I, Alex Cross

Chapter 78

THE MURDER MYSTERY was turning out to be more like a plague, spreading and infecting anyone who touched it, killing them.

Adam Petoskey sat up suddenly on the couch, all five foot four of him. His heart was kicking at the inside of his chest. Something besides a terrifying nightmare had just woken him, though there had been plenty of those lately too.

What was it?

What now?

His apartment was dark except for the TV. He'd been watching The Daily Show when he dropped off, finding solace in the droll humor of Jon Stewart.

Now there was an infomercial on, people laughing and screaming about some weight-loss thing. Maybe that's what woke him.

Paranoia was his roommate these days, and one hairy bitch to be cooped up with too. He hadn't left the apartment in a week. Literally a week. The phones were unplugged, the shades were drawn at all times, and garbage was piling up by the back door – ever since he'd nailed it shut on that first night when he couldn't sleep a wink.

There were things Adam Petoskey knew – things he wished to hell he didn't know.

Working for Tony Nicholson and his girlfriend, Mara, cooking the books and looking the other way, had been shitty enough. Not working for him, not hearing a word from him, as it turned out, was even worse.

Like tonight, just to use a handy example. He stood up off the couch, still a little shaky.

Halfway to the kitchen, he stopped. For the hundredth time that week, he felt almost sure someone was behind him.

And then, before he could even turn around – someone was.

A strong arm looped across his throat and pulled hard, until his feet nearly left the floor. Duct tape was pressed over his mouth. He heard it rip in the back and felt it stick and tighten.

"Don't fight, Mr. Petoskey. You fight – you lose – you die."

A hard finger pressed into the spot between his shoulder blades and moved him toward the bedroom door. "Let's go. This way, my friend."

Petoskey's brain squirmed. He was a numbers man, after all. He could run equations and probabilities like a machine, and right now, everything he knew told him to do as this guy said. It was even a strange kind of relief, following someone's orders after seven days of solitude in this hellhole.

In the bedroom, the man turned on a light. He was no one Petoskey recognized – tall and white, with gray-flecked dark hair. His gun had one of those extensions on it, a silencer, if the ones on TV were any indication.

"Pack a bag," he said. "Don't leave anything out. Clothes, wallet, passport, whatever you need for a long trip."

Petoskey didn't hesitate, but a whole new raft of questions floated into his crowded mind as he started to pack. Where was he going? What kind of long trip? And how could he possibly convince anyone of the truth, that he'd never had any intention of telling a soul what he knew?

One thing at a time, Petoskey. Clothes, wallet, passport…

"Now get in the bathroom," the man told him. "Pack everything you'll need in there."

"Right, he thought, clinging to the task at hand. Don't leave anything out. Toothbrush, toothpaste, shaver… condoms? Sure. Why not be positive?

The master bath was tiny, with barely enough room to stand between the pedestal sink, toilet, and shower.

Petoskey opened the medicine cabinet, but then he felt another poke between his shoulder blades.

"Get in the tub and lie down, little man."

It made no sense, but nothing did right now. Was he going to be tied up in the tub? Robbed? Left behind after all?

"No," the man said. "The other way, with your head down by the drain."

And suddenly it all became horribly clear. For the first time, Petoskey screamed – and he heard just how tiny his voice was from behind the tape. This was it. This was really it. Tonight, he disappeared forever.

He knew too much – the famous names, all their dirty secrets.

Chapter 79

I HAD FEWER and fewer people I could talk to about this murder case anymore. Lucky for me, Nana was still one of them.

For a few days, I'd been holding back on her. Somehow it seemed wrong to bring the extra stress into her room at the hospital. But as the days had passed, and these visits of mine turned into their own kind of normal, I started to realize something. If Nana were awake through all of this, she would have been asking about Caroline's case every day. No doubt about it in my mind.

So I didn't hold back anymore.

"It's not going well, old woman. Caroline's murder case," I told her that night. "I'm overwhelmed, to be honest. I've never been in a position like this before. Not that I can remember, anyway.

"Ramon Davies is ready to take me off. The Bureau was going at it full clip, and now I don't even know where they are on it. I've got the White House breathing down my neck, if you can believe that. Believe it.

"And these are supposed to be the good guys, Nana. I don't know. It's getting harder and harder to tell the difference anymore. It's like somebody said: You can love this country and hate our government."

It was quiet in the room, as usual. I kept the heart monitor volume down when I was there, so the only sounds besides my own voice were the hiss of the ventilator and an occasional snatch of conversation from the nurse's station down the hall.

Nana's condition hadn't changed, but she just seemed sicker to me. Smaller, grayer, more distant. It felt as though everything in my life was sliding in the same direction these days.

"I don't know where to go with any of this. One way or another, it's going to come out, and it's going to be huge when it does. I mean like Watergate huge, old woman. There'll be hearings and spin, and probably no one's ever going to know the real story – but I feel like I'm the only one who even wants to open that particular door. I want to know. I need to know."

There was one other thing about the quiet. It meant that I could hear Nana talking back.

Poor Alex. An army of one, huh? What else have you got?

It wasn't a rhetorical question. She'd really want to know. So I gave it some thought… I had Sampson on my side. I had Bree, of course. I had Ned Mahoney – somewhere out there.

And I had one other rainy-day idea I'd been sitting on. It wasn't the kind of thing that could be undone once it was started, but hey, how much rainier did I expect it to get?

I reached through the bed rail and put my hands on Nana's. Things like touch had become more important than ever to me – any way I could connect with her, for as long as I could.

The room's ventilator hissed. Someone laughed down the hall.

"Thank you, old woman," I said. "Wherever you are."

You're welcome, she communicated somehow, and we left it at that. As always, Nana had the last word.

Chapter 80

AND PEOPLE CONTINUED to die. Anyone who knew anything was at risk.

It was two thousand miles from Virginia back to the island of Trinidad and the bright blue house where Esther Walcott had grown up, just outside the capital city of Port of Spain. That's where she'd run to after the raid on Mr. Nicholson's club.

Mum and Bap had welcomed her home with open arms and, more important, asked no questions about the life she'd left behind so abruptly in America.

Two years of hostessing and recruiting for the club in Virginia had left her with a nice bank account, if nothing else, and she planned on putting it toward a hair and nail boutique of her own, maybe even something at Westmall, like she'd always imagined as a girl. It seemed like the perfect way to start her life over.

But when she woke up on that third night home with a man's hand pressed tightly over her mouth, and heard the American accent in her ear, Esther knew that she hadn't run far enough.

"One peep and I'll kill everyone in the house. Everyone. Do you understand what I'm saying, Esther? Just nod."

It was almost impossible not to scream. Her breath was coming in fast, high-pitched gasps, but she managed to nod yes.

"Good girl, smart girl. Just like at the club in America. Where's your suitcase?" She pointed to the closet. "Okay. Very slowly, now, I want you to sit up."

He got her propped up in bed and pasted a length of tape over her mouth before he let go. It was seventy-five degrees out, but she was shaking as if it were thirty. The touch of his rough hands on her stomach and breasts made her feel practically naked. And vulnerable. And sad.

When a light showed under her door, Esther's heart flip-flopped – a rush of hope at first, but then dread. Someone was coming!

The intruder turned to her in the semidark and held a finger to his lips, reminding her of what was at stake. Her family.

A moment later, there was a soft knock. "Esther?" It was her mother's voice, and all at once, more than she could take. Her right hand flew up and clawed the tape off her mouth.

"Run, Mummy! Man has a gun! Run!"

Instead, the door to the bedroom flew open. For a moment, Esther saw the wide shape of her mother shadowed against the light from the hall.

There was a soft popping sound, nothing like a regular gunshot, but Miranda Walcott clutched her chest and collapsed to the floor without another word.

Now Esther was screaming – and couldn't have stopped if she'd wanted to. Next she heard her father's voice, coming closer. He was running!

"Esther? Miranda?" he called out.

The intruder left her side, heading for the door, and she threw herself after him, if only to catch his ankles, make him fall somehow.

Instead, she hit the floor hard and again heard the awful popping sound.

Something shattered in the hall, and her poor Bap crashed against the wall.

Sparks of white light played at the edges of Esther's vision, and the room swam even as she scrambled up onto the bed again. With both fists, she pushed and clawed through the screen mesh in the window.

It wasn't far to a patch of black sage bushes below, and she was more outside than in when strong hands latched onto her ankles and started to pull. Her body scraped hard over the wooden sill as she reversed direction.

One more time, Esther screamed, knowing that the neighbors would hear, but also that it was too late to matter.

They were going to kill everyone who knew anything.

And anyone else in the way.

Chapter 81

DAMON HAD COME home for the weekend, which was a great thing for everybody. I'd bought him a ticket and asked him to make the trip, partly because of Nana, partly because all of this upset was making us miss him more than ever.

Anyway, I wanted the kids together in one place, even if it was only for a couple days.

We started with a welcome home dinner for Day, including a lot of his favorites: Caesar salad for everyone, with anchovies for me; Nana's sloppy joes in sourdough bowls that the younger two had hollowed out; and Jannie's monkey bread for dessert. It was the first time she'd ever made the bread by herself, without Nana's help. Everything about Day's visit was happy and sad at the same time.

It was interesting to see the changes around the house through Damon's eyes. Jannie, Ali, and I had gotten used to Bree coordinating schedules, helping with homework, and putting meals on the table. For Damon, though, it was all new. Mostly, he didn't comment other than a lot of "thank yous," which were much appreciated by Bree.

I waited until we'd heard about life at Cushing Academy and had enjoyed our meal together before I steered the conversation around to Nana Mama.

"Let's talk about it," I finally said.

Jannie gave a sigh. She was the one who kept the most informed, but emotionally, I think this was harder for her than anyone. She and Nana were incredibly close; they did everything together, and had since Jannie was a baby.

"What do you mean, Dad?" Damon asked. "We all know what's going on. Don't we?"

"Just what I said – we should talk. Nana could get better soon. That's what we're hoping for. Or she could be in a coma for a while. It's also possible… that she won't wake up again."

"She could die," Jannie said, a little rudely. "We get it, Dad. Even Ali does."

I looked over at Ali, but he seemed all right so far. In his way, he was older than his age. Both Nana and I had talked to him like an adult, respected his intelligence, since he was around four years old. One of my theories, and Nana's, about raising kids is that you cannot give them too much love, but that the environment inside your house has to bear a relationship to what they will face on the outside. So no excess coddling or making excuses for unacceptable behavior.

