Cross the Line

1

LEAVING THE GLUTEN-FREE Aisle at Whole Foods, Tom McGrath was thinking that the long, lithe woman in the teal-colored leggings and matching warm-up jacket in front of him had the posture of a ballerina.

In her early thirties, with high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, and jet-black hair pulled back in a ponytail, she was lovely to look at, exotic even. She seemed to sense his interest and glanced back at him.

In a light Eastern European accent, she said, “You walk like old fart, Tom.”

“I feel like one, Edita,” said McGrath, who was in his mid-forties and built like a wide receiver gone slightly to seed. “I’m stiff and sore where I’ve never even thought of being stiff and sore.”

“Too many years with the weights and no stretching,” Edita said, putting two bottles of kombucha tea in the cart McGrath was pushing.

“I always stretch. Just not like that. Ever. And not at five in the morning. I felt like my head was swelling up like a tick’s in some of those poses.”

Edita stopped in front of the organic produce, started grabbing the makings of a salad, said, “What is this? Tick?”

“You know, the little bug that gives you Lyme disease?”

She snorted. “There was nothing about first yoga class you liked?”

“I gotta admit, I loved being at the back of the room doing the cobra when all you fine yoga ladies were up front doing downward dog,” McGrath said.

Edita slapped him good-naturedly on the arm and said, “You did not.”

“I got out of rhythm and found I kind of liked being out of sync.”

She shook her head. “What is it with the men? After everything, still a mystery to me.”

McGrath sobered. “On that note, any luck finding what I asked you about the other day?”

Edita stiffened. “I told you this is not so easy, Tom.”

“Just do it, and be done with them.”

She didn’t look at him. “School? My car? My apartment?”

“I said I’d help you.”

Torn, Edita said, “They don’t give a shit, Tom. They-”

“Don’t worry. You’ve got the warrior McGrath on your side.”

“You are hopeless,” she said, softening and touching his cheek.

“Just when it comes to you,” he said.

Edita hesitated and then blew him a kiss before leading them to the checkout line. McGrath helped her unload the cart.

“Why do you look like the lonely puppy?” Edita asked him as the checker began ringing them through.

“I’m just used to a grocery cart with a little vice in it. Beer, at a minimum.”

She gestured to a bottle on the conveyor belt. “This is better for you.”

McGrath leaned forward and took it before the checker could.

“Cliffton Dry?”

“Think champagne made with organic apples, no grapes.”

“If you say so,” McGrath said skeptically.

As he loaded the food in cloth bags, Edita paid with cash from a little fanny pack around her waist. McGrath wondered what his childhood buddies would say about his hanging out with a woman who bought Cliffton Dry instead of a six-pack of Bud. They’d bust him mercilessly. But if apple bubbly was Edita’s thing, he’d give it a try.

He knew their relationship was a strange one, but he’d decided recently that Edita was, for the most part, good for him. She made him happy. And she made him feel young and think young, which was also a good thing.

They grabbed the shopping bags. He followed her out into a warm drizzle that made the sidewalk glisten. Traffic was already building in the southbound lane of Wisconsin Avenue even at that early-morning hour, but it was still light going north.

They turned to head south, Edita a step or two ahead of him.

A second later, McGrath caught red fire flashing in his peripheral vision, heard the boom-boom-boom of rapid pistol fire, and felt bullets hit him, one of them in his chest. It drove him to the ground.

Edita started to scream but caught the next two bullets and fell beside McGrath, the organic groceries tumbling across the bloody sidewalk.

For McGrath, everything became far away and slow motion. He fought for breath. It felt like he’d been bashed in the ribs with sledgehammers. He went on autopilot, fumbled for his cell phone in his gym-shorts pocket.

He punched in 911, watched dumbly as the unbroken bottle of Cliffton Dry rolled away from him down the sidewalk.

A dispatcher said, “District 911, how may I help you?”

“Officer down,” McGrath croaked. “Thirty-two hundred block of Wisconsin Avenue. I repeat, officer…”

He felt himself swoon and start to fade. He let go of the phone and struggled to look at Edita. She wasn’t moving, and her face looked blank and empty.

McGrath whispered to her before dying.

“Sorry, Ed,” he said. “For all of it.”

2

LIGHT RAIN HAD begun to fall when John Sampson and I climbed out of our unmarked car on Rock Creek Parkway south of Mass. Avenue. It was only six thirty a.m. and the humidity was already approaching steam-room levels.

The left lane was closed off for a medical examiner’s van and two DC Metro patrol cars and officers. Morning traffic was going to be horrendous.

The younger of the two officers looked surprised to see us. “Homicide? This guy kissed a tree going ninety.”

“Reports of gunfire before the crash,” I said.

Sampson asked, “We have an ID on the victim?”

“Car’s registered to Aaron Peters. Bethesda.”

“Thanks, Officer,” I said, and we headed to the car.

The Maserati was upside down with the passenger side wrapped around the base of a large Japanese maple tree. The sports car was heavily charred and all the windows were blown out.

The ME, a plump, brassy, extremely competent redhead named Nancy Ann Barton, knelt by the driver’s side of the Maserati and peered in with a Maglite.

“What do you think, Nancy?” I asked.

Barton looked up and saw me, then stood and said, “Hi to you too, Alex.”

“Hi, Nancy,” I said. “Anything?”

“No ‘Good morning’? No ‘Top of the day to you’?”

I cracked a smile, said, “Top of the morning, Doc.”

“That’s better,” Barton said and laughed. “Sorry, Alex, I’m on an old-school kick. Trying to bring congeniality back to humankind, or at least the humankind around me.”

“How’s that working for you, Nancy?” Sampson asked.

“Pretty well, actually,” she said.

“This an accident?” I asked.

“Maybe,” she said, and she squatted down again.

I knelt next to Barton, and she shone the light into the Maserati, showing me the driver. He was upside down, hanging from a harness, wearing a charred Bell helmet with a partially melted visor, a neck brace, and a Nomex fire suit, the kind Grand Prix drivers used, right down to the gloves and booties.

“The suit worked,” Barton said. “No burn-through that I can see. And the air bag gave him a lot of protection. So did the internal roll bar.”

“Aaron Peters,” Sampson said, looking at his smartphone. “Former Senate staffer, big-time oil lobbyist. No wonder he could afford a Maserati.”

Standing up to dig out my own flashlight, I said, “Enemies?”

“I would think by definition a big-time oil lobbyist would have enemies.”

“Probably so,” I said, squatting back down. I flipped my light on and probed around the interior. My beam came to rest on a black metal box mounted on the dashboard.

“What is it?” the ME asked.

