a successful and influential patent lawyer with an impeccable pedigree. Dartmouth. Georgetown Law. Editor of the law review. Clerked at the US District Court. Became a partner in a prestigious firm. Husband of twenty-seven years. Father of three girls.

“Thank God they’re all off at school,” Abigail moaned as I turned the corner back into the living room and found her slumped in the chair.

I raised an eyebrow at Sampson. “See if you can find her some coffee.”

Behind me I could hear the door of the powder room opening. Barnes’s wife looked toward the hall, said, “No, I want to hear everything about his filthy life.”

“I’ll let you two deal with that in private,” I said firmly. “Right now we’re hoping he can help us solve a mass murder and maybe save three lives.”

Mrs. Barnes looked appalled and then incredulous, as if I’d somehow challenged the idea that the planets revolved around her and not the sun.

“Let’s take a walk, Mrs. B,” Sampson said, and held out his hand.

She balked and then, reluctant and wobbly, got to her feet. Barnes must have heard me talking, because he’d stalled back there in the hallway. Sampson supported the crushed socialite as they left the room by another door.

As it shut behind them, I heard her sniffle, “I never thought my life would become a cliché. Was I naïve, Detective?”

Her husband came back into the room, looking like a husk of what he’d been not ten minutes before. Broken glass crunched beneath his wingtips, but he seemed not to notice.

“My name’s Alex Cross,” I began.

“I know who you are, Dr. Cross,” Barnes said weakly before sinking into the chair his wife had just occupied. “I read the papers.”

“I’m sorry about all this, but we had no other way of finding you,” I said.

Barnes made a flick of his fingers, replied, “I debated coming forward days ago. But I kept thinking maybe it wasn’t necessary.”

He fell silent and then gazed at me intently. “I want you to know that I wasn’t like Francones. Sex is not an addiction for me. Nor an obsession.”

“Okay.”

The attorney moved uncomfortably. “The truth is that my wife is more interested in her status than in sex. Or at least since she turned fifty and—”

“No offense, Mr. Barnes,” I said. “I’m not particularly interested in the motivations that led you to the Superior Spa.”

He knitted his brows, said, “Oh.”

“Just to confirm: You did actually go into the spa?”

Barnes blinked, thought like a lawyer, and said, “So you don’t actually have me on tape entering or leaving?”

“Does it matter?”

“It would in court.”

“If you were on trial here, and you’re not. But if you don’t talk and it turns out we can gather evidence that places you in that massage parlor before the murders, I can and will arrest you on obstruction charges, Counselor.”

Barnes rolled his lips back from his teeth, thinking, but then sighed and said, “Okay. I was there.”

Once the attorney started talking, he did not hold back. He described parking well up Connecticut Avenue and then walking to the Superior Spa, corroborating the time-line we’d established from the closed-circuit tapes. He said he spent time with An Lu, the young Korean woman in the robe we’d found dead in the lobby. As Barnes was leaving, he saw Mad Man Francones going down the hallway with Cam Nguyen to the squalid little room where he lost his life.

“I was surprised, you know?” Barnes said. “Guy like that.”

I wanted to say, “Guy like you,” but didn’t.

“He see you? Francones?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“And then?”

“I got out of there, out the front door.”

“See anyone?”

Barnes paused. “You mean inside or outside?”

“Outside on the sidewalk.”

The patent attorney was about to shake his head but then cocked it left as if he was confronting a memory. “A guy in a red hoodie.”

“Where? Standing there? Coming from what direction?”

He thought about that and replied, “Coming from the north.”

I felt my pulse quicken. It matched what we’d deduced from the tapes.

“So he went by you?”

“More like we went by each other.”

“You see him go into the Superior Spa?”

Barnes shook his head vigorously. “I never looked back.”

“You see his face?”

He hesitated, but then nodded. “He had his hood up, but there was a streetlight there. I guess I saw him pretty good.”

I wanted to pump my fist in the air but said, “You’d be willing to work with an artist?”

He nodded again.

“And you think you remember what he looked like?”

Barnes gazed into his lap, said quietly: “I don’t suppose you could forget the face of the man who missed killing you by a couple of minutes.”

The attorney had no sooner said those words than he got a pained expression on his face that was replaced almost immediately by one of terror. His arm came up, traveling toward the breast pocket of his suit coat, and he looked at me and choked, “I’m …”

Barnes keeled forward onto the floor, gasping.

“John!” I bellowed as I threw myself down on my knees next to him. “Call 911! He’s having a heart attack!”

CHAPTER 56

Cross returned home around midnight. Sitting in the van down the street, Sunday and Acadia watched the detective go inside and turn off the porch light. Most of the other lights in the house were already off.

“You sure this is the night, sugar?” Acadia asked with slight worry.

“Thanks to your brilliant three-D model, yes,” Sunday replied. “Besides, we need better, more up-to-date information if this is going to go like clockwork.”

“You know I’m moving on if you’re caught in there,” she said.

He smiled at her, stroked her cheek with his finger, and said, “I wouldn’t expect anything less from a girl who fed her own daddy to gators.”

Acadia bit gently at his knuckle, said, “How long are you going to wait?”

The last light in Cross’s house had just died.

“Couple of hours,” Sunday said. “Let them all get good and deep.”

“I’m going to nap until you’re ready,” she said, then crawled into the back of the van and a sleeping bag on a pad they’d brought along.

To pass the time, the writer reached forward, turned the radio on, and tuned to WTOP, the twenty-four-hour news station in the nation’s capital. The news was all about the latest nonsense in the Middle East, the upcoming primary season, and the opening day of baseball season the following week.

But then, at 1:45 a.m., the announcer said, “In local news, the Washington Post is reporting in an article posted on its website that police now believe that the kidnapping of infants Joss Branson and Evan Lancaster may be linked to the unsolved killing of Mad Man Francones and several others at a local massage parlor earlier this month.”

Sunday wanted to put his fist through the windshield when the announcer introduced Detective Bree Stone, who said, “We believe that this has happened before, variations of it, anyway, in Albuquerque and in Tampa. We are looking for a couple, one white male, one white female, who may be posing as the parents of the babies. They may have a Vietnamese girl about twenty with them. If you see people matching this description, please call our tip line immediately.”

The story ended.

Furious that Cross and his wife had one-upped him, Sunday punched off the radio, climbed into the back, and shook Acadia awake. “It’s time.”