I nodded Janelle's way. "We all get it. We're all sad and we're angry. C'mere, everybody. Maybe I'm the only one who needs a little help right now."

We gathered close for a group hug, and it was better that way, thinking about Nana without speaking.

Bree was the first to break down, and then everybody was in tears. No shame in that, nothing but love on display. That may not work for all families, but it sure does for us.

Chapter 82

BY MONDAY, I was ready to make my next move on the case. Her name was Wylie Rechler, although her readers knew her as simply "Jenna." She'd been helpful to the FBI and Metro before; in particular, she had aided Vice.

Wylie Rechler was DC's answer to Cindy Adams and Perez Hilton, with a hugely popular gossip blog called Jenna Knows. She'd used it to break a couple of smaller Washington stories over the years – Angelina Jolie's nomination to the Council on Foreign Relations, Barack Obama's closet cigarette habit – but most of her space was dedicated to the social and sex lives of the "people who matter most," as her home page called them.

Sampson and I caught up with the popular gossipist that afternoon at the Neiman Marcus store in Friendship Heights. Wylie was launching a new designer scent, whatever that means, also called Jenna Knows. With the smell of cheap perfume as thick in the air as it was, I kept thinking of it as "Jenna Nose" instead.

She was set up in the middle of the store, near the escalators. Pretty ladies in black smocks were spritzing passers-by, while Jenna herself autographed bottles from a big pyramid of red-and-black boxes on a C-shaped counter.

When she saw our detective badges, she put a perfectly manicured hand up to her chest. "Oh, God! I've finally gone too far, haven't I?" It got a good laugh from the crowd behind us.

"I was wondering if I could persuade you to take five," I asked her. "It's important."

""Mais oui." Wylie stood up with a little flourish. "Excuse me, ladies, but gossip awaits. The Metro Police know all. But – will they tell all?"

Some of the theatricality dropped off as soon as we were away from the crowd. "I'm not actually in any trouble here, am I?" she asked.

"Nothing like that," Sampson said, and held the door for her out to Wisconsin Avenue. "We just need some help."

We waited until we were in my car to go on. Then I just asked her point-blank. "I'm wondering if you've heard anything about a sex club for heavy hitters? Out in Virginia? Place called Blacksmith Farms. We're looking, first of all, for some verification."

She'd been rustling inside a little red clutch purse, but now she stopped cold. "You mean it's true?"

"I'm just wondering what you've heard. Names, stories, anything at all."

"Nothing in a while," she said, pulling out a lipstick. "Not enough to make a story I could go with. I figured it was – what? – a ridiculous suburban myth?"

"Aren't you in the business of publishing rumors?" Sampson asked her.

"Honey, I'm in the business of being as accurate as I can be and not getting my ass sued. I learned that the hard way blogging on Condi Rice's love life. And just for the record, there's no such thing as an old rumor in Washington."

"How do you mean that?" I asked.

"I mean you can't swing a stick around here without hitting some investigative reporter looking to make a name for themselves. Rumors either turn into headlines real quick or they're dead on arrival. When I didn't hear any more about that one, I figured it was a dead end."

She smiled happily and started reddening her lips in the rearview mirror. "Until now, anyway."

"That's another thing," I said, catching her eye. "I need you to sit on this for a while."

"Excuse me? You do know what I do for a living, don't you?"

"And I assume you know what I do," I said. "This is a murder investigation, Jenna, not a game. Do you understand what I'm saying here?"

"Okay, now you're scaring me," she said, returning the lipstick to her purse. Then she finally opened up and gave me a few names she'd heard connected to the sex club. New names, which was helpful.

"Listen." I handed her two of my business cards. "Call me if you hear anything else, and please give me your number too. As soon as this thing is ready to go, I'll bring you whatever I have. Do we have a deal?"

"That depends." She fanned herself with the cards. "How do I know you're the type to return favors?"

I chose my words carefully. "I'm here talking to you because I need you and I know you've been helpful to Metro before. That also means I can't afford to piss you off. Is that honest enough for you?"

She took out a little gold pen, scribbled some digits, then kissed the card. She handed it back to me with a lipstick imprint next to the number.

"Delicious," she said.

I took the card. "No, you had it right a minute ago – scary."

Chapter 83

I WAS SURPRISED to hear from one of Tony Nicholson's attorneys the next afternoon. It wasn't the bow-tie-and-suspenders nerd from the night of the raid, but someone else entirely. This one sounded even more expensive, with a 202 phone number on the ID. The heart of the heart of the capital.

"Detective Cross, my name is Noah Miller. I'm with Kendall and Burke. I believe you're familiar with my client Anthony Nicholson?"

"I've been trying to meet with your client since last week," I told him. "I've left half a dozen messages for Anthony."

"At Nyth-Klein?" he asked.

"That's right."

"Yes, they represent the LLC and its holdings in Virginia. We've taken over individual representation for Mr. Nicholson – which brings me back to the subject at hand. I want to be very clear that I'm making this call at his request, and that he's choosing to ignore counsel on the matter."

That got my attention. "How soon can I see him?" I asked.

"You can't. That's not why I'm calling. Please listen carefully. What I have for you is a safe-deposit key, if you'd like to come pick it up. Mr. Nicholson says it's important to your investigation. He also believes that the Metro Police are his best chance of staying alive. He doesn't want to deal with the FBI."

I was Googling Kendall and Burke while we spoke. "I've already been to Nicholson's safe-deposit box," I told him, as the firm came up on my screen. Big, reputable one on K Street.

"Yes, I know. This is in the same bank but a different box," he said, and my hands stopped over the keyboard. What would Nicholson have in a second box? More important, how could we protect him? And from whom?

"Can I assume you'll come pick this up today?" Miller continued.

"Definitely, but let me ask you something," I said. "Why Metro? Why me? Why wouldn't Nicholson give this up to the Federal Bureau?"

"Honestly, my client doesn't trust the people who are holding him – or, frankly, the integrity of their investigation. One more thing – he wants to make sure his cooperation doesn't go unnoticed."

I couldn't help a little smile. How weird, to suddenly be on the same side of the fence as Tony Nicholson, ah, Anthony. It sounded like he was getting as paranoid as I was – and maybe for good reason.

"Twenty-twenty K Street, fourth floor?" I asked, printing it off the screen.

"Very good, Detective Cross. Make it between one thirty and two o'clock. I'll be gone after that."

"I'll see you at one thirty," I said, and hung up on Lawyer Miller before he could hang up on me.

Chapter 84

IT DIDN'T TAKE long to snag the key from Nicholson's attorney at Kendall and Burke, and not much longer than that to get in and out of the Exeter Bank. It was as if the lawyer, Noah Miller, and the bank manager, Ms. Currie, were competing to see who could get me out of their lives faster. Fine with me.

It turned out that the only thing in the new deposit box was a single, unmarked disk, which was about what I'd expected. I drove straight back to the Daly Building with it and called Sampson on my way. He was already there, so it was no problem to meet as soon as I arrived with the disk.

In fact, the big man was sitting with his feet up, fooling around on a laptop, when I came into my office.

"Did you know Zeus was also called the Cloud Gatherer?" he said. "His symbols are the thunderbolt, eagle, bull, and oak. Oh, and he was a pederast too. Rumored to be."

"Fascinating," I said. "Get your shoes off my desk and slide this in."

I handed him the disk and closed the door behind me.

"What is it?" Sampson asked.

"Tony Nicholson thinks it's his life insurance."

Seconds later, the video started playing.

Right away, I recognized the bedroom from the carriage barn apartment at Nicholson's club. It looked the same except for some clean sheets on the bed and maybe a few more knickknacks.

A time signature at the bottom of the screen put it at 1:30 a.m. on July 20 of the previous summer.

"Can those signature numbers be faked?" I asked Sampson.

"No doubt. Why? Do you think Nicholson is screwing with you?"

"Maybe. Probably. I don't know yet."

After about thirty seconds, the image hiccupped, and the time jumped ahead to 2:17 a.m.

Now there was a girl on the bed, wearing nothing but black lace panties. She was blond and petite, with black cuffs on her wrists that were strapped to the posts over her head. Her legs were spread open as wide as humanly possible.

There was no sound, but the way she was moving looked more alluring than scared or defensive to me. Still, I had a fierce knot in my stomach. Whatever this was, I didn't think I wanted to see it proceed.

A man walked into the frame – a real creep wearing full S &M garb, with either rubber or latex pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Also heavy boots and a fitted hood that zipped all the way up the back of his head. Other than the fact that he was tall and well muscled, I couldn't tell much more about him.

"He knows the camera's there," Sampson said. "Maybe he wanted this filmed."

"Let's just watch, John."

I couldn't talk much right now. I was already thinking about what had happened to Caroline, possibly in this room, and maybe at the hands of the same creep we were watching.

Zeus, or whoever it was, bent over the girl and placed a black kidney-shaped blindfold over her eyes. "There's a ring," I said. "On his right hand."

It looked like a class ring, but the image quality wasn't good enough to make it out.

He took his time, pulled a few more things out of the dresser, a spreader bar that he cuffed to both of her ankles; a small brown bottle of something, possibly amyl nitrate.

When he waved it under her nose, the blond girl's face went very red. Then her head lolled from side to side.

Sampson and I watched silently as they had sex. Most of the time, the creep kept one hand on the mattress for balance and the other over her throat. It looked like he was performing asphyxophilia to me, controlling the girl's oxygen, giving it and then taking it away.

The girl played along and didn't seem distressed, which was distressing to watch. Then suddenly he arched up off of her, climaxing, I think, and raised his free hand like he'd just won some kind of contest.

All his weight appeared to be on her throat, and suddenly her movements became jerky and desperate. Her legs jutted straight out under him. It was a horrible thing to watch, like it was happening right now, and there was nothing we could do to stop it.

The more the blond girl struggled, the more excited he got, until finally her body went limp and she stopped moving altogether. Only then did he kiss her.

"Oh, Christ," Sampson said under his breath. "What's the matter with the world?"

The killer climbed off the bed after that. There was no lingering, no fetishizing with the body. In less than a minute, he was gone from the private suite.

Twenty seconds later, the video cut out altogether.

