Cross the Line

13

I LEFT THE Johns Hopkins campus, drove around the corner, stopped, and put my head on the wheel. I’d known my son was leaving for months, but it had still flattened me.

My cell rang. John Sampson. I answered on the Bluetooth.

“You like pho?” he asked.

“If it’s made right,” I said, putting the car in gear. “Why?”

“Because one of O’Donnell’s sources puts Thao Le at Pho Phred’s in Falls Church at one o’clock this afternoon. Can you make it back in time?”

I looked at the clock, said, “With the bubble and siren, yes.”

“I’d cut the siren when you get close,” Sampson said, and he hung up.

I got back onto 295, put up the bubble, and took the car up to eighty-five, tapping on the siren to get folks out of the way and thinking about Thao Le.

He’d been a gangbanger from the get-go. Son of a California mobster, he’d come east at eighteen and formed his own criminal enterprise that focused on the trade in heroin, cocaine, and marijuana, but he’d later branched out into human trafficking.

He’d been arrested twice on racketeering charges, and twice he’d walked because of insufficient evidence or, depending on your source, because of the money Le paid in bribes. Soon enough, though, Le came on the radar of Detective Tommy McGrath and his partner at the time, Terry Howard.

A year into the investigation of Le, Internal Affairs caught Howard with cocaine and money taken during a drug bust. Howard had always maintained his innocence, even tried to blame it on McGrath, but in the end, he’d been fired, and it had been ugly for him ever since.

McGrath believed Le had framed his partner. But six years after the fact, Tommy had not turned up enough evidence to exonerate Terry Howard because, as he’d noted in the file O’Donnell found, the Vietnamese gangster was slippery and careful. The most time Le had ever served was three and a half years for assaulting two police officers attempting to take him into custody. Both cops had ended up in the hospital.

Which is why I decided that if we were going to talk with Le, we would bring a small army with us. I started making calls.

At ten minutes to one, I pulled into a lumberyard just down the street from Eden Center, a Vietnamese and Korean entertainment and shopping hub in Falls Church. I found Bree, Sampson, and Muller waiting for me as well as four SWAT operators, two patrol units, and a sergeant detective named Earl Rand whom I’d worked with successfully before. All were with the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Department.

“How’d it go?” Bree said. She’d already armored up in the sweltering heat.

“Heartbreaking in some ways, the proudest moment of my life in others.”

“Good for you. You should be proud of him. He’s an amazing kid.”

“He is that,” I said, and I put on my own armor as Detective Rand placed a map on the hood of one of the cruisers. It showed the Eden Center, a mall laid out in a lazy U shape with a large parking lot in the middle.

Pho Phred’s was near the Viet-Royale restaurant in the northeast corner of the U, part of a section called the Sidewalk Stores that was set up to resemble an outdoor market in old Saigon. Rand showed us the access to the area from the south off the main parking lot and from the north off a smaller parking lot that abutted Oakwood Cemetery.

Rand said we’d want to cover both entrances as well as send in Fairfax officers familiar with the center through both ends of the bottom of the U.

“You’ll have him cut off in four directions,” Rand said. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

“Let’s do it,” I said, and I got in a car with Sampson.

“It’d be nice if Le’s good for McGrath, Kravic, and Peters,” he said.

“It would be,” I said. “I could take some time off, go watch Jannie run.”

“No reason that can’t happen,” Sampson said, starting the car and heading for Eden Center.

From there, everything went downhill fast.

14

WE WERE ALL in contact over the same radio frequency. Two Fairfax County officers entered Eden Center through Planet Fitness, on the far west side of the Sidewalk Stores. Two more came in from the east.

Bree and Muller came in the north entrance. Sampson, Detective Rand, and I went in through the south door. This section of Eden Center was painted light blue, which Rand said was believed to promote prosperity.

The area was certainly doing a thriving business. At one o’clock on a Friday afternoon, there were hundreds of Vietnamese Americans roaming around, shopping for fresh fish in one store, embroidered silk dresses in another, taffy candy in a third. And the air smelled savory and sweet.

Sampson and I stood out like sore thumbs, but being tall among short people had its advantages. We later figured that one or all of us must have been seen entering the center, because we were inside for no more than ninety seconds before, not fifty yards away, Thao Le blew out of Pho Phred’s, looked around, and saw us.

Le was wiry, fast, and agile. He turned and ran north.

“He’s coming right at you, Bree,” I said, breaking into a run.

“I see him.”

Detective Rand said, “Take him clean if you-”

Le must have spotted Bree and Muller, because he suddenly darted into a packed restaurant. Bree left Muller in the dust and dashed in after Le, her badge up. We heard screaming.

“There’s got to be a back way out of there!” I yelled, dodging into a fish store forty yards shy of the restaurant.

With my badge up, I yelled at the startled merchant and his customers, “Back door!”

His eyes got big and round, but he gestured to rubber curtains behind the counter.

I heard Rand calling for patrol cars as I went through the rubber curtains into a cold storage area off a small loading dock. The overhead door was raised. A wholesale-seafood truck was backing up.

I jumped off the dock before the truck could block it, landed in a putrid-smelling puddle, and stumbled. Sampson was right behind me; he grabbed me under the arm and got me upright just as we heard a crotch-rocket motorcycle start up and then saw it squeal out from behind a dumpster fifty yards away.

Helmetless, Le handled the bike like an expert, rear wheel drifting and smoking before he shot north and away from Bree, who had her gun up but wisely held her fire. Le accelerated toward the corner of the mall, then downshifted, braked, and disappeared to our right.

“I’ve got cars coming right at him!” Rand gasped as he caught up to us.

We were all running now. Bree got around the corner and held her ground. We reached her just in time to see the Fairfax patrol car turn Le.

The gangster came right back at us with the patrol car in pursuit. Another patrol car was entering the hunt from behind us. I was thinking Le was as good as in cuffs.

Le stopped about halfway down the parking lot, near another dumpster and a haphazard pile of wooden pallets stacked by the rear chain-link fence. The first cruiser was almost to Le when he looked our way and smiled.

He flicked the accelerator on the motorcycle, covered fifteen yards in a second, shot up that pile of wooden pallets, and was in the air for maybe ten feet before he landed almost sideways on the dumpster.

Le buried the throttle the instant he touched down, then he shot across the dumpster lids diagonally, jumped up on the pegs as the bike went airborne again, and sailed over the chain-link fence that separated the parking lot from Oakwood Cemetery.

The motorcycle landed on a service road and almost tipped, but Le got his foot down, righted it, and sped off, leaving us angry at losing him and slack-jawed at his mad skills.

Then a Fairfax patrolman still inside Eden Center came over the radio and said, “I’ve got Le’s girlfriend here at Pho Phred’s. You want to talk to her?”

15

WE FOUND THE officer and a zip-cuffed Michele Bui outside Pho Phred’s. Ms. Bui was, to put it mildly, unhappy.

“I got my rights,” she said. “I’m U.S. born and raised, never put a toe in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. So I don’t have to say a thing because I have not done a thing other than order lunch. This is harassment, pure and simple.”

Bui was tall for a Vietnamese female, almost five six, and slender. Her hair was shaved on one side and long on the other. She sported tattoos of yellow butterflies on her left arm, and red ones swarmed on the right. Two hoops in each nostril completed the look.

Bui began to shout in Vietnamese, and many people in the halls and other stores came to the doorways and looked at us.

“We just want to have a chat,” Bree said calmly.

“You usually bring guns and zip cuffs to a chat?” Bui asked.

“When Thao Le is who we want to chat with, yes,” I said.

“When are you guys going to leave Thao alone?” she said. “You arrest him, he gets off. You arrest him, he gets off. When you going to figure out that he can’t be had?”

She watched our faces and smiled knowingly. “You don’t have him, do you? You didn’t catch him!”

Bui started laughing and then called out something in Vietnamese that got the other people there laughing.

She looked at me. “You in charge?”

I jerked my head toward Detective Rand.

Bui rolled her eyes, said, “Can you take the cuffs off? They’re starting to hurt, and I smell a lawsuit coming on.”

Bree said, “If we take them off, you’ll talk to us?”

“Why would I do that?” Bui asked. “I am under zero obligation to talk to you because I have done nothing wrong.”

“How about aiding and abetting a cop killer?” Sampson said.

That seemed to come out of nowhere to Bui, and her chin retreated fast.

“Thao’s no cop killer,” she said.

“We think he is,” Bree said. “The cop was Tommy McGrath, a guy who had a jones to put Thao away for the rest of his life.”

Bui said nothing, her eyes darting back and forth.

“You’ve heard the name before? McGrath?” I asked.

The way she shook her head said she had heard of the late COD.

Bree picked up on it too. She said, “When someone kills a cop, the net gets big and wide. That net is forming around your boyfriend. Question is, which of his fish will get caught in the net with him?”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means your boyfriend is disloyal,” I said. “He keeps three different women in three different apartments, rotates among them.”

Bui’s face hardened, but she said nothing.

“How’s that make you feel, sharing him with two others, good for only one night in three?”

Le’s girlfriend blinked, stared at the floor, and said, “If that.”

“Right. And suppose his other two girlfriends decide it’s better to tell us what they know than get caught in Thao’s net. Where’s that going to leave you?”

Tears began to well in her eyes. “Up a creek,” she said. “Take off the cuffs, and I’ll tell you what I can.”

16

BREE BUILT UP a quick rapport with the twenty-four-year-old, so we decided to let her and Muller run the questioning when we returned to DC.

I went back to the office I share with Sampson and found a GoPro camera in a sealed evidence bag along with a note from the medical examiner Nancy Barton.

From the Maserati, she’d written. You’ll find it interesting. Barton had included a cable to hook up the camera to my computer. I attached it and turned the camera on. I had to fiddle until I got it in playback mode, and then Sampson and I watched the most recent MPEG file.

We watched it again. We talked about what we’d seen, and then we watched it a third time.

“I think we need to tell Michaels sooner rather than later,” Sampson said.

“Agreed,” I replied.

Ten minutes later, we were in the office of DC police chief Bryan Michaels. A welterweight fighting a paunchy belly, Michaels took a sip from his coffee cup and made a sour face.

“Damn it, I’ll never get used to this,” he said, shuddering and setting the cup down on his desk. “Hot lemon water. Supposed to be good for me, change my alkalinity.”

“Add honey,” I said.

“But first call up that video we sent you,” Sampson said.