She groaned, nodded, and sat up against the van’s inner wall. She got a laptop, opened it, and called up Skype. She dialed a number. Sunday heard the ring in the Bluetooth device in his ear, answered, and said, “Test.”

Acadia gave him the thumbs-up, and he slipped from the van without further ado. Wearing black clothes and snug 5mm neoprene booties found in a dive shop over on S Street, he padded toward Cross’s house. It was windy out, and the air smelled like a storm was coming.

Sunday had once again gone through the virtual version of the detective’s home earlier in the day. As he moved into the narrow space between the real thing and the house next door, he felt supremely positive about his chances.

You stand apart from the moral universe, he told himself as he slowed and donned a black balaclava. The laws of God and man do not bind you, Thierry Mulch. You, my friend, are the perfect criminal.

Buzzing on that idea, he slipped around the back of the main house and moved to the addition. The studs of the new room were up. So were the trusses and roof boards. Visqueen sheeting had been wrapped and stapled all around the perimeter.

Sunday got a utility knife from one of his cargo pockets. With the wind blustering all around him, he slit open the plastic where it met the house. When he had a flap about three feet long, he let it go, saw the piece flapping in the wind. He got duct tape out of the backpack. He tore a piece roughly the same length as the cut and pressed it gently against the outer flap.

Then Sunday crawled through the slit onto plywood floors covered in sawdust that whirled into the breeze. He almost choked on the dust before he could draw the duct tape tight to the side of the house. Getting to his feet, he brushed off the sawdust, moved toward the space that used to be the kitchen.

It was pitch-dark, and despite his familiarity with the general layout, Sunday was finally forced to get out a small night-vision monocle he’d bought from the Cabela’s catalog. He flipped it on and pressed the electronic spyglass to his right eye.

Cross’s inner sanctum now appeared in a soft green glow, making it more like the virtual version of the home, which suited Sunday. In seconds he found the plastic sheeting that separated the construction space from the rest of the house. As quietly as he could, the writer separated the Velcro fastener and stepped into Cross’s dining room.

He scanned it, seeing the table and the portable double burner and fridge. A few more moments’ study and Sunday had his spots picked out. He climbed up onto the table, got out a listening bug, activated it, and fixed it to the chain above the modest chandelier. Then he set a tiny motion-activated fiber-optic bug, transmitter, and nine-volt lithium battery in a spider plant in the corner, fish-eye lens aimed toward the table.

“Strong signals from both,” Acadia said in his ear.

Sunday made a light clucking noise with his tongue to tell her he’d heard and headed to the front room, where he placed an audio bug behind the sofa and a second optical bug in the bristles of the fireplace broom, aimed up at the couch and chairs. Then he went to the staircase and climbed as slowly and methodically as he’d practiced, keeping his weight well to the edges of the risers so they would not squeak.

Reaching the landing right beside Cross’s bedroom, Sunday grinned insanely at his audacity. If he wanted, he could open the door and shoot them both, or shoot Cross and take Bree. Anything he wanted. Everything was possible in an existential world.

Be patient, he thought. This will be so much better if you let it all play out.

CHAPTER 57

Sunday climbed up the second staircase to the attic and Cross’s fortress of solitude. When he reached the detective’s private office his heart was pounding. Was this what Raskolnikov felt as he planned the pawnbroker’s death?

Of course he did, the writer thought giddily. This sensation is classic, timeless, and shared by everyone on the face of the earth. Humans love causing destruction, especially of another human, especially those who have climbed highest. We just like to see them fall. It was just the way things worked.

He crossed to the gable window and drew down the shade. Then he pocketed the night-vision scope, turned on the desk lamp, and gazed around the room with great pleasure, thinking, How does that old song go?

Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby?

For several minutes, he hummed the tune, letting his happy attention dance over the shelves and the walls, the photographs, the mementos, the framed accolades and diplomas, and comparing it all to the photograph Acadia’s young computer genius had used in the virtual house.

Incredibly close, he thought. A book moved here. A picture there. But all in all it’s the same. Cross doesn’t like change, especially not in his sanctuary.

A weakness, he decided, one that he should exploit somehow.

Sunday set that idea aside for the moment and set about bugging the office, putting a keystroke repeater between the cable connected to the desktop computer and the wall socket that fed the Internet. Anything that Cross typed would be recorded and a transcript would immediately be sent to an anonymous website that Acadia had set up.

On the credenza behind the desk, Sunday taped an audio bug to the underside of the leg of a picture frame that held a photograph of Dr. Alex and his bride on their wedding day.

What about the last optical bug? Sunday looked around and spotted the perfect place. On the top shelf of a bookshelf opposite the desk, he fitted the tiny camera, transmitter, and nine-volt lithium battery between and behind two books on homicide investigation.

When he was satisfied the bug would not be seen unless Cross took down one of the books — an unlikely move — he went to sit in the detective’s chair, smiled at the camera, and murmured, “Test.”

“Anyone ever tell you that you look great in black?” Acadia said. “The mask especially is an improvement.”

He shot her the finger, checked his watch. It was 2:27 a.m.

Sunday was about to call it good and leave when he noticed tacked to the wall behind the desk the article about the mass murders that formed the basis of his book, The Perfect Criminal. Unable to help himself, he thumbed through the pages, looking for the places where the journalist had quoted him.

To his surprise, he saw that they’d been underlined. Cross had written something in the margin. Sunday had to turn the pages to see it.

“Grandstander in general, but this seems smart,” it read. “What else does he know?”

Grandstander? I know more than you, Cross. So much more than you.

Biting his lower lip, he considered the article another moment and then forced his attention to roam and come to rest on a penholder made from a tin can wrapped in red construction paper and decorated with little green Christmas trees, a present from one of Cross’s children, no doubt.

The penholder stood on the desk next to the phone. It had been right there in the picture the Post ran of Cross’s office three years before. It had probably never moved. Sunday picked it up and put it at the far end of the credenza.

The move was small. It was subtle. But if Sunday was right, it would serve to rattle Cross at some level. At least, that was what he hoped.

“I’m leaving,” Sunday muttered to Acadia.

He got up from the chair, careful to position it exactly where he’d found it, retrieved the monocle, and flipped off the desk light. In green night vision he crossed to the door and eased it open without a sound. Creeping down the staircase, he reached the second-floor landing and slipped toward the lower stairs and Cross’s bedroom.