"Come on, John. We're going to Alexandria. We need to find out if that was Zeus."

Chapter 85

AT THE DETENTION center in Alexandria, Sampson and I walked in through the visitors' area. We went down a familiar path – past Records and Door 15, where inmates are released, until we got to the command center.

At that point, our police IDs were enough to get us buzzed through another pair of steel doors, to the booking desk.

All that was the easy part.

As usual, three guards were stationed on the desk. Two of them were middle-aged and hung in the background. One younger guy had the grunt job of processing walk-ins like us. A gold tooth caught the light when he spoke.

"State your business."

"Detectives Cross and Sampson, MPD. We need a temporary custody order on two prisoners, Anthony Nicholson and Mara Kelly."

"You got a letter on file?" He was already picking up the phone.

"We've interviewed them before," I said. "Just a few follow-up questions and we're out of here."

It was worth a shot, anyway. Maybe there was a crack we could fall through.

The deputy wasn't on the phone for long, and he shook his head at me as he hung up.

"Well A, you don't have a letter for today, and B, it don't matter anyway. Your people are gone, Nicholson and Kelly both."

"Gone?" I couldn't believe what I'd heard. "Please tell me you mean they were transferred."

"I mean gone, man." He flipped open a black binder on the desk. "Yep, right here. Eleven hundred hours today. Someone named Miller posted – Jesus – full cash bonds on both of them. A quarter mil each."

That got the attention of the other two guards, and they came to look over his shoulder. One of them whistled low. "Must be nice," the other one said.

"Yeah, right?" the kid agreed.

This wasn't their doing and it wasn't their fault, but they were the ones standing in front of me.

"What is going on around here?" I said. "Nicholson is a major flight risk. Did anybody bother to check on that? He had plane tickets booked the day he was arrested!"

The young guard was staring at me now. The other two had hands on their batons. "I hear you, man, but you've got to step back, right now."

I felt Sampson pulling on my shoulder. "Don't waste your breath here, Alex. Let's go. Nicholson and the girl are gone."

"This is a disaster, John."

"I know, and it's done. Come on."

I let him pull me away, but I would have paid good money to take a swing at someone. Tony Nicholson, for one. Or that smug lawyer Miller.

Even as we were leaving, I could hear the guards talking about their former prisoners. "Fuckin' Richie Riches, man. They get their own breaks and everyone else's too."

"Yeah, right? It's like they say, the rich just get richer, and the poor -"

"Work here."

The last thing I heard was the guards laughing among themselves.

Chapter 86

WHAT AN INCREDIBLE circus! Whether or not it was Nicholson's own money that got him out, he still would have needed a federal judge to sign the Form 41, and someone else even higher in the food chain to broker the deal.

The cover-up was getting broader and deeper and dirtier every day, wasn't it? I think I was more awed than shocked by the whole thing, and worse, I suspected it wasn't close to being over.

John and I went through the motions of running out to Nicholson's house and then Mara Kelly's apartment, but we found exactly what we expected.

There was yellow police tape on the doors, but no indication that anyone had been there for at least a couple of days. Even if they had been, they were long gone now. I doubted that we would ever see Nicholson or Kelly again.

Before we got back on the highway, I asked Sampson to pull over at an Exxon station near Mara Kelly's apartment. I bought a little Nokia prepaid phone for thirty-nine dollars and used it to dial the number I'd gotten the other day.

Wylie Rechler answered on the first ring. "This is Jenna. Talk to me."

"It's Detective Alex Cross, Jenna. We met the other day out in Friendship Heights," I said. "Are you ready to jump into this thing?"

I heard a melodramatic little gasp on the other end. "Honey, I was ready the last time we chatted. What have you got for me now?"

"Ever heard the name Tony Nicholson?"

"I don't think so. No, definitely not. Should I have?"

"He's the one with the little black book you'd love to get your hands on, not that any of us ever will. Until eleven o'clock this morning, he was in federal custody. Now he's out on bail, and if I had to guess, he's on his way out of the country. With the little black book."

"What does this mean for me?"

"It could mean a lot, Jenna. If you help me out. I want you to put a bug in Sam Pinkerton's ear at the Post," I said. "Could you do that?"

"I suppose I could." She paused, and then her voice dropped. "Sam covers the White House. You know that, correct?"

"That's right."

"Oh Jesus, I'm wet – excuse my French. Okay, so what's Mr. Pinkerton going to have for me when I call? If I call."

I told Jenna the truth. "Maybe nothing right away. But you two might make a pretty good team on this one. You'll have all the right angles covered."

"I think I'm in love with you, Detective."

"That's another thing," I said. "Sam pretty much hates my guts. You'll probably get a lot further with him if you don't happen to mention my name."

As I hung up, Sampson was giving me a once-over from the driver's seat. "I thought Sam Pinkerton was a friend of yours."

"He is." I pocketed the new phone next to my old one. "I'm just trying to keep it that way."

Chapter 87

I HAD ONE more place to be that afternoon, and I asked Sampson to drop me off.

One of Washington 's favorite sons, and one of my favorite people too, Hilton Felton, had died a while back, too young at the age of sixty. I'd spent countless nights listening to Hilton play at Kinkead's in Foggy Bottom, where he'd been the house pianist since 1993. That's where they were having a memorial concert for him.

Something like a hundred and fifty people squeezed in to celebrate Hilton's life, and, of course, hear some great music from his friends. It was all very beautiful and relaxed and wonderful in its own way. The music could only have been better if Hilton had been there to play it himself.

When Andrew White got up and played one of Hilton's original compositions, it made me feel incredibly lucky to have known the man behind that music, but also deeply sorry to know that I'd never hear him play it again in the way that only Hilton could.

I missed him terribly, and all the while I was there, I couldn't stop thinking about Nana Mama too. She was the one who first took me to hear Hilton.

Chapter 88

AFTER THE EMOTIONAL stop at Kinkead's I caught a cab over to Fifth Street, then went upstairs to work. As if things weren't already interesting enough, we had a couple of unwanted visitors at the house that night. It was around eleven when Bree came up to my office in the attic to tell me the news.

"Alex, we've got company outside. Two guys in a Ford Explorer, parked across the street for the last hour. Cups on the dash, no coming and going. Just sitting there, watching the house. Maybe watching you up here."

Bree has the best instincts I know, so I didn't doubt that we had a new problem. I holstered my Glock and slid on a windbreaker over it.

Then I stopped in Damon's room on my way downstairs for his old Louisville Slugger. A good piece of ash, not aluminum.

"Please don't come out," I asked Bree at the front door. "Call dispatch if there's a problem."

"If there's a problem, I'm calling dispatch and I'm coming out," she said. I took off out the front door and down the stoop. The Explorer was parked just past the house on the opposite side. The driver was getting out when I took my first swing and obliterated his left taillight.

"What the fuck are you doing?" he screamed at me. "Are you nuts, man?"

In the streetlight, I could see he was hefty but not fat, with a shaved head and a nose that had been broken a few times. I'd been thinking government, but now that I'd seen him, he looked more like a Yellow Pages PI.

"Why are you here watching my house?" I shouted at him. "Who are you?"

His partner got out on the other side, but they both kept their distance.

"Alex?" I heard Bree coming up behind me. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," I shouted back. " Washington plates, DCY 182."

"Got it," she said.

The bald-headed guy flashed his palms for me. "Seriously, just take it down a notch, man. We know you're a cop."

"I'll take it down when you tell me what you're doing here where I live."

"We're not in for anything heavy, all right? I'm not even wearing a piece." He opened his overshirt to show me. "Somebody hired us to keep an eye on you for a little while. That's all this is."

"On me?" I cocked the Slugger a little higher. "Or me and my family?"

"On you. On you." I didn't know if he was telling me the truth or just what I wanted to hear.

"Who are you working for?" I asked.

"We don't know. Seriously. It's a cash job. All I know is what you look like and where you've been today."

That didn't do much to calm me down. I stepped over and took out another taillight.

"And where have I been?"

"You're working a murder case for Metro. Something to do with a detainee in Alexandria, and for fuck's sake, lay off the car already!"

Something had just flipped about this case. It hit me hard, in a way I couldn't deny. The people I'd been pursuing were starting to pursue me now.

"You know, you should be more careful," the second PI told me.

I took a step in his direction. "Why is that?"

"We're not the ones you need to worry about. Whoever this is, and whatever they don't want you doing – they've got some suction. That's all I'm saying. You can take it for what it's worth."

"Thanks for the warning." I pointed up the street. "You're done here. If I catch either of you in this neighborhood again, I'm going to arrest you and have this car towed, you got it?"

"Arrest us?" Now that he was over the hump, the first guy decided to show a little chin. "What are you going to arrest us for?"

"I'm a cop, remember? I'll think of something."

"What about my car, man? That's like five hundred bucks damage!"

"Charge it to your clients," I told him. "Believe me; they can afford it."

Chapter 89

I GOT CALLED into Ramon Davies's office again the next morning. He even had a desk jockey waiting outside the door to my office when I got there.

"What does he want?" I asked the officer. There were no good possibilities running in my mind, only very bad ones. Like more bodies.

"I don't know, sir. Just to meet with you. That's all I was told."

I've heard that Woody Allen leaves his actors alone when they're doing well and only directs them if there's a problem. Davies is kind of the same way. I hated these walks to his office.

When I got in there, he had someone waiting with him. I recognized the face from the White House but didn't know the name until Davies introduced us.

"Alex Cross, this is Special Agent Dan Cormorant. He's from Secret Service. He'd like to talk to you."

Cormorant was the one who had accompanied President Vance into the chief of staff's office the other day when I visited. I assumed he was here at his boss's behest.

"We've met, sort of," I said, and shook his hand. "I don't suppose you have anything to do with the two PIs outside my house last night?"

"Don't know what you're talking about," he said.

"Imagine that."

"Alex." Ramon cut me off with a raised voice and hand signal. "Be quiet and let's get to this."

Cormorant and I sat down across the desk from him.

"I'm not going to dwell on how we got here right now," Davies said, and the implication was clear. We'd talk about it later, in private. "But I will tell you what's going to happen next. Alex, you're going to make yourself available to Agent Cormorant and provide him with any case-related materials he needs. When that's finished, you're going to report back to me that you're ready for a new assignment. I've got a quad homicide in Cleveland Park with your name written all over it. Big case, serious crime."