“I could use a latte.” Michaels sighed, put on reading glasses, and turned to his computer.

A few keystrokes later, the MPEG video appeared.

“What is this?” he asked.

“Film of the last minutes of Aaron Peters’s life,” I said. “He had a GoPro Hero mounted in a fireproof housing on his dashboard. He must have hooked it up to his speedometer somehow, because-well, you’ll see.”

The chief clicked on the video, blew it up to full screen.

The camera gave us a view from the center of the dash, looking over the sleek hood and down along the headlight beams of the Maserati. In the lower right corner of the video, there was a digital speedometer. Lower left, a timer set at 0.

“Here we go, epic run,” said Aaron Peters off camera as he left Beach Drive for Rock Creek Parkway.

The timer started running as the engine roared, and the Maserati accelerated from thirty to seventy-five in under four seconds.

Peters laughed and then said, “Sonofa-”

The sounds of downshifting and brakes squealing filled the chief ’s office.

“Watch for it, Chief,” Sampson said.

Coming out of a backward S curve, a single headlamp cut the pavement beside the Maserati.

“Motorcycle?” Michaels said.

“What the… hey, asshole!” Aaron Peters said.

The headlights slashed again to the right, and you could hear the powerful whine of the motorcycle over the Maserati’s engine. But then Peters began cutting back and forth, trying to keep the motorcyclist from passing. He braked poorly in the next curve and tried to accelerate.

“Catch me if you can,” Aaron Peters said, and his speed climbed to ninety.

It didn’t seem to matter. The single headlight swung, and the motorcycle’s engine sounded almost as loud as the Maserati’s before two shots rang out. The sports car went out of control, smacked a guardrail, and did a whip-fast 360-degree skid that almost lit up the escaping motorcyclist for a split second before the car vaulted into the woods, hit the trees, and exploded into flames.

“Jesus,” Michaels said. “The guy shot from a motorcycle as he was going ninety?”

“Exactly our reaction,” I said. “Now call up the pictures I sent you.”

A minute later, the screen split into two photographs. One showed the wounds on COD Tom McGrath as photographed during his autopsy earlier in the day. The other picture was a close-up of Peters’s two head wounds.

“Okay?” Michaels said.

“In both cases, the shooting was extraordinary,” I said. “And in both cases, every bullet fired was a forty-five, perhaps from a Remington model 1911.”

Chief Michaels squinted one eye. “You think it’s the same shooter?”

“We have two slugs from Peters’s Kevlar helmet. We should have solid comparisons to the bullets that killed McGrath, but in the meantime we have to consider the possibility of one shooter, and I thought you should know.”

The chief thought a moment, said, “I don’t want any of this getting out until we’ve got a confirm or no-confirm on the ballistics. Are we clear?”

“We are,” Sampson said, and I nodded.

“Any connection between Peters and McGrath?” the chief asked.

“Nothing yet,” Sampson said.

“Keep me posted.”

“Every few hours, sir,” I said.

When we turned to leave, Michaels said, “Alex, could I have a word with you?”

I glanced at Sampson, said, “Sure.”

When the door closed behind my partner, Michaels said, “I need a chief of detectives.”

“Who are you considering?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“Who better?”

I felt all sorts of conflicting emotions roil through me.

“Well?” Michaels said.

“I’m flattered, Chief,” I said. “And humbled that you think highly enough of me to offer me the job. But I need some time to think, to talk to Bree and my family.”

“You’d have more regular hours. Be able to see them more consistently, if that matters to you.”

“It does, but I still am going to need some time to-”

“Take all the time in the world. Just give me an answer by eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”

17

NANA MAMA WAS in rare form that night. She’d seen Rachael Ray make chicken Provençal and decided to make it herself, doctoring the dish a bit by adding a little of this and a little of that until it was the kind of meal where you fought for seconds.

“Good, isn’t it?” I said.

“I’ll say,” Ali said.

“More, please,” Jannie said.

“Is that cumin?” Bree asked, smacking her lips.

“And a touch of curry powder,” Nana Mama said. “That and the way the onions and the chicken skin get so crispy? I’d pay for a meal like this.”

“Nana?” Ali said. “Did you check the lottery?”

Nana Mama had been playing numbers since I was a little kid. It was one of her few vices. Every week since I’d moved into her home all those years ago, she’d played a number.

“Already looked,” I said. “No one won Powerball. It’ll be up over fifty million the next draw.”

“No, Dad,” Ali said. “The charter-school lottery.”

My grandmother said, “Ali wants to go to Washington Latin, and I want him to go. He’ll be challenged academically in a charter, just as Jannie has been.”

“I should get in, right, Dad?” Ali said. “I scored ninety-six percent in math.”

“In the ninety-sixth percentile in math,” Nana Mama corrected him.

“And ninety-one percent, uh, tile, in reading,” Ali said.

“That will get you at least one more number in the lottery.”

“Two more,” Nana said. “He’ll have a good chance.”

Ali grinned down the table at me. He was such an affable brainiac, interested in so many subjects it was sometimes hard to believe he was only seven. “I’m getting in if I have to go down the chimney,” he said.

“Always better to go in the front door,” Bree said.

She was up clearing dishes. I joined her, and we cleaned the kitchen to a high gloss that pleased Nana Mama enough for her to go out to watch NCIS, her latest favorite television show. Bree looked ready to join her, but I said, “Take a walk in the rain with me?”

Bree smiled. “Sure.”

The air was hot and saturated with the light rain that had begun falling. It felt good to walk in it, loosened up my legs a little after I’d eaten so much.

“What did Michele Bui have to say?”

“Nothing that pins the murders on Le, but she gave us enough promising leads to make it worthwhile,” Bree said. “She says he does have a Remington 1911 in a forty-five caliber. Several, evidently. And he had mentioned Tommy McGrath numerous times in the past few months, and always in anger. Le told Michele that Tommy was persecuting him. It’s amazing how they squeal when someone’s getting close.”

“I know,” I said. “Listen, Michaels offered me chief of detectives.”

Bree stopped and beamed at me. “Really? Oh my God, Alex. This is big.”

“I know.”

“You should do it. You deserve it, and I think you’d be great at it. Kind of like Tommy was, a mentor, an ally for every detective in Metro.”

We started walking again. “I’ve thought of that. It’s appealing on that level.”

“You’d also have more regular hours for the first time in longer than you’ve known me,” Bree said. “Jannie’s gonna be a sophomore. She won’t be home forever.”

“I know,” I said. “And I’d get to see all of her races and attend science fairs with Ali. It’s really tempting.”

Bree stopped again. There were raindrops on her cheeks that looked like tears. I brushed them away.

“I hear a but coming,” she said.

“There’s always a but coming.”

“And yours is?”

“Right here,” I said, patting my rump.

“You’re avoiding the issue,” she said.

“I am. Let’s go back.”

“Not before you kiss me,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re kind of sexy in the rain.”

“That so?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, and she got up on her tiptoes, put her arms around my neck, and kissed me long and deep.

“Wow,” I said. “I’m going to have to walk in the rain more often.”

She grinned and started strolling away coyly. “Can you imagine me in a steamy-hot rain forest, Chief Cross?”

“Vividly,” I said, and we both laughed our way back to the house.

I went upstairs to our bedroom and punched in the number for my recently found long-lost father. He answered on the second ring.

“Haven’t heard from you in a bit, Alex,” my dad said.

“You either, Dad. Retirement got you busy?”

“Picking up more work than I can handle with the Palm Beach County prosecutors,” he said, sounding as if he couldn’t believe it.

“Why does that surprise you?” I said. “They may have thrown you out of sheriff’s homicide, but they’re not going to waste talent.”

“I’m still pinching myself I’m not in prison.”

“You paid your dues. You became a good man, Jason Cross or Peter Drummond or whatever it is you’re calling yourself these days.”

“Pete’s fine,” he said. “End of that. What’s up with you and the family?”

I told him about the job offer.

He listened and then said, “What turns you on, son?”

“Being a detective,” I said. “It’s what I’m good at. Being an administrator-not so much.”

“You can always delegate,” he said. “Stick to the stuff you’d enjoy about being COD and get rid of the rest of it. Negotiate it with your chief up front.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll sleep on it.”

“Sounds to me like you’ve already made your decision.”

18

ON THE EVE of battle, he always changed his identity to suit his role. That night he thought of himself as John Brown.

Brown rode in the front passenger seat of a tan panel van that bore no markings. Perfect for a predator. Or a pack of them.

“Seven minutes,” Brown said, rubbing at a sore knee.

He heard grunts from behind him in the van and then the unmistakable ker-thunk of banana magazines seating and the chick-chink of automatic weapons feeding rounds into breeches.

They left Interstate 695 and crossed the bridge over the Anacostia River, heading toward the part of DC few tourists ever ventured. Drugs. Apathy. Poverty. They were all here. They all festered here, and because they were an infection, they had to be cut out, the area doused with antibiotics.

They left the bridge, headed south on I-295 and then east again on Suitland Parkway. They exited two miles later and went south of Buena Vista.

“Be smart and disciplined,” Brown said, pulling a sheer black mask down over his face. “Nothing gets taken, and nothing gets left behind. Agreed?”

Grunts of approval came from the blackness of the van behind him. Brown leaned over and took the wheel while the driver put on his mask.

A female voice in the back said, “Work the plan.”

“Smart choices, smart fire,” a male said.

“Surgical precision,” another male said.

Brown pressed the microphone taped to his neck. “Status, Cass?”

His headphones crackled with a woman’s voice

“Good to go,” Cass said. She was in the van trailing them.

Brown said, “Fifty seconds out.”

More rounds were seated in chambers. A few soldiers coughed or blew their noses. The tension in the van was remarkably low, given the task ahead. Then again, the men and women following Brown were highly trained. This was neither a new drill nor an unfamiliar assignment.

They pulled onto a spur road that hooked around back to the west, where it met the Lincoln Memorial Cemetery. The van stopped where three streetlights had gone dark thanks to Crosman pellet guns two of his men used the night before. Brown’s driver killed the headlights. The rear of the van opened, and four men dressed head to toe in black spilled out.

Brown got out after them. Before clicking shut the passenger-side door, he said, “Oh three thirty.”

The driver nodded and drove away. The second van disgorged its passengers as well, and soon eight men and two women were climbing up and over the wall and into the cemetery. They turned on night-vision goggles. They wove through the green shadows and tombstones on a route that had been scouted repeatedly in the past three weeks. The intelligence was solid. So was this entry and exit route.