“If I’m right, that’s a camera inside that box, probably a GoPro. I think he may have been filming his run.”

“Would something like that survive a fire?” Sampson asked.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” I said, then I trained the beam on the driver’s blackened helmet. I noticed depressions in the upper part of it that didn’t look right.

“You’ve photographed it?” I asked.

Barton nodded. I reached up and released the buckle of the chinstrap. Gently but firmly, I tugged on the helmet, revealing Aaron Peters. His Nomex balaclava looked untouched by the fire, but it was blood-soaked from two through-and-through bullet wounds to Peters’s head.

“Not an accident,” I said.

“Impossible,” Barton agreed.

My phone rang. I was going to ignore it but then saw it was chief of police Bryan Michaels.

“Chief,” I said.

“Where are you?”

“Rock Creek,” I said. “Murder of an oil lobbyist in his car.”

“Drop it and get to Georgetown. One of our own is down, part of a double drive-by, and I want our best on the scene.”

I stood, motioned Sampson back toward the car, and broke into a trot, saying, “Who is it, Chief?”

He told me. My stomach turned over hard.

3

SAMPSON PUT THE bubble up on the roof and hit the siren, and we sped toward Georgetown. I noticed the light rain had finally stopped as I was punching in the number for Detective Bree Stone, my wife. Bree was testifying in court that day and I hoped she’d-

Bree answered, said, “Rock Creek an accident?”

“Murder,” I said. “But FYI, Michaels just moved us to Georgetown. Two shooting victims. I’m afraid one is Tommy McGrath.”

There was a long stunned silence before Bree choked out, “Oh Jesus, Alex. I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Exactly my response. Anything I should know?”

“About Tommy? I’m not sure. He and his wife separated a while back.”

“Reasons?”

“We didn’t talk about personal stuff, but I could tell he was quietly upset about it. And about the fact that the new job kept him from working cases. He said he missed the streets.”

“I’ll keep it all in mind, and I’ll text you when we get on the scene.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I’m going to have a cry.”

She hung up, and my stomach felt sour all over again because I knew how much Tom McGrath meant to her. McGrath had been DC Metro’s controversial chief of detectives and our boss. But back when Bree was a junior-grade detective, and McGrath was still working cases, he had taken her under his wing and guided her, even served as her partner for a brief time. He’d mentored her as she rose in the ranks and was the one who’d recommended that she move to the major cases.

As the COD, McGrath was a competent and fair administrator, I thought. He could be tough, and he played politics at times, the kind of cop who made enemies. One of his former partners even thought McGrath had turned on him, planting evidence and driving him from the force.

As a detective, though, Tommy had keen instincts. He was also genuinely curious about people and a good listener, and as I drove across the city toward his death scene, I realized I would miss him a great deal.

There were patrol cars with flashing blue lights, uniformed cops, and barriers closing off the 3200 block of Wisconsin Avenue. We parked down the street, and I took a moment to steel myself for what I was about to see and do.

I’ve spent years as an investigator with the FBI and with DC Metro, so I have been to hundreds of murder scenes, and I usually go to work inside a suit of psychological armor that keeps me at an emotional distance from all victims. But this was Tommy McGrath. One of the brethren was down, one of the good guys, and that put chinks in my armor. It made this all personal, and when I’m dealing with murder, I don’t like it to be personal. Rational, observant, and analytical-that’s my style.

I got out of the unmarked car trying to be that detached observer. When I reached the bloody scene, however, and saw McGrath in his workout shorts and T-shirt lying next to a beautiful woman in yoga gear, both of them dead of multiple gunshot wounds, the cold, rational Alex Cross took a hike. This was personal.

“I liked McGrath,” Sampson said, his face as hard and dark as ebony. “A lot.”

A patrolman approached and laid out for us what seemed to have happened based on the initial statements he’d taken from witnesses. They said the car had come rolling toward McGrath and the woman. There were shots, three and then two. On that, all the witnesses agreed.

McGrath was hit first, then Jane Doe. Chaos ensued, as it always does when there’s gunfire involved, witnesses diving out of the way, trying to find cover or safety, which is entirely understandable. Folks have the right to survive, but fear and panic make my job harder, because I have to be sure those emotions don’t cloud their judgments or taint their memories.

The witnesses were waiting for us inside the Whole Foods, but before I went in, I walked the perimeter of the scene, seeing the organic goods strewn about the bodies: fresh produce, beeswax candles, and two broken bottles of kombucha tea.

Lying in the gutter about ten feet from the corpses was a bottle of Cliffton Dry, some kind of bubbly apple wine, which I thought was odd.

“What are you seeing, Alex?” Sampson asked.

I shrugged, said, “I thought Tommy McGrath always drank Bud.”

“So it’s her bottle. They together?”

“Bree said McGrath and his wife were separated.”

“Divorce is always a possible motive in a murder,” Sampson said. “But this looks gangland to me.”

“Does it?” I asked. “This wasn’t the normal spray-a-hail-of-bullets-and-hope-you-hit-something killing. This was precision shooting. Five shots fired. Five hits.”

We looked over at the woman, who lay on her side at an awkward angle.

I noticed the fanny pack, put on gloves, and knelt down to open it.

4

IN ADDITION TO three hundred dollars in fifties, the fanny pack contained a student ID card from American University’s law school and a District of Columbia driver’s license, both in the name of Edita Kravic. She was three days shy of her thirty-second birthday and didn’t live far from the Whole Foods store.

I also found two business cards emblazoned with the phoenix club-the new normal, whatever that meant; according to the cards, Edita Kravic worked there as a Level 2 Certified Coach, whatever that meant. Below the club’s name was a Virginia phone number and an address in Vienna, near Wolf Trap.

I stood up, thinking, Who were you, Edita Kravic? And what were you to Chief of Detectives McGrath?

Sampson and I went inside the Whole Foods and found the shaken witnesses. Three of them said they’d seen the entire event.

Melanie Winters, a checkout clerk, said the victims had just been in the store, laughing and joking with each other. Winters said they’d seemed good together, Tom and Edita Kravic, like they had chemistry, although McGrath had complained in the checkout line about her not letting him buy beer.

I glanced at Sampson. “What did I say?”

As McGrath and Kravic left, the checker said, she started moving empty produce boxes by the front window. She was looking outside when a dark blue sedan rolled up with the windows down and bullets started flying. Winters dived to the floor and stayed there until the gunfire stopped and the car squealed away.

“How many people in the car?” Sampson said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just saw these flashes and heard the shots.”

“Where were the flashes?” I said. “Front seat or back or both?”

She winced. “I’m not sure.”