I heard the words, but my mind was elsewhere. If I had to guess, I'd say that Ramon was embarrassed at having the Secret Service foisted on him, probably by the chief himself. He'd never spoken to me like this before, but I decided to bite my tongue until I had a chance to see what Cormorant was all about.

The meeting ended pretty soon after that, and I walked out with Cormorant, back toward my office.

"How long have you been with the presidential detail?" I asked him. "That's some rarified air."

"I've been with the Service for eight years," he said, not quite answering my question. "Philadelphia PD before that, and for what it's worth, I know how much you don't want me here."

Rather than getting into it, I asked, "So where are you guys on Tony Nicholson at this point? Where is he now? If I can ask that kind of question."

He smiled. "How much do you already know?"

"That he was in Alexandria until eleven o'clock Friday morning, and now he's nowhere to be found. At least not by Metro."

"Then we've got the same information," Cormorant said. "That's part of why I'm here. This is a big mystery, Detective Cross. And a dangerous one."

He struck me as a little looser than a lot of the guys I knew at the Service, although that's all relative. And the question remained – was he here to legitimately pursue this case or to bury it?

In my office, I took out the latest disk from Nicholson and handed it to him. "Most of the physical evidence is with the Bureau, but this is new."

He turned it over in his hands. "What is it?"

"Is the name Zeus already familiar to you? I'm guessing it is."

He looked at me but wouldn't answer.

"Cormorant, do you want my help or not? I would actually like to help."

"Yes, I've heard the name Zeus," he said.

"Supposedly, this is him. On the disk."

"Supposedly?"

"It's a homicide. White male assailant with a distinctive ring on his right hand. I'm not going to make any assumptions, and you shouldn't either."

It's comments like that last one I should really work a little harder at keeping to myself. I saw Cormorant stiffen right up.

"What else do you have?" he asked. "I need to hear everything, Detective."

"I need a little time to pull my notes together. But I can get you whatever I have by tomorrow," I told him.

"What about copies?" He held up the disk I'd given him. "How many of these are floating around?"

"That's the only one I know of," I said. "It came out of Nicholson's safe-deposit box. He was using it to bargain. Of course, if we could find him -"

"Okay, then." He shook my hand again. "We'll talk soon."

After he was gone, I ran over the conversation in my head and wrote down everything I could remember. How many lies had Cormorant told me already? And by the same token, other than the one I'd just told him about copies of Nicholson's disk, how many more would I have to tell before this was over?

Chapter 90

HERE'S HOW CRAZY/PARANOID things were getting. I had stopped using my own phone, and stuck to prepaid ones, changing the number every forty-eight hours or so.

After my meeting with Cormorant, I ran out to get a new one and used it to call Sam Pinkerton at the Washington Post.

Sam and I originally met at the gym where we both work out. He's more into Shotokan, whereas I'm straight boxing, but we'd spar anyway, and have a drink once in a while too. So it wasn't completely out of left field for me to call and ask if he felt like grabbing a quick one at Union Pub after work.

I spent the rest of the afternoon chasing Tony Nicholson's shadow and pretty much getting nowhere that I hadn't been before.

Then, just after five, I walked up Louisiana and along Columbus Circle to meet with Sam.

Over a beer, we shot the breeze and played catch-up, about how our kids were doing, what we thought of the DC school budget fiasco, even the weather. It felt good to sit and have a seminormal conversation for a little while. My days had been too crowded for regular life lately.

On the second round, things heated up and got a whole lot more pointed.

"So what do you have brewing at work these days?" I asked.

He leaned back in the booth and tilted his head at me. "Did this meeting just start?"

"Yeah. I've got a case going, and I'm trying to take the temperature on a few things out there."

"As in, over there?" He pointed in the general direction of the White House, which was his beat, and only a few blocks from the bar. "Are we talking about legislation or something else? I think I already know the answer."

"Something else," I said.

"I assume you don't mean the president's sixtieth-birthday thing?"

"Sam."

"'Cause I can get you in if you want. The grub's going to be pretty good. You like Norah Jones? She'll be performing. And Mary Blige."

He knew he was doing me a favor, and he wasn't going to let it go by without busting on me a little.

"Okay, here's something," he said. "You know the blog Jenna Knows? I get a call the other day from Jenna herself. Now, you've got to consider the source on something like this, but suffice to say she had some pretty wild shit. I can't go into any detail right now. You might want to buy me another drink in about two days." He drained his glass. "Unless you want to tell me what the hell you're working on."

"No comment. Not just yet," I told him. And I also thought, Mission accomplished. Whatever else happened, this thing was at least set in motion, with or without me.

"There is one other thing, though," I said. "It's a little unconventional."

"My favorite convention," he said, and spun his finger in the air at the waitress for another round.

"Off the record. If anything happens to me in the next few days or weeks, I want you to look into it."

Sam went still and stared at me. "Jesus Christ, Alex."

"I know it's a strange thing to say. More than a little, I guess."

"Don't you have – I don't know – an entire police department looking after you?"

"It depends on how you mean that," I said, as the next round came to the table. "Let's just say I'm calling for backup."

Chapter 91

TWO WEEKS AGO, hell, last week, Tony Nicholson had been popping five-hundred-dollar bottles of champagne when he was thirsty. Now here he was, huddled in the rain at a filthy I-95 truck stop like some third world alien on the run.

Mara waited inside, watching through the plate glass window of the Landmark Diner. When he looked back, she tapped her wrist and shrugged, like maybe he'd forgotten they had somewhere else to be.

He knew, he knew.

The alternative to this had been no alternative at all – rotting in a cell at the Alexandria Detention Center. At least now there was the promise of passports, plane tickets, and enough cash to get them off this plasticized continent for good.

But his contact was late, and Nicholson felt a little more paranoid with every passing minute. On top of it all, his bad knee was only getting worse in the rain and cold, and it throbbed like a sonofabitch from standing too long.

Finally, another five minutes later, there was movement in his line of vision.

A panel truck of some kind flashed its lights from across the front parking lot. Nicholson looked over, and the driver motioned him to come that way.

He motioned again – more urgently.

Nicholson's heart jumped into his throat. Something was off. It was supposed to have been a car, not a truck, and the meeting point was supposed to be right here, where people could see. Where nothing funny could happen.

Too late. When he looked back at the diner again, Mara was gone. A little boy stood where she'd been, hands cupped around his face behind the glass, looking out at him like this was a remake of Village of the Damned.

Pulse racing, Nicholson motioned to the driver that he'd be right back, and gimped toward the door at what he hoped was a natural enough pace.

Inside, the restaurant and newsstand were mostly empty, with Mara nowhere in sight.

A quick check of the deserted ladies' room told him what he already knew: This had just officially become an individual sport. He continued out the back door by the loos and kept moving.

The rear lot was quiet and looked empty. He'd parked the rental maybe fifty yards away, which right now seemed like fifty too many. When he checked over his shoulder, someone was coming out the same door he'd just used – maybe the truck driver, maybe not; it was hard to tell in the blowing mist and rain.

He broke into an excruciating, lopsided run, but now he could hear faster steps than his own slapping the wet pavement behind him.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the panel truck again, skirting the lot. Pete's Meats, it said on the side, and even now some part of his brain registered the irony.

Mother of God, I'm dead. So's Mara. Maybe she is already.

He got as far as one hand on the rental-car door. A calloused palm slapped over his mouth, absorbing any scream he had to offer. The man's arms were massive, and Nicholson felt himself twisted around as though he were a small child.

For a split second, he felt sure his neck was about to be broken. Instead, something stabbed up under his chin, creating a stomach-churning flash of pain and disorientation.

His vision fluttered. Parking lot, sky, and car all swam together in a blur, until the curtain came down for Tony Nicholson and everything went far, far away.

Chapter 92

NICHOLSON WOKE UP in the dark, on cold ground, but at least he was alive. He was completely naked, he realized, and his wrists and ankles were bound.

A horrible ache blazed up in his neck when he tried to look around. But he was still in the game, which was all that really counted now, wasn't it?

There was a building of some kind behind him, dimly lit from the inside. Everything else was just shadows and trees. A stack of firewood, maybe. Machinery of some kind near the building. What? A snowblower? Lawn mower?

"He's waking up," a voice said, not far away from him.

Nicholson heard footfalls and the sound of sloshing water. As the steps came closer, a flashlight beam lit the ground in front of him. He saw a pair of feet in dark cordovans.

"Welcome back, Tony. Thought we lost you back there. Here you go!"

When the splash of water hit, it jolted him like an electric shock. His whole body seized with the cold, and his breath came in crazy accordion gasps he couldn't control.

"Get him up," someone else said.

They hoisted him under the arms until his bare ass landed on a wooden chair. The flashlight caught just glints of things – a face, a stump, a flash of silver in someone's hand. Gun? Phone?

"Where's Mara?" he slurred, as she suddenly came to mind.

"Don't worry about her right now. Least of your problems. Trust me on that."

"We had an arrangement!" He sounded pathetic and he knew it. "Promises were made to me. I did exactly as I was told!"

Something sharp pricked at the crown of his head. "Who else knows about Zeus?" one of the men asked. His tone was bland, conversational.

"No one! I swear! Nobody knows. I did my part. So did Mara!"

A stinging line, almost like fire, ran straight down behind his ear to the back of his neck. There was a slight breeze, an air current, but it lit up the pain like acid.

"Not Adam Petoskey? Not Esther Walcott?"

"No! I mean… they might have figured a little out. Adam wasn't as careful at the end as he was at the beginning. But I swear to God -"

Two more cuts slashed across the front of his chest and down his abdomen. Nicholson screamed both times.

He drew in his stomach muscles as if he could somehow escape the blade even as it continued down slowly, separating skin from skin, until it stopped just at the base of his cock.

"Who else, Nicholson? Now would be a good time for you to get chatty."

"Nobody! Jesus, God, don't do this!"

He was crying now, moaning out of control. It was all so incredibly unfair. He'd spent his adult life trading in one kind of a lie or another, and now here he was, caught in the truth.

"I don't know what it is you want," he blubbered at them. "I don't know anything anymore…"

"Somewhere behind him, a third voice came out of the dark. It was different than the other two, with the kind of Dukes of Hazzard redneck twang Nicholson had looked down on ever since he came to America.

"Hey, fellas, let's move this along, all righty? I got some work of my own to attend to."

