Cross the Line

36

MERCURY RARELY RODE his motorcycle in broad daylight.

He generally took the bike out only at night and on patrol. But heading south on Interstate 97, he felt like nothing could shake him today, as if more balance were coming into the world, and into his life. He had been the avenger now in more ways than one, and he rather liked the role.

Hell, he loved everything about what he’d been doing these past few weeks-taking charge and acting when no one else would. Certainly not the police. Certainly not the FBI or NCIS. Do-nothings, one and-

Mercury noticed a beige Ford Taurus weaving in the slow lane just south of the Maryland Route 32 interchange. He hung one car back and one car over.

The Taurus drifted, and the Porsche SUV in front of Mercury honked at it. The Taurus wandered back into its lane.

The Porsche accelerated. Mercury sped up as if to pass the Taurus too and got just far enough to see what was really going on.

“Stupid bitch,” he muttered, anger beginning to build, boiling away all that good feeling. “Don’t you read? Don’t you listen?”

He backed off, telling himself that this wasn’t the time or the place.

But as he entered a long, slow, easterly curve in the four-lane highway, Mercury realized that, except for the Taurus, the southbound lanes were clear in front and behind him.

He made a split-second decision and zipped open his jacket. With his right hand he twisted the throttle, and with his left, he drew the pistol.

The motorcycle sped up until it was right beside the Taurus. The stupid bitch driving didn’t look at him, and she wasn’t looking at the road ahead.

She was texting on an iPhone while driving sixty-two miles an hour.

Years of practice had made Mercury an ambidextrous shot. He was about to pull the trigger when Ms. Textaholic actually took her eyes off the goddamned screen.

She looked over. She saw the gun.

She dropped the iPhone and twisted as he shot.

The tail end of the Taurus swung violently into his lane, almost knocking over the motorcycle, and then it veered back the other way, did a 360-degree spin, ran up an embankment, and flipped over onto its roof.

He put away the pistol and drove on at a steady sixty-three, two miles below the speed limit.

No need to draw any attention now that the traffic laws were being obeyed and a sense of balance, a sense of order, had been restored.

37

THAT AFTERNOON AFTER we talked to Condon, we went to Bree’s office and gave her our report.

“So Condon threatened two law enforcement officers?” she asked, looking as stressed and tired as I’ve ever seen her.

“Oh yeah,” Sampson said.

“In a manner of speaking, anyway,” I said. “He’s highly intelligent. Knew what we were up to the second we mentioned the massacre.”

“You ask him where he was on the night in question?”

“He wouldn’t answer,” Sampson said. “Said he’d learned the hard way never to talk with an investigator of any kind without an attorney present.”

“But you put him on notice that he’s a suspect,” Bree said. “That can be a good thing.”

“It can,” I said. “But we can’t exactly put him under surveillance from here, and we don’t have evidence to support a search warrant.”

“Find me one thing that links Condon to that factory, and I’ll call in some favors with the state police in Maryland. Have them put him under surveillance.”

“I find one thing that links Condon to that factory and I think Mahoney will take over and call in the FBI cavalry, and it will be out of our hands.”

Sampson said, “I’m going to check if Condon has a Tanner-ite waiver. If not, he’s stockpiling explosives and we can walk in his front door with an army behind us.”

“Good,” Bree said.

We started to leave, but Bree called after me, “Alex? Can we talk?”

“Fine,” Sampson said. “I know when I’m not wanted.”

He closed the door as he left. Bree sagged back in her chair.

“You okay?” I said.

“Not today,” she said. “This morning, the mayor and the chief took turns using me as their verbal punching bag over the massacre.”

“And a few days ago, you helped them get the pressure off their backs by naming Terry Howard as Tom’s killer. You can’t go up and down emotionally along with their roller-coaster whims. Accept the fact that getting pressure from above is part of the job but doesn’t define it. Focus on doing the best you can. Nothing else. Three months from now you’ll have a whole different outlook on things.”

Bree sighed. “Think so?”

“I know so,” I said, coming around to massage her shoulders and neck.

“Ohhhh, I need that,” she said. “My lower back’s hurting too.”

“You’re sitting down too much,” I said. “You’re used to being up and active, and your body’s protesting.”

“I’m a desk jockey now. Part of the territory.”

“Get the chief to buy you one of those stand-up desks. Or better yet, a treadmill desk.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Bree said.

“I’m full of good ideas today.” I bent over and kissed her on the cheek.

“I miss you,” she said.

“I miss you too,” I said and nuzzled her neck. “But we’re good, right?”

“Always.”

There was a knock at the door.

Sampson called out, “You still dressed?”

“No, we’re buck-naked,” Bree called back. “C’mon in.”

He opened the door cautiously, saw me massaging her neck, and said, “Sorry to disturb you in the middle of things, but I had a ViCAP going on drivers who were shot like Mr. Maserati there in Rock Creek.”

I stopped kneading Bree’s neck. “You got a hit?”

“You tell me.”

38

A FEW WEEKS before Aaron Peters was shot to death by a motorcyclist on the Rock Creek Parkway, thirty-nine-year-old Liza Crawford, a successful real estate agent in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was found dead in her brand-new Corvette on a winding rural road lined in places with stacked stone walls.

The investigator said Crawford was traveling at a high rate of speed when she hit a stone wall. The Corvette flipped over and landed on its roof, crushing her.

The extensive damage to Crawford’s head had initially hidden the.45-caliber-bullet entry and exit wounds, but they were discovered during the autopsy. She’d been dead before the crash. The slug was retrieved from the passenger-side door and it was now being processed at Pennsylvania’s state crime lab.

Samuel Tate, twenty-three, died two months before Peters and Crawford. An auto mechanic, Tate was found dead inside his souped-up Ford Mustang, the front end of which was wrapped around an oak tree on a rural road west of Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Tate was known to be an excellent driver who never drank or got high. There were no skid marks on the road, and yet he’d been going well over one hundred miles an hour when he lost control. A medical examiner found a hole made by a.45-caliber bullet in the left side of his head. The bullet had already been processed.

“Look at that,” Sampson said now, tapping on his computer screen, which displayed the report on Tate’s bullet and the report on the bullets taken from the Rock Creek victim. “They’re a dead-on match.”

“Crawford’s will be too,” I said, studying a map. “She died about the same distance from Washington as Tate did, but she was to the north of it and he was to the south. So a ninety- to ninety-five-minute radius.”

“Which means what?”

“We’ve got a serial killer. A hunter on a motorcycle. Draw a ninety-minute circle around us. That’s his hunting ground.”

“What’s he hunting?”

“Maseratis. Corvettes. Mustangs.”

“High-performance cars,” Sampson said.

“Well, the people who drive high-performance cars.”

“And drive them very fast.”

Tapping my lip with one finger, I thought about that.

“What’s the point?” Sampson asked. “Is it a game?”

“Could be,” I said. “That video from Peters’s car shows they were playing cat and mouse, and the motorcyclist was better at being the cat.”

Sampson shook his head. “The media’s going to have a field day with this one too. Remember the Beltway Sniper attacks?”

“How could I forget?”

I was still with the FBI on the morning of October 3, 2002, when four people were randomly shot to death in suburban Maryland. That night, inside the District, a seventy-two-year-old carpenter was shot and killed while taking a walk on Georgia Avenue.

The press called them the Beltway Sniper attacks. But it soon became clear to the FBI that the shooting spree had started eight months before in Tacoma, Washington. In all, we found twelve people who’d been wounded or killed by the snipers prior to October 3, from Arizona to Texas to Atlanta to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

We eventually caught the two troubled men with a Bush-master AR-15 rifle, but before it was over, seventeen people died. Another ten were wounded but survived.

“Malvo and Muhammad did it for sport,” Sampson said. “It could be what we’re looking at here.”

“Possibly,” I said. “A challenge to the motorcyclist, chasing the fast car down and getting off a lethal shot at the driver.”

“And escaping unharmed?”

I nodded, thinking how bad this could get. The country had been caught up in twenty-three days of fear when the Beltway Snipers were shooting and killing. Those twenty-three days had been some of the most stressful of my life.

“You going to tell Bree? She’s got a lot on her shoulders already.”

Before I could answer, my wife appeared at the door to my office, breathless.

“O’Donnell, Lincoln, and two patrolmen came under automatic-weapon fire in Northeast five minutes ago,” she said. “Lincoln was hit. So was a patrolman. O’Donnell says Thao Le was one of the shooters.”

39

WE RACED THROUGH the city, blues flashing and sirens wailing. I drove. Sampson struggled into body armor in the seat beside me. Bree was in the back, fielding calls, fighting to get a full understanding of the situation, and coordinating with the other chiefs to send the right personnel to the scene.

Evidently, Detectives Lincoln and O’Donnell had been tracking Thao Le through his girlfriend Michele Bui. She had texted O’Donnell that Le was moving a load of drugs through a row house in Northeast that afternoon.

The detectives had gone to check it out and called for backup. One patrol car drove into the alley behind the house. Another patrol car came onto the block at one end, and Lincoln and O’Donnell came from the other. They saw Le and three of his men chilling on the front porch.

O’Donnell had stopped his vehicle just shy of the house. The other patrol car did the same. All four officers jumped out, guns drawn, and ordered the men on the porch to lie down. Le came up with an AK-47 and opened fire.

Lincoln and a patrolman were hit; Lincoln took a bullet through his thigh and another through his hand. O’Donnell had been able to pull him behind a car across the street. The injured patrolman, Josh Parks, had been shot through the pelvis, but he’d dragged himself up against the base of the porch, where he could not be seen or shot at from inside.

“How are you, Parks?” Bree asked over the radio.

“Feel like I got a drill bit through my groin to my spine, but otherwise peachy,” the officer said.

“O’Donnell?”

“We need to get Lincoln and Parks to the hospital without getting shot.”

“I hear you,” she said. “Cavalry’s on its way. ETA four minutes.”

“I heard a lot of screaming inside. I’m thinking he’s got hostages.”

We heard shouting and automatic gunfire, and then the connection died.

“Shit!” Bree shouted.

She tried to redial, but her phone rang before she could.

“O’Donnell?” Bree said, and listened. “Where are you?”

Bree punched the speaker button, and out came the terrified voice of Michele Bui.

“I’m hiding inside a closet upstairs,” Thao Le’s girlfriend said, clearly on the verge of tears. “Thao and his friends have been snorting coke and meth for days, and they’re out of their minds and paranoid. He’s got them convinced they’re next.”

“Next for what?”

“Next to be killed,” she said. “They were so whacked, they thought the cops were those vigilantes killing meth cookers.”

“Who else is in the house with you?” Bree asked.

“I don’t know exactly,” she said. “I was upstairs sleeping, but I heard a few of the cutters and packagers come in and work through the night. After the shots, I heard screams and-”

“What?”

“Thao’s yelling for me,” she said. “I gotta go.”

The line went dead.

40

METRO PATROL CARS were parked in V formations blocking the street at both ends of the road. Other officers were moving through the alleys to evacuate residents closest to the row house Le was in.

A pair of ambulances had already arrived. We left our squad car down the street and got our first look at the situation through binoculars.

Halfway down the block on the east side, Officer Joshua Parks was on his side by the stoop to the row house, contorted in agony.

“We’re here, Parks, with more on the way,” Bree said over her radio.

“Good,” he said. “I’m getting one hell of a leg cramp lying on the cement like this.”

Bree couldn’t help but smile. “We’ll have that cramp looked into. Talk to me, O’Donnell.”

Detective O’Donnell was across the street from Parks on the sidewalk behind a white Ford Explorer. He was holding Lincoln, who looked weak.

“O’Donnell, talk to me,” Bree said again.

“Lincoln’s conscious, but hurting bad. What’s the plan?”

“Working on it,” Bree said.

She looked at me, said quietly, “I’ve never handled anything remotely like this, Alex. You have, so I’m all ears.”

I scanned the scene again and then said, “We need to be inside the house directly across the street from Le’s and also in the house directly behind it. And we need Le’s cell phone number.”

“I’ll try Michele Bui again,” Bree said.

The SWAT van pulled up. Captain Matt Fuller, dressed head to toe in black body armor, climbed out and hurried toward us.

“Shit,” I muttered.

“What?”

“I’d hoped Captain Reagan was on duty,” I said. “Fuller’s good at what he does, but he wants to do it as often as he can, if you know what I mean.”

A burly man with soft, almost saggy facial features, Fuller said, “Dr. Cross. Chief Stone. Sampson. How’s the officer down?”

“Two are down, Captain,” Bree said. “Lincoln, who’s one of my men, and Officer Parks. Both are in critical need of medical attention, especially Parks.”

Fuller looked at the scene through binoculars. When he put them down, he said, “We’re going to want to be in the house opposite and the one behind.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” I said, and then I looked to Bree again. “Call Michele. Get that number.”