Sunday was right there, about to take that first step down the next flight, when he heard a latch lift. A door opened behind and to his left.

The writer froze and slowly looked over his shoulder, seeing little Ali Cross rubbing one eye.

CHAPTER 58

It was only a second, maybe two, but time seemed to stand still while the obvious option seized Sunday’s mind: Kill him! Now!

In two steps he could have the boy, break his neck, and—

Ali dropped his hand and staggered toward the bathroom door as if he’d never seen Sunday. He pushed the door open and went inside. A motion-detector night-light went on.

Sunday danced down three stairs and froze, hearing the sound of the boy peeing. Eight more stairs, and he reached the front hall and froze again. The toilet flushed.

Small feet moved. A door opened.

There was a pause and then the boy cried out, “Zombie! There’s a zombie in the house!”

Sunday fled on tiptoes down the hall, into the dining room, and through the Visqueen into the construction area. He paused to close the Velcro strips, then got out the pistol and headed toward the slit he’d cut in the plastic sheeting that surrounded the new addition.

He felt the duct tape come free and the wind rushed in, swirling sawdust all around him again.

Sunday got outside, and despite the fact that the boy was still yelling and now other voices were adding to the mix, he calmly and deliberately pressed the tape neatly over the cut against the wall, sealing the new addition off once more.

“Lights in Cross’s room and the grandmother’s,” Acadia said through the earpiece.

Sunday was already running. When he reached the front of Cross’s house, he muttered, “Good?”

“Stick to the shadows and go!” she said.

Out of the corner of the writer’s right eye he saw lights go on, figured they were over the staircase and lower hall. Cross or his wife was coming.

Sunday bolted down the short slope of the lawn and vaulted over the low fence, landing on the sidewalk. He ducked down and sprinted away from the house and was well down the street before crossing. Keeping in a crouch behind parked cars, he snuck back toward the van, seeing more lights come on in the first-floor windows of Cross’s house.

But the porch lights didn’t come on until Sunday had opened the van’s rear door, climbed inside, and scrambled forward next to Acadia to peer over the front seats and through the windshield. Cross came out on the porch, wearing a robe and carrying a flashlight, which he played about the front yard and over the Dumpster for a few moments before going back inside.

“Dining room bug!” Sunday said.

Acadia spun around, picked up the laptop, and turned up the volume.

At first they heard nothing but static, and then Cross’s voice became audible: “Anything?”

“I don’t know,” Bree said. “There are a few marks in the dust out in the addition that could be footprints. But nothing new.”

“I’ll go up and sleep with him,” Cross replied. “But I think we should be changing the rules about him watching so many zombie shows.”

“Agreed,” said Bree. “A rationing of zombie shows.”

Footsteps. The lights began to go out. Sunday collapsed against the far wall of the van, laughed, and said, “That’s how a perfect criminal does things.”

Acadia began to laugh, too, and crawled over to him hungrily.

CHAPTER 59

I felt someone shaking my shoulder, startled awake, and found my younger son’s earnest face about seven inches from my own.

“I know there was a zombie, Dad,” he said in a forceful whisper. “When I went in to take a pee, he was there, and when I came out he was gone.”

Sighing, I glanced at the clock: 7:30 a.m. Bree shifted in bed next to me, still fast asleep. Gesturing out the bedroom door with my finger, I slid out from under the sheets, grabbed my robe off the hook, and went out after Ali.

As soon as I shut the door, Ali insisted in a whisper, “He was right where you were standing. It wasn’t a dream or a nightmare like you said.”

I glanced down at the carpet where it met the staircase and saw bits of sawdust. We had all vowed to be careful to remove our shoes inside the house during the construction, but there was sawdust here and there all over the house. Some could easily have come in on someone’s pant legs, my pant legs.

Downstairs I could hear the rumor of Nana Mama talking to Jannie, but I made out nothing distinct other than my daughter’s using the phrase “never home.” Noticing a bit more sawdust here, a bit more sawdust there, I went down the stairs.

When I reached the lower landing, Ali was right behind me and said in a loud voice, “Dad, why don’t you believe me?”

Irritated by lack of sleep, I glared at him and said, “Keep it down. Bree is trying to sleep. And why don’t I believe you? Because you say you saw him when you were half asleep, and when you came out later, more awake, he was gone. Doesn’t that sound wrong to you?”

“No, that’s one of the reasons I know it was a zombie.”

A headache began to throb. Confused by this seven-year-old logic, I said, “What was the other reason?”

“I smelled him,” he said earnestly.

Rubbing at my temple, too tired to be having this conversation, I said, “So you smelled something dead in the house? Don’t you think I would have smelled something like that? Or Bree?”

He appeared puzzled, and I took that as a chance to give him a wink and head toward the dining room.

“No, he didn’t smell like something dead,” Ali called after me. “But it wasn’t a smell we have here in the house. It was like—”

“Quit while you’re ahead, son,” I said, and turned into the dining room to find Nana Mama pouring coffee from an old metal percolator and Jannie eating Raisin Bran with a sullen expression.

“You look happy this morning,” I said to her as I sat at the table and my grandmother handed me the cup of coffee.

“What do you care?” Jannie asked, not meeting my eyes.

“Okay?” I said. “What’s up?”

Jannie said nothing, just fumed.

“She’s upset and she has a right to be,” Nana Mama announced.

“Over?”

“Jannie made the varsity track team at Benjamin Banneker yesterday, the youngest in the school to do it, the only freshman, and the coach thinks she has a great future in the sport. She tried to wait up to tell you, but it was after midnight and you hadn’t come home.”

Once again I was reminded how much I was missing in the day-to-day life of my children, something I’d vowed to end too many times to count. Too many times I’d used the excuse of having to work, but this wasn’t one of them.

“I was with a guy who had a heart attack,” I said. “I had to get him to a hospital. That’s why I wasn’t home until after midnight.”

My daughter was unmoved. In fact, my answer seemed to make her even angrier. At last she turned to look at me with tears in her eyes and said, “Did you ever notice that there’s always someone who needs you more than we do, Dad?”

My mouth hung open, and then I bowed my head. “You could have called or texted me—”

Crying now, she got up and said, “I wanted to see your face, Dad. Can you understand that? Your face?”