Now it was just a matter of executing the plan.

With his sore knee, Brown struggled to keep up, but he soon joined the others strung out along the tree line as they looked across a junky parking lot toward a dark and abandoned machine-tool factory. He listened, heard the purr of gas-fired electric generators, several of them, which was all the evidence you really needed to know that there was more to that relic of a factory than met the eye.

“See them, right there?” Cass whispered. “Two by the door, one on either end? Just like I told you.”

Cass was a big woman in her early thirties with short blond hair, and she was extraordinarily strong from years spent training in CrossFit. She was also one of the most competent and loyal people Brown had ever met. He’d had her scout the machine shop, knowing she’d do the job right.

He turned up the magnification on his night-vision, peered across the lot, and spotted the first two guards. They were lying on mattresses on either side of a double door. A third smoked a cigarette at the far corner. The fourth sat on his haunches at the opposite end of the building.

“Formation is the same,” Brown murmured into his microphone. “Cass and Hobbes, take the center. Price and Fender, the flanks.”

They padded softly toward their prey. The two guards sleeping at the doors didn’t have a chance to stir or make a peep before Cass and Hobbes snapped their necks. And the two watching the corners of the factory had no warning as Price and Fender came up behind them, flipped loops of piano wire over their heads, and crushed their throats.

19

IN THE MISTY August dawn, six patrol cars with lights flashing formed a broad perimeter around an abandoned machine-tool factory in Anacostia. Despite the early hour, small groups of people were standing outside on stoops and sidewalks, peering at the old brick building as if it were some cursed place.

Bree, Sampson, and I had responded because we were closest, and we found the two patrolmen who’d made the discovery shaken.

They laid out the situation, which began with an anonymous call to 911 and ended with what they’d found in the old factory.

“We saw enough to fall back and call in the cavalry,” one said.

“You did right,” I said. “Show us.”

The officers led us around the rear of the building. We could hear generators rumbling inside when we turned the corner and saw the first strangled man sprawled ten feet away on gravel and weeds.

The piano wire that had killed him was embedded in his flesh. Early twenties, Hispanic, better than six feet tall and well over two hundred hard pounds, he wore a black wifebeater, baggy denim, expensive Nike basketball shoes, and lots of gold bling.

“Took somebody awful strong to do this,” Bree said.

“You know it,” Sampson said.

I dug through the victim’s front pockets and came up with cash and a vial of pinkish powder.

“Tastes like meth,” I said after dipping a gloved finger into it.

There was something odd about the angle of the dead man’s hips, so I pushed the body forward. Nothing on the ground. But when I lifted the tail of his shirt, there was a 9mm Ruger in a concealed-carry holster at the small of his back.

“He never got the chance to go for his gun,” I said.

“So somebody awful strong and awful sneaky quiet,” Bree said.

There were three other dead men outside the factory. The two by the doors were African American and had suffered broken necks. The one at the far corner was Caucasian and had also been strangled with piano wire. All of them were buff. All of them were armed. Not one of them carried an ID.

“So how did it work?” Sampson asked. “One killer?”

“He’d have to be a ninja or something,” I said. “I’m thinking four.”

“At the same time?” Bree said.

I looked around, saw no lightbulbs in any of the exterior light fixtures.

“At the same time and in the dark,” I said. Then, gesturing toward the steel doors, I asked, “If they were guards, what were they guarding?”

Sampson went to the near door, turned the knob, and pushed. The door creaked open. We got out Maglites and, pistols drawn, entered the abandoned factory. I led, my beam flickering down the cement-floored hall to swinging double doors, which I pushed through.

Big machine tools had once occupied the large open space. You could see the outlines of them on the floors beneath a film of grit and dust; you could smell the oil of them in the air. There was also a faint smell of engine exhaust.

Pigeons flew through broken windows two stories above us. The sun was starting to light up the area, but I kept the flash-light on, peering around, seeing that about halfway across the factory, the vault met the walls of a second story. In the space below that upper floor, there were two large gas-fired electrical generators idling, the source of that exhaust smell.

“No one move,” Bree said.

I turned and found her studying the factory floor. She scuffed at the grime with the toe of her shoe and then turned her light back the way we’d come.

“We’re leaving footprints here,” she said. “But not back in the hallway. It’s been swept. Maybe mopped.”

I got what she was saying and trained my flashlight on the floor by the double doors. The floor there was clean as well. On either side of the doors, there was a cleaned path about twenty inches wide that ran the length of the room tight to the wall; each ended at a steel industrial staircase.

We didn’t need the flashlights to see that the stairs climbed to two catwalks and that the catwalks led to doors, one at either end of the second story. We walked along the left path, our flashlight beams finding mounds of junk, old pipes, conduits, and metal fittings, all coated in filth.

But the steel staircases looked freshly swept. The catwalk too.

One door was ajar, and I could see light shining beyond.

“Alex?” Sampson said. He’d stopped on the catwalk behind me and was shining his light down at the factory floor and onto a fifth dead man sprawled on his belly there.

“He’s been shot in the head,” Bree said, focusing her beam on the nasty exit wound at the back of his skull. “I’m calling in a second forensics team.”

“Smart,” I said, shifting my attention to the open doorway. I moved closer and pushed the door inward, revealing a short passage that was blocked from floor to ceiling and wall to wall with black, heavy-gauge plastic sheeting.

There was an industrial-strength vertical zipper in the sheeting and two small square windows through which light was blazing. I stepped up, looked through one of the windows, and felt my stomach fall twenty stories.

“Alex?” Bree said from behind me. “What is that?”

“An air lock,” I said, twisting away from the window.

She must have caught the shock on my face, said, “What?”

“Call in two more forensics teams,” I replied, hearing the tremor in my voice. “Better yet, call the FBI, Ned Mahoney. Tell him we need a team of the best from Quantico. And have them bring chemists and hazmat suits.”

20

BY THE TIME my old friend and partner Ned Mahoney and two FBI chemists arrived, there were news satellite trucks setting up and news helicopters circling overhead.

I was on the phone with Chief Michaels, having just given him an overview of what we’d seen inside.

“Jesus,” he said. “The FBI will take this over, won’t they?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Which brings me to your question from last night.”

“Okay?”

“I’m honored, but my place is in the field, and right now it’s inside this factory.”

“Goddamn it, Cross, I need someone managing my detectives.”

“Chief, they’re bringing me my hazmat suit. I’ll call when we’re out and know the full extent of things.”

I hung up before he could challenge me. I went to the FBI van, where Mahoney, his chemists, and Sampson were climbing into protective suits.

“How many did you see?” Mahoney asked.

“At least five more bodies,” I said.

“Wait until the cable shows get hold of this,” Sampson said.

“They already have,” said Bree, coming up behind us and eyeing the hazmat suits. “Someone needs to talk to them.”

“Once we know what to tell them,” I said. “You coming?”

She made a sour face and shook her head. “I’d get claustrophobic in one of those things. And we don’t even know what’s in there yet.”

“Which is why we have to go look,” I said, and I kissed her.

I donned the hooded visor. The temperature outside was pushing ninety, and inside the suit, it had to be well over one hundred degrees as we started back into the factory. Sampson let the chemists go through the air lock first. I heard one of them inhale sharply.

“Be careful in here,” he said. “No sudden moves.”

“Believe me, there won’t be,” I said, and I ducked through the flaps of the air lock into a room set up as a sophisticated laboratory.

The FBI chemists were already studying the mind-boggling array of equipment and the various chemical processes that had been under way at the time of the massacre. Sampson and I went to the five dead people in the room, two women and three men, sprawled by various workbenches.

They wore hospital scrubs, lab goggles, booties, and surgical hats and masks. Every one of them was shot either through the head or square in the chest.

I scanned the floor all around, said, “I haven’t seen a cartridge casing yet.”

“No,” Sampson said. “They policed their brass, swept their way out.”

“Professional gunmen,” I said.

Mahoney and the chemists came over.

“What do you think?” I asked.

Pitts, one of the chemists, said, “It’s no Walter White setup, but this has the makings of a serious drug lab. Meth and ecstasy.”

“Any danger of this place exploding?” I asked.

“Lots of potential danger,” Pitts said. “But now that we know what we’ve got, we’ll start shutting down the reactions. Then we’ll do an inventory and take the samples we need. We’ll call for a full team to dismantle the entire lab and store it for trial.”

Trial. I couldn’t begin to think how long it was going to take to investigate this case, much less bring the killers to court. Sampson and I headed toward a second air lock at the other end of the laboratory.

We went through it, and in the next twenty minutes we found the rest of the illegal drug factory as well as twelve more bodies. Five females, seven males of various races and ages. Twenty-two dead in all.

Three of the females were found in a packaging room with long stainless-steel tables, large mortars and pestles, digital scales, hundreds of boxes of zip-lock bags, and four vacuum-sealing machines. Six kilos of raw meth were piled on the table. Sampson figured there was at least twice that amount already wrapped, sealed, and boxed for delivery.

“If this were a case of assassins hired by rival drug lords, you’d figure they would have taken the drugs with them,” Sampson said.

“Maybe they were after money,” I said. “An operation this size has to be generating millions in cash.”

In the last room we found the cash. On a pallet, there were banded fifty-dollar bills, similar to the ones we’d seen at Edita Kravic’s place, stacked three feet high and wrapped in cellophane. Next to that were two guys in their mid- to late thirties wearing suits and ties. Both had been shot between the eyes.

“Has to be at least a million dollars right there, and they leave it,” Sampson said. “I don’t get it.”

“I don’t either,” I said.

“Revenge?”

“Maybe. Not one of the victims seems to have put up any kind of resistance. It’s as if every single one of them was surprised and killed with a single shot.”

“Which means suppressors on all the weapons.”

“Definitely.”

Sampson said, “Everything about this is scary smart and precise. The shooting. Picking up the brass. Sweeping as they left. The lack of a reason.”

“Oh, there’s a reason, John,” I said. “You don’t kill twenty-two people if you don’t have a damned good reason.”

21

AN HOUR LATER, in the full heat of the day, Bree stepped up in front of a bank of microphones outside the factory fences.

“I know this has been frustrating, but we wanted to give you accurate facts and it took time to gather them,” she said in a clear, commanding voice. “We are dealing with multiple homicides in the unstable environment of an extremely large methamphetamine lab. Twenty-two are known dead.”