Captain Fuller, four of his men, Sampson, and I used an alley to reach the row house directly in front of Detectives O’Donnell and Lincoln and across the street from Parks. A frail older woman had been evacuated from the house. She’d given her key to one of the patrolmen who’d helped her, and we used it to go through the back door into her kitchen.

We passed a steep staircase on our way into the living area, barely taking in the dated furniture, the photos of a lifetime, and a baby grand piano.

“Maxwell and Keith, you’re upstairs,” Captain Fuller said behind me. “Stay back from the windows, keep it dark.”

While the two SWAT officers climbed the stairs, Bree pushed aside the window curtains just enough for us to see O’Donnell and Lincoln right there on the sidewalk, backs to the Explorer, no more than fifty feet away. O’Donnell had his belt around Lincoln’s thigh, but Lincoln looked wan, like he’d lost a lot of blood.

“Lincoln needs medical help now,” Bree said.

“Both of them do,” I said, watching Parks go through some kind of pain spasm that made him arch in agony.

The SWAT commander was quiet for several moments and then said, “We’re going to handle this one at a time. Easiest first, which means Lincoln.”

Fuller looked at his two other men. “How fast can you get out the door, go down those steps, grab Lincoln, and get your asses back inside?”

“Twenty seconds,” Sergeant Daniel Kiniry said.

“Maybe less,” Officer Brent Remer said. “Unless we come under fire.”

“O’Donnell? How long since the last shots?” Fuller asked.

“Ten, maybe twelve minutes,” the detective came back.

The captain thought a moment and then spoke into his radio. “Wilkerson?”

“Go ahead, Captain.”

“Break me out a couple of grenades.”

41

BREE AND I looked at Captain Fuller like he’d lost his mind.

“Grenades?” Bree said. “Isn’t that a little extreme?”

“No,” Fuller said, and then he explained what he wanted to do.

I considered it, decided once again that Captain Fuller was good at his job, and admitted, “That could work.”

“It could,” Bree said. “Your move, Captain.”

Three minutes later, on Fuller’s command, two flash-bang grenades went off behind the row house where Le and his fellow gangbangers were holed up.

I had my binoculars trained on the windows across the street and saw movement inside, figures running to investigate the explosions. Then Bree threw up the window sash, and we stuck our service weapons out the window.

“Go,” Fuller said, and he yanked open the front door to the old lady’s home.

Kiniry and Remer bolted across the porch, leaped off the stairs, and landed beside Lincoln. O’Donnell let go of his partner.

The SWAT guys got their hands under Lincoln and came up fast. O’Donnell jumped up, his gun, like ours, aimed at the row house as he backed up, covering Kiniry, Remer, and Lincoln.

They got Lincoln inside, and O’Donnell was almost there when Le or one of his men opened up with an automatic weapon. Bullets blew out the windows of the Explorer and pinged and cracked off the cement stairs while Sampson, Bree, and I emptied our weapons at the house.

O’Donnell sprinted and dove inside. Fuller slammed shut the heavy oak door as bullets strafed the side of the house and then stopped.

“Fuck!” O’Donnell screamed, crawling and clutching at his shoe. “He shot me through the foot!”

“Get this man medical attention!” Bree yelled back into the house.

Two EMTs came running from the kitchen.

While they started to work, I reloaded. Over our headsets, a voice said, “Cap, this is Maxwell.”

“Go, Maxwell,” Fuller said.

“I’ve got the shooter. Full chest exposed.”

“Identity?”

“Unclear, but subject is armed with an AK.”

“Take him,” Fuller said without a moment’s hesitation.

“What? Wait!” Bree said.

There was a rifle crack overhead, followed by a death scream across the street.

“Slow down, Captain!” I shouted.

“You’re not giving them any options!” Bree said.

“Options?” Fuller looked at us like we were addled. “That shooter, Le or not, just tried to kill four-count them, four- of my fellow officers. In my mind, that makes that person a potential cop killer with active intent, so I ordered him shot. End of story.”

Bree started to argue but her phone buzzed. Angry, she looked at the screen, rocked her head back, and said, “Oh Jesus.”

“What?”

“It’s Michele Bui. She says we just shot and killed one of the female hostages.”

42

FULLER DIDN’T HEAR. He was barking orders into his radio while EMTs rolled a morphine-happy Detective O’Donnell through the kitchen toward the back door. The siren of the ambulance bearing Lincoln was already wailing away.

“Captain!” I shouted at Fuller.

The SWAT commander put his radio on his shoulder, peered at me angrily. “Detective Cross, stand down.”

“I won’t stand down, Captain,” I said.

“Nor will I,” Bree said. “One of your men upstairs, Officer Maxwell, just shot an innocent hostage on your orders.”

Fuller lost color. “No.”

“Le’s girlfriend, who is in there, says yes.”

The captain pulled himself together and clicked his radio. “Maxwell?”

“Right here, Cap.”

“How did you identify the shooter?”

“White T-shirt and weapon.”

“No head?”

“Negative.”

“How long did you have the shooter in your scope?”

“From right before he started shooting at O’Donnell,” Maxwell replied. “When he stopped, he ducked out of sight for maybe three seconds and then returned, like he’d reloaded.”

“That was not a reload,” Bree said into her radio. “Officer Maxwell, you shot a hostage.”

There was a long, terrible silence before Maxwell said, “Cap?”

“Maxwell?”

“Permission to stand down, sir.”

Fuller glared at Bree, said, “Permission denied. I need you up there.”

Bree said, “Captain, for the time being, you are going to stand down and let me try to save Officer Parks and avoid more bloodshed. Or do I call Chief Michaels to have you relieved of command?”

Fuller blinked slowly at Bree, said, “I guess it’s your show, Chief.”

“No, it’s Dr. Cross’s show,” she said, looking at me. “I’ve got Le’s phone number. Try to talk to him.”

I took a moment to mentally adjust, to become less a police detective and more a criminal psychologist. Then I entered the phone number and hit Send.

The phone rang three times before Le answered in a jittery, cocaine-fueled voice. “Who the hell’s this?”

“The only chance you have of not dying today, Mr. Le,” I said. “My name is Alex Cross.”

43

LE’S BREATHING WAS rapid and shallow in my ear.

“Do you understand, Mr. Le?” I asked. “There are SWAT officers preparing to storm in and kill you. I’m offering you a way out.”

After a long, long pause, he said, “How’s that?”

“Start by not making it worse for yourself,” I said. “Two police officers have been wounded and a hostage killed.”

“That’s not on me,” Le said. “Some cop shot her.”

I wasn’t going to quibble and point out that he’d shoved her into the line of fire with a weapon in her hand; I needed to keep him talking, establish rapport.

“You’re a hell of a motorcycle rider,” I said. “Saw you in action at Eden Center a while back.”

Le chuckled. “You never saw anyone pull that kind of shit before.”

“Never,” I said. “You are a rare talent. Now, how are we going to keep you, and your talent, from dying today?”

During a long pause I heard him snorting meth or coke or both. Then he said, “I dunno, Alex. You tell me.”

“How about you show me you can be trusted?” I said. “Let us retrieve our wounded officer.”

“What’s in that for me?” Le said.

I said, “We’re in this together.”

“Give me a fucking break,” he said. “We’re not together. We’re traveling different roads.”

“Different roads that are at an intersection. I’m trying to prevent a crash that you would not survive. Is that what you want too?”

He didn’t say anything for almost a minute.

“Mr. Le?” I said.

When Le spoke, his voice was softer, more thoughtful. “I figured things would turn out different for me.”

“What was your dream? Everyone’s got one.”

Le laughed. “X Games, man.”

“On the motorcycle?”

“That’s it,” Le said. “All I thought about. All I did.”

“When did you let the dream die?”

“I crashed too much and needed something strong enough to get through the pain,” he said. “Going into the business of killing pain just made sense.”

Le was smart, articulate, and self-aware. No wonder he’d been able to build a small empire.

“Can we come for Officer Parks? Things will go worse for you if he dies.”

Le thought about that and then said, “Do it. We won’t shoot.”

44

“THANK YOU, MR. LE,” I said. “We appreciate it.”

I muted my phone and said to Bree and Fuller, “Get me EMTs. I’m going across with them. I’ll keep him talking until Parks is clear.”

“I don’t like it,” Fuller said.

“Neither do I,” Bree said.

“Le needs to see me. It will change things.”

I didn’t wait for a reply. I cut the mute and said, “Mr. Le? You there?”

I heard him snort something again. “I’m here. You coming?”

“I am,” I said. “I’ll be the tall unarmed man with the ambulance workers.”

The EMTs came in pushing a gurney. I hit the mute button again.

“He says he won’t shoot,” I said. “But it’s your call. I’ll go alone if I have to.”

The male EMT, Bill Hawkins, said, “He mentally stable?”

“Surprisingly so, at the moment,” I said. “But an hour ago he evidently thought Officer Parks and the others were part of a vigilante gang and opened up on them. So there’s got to be some delusion there.”

“You trust him?” said Emma Jean Lord, the other EMT.

“Enough to lead the way,” I said.

They looked at each other and nodded.

“Be quick about this,” Bree told them. “Let Alex talk. You go straight to Parks, everything crisp and businesslike, no different than if he’d had a heart attack on his front lawn.”

“Okay,” Hawkins said. “Let’s go.”

Looking to Captain Fuller, Bree said, “You’ll cover them?”

“What are the rules of engagement?” he said with the hint of a sneer.

“Protect them.”

“Okay,” Fuller said. “I can live with that.”

“Good,” I said, thumbing the mute button off. “We’re coming out, Mr. Le. We will be moving fast to get to Officer Parks.”

“Come on, then,” Le said.

I holstered my gun, opened the door, and trotted off the front porch, saying, “You’re seeing me?”

“We’re not looking out windows and getting shot,” Le said. “Do what you have to do.”

Still, I couldn’t help feeling as if crosshairs were on my forehead as the three of us went to Officer Parks, who was gray and sweating with pain.

Hawkins swung the gurney next to him.

Lord said, kneeling beside Parks, “Can you feel your legs?”

“Yeah, too much,” Parks said through gritted teeth. “Like they’re on fire, and it hurts insanely bad around and above my hips. I think my pelvis is broken on both sides. And I’m thirsty.”

“Because you’re gut shot,” the EMT said, taking his vitals.

“Am I gonna live?”

“If we have anything to say about it,” Hawkins said.

Lord and Hawkins worked fast, getting an IV into Parks’s arm and then putting him on a backboard. They lifted him onto the gurney, strapped him down, and headed for the street.

I waited until they were out of range before saying, “You did a good thing, Mr. Le. Officer Parks will live. Why don’t you do another good thing and come out onto the porch to talk to me face-to-face?”

There was a moment of silence before Le said, “You must think I’m an idiot. I take one step out that door and I go boom-boom away.”

“Not if I have anything to do with it,” I said. “At least let some of the hostages go.”

“No.”

“No, you won’t come out and talk, or no, you won’t let the hostages go?”

“The hostages stay,” Le said, and I heard him set his cell down.

Then I heard him snorting yet again.

A female voice in the background said, “Go talk to him. Figure this the hell out, because I’m not dying for you and your meth paranoia!”

After several moments, the phone was picked up again. Le said in a slow, weird voice, “Uhhhh, sure, Cross. I’ll come out, and we’ll have us a chitchat.”

“When?”

“Why don’t we do it right the fuck now?”

Before I could reply, the line went dead, and inside the house a woman screamed.

45

BREE’S VOICE BARKED in my earbud, “What’s going on in there?”

“I have no idea-” I started, and then the front door flew open.

A dazed Michele Bui shuffled out, her face a spiderweb of blood from a head wound. Thao Le stood behind her, one arm around her neck, the other hand pressing a.45-caliber 1911 pistol to her temple.

Le looked as wired as any snort-head I had ever seen. His eyes were sunk in their sockets, and the whites were the color of a freshly painted fire-alarm box. Blood seeped from his left nostril over skin and lips that had turned so waxy from the drugs they would have looked dead were it not for the odd twitches in his cheeks and cracked lips.

I turned my palms up to show I had no weapon, said, “Mr. Le?”

On the porch, two feet out from the open doorway, Le tracked me. “You… Cross?”

“That’s right,” I said. “What are you doing? We agreed to talk man-to-man.”

“What, did you think I was coming out alone? Without a shield? Let you all shoot me down? You cops been wanting to take me out for years.”

“Why don’t you let Michele go? She’s bleeding. She needs medical help.”

Le blinked and cocked his head but said nothing.

“C’mon, Mr. Le. She’s your girlfriend. Do you really want to-”

“You know her name, Cross?” he said. “And that she’s my girlfriend?”

He laughed and pressed the muzzle of the gun tighter against her head. Michele Bui winced and tried to cringe away, but he held her close.