Lucas Phelps, a senior at Georgetown, had been outside, about half a block south of the store. Phelps had been listening to a podcast over his Beats headphones when the shooting started. The student thought it was part of the program he was listening to until he saw McGrath and Kravic fall.

“What kind of car?” Sampson said.

“I’m not good at that,” Phelps said. “A four-door car? Like, dark-colored?”

“How many people in the car?” I asked.

“Two, I think,” Phelps said. “From my angle, it was kind of hard to say.”

“You see flashes from the shots?”

“Sure, now that you mention it.”

“Where were the flashes coming from? Front seat, back, or both?”

“Front,” he said. “I think. It all happened so fast.”

The third witness, Craig Brooks, proved once again that triangulation is often the best way to the truth. The seventy-two-year-old retired U.S. Treasury agent had been coming down the sidewalk from the north, heading to Whole Foods to get some “gluten-free crap” his wife wanted, when the shooting started.

“There were three people in that car, and one shooting out the window from the front seat, a Remington 1911 S, forty-five caliber.”

“How do you know that?” Sampson asked.

“I saw the gun, and there’s a fresh forty-five casing out there by the curb.”

I followed his gesture and nodded. “You touch it?”

“Not stupid.”

“Appreciate it. Make of the car? Model? License plate?”

“It was a GM of some sort, four-door, dark-colored but flat, no finish, like primer. They’d stripped it of any identifiers and covered the license plate too.”

“Male? Female?”

“They were all wearing ball caps and black masks,” Brooks said. “I got a clear look at the shooter’s cap, though, as they went by me. Red with the Redskins logo on it.”

We took phone numbers for possible follow-up, and I walked back outside. By then a team of criminalists had arrived and were documenting the scene.

I stopped to look at it all again now that we’d been given three versions of how the shooting had gone down. I could see it unfold in my mind.

“The shooter was more than good-he was trained,” I said.

“Gimme that again,” Sampson said.

“He’d have to be a pro to be able to shoot from a vehicle going fifteen to twenty miles an hour and still hit moving targets five out of five times.”

“The difficulty depends on the angle, doesn’t it?” Sampson said. “Where he started shooting and when, but I agree-he practiced for this scenario.”

“And McGrath was the primary target. The shooter put three rounds in him before turning the gun on Edita Kravic.”

One of the crime scene guys was taking photos, a dull aluminum lamp throwing light on the victims. I’d looked at McGrath in death at least six times now. Every time it got a little easier. Every time we grew apart.

5

WORD GETS OUT fast when a cop is killed. Wisconsin Avenue was a media circus by the time Sampson and I slipped out through an alleyway behind Whole Foods. We didn’t want to talk to reporters until we had something to report.

The second we were back in the squad car and Sampson had us moving, I called Chief Michaels and filled him in.

“How many men do you need?” he asked when I’d finished.

I thought about that, said, “Four, sir, including Detective Stone. She and McGrath were friends. She’ll want in.”

“Done. I’ll have them assembled ASAP.”

“Give us an hour,” I said. “We’re swinging by McGrath’s before we head in to the office.”

“No stone unturned, Alex,” Michaels said.

“No, sir.”

“You’ll have to look at Terry Howard.”

“I heard Terry’s in rough shape.”

“Just the same. It will come up, and we have to say we’ve looked at him.”

“I’ll do it myself.”

Michaels hung up. I knew the pressure on him to find the killer was already building. When a fellow cop is murdered, you want swift justice. You want to show solidarity, solve the case quick, and put someone in cuffs and on trial.

Then again, you don’t want to leap to conclusions before you’ve collected all the evidence. With six detectives now assigned to the case, we’d be gathering facts fast and furious for the next few days. We’d be working around the clock.

I closed my eyes and took several deep, long breaths, preparing for the hard road that lay ahead and for the separation from my family.

The prospect of hard work didn’t bother me; being apart from my family did. I’m better when I have a home life. I’m a more grounded person. I’m also a saner cop.

The car slowed. Sampson said, “We’re here, Alex.”

McGrath’s place was a first-floor apartment in a converted row house near Dupont Circle. We got out the key our dead boss had been carrying and opened his front door.

It swung open on oiled hinges, revealing a sparsely furnished space with two recliners, a curved-screen TV on the wall, and a stack of cardboard packing boxes in the corner. It looked like McGrath had not yet fully moved in.

Before I could say that to Sampson, something crashed deep inside the apartment, and we heard someone running.

I drew my weapon, hissed, “Sampson, around the back.”

My partner pivoted and ran, looking for a way into the alley. I went through McGrath’s place, gun up, moving quickly, taking note of how few possessions the chief of detectives had had.

I cleared the floor fast, went to the kitchen, and found a window open. I stuck my head out. Sampson flashed by me. I twisted my head, saw he was chasing a male Caucasian in jeans, a black AC/DC T-shirt, and a black golf hat, brim pulled down over a wild shock of spiky blond hair.

He was a powerful runner; an athlete, certainly. He was carrying a black knapsack, but he still bounded more than ran, chewing up ground, putting a growing distance between himself and my partner. I spun around, raced back through McGrath’s house and out the front door, jumped into the car, threw on the bubble and siren, and pulled out, trying to cut the runner off.

I came flying around the corner of Twenty-Fifth and I Streets and caught a glimpse of his back as he dodged a pedestrian and vanished at the end of the block. It was astonishing how fast he’d covered that distance. Sampson was only just coming out of the alley, at least a hundred yards behind the guy.

I felt like flooring it and roaring after him, but I knew we were already beaten; I Street jogs at the end of the block, becomes Twenty-Sixth Street, and dead-ends at Rock Creek Park, which had enough vegetation and terrain changes to swallow up any man who had that kind of wheels. Oddly, we weren’t far as the crow flies from where the Maserati had crashed and exploded earlier in the day.

I turned off the siren, stopped next to Sampson, and got out.

“You okay, John?”

My partner was bent over, hands on his knees, drenched in sweat and gasping for air.

“Did you see that guy go?” he croaked. “Like the Flash or something.”

“Impressive,” I said. “Question is, what was the Flash doing in Tommy McGrath’s place?”

6

TWO HOURS LATER, Detective Bree Stone drove into the tony West Langley neighborhood of McLean, Virginia.

“What do you think Tommy had on his laptop?” asked Detective Kurt Muller, the older man sitting beside her in the passenger seat. He was working the ends of his silver mustache so they held in tight curls.

“Something that got the laptop stolen and maybe also got him killed,” Bree said, thinking back to the meeting they’d just left and the briefing they’d gotten from Alex and Sampson.