“Oh, God, Jannie, I—”

She stormed away, pushed her brother aside where he was still standing in the door, and pounded up the stairs.

“Dad!” Ali complained, rubbing his shoulder.

I started to get up to follow Jannie but felt my grandmother’s hand on my elbow. “You leave her be a bit,” she said quietly. “Some of that’s just hormones.”

That served to churn my emotions even more. I’d always thought of Jannie as my little girl, but here she was the youngest in the school to make varsity track and now she was surging with hormones?

I put my head on my forearms, desperate to go back to sleep.

“What’s hormones, Nana?” Ali said.

A pause. “Ask your father.”

My son replied, “He doesn’t want to talk to me because he doesn’t believe I smelled a zombie last night.”

I raised my head, shot my grandmother an I-give-up look, and said, “I think I’ve given Jannie enough time.”

Nana Mama looked ready to argue but then shrugged and looked at Ali. “Cereal or eggs, young man?”

“Sunny side up,” Ali replied as I headed toward the hall, then called after me, “Dad, will you walk me to school?”

I checked my watch, realizing that if the killer and kidnapper kept to their ritualistic timetable, in less than thirty-six hours Cam Nguyen and those kids were going to die.

“Can’t, son,” I yelled. “I have a meeting.”

“Dad, please,” he insisted.

“Tomorrow,” I called back down the stairs. “No ifs, ands, or buts.”

Outside Jannie’s bedroom door, I raised my hand to knock but then heard Bree’s voice already inside.

“It’s my fault,” she was saying. “I could tell you wanted to tell your dad something, but I didn’t pick up on what a big thing you’d done.”

There was a long pause before Jannie said in a quiet tone, “I should have told you, but I wanted it to be a surprise. You know?”

“I do,” Bree said.

I knocked and opened the door, finding my wife hugging my daughter.

“Group hug for the greatest freshman quarter-mile runner in Washington, DC?” I asked, throwing my hands wide in a comical gesture.

Jannie smiled and nodded. I went over and wrapped my arms around her, saying, “We are very, very proud of you.”

She snuggled her head into my chest and said, “Promise me you’ll both come to my first meet? It’s Friday afternoon. They’re putting me in the invitational.”

“Good Friday,” Bree said. “Of course we’ll be there.”

I added, “Wild horses couldn’t drag us away.”

CHAPTER 60

Harold Barnes came out of recovery at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring around three that Tuesday afternoon. He’d had a stent placed earlier in the day, and the nurse I’d been in touch with said he’d probably be alert enough to work with a police artist that evening.

I kept looking at the clock in our office, knowing that every second that passed gave us less of a chance of finding Cam Nguyen, Joss Branson, and Evan Lancaster alive. Part of me wanted to go straight out to Holy Cross, pour cold water on the attorney’s face, and get him to work. But the more rational side of me wanted Barnes to have the clearest possible mind when he started describing what the man in the Redskins hoodie had looked like the night of the Superior Spa slayings. If Barnes was at all foggy, a defense attorney could shred him in court.

Bree called around six and in a stressed voice said, “What do we have now? Twenty-four hours?”

“Give or take,” I said.

“The Lancasters and the Bransons keep calling. I have nothing to tell them, nothing I can tell them. That’s the worst part. Knowing what I know about the timetable and having to keep it from them.”

I felt for her, I really did. I said, “Stay positive. I’m going to head out to Silver Spring in about an hour, watch Barnes work with the artist. I’ll call you the second we have something.”

At a quarter to seven, I was gathering up my things to head home when Captain Quintus came rushing down the hall with that expression on his face.

Sampson saw it, too, waved his mitt of a hand and said, “No. No more.”

“Four known dead at a high-class brothel in Georgetown,” Quintus said. “They were all shot at close range sometime late this afternoon. This could be your guy.”

“No way,” Sampson said.

I shook my head, too. “Our guy targets sleazy massage parlors once every two years.”

“Weren’t you the one who said he could be evolving?”

Sampson drove us to Georgetown. Along the way I texted Bree to let her know about the shootings, and that it was going to be another late night.

She called as we parked south of the scene off Wisconsin near Book Hill Park. Dusk was falling. Blue lights were flashing. A perimeter had already been set up. Luckily, the word had not yet spread to the media. There were only a couple of freelance television guys. But a crowd was forming.

Sampson got out, headed toward the crime scene while I took the call.

“Is this connected?” Bree asked.

“Quintus thinks so,” I replied.

“Should I come over?”

“I’ll let you know once I’ve taken a look.”

“You sound beat.”

“You know that candle that burns at both ends? I’m feeling like they’re almost one flame right about now.”

“I know the feeling,” she said. “But I promised myself I’d take a look for Ava before heading home.”

“Maybe that girl was right and Ava’s long gone for the Left Coast.”

“Well, I’m going to give it a try, anyway.”

“Another reason I love you,” I said, and hung up.

I skirted the growing mob of looky-lous and reporters by walking up the west side of the street until I reached the tape.

Showing the patrolwoman on duty my badge, I ducked under and started toward the apartment building. As I did, I happened to look back into the crowd, catching a glimpse of a man I almost recognized in a Georgetown sweatshirt. I slowed, trying to get a better look.

“Alex?”

I shot my attention to Sampson. The big man stood in the open doorway with that grim expression he gets when something has rocked his world.

“Bad?” I asked, moving toward him.

“Worse,” Sampson replied. “And you can forget that original body count.”

CHAPTER 61

Some crime scenes become etched in your mind, unerasable. I knew from the second I walked in that this was one of them. The smell hit you before the scene did, not citrus cleaner but Pine-Sol.

You could see from the front door down a hall past two closed doors on your left and the gourmet kitchen on your right into a luxuriously appointed main room. Blood was visible, streaked and spattered across the butter-colored carpet and up the sides of the mouse-gray drapes, couches, and chairs.

The room held four bodies. A sharply dressed man in his early twenties had been shot in the right eye at close range. He lay sprawled closest to the entry. The others were women, all beautiful, all in their late twenties, early thirties, all in lingerie and negligees. Two of them had died on the couch, shot through their heads and chests. The third was belly-down near a hallway. She’d been shot through the back of her neck. Amber splotches of Pine-Sol showed in and around the bodies. And there were 9mm casings scattered, too, ten of them by my count.