“I am not stupid, Cross,” he said. “You know her name means you talked to her, and she’s been talking to you. And my girlfriend? Hell no. This skank’s a throwaway blow-up sex doll, means nothing to me.”

Something started to change in Michele Bui’s expression. She came up out of the daze and her eyes went hard.

“Michele seems interested only in keeping you alive,” I said. “In my book, that’s caring, Mr. Le. That’s love.”

Le glanced at his girlfriend and laughed. “Nah. That’s survival. Without me, she’s on the street selling her ass.”

“So what do you want?”

“A way out of here,” Le said.

“That can be arranged.”

“Not in cuffs. Not in a cruiser. I mean gone.”

“Gone is not happening. But you can do yourself some good. Let her go.”

“No,” Le said. “I know stuff. There’s got to be a trade here. I tell you the stuff I know, and you let me walk.”

“You’d have to know something of great value for that to happen,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like who are the vigilantes? Are they mercenaries hired by rival drug gangs?”

“Hey, I don’t know, man,” Le said. “Seriously. I know a lot, but not that.”

I thought a moment. “Did you kill Tom McGrath?”

“No way,” Le said. “I wanted to, but that ain’t on me, and I can prove it. Can’t I, Michele?”

Bui looked at me and nodded. “We were in bed when that happened.”

“See?” Le said, relaxing his hold around her neck. “Sex dolls are important in other ways. What else do you want to know?”

I was just doing my best to keep him talking when something popped into my head.

“Did you frame Terry Howard?” I asked. “Did you plant the cocaine and the money? He’s dead, you know. It would help clear things up.”

“Nah,” Le said with a smirk. “I never did nothing like-”

Michele Bui opened her mouth and chomped down on Le’s forearm.

Le howled in pain and yanked his arm free. A ragged chunk of his flesh tore away, and his arm poured blood. In his drug-agitated state, Le looked at the wound in disbelief and trembled from adrenaline.

Bui smiled, spit, and said, “A throwaway sex doll that bites!”

She tried to kick Le in the balls, but he swatted the kick away, which threw her off balance, and she fell, half on the porch, half on the stairs to the front yard.

Le raised his gun, screaming, “I’m throwing you away now, bitch! You see it coming?”

“Le, don’t!” I shouted.

But it was too late.

From the second story of the house across the street, a sniper rifle barked.

Le lurched at the impact and fired his pistol, but the bullet went a foot wide of Bui’s legs and splintered one of the corner posts of the porch. The gangbanger staggered backward, hit the doorjamb, and slid down it.

I raced up, jumped over Bui, and got to Le. He gasped something in Vietnamese.

I knelt next to him, said, “There’s an ambulance coming.”

He laughed. “Won’t make it.”

“Did you frame Terry Howard?”

Le looked up at me, smiled, and seemed to try to wink before blood spilled from his lips and the light in his eyes turned a dull shade of gray.

46

JOHN BROWN APPRECIATED overcast nights like these, when it was so dark he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. Blinded, Brown found his other senses heightened. He smelled manure and ripening tobacco, heard a barn owl hooting, and tasted the bitter espresso bean he was chewing to stay alert.

“Three miles out,” Cass said in his earpiece.

“Copy,” Brown said, shifting his weight on the corrugated steel. “Hobbes?”

“We’re ready.”

“Fender?”

“Affirmative.”

Brown bent to dig into a knapsack at his feet. A stabbing pain drilled through his knee, and he grunted through the spasm.

He managed to get out his iPad and stand, feeling the bones in his knee crack and settle. In a cold sweat, Brown turned on the tablet and signed into a secure website.

“Coming at you,” Cass said. “Lead car’s a blue Mustang, Florida plates. Behind the trucks, there’s a black Dodge Viper, Georgia plates.”

“Copy,” said a male voice.

Brown clicked on a link that opened a private video feed from a camera carried by one of Hobbes’s men. The scene was an interchange on Interstate 95 near the town of Lady-smith, Virginia, roughly one hundred and fifteen miles south of Washington, DC.

I-95 below the interchange was under repair. Crews were down there laboring under bright lights, and a detour forced all northbound traffic off the Ladysmith exit ramp. Another of Hobbes’s men stood at the top of the ramp.

He was dressed in a workman’s jumpsuit, a yellow reflective vest, and a hard hat, and he held a flashlight with an orange cover that he was using to direct the sparse traffic west, toward Ladysmith and the Jefferson Davis Highway.

The blue Mustang came into view, followed by the first of three eighteen-wheel refrigerated semis bearing the logo of the Littlefield Produce Company of Freehold Township, New Jersey. The black Dodge Viper brought up the rear as Hobbes’s flagman waved them east, to State Route 639.

When the flagman had done the same to Cass, who was driving a white Ford Taurus, Brown changed the feed to a camera held by one of Fender’s men, who was standing in the road directing traffic a mile west of the interstate. He waved the little convoy north on Virginia Route 633.

When Cass’s taillights disappeared, Brown said, “Stick to the plan. Execute the plan. Surgical precision in every move.”

Brown did not bother to watch the feed of the flagmen turning the convoy off Route 633 onto a little-used, unpaved county road that cut through woodlots and agricultural fields. He could already see the headlights of the Mustang turning off the county road, following the detour signs.

“Come to Papa,” Fender said.

Hearing guns being loaded all around him, Brown watched the semis make the turn onto the farm road and saw the Viper coming behind them. He knew he was going to suffer, but he knelt and gritted his teeth at the agony in his knee. The headlights came closer, revealing Brown on the corrugated steel roof of an old tobacco-drying shed.

There were six such long, low sheds in all, three set back on either side of the road that passed between them. The Mustang slowed at the blinking red light next to the sign they’d put up beyond the southernmost shed; it read tight spot, 15 mph.

Brown watched through the sheer black mask he wore as the Mustang kept coming. He could see the driver and the passenger now, both wearing T-shirts and looking around as if to say Where the hell is this detour taking us?

“Patience,” Brown said as the Mustang passed below him and beyond the northernmost shed.

He glanced at the semis but then focused on the Mustang as it followed a curve in the road and stopped at a high berm and dead end.

The trailer of the first semi was almost beyond the sheds when it stopped. The second one was completely between the sheds, and the third had its cab and half of the trailer between them.

Brown waited until he heard shouting from the men in the Mustang before he said, “Take them.”

He saw it all unfold in headlight glare and shadows.

Before the driver of the Viper behind the semis could even get out of his car, Cass came up fast behind him and head-shot him with a.223 AR rifle mounted with a suppressor. From the roof of the southern shed, one of Hobbes’s men armed with an identical weapon shot the passenger through the windshield.

Others positioned on the roofs of the sheds took out the drivers and passengers in all three semis. The six men died in their seats even as the Mustang’s driver and passenger realized what was happening. They came out of the Mustang fast and low, carrying automatic weapons.

Fender rose up from behind the berm in front of the Mustang and shot both men before they got twenty yards from their vehicle.

“Clear,” Fender said.

“Clear,” said Hobbes.

Brown said, “Leave the trucks and cars running. Police your brass, sweep your way out; we’ll meet on the road.”

Cass said, “Are you sure we shouldn’t check the produce?”

Brown grimaced as he fought his way up out of the crouch. They’d been over this before and she was still challenging him on it.

“Negative,” Brown said emphatically. “Nobody gets anywhere near that cargo.”

47

MIDMORNING, AN FBI helicopter picked up Sampson and me on the roof of DC Metro headquarters. Special Agent Ned Mahoney, grim and quiet, sat up front.

Ninety minutes earlier, a Caroline County sheriff’s deputy had been driving by a tobacco-drying facility northeast of Ladysmith, Virginia. A heavy chain usually blocked the entrance, but he noticed that today the chain lay in the mud next to the tracks of many large vehicles.

The deputy thought it odd because the harvest was still weeks off, and he drove in. He saw enough to call the state police and the FBI.

“Who’s been through the scene other than the deputy?” I asked.

“No one,” Mahoney said. “As soon as I heard, I was on the horn to Virginia State Police to seal off the area. We should be looking at it fairly clean.”

Forty-five minutes later we were dropping altitude over mixed farmland and woods, rolling terrain, mostly, with some creek beds and rivers. After the chopper soared over a last stand of towering oaks, the forest opened up and we flew in an oval pattern around the scene.

The grille of a blue Mustang was nosed up against an earthen barrier, the vehicle’s doors open. Two bodies, both male, were sprawled nearby in the grass. Between the long drying sheds, three gray, refrigerated semitrailers were lined nose to tail like elephants on parade. The truck windows and windshields were shot through and spiderwebbed. Behind the last semi was a black Dodge Viper with two dead men in the front seat.

The pilot landed out by the highway, where a perimeter had been established. After checking in with the Virginia State Police lieutenant and the county sheriff, we went to the crime scene on foot.

It was hot. Insects buzzed and drummed in the forest around the tobacco facility. Truck engines idling swallowed the sound of blowflies gathering around the Viper.

“They’ve swept their way out again,” Mahoney said when we were ten yards from the Dodge.

I looked at the glistening dirt road between the Viper and us. I saw faint grooves in the moist dirt and said, “Or raked.”

The door to the muscle car was ajar. The window was down. The driver had taken a slug through the back of the skull, left occipital. Blood spattered the windshield and almost covered two bullet holes, one exiting, and one entering. The passenger in the Viper had been rocked back, his left eye a bloody socket and a spray of carnage behind him.

“Two shots, two kills,” Sampson said. “Driver was shot from behind.”

“And at a slight angle,” I said. “The passenger was shot from one of those roofs, probably the left one.”

We walked on, seeing the trucks parked grille to bumper and the signs that said they belonged to the Littlefield Produce Company of Freehold Township, New Jersey. Two dead men in every cab. Each of them shot once.

“They were suckered in here and then executed from above,” I said, wondering if Nicholas Condon and his buddies could have dreamed up this ambush. Yes, I decided, probably relatively easily.

“Shot from one shed roof or another,” Mahoney agreed. “The roofs are slanted toward us and yet we haven’t seen a single spent casing on the ground.”

“If each sniper shoots once, there’s no reloading, so no brass,” I said.

We walked past the forward semi and looked to the Mustang and the two dead men lying in the field with tape up around them and a crew of FBI criminalists documenting the scene. Figuring we’d better not disturb them, we walked back to the rear semi, the only one without a truck grille up against its rear bumper.

Deputy Max Wolford, who’d discovered the massacre, was waiting with the bolt cutters.

Sampson said, “How much do you want to bet we don’t find radishes and baby greens in here?”

“I vote for drugs and money,” Mahoney said, and he nodded to Wolford, who centered the lock shackle between the cutter’s blades and snipped it off. Sampson worked the lever and threw up the door.

A cloud of cold humid air billowed from the refrigerated unit, and sunlight poured inside. It wasn’t what we’d expected. Not at all.

“Jesus Christ,” Sampson said. “I didn’t see that coming.”

I swallowed my reaction, drew my gun, held up my badge, and climbed in.

48

FOUR BLUE CORPSES in underwear were laid out on tarps on top of stacks of wooden produce crates marked cucumbers, tomatoes, and lettuce. Three of the dead were young women, late teens and early twenties. The fourth was a young boy, maybe a year older than Ali, no more.

Beyond the bodies and the crates, far back in the container, I could see the shoulders, heads, and fearful eyes of at least thirty people of various races and colors, mostly young women and a few young boys dressed in ragged winter clothes, all pressed tight together, teeth chattering, trying not to freeze to death.

“Move the trucks so we can get the other containers open,” I told Mahoney. “We’ve got to get emergency medical crews in here.”

“And a lot more support,” Mahoney said, pulling out his cell phone.

I pulled off one of the tarps, gave it to Sampson, said, “Cover the Viper. They don’t need to see that.”

He took it, and I started clearing a path through the produce boxes.

“I’m with the police,” I said. “We’re getting you all help.”

They stared at me either shyly or blankly.

“Any of you speak English?” I asked.

A few of them shifted their eyes, but not one replied.

When I reached them, some were crying, and some shrank from me, would not look at me, as if they were both afraid and ashamed somehow. I tried to smile reassuringly and gestured toward Sampson. At first, no one moved.

Then a pretty young woman with black hair wearing a gray snorkel parka broke from the group and hurried past me. A stream of them followed. Only a few glanced at the corpses on the way out.

Sampson helped them off the truck, and they lay down in the grass in the baking sun beyond the shrouded Viper, weeping, hugging, and consoling one another in at least five languages.

State troopers brought jugs of water and boxes of PowerBars, which they tore into ravenously. After the cabs of the other trucks had been photographed, we had the miserable task of removing the dead and placing them on the plank floors of the drying sheds.

In the other two containers we found a total of five corpses and sixty-seven survivors.