There was a lot to absorb, but they were sure that the fast-running burglar had taken McGrath’s computer and probably his backup drive from his home office. They had DC Metro’s IT experts going over McGrath’s work files, and there was a detective looking at every security-camera feed within six blocks of the Whole Foods. Another top investigator was searching through all of McGrath’s old cases to see if he had done anything that might warrant assassination.

Alex had asked Bree and Muller to pay a visit to McGrath’s estranged wife at her home in McLean, Virginia. Alex and Sampson would focus on Edita Kravic and Terry Howard.

“Heard Howard’s sick,” Muller said.

“Hate to think that he was involved,” Bree said as they drove.

“Me too,” Muller said. “He used to be a friend of mine.”

She slowed, spotted the mailbox with the address she was looking for, and turned into the long driveway of a sprawling Cape house with gray cedar-shake siding and a lushly landscaped yard.

“This must have cost a small fortune,” Bree said.

“One point seven five million,” Muller said. “I checked before we left.”

“How does a chief of detectives afford a place like this?”

“Wife’s money,” Muller said. “She came with a trust fund.”

That had Bree chewing the inside of her cheek. Parking, she said, “How come I didn’t know that?”

“I take it you were never invited out here for dinner or a barbecue.”

“I’ve never been here before in my life.”

“I have,” Muller said, and he climbed out.

Bree followed him as he crossed the driveway. When they were twenty feet shy of the door, it opened, and a tall, distinguished-looking man in a well-cut suit exited carrying a briefcase. The man stopped when he saw them.

A woman in her forties appeared in the doorway behind him. She had sandy-blond hair, a tennis-honed body, puffy red eyes, and a tortured expression on her face.

“Kurt,” she called to Muller in a wavering voice. “I’m crushed to see you like this.”

Muller nodded, said, “I am too, Vivian.”

The well-dressed man half turned toward her.

Vivian McGrath gestured to the man absently. “Kurt, this is Lance Gordon, my attorney. Detective Muller used to work for Tommy, Lance.”

“We both did,” Bree said.

“I’m sorry for your loss, all of you,” Gordon said. “Vivian, call anytime if you have questions.”

“I appreciate it, Lance,” she said. “Really.”

The lawyer pursed his lips and nodded before walking past Muller and Bree. When he went by, Bree noticed an oddly familiar odor trailing him. Weirdly sweet. But she couldn’t place it.

Bree and Muller went to McGrath’s widow. Muller said, “Got to be hard, Viv. Even after everything.”

Bree forgot about Gordon and focused on Vivian as tears leaked from her eyes and she swallowed against emotion.

“It’s true,” she choked out. “I’d already lost him. But this. It’s just…”

Muller patted her shoulder awkwardly, said, “Viv, this is Detective Bree Stone. We’re part of a task force working on Tom’s case. Alex Cross is leading.”

Vivian smiled weakly. “Nothing but the best for Tommy.”

Then she put a well-manicured hand on Bree’s arm and said, “He talked of you often, Detective Stone. Please come inside. Can I offer you coffee?”

“Please,” Bree said, and Muller nodded.

She led them through rooms that could have been featured in Architectural Digest and ushered them into a kitchen with exposed-beam ceilings, cream-colored cabinets, and a maroon stove.

Gleaming copper pots hung over a prep station. Every surface was spotless. Every knife and utensil looked in its place, so much so that it felt sterile to Bree. There were no pictures taped to the fridge, no stacks of mail on the counters, and no dishes in the sink.

“Sit, sit,” Vivian said, gesturing to stools at a breakfast counter. “What do you want to know? How can I help?”

“We understand you and Tom were getting divorced,” Bree said.

“We’d separated, yes.” She sniffled. “What would you like? Espresso? A latte?”

Bree said, “Espresso would be fine.”

“Latte,” Muller said, and he touched his mustache.

In one corner of the kitchen was an espresso maker that Bree figured would have set her back a month’s pay. Vivian pushed a button, and the machine steamed and hissed and spilled black coffee that smelled like heaven.

When Vivian set the cup and saucer down in front of her, Bree said, “The separation.”

McGrath’s widow hardened, crossed her arms, and said, “What about it?”

“Tom’s idea?” Muller asked. “Or yours?”

“Tom never told you?”

“Assume we know nothing,” Bree said.

“I suggested the separation, but it was because of Tom,” she said forlornly. “I’d always believed we could make it work. He was so unlike anyone who ran in my social circles, but we worked for seventeen years, and then, for reasons I’m still trying to figure out, we just didn’t anymore.”

She broke down sobbing.

7

BREE TOOK A breath, feeling more frustrated than sympathetic.

When Vivian got control again, Bree said, “Can you be more specific about how it wasn’t working?”

She wiped at her eyes with a tissue, glanced at Muller, and then said, “He stopped touching me, if you must know. And it felt like he had secrets. He kept a second phone. Spent money he didn’t have. I figured he had a mistress.”

Bree didn’t comment on that.

“Did Tommy have a mistress?” Muller asked.

“I don’t know,” Vivian said. “I think so. You tell me. I never hired anyone to look, I mean. But I could see Tom was unhappy with me, so three months ago I asked him if he still loved me. He wouldn’t answer the question. I asked him if he wanted a separation, a divorce, and he said that was up to me.”

“If you wanted to stay with him, why did you suggest the separation?” Bree asked.

Vivian wiped at her eyes, pulled herself up straight, and gazed at Bree evenly. “I thought it might knock some sense into him, make him come back to me.”

“I gather he didn’t,” Muller said.

She looked humiliated. “No.”

“Had you filed for divorce?” Bree asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I still loved him,” she said. “I hoped…”

“Must have hurt,” Bree said.

“It hurt, it demeaned, and it saddened me more than you can imagine, Detective Stone,” she said with a stricken expression.

“And angered you?”

Vivian looked right at Bree. “Of course.”

“Enough to kill him?” Muller asked.

“Never. We used to watch those television shows like Forty-Eight Hours and Dateline where there’s always one spouse killing another. We always said we couldn’t understand that; if the marriage wasn’t working, you left. Found a way to be friends or not and just moved on.”

“How did your marriage work financially?” Bree asked.

“There was a prenup, if that’s what you’re asking,” Vivian said. “The day we married, seventeen years ago, Tom knew he’d get nothing if we divorced.”

“He angry about that?” Muller asked.

Vivian snorted. “Quite the opposite. Tommy was fine with the agreement-proud of it, in fact. He said it proved he’d married me for…”

Tears welled in her eyes again. She took a deep breath. “He liked the personal independence it represented, and the self-reliance.”

“How did your lives mix?” Bree asked. “I mean, you’re out here, leading a country-club life, while Tom was in the city doing a dangerous job.”

Vivian’s face went through a slow flurry of emotions-resistance, then consideration, and finally acceptance. Her shoulders slumped.