“There’s three more victims down the hall in the bedrooms,” Sampson said. “Two men, one woman.”

Before going back there, I spoke with a shaken Officer Andrea Sprouls, who’d been first on the scene. Sprouls said she’d responded to a noise complaint — loud music and people yelling — from the elderly woman who lived in the condo upstairs. When she arrived, the angry tenant buzzed her in. Sprouls had heard the throbbing hip-hop music immediately.

Officer Sprouls had pounded on the door of the apartment, had gotten no answer, and had tried the handle. The door had been unlocked.

“I called it in based on what I could see from the entryway,” said Sprouls. “Which was more than enough. I … I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“It’s hard every time,” I said sympathetically. “Touch anything?”

“Yes,” she said. “Besides the doorknob, I used my handkerchief to unplug the stereo and upstairs, to check the bedrooms. Then I backed out and waited.”

“You talk to the old woman?” Sampson asked.

The officer nodded. “Mrs. Fields. She didn’t think anybody lived here full-time because they were always so quiet. Which made the loud music strange.”

“Good job,” I said. “Officer, could you wait for the crime unit and show them everything you touched, including the outer door? They’ll need your boots, too.”

She nodded, looked relieved, and left. I followed Sampson down the hall toward the bedrooms. There were three bedrooms, all well appointed. The first one was empty. The second held two victims, a man and a woman, both naked. He lay on his side with a single wound to the side of his head, and she appeared to have tried to scramble forward, only to die from a bullet to the back of the skull. Their blood soaked the silk sheets, and the wooden floor was sticky with drying Pine-Sol.

The third bedroom held a single male corpse, crumpled on his side below a wide-open window. This victim’s feet were bare, as was his chest. He wore pants, but the zipper was down and the belt unbuckled. The killer had shot him three times, twice in the back, once through the throat.

A man’s shirt, tie, and jacket hung from a stand, shoes and socks below. A black lace negligee was draped over a rocking chair in the near right corner. A shred of black lace about the size of a thumbnail hung from the bottom of the raised window.

“Tell me what happened, Alex,” Sampson said.

I paused, reflecting on what I’d observed so far, then said, “He enters through the front door, so he’s expected, which means he contacted someone, a booker, maybe the dead guy in the main room, or one of the women out there.”

My partner nodded.

“So he comes armed, but not in a way that triggers alarm in whoever lets him in,” I continued. “A lineup of the available women, in this case three, is called. They file into the outer room. The killer stands near the stereo. He twists up the volume. The guy maybe tells him to turn it down. The killer shoots him at close range, then the two women nearest to him. He has to be quick and shoot across the room to get the third woman before she reaches the hallway.”

Sampson thought about that. “Why turn up the stereo?” he asked. “He probably had a suppressor.”

I shrugged. “Maybe he wanted to drown out any screams. In any case, given how the couple in the other room died, we can assume that all they heard was loud music until the killer came in. He shoots that john first, then the girl.”

Sampson gestured at the body in front of us. “And this?”

I chewed my lip a second, letting scenarios play out. “He hears something, or maybe the lady with him hears something, a scream. Whatever. They’re trying to get out through the window. Though she snags and tears her nightgown, she makes it. He doesn’t.”

“I could see that,” Sampson said. “But what if he comes in, shoots the guy trying to get out the window, and takes her like Cam Nguyen?”

“One or the other,” I said. “We’ll know more once Forensics gets in here.”

“I’ll start figuring out who’s who.”

“I’ll be along,” I said, and then stepped over the victim, stuck my head out the open window, and used my flashlight to look around.

There was a small backyard that featured a brick terrace, raised flower beds, brick walls about five feet high, and a few pieces of wrought-iron furniture. A low set of stairs climbed to French doors far to my right, probably behind those closed drapes in the main room.

The overgrown beds, the moldering leaves, dead branches on the brick, and an old Styrofoam coffee cup told me that those French doors and this terrace had rarely been used of late. I was about to draw my head back in when my flashlight beam caught something I’d missed on the first pass.

Below and to my left there was a cement stairwell littered with broken beer bottles. I leaned out farther, angled the flashlight, and saw liquid in the curve of some of the shards.

That didn’t make sense. Except for the matted leaves, there didn’t appear to be anything wet in the backyard, and it hadn’t rained in days. I wriggled out just a little farther and saw a steel door at the bottom of the stairs. A basement?

Wanting to get a closer look at those broken bottles and that liquid, I retreated, stepped back across the victim, and went out to the main room, where crime scene techs were beginning to photograph and otherwise document the scene. Sampson was in the kitchen, going through purses and wallets.

Rather than interrupt him, I went over to the drapes, drew them back, found the handles to the French doors. They were locked with a Master Lock that required a key, and I had no key.

Heading toward the kitchen, meaning to search the drawers and the pocketbooks for key rings, I noticed the closed doors in the hallway. The one nearest to me was a utility closet. The one nearest to the entry was locked.

Irritated, I looked up and saw the barest hint of brass sticking over the lip of the door sash. I smiled and reached up for the key. It fit the lock. It probably fit the locks on the French doors as well, but I opened the door nearest to the entry and found a steep staircase that dropped into darkness.

The air coming up from the basement was musty, a welcome break from the smell of Pine-Sol. The building was old, built back when people were smaller, and I had to duck while climbing down the stairs. And when I reached the dirty basement floor I still had to stoop to protect my head.

Slicing the flashlight beam around, I spotted eight pieces of new luggage lined up along the wall closer to me, stacks of old boxes, and garden tools covered in dust and cobwebs over by the furnace and oil tank. To the left of the furnace my flashlight found the other side of the steel door to the backyard.

I went toward it. When I passed the furnace I was digging in my pocket for the key, and my light was focused on the door. Finally getting the key out, I unlocked the door and pushed it open, getting a much better look at the broken beer bottles and the liquid in the curved shards and drying on the cement pad.

It was blood.

Not huge swaths of it like upstairs. More like spurts flaring in many directions, almost as if someone had run across the glass barefoot and …

I shined the flashlight down at the door’s threshold, seeing smeared blood there. Taking a step back, I spotted what I’d missed in my hurry to unlock the door: bloody footprints in the dust, leading—

Silk rustled against the floor before she screamed in what sounded like a Russian accent: “I kill you, motherfucker!”