“We have no idea how long they’ve been in there,” Sampson said, frustrated as the scope of the situation sank in. “We have no idea where they came from or who all these dead guys are. There’s not a stitch of identification on any of them.”

We were standing to the side, watching as EMTs and disaster-relief workers began to arrive. I noticed the girl who’d left the container car first, the one with the dark hair who’d scurried past us in the gray snorkel parka. She’d stripped off her heavy coat and pants, revealing shorts and a long-sleeved pink T-shirt with silver sequins spelling out goddess. She was within earshot and as we spoke, she kept glancing our way.

I smiled and crooked a finger at her. Goddess acted like she didn’t understand. I went over and crouched next to her.

“You can stop pretending that you don’t know any English,” I said.

She looked at her lap.

“We’re here to help,” I said. “But we need your help in return.”

There was no change in her affect, just a casual glance up, as if she were looking through me toward something far away.

“Suit yourself,” I said. “But U.S. Immigration will be getting involved soon enough. If you want a chance at staying in this country, you need to start talking.”

Her pupils dilated and her breath quickened. I saw both tells, shrugged at her as if I were done, stood up, and took a few steps toward Sampson.

She called after me in a thick accent, “You get me a pack of Marlboros and I try to help you.”

49

“YOU BELIEVE HER?” Bree asked when I finally got home around eleven that night after one of the more upsetting days of my life.

“I’ve got no reason not to believe her,” I said, eating leftover lamb kebabs with a sweet, fiery peanut sauce Nana Mama had come up with. “Several of the other young ladies who spoke English told a similar story. The young boys too.”

“It’s inhuman,” she said.

“No argument there,” I said, my thoughts traveling back to Mina Codrescu sitting on her snorkel coat and taking a long drag on that first Marlboro before she spoke.

Mina was nineteen and from the city of Balti in northern Moldova, a small, impoverished country between Hungary and Ukraine. Her mother was dead, she’d told us; her father was a drunk. She had no assets other than an ability to speak English and a dream of someday going to America, so when a Russian man she met in a bar told her there was a way she could go to the States, she’d been interested. He took her to Chişinău, the capital of Moldova, where she met a second Russian man.

“He said he would bring me to America in return for five years of work,” Mina had told me, blowing out smoke from her cigarette and looking away.

“What kind of work?” Sampson had asked.

“Sex work,” she’d said defiantly.

“You agreed to it?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” she said and took another drag.

I said nothing.

Mina waved her cigarette at the scenery and in the same defiant tone said, “This was worth it. For this, I would do it again. Look, I am here, in America. I can smell my dream here. If I didn’t say yes, none of this happens.”

“We’re not judging you, Mina,” I said. “Just listening. Tell me how it worked after you agreed to the deal.”

Mina said she had had sex with the second Russian for three days, and then he’d handed her a ticket for Miami. A woman she knew only as Lori met her in Florida.

Lori took her passport and cell phone. She told Mina she’d get the passport back in five years and the cell phone once she was assigned to a particular locale. Lori brought Mina to a truck depot in the middle of the night. Delivery vans pulled up, and other women and boys began to pour out.

Piles of old winter clothes were dumped out on the ground and they were told to put them on. Lori had set aside the snorkel parka, pants, and boots for Mina, and she’d helped her into the refrigerated truck with assurances that her life would be much better at the other end of the drive. Luxurious, even.

“It wasn’t bad for me because it gets cold where I come from,” Mina had said. “But others, they barely had any clothes. We tried to keep them warm, but some of them were sick and too weak already from traveling, and they just died.”

“How long were you in the truck?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t have a watch or phone. Two days? Maybe more?”

“Any other young Moldovan ladies here?”

“Two,” she had said. “There are more from Hungary and Slovakia.”

Several had been recruited as Mina had, she’d told me. Others had worked in brothels in Germany before being “transferred” to the United States, and-

“It’s sad,” Bree said, breaking me from my thoughts, “that there are parts of the world now where there’s so little hope that young women and boys desperate for something better will sell themselves into sexual slavery.”

“It sounded more like indentured servitude,” I said.

Bree arched an eyebrow. “You honestly think those Russians were going to turn Mina loose after five years? No way. They were going to use her up, spit her out. Someone would have found her in a ditch.”

“Maybe, but she’s got a chance now,” I said. “When the INS special agent in charge from Virginia Beach showed up, I had Mahoney single her out as critical to the investigation and in need of political asylum.”

“That’ll help her.”

I nodded, trying to feel good about that rather than tired and emotional, but my exhaustion must have shown because Bree said, “You okay, Alex?”

“Not really,” I said. “The whole ride back on the helicopter I was thinking about Jannie and Ali, and us. We all won the lottery at birth and got to grow up here in America, not someplace where we’d have to prostitute our way out of misery. I mean, I’m sorry, but something’s wrong or out of balance when that exists. Or am I overthinking things?”

“You’re just indignant,” she said. “Maybe outraged.”

“That bad?”

“No. It shows passion and a noble sense of fairness that I adore in you.”

I smiled. “Why, thank you.”

“Anytime,” she said, and she smiled and yawned. “I have to sleep.”

“Wait-how was your day, COD?”

Bree got to her feet, waved me off, and said, “I’m doing my best to forget it and start life over tomorrow morning, bright and early.”

“I like that idea,” I said.

“I’m full of good ideas,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek.

50

LATE IN THE afternoon the Friday before Labor Day weekend, fifty members of law enforcement were crammed into the roll-call room at DC Metro for Special Agent Ned Mahoney’s briefing on the massacres.

I was pleased to see the same faces from ATF, Justice, and the DEA there. It helped if the same people showed up, kept the communication lines open and clear.

If I didn’t know Mahoney so well, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the slight stoop to his shoulders and the tight lines around his eyes. The case was weighing on him. He was being squeezed, probably harder than Bree.

“There have been no new attacks,” Mahoney said, “and we have made some progress, but we’ve been hampered by media leaks and the frenzy surrounding this killing spree.”

That was true. The media coverage had turned red-hot and constant after the fourth massacre. Stories had been published or broadcast stating that “unnamed sources close to the investigation” said that the FBI believed ex-military, likely mercenaries, were executing the attacks and were either working on behalf of a cartel or acting as vigilantes.

Also leaked was the fact that, in addition to the human cargo, the trucks had contained a million dollars in cash and ninety kilos of cocaine, all hidden in the produce crates. DC Metro and the FBI had been hoping to keep all that inside this room.

“The leaks must stop,” Mahoney said. “They’re hamstringing us.”

I scanned the room, seeing no one displaying obvious guilt or avoidance postures. But that didn’t matter. The leaks had already made the cops distrust this group as a whole. We had decided to hold back some of the new evidence we’d found, at least for the time being.

“Moving on,” Mahoney said. “There is no Littlefield Produce Company of Freehold Township, New Jersey. And six of the dead traffickers have been identified through fingerprints and IAFIS.”

Six mug shots went up on a screen behind the FBI agent.

“The two on the left are Russians with ties to organized-crime syndicates out of St. Petersburg and Brighton Beach,” Mahoney said. “There are agents in New York and Russia working those angles. These other four are more familiar to law enforcement. Correct, George?”

George Potter, the DEA’s special agent in charge, nodded. “All four have long rap sheets in south Florida or Texas. The two there on the right, Chavez and Burton, they have loose connections to the Sinaloa cartel.”

“Do any of them have a history of involvement in human trafficking?” Bree asked.

“Not that we know of,” Potter said. “But they could be branching out.”

“Or this could be just one branch of something bigger,” I said. “These connections to both Russian mobsters and Mexican drug cartels suggests a possible alliance that is frightening when you think about it.”

Potter nodded. “Like a supercartel.”

Sampson said, “Or maybe they’re just a crew of freight agents that transport three different kinds of criminal commodities at once: drugs, cash, and people.”

“Slaves, you mean,” Bree said.

Bob Taylor, a smart, African American agent over at Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, asked, “Are you a slave if you sign up of your own free will?”

“They were bought and paid for,” Bree said. “Even if the sellers were the girls themselves. Let’s call this what it is: sexual slavery.”

Taylor threw up his hands in surrender, said, “Just trying to clarify, Chief. You ask me, whoever these shooters are, they’re doing the world a favor getting defects out of the gene pool.”

There were a number of nods and murmurs of agreement in the room.

I couldn’t argue with the sentiment in one sense. I’d had the chance to go over the dead men’s rap sheets, and there was viciousness, cruelty, and depravity laced through their lives.

I don’t care if you believe in Jesus, God, Allah, karma, the spirit of the universe, or a Higher Power-the crew of thugs who’d died in Ladysmith, Virginia, had been begging for a violent death like that: shot down, no mercy. I believed that was true, even if I also believed that whoever killed those thugs deserved trial and punishment.

In my book and in the blind eyes of justice, the fact that a man had it coming to him doesn’t make killing him right. Especially if he’s killed in an ambush. That’s premeditation any way you look at it.

Mahoney went on with the briefing, giving some of the preliminary lab reports. The victims were all shot with.223 rounds, probably from AR-style rifles.

“Military?” ATF Special Agent Taylor asked. “Full-jacket?”

“No,” Mahoney said. “The bulk crap you can buy at Wal-mart.”

Sampson leaned over to me. “I gotta go. Anniversary dinner with Billie.”

“Congratulations to you and Billie. How many years?”

“The big six, and thanks.” He slipped out.

The big six. Somehow that was funny.

A few moments later, Bree leaned over and said, “I’ve got a pile of work on my desk I need to dig through.”

“I’ll stay here and tell you if there’s anything new,” I said.

There wasn’t anything new, at least not from my perspective. Mahoney wrapped up the rest of the briefing in twenty minutes, and the place emptied out.

“You look like you could use a three-day weekend,” I told Ned.

“Wouldn’t that be something?” Mahoney said.

“Go to your place on the shore; it’ll give you fresh eyes on Tuesday.”

“I don’t think the gods of the Bureau would appreciate me kicking back with a cold one if there’s another attack on the underworld over the weekend.”

“You can always keep your phone on,” I said. “No one says you have to be in your office waiting for a call. There has to be some benefit to these phones beyond Facebook and texting, right?”

Mahoney half bobbed his head, getting a distracted look. “Traffic will be a bitch tonight. Maybe I can sneak away early tomorrow?”

“Now you’re thinking.”

“What about you? And Bree? Why don’t you and the kids come? Supposed to be a beautiful weekend.”

“Nothing would make me happier, but Jannie’s got an invitational thing over at Johns Hopkins, and we were going to see Damon too.”

“There are three days to the holiday. You could always come on Sunday morning, or even on Saturday night.”

“Tempting. Let me run that by the new chief of detectives.”

51

ORDINARILY, THE TRACK season ends in mid-August, but the U.S.A. Track and Field organization had launched a program to nurture young talent, inviting high school athletes from across the country to a meet on the Johns Hopkins campus in an effort to help coaches identify those with potential.

The fact that Jannie had been invited at the age of fifteen years and eight months was a shock to us. Initially, she hadn’t been among the athletes offered spots at the meet. But Ted McDonald, a well-regarded track coach who works with my daughter, showed videos of her to the right people, and she got in on discretion.

We were on the shady side of the stands an hour before she was set to run. Down on the field, the kids were warming up. Except not many of them looked like kids.

“What are they feeding them?” Bree asked.

“Human growth hormone cereal with steroid milk,” Nana Mama said, and she cackled.

“I hope not, for their sake,” Bree said. “Jannie said everyone had to submit urine and blood samples.”

“Those can be doctored,” Nana Mama said.

We knew that all too well. Earlier in the summer, a vindictive and jealous girl in North Carolina had tried to frame Jannie for drug use. Since then, we’d always demanded samples from any drug test she had to take.

A group of athletes glided by at an easy ten miles an hour. I watched them, trying to keep memories of the prior evening at bay. This was a holiday, and I’d read that it was important to take them and enjoy them or you risked burnout.

“Can I have a Coke?” Ali asked, pulling off his headphones, which were attached to the iPad we’d bought used on eBay.

“Water would be better,” Nana Mama said.

“I thought this was a holiday,” Ali grumbled. “Holidays are supposed to be fun. You’ve heard about fun, right?”

My grandmother twisted on the bleacher and fixed him with her evil-eye stare. “Are you sassing your great-grandmother?”

“No, Nana Mama,” Ali said.

“I won’t take sass,” she said. “You’ve heard about that, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Bree and I watched in amusement at the mastery with which Nana Mama handled Ali.

“What are you listening to?” Nana Mama asked, her voice softening.

Ali brightened. “A podcast about dolphins and how they have echolocation just like bats, only in the water.”

“What’s the single most surprising thing you’ve heard so far?”

Without hesitation, he said, “Dolphins have the best hearing in the world.”

“Is that true?” Bree asked.