And that's when Nicholson gave up the last piece, his lifeline – at least he hoped so.

"I gave a disk to the cops. Zeus was on it. Detective Alex Cross has the disk!"

Chapter 93

IT TAKES WHAT it takes. That had always been a favorite expression of Nana's – one part stubbornness, one part optimism – and it kept running through my head these days. I wasn't giving up on this case, any more than I was giving up on her.

The entire intensive-care unit at St. Anthony's, Five West, was more than a little familiar by now. I knew all the nurses and some of the patients' family members. In fact, I was in the hall that night, chatting with a new acquaintance about her father's brain injury, when the alarm went off in Nana's room.

Alarms weren't always a reason to panic on Five West. They rang all the time, for slipped finger clips and some electronic glitch or another. The rule of thumb was that the higher and more obnoxious the sound got, the more you needed to be concerned.

This one started low, but by the time I got inside Nana's room, it was up to a hard wail. One of the nurses, Zadie Mitchell, was already in there.

"What is it?" I asked Zadie. "Anything?"

She was adjusting Nana's O2 clip and watching a wave pattern on the monitor, so she didn't answer right away.

Another nurse, Jayne Spahn, came in behind me. "Bad pleth?" she asked.

"No," Zadie said. "It's accurate. Page Donald Hesch." She hit the hundred-percent-oxygen button on the ventilator and started suctioning Nana right away.

My heart was pounding now. "Zadie, what's happening?"

"She's desaturating, Alex. Don't worry yet."

I wasn't so sure. Even with the ventilator, all the excess fluid in Nana's system made it a constant struggle for her heart to circulate enough oxygen. For all I knew, she was drowning in front of my eyes.

Dr. Hesch came in a couple minutes later, with Jayne and one of the staff respiratory therapists. They squeezed between the machines to work on Nana. All I could do was stand by, listen in, and try to keep up.

"She was bolused this morning for MAPs in the forties. I've been suctioning blood-tinged sputum since we paged you."

"Did she get a gas today?"

"No. She's a hard stick; her last gas was two days ago."

"Okay, go up to ten and try to get a reading in an hour. Let's see what dialysis does in the morning. I'll check her X-ray in the meantime."

Hesch rushed back out without another word, and Jayne took me by the elbow into the hall.

"She's having a rough night, Alex, but she's going to get through this okay."

I watched Nana through the door, where Zadie and the RT were still working on her. It was such a helpless feeling, not being able to give her what she needed, even something as basic as oxygen. Especially something like that.

"Alex, did you hear me?" Jayne was still talking, I realized. "There won't be any more to know until tomorrow morning. Someone can call and check in around seven -"

"No," I said. "I'm going to stay tonight."

She put a hand on my shoulder. "That's really not necessary," she said.

"I understand."

But it wasn't about necessary anymore. It was about what I could and couldn't control here. For the past ten minutes, I hadn't just been thinking about losing Nana. I'd been wondering, What if I wasn't here? What if she died and no one was with her when it happened?

I'd never forgive myself, I thought. So if it meant going back onto the night shift for a while, then that's what I was going to do.

Whatever it took – I was going to be there for Nana.

Chapter 94

SENATOR MARSHALL YARROW was pulling a bag of golf clubs out of the back of his Navigator when he saw me and Sampson coming across the parking lot of the Washington Golf and Country Club. He looked like I'd just ruined his perfectly good Saturday morning. Imagine that. What a damn shame.

"What in hell's name are you doing here?" he asked as we came up to his vehicle.

"Three appointments, three cancellations," I told him. "Call me crazy, Senator, but I'd say you're avoiding me. You were, anyway."

"And who's this?" He looked John over – more up than down, given Sampson's height.

"This is my partner, Detective Sampson. You can just pretend he's not here. He fits right in, doesn't he? We both do. Maybe as caddies."

Yarrow snorted at me and waved to someone waiting under the porte cochere in front of the club. "Mike, I'll see you inside. Order me an espresso, would you?"

I realized after the fact that the other man had been Michael Hart, a senator from North Carolina, and a Democrat to Yarrow's Republican.

"Would you rather talk in my car?" I asked him. "Or maybe in yours?"

"Do I look like I want to get in a car with you, Detective Cross?" I was surprised he remembered my name.

He stepped back out of sight then, between his own SUV and the other giant boat parked next to it, a brand-new Hummer H3T. With the likely hundred-thousand-dollar joining fee at this place, I guess no one was too worried about gas prices.

"I won't keep you long, Senator," I said, "but I thought you'd want to know, we're a little short on leads here. The only next step I can see is to start releasing the recordings from Tony Nicholson's club."

Yarrow's eyes flitted over to Sampson; I think he was wondering if both of us had seen him in action, or just me. His hands tightened over the head cover of the TaylorMade driver in his bag.

"So unless you've got some other meaningful direction we might go in -"

"Why would I?" he said, still cool.

"Just a gut feeling I had. Something about all those missed appointments."

He took a deep breath and ran a hand over the weekend stubble around his chin. "Well, obviously I've got to run all this by my attorney."

"That's probably a good idea," I said. "But just so you know, this is a working Saturday for us. We need to get one thing or another done today."

I almost felt bad for Yarrow, he looked so uncomfortable. There were no good options left, and he knew it. When I'm lucky, that brings people right to the truth.

"Just for the sake of argument," he said, "what could you offer me by way of immunity?"

"Nothing right now. That's up to the DA."

"Right, 'cause you people never wheel and deal, is that it?"

"Here's what I can offer you," I said. "You tell us what you know, and then when the Secret Service comes looking for you, and they will, it won't be about obstruction of justice and conspiracy to cover up a string of murders."

I could only imagine how much Yarrow was hating me right now. Without ever taking his eyes off mine, he said, "Tell me something, Detective Sampson. Would you say your partner here is a vindictive man?"

Sampson laid a big hand on the roof of Yarrow's car. "Vindictive? Nah, that's not Alex. I'd say more like realistic. Might be a good word for you to consider about now."

At first, I thought Senator Yarrow was going to walk, or maybe even go postal with one of those TaylorMade irons of his. Instead, he reached into his pocket, and the doors on the Lincoln chirped open.

"Just get in the car."

Chapter 95

YARROW'S CAR'S LEATHER interior reeked of coffee and cigarettes. I would have pegged him more as a cigar smoker.

"Let me get a few things out of the way," I said first. "You were a paying client of that club, yes or no?"

"Next question."

"You were aware that escorts connected to the club had died."

"No. That's not true," he said. "I'd just started to suspect something was wrong before all this fuss happened."

"And what did you plan to do with that information? Your suspicions."

Yarrow turned suddenly and pointed a finger in my face. "Don't interrogate me, Cross. I'm a goddamn US senator, not some worthless thug in Southeast DC."

"Exactly my point, Mr. Yarrow. You're a US senator and you're supposed to have a conscience. Now, do you have something for us or not?"

He took a beat, long enough to pull a pack of Marlboro Reds out of the console. I noticed that the flame on his gold Senate lighter shook when he used it.

After a couple long consecutive drags, Yarrow started to talk again, facing the windshield.

"There's a man you should check out. His name's… Remy Williams. If I had to guess, I'd say he's in this thing deep."

"Who is he?" I asked.

"That's a good question, actually. I believe that he used to be in the Secret Service."

Those last two words went off in my mind like a Roman candle. "Secret Service? What division?" I asked him.

"Protective Services."

"At the White House?"

Yarrow smoked almost continuously while the knuckles on his free hand went white gripping the wheel. "Yeah," he said with an exhale. "At the White House."

Sampson was staring over the headrest at me, and I'm sure we were wondering the same thing. Was this the White House connection we'd already heard about? Or the kind of coincidence that gums up investigations all the time? Senator Yarrow went on without any more prodding from me. "Last I heard, Remy was living in some godawful shack, way out in Louisa County, like one of those survivalists with the bottled water and the shotguns and all. Into the Wild kind of lifestyle."

"What's your association with him?" Sampson asked.

"He was the one who told me about the club in the first place."

"That doesn't really answer the question," I said. "Look, Senator, I'm not recording any of this. Not yet anyway."

Yarrow opened the window and twisted the last of his cigarette onto the pavement, then put the butt in his ashtray. I could sense him starting to circle the wagons again.

"He's my ex-wife's brother, okay? I haven't seen the bastard in over a year, and it doesn't matter. The whole point is, you take a drive out there, you might just have something more to do with your Saturday than harassing public servants."

Chapter 96

IT WAS JUST over two hours' drive to the western edge of Louisa County, which was also about an hour south of Nicholson's club. Those two locations triangulated easily with the spot on I-95 where Johnny Tucci from Philly had been pulled over carrying my niece's remains in the trunk. Maybe we were actually getting somewhere with all this.

Yarrow's vague sense of the cabin sent us down a handful of wrong turns before we eventually found the right gravel road off Route 33. Several miles back through the woods, it came to a makeshift dead end, with a row of rocks blocking the way. They'd obviously been moved there by hand, and it didn't take us long to clear them.

Beyond that were two dirt tracks retreating into the brush, and another half hour of slow going before we saw anything man-made. Remy Williams's nearest neighbor seemed to be Lake Anna State Park to the east.

The driveway, such as it was, came up on the back of a rudimentary single-story building surrounded closely by fir trees. It looked unfinished from here, with a galvanized standing-seam roof but just warped and silvered plywood over Tyvek on the walls.

"Very nice," Sampson muttered, or maybe growled. "Unabomber east, anyone?"

It was bigger than Ted Kaczynski's famous shack, which I'd been to once before, but the general feeling was about the same: madman in residence.

Around front, the two small windows under a covered porch looked dark. There was a dirt yard big enough for several cars, but no sign of any vehicle. The place seemed completely deserted, and part of me hoped it was.

It wasn't until I'd driven around nearly full circle that I saw the wood chipper at the side of the house.

"Sampson?"

"I see it."

It was an old industrial unit, with two tires and a rusted trailer hitch balanced on a cinder block. Most of the paint was long gone, just a few impressionistic flecks of John Deere green and yellow on the frame. Next to it, a blue tarp was folded on the ground, weighted down with a two-gallon gas can.

I kept the car running as we got out, and I pulled my Glock.

"Anyone home?" I called halfheartedly.

There was no answer. All I heard was the wind, a few birds chattering in the trees, and my idling car.