Gasps went up. Reporters started bellowing questions. Screams of horror and grief gathered force in the crowd beyond the media throng.

“Please,” Bree said, holding up her hands. “The bodies have been stripped of identification. Someone out there knows someone who worked in this factory-a wife, a mother, a friend, a husband, a father, a son or daughter.

“If you’re that someone, we ask that you come forward to identify the body and help us understand who might be responsible for committing these cold-blooded killings and why.”

The media went nuts and bombarded Bree with questions. She kept calm and told them essentially the same thing over and over again.

“Well done,” I said when she walked away from the microphones after promising to update them on the hour.

“Just have to know how to feed them,” Bree said. “Bit by bit.”

No one came forward initially, not even those people openly grieving. Then the bodies started leaving the factory in black bags, and the massacre was real, and their loss was heartbreaking.

Vicky Sue Granger was the first to talk. In her late twenties, she looked devastated, and she said she was sure her husband, Dale, was in there.

“He work in the lab?” Bree asked.

“Shamrock City,” she said weakly. “That’s what they called it. If you were lucky enough to get inside, and you worked hard, the money just came pouring-”

She stopped talking. I guess she figured the less she said about illegal cash, the better.

I said, “Who was in charge?”

Mrs. Granger shrugged, said, “Dale got in through T-Shawn, his cousin.”

Other relatives started coming forward once we’d moved the bodies to an air-conditioned space at the medical examiner’s office. Family after family was forced to walk down the line of corpses lying in open bags on the cement floor. One man was looking for his eighteen-year-old son. Two girls were there for their older sister. A grandmother broke down in Bree’s arms.

Dale Granger was there. He worked in packaging and had taken a bullet to the chest. His cousin Tim Shawn Warren, a part-time bouncer at a strip club, was one of the muscular guys who’d been strangled outside.

Few of the relatives wanted to talk. The ones that did come up to us claimed to know little of what their loved ones had been doing, only that they’d gotten jobs and suddenly had a lot of cash on hand.

Then Claire Newfield walked in. She saw her younger brother, Clyde, a guard with a broken neck, and became hysterical. When she finally got herself under control, she said Clyde had told her that he worked for scientists.

“He said they were like geniuses,” Newfield said. “They’d figured out a new way to make meth and they were going to rule the entire East Coast.”

“You have names?”

“No, I didn’t want to know.”

Around eight that night, we were left with seven bodies on the chill cement floor, and no one waiting outside. Two Jane Does. Five John Does. Two were the older Caucasian males in suits who’d been found with the cash; the remaining five were all in their late twenties and had been discovered in the meth lab.

I knelt next to the bodies and looked at them. What had brought them to this? Who the hell were they?

“Let’s get these bodies on ice,” I said.

“Dr. Cross?” called one of the patrolmen by the door. “There’s a young lady out here who wants to look for her friends.”

“Okay, one more.”

Alexandra Campbell shuffled in as if against her will, shoulders rolled forward, looking everywhere but at the bodies. She was a reedy woman in her twenties with a colorful sleeve tattoo and blond hair dyed peach in places.

“You think you know someone here?” I asked after introducing myself.

Campbell shrugged miserably, said, “Gotta look. Make sure.”

I led her over. Campbell stopped eight or nine feet from the remaining seven bodies. Her hand trembled up to cover her mouth.

“Carlo,” she choked out. “Now look where you’ve left me.”

She kind of folded down into herself then, wrapped her arms around her knees at the feet of the body bags, and sobbed her poor heart out. I gave her some time and then crouched at her side and offered her a tissue box.

Bree brought her a bottle of water, and Campbell told us everything she knew.

22

WE DIDN’T REACH home until well after midnight. We ate cold leftover chicken in the kitchen and tried to forget the things we’d seen and heard.

“You believe her?” Bree asked, getting up from the table to wash her plate. “Alexandra Campbell?”

“The bones of it,” I said.

“God help us, then,” she said. “Tomorrow’s going to be a zoo.”

“Just be the calm tortoise,” I said.

“You’re asking me to act like a turtle at work?”

“No, like a tortoise, with a big armored shell and the ability to stand back from it all and keep plodding toward the finish line.”

Bree looked at me sleepily, came into my arms, and said, “I have a feeling this is going to be all-consuming for a while, and you telling me to act like a land turtle wasn’t exactly the advice I expected from you. But I love you and let’s not lose track of each other.”

“Deal,” I said, and followed her upstairs to bed.

I don’t remember my head hitting the pillow. I don’t remember dreaming.

There was nothing but darkness until the alarm went off at six fifteen. Bree was already up, showered, and dressed, and eating in the kitchen with Nana Mama. Jannie was drinking a protein shake and wearing her warm-ups.

I yawned, said to Jannie, “You’re up early.”

“Trainer’s waiting. He wants my workouts done before the heat comes up.”

“You on the track?”

“Gym,” Jannie said. “I’m being introduced to Olympic weight lifting.”

“You’re going to be one of those bodybuilders?” my grandmother asked. “They’re not fast.”

“No, Nana,” Jannie said. “This is exactly the opposite of bodybuilding. The Olympic lifts require every muscle in your body to engage and fire. So doing them in addition to running will get me much stronger and more explosive, and it’ll do it without making my body look freakish.”

“Oh, well, that’s good,” Nana Mama said. “No freakish in this family.”

I smiled through another yawn, poured myself coffee. Bree rinsed the dishes and got ready to leave. I followed her into the front hallway.

“Why are you in such a rush?” I asked.

“Chief Michaels texted me, asked me to be in his office by nine.”

“For what?”

“To brief the mayor and the commissioner. How do I look?”

“Like a badass crime fighter.”

Bree smiled at that, pecked me on the lips, and said, “Thanks for making my life easier.”

“Anytime. Day or night.”

23

THE MURDERS OF Aaron Peters, Tom McGrath, and Edita Kravic were put on the back burner after the massacre. Chief Michaels ordered virtually the entire Major Case Unit to work on the factory slayings.

The FBI put another ten agents on the case. The help of the DEA was enlisted as well. A task-force meeting was called for early that afternoon in a room normally used for patrol roll call.

The room was packed when Chief Michaels came in; he was followed by Ned Mahoney, a guy with a shaved head I didn’t recognize, and Bree. We hadn’t seen each other all morning, since I’d been back at the factory, watching the FBI neutralize and dismantle the meth lab.

She smiled and opened her eyes wide at me, mouthed the word Text.

I frowned, reached in my pocket, pulled out my smartphone, and realized that I’d shut the alerts off. There were several texts from Bree. The first three said Call.

The last one said Oh, well, hold on to your hat.

“This kind of slaughter will not go unanswered,” Chief Michaels began. “You cannot kill twenty-two people and not face punishment.”

Everyone in the room sobered. Many nodded their heads.

“The FBI, DEA, and DCPD have pledged total cooperation in that effort,” Chief Michaels said. “Our new chief of detectives, Bree Stone, will be supervising liaison with Special Agent Mahoney of the FBI and the acting DEA special agent in charge for the District, George Potter.”

Sampson whispered in my ear, “Your mouth’s hanging open.”

I shut it and grinned, prouder than proud. How could I not have seen that one coming?

Bree stepped up to the mike and nodded to me, all business.

Multiple photographs appeared on a screen in the corner.

“As of now, we have twenty out of twenty-two confirmed identities for the victims,” Bree said. “Any one of these people could be linked to the killers, so we are going to need workups on all of them.”

She nodded to someone, and the photos were reduced to five.

“This has not come out yet, but we know quite a bit about these five from a witness who came forward late last night,” she said. “All five are classmates in the graduate chemistry program at Georgetown University.”

That sent a rumble through the crowd. Georgetown? Chemists from a prestigious university running a meth lab?

Bree gestured to a photo of a dark-complected curly-haired man and said, “This is Laxman Dalal. Twenty-two years old. PhD candidate. Born in Mumbai, he went to the University of Southern California on a full academic ride and finished in two years. We believe he was the brains and driving force behind the drug lab.”

From there she gave them a story of four very smart, very driven people who’d been seduced into crime and easy money by Laxman Dalal, a man whom Campbell had described as “brilliant, charismatic, and morally corrupt.”

“Dalal evidently didn’t think the laws applied to him,” Bree said. “By sheer force of brains and personality, he convinced his fellow students, including Alexandra Campbell’s ex-boyfriend Carlo Puente, that they could earn a whole lot of cash by making meth at night, on weekends, and during their summer breaks.”

They got good fast, and their illegal business started to grow even faster. Campbell said it had started in a small garage in Southeast DC, but they’d soon moved to the factory in Anacostia.

“Campbell said her boyfriend showed her bags of money back in March,” Bree said. “That’s when she said she called it quits with Puente. She says she told him Dalal was going to get him killed. And he did. That’s it for me. Special Agent Potter?”

Bree stepped away from the lectern, and the DEA SAC took her place.

Potter said, “Before last year, I would have told you that there was no drug gang brazen enough or capable enough to pull off this kind of massacre. But in the last six months, across northern Mexico and the desert Southwest, we’ve seen a rise in deadly turf wars. Traffickers shot and left for dead. Labs like this one blown up. When I was in the El Paso office, it looked like some group was bent on cornering the market in illicit drugs, forming kind of a supercartel that was willing to kill anyone in its way.”

“We have a name for this supercartel?” I asked. “People involved?”

Potter looked at me, said, “I wish we did, Dr. Cross. In El Paso, it was like chasing ghosts, and then I was transferred here.”

“Did you have any intelligence about that factory?” Sampson asked.

Potter looked at his men, who shook their heads.

“It was as big a surprise to us as it was to you,” Potter said, and then he sighed. “But then again, we’ve been shorthanded. Budget cuts.”

Ned Mahoney cleared his throat, said, “I don’t know about a supercartel, but I think you’re right about brazenness being a factor here. You’d have to be stone-cold to do this, so I think we have to agree from the start that this was professionally done and proceed from there.”

“No doubt,” Potter said. “These guys were highly trained.”

“SWAT level?” Bree asked.

“I think we’re dealing with a group that’s quite a few steps above SWAT,” Mahoney said. “This feels commando-trained, at a minimum.”

“So, mercenaries?” Sampson asked.

“Could be,” Mahoney replied. “There are a lot of private security contractors around, now that Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down. I don’t think you’d have trouble putting together an elite team if the money was right.”

“Hold that thought,” Bree said, and nodded.

Photos of the remaining two John Does, the ones dressed for business, got bigger on the screen.