“The more I think about it, Detective Stone, the more I see that Tom and I did live in separate worlds, right from the beginning. Here we had a safe, fairy-tale life, but out there in DC, on the streets-well, Tom liked to fight dragons. Being a cop made him feel alive, and all I could feel when I went into the city with him was fear.”

Muller said, “He was killed with a younger woman.”

“I heard that,” she said. “Who was she?”

“Edita Kravic, early thirties, studying law at American University, damned attractive.”

Vivian took the news that the woman her estranged husband had died with was in her early thirties and damned attractive like a one-two punch.

“Was she his mistress?” she asked in a strained voice.

“We don’t know,” Bree said. “He ever mention that name to you?”

“Never.”

“Just for the record, Mrs. McGrath,” Bree said, “where were you at seven twenty this morning?”

Vivian looked at her incredulously. “You honestly think I could kill Tom?”

“We have to ask, Viv,” Muller said. “It’s part of the job. You know the drill.”

“I was probably taking a shower.”

“Anyone see you?”

“I should hope not. I’ve been living alone.”

“Who was the first person you saw this morning?”

“Catalina Monroe. My massage therapist. I had an eight o’clock.”

“You have a way we can contact her?”

McGrath’s widow rattled off a phone number, then said, “You know who you should be looking at?”

“Tell us,” Bree said.

“Terry Howard,” Vivian said with spite in her voice. “He threatened Tom on multiple occasions.”

“Cross is working that angle,” Muller said.

“Good. Good. I was afraid it might be… well, you know.”

“Are you planning a memorial?” Bree asked.

Vivian seemed more confused than ever; she looked down and whispered, “Is that something I’m supposed to do? I don’t know if Tommy would even want me to be involved.”

Muller said, “I suppose you make that decision by first taking a moment to honor the good times you had with Tommy, figure out what they meant to you. If Tommy’s love during those years was enough, you do it, you see him buried. And if those years of love weren’t enough, you don’t.”

“If you decide not to do anything, I’ll take care of the arrangements,” Bree said.

McGrath’s widow looked around as if in a daze, her chin trembling, and then said, “No, Kurt’s right. Honoring our love and burying the husband Tommy was is the least I can do.”

The dam burst, and she wept. “It’s the only thing I can do for him now.”

8

EDITA KRAVIC’S APARTMENT in Columbia Heights looked like it had been decorated right out of the Sundance Catalog-high-end furniture, nicely framed prints on the wall-and given the place’s location, the rent had to be two, maybe three thousand a month.

That was strange, I thought, because law students were usually starving. Edita evidently did quite well with the whole Level 2 Certified Coach thing.

The kitchen was stocked with culinary gadgetry, and there were fine wines chilling in the fridge along with gourmet cheeses and spreads. Nice crystal in the cabinets, but no photographs anywhere in the living area, nothing that suggested Edita Kravic’s private life, nothing that could tell us more about her.

The apartment had three bedrooms. The smallest one had been turned into an office. There was a business phone with several lines and an open laptop on the desk.

“I’ll look here,” I said.

“I’ll take the bedrooms,” Sampson said.

Just as in the living area, there was nothing personal on the shelves or the walls. Just a basic desk, a backless chair, and two wooden filing cabinets. I tugged on the drawers of one and found them locked. The top drawer of the other slid open, revealing standard office supplies.

The next drawer down was full of files. I looked through them, found out that she owned a late-model Audi A5 and that she vacationed in the Caymans-a lot, as in three times in the prior year. But there was nothing that gave me a clear idea of how she’d paid for it all.

I was thinking she’d have to have an income of over a hundred grand to live like this. Did Level 2 Certified Coaches make that kind of money? If so, maybe I was in the wrong business.

I thought about breaking the lock on the first cabinet but decided to take a look at the computer first. To my surprise, when I ran my finger across the touchpad, the screen lit right up and showed me the desktop. Several different applications were running.

One was Edita’s law school e-mail account. I sat down and scanned through the e-mails, seeing nothing from Tom McGrath. Most of the messages were to and from professors and classmates. One classmate, JohnnyBoy5, had sent six e-mails to her in the eighteen hours preceding her murder.

Really? read one sent around ten thirty the previous night. Standing me up again? This was your meet, remember?

I did a search of her entire in-box, looking for all e-mails from JohnnyBoy5. There were more than a hundred, going back eighteen months. I rearranged them so they were in chronological order and read a tale of growing obsession.

JohnnyBoy5 had evidently been smitten by Edita Kravic from the get-go, and he was not shy about saying so. Though she seemed to flirt with him at times, for the most part, she did nothing to encourage him.

For the first year, she’d managed to keep JohnnyBoy5 at bay. But after that, his tone became irate, and then depressed.

I don’t know what’s come over me, JohnnyBoy5 had written back in March. I’m terrified that I won’t see you again, Edita. I know it’s irrational, but there it is. I can’t shake this dark, dark feeling that I’m going to lose you somehow, that something bad is going to happen to you, that you’re never going to see the real me, and that you’ll never understand how much I truly care about you.

Edita wrote back, This is no good, Johnny. Go away or I get a restraining order. A third-year told me how to do it.

For three weeks after that, there was no contact between Ms. Kravic and JohnnyBoy5. Then he e-mailed her again.

I know what you are, Edita, what you do out of class.

No return e-mail. No follow-up for months. Three weeks before Edita was murdered, however, JohnnyBoy5 wrote her again.

Who is he? The big meathead who threatened to break my face? Really? This is how things are between us? What if I just posted on Facebook about you and the life you don’t want anyone to know about? Will that do it?

Two weeks passed.

Sorry for the rants, JohnnyBoy5 wrote. God, I read back through some of it and that wasn’t me, Edita. The doctor put me on this asthma medicine called montelukast and I had a rare but bad side effect, which put me in a dark way. But I’ve returned to the living! Study group’s starting up again. Love to have you back, of course. No worries about anything else. Everyone’s got skeletons in the closet, am I right?

Edita did not respond. Every day after that, leading up to the day before her death, JohnnyBoy5 wrote-chidingly, in worry, in despair, and in anger.

In so many ways, meeting you was the ruin of my life, he’d written just two days before she died. Everything I built was reduced to rubble the moment I met you. Ruin deserves ruin, Edita. Ruin deserves ruin.

Obsession has been a staple in the recipe book of murder since time immemorial. Sometimes obsession is a major ingredient. Other times, obsession is the oven that makes things too hot to handle.

Some obsessives were taught to be that way through neglect or cruelty. Others developed hatred as the basis of their obsession. This was especially true of organized serial killers. They ritualized their killings, taking their rage out on surrogates for the people who’d spawned their hatred.