Sampson and I took the porch from opposite sides to check the windows first, then the door.

When I looked in, it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. Then I saw a man, sitting in a chair against the far wall. It was too dark for details; I couldn't even tell if he was alive or dead. Not for certain. Not yet.

"Fuck," Sampson muttered,

Exactly right. My thoughts exactly.

Chapter 97

THE SHACK'S FRONT door had no lock, just a hammered-iron latch, and as soon as I swung it open, the smell hit us.

It was that combination of sweet and putrid that's so distinct and so hard to take. Like fruit and meat rotting for days in the same barrel.

The place was mostly empty, with just a few pieces of furniture – a metal cot, a woodstove, a long farm table.

The only chair in the place was occupied, and Remy Williams had apparently died in it.

He looked graphic-novel-style slack jawed where part of his face had been blown off. A Remington shotgun was still half-clutched in his left hand, barrel pointed down at the soft pine floor.

The other hand hung loose at his side, and it looked like there was some kind of writing on his forearm. Writing? Was that it?

"What the hell?" Sampson covered his mouth and nose with his arm and bent down for a closer look. "Oh no, he didn't."

When I put my Maglite on it, I saw that the arm had been carved, not written on.

A six-inch hunting knife was on the ground at Williams's feet, streaked the same reddish brown as his skin. The letters were still easy enough to read:

SORRY

Chapter 98

A LOT HAPPENED really fast after we found Williams. Within a few hours, we had new versions of all the old players on the scene – Virginia State Police out of Richmond and the FBI team from Charlottesville. There was no one I knew here, which was maybe a good thing and maybe not. I'd find out which pretty soon.

The Bureau's Evidence Response Team included serious-looking folks from serology, trace analysis, firearms, photography, and fingerprinting. They set up a tent and spread long sheets of butcher paper over plywood-and-sawhorse tables.

The ground around the wood chipper was sectioned into eight-inch squares, and they started right in, meticulously sifting one square at a time, separating potential evidence from dirt and debris.

The chipper itself would be disassembled in a lab in Rich mond, but blood-enhancement agents had already shown trace amounts of serum. A visual inspection also turned up some likely bone fragments in the mechanism's blades.

Everything was duly photographed, documented, and either set out to dry or put into manila envelopes for transport.

The faster job turned out to be a search of the woods. A lieutenant colonel with the state police called in two K-9 units, and within the first hours, they'd sniffed out a freshly turned patch of earth half a mile east of the cabin.

Some careful digging brought up two plastic bags of "remains" from about five feet down. Everyone on the site was carrying around a hangdog face. No one is ever ready for this kind of murder scene.

The new remains looked exactly like Caroline's had, and the consensus was that they hadn't been in the ground for more than three days. Right away, I thought of Tony Nicholson and Mara Kelly, who were still officially MIA.

"It adds up, on paper anyway," I said to Sampson. "Get them out of jail, and you can make them disappear once and for all. We were supposed to think they fled the country."

"Hell of a way to cover your tracks," Sampson said. "But I have to admit, effective."

We were sitting on the edge of the porch around one a.m., watching an agent tag what was left of the newly deceased as evidence, before they went into body bags. John couldn't take his eyes off it, but I'd seen enough. It depressed me to know that my own niece's case was becoming the single grisliest piece of work I'd ever investigated.

But that fact kept me moving too. For the fourth time in as many hours, I dialed Dan Cormorant's phone number.

This time the Secret Service agent actually picked up.

"Where the hell are you guys?" I asked him. "Are you even tracking this?"

"You're obviously not watching TV right now," he said. "It looks like they've got everyone but ESPN out there in those woods."

"Cormorant, listen to me. Remy Williams wasn't Zeus, any more than Tony Nicholson or Johnny Tucci was. Williams may be a stone-cold killer, but he's not the one we're looking for."

"I agree with you," Cormorant said, "and you know why? 'Cause we've got Zeus pinned down. Right now. You want to be part of the sideshow, you stay where you are. But if you want to be here when we finish this thing once and for all, I'd suggest you get your ass back to the city. Pronto, Detective Cross. This case is about to close. You should be there."

Chapter 99

SAD TO SAY, I was operating on nothing but adrenaline and caffeine by the time we got to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across from the West Wing. It was nearly four a.m. at this point, but the Joint Operations Center was buzzing like midday.

The mood in the briefing room was tense to say the least. They had CNN on one of a dozen flat screens arrayed on the wall, with an overhead shot of Remy Williams's cabin and the subhead Secret Service Agent Found Dead.

At the front of the room, a fiftyish agent in shirtsleeves was shouting on the phone, loudly enough to be heard over everyone else.

"I don't give a shit who you need to speak to; he's not a member of the Secret Service. Now change the damn graphic!"

I had already spotted several people I knew, including Emma Cornish, who was MPD's liaison to the Service's High Intensity Violent Crimes Task Force; and Barry Farmer, one of two Secret Service agents assigned to Metro's Homicide Unit. It was as if the two departments had suddenly been knitted together, right there in the middle of the night.

For show, maybe?

I wasn't ready to say yet.

We all gathered around a long oval table for the first briefing. The man with the big voice in front turned out to be Silo Ridge, deputy special agent in charge. He was the whip on this one, and he stood up with Agent Cormorant.

"I'm sending around a fact sheet," Ridge said, handing half a stack in each direction. "The subject's name is Constantine Bowie, aka Connie Bowie, aka Zeus. Most of you know this already, but Bowie was an agent with the Service from 1988 to 2002."

Nobody flinched but me – and maybe Sampson. It was like a whole new map of this thing had just been unfolded in front of us.

I put up my hand. "Alex Cross, MPD. I'm just catching up here, but what's the known relationship, if any, with Remy Williams? Other than the fact that they're both supposed to be former agents."

"Detective Cross, glad to have you here," Ridge said, and a few more heads turned my way. "The focus of this operation is former agent Bowie. Everything else is on a need-to-know basis for the time being."

"I'm only asking because -"

"We appreciate MPD's participation, as always. This is all obviously a little sensitive, but we're not going to start unpacking it here. Moving on."

I gave Ridge the benefit of the doubt, for the moment at least. It wasn't a bridge I had to cross yet. Or burn.

An image of Bowie 's 2002 credentials came up on one of the screens. He looked like a million other agents to me – Waspy, square jaw, brown hair combed back. Everything but the dark shades.

" Bowie 's been implicated in the murder of at least three women," Ridge went on, "all of them known employees of the so-called gentlemen's club in Culpeper County. Those women are Caroline Cross, Katherine Tennancour, Renata Cruz…" Surveillance photos that I'd seen before went by in a slide show. "And this is Sally Anne Perry."

A video started up, and right away I recognized the recording I'd handed over to Cormorant just the other day. Like Ridge had said, the Secret Service appreciated MPD's participation.

"There's nothing pleasant about having to watch this," Ridge said, "but you should know who we're going after. The man about to come into the bedroom is Constantine Bowie. And he is about to commit murder."

Chapter 100

EVERYONE HELD THEIR professional cool as the video played out, and Agent Ridge kept talking as it did.

"A little history here. Bowie was recruited from Philadelphia PD into the Service in 1988. For thirteen years, there's not much to tell, but shortly after 9/11, his perform-ance started to slip.

"Then in February of 2002, after an improper firearm discharge, which I'm not going to detail this morning, Bowie was removed from the Service without benefits."

Cormorant took it from there and brought up a slide of a generic-looking office building.

"In 2005, he opened Galveston Security here in DC -"

" Galveston?" someone asked.

"His hometown," Cormorant said. "Today, he's got satellite offices in Philadelphia and Dallas, with a personal net worth of seven million, give or take. The Philly ties don't prove anything, but it's worth noting that at least some contract work with the Martino crime family out of Philadelphia has been part of this whole picture as well."

Cormorant's eyes traveled over to me before he went on. "One other thing we can tell you is that phone records show two calls from Bowie 's cell phone to the one found in Remy Williams's cabin today. One of those calls was made two months ago, and the other was four days ago."

"Where's Bowie now?" one of the agents asked.

"Surveillance puts him at home, as of twenty-three hundred hours last night. We have half a dozen agents watching his house."

"How soon can we move on this?" someone else asked. You could feel the impatience in the room. No one wanted to tackle the operation, I think, so much as they wanted to get it over with.

Agent Ridge looked at his watch. "We go as soon as you're ready," he said, and everyone started to stand up.

Chapter 101

IT WAS EERILY quiet when we pulled up to a row of flat-topped brick town houses on Winfield Lane in Northwest. One pair of tennis players was at it on the Georgetown courts across the road, and the playing fields were still wet. If Nana were home, I thought, she'd just be getting up and ready for church.

We had four SWAT officers posted in back, with MPD cruisers at either end of the block and EMS on standby. The rest of us emerged onto the street several doors away from Bowie 's place, where a single white van was just coming to a stop.

Once Ridge gave the go, an entry team of five men in ballistic gear exited the van and snaked up the front steps of Bowie 's town house in a line. It was a silent operation; they pried the door and then disappeared inside.

After that, it was ten long minutes of waiting while they leapfrogged through the house, clearing one space after another. Ridge kept his head down and a hand over his earpiece as the SWAT commander whispered their progress to him. He held up two fingers to indicate they'd reached the second floor, and a few minutes later, three fingers.

Then he straightened up suddenly. I could hear shouting coming from the house.

"They've got him!" Ridge said – but then, "Wait."

There was some fast back-and-forth now, with Ridge blurting communications. "Yes? I hear you. Do not stand down." Eventually he said, "Okay, give me one second," and turned to address the rest of us.

"We've got a standoff situation inside," he said. " Bowie 's armed and belligerent. Says he won't talk to Secret Service."

I didn't have to think about this. "Let me talk to him," I said.

Ridge held up a finger and went back to the mic in his cuff. "Peters, I'm going to send in a throw phone -"

"No," I said. "Face-to-face. All he's looking at in there is five armed officers. We're not window dressing, Ridge. You brought us here for a reason, and now we know what it is."

There was another long stretch of back-and-forth after that, relayed between Ridge, SWAT, and Constantine Bowie inside. Eventually, an agreement was reached. Bowie would let them check the rest of the house to make sure no one else was there, and then I'd go in. All of a sudden, some one was handing me a vest and Ridge was giving me the rundown.