I cocked the light up, catching a big, crazed woman in a black lace nightgown coming at me with a pitchfork.

CHAPTER 62

Maybe it was the fact that recently a homeless man had sprung from the darkness to hit me in the stomach with a baseball bat.

I don’t know.

But seeing the sharp tines of that pitchfork arc toward my face caused me to throw myself to the side and away from her. One tine caught my ear and cut me.

I hit the cement floor hard but rolled and clawed for the pistol in the shoulder holster beneath my jacket. I kept rolling, heard the steel tines ping off the cement right behind my back, and turned over once more, flashlight in one hand, service pistol in the other.

She had lifted the pitchfork high with both hands, ready to take another downward stab at me. But the light was blinding her.

“Police!” I shouted at her. “Drop your weapon or I’ll shoot!”

She looked deranged, said something in what sounded like Russian.

“Drop it!”

The young woman let go of the pitchfork. It clanged to the floor and she stood there trembling in shock and disbelief before she collapsed into a sobbing heap. That was when I saw her bare feet, all sliced up and draining blood.

It took a while for her to settle down and for paramedics to tend to her feet. In the ambulance on the way to Georgetown University Medical Center she gave me her initial statement in broken English.

Her name was Irina Popovitch. Twenty-four, she had been in the United States thirteen months on a work visa obtained through an agency in St. Petersburg, where she’d been assured she would find employment as a fashion model. They’d even paid her airfare.

Instead of glory on the fashion runways, she’d arrived to find that she had become the property of Russian organized crime figures who ran a string of high-class private brothels up and down the Eastern Seaboard: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, Tampa, and Miami.

Popovitch had been to every one of them. The Russians evidently believed in moving the girls around in order to keep the clients, who paid upwards of two thousand dollars a visit, coming back for more. She’d been with this team of four women about a month. They stayed in a guarded apartment in Falls Church and commuted to work every day under the watchful eye of Dimitri, the well-dressed dead guy in the main room.

Around six forty-five that evening, twenty minutes after the arrival of the man we’d found dead in the first bedroom, Popovitch had welcomed Martin, her third client of the day, a man she’d seen once about a week before. She said Martin had asked Dimitri for her specifically.

Martin liked to take off his clothes first and have her tease him in her lingerie before they got down to business. That was what she was doing, teasing, when she heard the apartment buzzer. She was still teasing Martin when the music in the outer room was turned up very, very loud.

“That does not to make sense for me,” Popovitch said, beginning to cry again. “Dimitri, he hate loud music and he hate hip-hop music. He say men with money enough for us are too old to like that shitty rap.”

Streaks of mascara ran down her cheeks like spiderwebs. I got a wipe and cleaned her face, said, “So, you heard the music and you went to look?”

Popovitch nodded, sniffling. “After a minute, yes, because, well, my client he says he cannot do things he wants to with such music playing so loud. I go to bedroom door, and I don’t know why, something says open just little bit.”

Her face grew taut and her gaze fixed.

“You saw him?” I said. “The killer?”

She bobbed her head, crying again. “He wears business suit and hat like Indiana Jones. He carries two guns with these things to make no sound.”

“Suppressors.”

She took a deep, wavering breath. “He disappears into Marina’s bedroom, and then I see down the hall my friend Lenka lying there in her blood.”

Popovitch said she spun around and hissed to her naked client, “Run! He kills everyone!” She heard a scream from the other bedroom and ran for the window. She got her head and shoulders out the window, realized she was going to fall headfirst onto brick, and hesitated. Martin pushed her out from behind. She fell and hit her head.

Stunned, she nevertheless heard the music grow louder, understood that the door of her bedroom had opened. She heard her client say, “No, please!”

Then she got up, trying to find another place to hide. She said Dimitri kept a key to the basement door in a fake rock and she figured if she could get in there she was safe.

“I no know the glass is there,” she said. “I run onto it, feel it cut, and want to yell, but I say nothing. I hear something back up at window, so I get down, cut myself more, but try to find key.”

“Lucky you did,” I said. “Why didn’t you come upstairs once you heard the music stop?”

“I hear walking on floors, I hear voices,” she said. “I no know who this is, where he is, so I stay put.”

The ambulance stopped and then backed up to the emergency room entrance at Georgetown University Medical Center.

“How well did you see him?” I asked.

She thought about that. “He will know of me?”

“If you mean can we protect you, yes,” I said firmly. “This is not Russia. Did you see him?”

Popovitch hesitated but then replied reluctantly, “Yes. Good in light from bathroom. But only from the side as he goes into Marina’s bedroom.”

The EMTs opened the rear doors to slide out her gurney. There was a female police officer waiting behind them.

“You come with me, Detective?” Irina asked in a pleading tone.

“The officer will stay with you,” I assured her. “They’ll fix your cuts, and I’m going to send an artist around to see you.”

“I see this on television. They draw what I see, yes?”

“Exactly,” I replied, and patted her on the shoulder. “You’re a brave woman, Irina, and we’re going to help you.”

She started to cry again as the EMTs took her into the emergency room. “I just want to live in the United States, you know?”

I stood there a moment, feeling her pain. But by the time the doors had shut behind her, I was thinking that with any luck, by late that night we would have sketches of the killer from two different angles, and then the hunt for a mass murderer would really begin.

I was immediately overcome with doubt. Would we have enough time? Who knew whether anyone would recognize the killer?

I sat on a bench outside the ER and phoned Bree. I just needed to hear her voice.

CHAPTER 63

For nearly two hours Bree had driven all over Southeast DC looking for Ava. She’d been everywhere she and Alex had gone in the past week, including the factory where the homeless guy said he’d seen Ava light Jane Doe on fire.

But there had been no sign of her.

Finally, around nine thirty, Bree pulled into a 7-Eleven parking lot on Eighth Street and rested her forehead on the steering wheel of her car. Maybe Ava is gone, she thought, feeling desperately sad at that idea.

She’d become very close to the girl during Ava’s all-too-brief time in the Cross household, almost as if Ava were the younger sister she’d never had. To think that she might never see Ava again, never know what became of her, well, that was …

She flashed on the poor Bransons and the Lancasters, grasping the depth and dimensions of their parental desperation and fear. Tears welled in Bree’s eyes at the thought that those kids were going to be drowned tomorrow, and for several seconds she gave in to the misery.