“We think these two are the moneymen,” she said. “Either they funded the lab’s construction and equipment or they were involved in the sale of-”

Mahoney’s phone started beeping. So did Bree’s. And Potter’s.

They all went for their phones. Bree’s was right in her hand. She scanned the screen, stiffened, and said, “Two more drug labs have been hit. One in Newark. Another in rural Connecticut. Multiple deaths confirmed in both places.”

24

BOTH METH LABS had been taken down within minutes of each other, and with the same attention to detail. All the people inside the drug factories were dead. There were no cartridge casings at either scene. In each case, hundreds of thousands of dollars and multiple kilos of methamphetamine were left untouched.

Ned Mahoney and the FBI seized control of the larger investigation at that point. Three different massacres across state lines demanded it, though Chief of Detectives Bree Stone remained in charge of the Anacostia slayings.

It was a little odd at first, having my wife be my boss, but then I realized she and Nana Mama ruled the roost at home anyway, and I got over it. Even better, Bree was good at being a chief. Right off the bat. She had a knack for pulling the levers, getting you what you needed.

But despite her efforts, for several days we made little progress. Then, ninety-six hours after we arrived at the massacre scene in Anacostia, we identified the two dead businessmen through missing-persons reports in Virginia and Maryland.

Chandler Keen of Falls Church ran a small investment firm currently under investigation by the SEC. Matthew Franks was a Bethesda-based real estate developer who’d been hit with several multimillion-dollar legal judgments in construction-default lawsuits.

The FBI raided their offices and homes, but it was going to take some time to cull through the seized evidence. It was clear, though, that both men had had adequate reasons to get involved in the lucrative business of illegal drug manufacturing. But how it had happened and why they and the twenty others had been targeted for death remained a mystery.

Cable news, not surprisingly, went bonkers over the case, especially the Georgetown University angle. Students were back on campus and some of them were more than happy to talk. As a result, we knew a lot more about the five genius victims, but nothing game-changing.

On the sixth morning after the massacre, I told Bree I was going back to work the Tom McGrath case while we waited for forensics to give us some kind of tangible lead on the factory killings.

“Wish I could go with you,” she said, sitting behind her desk with a stack of papers before her. “But between fielding calls from the brass and making decisions on overtime, I’m going to be here for a while.”

“I feel for you. Take my dad’s advice: delegate the worst of it.”

“I can’t delegate anything until I understand the job.”

“True,” I said. “You’re doing great, by the way.”

“You think?”

“Not just me. Keep trusting your instincts.”

Bree laughed. “They’re all I’ve had so far. Where are you going?”

I told her I was going to look for an American University law student named JohnnyBoy5.

25

SAMPSON AND I made a trip to the administrative offices of American University’s law school. We explained we were working on Edita Kravic’s murder case, and that got us fifteen minutes with the dean, who told us Kravic had been a star student, a role model for foreign students and women entering school at a relatively late age.

“We could use some help, then,” I said, and I told him about JohnnyBoy5. “That’s his online name, but he’s a student here, and we want to talk with him. Can you figure out who he is?”

“May I ask why?” the dean said.

“He was obsessed with Ms. Kravic,” Sampson said. “Maybe enough to kill her and Chief McGrath.”

The dean cringed at the idea that one of his students might have murdered another as well as the police chief. He hesitated, said, “There are privacy issues.”

“More important than bringing a double murderer to justice?” I said flatly. “Do we have to go to the press and tell them that the dean of a law school is being obstructive in the hunt for a cop killer?”

Five minutes later, we had a bead on one John Boynton, aka JohnnyBoy5, a second-year law student from Indiana who was attending a summer class on torts in the school amphitheater. The dean texted us his photo.

We waited in the hallway on the second floor of the law school for the lecture to end. A crowd of students began exiting the amphitheater, and I soon had eyes on JohnnyBoy5, who was still inside the room, about ten feet back from the door.

“Check out the hairdo,” I said.

“I see it,” Sampson said. “Flashy.”

I don’t know what about us tipped Boynton. Maybe it was his Spider-Man instincts. Or maybe just the memory of a big guy threatening to break his face. Whatever triggered it, the guy with the spiked blond hair took one look at us and shoved several students forward hard, causing people in the crowd to stagger and fall like dominoes. Then he spun and took off deeper into the lecture hall.

“Sonofabitch, he’s running!” Sampson roared. He drew his service weapon and sped after him, throwing students out of his way and yelling, “Police! Get down!”

I went another route, running down the hall toward an exit sign. I shouldered the door open and took the stairs four at a time. When I hit the bottom I threw open a second door, saw students fleeing the amphitheater through an exit at the end of the hall.

A girl looked over her shoulder and screamed. I stepped into a janitor’s closet next to the stairwell, leaving the door open.

Boynton came out of the amphitheater, smashing people out of his way, then sprinted down the hall right at me. I waited until he was just past me and then hit him hard across his back with the head of a heavy, wet industrial mop.

JohnnyBoy5 smashed into the stairway door and fell in a heap, groaning.

26

BOYNTON SAT ON the floor, held his nose, which was gushing blood, and moaned. “I’m suing. Whoever you are, I’m suing.”

“No, you’re not,” I said as Sampson came up behind me. “We’re homicide detectives investigating Edita Kravic’s murder. We saw the e-mails you sent her.”

That rocked him. He wiped at his nose, groaned, muttered, “I had a bad reaction to a generic version of Singulair, an asthma drug. Talk to my allergist. He said in rare cases, it could make you manic. It definitely made me that way.”

“Some of the things you wrote sounded threatening and psychotic,” I said. “She was going to file a restraining order against you.”

His shoulders slumped. “I swear to you, Detective, that wasn’t the real John Boynton writing those things. It was a hopped-up, crazed version of me. Two days after getting off that goddamned drug, I was fine.”

The way he said it, exposed and defeated, made me believe it was possible that some of the messages had been fueled by a bad reaction to a drug.

“Okay, let’s put those particular e-mails aside,” I said. “The fact is, you seem to have had an escalating obsession with Edita Kravic from the first day of law school. Did you love her?”

Boynton looked ready to deny it but then surrendered and nodded. “I thought she was perfect.”

“But she didn’t feel that way about you?”

“She liked me at first, then I got all weird with the medicine.”

“You wrote to her once accusing her of hiring muscle to threaten you.”

“Said he’d take a baseball bat to my face if I didn’t end all contact with Edita.”

“Who was it?”

Boynton shrugged. “The cop she was sleeping with, and died with.” Something about the way he moved just then made me recognize him-this was the guy with the knapsack who’d run out of McGrath’s apartment.

“Can I go to a hospital, please?” he whined.

“When we’re done talking,” I said. “You’re not going to die from a nosebleed. Why did you break into Chief McGrath’s place?”

He hesitated. Then he said, “She asked me to.”

“Bullshit,” Sampson said.

“She did,” he insisted.

Boynton claimed that Edita had called him and said that she’d done some research and now believed him about the medicine. She’d also said she was in trouble and needed his help. They met, and she asked him to steal McGrath’s laptop.

“She said McGrath had stuff on the computer that could get her in big trouble, prevent her from becoming a lawyer,” Boynton said.

“Like what kind of stuff?”

“She wouldn’t tell me, but she was convincing,” Boynton said. “You could hear it in her voice and see it in her body language. She was scared by whatever he had on the laptop.”

Recalling the e-mails I’d seen in Edita’s computer, I said, “You were supposed to meet at ten the night before she was killed?”

He nodded and said she’d come over later than that, around eleven, to give him McGrath’s apartment key and to have sex.

“Edita was sleeping with you both?” Sampson asked, eyebrows raised.

“She was going to break up with McGrath after I gave her the laptop,” he said, looking crestfallen. “She was finally going to be mine.”

Before she’d left Boynton’s apartment that night, Edita had told him she was taking McGrath to an early-morning yoga class and then to breakfast at her place. Boynton would have plenty of time to use the key and get the laptop. I thought about it, remembered Boynton running with the backpack from McGrath’s place. It all fit in a strange way.

Boynton said he had the laptop at his apartment. We got him to his feet, handcuffed him, and told him we’d swing by his place on the way to the hospital.

“Am I under arrest? They’ll throw me out of school.”

“You’re in custody for now,” I said.

In the car on the way to his apartment, I turned around in the front seat and looked at him.

“In one of your e-mails during your manic phase, you wrote something like ‘I know what you do, Edita, and I’ll tell everyone.’ What was that all about?”

Fear flickered across Boynton’s swollen face. “I was just bluffing, you know? Everyone has a secret, so I figured-”

“You’re lying to me, Mr. Boynton,” I said with a sigh. “Every time you lie, you get closer to an arrest and the end of law school. So what do you know?”

“I… I followed her a few times.”

“You stalked her?” Sampson said.

“Just followed her. I wanted to see what she did when she wasn’t at school. That’s all.”

“Get to it,” Sampson said. “Where did she go?”

“This place in Vienna, Virginia, called the Phoenix Club.”

Edita went there three or four days a week, he told us. She’d often stay until after midnight. Boynton tried to get inside once but was told it was a private club. He said he stopped following her once he realized someone else was following her.

“Who?” Sampson said.

“Another cop,” Boynton said. “At least, he talked like a cop.”

“He caught you following Edita?”

“Twice. The second time he told me he had her under surveillance and I had to stop or he’d have me arrested for obstructing justice.”

“Name?”

“He never said.”

“Never showed you a badge?”

Boynton shook his head. “But like I said, he acted like a cop.”

“What did he look like?” I said.

“Tall, big, but he didn’t look too good, like he was sick or something. He coughed a lot. And he wore a red Redskins cap.”

27

BREE MANAGED TO get away from all her paperwork, and three hours later, Kurt Muller, Bree, and I pulled up in front of Terry Howard’s depressing apartment building in Northeast DC.

We’d retrieved McGrath’s laptop and taken it and Boynton downtown. The laptop went to Detectives Lincoln and O’Donnell, along with marching orders to look for anything related to Edita or the Phoenix Club. Sampson stayed behind to take Boynton’s full statement.

We stood in the foyer and buzzed Howard’s apartment three times but got no answer. We buzzed the other five apartments, but it was a weekday and everyone was out. No response.

“Call him,” I said.

Bree looked up Howard’s number and punched it into her cell phone. No answer. Straight to voice mail.

We were turning to leave when Muller noticed a beater Dodge four-door parked across the street. “That’s Howard’s. He’s here, just not answering.”