"Keep SWAT between you and Bowie at all times. If you can get him to stand down, do it, and if not, leave. Don't drag it out." He checked his watch again. "Fifteen minutes. That's it. Then I'm going to pull you out myself."

Chapter 102

THE PROFILER IN me was working overtime as I entered the alcove of Bowie 's town house by myself. The place was airy and well-appointed inside. A large amount of cash had gone into Early American antiques and art. It was also extremely neat; not a loose magazine, newspaper, or stray knickknack in sight. I saw a lot of control at work in this house. Was this where Zeus lived? Had he murdered here as well?

The master bedroom was at the top of the stairs on the third floor.

Two SWAT officers in the hall nodded at me as I came up, but they didn't say anything. I could also see two of the three who were inside the bedroom, covering Bowie from different angles with their MP5s. I called out to Bowie.

" Bowie, my name's Alex Cross. I'm with MPD and I'm coming in, okay?"

There was a pause, and then a strained voice. "Come in. Let me see a shield."

He was sitting flat on the floor, wearing just boxers, sweating profusely. The king-size bed had obviously been slept in, and the nightstand drawer was hanging open.

He'd cornered himself under a window, between the bed and one of the two closets. His arms were locked out in front of him, with a.357 SIG Sauer pointed at the nearest officer.

The other thing I noticed was the signet ring on his right hand – gold with a red stone, just like the one in the video we'd all seen by now. Man, he was making this too easy. Why? Was he Zeus?

I kept my own hands in front of me with my badge showing, and only came as far as the doorway. Everyone else stayed still as statues.

"Nice house," I said right off. "How long have you lived here?"

"What?" Bowie 's eyes took me in for half a second, then went back to his target.

"I was wondering how long you've lived here. That's all. Breaking the ice."

He scoffed. "Checking my mental acuity?"

"That's right."

"I've been here two years. The president of the United States is Margaret Vance. Seven times eight is fifty-six, okay?"

"So I guess you understand the gravity of what you're doing," I told him.

"That's where you're wrong," he said. "I have no fucking clue what's going on here."

"Well then, I'll tell you. I'll try to anyway. Technically, you're under arrest for the murder of Sally Anne Perry."

His eyes flashed anger without actually moving. "Fuck that! They've been gunning for me ever since I got pushed out."

"Who has?"

"The Service. The Feds. Goddamn President Vance for all I know."

I stopped and took a breath, hoping he'd do the same. "You're giving me mixed signals here, Bowie," I said. "One second you seem lucid and the next -"

"Yeah, well, just cause I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me, right?"

Oddly enough, I couldn't argue with that, so I moved on.

"Why don't you tell me what you need to hear before you lower that weapon?"

He chinned at the officer closest to him. "They put theirs down first."

"Come on, Constantine. That's not going to happen, and you know it isn't. Work with me here. If you really are innocent, then I'm on your side. Where did you get that ring?"

"Stop with the questions. Just stop."

"Okay."

His arms were all muscle, but after at least twenty minutes outstretched, they were starting to shake. And in fact, he moved to adjust himself, up onto one knee with the shooting arm resting on top.

" Bowie, I -"

A tinkle of glass sounded. That was all it was. One of the small windowpanes behind him split into shards, and Bowie fell facedown onto the carpet, a small dark hole in the back of his head.

I couldn't believe it. Didn't want to believe it. Immediately SWAT flew into action. Someone pulled me backward into the hall while the rest closed in around Bowie.

"One round fired – subject is down! We need medical up here right away!"

A few seconds later, I'd pushed my way back into the room. My body was shaking with rage. Why had they fired on him? Why now? I had him talking. Bowie was splayed on the ground, arms out at his sides. Through the broken window, I could see another officer on the opposite roof, standing down with his rifle.

"Scratch that, medical," the commander was saying. "We'll meet you downstairs and bring you up."

And then two of them were walking me out the door and down the stairs, in no uncertain terms. My usefulness had obviously played itself out here.

When we got to the front stoop, the EMTs were waiting. It was protocol to call them in, but at this point, that's all it was. I'd already seen enough to know that Constantine Bowie was as dead as he was going to get.

And that I'd just been bait in the whole damn thing. They had meant to kill him all along.

Whoever they were.

Chapter 103

IT ALL SEEMED too neat, too easy, but that didn't mean Constantine Bowie wasn't the killer, did it? The next few days were all about paperwork, lots and lots of it. I don't think most people have any idea how much ink it takes to put a murder case in the drawer, especially one of this magnitude.

Not even when the FBI and the Secret Service are both arguing that justice has been done.

There were endless meetings to come, and after that, public hearings. A full congressional investigation had already been promised, amid all kinds of unchecked speculation on the Hill and in the media. The country was buzzing: about Tony Nicholson's client list, about the involvement of Secret Service, and even about who else might still be out there as part of Bowie 's murder spree.

Once the paperwork was behind me, I put in for the rest of the week off. I left the office late on Wednesday and went straight to the hospital. Nana was looking a lot more peaceful these days, like an angel, which was kind of nice and also hard to take. I stayed awake most of that night, just watching her.

Then Aunt Tia spelled me early on Thursday, and I managed to catch Bree still in bed when I finally, finally got home. She was just starting to stir as I spooned up next to her.

"Do whatever you want," she whispered softly. "Just don't wake me up."

But then she laughed and turned over to kiss me good morning. Her feet and legs stayed tangled up with mine under the covers.

"All right, then, just do whatever you want to me," she said.

"This is nice. Remember this?" I said.

She nodded with her forehead against mine, and I was thinking maybe I never had to be anywhere else but here. Ever again.

Then the bedroom door opened. Of course it did. "Daddy, you home?" Ali poked his head around the corner and jumped up onto the bed before we could tell him to go away.

"Little man, how many times have I told you to knock first?" I asked him.

"About a million," he said, and he laughed and wormed in between us anyway.

Not to be outdone, Jannie was there soon enough, and the two of them started chattering at us like maybe it wasn't six thirty in the morning. Even so, it was kind of nice to be all together again.

By seven, I was frying up a batch of bacon, egg, and tomato sandwiches while Bree made coffee and poured the orange juice. Jannie and Ali were scanning the morning paper for my name, and I even had a little Gershwin playing in the living room. Not the bedroom with Bree, but not too shabby either.

Just as I was flipping my breakfast creations out of the pan, a phone chirped from upstairs, loud enough to be heard over the music.

Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at me, standing there with my greasy spatula in hand.

"What?" I said, all wide-eyed and innocent. "I don't hear anything."

That got me a chorus of cheers all around the table, and even a little pat on the butt from Bree.

Whoever it was, they had the good sense not to call again.

Chapter 104

A FEW HOURS later, Bree and I were back from walking the kids to school and running a few necessary errands to the drug-and food stores. "Upstairs," I told her before the front door had even closed behind us. "We've got some unfinished business, you and I."

She took the grocery bag out of my hands with a kiss. "I'll be right there. Don't start without me."

I was halfway up the stairs, when she called me back from the kitchen.

"Alex!" Her voice was tense. What was it now? "Company."

When I came down, she was standing at the pass-through to the sunporch, looking out.

"Guess who's here?" she said.

I stepped up next to her and saw Ned Mahoney sitting in our backyard, drumming his fingers on the picnic table.

"God damn it," I said.

He stayed where he was as I came out onto the porch and then down into the yard to see what was happening.

"Was that you who called earlier?" I asked. Ned nodded, and before he even said a word, I realized the case wasn't over. "You want to come in?"

"Let's talk out here," he said.

I grabbed a jacket and two cups of coffee from inside, and then came back out to the picnic table.

Ned gulped the coffee as I sat down. He looked exhausted. All his usual effusiveness seemed to be gone – or at least depleted.

"You okay?" I asked him.

"Just a little tired," he said. "I haven't let go of this thing, Alex. I've used up all my personal days, all my vacation. Kathy's ready to kill me."

I nodded. "So is Bree. And she has a gun."

"Still, it's paid off. Boy, has it ever. I've got somebody I want you to meet. His name is Aubrey Lee Johnson. He lives down in Alabama, but he's got a custom fly reel business that brings him up to Virginia a lot."

Ned downed the last of his coffee, and I slid mine over to his side of the table. Some of the usual rev was coming back into him already. "This guy's got a story he thinks might be important. And guess what, Alex? It is."

Chapter 105

THERE WAS NO way Mahoney could get travel status for this. Even if it were his case, which it wasn't, the Bureau watches out for our tax dollars by requiring agents to use the local field offices for out-of-state interviews. Ned had already traded a few electronic communications with the Mobile office, but in the end, we decided to fly to Alabama on our own nickel.

We arrived at Mobile Regional Airport late the next morning and rented a car from there.

Aubrey Johnson lived on Dauphin Island, about an hour south. It was a sleepy little village, at least this time of year, and we had no trouble finding his store – Big Daddy's Fishing Tackle, on Cadillac Avenue.

"This is why we're here? Big Daddy's Fishing Tackle?" I said to Ned.

"Odd as it may seem, this is it, the end of the road. The conspiracy gets tripped up here. If we're lucky, that is."

"So let's start getting lucky."

Johnson was a tall, gregarious guy in his midfifties, and he ushered us in like a couple of old friends, just before he double-locked up behind us.

Ned had already questioned him on the phone, but Johnson repeated his story for me – how he'd been driving late one night on Route 33 in virginia about a month ago, when a beautiful girl in a negligee stumbled out of the woods in front of his truck.

"Truth be told, I thought it was my lucky night," he said, "until I saw what kind of terrible shape she was in. Any bigger caliber on that slug in her back and she would have been dead."

Even so, the girl had insisted that Johnson keep driving, at least until they were across the state line. He finally got her to an ER just outside Winston-Salem.

"Still, Annie wasn't hanging around for any cops to show up," he went on. "She told me she was either leaving there on foot or in my truck, so I drove her. Probably shouldn't have, but what's done is done. My wife and I have been looking after her ever since."

"Her name is Annie?" I asked.

"I'll get to that part," Johnson said.

"Why did she come forward when she did?" I asked them. All I knew was that the contact between Mr. Johnson and Mahoney had started before the names Constantine Bowie and Zeus had ever made it into the headlines.