But love can be the basis of obsession too, especially if one party or the other is spurned. You see that kind of gradual tick-tick-tick change in a person as he goes from being smitten to being crazy in love to-when he’s rejected-feeling sad, then worthless, then angry, then enraged, and then he grabs a gun because If I can’t have the object of my desire, no one will.

Was that what had happened with JohnnyBoy5? Had he taken the romantic spiral toward homicide and killed Edita and Tommy McGrath, the big guy who’d threatened to break his face? Or was that someone else?

Sampson walked in. “I got something you need to see.”

“Me too,” I said, getting up. “She’s got a stalker.”

“That fits,” he said. He turned and led me into her bedroom.

Big four-poster bed. Matched linens. New dresser. Nice mirror. A walk-in closet with racks bulging with clothes and shelves holding dozens of beautiful shoes.

There were built-in drawers at the far end of the closet.

Sampson had pulled two of them open. The first was filled with fine lingerie. The second featured a wide selection of sex toys and lubricants.

“So she had a kinky side,” I said. “So what?”

He pushed shut the two drawers and opened the ones directly below. I took both in at a glance and said, “Oh, well, that changes things.”

“Damn sure does,” Sampson said, looking into the right drawer, which was filled with hard-core S&M equipment.

I was more interested in the drawer on the left, the deeper one, the one filled with stacks and stacks of banded fifty-dollar bills.

9

SAMPSON AND I left Edita Kravic’s apartment shortly after seven that evening. We’d found the sex equipment and the cash, which we estimated at forty thousand dollars, but little to explain how a second-year law student had come to have that kind of money stuck away in a clothes drawer.

When you see that much dough and the sex gear, your investigative instincts tend to drift toward hooking or drugs or smuggling or organized crime. But we’d found no direct evidence of anything illegal, not even in the locked file cabinet, which we’d opened after we’d located the key.

The cabinet had more of Edita Kravic’s personal files, one of which revealed that she was from Slovakia and had a green card. Another file showed an account with Bank of America with a balance of fifteen hundred dollars. She owed less than that on her Visa and American Express cards. I found her lease. I’d predicted the rent would be two or three grand a month; it was actually four thousand. But she wasn’t writing checks for the rent, or not any that I could see.

“She paid cash for everything,” I said when we got back to the car.

“Bought high-end stuff with it,” Sampson said. “Classic way to evade taxes.”

“Still doesn’t explain where the money came from,” I said. “There were no files from the Phoenix Club, no record of payments.”

“Maybe the club’s evading taxes too,” Sampson said, starting the squad car. “Where to?”

“Swing by Terry Howard’s place before heading back to the office.”

“Make the chief rest easier?”

“Exactly.”

We drove to a shabby, four-story apartment building off New York Avenue in Northeast.

“This the right one?” I asked.

“Google Maps don’t lie,” Sampson said.

The seedy neighborhood sobered me, made me realize just how far and how hard Tommy McGrath’s onetime partner had fallen since his days with the Major Case Unit. Terry Howard had had a formidable reputation for playing the tough guy. He had never been above intimidating a source to get what he wanted. In fact, he’d been accused of it multiple times, and because of that, and because Tommy had ultimately turned on Howard, we were here.

But the former detective who opened the door of his one-bedroom apartment didn’t look like a tough guy; he looked like a tired man pushing seventy rather than fifty-five. He wore a faded Washington Redskins ball cap, a plain black T-shirt, and jeans that sagged off him. The big frame I remembered was still there, but he’d gone soft and lost weight. His eyes were rheumy. He smelled of vodka.

“Figured I’d see you two before too long,” Howard said.

“Can we come in, Terry? Ask a few questions?”

“Not tonight, I got lots of jack shit to take care of. Sorry.”

I said, “You know we have to talk to you, and you know why. Now, we can continue standing here in your doorway where everyone on the floor will know your business, or we can come in, or we can take you down to the station. Any way you want to do this is fine by us.”

Howard’s bleary eyes got hard and beady. “In here.”

He stood aside. We walked into his sad little world. The apartment reeked of cigarette smoke. The muted television was tuned to a cable station rerunning classic baseball games. Beer cans and three empty bottles of Smirnoff vodka crowded the coffee table. The parakeet in the cage between the easy chair and the couch looked like a miniature plucked chicken. It had no feathers except for a crown of baby blue and orange.

“That’s Sylvia Plath,” Howard said. “She’s got issues.”

He laughed uproariously at that and then started coughing hard. He picked up a tissue, spit into it, and then said, “Aren’t you going to ask me where I was when Tommy got it?”

“We figured we’d dance with you awhile before that,” Sampson said.

Howard sobered, said, “No reason to. I was right here at the time the TV guys say he was killed.”

“Anyone see you?”

“Six of the fine ladies from my neighborhood Hooters were supposed to come over for breakfast and watch last night’s game with me on the DVR,” Howard said. “But, alas, they stood me up. Too bad. Good game. Senators demolished the Red Sox in interleague play. Harper went three for four.”

“So you have no alibi,” I said.

“Nope,” Howard said, going to the kitchen and pouring orange juice and vodka into a dirty highball glass. “But I know you can’t put me on upper Wisconsin because I wasn’t there. Hell, I can barely walk two blocks.”

“You must have wanted to kill Tommy at one time,” Sampson said.

“Man destroys your life, it crosses your mind,” Howard said, shuffling back and settling into a recliner. “But I did not pull the trigger on COD McGrath.”

“You own a Remington 1911?” I asked.

“I have always been a devotee of Smith and Wesson, so no.”

“Mind if we look around?”

“Hell yeah, I mind,” the disgraced detective said. “You got a warrant, Cross, have at her. Otherwise, and with all due respect, we’re done here. Me and Sylvia P. got another game to watch.”

10

SAMPSON AND I didn’t argue with Howard. The former detective didn’t strike me as being physically or mentally capable of shooting McGrath. He seemed to have given up and was at some bitter peace with that.

So we left and returned to the office, where I found Bree and Muller waiting with Rico Lincoln and Martin O’Donnell, the other detectives Chief Michaels had assigned to the murder of Tom McGrath. Bree and Muller described their meeting with Vivian McGrath and we brought them up to speed on what we’d found at McGrath’s, Edita Kravic’s, and Terry Howard’s.

When we finished, I looked at Detective Lincoln, a tall, skinny marathoner who’d been smiling and acting impatient during our reports.

“You got something you’d like to share, Rico?”

“I do,” Lincoln said. “I mean, we both do.”

“You first,” O’Donnell said.