“He could have walked somewhere,” Bree said. “Taken the Metro.”

“Not the way he was coughing and wheezing the last time I saw him,” I said.

“Where’s his apartment?”

“The third floor, back.”

We walked around into the alley and located Howard’s apartment and the fire escape. I picked Bree up; she grabbed the ladder and pulled it down. We climbed up the three flights and stopped outside the kitchen window.

The sink overflowed with dishes. Liquor and beer bottles crowded the small table and just about every other surface. A second window was raised slightly and looked into a small dining area and part of the living room where Sampson and I had spoken with Howard. We could see the television was on, tuned to ESPN.

“Call his number again,” I said.

Bree did, and almost immediately I heard the jangle of an old-fashioned rotary phone coming from the apartment. The ringing stopped.

“Voice mail,” Bree said.

“That’s probable cause to do a well-being check, don’t you think, Chief?”

She hesitated, and then said, “No fruit of the poisonous tree.”

Nodding, I pushed up the sash and climbed in, calling, “Terry Howard? It’s Alex Cross. We’re just checking on your well-being.”

No voice replied, but almost immediately I heard a bird squawking.

“That’s Sylvia Plath,” I said, helping Bree and Muller inside. “His neurotic parakeet.”

“Howard always had a twisted sense of humor,” Muller said.

We moved deeper into the apartment, past a dining table buried in stacks of old newspapers to the parakeet that was pacing back and forth on its perch, screeching, bobbing its head, and pecking viciously at its featherless skin, clearly agitated.

We stepped into the living area and saw why.

Terry Howard sat in his easy chair facing the television; a film of blood and gore spattered the ceiling and walls around him. He had apparently put a gun in his mouth and shot himself. A sizable chunk of his skull was gone. A bloody, red Redskins cap was on the floor beside him.

An empty bottle of Smirnoff and a Remington 1911.45-caliber pistol, the same kind of gun that had killed Tom McGrath, lay in his old partner’s lap.

On the floor beside him, there was a note scrawled in ink.

Rot in hell, Tommy McG, it read. You and your lying bitch of a girlfriend.

28

“CASE CLOSED?” SAMPSON asked as we drove past the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in Northern Virginia.

“Bree thinks so,” I said. “So does Michaels. Tough one to swallow, but there it is.”

“You’re not sold?”

“Just trying to understand the entire situation before we declare it a revenge killing and a suicide. Take a right.”

Sampson did, and then he made a left, and we were into big-money properties, sprawling estates, some with high walls and security gates. It was dusk and lights were blinking on.

“Coming up on your right,” I said.

Sampson slowed, put on a blinker. We drove up a narrow road maybe a hundred feet long with gardens on both sides. At the end of it was a guardhouse, a turnaround, and a steel security gate set in a high wall.

The polished brass sign on the guardhouse read THE PHOENIX CLUB. PRIVATE. MEMBERS ONLY.

We’d no sooner reached the turnaround than a big, muscular dude stepped out in a blue polo shirt with the Phoenix Club logo on the chest and a Glock pistol holstered at his waist.

He held up his hand and came to the driver-side window.

“Are you members?” he said in a thick Eastern European accent.

“No,” Sampson said, and he showed his police badge and ID. “We need to talk to someone about Edita Kravic.”

“I don’t know her,” the man said, seeming unimpressed that we were cops.

“She worked here, and now she’s dead,” Sampson said. “So go inside and call whoever would know and tell them we’re not leaving until we speak with someone about her.”

The guard stared at Sampson. Sampson glared back. Then the security guy bit his lip and went into the guardhouse.

Twenty minutes later, the gates opened and out came a golf cart driven by a bald man in a finely tailored blue suit. He stopped the cart and got out. He was in his thirties, with slightly cauliflower ears, pale blue eyes, and extraordinarily large hands with knuckles that had been broken a few times.

“I am Sergei Bogrov,” he said, taking my hand and then laying his other mitt-like hand on top of mine, swallowing it. “I help manage the club. How may I help?”

“Edita Kravic,” I said. “She worked here.”

Bogrov’s face fell and he let go of my hand. “Yes, we hear this. Very sad. She was well liked by the staff and members.”

“What did she do?”

“She taught a hybrid of yoga and Feldenkrais therapy.”

“Level Two Certified Coach?” I asked.

“That’s right,” Bogrov said. “She also worked in the spa as a masseuse. She was an excellent one.”

“Good money in that?” Sampson asked.

“If the member is a generous tipper, it can be,” he said.

“So, what is the Phoenix Club?” I asked. “Health spa and…”

“Pools, tennis courts, fitness center, an excellent private restaurant, an extensive wine cellar, the best bar in Virginia, and the company of others who have achieved much in life and deserve more,” Bogrov said.

“You sound like you’re doing a marketing pitch,” Sampson said.

Bogrov smiled. “You caught me.”

“Can we get a tour?” I asked.

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” Bogrov said. “Our members belong to the club as much for its strict privacy as for its amenities.”

“We could get a warrant,” Sampson said.

Bogrov dropped the facade of friendliness and said, “On what basis, Detective?”

“The murder of a DC police chief and his confidential informant.”

Bogrov’s eyes narrowed. “I ask again, on what basis? Yes, I know who Edita was killed with, but where do you connect this to my club?”

“At the moment, I’m not at liberty to say.”

“This means you have nothing,” Bogrov said with a dismissive flap of a giant hand. “And since you are from the District of Columbia and not the Commonwealth of Virginia, you have no jurisdiction here. So I ask you politely but firmly to leave the property.”

29

I WOKE OUT of a dead sleep to find Jannie standing by the bed holding her running shoes.

Dazed, I glanced at the clock. Ten minutes to six. Then I remembered I’d told her to wake me and we’d run together. I’d been working so much I wasn’t getting in my normal workouts and had put on five pounds I didn’t need.

So I nodded and got up, leaving Bree blissfully snoozing. I dressed in the bathroom, went into the kitchen, and made a cup of instant coffee. As I sat there drinking it, I tried to muster up the will to tie my shoelaces. This wasn’t going to be a fun run. More like torture.

“Dad?”

Stifling a yawn, I looked up and saw Ali standing there, rubbing his eyes.

“What are you doing up so early, kiddo?” I asked.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said, coming over to snuggle with me, which didn’t help my workout plans. I could have drifted off right then and there with my little boy in my arms.

But I said, “You couldn’t fall asleep? Or you couldn’t stay asleep?”

“Both,” he said. “I had too much to think about.”

“Really?” I said, closing my eyes. “Like what?”

“Time,” Ali said. “And how it, like, curves at the speed of light. Neil deGrasse Tyson said that’s what happens, so it has to be true.”

I opened my eyes, thinking how strange it was to be having this conversation with a seven-year-old. “I think Einstein figured that out.”

“I know that,” Ali said. “Which makes it doubly true, and that’s the problem, and that’s why I can’t sleep.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I can’t see it in my head-you know, time curving.”

“And that’s why you fell asleep late and woke up early?”

“Yes,” he said, snuggling deeper into my lap. “Can you explain it to me?”

I had to fight not to laugh.

“Uh, no,” I said. “Physics isn’t one of my strengths even when I’m well rested.”

“Oh,” Ali said. “I was thinking that maybe it was like when you’re dreaming and time seems like it goes on forever, but scientists studying your brain say you’re only dreaming for three to eight minutes. Does that make sense?”

That woke me up for good, and I looked down at my son and wondered what he would become. I’d told all my kids that they could be anything their hearts desired as long as they were willing to work for it. But at that moment, Ali seemed limitless.

“Dad? Does that make sense?”

“I’ve never heard Einstein’s theory of relativity explained that way, and I honestly can’t tell you if it makes sense, but you certainly showed imagination coming up with that idea.”

Ali smiled and then chewed on his lip. “You think Neil deGrasse Tyson would know if that’s how dreams work? You know, at the speed of light and bending time?”

“I would imagine that if anyone knows, it would be Neil deGrasse Tyson.”

“He’s not here,” Ali said. “At the Smithsonian, I mean.”

“No, he’s in New York. At the Natural History Museum, I believe.”

“Think I could call him up and ask him?”

I laughed. “You want to call Dr. Tyson up and tell him about your theory?”

“That’s right. Can I, Dad?”

“I don’t have his number.”

“Oh,” Ali said. “Who would?”

Jannie appeared in the doorway. “Dad, do you even have your shoes on?”

“They’re on, just not tied,” I said, giving Ali a nudge.

He got off my lap grudgingly and said, “Dad?”

“I’ll look into it and get back to you. Okay?”

Ali brightened, said, “I’m going to watch Origins until Nana Mama gets up to make breakfast.”

“An excellent idea.” I grunted and tied my shoes.

30

“FINALLY,” JANNIE SAID when I walked out onto the front porch and found her stretching.

“Your brother had lots of questions.”

“As usual,” Jannie said, sounding slightly miffed. “Where does he come up with that stuff? Dreams and time and, I don’t know, the universe?”

“Those shows he watches,” I said, trying to stretch my hips and failing miserably. “And the Internet.”

“He’s the only kid I know who thinks like that,” she said.

“It’s a good thing.”

“I guess,” she said. “But it’s like guaranteed now he’s going to be a nerd.”

“Nerds rule the world these days, or hadn’t you noticed?”

Jannie thought about that, said, “Well, I guess it would be okay if my little brother grew up to rule the world.”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Right.” She grinned. “Now, are we going to run or not?”

“To be honest, I would vote for not.”

“Do I need to remind you about the ten pounds you need to lose?”

“Ouch,” I said. “And it’s five.”

Jannie crossed her arms and raised her eyebrow skeptically.

“Okay, seven,” I said. “And let’s go before I decide to get doughnuts.”

Jannie turned, started to move, and became someone else. It was a very strange thing, I thought as she started to lope down the sidewalk with me puffing already. There was my daughter, Jannie, who had to struggle to sit still and succeed in school. And there was Jannie Cross, who ran so effortlessly.

She picked up her pace all the way to the end of the block and then glided back to me.

“Show-off,” I said.

“You’re breaking a sweat,” she said. “This is good.”

“How far are we going?” I asked.

“Three miles,” she said.

“Thank you for being merciful.”

“The idea is to make you want to show up again tomorrow.”

“Right,” I said without enthusiasm.