But almost immediately she got angry. No, she was not giving up. Not yet. Not on those babies. And not on Ava.

Bree got out, went into the convenience store in search of comfort food. She bought a Coke and a bag of crunchy kettle-fried Zapp’s Cajun-style potato chips, one of her few vices. Back in the car, she tore open the bag and snapped open the soda can. As she drank and crunched her way through the potato chips, she told herself she was going to have to think differently.

If Ava hadn’t left Washington altogether, it made growing sense to Bree that the girl would at least have left Southeast, where drug dealers were hunting her. And Yolanda had said that Ava had been using painkillers like oxy and Percocet.

Once you latched on to those kind of drugs, it was hard to let go, Bree reasoned. Which meant that if Ava was still in the city, she’d be looking for a fix.

Bree had never worked narcotics and neither had Alex, so she wasn’t totally up to speed on where people scored these days. But she had a friend from the academy who’d worked drugs and gangs the past three years. She texted the detective, asking her where dealers worked in the city besides Southeast.

She was finishing the last crunchy Zapp’s chip when her phone buzzed. She picked it up and read the reply. She drained her Coke can and started her car, hearing her phone ring. She clicked Answer and Speaker.

“Hey.” It was Alex. “Where are you?”

“Out for a drive. You?”

“Georgetown Medical Center.”

She felt her stomach knot. “You all right?”

“Just in need of a ride.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” Bree said. “I want to check one more place before I put Ava on the back burner.”

“I’ll be sitting outside the emergency room.”

CHAPTER 64

Forty minutes later we were just north of Adams Morgan in a transitional neighborhood where enclaves of eight-hundred-thousand-dollar townhomes give way to a rougher side of the nation’s capital. From Eighteenth Street we cruised east on Euclid, a narrow road with old redbrick row houses, oak trees, and older cars parked on both sides.

Ahead, near the intersection of Seventeenth, we could see the taillights of cars stopped in the road. This was where Bree’s pal in narcotics had said there was a thriving open-air drug market catering to everyone from US Senate aides in search of a mild thrill to hard-core junkies on a jones for their next fix. And sure enough, as we got closer I could see figures darting up to the windows of the stopped cars.

“Should we stop?” Bree asked as we came within sight of the old Euclid Market, now boarded up and for lease. Five or six young men in hoodies were leaning against the wall, drinking Colt 45, smoking cigarettes, and watching us. Another band of guys stood on the opposite side of the intersection, dealing with the buyers coming in from the north.

“Go on through,” I said, looking straight ahead. “We’re better off talking to them on foot.”

Bree nodded and we drove across Seventeenth, down the block past Mozart Place, and found a spot to park near the Children’s Health Center. It was a quarter to twelve when we walked back toward the intersection, carrying that snapshot of Ava, months old now. Part of me wondered whether this was a wild-goose—

“There she is, Alex!” Bree cried, and pointed south on Seventeenth, to the west side of the street.

Ava was walking toward the dealers along the wall of the empty store. She must have heard Bree’s voice, because she went on instant alert, scanned the area, and spotted me starting to trot in her direction.

She turned on a dime and exploded back the way she’d come.

“Ava!” I yelled, and took off after her.

“We just want to talk!” Bree shouted as she flanked Ava on the east sidewalk.

Ava sped up. She obviously knew this part of the city, because when she cleared the back of the Euclid Market, she darted west, jumping a low fence made of planks and dropping into an overgrown lot that had become a dump of sorts.

By the time I reached the lot, Ava had scrambled across two mattresses and was well up a mound of dirt and old construction debris. The abandoned lot sat at the corner of an alley that led back toward Eighteenth. That was where I thought she was heading. That was where Bree thought she was going, too, because I spotted my wife angling at the alleyway.

“Ava!” I shouted, trying to stop her.

But there was no stopping her, and she didn’t go for the alley. Like a spooked squirrel, she sprang onto a chain-link fence at the rear of the lot, climbed it, then grabbed the top of a wooden fence beyond. She hauled herself over both fences into darkness.

I scrambled up to the first fence and looked over the second. Ava was across the backyard of one row house and climbing into the next.

“We want to help you!” I yelled.

But she never slowed. We had lost her all over again.

“At least she’s here in DC,” I said as we trudged back to the car. “As long as she stays, we’ll find her again.”

Bree, however, was quiet and somber the entire way home.

“She doesn’t trust us anymore,” she said as we climbed up onto the porch.

“I know,” I said. “And I don’t know why.”

“Guilt?” Bree said, putting her key in the lock and opening the door into the front hallway.

It was past midnight and the house was dark. By my count we had about eighteen hours until Cam Nguyen and the babies would be killed.

I pulled out my phone to see if the police artists had e-mailed or texted me. They had not.

“Beer?” Bree asked.

“I don’t think I could sleep without one,” I said, turning on the light in the dining room.

She fished two beers out of the little fridge we were relying on during the remodel, opened one, and handed it to me.

The house phone rang. It surprised us not only because of the late hour but also because it seemed the only people who used the number anymore were telemarketers. I checked caller ID, didn’t recognize the number, and answered harshly, “Kind of late to be selling something, isn’t it?”

“It’s me.”

“Ava?” I said, punching on the speakerphone. “Where are you?”

“We’ll come right away,” Bree said anxiously.

“Please,” Ava said, choking with tears. “Don’t try to find me anymore. Please just forget me.”

“Ava.”

“It’s the only thing you can do for me now,” she said, and hung up.

CHAPTER 65

Haunted by thoughts of Ava as a wanted felon, haunted by the looming execution of Cam Nguyen and the babies, we barely slept. Bree finally dozed off around dawn. But I was wide-awake when our bedroom door creaked slowly open around a quarter to seven.

“Dad …” Ali began in a soft voice.

There was no use arguing because I wasn’t going to sleep as it was. I got up, holding my finger to my lips. Out in the hall I whispered, “Let me take a shower and I’ll walk you to school.”

He grinned at me and I saw that he’d lost another front tooth. I gestured at my own. “When did that happen?”

“Last night,” he said. “Nana Mama said it happened too late for the tooth fairy to come.”

“I heard she had strict rules,” I replied. “The tooth fairy, I mean.”

My youngest son nodded as if that were the most logical thing in the world and then went down the stairs toward the racket my grandmother was making as she whipped up breakfast.