Lincoln got on his computer and linked it to a large screen on the wall. The screen jumped to a traffic-camera perspective of upper Wisconsin Avenue. Cars in both northbound lanes came at the camera head-on so we could see each vehicle and its passengers best at a distance. With the rain, it was hard to get a good look through the windshields, especially the ones in the right lane.

Lincoln sped the video up, watching the data in the lower corner, and then paused at the time stamp reading 7:20 a.m.

“Tommy McGrath and Edita Kravic are gunned down at seven twenty,” he said, and he hit Play. “Coming at you in the northbound right lane, dark-primer four-door sedan, stripped, almost looks like it’s about to be repainted.”

“That Treasury agent called it,” Sampson said.

“Watch now,” Lincoln said.

The car was passing, rain spattering its windshield, and you couldn’t see a thing. Lincoln froze the screen when the front of the car was almost out of view. He pointed to the left side of the windshield. Up on the dashboard, there was a red Washington Redskins ball cap.

“We saw Howard wearing a red Redskins cap just like that not an hour ago,” Sampson said.

It was true. Same hat.

Lincoln said, “Something else.”

The detective advanced the frames so the windshield of the car and then the tinted driver-side window disappeared. When he stopped the film again, we had a side-angle view through the open rear window.

We could see the silhouette of a person with a wild mop of hair sitting in the middle of the backseat.

“Okay?” I said.

Lincoln advanced the film two frames. Here, the shadows were different. Three-quarters of the face was revealed.

I stared for a second and then said, “Raggedy Ann?”

“That was our reaction,” Detective O’Donnell said. “At first we thought we had the wrong car and the cap on the wind-shield was just chance.”

Lincoln said, “But the more we thought about it, the more we became convinced that there wasn’t a third person in the backseat. A scarecrow was sitting there. See the shadows here and here? That’s the shoulders of a dark coat. See the lapels?”

“I get it,” I said. “Why’s Raggedy Ann wearing a coat?”

“Exactly,” Lincoln said.

Rubbing my chin, I said, “I agree that’s our shooter’s car. Have pictures of it at the best angles sent to every officer on the force.”

“On it,” Lincoln said, and he started typing.

Bree fought off a yawn. I fought off a yawn too and then nodded at O’Donnell, who said, “I started going through Chief McGrath’s work files. Right away, I found a threatening e-mail.”

He typed on his computer, and the screen changed from the close-up of the Raggedy Ann doll to a July 3 e-mail to McGrath from TL.

You push too hard, we gonna push right back. Only it’s gonna be lethal this time, Chief McG.

“TL?” Sampson said. “That Thao Le?”

“Has to be,” Bree said, sitting forward.

Muller said, “I thought Le got convicted in Prince George’s last year.”

“Got off on appeal four months ago,” O’Donnell said, showing us an investigative file he’d found in McGrath’s desk. “Tommy had evidently been running a solo investigation into Le’s activities since his release.”

“What did he find?” Bree asked.

“That Le was back in the game. Associating with known criminals and members of his old gang. Drugs. Women. Loan-sharking. Extortion.”

“Why wouldn’t Tommy have told someone?” Sampson asked.

“Nailing Le was personal with Tommy,” O’Donnell said. “He even wrote about it. He thought Le was the one who’d planted the evidence in Terry Howard’s case, and even though Terry hated him, Tommy was out to prove it.”

“So maybe Tommy got close enough to spook Le into making good on his threat,” Bree said.

“Where’s Le now?” I asked.

“No clue yet,” O’Donnell said. “But the last two times Le was picked up on weapons charges, he was carrying a forty-five-caliber Remington 1911.”

11

I WAS UP before dawn, startled awake by a dream where a pistol-packing Raggedy Ann drove a motorcycle down Rock Creek Parkway, which was littered with fifty-dollar bills. The cash almost covered the corpses of Edita Kravic and Tommy McGrath.

I eased from bed, letting Bree sleep. We’d gotten home after midnight, wolfed down leftovers from the fridge, and gone straight to sleep.

After a shower, I went downstairs to find my ninety-one-year-old grandmother making breakfast.

“You’re up kind of early, Nana Mama,” I said, kissing her on the cheek.

“Big day ahead for you,” she said. “I wanted to make sure it starts right.”

“We appreciate it,” I said. I poured myself some coffee and got the papers from the front porch.

The murder of Tommy McGrath and Edita Kravic led the front page of both the Washington Post and the Washington Times. Chief Michaels was quoted as saying DC Metro had lost one of its best men and that the department would be relentless in its pursuit of the killers. He announced the formation of an elite task force to investigate the murders, and he named me as team leader.

“Pop?”

I glanced up from the papers to see my oldest child, Damon, standing there, looking excited.

I smiled, asked, “You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

“Sit down there and Nana will give you one last proper breakfast.”

Damon’s six foot five and towers over my grandmother. He scooped her up and gave her a kiss, which caused her to shriek with laughter.

“What was that for, young man?” she demanded, looking ruffled when he set her down.

“Just because,” Damon said. “Can I get three eggs this morning?”

She sniffed. “I suppose I can manage it.”

“Two for me,” said my fifteen-year-old daughter, Jannie, who was still in her pajamas and rubbing her eyes when she came in. “I’ll make my own shake.”

Ali, almost eight and my youngest, ran in after her and said, “I want French toast.”

“No sugar-bombing in my kitchen,” Nana Mama said. “Eggs. Protein. Good for your brain.”

“So’s French toast.”

I looked at him, said, “You’ll never win that one.”

Ali acted like the weight of the world was on him. “Can I get two sunny-side up with regular toast?”

“That you can have,” my grandmother said.

Bree joined soon after. It was a nice treat, all of us sharing breakfast together on a weekday. All too soon, though, we were out in front of the house helping Damon load the last of his things into our car.

“That’s it?” I said, shaking my head. “Really not that much.”

“That surprises you?” Damon asked.

“I guess it does,” I said. “Back when I left for school, I had twice the amount of stuff, or maybe my stuff was just bigger. That’s it-there’s no huge stereo system anymore. Everything’s gotten smaller.”

“That’s a news flash, Alex,” my grandmother said impatiently, and she rapped her cane on the sidewalk. “Now, Damon, you come over here and give your Nana Mama some love before you go, but do not pick me up again. You’ll break my back.”

Damon smirked before bending over and kissing Nana Mama good-bye.

“I’m so proud of you,” she said, her eyes getting glassy. “You are a gentleman and a scholar.”

Coming from my grandmother, a retired English teacher and former high school vice principal, that was high praise.

Damon beamed, said, “That’s because you taught me how to study.”

“You learned it and ran with it,” she said. “Give yourself some credit.”