We ran past the Marine barracks and heard them doing PT. We ran past Chung Sun Chung’s convenience store, the best around. It was doing a brisk business, as usual. In the window, the Powerball sign said the pot was nearing fifty million dollars.

“Remind me to stop and get Nana Mama’s tickets on the way back,” I said.

“You ever won anything?”

“No.”

“Nana Mama?”

“Twice. Once ten thousand dollars and once twenty-five thousand.”

“When was that?”

“Before I went to college.”

“So a long time ago.”

“Paleolithic era,” I said.

“Must be why you run like a mastodon.”

She laughed and took off in a burst of speed, ran all the way to the end of the block, then jogged back to me again.

“Mastodon?” I said, trying to act offended.

“Saber-toothed tiger trying to get back in shape?”

“Much better.”

We ran on for several minutes before Jannie said, “So why were you and Bree fighting last night?”

“We weren’t fighting,” I said. “We were arguing.”

“Loud argument.”

“Passionate subject,” I said. “And Bree’s under a lot of pressure from the top brass to make something happen, something that shows the public that DC Metro is still on top of things.”

“Like what?” Jannie asked as we ran past the armory.

“Like clearing a major murder case. The Tommy McGrath murder case.”

“Are you close to making an arrest?”

“No, because the prime suspect shot himself yesterday.”

Jannie shook her head. “I don’t know how you deal with that kind of stuff.”

“Like anything, it takes practice.”

“So why did he shoot himself? Because you suspected him and he knew you were after him?”

“That’s what Bree thinks,” I said. “It’s also what Chief Michaels thinks.”

“But you don’t?”

I struggled with how much to tell her. “There are other explanations of why the suspect would want to commit suicide.”

“Like what?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Oh.”

“And no more questions about that, okay?”

“Sure, Dad. I was just interested.”

“And I appreciate your interest in that and in getting me out of bed this morning.”

We ran to the National Arboretum, and on the way back, the running wasn’t half the torture I’d expected. When we passed Chung Sun Chung’s store, the line for lottery tickets was ten-deep, so I skipped it and we went home.

Nana Mama was up cooking scrambled eggs and bacon, and Ali was engrossed in Origins. I went upstairs; Bree was in the shower.

“Hey,” she said when I climbed in.

“Sorry we argued last night.”

Bree nodded, hugged me, and said, “I still think Howard did it, shot Tom, Edita, and then himself.”

“Or Howard shot himself because he had stage four lung cancer. Or he was telling you the truth about not owning a Remington 1911.”

“Or he was lying about it.”

“Or he was lying about it. Or he didn’t kill anyone, and someone associated with the Phoenix Club did. Truce until we know more?”

Bree hugged me tighter. “Being chief of detectives is hard.”

“I think you’re doing a great job.”

“Chief Michaels doesn’t think so.”

“Sure he does. He’s just getting heat from the mayor and the city council.”

“I am going to get through this, right?”

“We are going to get through this.”

31

THE BALLISTICS REPORT on the.45-caliber Remington 1911 that killed Terry Howard came back around ten fifteen that morning. It was the same pistol that had been used to kill Tom McGrath and Edita Kravic.

“Case closed?” Chief Michaels asked. “We can tell the media that?”

“Yes,” Bree said.

I said nothing.

The chief noticed, said, “Alex?”

“You might want to say there’s strong evidence that Howard did it, but there are still some loose ends to take care of before we put the file in boxes.”

“What loose ends?”

“The car used in McGrath’s murder. It wasn’t Howard’s. And I’d like to see a bill of sale saying Howard actually owned a Remington 1911. All records I’ve checked say he was a Smith and Wesson guy.”

Chief Michaels looked at Bree, said, “You’re confident?”

“Terry Howard hated Tom,” she said. “Howard had lost his job and had cancer. Tom was chief of detectives with a younger girlfriend. So Howard’s bitterness built into rage, and he shot Tom and Edita. Then he shot himself, figuring we’d eventually put two and two together.”

“Kind of convenient.”

“Or true.”

“Sorry, Alex,” Chief Michaels said. “I agree with Chief Stone.”

“Not my call, but I can live with it,” I said.

“Good. And the drug-lab massacre?”

“We’ve had everyone pressuring informants, but there’s no talk on the streets about the hired gunmen. Just the victims.”

“Which means?”

“They’re an outside force,” I said. “Highly trained. Probably ex-military.”

“Probably hired by a rival drug interest,” Bree said.

“Or they’re vigilantes,” I said.

“Alex,” Bree said with a sigh.

“Vigilantes?” the chief said, eyes narrowing. “Where do you see that?”

“No drugs were taken in the three attacks. No money was taken in the three attacks. If you think about it, a message was being sent loud and clear.”

“What message?”

“Stop making meth or we’ll kill you too.”

Chief Michaels thought about that for several moments before he looked at Bree. “No talk about vigilantes until we have something more solid.”

Bree glanced at me, then said, “Done, sir.”

Sampson and I watched Bree’s press conference in our office. Even though Bree and I disagreed on both cases, I thought she handled the situation skillfully, and I was grateful when she said that the evidence indicated Howard killed his former partner but that there were loose ends that had to be dealt with before the investigation could be considered closed.

When discussing the mass murder at the drug factory, however, she made no mention of vigilantes and supported the theory that we were dealing with a drug gang war and mercenaries.

“I hope she’s right,” Sampson said.

“I do too, actually,” I said.

“No attack in days.”

“It is possible that there won’t be any more, that what needed to be done has been done.”

“Uh-huh,” Sampson said. “What’s your Spider-Man sense telling you?”

“I don’t have a Spider-Man sense. I can’t even pick a good lottery number.”

“Okay, what are your years of experience telling you?”

I thought about that, said, “This isn’t over. Not by a long shot.”

Detective Lincoln knocked, said, “McGrath had serious encryption on his computer. We’re going to have to send it out.”

“Send it to Quantico,” I said. “I’ll try to get it moved to the front of the line.”

“Right away,” Lincoln said, and he left.

Sampson said, “I feel like we’re banging our heads against a wall on every aspect of every case we’ve got.”

“You’ve got a hard head; you’ll break us through.”

“No match between Howard’s gun and the Rock Creek shooter.”

“I saw that. You talk with Aaron Peters’s fellow lobbyists? Family?”

Sampson nodded, said the Maserati’s driver had been divorced for five years. No kids. Played the field. He had a reputation for ruthlessness, but not in a way that provoked animosity or revenge.

“His partners said Peters could make you smile while he was cutting your throat,” Sampson said.

“Lovely image,” I said. “What about other shootings like these?”

Sampson frowned, said, “I’ll look. You?”

“I think I’ll go hunting for mercenaries.”

32

THREE DAYS LATER, Sampson and I drove south on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Looking west across Chesapeake Bay, I saw something pale and white in the sky far away. I squinted. The sun caught it.

“There’s a blimp out there,” I said. “A couple of them.”

“Don’t see those too often. There a big sports event?”

“No idea,” I said before losing sight of them.

Forty minutes later, we were on the Nanticoke Road in Salisbury, Maryland. Farmers were cutting hay and harvesting corn in a shimmering heat.

“Feels like we’re going to kick a hornet’s nest,” Sampson said.

“Or a basket with spitting cobras inside,” I said, and I wondered whether we might be biting off more than we could chew, coming here without an entire SWAT team to back us up.

“This guy’s background is spooky.”

I nodded, said, “In some ways, he’s got the perfect résumé for a mass murderer.”

“That’s it up ahead on the right, I think,” Sampson said, gesturing through the windshield at a gated pull-off in a large woodlot between two farms.

Hand-painted signs hung from the locked gate: DOGS ARE THE LEAST OF YOUR WORRIES; DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT; BLAST ZONE; and, my favorite, THE LUNATIC IS IN THE GRASS.

“We might want to rethink this,” Sampson said.

“Dolores said he’s good until sundown usually,” I said and pulled the squad car over on the shoulder beyond the gate.

I got out, felt the breeze, smelled the salt air, and heard the sawing of cicadas in the hardwoods. I looked at the signs on the gate again, thought about the path that had taken us here, and wondered if Sampson was right, if we should rethink this unannounced visit.

Three days before, I’d started looking into mercenaries living in the Washington, DC, area, and I was shocked at the high numbers. But once it was explained to me, it made sense.

In 2008, at the height of the Iraq War, there were 155,826 private contractors operating in Iraq in support of 152,000 U.S. soldiers. Private contractors outnumbered the U.S. military in Afghanistan as well. Between the two wars, best estimates are that as many as forty thousand men and women were involved in security and other private military activities. In other words, guns for hire. In other words, mercenaries.

Most of them were highly trained former elite soldiers working through security companies like Blackwater, which had been based in Northern Virginia. These companies and ex-soldiers had made a lot of money for nearly a decade.

And then the spigot closed. President Obama ordered the troops withdrawn from Iraq, and with them went the need and the money to hire scads of private security personnel. Men who’d been making a hundred and fifty thousand to a half a million a year in the war zones were suddenly looking for work.

A friend of mine at the Pentagon told me there were probably five thousand of these guns for hire living in and around the nation’s capital. But it wasn’t like there was a directory of them.

I’d asked my friend if there was someone who knew a lot about that world, someone who might point us in the right direction. He’d called back yesterday and given me a phone number.

When I’d called it, a woman answered and said, “Don’t bother doing a trace, Detective Cross. It’s a burn phone. And call me Dolores.”

“I’m just asking for advice, Dolores.”

“Ask away.”

I asked Dolores if she’d read about the massacre at the drug factory in Anacostia. She had. I told her how clean an operation it was and how we believed ex-military were involved.

“Makes sense,” she’d said.

“Any candidates you can think of? Someone with military training, and maybe a beef with drug dealers? Someone willing to go outside the law and lead others into mass murder?”

There was a long, long pause, and finally Dolores had said, “I can think of only one offhand.”

Startling me from my thoughts, Sampson cleared his throat and gestured at the gate. “After you, Alex.”

With a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach, I walked to the gate of Nicholas Condon’s place and climbed over it.

33

SAMPSON AND I had looked at Condon’s hundred-and-twelve-acre empire on Google Earth the night before. The dirt road beyond the gate wound through woods to a modest farm with several fields.

Now we could see that the road was not frequently used and even less frequently maintained, with wild raspberry and thorny vines trying to choke it off on both sides.

“Get your badge out,” I said. “You see him, you raise both hands and identify yourself.”

“Think he’ll care that we’re cops?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “But someone with his background probably realizes that killing a cop would be a stupid move.”