Fifteen minutes later, after a quick shower, a shave, and a change of clothes, I turned the bathroom over to Bree and left our room. I stood on the landing at the top of the staircase, looking into Ali’s room and watching him pull on a sweatshirt. All I could think about was Joss Branson and Evan Lancaster and whether some insane couple was going to drown them today and strangle a prostitute for no reason that I could figure.

“C’mon, little man, I’ve gotta move,” I said.

“I’m moving!” Ali cried as he pushed his feet into his sneakers.

I shifted my attention to the staircase at the end of the hall that climbs to my attic office and frowned. Sawdust? I almost went over to see, but then Ali bounded out of his room, saying, “I’m ready!”

He threw his arms around my legs, smiled up at me, revealing his missing front teeth again, and said, “We gotta move!”

“That’s right,” I said, and hugged him to me.

We went out the front door with cries of “See you after school!” to Nana Mama. The builders were just arriving for the day, and I had a brief conversation with Billy DuPris, our contractor, who informed me that the plywood walls were going up around the addition today and the roof tomorrow.

“Dad, I’m going to be late,” Ali said.

“Gotta move,” I told DuPris, and we headed south toward Sojourner Truth, which is about seven blocks from my house.

As we walked, Ali held my hand, and my thoughts drifted to Ava and how she’d begged us to forget her. I noticed a panel van from a vacuum repair company parked on the opposite side of the street and thought someone in the neighborhood must have gotten into the business, because I’d seen it parked there before, sometime in the past—

“Dad?” Ali said.

“Huh?” I replied, looking down at him and realizing we’d gotten to the end of the block and had to cross the street. “Oh, sorry.”

“Dad, you think a lot,” he said as we walked on.

I smiled and said, “Sometimes too much.”

We walked in silence for the next five blocks. When we were almost to the school, Ali said, “I think a lot sometimes.”

I looked down at him in wonder. You never knew what my son was going to say next. “Sometimes?”

“Yeah.”

“You thinking now?”

“A lot.”

“What are you thinking about?”

He fell silent.

“Zombies?” I guessed.

His head bobbed and he looked up at me, said, “And how they smell.”

“Right. Not like something dead.”

“Well, I don’t know about all zombies. Just the one that was in the house.”

“How could I forget?”

My son stopped outside the fence that surrounds the school playground and said, “You don’t believe me, but I figured out what he smelled like, I mean who he smelled like.”

“And who was that?”

“That guy who came to my school and talked to us about his company,” Ali said, and curled up his nose. “He smelled weird, just like the zombie.”

That stopped me. “What was this man’s name?”

“I don’t remember,” Ali replied. “Just that he smelled weird. I could ask Mrs. Hutchins, though, and have her tell you.”

“You do that,” I said, and mussed up his hair. “Nana will be here when school gets out.”

CHAPTER 66

I watched my little boy until he’d joined a group of his buddies gathered at the tetherball pole and then hurried home, trying to figure out what I was going to do first. The vacuum cleaner van was gone and a dark-blue Chevy Tahoe with tinted windows and District plates had taken the parking spot.

The sound of nail guns greeted me as I climbed the stairs up to the house, only to find Nana Mama coming out the front door in a tizzy.

“If they’re going to do that all day, I’m leaving,” she announced.

“Smart idea.”

“Father Hannon asked for my help, anyway,” she replied. “Getting ready for Good Friday and Easter services.”

“Need a lift?”

“Absolutely not,” she said, and went on down the stairs.

In the dining room, Bree was eating cereal and looking morose.

“Thinking about those babies?” I asked, pouring myself coffee.

“And Cam Nguyen,” she replied, her face pinched. “I can’t stand feeling helpless like this, knowing that—”

My cell phone rang.

“Got your fax on?” Sampson asked by way of greeting.

“Think so. I can check.”

Sampson said we had artists’ sketches on the way: the profile view from Irina Popovitch, who’d witnessed the brothel slayings, and the head-on perspective that Harry Barnes had gotten of the killer leaving the Superior Spa.

“Quintus’s sending over the artists’ sketches any minute.”

“You seen them?”

“Not yet. When are you going in?”

“Straightaway,” I said, and hung up.

Already heading for the stairs and the fax machine in my attic office, I called to Bree, telling her about the sketches about to come in.

“Be right up,” she called after me.

I’d no sooner climbed to the attic and stepped into my office than I noticed something off. I couldn’t place it at first but then saw that a penholder Damon had made for me when he was seven had been moved from beside the phone on my desk to the far end of the credenza. In the ten years I’d had it, I’d never moved it more than an inch.

I looked down, saw a few tiny specks of sawdust, and then startled when my cell phone buzzed, alerting me to a text. It was from Ali’s teacher, Mrs. Hutchins. My head snapped back when I read it.

Our speaker last Thursday was Mr. Thierry Mulch.

Thierry Mulch? The same guy who’d sent me that letter with the—

The fax machine rang, connected, and started to print. I just stood there staring at the message and then stared at the penholder.

Over the sound of Bree coming up the stairs, I remembered Ali saying, “He smelled weird. Just like the zombie.”

Had someone, Thierry Mulch, been in my house the night before last? Had Mulch moved my penholder?

Bree knocked, entered, said, “Sketches?”

Preoccupied, I gestured toward the fax, unable to shake the idea that the crazy man who’d pointed out the connection to the earlier massage parlor killings had been to my son’s school, been close enough that Ali had smelled him, and then might have broken into my—

“This guy looks familiar,” Bree said, excited.

“What?” I said, looking over to see her studying two drawings laid out on my desk. “Where?”

“I can’t place him yet,” she said, then tapped on the drawings. “But I know I’ve seen him somewhere in the last week or so.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I swear.”

I came around the desk beside her, wondering if I was going to be looking at the face of Thierry Mulch. I saw the two perspectives of the killer, one in a hoodie looking right at me, and the other wearing a suit and in profile.

Both drawings showed a baby-faced character in his late twenties.

Immediately I had the sense that I’d seen him before as well, but I couldn’t place him at first. But then, in the blink of an eye, I saw him dressed differently and was assaulted by the images of several encounters I’d had with him recently, and felt no doubt.

“That creepy cold-blooded sonofabitch,” I whispered. “He was right there in front of us the entire time.”