“Humans can hear up to, like, twenty kilo-hearses. Dogs to like forty-five kilo-hearses.”

“Hertz,” Nana Mama said. “Forty-five kilohertz.”

“Hertz,” Ali said. “Big cats, like lions, hear up to sixty-five, I think. But a dolphin can hear sounds up to a hundred and twenty kilohertz. And they have, like, an electrical field around them. They say you can feel it if you swim with them. I want to do that, Dad, swim with dolphins.”

“I thought you had a few questions for Neil deGrasse Tyson.”

“That too,” Ali said. “Can I have a Coke, Dad?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What?” Nana Mama said.

I smiled. “The holiday argument gets me every time.”

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and found Damon.

“Hey!” I cried, and I stood to hug him. “Look who snuck up!”

“Hi, Dad,” he said, grinning from ear to ear and hugging me back.

There was a round of hugs and kisses. We heard about orientation, and Ali got a Coke and a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips, and life was good and grounded and solid. The pressure of Bree’s new job drained away too. I could see that in the way she laughed at one of Damon’s tales.

She felt at ease. I did too. A rare thing in those days.

“Hey, Dad?”

52

JANNIE WAS CALLING to me from the fence, so I got up and started down toward her.

“Jannie, you got this,” Damon said, following me. “My friends on my hall are coming to see you smoke them all.”

Jannie laughed, and punched the air before hugging Damon. She has never had stage fright, at least not when it comes to running. In the past year, she’d faced women running for NCAA Division 1 schools, and she’d run well enough to be here.

“You good?” I asked.

“Always,” she said, relaxed. “Coach McDonald’s got good meet and race strategies worked out.”

“What’s the difference?”

“You’ll see. Love you both.”

“Love you too,” I said. “Nana Mama said to run like God gave you a gift and you are grateful for every stride of it.”

She smiled but with some confusion. “Tell Nana Mama I’ll try, Dad. Coach Mac’s up behind you, by the way.”

She trotted off. We climbed back up into the stands.

Clad in his trademark gray warm-ups and a blue hoodie and wearing a pair of binoculars around his neck, Ted McDonald was moving nervously from one running-shoed foot to the other as he spoke to Bree and Nana Mama. In his fifties, with a shock of reddish-gray hair that defied gravity, Coach McDonald had a straightforward style that I appreciated.

“Dr. Cross,” McDonald said, shaking my hand.

“Dr. McDonald,” I said. He had a doctorate in exercise physiology.

“Ready to see a little history made today?” McDonald asked.

Ali had been listening to his podcast, but he tugged out his earbuds and asked, “What history?”

Jannie’s coach said, “Anything can happen under race conditions, but I’ve been tracking her workout times. They’re impressive. She could do something here that would really make people stand up and take notice.”

“Like which people?” Nana Mama said.

McDonald gestured across the track. “Like those folks over there with the hand timers. All of them are D-One coaches. Oregon. Texas. Georgetown. Cal. Stanford. Every one of them is going to watch Jannie run.”

“Does she know this?” I asked.

“No. I’ve got her running against the clock and herself.”

“What’s that mean?” Bree asked.

“I’ll tell you if it happens,” the coach said, looking back to the track and clapping his hands. “Here we go. Nice and easy.”

Jannie lined up on the stagger in lane four. At the starter’s gun, she broke into her long flowing stride and kept pace with two high school seniors from California and another from Arizona.

She was third when they crossed the finish line and didn’t look winded at all.

“Eighty percent,” McDonald said after looking at his stopwatch. He leaned over to me and said in a low voice, “With that run she’s got every coach over there interested enough to start giving her calls in the coming months, maybe even make a few house visits.”

“But she’s a sophomore,” I said.

“I know,” McDonald said. “But later on, if she runs the way she did the other day in training, you could have every coach over there camped out in your front yard.”

I didn’t ask him for more. No particulars. The entire conversation had me nervous in a sour-gut sort of way, and proud, and nervous all over again.

We used the two-hour break to have lunch with Damon and two of his new friends, his roommate, William, and fellow basketball player Justin Hahn, from Boston. Both were good guys, both were very funny, and both were capable of eating a staggering amount of food. Damon too. They ate so much, we almost missed the finals.

Jannie and seven other girls were heading into the blocks when we hurried to our seats. She drew lane three of eight. The girls took their marks. The gun went off.

Jannie came up in short choppy strides, tripped, stumbled, and fell forward onto her hands and knees.

“No!” we all groaned before she sprang up and started running again.

“Oh, that sucks,” Damon said.

“There goes the scholarship,” his roommate said, which annoyed me but not enough to make me lower my binoculars.

Ali said, “What happened?”

“She got off balance,” said Coach McDonald, who was also watching through binoculars. “Kicked her heel and… she’s maybe twenty yards in back of Bethany Kellogg, the LA girl in lane one. Odds-on favorite.”

The runners in the outer lanes were almost halfway down the back straight when Jannie finally came out of the curve in dead last. But she didn’t look upset. She was up to speed now, running fluidly, efficiently.

“That’s not going to do it, missy,” McDonald said, and it was almost like Jannie could hear him because her stride began to lengthen and her footfalls turned from springy to explosive. She didn’t run so much as bound down the track, looking long-legged, loose-jointed, and strong as hell.

Through the binoculars, I was able to get a good look at her face; she was straining but not breaking with the effort.

“She just picked off the girl from Kentucky in lane four,” McDonald said as the runners entered the far turn. “She’s not going to be last. C’mon, young lady, show us what you’ve got now.”

The stagger was still on, but the gaps between the athletes were narrowing fast as they drove on through the turn. Jannie was moving up with every stride. Coming onto the home-stretch, she passed a Florida girl in lane two.

Damon’s roommate yelled, “She’s freaking flying!”

We were all on our feet now, watching Jannie dig deep into her reservoir of grit and determination. Thirty yards down the stretch, she surged past the Texas girl in lane six. She went by an Oregon racer in lane eight at the halfway mark.

“She’s in fourth!” Ali shouted.

The top three girls were neck and neck, with Bethany Kellogg barely leading and ten feet between Jannie and the girl from Alabama in third.

With thirty yards to go, she closed that to six feet. With fifteen yards left, she’d pinched it to three.

Eight inches separated the two girls when they crossed the finish line.

Coach McDonald lowered his binoculars, shaking his head in wonder. “She just ran out of track, that’s all that happened there.”

My binoculars were still glued on Jannie, who was limping away from the finish line in pain. A television cameraman was moving toward her across the track when she bent over and started to sob.

53

FOUR HOURS LATER we had the surreal experience of seeing Jannie’s race on ESPN. We watched the clip on a flat-screen at Ned Mahoney’s beach house on the Delaware shore.

The edited video showed the start of the race, Jannie’s fall, and Jannie coming into the backstretch in dead last, then the tape jump-cut to the far turn and her go-for-broke sprint down the stretch.

A second camera caught her limping away from the finish line and doubling over, and then the screen cut to the anchor desk at ESPN’s SportsCenter.

Carter Hayes, the Saturday coanchor, looked at his partner, Sheila Martel, and said, “That girl ran so hard after the fall, she broke her foot crossing the finish line!”

Martel stabbed her finger at her coanchor and said, “That girl ran so hard after the fall, she missed third by eight one-hundredths of a second, and first by four-tenths of a second.”

Hayes jabbed his own finger Martel’s way and said, “That girl ran so hard that if you subtract the conservative two seconds she lost in the fall, she would have won by one point six seconds and she would have been in the record books with the seventh-fastest time for the four-hundred among high school women. An amazing performance. Highlight of the day, no question.”

Sheila Martel pointed at the camera and said, “Heal up, young Jannie Cross. We have a feeling we’ll be hearing from you again.”

The screen cut away to the next story. We all cheered and clapped.

“Seeing her run in person, I swear my heart almost stopped,” Nana Mama said. “But when they called out Jannie just then, it almost stopped again.”

“Dad?” Ali said. “Is Jannie famous?”

“Tonight, she is,” I said.

ESPN? Highlight of the day? Jannie?

“How the hell did ESPN know about the race?” Mahoney asked.

Bree said, “Some freelance cameramen who sell to ESPN were there. They caught the whole thing.”

My phone rang. It was Jannie, calling from somewhere with a lot of background noise.

“Did you see it?” she shouted.

“Of course we saw it. Where are you?”

“At a party with Damon and his friends and some people I met at the meet. Everyone cheered for me, Dad.”

“Everyone cheered here too,” I said, tearing up. “You deserved it.”

“Yeah, but now Damon’s introducing me to girls he’s trying to pick up.”

“Too much information,” I said. “We’ll be back for you tomorrow afternoon. Keep that foot elevated. No weight.”

“I heard the doctor,” she said. “I’m glad you were there.”

“Me too,” I said. “Now go have fun.”

Bree and Ali went out to the beach beyond the dunes. Nana Mama and I shucked corn on the back deck of Mahoney’s cottage. He’d inherited the place from his aunt, a devout Catholic who’d attended mass daily.

“I’m convinced it’s why it survived Hurricane Sandy,” Mahoney said as he loaded charcoal into a Weber kettle grill. “Bunch of places just to the north of here were leveled, pretty much splintered.”

“So it’s got good karma,” I said.

“If I agreed with you on that, my aunt would probably throw a lightning bolt down at me,” he said. “But yes. This place calms me.”

“How couldn’t it?” my grandmother said. “Cool ocean breeze. The sound of the waves. It’s very tranquil.”

“Glad you could come, Nana Mama,” Mahoney said. “When was the last time you were at the beach?”

“I can’t remember,” she said, finishing the last ear of corn. “That happens a lot lately. I’ll start the water on the stove.”

I knew better than to argue as she got up. She was heading for the kitchen, her favorite place in any house.

“How bad is Jannie’s break?” Mahoney asked, lighting the charcoal.

“Hairline fracture of one of the metatarsal bones,” I said. “Crutches for two weeks, and a hard walking boot for another three. She can run in two months.”

“Too bad she couldn’t come out.”

“Go to the beach with her stepmom, dad, great-grand-mother, and little brother, or hang out with her new friends in the track world and her big brother at college for a night…”

“Enough said.”

We saw Bree and Ali walking back along the path from the dunes. He had a towel around his shoulders and a grin that made me glad to be alive.

“He’s like a dolphin himself,” Bree said, coming up onto the deck. “You should have seen him in the waves out there.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “First thing.”

Ali started toward the sliding doors, but Mahoney caught him. “Around the corner, there’s an outdoor shower. Get the sand off and dry off before you go in or my lady friend will not be happy.”

“I’ve never been in an outdoor shower,” Ali said.

“It’s life-changing,” Mahoney said and he returned to his grill.

“I’m next,” Bree called to Ali as he rounded the corner.

I went to the cooler and fished us out bottles of cold Old Dominion beer, a Delaware favorite, and opened them.

“I needed this,” Bree said, taking her beer. “A break from everything.”

“I think we all needed this,” Mahoney said.

“We going to meet the mysterious lady friend?” Bree asked.

“Right here!” said a pretty brunette in white pedal pushers, sandals, and a gauzy blue top as she came around the corner with a plate of fresh-baked cookies.

She set down the plate, beamed at us, and said, “I’m Camille.”

“Not lady-friend Camille?” I said.

Camille laughed. “Indeed. Lady-friend Camille.”

“You’re spicing up the party,” Mahoney said.

“I try,” she said, and she shook our hands. “Ned’s told me so much about you both, I feel like I already know you.”

Camille was a real estate agent in the area, a widow, and as bubbly as they come. She and Ned had met at a local seafood restaurant after they’d both noticed each other eating alone on two consecutive Saturday nights. On the third Saturday, Mahoney went over and showed her his badge.

“He said he was conducting an FBI investigation and needed to ask me a few questions,” Camille said. “First question after my name was why I always eat alone. It was my question for him too.”

They were good together and we laughed and ate and probably drank a little too much. The moon rose. Nana Mama turned in. Ali fell asleep on the couch. Mahoney and Camille took a walk north on the beach, and Bree and I walked south and admired the moon tracking on the ocean and the waves.

“It’s good to be with you,” I said, wrapping a blanket around both of us.

“Hard to imagine the job right now,” Bree said.

“Means you’re tuning out, giving your brain a needed rest.”

“Parks came through surgery fine,” she said. “Lincoln too.”

“Good,” I said, and I whispered a suggestion.

“What?” She laughed softly. “Here?”

“Back in the dunes somewhere. We’ve got a blanket. Be a shame to waste the opportunity.”

She kissed me and said, “Sounds like the perfect end to a perfect day.”

54

FIVE DAYS LATER, on the Thursday after Labor Day, Sampson and I climbed out of an unmarked car in the parking lot of Bayhealth Kent General Hospital in Dover, Delaware.

“Let’s hope she’s alert enough to help,” I said.