“Comforting when you’re going to talk to a guy who considers himself a lunatic in the grass.”

I couldn’t argue with Sampson’s concern. Condon had graduated from the Naval Academy and been a sniper, a damned good one, with a SEAL Team 6 unit. A week after he had mustered out of the military for medical reasons, a company called Dyson Security gave Condon a contract and sent him to Afghanistan.

Condon’s reputation for having a cool head even in the most extreme conditions continued after he left the military, and he soon led a Dyson team that specialized in protecting political and corporate dignitaries and rescuing private contractors taken hostage by the Taliban.

One of those private contractors was an American woman named Paula Healey who worked trying to improve the lives of Afghani girls, which had made her a target for the fundamentalists. Healey was also the love of Condon’s life.

She and three other women were taken outside of Kandahar. After several months, Condon learned where Healey was being held-in a remote village in a region known for poppy cultivation and opium production.

Condon and a team of his men went in under cover of night. After a firefight with the local Taliban, he found Healey strung out on opium and stabbed in the chest. She was the only one of the four women left alive. She’d been raped repeatedly and died in Condon’s arms.

What happened then depends on whose testimony you believe. Either the Taliban counterattacked and Condon risked his life repeatedly to kill and drive them back, or Condon went berserk with grief and rage and gunned down every male over the age of fourteen left in the village.

There’d been an investigation, and every one of the Dyson Security operators backed up Condon’s version of events. The widows and mothers claimed their dead were not Taliban and that they had been slaughtered.

Ultimately, Condon was exonerated. But losing his love changed him, made him violent and unpredictable. Dyson decided he could not be put in the field and paid off his five-year contract in a lump sum.

Condon had used the money to buy the land we were walking through.

Dolores said Condon was a hermit who liked to farm and go fishing on his boat out on the ocean alone. He distrusted anybody involved in the government. His only visitors, and they were rare, were the men and women who’d served with him in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I’d asked Dolores how she knew so much about him.

She’d hesitated and then said, “Once, a long time before he met Paula, I was the love of Nicholas’s life.”

There was a picket stake in the trail with a piece of orange tape fluttering off it. We went around it and entered the field forty yards from its eastern end, where there was a ten-foot-high dirt embankment with a large red tub of Tide detergent sitting on top.

The field to our right lay fallow. It was long and narrow, three hundred yards to the other end and maybe fifty yards to the far tree line.

“The house is in the next field?” Sampson said as we started across.

“That’s the way I-”

We never heard the shot, just the bullet ripping the air before the Tide detergent tub on the embankment erupted like a land mine, throwing dirt, rock, and melted plastic everywhere and sending a plume of gray smoke toward the sky.

34

AS SOON AS we heard the bullet ripping past us, instinct kicked in. We were both diving when the bomb went off.

Sampson and I hit the ground and put our arms over our heads as debris rained down on us. My left ear rang and for a moment I was disoriented.

Then, like a boxer recovering from a glancing blow, I became more alert. I dug at my back for my service pistol and then followed Sampson as he squirmed forward into high grass and weeds.

“Where’d the shot come from?” Sampson asked in a harsh whisper.

“From Condon’s sniper rifle?”

“I meant from what direction?”

“No idea, but it had to have been far away if we didn’t hear the report before whatever was in that Tide thing exploded.”

“We need to reach the trees and call for backup,” Sampson said.

“Backup first,” I said, and pulled out my cell. “Great-no service.”

“I had it over by the road.”

“Not here,” I said, and then I heard something over the ringing in my left ear.

Sampson heard it too, rose up to look, and then ducked down.

“That’s an ATV,” Sampson said. “He’s coming for us. Two hundred yards out. Near the tree line.”

We stared at each other, thinking the same thing: Do we run for the trees and risk getting shot by a world-class sniper? Or-

I pushed myself to my feet, held out my badge, and aimed my pistol at Condon, who was less than a hundred yards away in a green Polaris Ranger. Sampson stood up beside me and did the same.

Condon pulled up at ninety yards, snaked a scoped rifle over the wheel, and shouted, “You trying to get yourselves killed? Didn’t you see the goddamned orange flag in the road?”

“We didn’t know what it meant,” I shouted back. “We’re detectives with Washington Metro Police. We just want to ask you a few questions.”

Condon was hunkered over the rifle, aiming at us through his scope. At ninety yards, any shot we might take with the pistol would be a Hail Mary. But ninety yards with a precision sniper rifle was a chip shot.

I had a funny feeling in my chest, as if he’d put the crosshairs there. Then he lifted his head. “You the Alex Cross? FBI profiler and all that?”

“I was,” I called back. “That’s right.”

That seemed to satisfy Condon because he slipped the rifle into a plastic scabbard mounted to the side of the ATV and started driving toward us.

“How’d he know your name?” Sampson asked.

“I’m thinking he read our credentials through his scope,” I said, lowering my gun but not holstering it.

Condon pulled up about ten yards away. Late thirties and rawboned, he had silver-and-red hair and a matching beard. Both needed cutting.

“Azore,” he said. “Denni.”

Two German shepherds jumped down from the flatbed carrier behind the sniper. They stopped and stood there, panting, at Condon’s side.

“You mind telling us what the hell that was all about?” Sampson asked. “Shooting at us?”

Condon said, “Practicing my trade. You walked into a hot rifle range, my place of business, unannounced and forewarned. That’s what happened.”

I said, “You didn’t see us before you shot?”

He looked at me, blinked, said, “Hell no, I was in the zone. In the whole wide world, there was nothing but the I and the D and the trigger and me.”

“What’s the I and the D?”

He spelled it out. “T-i-d-e.”

“What was in that container?” I asked.

“Tannerite,” he said. “Exploding target material. Shot indicator.”

Sampson said, “You almost killed us with that stuff, which is illegal in Maryland, by the way.”

Ordinarily the mere presence of a pissed-off John Sampson was enough to shake the toughest of criminals. But Condon looked at ease.

“Not for me,” he said. “I have a federal permit through Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. And, like I said, I didn’t know you were there. If I’d wanted to kill you, Detectives, you’d already be dead, and I’d have a shovel-and-shut-up mission on my hands. Know what I mean?”

I did know what the sniper meant and absolutely believed him.

35

CONDON CROSSED HIS arms and said, “So go ahead, ask your questions.”

“Somewhere we can sit down?” Sampson said. “Get out of this heat?”

Condon considered that, said, “Two weapons each? Primary and backup?”

I nodded.

“Azore,” Condon said. “Denni.”

The dogs circled us in easy lopes. Both hesitated, turned noses toward our ankles, then wagged their tails.

The sniper whistled and they went back to his side.

“Always like to know for sure,” Condon said, and he started up the Ranger. “One of you can sit up front. One in the back.”

“I’ll take the back,” I said, then I holstered my pistol and climbed up onto the little flatbed carrier beside several tool-boxes that presumably held the tools of Condon’s trade.

Sampson had to duck his head to squeeze into the passenger seat.

Condon put the Ranger in gear, glanced at Sampson, and said, “Guys big as you don’t last long when the shit hits the fan.”

“Which is why I like to be holding the fan at all times,” Sampson growled.

Condon almost smiled.

The German shepherds ran along as we drove to the tree line, where another picket with orange flagging blocked the road. The sniper got out, drew it from the ground, and handed it to me.

A minute or two later, we pulled up by a black Ford F-150, a Harley-Davidson, and a John Deere farm tractor parked in front of a white ranch house in need of scraping and painting. A Grady-White fishing boat sat on a trailer near a red barn in need of shoring and paint.

The long field in front of Condon’s house was shoulder-high in corn. His grass needed mowing, and the air smelled of stale dog dung and urine.

Condon turned off the ATV, tugged the rifle from the black scabbard, and got out. He walked with a slight hitch in his stride to retrieve one of the toolboxes.

“Nice gun,” I said.

“Designed it myself,” he said, grabbing one of the toolboxes and showing me a.338 Lapua with a Timney trigger, a Lone Wolf custom stock, and a Swarovski 4 to 18 power scope.

No wonder he’d been able to read my credentials at ninety yards.

“How far can you shoot something like that?” Sampson asked.

“Wind’s calm and I’m right, a mile,” Condon said, and he went with a slight hitch in his gait up a cracked walkway to the front porch.

He came up with a heavy ring of keys and used them to open three dead bolts. Opening the door, he called, “Denni. Azore.”

The dogs streaked into the house. Two minutes later, they returned.

“Kennel up,” he said.

The dogs trotted over to cedar beds and lay down.

Condon gestured for us to follow him inside and flipped on the light in a small living area off a kitchen. The place reeked of marijuana. Beer cans and an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s crowded a coffee table between a couch with busted springs and a large TV on the wall. An image from Game of Thrones was frozen on the flat-screen.

The drapes were drawn. Condon crossed to an air-conditioning unit mounted on the wall and turned it on.

“Beer?” he asked.

“We’re on duty,” Sampson said.

“Suit yourself,” Condon said, and he went into the kitchen.

I looked around, saw Sampson had gone to a small table in the corner and was looking at several framed photographs, all of the same beautiful young woman in a variety of rugged outdoor settings. In the largest picture, an eight-by-ten, she was in Condon’s arms and he glowed like he owned the world.

“That what you’re here about?” Condon asked. “Paula and all?”

Even with the limp, he’d come up behind us so quietly we both startled.

When I turned, the sniper popped his Bud can, looked at us coldly.

“We’d heard about her. I’m sorry for your loss.”

Condon softened slightly, said, “Thank you.”

“What’s it been? Four years?”

“Four years, six months, three days, nine hours, three minutes. Was this what you came all the way from DC to talk about?”

In the car, Sampson and I had hashed out how best to approach him. Trying to bull or bluff a guy like Condon wasn’t going to work, so I opted to come at him from the side.

“We need your help,” I said. “Do you keep up with the news?”

“I try not to,” Condon said.

“There was a mass murder in a methamphetamine factory in Washington, DC,” I said. “Twenty-two people died. The assault seemed professional, as in highly trained. Probably ex-military.”

As if he were seeing an enemy in the distance, the sniper’s eyes hardened.

“I know where this is going,” he said. “I’ll save you some time. I had nothing to do with that. Now, unless you have a warrant, Detective Cross, I’m going to have to ask you to get out of my house and off my land.”

“Mr. Condon-”

“Now. Before I get all loony and PTSD, start thinking you’re the Taliban.”