He kissed her on the cheek again and then turned to Jannie. “You keep killing it, you hear?”

“That’s the plan,” she said, and hugged him. “You’ll come to the invitational, right?”

Damon said, “Wouldn’t miss out on watching the fastest woman on earth.”

“Not yet,” Jannie said, grinning.

“Dream it, own it, give it time,” Damon said, and then he picked up Ali, who was looking morose. “Why the face, little man?”

Ali shrugged, said, “You’re going away. Again.”

“I’ll be an hour away,” Damon said. “Not six hours, like when I was up at Kraft, so I’ll be home to see you a whole lot more.”

Ali perked up. “Promise?”

“You know I need my Ali Cross fix,” Damon said, and he tickled Ali until he howled with laughter.

Then he hugged Bree, told her to take care of me.

“Ready?” I asked.

“Whole new life waiting,” Damon said, and even though he was trying to remain cool, I could see he was vibrating with emotion as we drove away.

12

WE TOOK 295 heading north toward Baltimore and drove in a pleasant quiet. Part of me wanted to be a helicopter parent, remind him to do this or do that, tell him how to handle one academic crisis or another.

But Damon had left home at sixteen to chase his dreams. He knew how to take care of himself already, and that made me both proud and sad. My job as a parent had shrunk to the role of adviser, but once upon a time, I had been all he had.

Passing Hyattsville, Maryland, I flashed on the moment Damon was born, how my first wife, Maria, had sobbed with joy when the nurse laid him on her belly, a squirming, squealing miracle that I’d loved in an instant.

I managed to keep my mind from going to the night Maria was killed in a drive-by. Instead, my memories were of those first few years after Maria died, how ripped apart I’d felt unless I was holding Damon or Jannie, who’d been an infant at the time. Without Nana Mama I would never have been able to go on. My grandmother had stepped in as she had when I was a boy. She was Damon’s mother as much as she’d been mine.

Damon and I talked baseball near Laurel, Maryland, and both of us agreed that if Bryce Harper could stay healthy, he would put up Hall of Fame statistics. We’d gone to New York a few years ago for the All-Star Game and watched him hit in the Home Run Derby. Harper had freakish quickness and strength.

“He’s like Jannie, you know?” Damon said. “An outlier. There’s something special about them. You just see it when they move.”

“You’re not so bad yourself,” I said.

“I’m good enough to be a seventh or eighth man in Division One.”

“Never sell yourself short,” I said.

“Just being honest, and I’m good with coming off the bench, Dad,” he said. “Jannie, though? She’s in a world where very few people get to live.”

That was true. Seeing my daughter run on a track was like watching a gazelle chased by a lion and-

“Dad! Watch out!”

Six or seven car lengths in front of us, a twenty-seven-foot Jayco camping trailer attached to the back of a Ford F-150 pickup had started to swerve wildly. I got my foot on the brake a split second before the camper and pickup went into a wide, arcing skid and then jackknifed, flipped, and careened left, inches off our front bumper.

I hit the gas, shot forward, and went by it. The trailer smashed an oncoming car, the pickup slammed into something else, and then the whole mass of twisted metal went across the fast lane and down the embankment behind us.

“Holy shit!” Damon yelled. “Holy shit, we just almost died!”

My heart was slamming in my chest, and my hands were trembling on the wheel as I got over on the shoulder. We had almost died. The Grim Reaper had been right there but passed us by.

“C’mon,” I said, yanking out my cell and dialing 911. “We’ve got to help.”

Damon jumped out and ran back down the road to the embankment while I told the dispatcher what had happened.

When I reached the pickup, Damon shook his head. The driver was dead and hanging out the back window. We heard a baby crying in the car that had been hit by the travel trailer and flipped onto its roof.

“Help!” a woman yelled. “Someone please help us.”

Damon got down on his knees by the car and I did too. The young mom’s head was bleeding hard. The baby was upside down but appeared uninjured, mostly just upset about being upside down.

“We’ve got an ambulance coming,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Sally Jo,” she said. “Sally Jo Hepner. I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. Am I gonna die?”

“I think you’ll need a lot of stitches, but you’re not going to die. What’s your baby’s name?”

I could already hear sirens.

“Bobby,” she said. “After my dad.”

Damon had wriggled in through the window and gotten the car seat free. He squirmed back and pulled him out. Bobby Hepner was fussing, but just showing him his mother seemed to quiet him down.

Firemen and EMTs were on the scene within five minutes of the crash. We stayed until we saw the mom safely extracted from the car and put on a backboard with a neck collar, just in case. One of the EMTs carried her baby into the ambulance.

“Looks like our work here is done,” I said. “Let’s get you to school.”

Damon smiled, but when we got back in the car, he was brooding. “Strange how life is. Here one minute and gone the next.”

“Don’t worry about it too much.”

“I guess. But seeing that, it’s like, what’s the point? You never know when your time is up.”

“Exactly,” I said. “So live every minute like it’s your last, and be grateful. The way I see it, that near miss was a message. We came close, but we weren’t meant to be in a car accident today. We were reminded of how fragile and precious life is, but we weren’t supposed to die. We were supposed to get you to college, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Damon dipped his head, but then he grinned, said, “Okay.”

Johns Hopkins had changed in some ways since I was a student, but the Homewood campus was still an oasis of green quads and red-brick halls in the city of Baltimore, and I still felt the electricity of the place when we arrived. We were met by student volunteers, who steered us through the various lines and gave us a thick orientation packet for incoming freshmen.

We found Damon’s room and met his roommate-William Clancy, a lacrosse player from Massachusetts-and his parents. The boys seemed to click from the start. We helped them get squared away, and then there was an awkward moment when it was obvious they wanted the parents to leave.

“Walk me to the car,” I said. “There’s something down there that I want you to have.”

“Uh, sure,” Damon said, and he nodded to his roommate. “Be back, and then we’ll go to the welcome picnic?”

“Sounds good,” William said.

We got to the car, and I looked at him with fierce pride and love.

“What did you want me to have?” Damon asked.

I grabbed him and bear-hugged him, unable to stop the tears.

“Your mom,” I choked out. “She would have been very, very happy to see who you’ve become.”

Damon looked uncomfortable when I released him and stepped back. A few tears slipped from his eyes before he said, “Thank you, Dad. For everything.”

I couldn’t take it, and I bear-hugged him again and then told him to get going before I became a total, blubbering mess. He laughed. We bumped fists. And he was gone, into the place that had cut and sharpened me into a man.

Driving away was bittersweet; I was happy beyond words for his achievements but already mourning a part of my life that had begun in the loving care of Damon, my helpless infant boy, and ended just a few moments before, when my young man had walked confidently away.