“We knew we were taking a chance,” Sampson said. “If she’s not, we’ll just come back.”

The day before, we’d received two reports that had brought us to the Bayhealth hospital. The first report, filed the week before by a Maryland state trooper, described a Ford Taurus found flipped in Maryland just south of Millersville.

The driver, a twenty-nine-year-old waitress, was later found to have died of a.45-caliber gunshot wound to the head. The shooting had to have occurred in broad daylight, yet no witnesses had come forward.

The second report, from the sheriff’s department in Kent County, Delaware, concerned a white Mustang convertible that crashed into a tree along Route 10 between Willow Grove and Woodside East. The driver, twenty-four-year-old Kerry Rutledge, a clothes buyer for Nordstrom’s, was found unconscious but alive around two a.m. on Labor Day. Rutledge had broken ribs, facial injuries, a concussion, and a four-inch-long wound across the back of her head.

Ms. Rutledge regained consciousness after a few hours, but she was confused and unable to remember anything about the crash. A sheriff’s detective interviewed her the following day. She told the detective she thought she’d been shot but couldn’t remember how it had happened or why. The wound to the back of the head was consistent with a bullet grazing the skin, so we thought it worth the drive to try to talk to her ourselves.

At the front desk, we learned that Kerry Rutledge was out of intensive care and under observation pending the results of neurological tests. When we reached the nurses’ station, we showed our badges. The head nurse said Rutledge’s parents had been in to see her earlier, and the last time she’d checked, her patient was asleep.

But when we knocked softly and entered her room, the Nordstrom’s buyer was propped up, sipping a cup of ice water, and gazing at a television on mute. She was a wisp of a woman with pale, freckled skin and fine copper hair that hung about the bandages that covered her bruised face.

“Ms. Rutledge?” I said, and I introduced Sampson and myself.

“You’re here because I was shot,” she said with a flat affect.

“That’s right,” Sampson said. “Did you see the person who shot you?”

Her head rotated a degree to the right and back. “I’m having trouble remembering things.”

I hesitated, thinking how best to proceed, and then said, “How do you know you were shot, Ms. Rutledge?”

Her head rotated again, and stayed cocked to the right as she blinked and pursed her lips. “He was right there. He… he had a gun. I saw it.”

“That’s good. What kind of gun?”

“A pistol?”

“Even better. Where was he? And where were you?”

Rutledge’s eyes got soft and her head started to droop ever so slightly before she frowned and came out of it and said, “I’m an idiot. What was I…”

“Ms. Rutledge?”

“I was texting,” she said. “I’d been to a party and I was on my way to my parents’ house in Dover. I had the top and the windows down. It was a pretty night and I was texting a friend. I remember that. Just before I was shot.”

“What time was that?”

“I don’t know. Late.”

“So you’re driving,” Sampson said. “Eyes on and off the road because you’re texting?”

Her mouth hung slightly open, but she gave a faint nod. “I’ve driven that road a thousand times. Maybe more. Oh God, what’s my car look like?”

“A mess,” I said. “But you were texting, and then you saw the pistol?”

“Yes. I mean, I think so.”

“What happened in between? Before you saw the gun and after you stopped texting?”

She looked at me blankly, and I decided to take another approach.

“How fast do you think you were going?”

“Not fast. Fifty? I…” Rutledge said, and she paused as if noting distant and dim things.

“What are you seeing?” I said.

“There was a headlight,” she said. “A single one in the rearview.”

“A motorcycle headlight?”

Rutledge’s eyes went wide at that. She took a deep, sharp breath and pressed hard back into the raised mattress, not realizing how much that would hurt her ribs.

“Ohh,” she moaned. “Ohh, that was just… bad.”

She closed her eyes. A minute passed, then two, and gradually the spasm of pain released her and left her breathing so rhythmically I feared she’d fallen asleep.

But then her eyelids fluttered open and she looked at us more clear-eyed.

“I’m seeing more of it now,” she said. “He drove up alongside of me, like he was passing, and then he backed off and pulled in behind me again. I put my phone on the console, got both hands on the wheel, and that’s when he came again, right up beside me on one of those big motorcycles with a windshield. I looked to my left and he was right there, five or six feet away, with, like, a black helmet and visor, aiming the gun at me. He… he…”

Rutledge looked at us with growing disbelief. “Before he pulled the trigger, I remember now, he yelled something like ‘Let this be a lesson. Never text and drive.’”

55

THURSDAY AFTERNOON, IN her office in the Daly Building, Bree realized that by agreeing to become chief of detectives, she’d also agreed to go surfing on a tsunami of memos, overtime requests, and high-pressure meetings at which she was called upon to defend her handling of a job that she hadn’t been given enough time to learn.

The good times on the Delaware shore, watching Alex and Ali playing in the waves, seemed such a distant memory that Bree wanted to throw something just to hear it break.

A knock on the doorjamb jolted her from her funk. Detective Kurt Muller ducked his head in and said, “Howdy, Chief Stone.”

Looking at his waxed mustache, she couldn’t help but grin. “Howdy?”

“I’m showing my inner Oklahoman today,” Muller said. “Anyway, I know you’re COD now and all, but I’m going to Terry Howard’s storage unit. His ex-wife gave me permission to look through it, and she also gave me the combinations to two safes, which he evidently gave her in case he died.”

“I didn’t even know Howard had an ex-wife,” Bree said. “Patty,” Muller said. “They divorced seven years ago. She’s remarried to a veterinarian. Lives in Pensacola. She said she’s in shock about Howard’s suicide and the cancer. He never told her, or their daughter, who is nine. Anyway, I wanted to know if you felt like tagging along.”

Bree almost dismissed the offer out of hand. The case was closed. Why would she want to pick through a dead man’s storage unit?

But then she remembered Alex’s dissent when Chief Michaels declared the homicides of Tommy McGrath and Edita Kravic solved, pinning them on the bitter ex-cop who’d blown his head off with the kind of gun he had never owned and didn’t like to use.

“Sure, I’ll go with you, Muller,” Bree said at last, getting up from behind her desk. “It’ll help me to clear my head, get me out of the spin cycle I’ve been on.”

“I felt like that once,” the detective replied. “Inner-ear infection. You would have thought I was on deck in a hurricane sea or drunk off my ass. I couldn’t tell which way was up.”

On the way to the storage unit in Tacoma Park, Bree actually enjoyed listening to Muller drone on about the role of the eustachian tube in regulating equilibrium.

They cut off the lock to the unit and threw open the overhead door. Near the wall to their immediate right was a baby’s crib with a mattress, mobiles, and folded dusty blankets. Behind that were stacks of boxes, an old bicycle, a rolled-up volleyball net, and two large Cannon 54 safes.

“You have the combinations?” Bree asked.

“They’re on here somewhere,” Muller said, pulling out his phone.

Bree went to the safes, noting four green army-surplus ammunition boxes on top of one.

“You still think Howard shot himself?” Bree asked, taking one box down.

Muller shrugged, still scrolling on his phone. “Seems a little convenient in retrospect. McGrath and Howard have a bad beef. Howard kills McGrath and shoots himself because he has cancer and because he’s had his revenge.”

“It wraps up in a nice package, doesn’t it?” Bree said.

She opened the box and found smaller cardboard boxes of.40-caliber ammunition stacked neatly inside. The second box was half full of nine-millimeter ammunition. The third box carried.30-06 rounds and a single cardboard container of Federal.45-caliber pistol ammunition.

56

BREE PICKED UP the box of ammunition and opened it.

Six of the twenty bullets were missing from the plastic rack inside.

But there they were: fourteen.45-caliber bullets. Ammunition for a gun Terry Howard had claimed he never used.

“Got the combinations,” Muller said. “Ready, Chief?”

“Gimme a second,” Bree said, pulling out one of the bullets, noting the copper full-jacket bullet and the slight hollow spot at the tip. She inspected the primer and the rim around it and saw something that made her pause.

After a moment, she dug in her pocket and put the bullet and the box in an evidence bag.

“Ready?”

“Just let me finish here,” she said, opening the fourth ammo box.

Bree found a gun-cleaning kit with jars of bore solvent, all tightly closed but still tainting the air with their peculiar smell. She reached in and pulled out a small bottle of Hoppe’s #9.

She opened the top and sniffed. The liquid bore cleaner smelled like she remembered it, sweet, almost like hot caramel. It was bizarre that something that smelled that good stripped out spent gunpowder and metal fouling.

Something deep in her brain stopped her train of thought. She stared at the bottle of Hoppe’s #9 and sniffed it again, grasping for a memory and not knowing exactly why.

“You ready now, or do you want some glue to sniff?”

“Funny,” she said. She put the gun-cleaning kit away and stood in front of the safe’s electronic keypad. “Tell me.”

Muller called out a series of numbers that she entered and soon there was a chunking noise as the locks released. Bree opened the safe and shone her flashlight inside.

Muller whistled. “He’s got an arsenal in there.”

They would later count sixty-three guns in the two safes. There were Smith and Wesson pistols in.40,.357 Magnum, and.44 Magnum calibers on one shelf in the first safe. There was a 1962 Winchester Model 70 bolt-action hunting rifle in.30-06 caliber on another shelf. The other fifty-five weapons in the safes were gleaming side-by-side double-barreled shotguns.

Bree ignored them and started to pull open the stacked drawers below the pistol shelf. Muller, however, got out his own flashlight and shone it on one of the shotguns. Then he pulled out a pair of reading glasses, got down on his knees, and looked closer at the barrel.

“Mother of God,” Muller said, fishing in his pocket for latex gloves.

“What’s the matter?”

“Let me make sure,” he said, and he removed the gun as if it were fine crystal. He peered at the writing on the barrel and shook his head in wonder. “This was made by Purdey and Sons.”

“Never heard of them,” Bree said.

“They’re the best,” Muller said. “I had an oil-rich uncle back in Oklahoma who had one. I’ll bet this one gun is worth somewhere between twenty-five and fifty thousand dollars.”

Bree stopped pulling out drawers. “Is that right?”

“Purdeys are handmade in London,” Muller said. “They never lose value. If all the guns in here are this fine, we could be looking at two million dollars, maybe more.”

“Two million?” Bree said, shocked. “How the hell did Howard get…”

And then she knew. Of course. Howard had been guilty. The drugs. The money. But why shotguns?

She went back to opening drawers. The next two were empty. But the third contained a large manila envelope. Bree drew it out, seeing Howard’s writing across the front: To be opened in the likely event of my death.

There was a second envelope in the drawer, white, legal-size.

There was a pen scrawl there too.

It read: To COD Thomas McGrath, DC Metro.

57

BASED ON INFORMATION gleaned from Kerry Rutledge’s accident report, Sampson and I found the tree her Mustang had collided with, an ancient oak off Route 10 that had a nasty gouge in it.

“Fifty miles an hour?” Sampson said doubtfully. “Looks faster.”

“She said she hit the gas just before he shot,” I reminded him. “So she could have been going sixty or sixty-five if she’d reacted to the bullet grazing her head by stiffening and keeping the accelerator pinned to the floor.”

As we returned to the unmarked car, Sampson said, “I keep going back to his amplified voice.”

Rutledge had said that when the shooter told her never to text and drive, his voice had been very loud, as if he were talking through a loudspeaker on the motorcycle.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said, getting into the passenger side. “Highway patrolmen use those kinds of built-in bullhorns, but I’m pretty sure you can get them for just about any touring motorcycle these days.”

“Well, whoever he is and whatever modifications he’s made to his motorcycle, he’s killing people for traffic violations,” Sampson said as he started the car. “Three were speeding. And that girl last week, I’ll bet she was texting too.”

“Possible,” I agreed. “All of a sudden, though, I’m starving.”

“All of a sudden, me too.”

We drove west toward Willow Grove, and I caught sight of something shiny in the sky far away.

“There’s those blimps again,” I said. “What the hell are those things for?”

“One of the great mysteries of life,” Sampson said, pulling into the Brick House Tavern and Tap for lunch. I brought a road map into the tavern with me, and after ordering a chicken salad sandwich with kettle-fried potato chips, I used a pen to note where the five shootings had occurred and when.

The first was west of Fredericksburg, Virginia, months ago. The second was in southern Pennsylvania a few weeks later. Rock Creek Park was two weeks ago. Southwest of Millersville, Maryland, four days later. Willow Grove, three days ago.

“His time between attacks is shrinking fast,” I said, drawing a circle. “He could kill anytime now, and he likes it here, in this general area. He feels comfortable hunting from DC east.”

The waitress brought our food. Sampson took the map and bit into a tuna melt while looking it over.

After a few minutes, he laughed, shook his head, and said, “It was staring us right in the face, and we were too close to see it.”

I swallowed a gulp of Coke and said, “See what?”

He turned the map for me, picked up my pen, and traced short lines from each of the crash scenes to Denton, Maryland. The Rutledge scene was closest, no more than twenty miles away. The tavern we were eating in was closer still.

A half an hour later, as we drove down a dirt road south of Willow Grove, Sampson said, “I don’t think popping in again to say hi is the smart way to go.”

“Surprise is always good, though,” I said.

“Unless you’re surprising a lunatic-in-the-grass world-class sniper with a chip on his shoulder,” Sampson said.

“If we see orange flags, we’ll turn around.”

“How about we call in first?”

We rounded a curve onto a straightaway about three hundred yards long, and our options narrowed. The gate to Nicholas Condon’s farm was at the end of the straight, and it appeared to be opening, swinging out toward the road.

We were about one hundred and fifty feet from the gate when a Harley-Davidson appeared from the farm lane. Even though the rider wore dark leathers, a helmet, and goggles, I could tell by the beard that it was Condon.

He looked left toward us. Maybe his mercenary instincts kicked in, I don’t know, but the sniper saw something he didn’t like, popped the clutch, and buried the throttle. His back tire spun on the hard gravel, sliding side to side and throwing up a cloud of thick dust that curtained off the road behind him.

“Crazy sonofabitch,” Sampson said, and he stomped on the gas.

58

STONES AND GRAVEL hit the squad-car windshield and we had to slow down for fear of crashing. Luckily the dirt road soon met asphalt at County Road 384. By the loose soil his tires had shed on the road, we knew Condon had headed north. Sampson accelerated after him.

“Stay near the speed limit,” I said. “We have no jurisdiction here.”

“I don’t think Condon cares.”

“I imagine he doesn’t, but-there he is.”

The sniper was weaving through the light traffic ahead and headed toward a stoplight at the intersection with Maryland Route 404. It turned red and Condon stopped, first in line. We were four cars behind him when I jumped out and started running toward him.

Condon looked over his shoulder, saw me coming two cars back, waved, and then goosed the accelerator on the Harley a split second before the light turned green again. He squealed out onto 404 heading west.

Sampson slowed as he came past and I jumped in.

“I’ve got to run more,” I said, gasping, as the squad car swung after Condon.

“We all do,” Sampson said. “Desk jockeys can’t move.”

Traffic heading east was heavier, but Condon was driving the Harley like a professional, roaring out and passing cars whenever he got the chance as we tried to follow him through Hillsboro and Queen Anne.

He was ten cars ahead of us when he took the ramp onto U.S. 50, a four-lane. He seemed fully aware of us, and every time we’d close the gap he’d make some crazy-ass move and put more space between us.

Condon got off at the 301, heading west again across the bay bridge. We lost him for a minute but then spotted him getting off the exit to 450 South toward the Severn River. Ahead of us entering Annapolis, he cruised down the middle of the street while we sat stalled in traffic. But by opening the door and standing up on the car frame, I was able to see him take a left on Decatur Avenue. Three minutes passed until we could do the same.

“He’s heading toward the Naval Academy,” Sampson said. “It’s straight ahead there.”

“Academy alumnus,” I said. “He’s going home.”

“Yeah, but where, exactly?”

I scanned the street, looking for Condon or his Harley. I wasn’t spotting-

“Got him,” Sampson said, pointing into a triangular parking lot at the corner of Decatur and McNair, right next to College Creek. “That’s his ride, sitting there with the other motorcycles.”

We pulled into the lot. A Marine Corps officer was just getting onto his bike, a midnight-blue Honda Blackbird with a partial windshield. We stopped beside him. I got out.

“Excuse me?” I said.

The officer turned, helmet in hand. He appeared to be in his late forties with the rugged build of a lifelong member of the Corps. I glanced at the nameplate: Colonel Jeb Whitaker.

“Colonel Whitaker, I’m Detective Alex Cross with DC Metro.”

“Yes?” he said, frowning and looking at my identification and badge. “How can I help?”

“Did you see the man on that Harley-Davidson come in?”

Colonel Whitaker blinked and then nodded in exasperation. “Nick Condon. What’s he done now beyond parking where he’s not supposed to again?”

“Nothing that we’re aware of,” Sampson said. “But he’s been avoiding having a conversation with us.”

“Regarding?”

“An investigation that we are not at liberty to talk about, sir,” I said.

The colonel thought about that. “This isn’t going to reflect badly on the Naval Academy, is it?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “What’s Condon to the academy these days?”

“He teaches shooting. On a contract basis, which means he’s supposed to park in a visitors’ lot, not here where you need an academy parking sticker.”

He gestured to a light blue sticker with an anchor and rope on it stuck to the lower right corner of his windshield.

“So we can’t park here?”

Whitaker said, “I suppose if you put something on the dash that said Police, you could get around it.”

I glanced at Sampson, who shrugged and pulled into a space.

“Where would we go to find Mr. Condon?” I asked.

“The indoor range?” Whitaker said, and he told me how to get there.

“Thank you, Colonel,” I said, shaking his hand.

“Anytime, Detective Cross,” Whitaker said. “You know, now that I think about it, I’ve seen you on the nightly news with those shootings of the drug dealers. Is this about that?”

I smiled. “Again, Colonel, I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Oh, right, of course,” Whitaker said. “Well, have a nice day, Detectives.”

The colonel put his helmet on and started to get on his bike, but then he stopped, patting at his pockets.

“Forgot my keys again,” he said, hurrying by us. “You’d think someone who teaches military strategy could at least remember his keys.”

“Age happens to the best of us,” I said.

Whitaker waved his hand and trotted stiffly toward the heart of the Naval Academy. He’d disappeared from sight by the time we passed a sign saying god bless america and reached Radford Terrace, a lush, green quadrangle bustling with midshipmen and plebes during this, the first real week of classes.

“Stop,” Sampson said, and he gestured across Blake Road. “Isn’t that Condon right over there?”

59

I CAUGHT A fleeting glimpse of the sniper before he slipped inside the Naval Academy’s chapel, an imposing limestone structure with a weathered copper dome. We hurried across the street and followed Condon in.

The interior of the chapel was spectacular, with a towering arched ceiling, balconies, and brilliant stained-glass windows depicting maritime themes. There were at least fifty people inside, some plebes, others tourists taking in the sights. We didn’t spot Condon until he crossed below the dome and went through a door to the far right of the altar.

Trying to stay quiet while rushing through the hush of a famous church is no mean feat, but we managed it and followed him through the door. We found ourselves on a stair landing. There was a closed door ahead of us, and steps that led down.

We figured the door led to the sacristy and went down the stairs. We wandered around the basement hallways, not finding Condon but seeing the tomb of Admiral John Paul Jones before returning to our last point of contact.

Back on the landing, I stood for a moment wondering where he could have gone, and then I heard Condon’s distinctive voice raised in anger on the other side of the sacristy door.

“But they’re following me now, Jim,” Condon said. “This is persecution.”

That was enough for me to rap at the door, push it open, and say, “We’re not persecuting anyone.”

Condon and a chaplain stood in a well-appointed room with plush purple carpet and a clean, stark orderliness. The sniper’s face twisted in anger.

The chaplain said, “What is this? Who are you?”

“Really, Dr. Cross?” Condon said, taking a step toward us with his gloved hands clenched into fists. “You’d follow me in here? I thought better of you.”

“We just wanted to talk,” Sampson said. “And you ran. So we followed.”

“I didn’t run,” he said. “I was late for a meeting with the chaplain.”

“You saw us and played cat and mouse,” I said, dubious.

“Maybe,” Condon said. “But that was just entertainment.”

“What’s this about?” the chaplain asked, exasperated.

“You his spiritual adviser?” Sampson asked.

They glanced at each other before the chaplain said, “It’s a little more complicated than that, Detective…?”

“John Sampson,” he said, showing him his badge and credentials.

“Alex Cross,” I said, showing mine.

“Captain Jim Healey,” the chaplain said.

“What’s complicated, Captain Healey?” I asked.

“This is none of their business, Jim,” Condon said.

The chaplain put his hand on the sniper’s arm and said, “I am Nicholas’s spiritual adviser. I was also the father of his late fiancée, Paula.”

I didn’t expect that; I lost some of my confidence and stammered, “I’m-I’m sorry for your loss, Captain. For both of your losses.”

“We meet to talk about Paula once a week,” the chaplain said, and he smiled faintly at Condon. “It’s good for us.”

For a second I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry to have interrupted,” I finally told him. “We just wanted to talk to him for a few moments, Captain.”

“About what?” Condon said, pugnacious again. “I already told you I didn’t have anything to do with those killings.”

“You actually never answered our questions about that, but this is about six motorists shot by a lone motorcyclist within an hour’s drive of your house.”

“One of them just up the road from your place,” Sampson said. “Beyond Willow Grove.”

The sniper shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You own a forty-five-caliber handgun?” I asked.

“Somewhere,” he said.

“Would you let us test it?”

“Hell no,” Condon said, and then he cocked his head. “Wait, you think I shot these people from my Harley? For what?”

“Breaking traffic laws,” Sampson said. “Speeding. Driving and texting.”

“This is insane, Jim,” the sniper said to the chaplain, throwing up his hands. “Every time a nutcase appears on the scene, they come after me. Even when a cursory glance at my medical record would show that I am not capable of shooting a forty-five-caliber handgun from a motorcycle going fast or slow.”

“What are you talking about?” Sampson asked.

Condon looked over at the chaplain and then pulled off his gloves, revealing that he wore wrist braces. He tore those off too, revealing scars across his wrists.

Captain Healey said, “Nick shattered both wrists in a training exercise when he was with SEAL Team 6. He can still shoot a rifle better than any man on earth, but his wrists and hands are too weak to shoot a pistol with any accuracy. It was what got him his medical discharge.”

60

SAMPSON PULLED UP in front of my house just as the sun was setting.

“Don’t look so glum,” Sampson said. “We’ll come up with a new battle plan tomorrow.”

“I feel like we had preconceptions about Condon,” I said, opening the door. “He was the easy person to look to, so we did.”

“We had to look at him,” Sampson said. “It was our job.”

“But it wasn’t our job to insult a war hero and tarnish his reputation,” I said, climbing out.

“Did we do that?”

“In a roundabout way, yes.”

“Are we supposed to be dainty or something in a murder investigation?”

“I don’t know,” I said, rubbing my temples. “I just need food and some sleep before I try to learn something from today.”

“Me too, then. Best to the chief.”

“And to Billie,” I said and climbed up the porch steps.

When I went inside, I was blasted by the smell of curry and the sounds of home. Jannie was in the television room, her foot up and on ice.

“How’s it feel?”

“Like I could run on it,” she said.

“Don’t you dare. You heard the doctor.”

“I know.” She sighed. “But my legs are starting to ache from inactivity.”

“They said you can start pool therapy on Monday and the bike on Tuesday. In the meantime, stretch. Where is everyone?”

“Bree’s upstairs taking a shower,” she said. “Nana Mama’s in the kitchen with Ali. They’re working on a letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson.”

“He’s not going to give this up, is he?”

Jannie grinned. “He’s like someone else I know once he gets something going in his brain.”

“Ditto,” I said. I winked at her and went through the dining room to the new kitchen and great room we’d had put on the year before.

“God, it smells good in here,” I said, giving my grandmother a kiss as she stirred a simmering pot on the stove.

“Bangalore lamb,” she said, tapping her wooden spoon and replacing the lid. “A new recipe.”

“Can’t wait,” I said, and then I crossed to Ali. “How’s the letter coming?”

“It’s hard,” he said, head down, studying his iPad. “You really have to think about what you want to say, you know?”

“Keep at it,” I said, tousling his hair. “I have time for a shower?” I asked Nana Mama.

“Dinner’s on the table in exactly half an hour,” she said.

I hoofed it up the stairs, knocked twice on our bedroom door, and went in. Bree sat on the bed in her robe, studying a document on her lap. She didn’t look up until I was almost at her side.

“Hey,” she said softly and with some sadness.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Muller and I went to Howard’s storage unit to take a look through his things on behalf of his ex-wife and daughter. We found two envelopes and… here, draw your own conclusions.”

She held out the envelopes. “First one’s a will and an explanation of his investing theory.”

“Terry Howard had an investing theory?” I said, taking the documents.

“It’s all there,” she said, and she turned toward the closet. “Take five minutes to read, if that.”

I read the pages while she dressed. When I was done, I looked up. Bree had those sad eyes about her again.

“So I might be right,” I said.

“Looks that way,” she replied. “Which is why I’m beginning to think I am a pretty shitty chief of detectives.”

61

BREE PUT HER hand to her mouth and tears welled in her eyes.

I got up off the bed fast and went to her. “You know that’s not true.”

“It is,” she choked out, coming into my arms. “I was playing politics when I said Howard was good for Tommy’s death, trying to clear a murder so I could get the chief and the mayor off my back.”

“Is that what you were doing?”

“Well, I definitely wasn’t making sure Tommy McGrath’s killer was caught.”

“Then the most you’re guilty of is being human,” I said, rubbing her back. “You were caught between a rock and a hard place, and Howard looked good for a suicide. The chief agreed.”

“But you didn’t,” she said.

“I thought it warranted further investigation. And guess what? You further investigated. You found documents we should have looked at weeks ago, but you found them nonetheless. You made a mistake, but you corrected it. You’re back on track, Chief Stone.”

“Am I?” she said, unconvinced.

“I have faith in you,” I said.

“Thank you. It means everything.”

We kissed.

She scrunched up her nose afterward and said, “You are the love of my life, Alex, but you need a shower.”

“On it now,” I said and headed into the bathroom.

Letting the hot water beat on my neck, I thought back on the two documents Terry Howard had left behind. The first was a simple will that the disgraced detective wrote himself and had had notarized in duplicate. The will awarded all of Howard’s property, including his shotgun collection, to his nine-year-old daughter, Cecilia.

Attached to the will was a letter explaining that he’d started investing in fine shotguns after learning that they tended to appreciate fast and were a safer bet than the stock market. Beginning with a small inheritance he’d received in his early twenties, he had been buying and trading shotguns for many years. He recommended a gun buyer in Dallas who could determine the collection’s value after his death.

The second document was a brief letter to Tommy McGrath, Howard’s ex-partner. In it, Howard said he bore no ill will toward McGrath and that he knew his disgrace was the result of his own actions.

And now the cancer’s got me, Tommy, or you wouldn’t be reading this, Howard wrote. I couldn’t tell you because I did not want you to pity me. I saw you with your young lady friend-you dog-and realized things were going better for you. You deserve better. May your life be long and fantastic. Remember me fondly-T.

It didn’t sound like a man who was angry and ready to commit murder. To me and to Bree, it sounded like a man trying to make peace with himself and his old partner. If he’d killed McGrath and then committed suicide, why would he have left such a note? He’d obviously written it before McGrath’s death, so wouldn’t he have retrieved it and destroyed it before he killed himself? Or had he just forgotten it?

The most cynical slice of me played with the idea that Howard had put the letter there as a way to throw us off the scent, but that didn’t make sense in light of the suicide. Wouldn’t he have left some kind of diatribe condemning McGrath?

So maybe Howard didn’t commit suicide. In that scenario, whoever killed McGrath had also killed Howard and then framed the disgraced detective for McGrath’s murder.

It wasn’t the perfect crime. But it was close. That is, if we could prove it.

I got out of the shower and dried off. Bree came into the bathroom.

“Chief Michaels is going to need harder evidence than that letter to officially reopen the case,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Can you help grease the wheels at the gun house?”

“Sure. How fast?”

“Tomorrow?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks. By the way, how’d your day go?”

I briefed her as I pulled on clothes.

When I finished, she sighed. “So we’re no closer to finding Tommy’s killer or the road-rage shooter.”

“Or the vigilantes, for that matter. Whoever they are.”

62

THANK GOD FOR Alex and Ned Mahoney, Bree thought the next afternoon as she and Muller hurried down a hallway to the Gun Room, the area of the FBI’s crime lab that was dedicated to the Firearms/Toolmarks Unit. The backlog for FBI testing was weeks long, and yet here they were in Quantico, marching in the front door on less than three hours’ notice.

“We’re here to see Ammunition Specialist Noble,” Bree told the receptionist who was inspecting their visitors’ passes.

The receptionist made a call, and several minutes later a petite woman in her late forties wearing a blue skirt, a white shirt, a white lab coat, and reading glasses on a chain came out to meet them.

“Judith Noble,” she said crisply. “You have friends in high places, Chief Stone.”

“We’re lucky,” Bree said. “And thank you for agreeing to help us.”

“Not agreeing wasn’t an option,” she said coolly. “What can I do for you?”

Bree handed over the evidence bag containing the.45-caliber bullets found in Howard’s storage unit as well as the bullets that had killed Howard, Tommy McGrath, and Edita Kravic.

“We need a comparison done,” she said. “Just to make sure we’ve gotten all our ducks in a row.”

The ammunition specialist glanced at her watch and nodded. “Long as things don’t get too complicated, I can do that.”

Noble led them back to her workstation, which was immaculate.

“How do you get any work done?” Muller said. “I need a proper mess to think straight.”

The ammunition tech said, “Thank God you’re not in my field, Detective Muller. Defense attorneys would crucify you on the stand.”

“Why’s that?”

“Firearms testing is like engineering,” Noble said, putting on gloves. “This is about precision, not chaos.”

“Like I said, I wouldn’t get a thing done,” Muller said and he smiled at Noble in a way that Bree found kind of strange.

Noble did not respond, merely took out the three bullets that had killed Tommy McGrath, the two that had struck Edita Kravic, and the single shot that had ended Terry Howard’s life.

“They’re all a match for this gun,” Muller said, handing over the suicide.45 in an evidence bag.

“Says who?”

“I dunno,” Muller said. “Someone here.”

“I can call up the report,” Bree said, pulling out her phone.

Noble held up her hand. “I believe you. So all you’re looking for is confirmation that the ammunition in this box matches these six rounds?”

“Exactly,” Bree said.

“It should be easy,” the tech said. “We have everything Federal makes in the SAF, the standard ammunition file.”

She looked at the end of the box. “Personal-defense grade, two hundred and thirty grain. Pretty standard for a forty-five semiautomatic.”

Noble opened the box, took out one of the fourteen remaining bullets, looked at it, and frowned. “That doesn’t match.”

63

“WHAT?” MULLER SAID. “You haven’t even looked at the others.”

“I don’t need to,” Noble said, miffed. “The unfired cartridges here might indeed match the killing rounds, but they do not match the labeling on the Federal box.”

“No markings around the primers, right?” Bree said.

Noble cocked her head in appreciation and nodded. “That is correct, Chief Stone. All commercially made handgun ammunition has a stamp indicating manufacture and caliber on the brass around the primer.”

“Which means what?” Muller asked.

“Which means that these are hand loads,” the tech said. “Someone bought the components-the brass, the powder, the primer, and the bullets-and built these to custom specifications.”

“We didn’t see any hand-loading equipment at Howard’s apartment or in the storage unit,” Muller said.

“He could have hired someone to build the bullets,” Noble said.

“So do they all match?” Bree asked.

“Give me a few minutes,” Noble said, and then she looked at Muller. “You neat enough to get coffee and bring it back?”

“On my best days,” Muller said, and he gave her that goofy grin again.

While Noble told Muller how to get to the cafeteria, he continued to moon at her. Bree happened to look at the ammunition tech’s left hand. No ring.

She fought not to laugh. Muller was smitten!

Part of her wanted to mention his kidney stones or one of his other ailments, but she took pity and said nothing when he hurried off.

“He’s an odd duck,” Noble said, starting to work on the bullets.

“He kind of grows on you after a while,” Bree said.

“Married?” the tech asked.

“Divorced.”

“Hmm,” Noble said, and she kept at her work.

Twenty minutes later, Muller returned. The ammunition specialist didn’t look his way. She stared at the image of a bullet on her computer screen.

He put the coffee in front of her, and she said, “The bullets in the box are a match for the used slugs. They’re all Bear Creek moly-coated two-hundred-grain RNHBs. Which are about as far as could be from the specs on the box. These were made by and for an expert to exact, competition-level specs.”

“You mean like three-gun competitions?” Muller asked.

“Or straight pistol on a combat range,” the tech said.

“That’s a problem, then,” Bree said. “As far as we know, Terry Howard never competed with a pistol, never built his own bullets, and was not a gun nut. Well, not a pistol nut.”

“Howard could have gotten the custom ammunition with the gun,” Noble said. “Bought them from the owner.”

Bree said, “Or maybe an expert shot, someone who competes with a forty-five handgun and builds his own ammo, killed all three of them and framed Howard to get away with it.”

64

THEY WAITED UNTIL the heart of the cloudy night before turning on night-vision goggles and climbing over the chained and locked aluminum gate.

Hobbes and Fender went over smoothly, making no sound. But John Brown’s bad knee was acting up again. As he straddled the gate, the chain clinked ever so softly.

Brown landed on the dirt road on the other side. A dog barked once, straight to the south, five, maybe six hundred yards. Brown saw in his night-vision goggles that Hobbes was holding up his hand for him not to move.

Another bark, and then nothing for five long minutes.

“Like a cat, now,” Fender whispered through a jawbone microphone, and he began to pad down the dirt driveway.

Fender wore fleece-bottomed booties over his sneakers. They all wore them and barely made a sound moving deeper and deeper into the property. The dog stayed quiet.

That wouldn’t last long with a trained canine listening and scent-checking the wind. For the moment, however, they had it made from a scent perspective. A sturdy breeze blew right in their faces. The dog’s superior nose was disabled.

But sooner or later, one of the German shepherds would hear something or perhaps see them moving into position. If the noise was blatant or the dog got a solid look at them, it would certainly bark and sound an alarm. Things would get difficult then, but not untenable.

If the movements and noises they made were soft and irregular, however, the dogs would be uncertain and would come to investigate. And that would make things easier all around.

They crossed a clearing without alerting the dogs and crept closer. Slats of light from the house were visible through the trees when Hobbes toed a rock. It rolled and tumbled into the ditch.

The dog barked once. Brown and his men froze, listening, and heard a low growl and then a heavy dog’s nails clicking and scraping on porch floorboards. They’d anticipated something like this scenario and stayed with their plan. Hobbes stepped off the right side of the driveway into the ditch. He leaned against the bank there, both hands gripping a pistol with tritium night sights.

Brown and Fender did the same on the left side of the drive, back to back, with Brown facing the house with his pistol, Fender covering their trail with an ultralight, suppressed backpacking rifle.

Rather than circling to catch their scent in the wind, the dog came directly at them, trotting confidently down the driveway and into the dense pines where they waited.

When the dog was fifteen yards away, Hobbes pulled the trigger, causing a burst of pressurized air to drive a tranquilizer dart into the animal’s shoulder.

It made a soft yipping sound, staggered to its left, panted, and went down.

No one budged for another five long minutes, during which Brown caught the faint sound of-cheering? And where was the second dog? Inside?

Hobbes moved first; he stalked forward to the edge of the yard, Brown right behind him. Fender passed them and stuck to the shadows, moving to the right and up onto a dirt mound where he could get a better look at the front of the house.

Brown paused next to Hobbes, hearing the voices of announcers and seeing the flicker of a television through the partially open blinds of the room to the right of the front door.

“See anything in there?” he murmured.

65

A FEW MOMENTS later, Fender said, “College football highlights playing on the big-screen, but I’m not seeing anyone in there watching. Dark, though. Lot of shadows. Hard to tell.”

“I’m going,” Brown said, and he moved slowly across the yard, heading past a Grady-White fishing boat toward a motorcycle. He crouched by the side of the bike and worked at a leather saddlebag strap with leather gloves.

When Brown had it open, he drew out from his jacket a plastic ziplock bag that held a kit wrapped in dark cloth. He got the kit free of the plastic and placed it behind a tool kit in the saddlebag.

Then he reached into a top pocket and fished out a film canister. He opened it and spilled the contents onto the gas tank.

“I’ve got him,” Fender whispered in Brown’s earbud. “He’s leaning forward in a chair. Just changed the channel.”

“Kill him if you can,” Brown said, buckling the saddlebag.

Fender’s ultralight rifle produced a sound similar to the air pistol’s. The bullet made a small tinkling noise as it passed through the screen, the blinds, and the window, and then there was the sound of lead hitting flesh and bone.

“Done,” Fender said.

“Done,” Brown said; he spun away from the Harley and took off in a low crouch across the yard.

Inside the house, a woman began to scream.

“Shit,” Hobbes said. “He wasn’t alone.”

“Too late,” Brown said. “Get to the car.”

They sprinted into the pines, through them, and across the clearing. When they entered the woodlot close to the road, Brown thought they were going to get away clean. The woman had stopped screaming. She was probably calling 911, but they were less than one hundred yards from the car. Nothing could-

A form hurtled out of the woods to Brown’s right and sprang at him with a guttural snarl. The second dog got hold of his upper right arm and bit down viciously.

“Ahhh!” Brown cried out, feeling his flesh rip as the dog shook its head and dragged him down. Brown sprawled on his side, but he still had his pistol in his right hand.

The dog released its hold and bit again, harder this time.

Before Hobbes or Fender could do a thing to help him, Brown let go of the pistol, grabbed it with his left hand, and, at point-blank range, fired a tranquilizer dart into the attack dog’s stomach.

It yelped and scratched the back of Brown’s head getting off him. It didn’t make it six more feet before flopping over and panting.