"That's a little complicated," he said. "She still hasn't told us everything. We don't even know her real name; we just call her Annie to keep things simple. When I tried putting out some feelers, there wasn't much I could say, so I don't think people took me too seriously. At least, not until Agent Mahoney here called me back. He was following up on a call I'd made to the FBI field office in Mobile."

"And where is she now, Aubrey?" Ned asked.

"Not far." Johnson took a set of keys off the counter. "I'll let her speak for herself, but I will tell you this much. That fellow they're calling Zeus on the news? She says you all got the wrong man. She isn't Annie, and he isn't Zeus."

Chapter 106

JOHNSON LED US back through the village in his truck, almost to the mainland bridge.

Then he turned off and parked at the Dauphin Island Marina. Fewer than half of the slips were occupied, and the office and snack shack on the waterfront both looked closed and shuttered for the season.

We followed him up one of the three long docks to a sport fishing boat called the May. A heavyset woman, presumably Mrs. Johnson, was waiting on the deck. She looked at us a lot more skeptically than her husband had.

"This them?" she said.

"You know it is, May. Let's go."

She didn't move. "This girl's been through a living hell, do you understand me? You need to go easy with her."

I had no quarrel with the attitude; actually, I was grateful for it. We assured Mrs. Johnson that we'd be good with the girl, and then followed her down to the little cabin below deck.

"Annie" was sitting in the crook of the dining banquette, looking drawn and nervous. Even so, she was an obviously beautiful girl, with the kind of china doll features that Tony Nicholson seemed to have favored for Blacksmith Farms. Her cargo pants and baggy pink sweatshirt were either borrowed or thrift shop specials, and she had a gray canvas sling on her right arm. She was huddled over, and when she moved, I could see that her back, where she'd been shot, still hurt quite a bit.

Mahoney started with introductions and asked if she was willing to give us her name.

"It's Hannah," she said, tentatively at first. "Hannah Willis. Is that something you can help me with? Becoming somebody else? Witness protection, or whatever it is you use these days."

Ned explained that the US Attorney's office would decide if she even needed to testify, but if so, then yes, she was a perfect candidate for WitSec. In the meantime, he assured her, we wouldn't record anything that she had to tell us.

"Let's start with what happened to you," I said. "The night Aubrey picked you up in his truck."

She nodded slowly, mustering the memory, or maybe just the will to tell it. May Johnson sat next to her, holding her hand the whole time.

"It was supposed to be some kind of private party at Blacksmith," Hannah said. "We didn't know anything except the client code name. Zeus. You think maybe he has a high opinion of himself? Code name is a god?"

"Was this party held in the apartment over the carriage barn?" I asked.

"That's right." She seemed surprised that I already knew. "I'd never been up there before. I knew the pay was better."

"When you say 'we,' " Ned asked, "how many of you were there with Zeus?"

"Just me and one other girl, Nicole," she said. "Although I doubt that was her real name."

It also wasn't the first time I'd heard it used in a conversation like this. I could feel my heart thumping as I reached into my pocket and took out the picture of Caroline that I'd been carrying with me from the start of this terrible, unholy mess.

"Is this her, Hannah?" I asked.

She nodded, and the tears started to come.

"Yes, sir. That's the girl who died. That's Nicole."

Chapter 107

I LISTENED CAREFULLY, filtering my rage away from the information Hannah was giving us about Caroline's murder and her own terrible ordeal at Blacksmith Farms.

She described how Zeus had handcuffed them to the bed, then used his fists and his teeth, focusing more on Caroline than on her, for reasons she couldn't explain, even now. By the time he had raped both women, she said, "Nicole was barely conscious, and the mattress cover on the bed was slick with blood."

He left soon after that, and Hannah had begun to hope the worst of it might be over, until two men came in to take them away. One was tall and blond, the other Hispanic and stocky. That's when she understood what was coming next – on account of what had happened with Zeus, on account of what she and Caroline knew about him.

"They worked quickly, like they'd done it before. Cleaned up his mess," Hannah said. "I can still see the two of them. The bored look on their faces."

Both girls were then carried down and put in the trunk of a car. Hannah told us how she held Caroline's hand there in the dark and tried to keep her talking for as long as possible. Eventually, though, Caroline stopped answering. By the time they got where they were going and the trunk opened again, she was dead.

They were in the woods, at a cabin of some kind. A third man was there, and he seemed to take over for the other two. The only light on them was his lantern, and he held it up to Hannah's face, examining her as though she were a piece of meat. Then he set it on the ground to have a closer look at Caroline, to make sure she was dead.

That's when Hannah decided she had nothing left to lose, since they would surely kill her too. She kicked the lantern over and ran for the woods.

The three men came after her, of course, and there were gunshots, including the one that lodged in her back. Somehow, she managed to keep going. It was nothing she could explain at this point, or even remember very clearly, right up until she came out on the road and saw the oncoming headlights of Aubrey Johnson's pickup truck.

Everything about the story lined up with what I already knew – the indications of bite marks on Caroline's remains, the cabin in the woods, the description of the two men with the car. There was only one question still hanging.

The question.

"Who was he, Hannah? Who was Zeus? How did you know who he was?"

"We knew because he showed us his face. He lifted his terrible mask and said it didn't matter if Caroline and I saw him."

"Hannah," I said next. "Who is he? Who is Zeus?"

And even then, with everything else I knew about this case, her answer still floored me.

Chapter 108

THE KENNEDY CENTER 'S Grand Foyer was lit up like a Macy's Christmas window for the spectacle that was the annual Honors reception. Medals had been awarded to five of the entertainment industry's best and brightest tonight, and half of LA seemed to be here, rubbing elbows with half of DC. In Washington terms, there was no other night quite like this one. No night was more star filled.

For Teddy, it was definitely a night to celebrate. Ask any of these glitterati about the week's headlines, and nine out of ten would have told the same story. Zeus was dead. A very bad man had done terrible things, and he'd paid the ultimate price for his indiscretions. It was the stuff of classics.

And like any good fairy tale, it was a lie only loosely based on truth. In fact, Zeus was right here among them, enjoying the lobster cocktail and champagne just like anyone else. Well, not exactly like anyone else. Teddy's was a world where even the power elite kissed his butt on a regular basis, and people paid good money just to be in the same room with him. If that wasn't a privilege worth preserving, he didn't know what was.

Still, there was the matter of "the urges." To screw beautiful girls. To see them in pain. To kill. Whether or not he could keep "the urges" in check now was yet to be seen, but the timing, and the opportunity to leave it all behind, could not have been better. He was in the clear now. He'd been given a second chance.

So Teddy pushed all those hot thoughts way to the back of his mind, where they belonged for now, and resumed working the room as only he could. This was pure Teddy, Teddy at his best, Teddy in his element.

He chatted briefly with Meryl Streep and John McLaughlin at the bar. Complimented the House Speaker on his recent Meet the Press slam dunk interview. Congratulated Patti LuPone, one of the night's honorees, for all of her stunning achievements – whatever they might have been. And he kept moving, kept moving, kept moving, never staying too long in the same place, never wearing out a welcome, never revealing a thing about himself. That was the beauty and allure of the cocktail hour.

Eventually, he came upon Maggie in the Hall of Nations, schmoozing the new Democratic governor from Georgia and his greyhound-faced wife, whose name Teddy could never remember.

"Speak of the devil." Maggie hooked her arm into his. "Hello, darling. We were just talking about you. Douglas, Charlotte, and I."

"Hello Doug, Charlotte. All good things, I hope," he said, and the others laughed as though it were expected of them, which it was.

"Your wife was just telling us you're quite the equestrian," the governor said.

"Ah," Teddy answered. "My little-known secret. I have so few these days. I don't like those to get out."

"We'll have to have you down to the farm sometime. We've got some beautiful trails around our summer place."

"That sounds absolutely terrific – the farm," he said, telling the kind of lie that never hurt anyone. "And the president and I will have to have you overnight at the White House one of these days." He looked over at Maggie, smiling placidly. "Isn't that right, sweetheart?"

Chapter 109

DRIVING IN FROM the airport that night, Ned Mahoney and I were part of an emergency conference call that had been pulled together while we were still in the air. Theodore "Teddy" Vance was known to be with his wife, the president of the United States, at the Kennedy Center Honors. We had him. The question on the table was how to proceed.

Most of the resistance was from Secret Service, who ironically had the least say in this decision, except maybe for me. Their deputy director of investigations, Angela Riordan, was doing most of the talking.

"We're certainly not going to put up with any of this habeas grabbus crap, understand? This is the First Gentleman of the United States we're talking about. If the Bureau even thinks about crossing our security line, he'll be gone before anyone gets inside the building. Do I need to repeat myself?"

"We have no issue with that, Angela." This was Luke Hamel, the Bureau's assistant director in charge on the case before it got moved to Charlottesville. We also had the FBI director himself, Ron Burns, listening in with a few of their people from legal. "No one's talking arrest yet," Hamel went on. "We just want to speak with him. He's a person of interest at this point."

"Then there's no reason it can't wait until tomorrow." I recognized the slight accent of Vance's personal attorney, Raj Doshi, who was driving in from Maryland as we spoke.

"Actually, there's a very good reason," I said. "People have already died under this cover-up. Not doing anything tonight means risking more lives, and the fact that we're having this conversation only increases that risk."

"Excuse me – Detective Cross, was it?" Riordan asked. "We're not going to make tactical decisions here based on your gut feelings or your paranoia."

"With all due respect, you have no idea if I'm being paranoid or not," I said. I didn't want to put too fine a point on it, but Ned Mahoney and I were holding more cards here than anyone else on the call.

Ultimately, I think Riordan recognized her lack of options, and she agreed to pull Vance in for questioning.

When Doshi insisted the interview take place off site, the FBI had no objection to the demand. They quickly settled on the Eisenhower Building.

"This is Cross again," I said into the speaker. "Can I assume Dan Cormorant is already on duty at the Kennedy Center?"

"Why do you want to know?" It was Agent Silo Ridge this time; I hadn't even realized he was on the line.

"Cormorant's been my Secret Service contact on Zeus," I said. "I'd be surprised if he didn't have information we could use."

The full truth was that I had some questions of my own for Cormorant, and I wanted to see him face-to-face before I said anything I might regret later.

They never answered me, but it didn't matter. I'd find out soon enough. I could see the Kennedy Center looming straight ahead.

Chapter 110

THERE HAD PROBABLY never been a takedown like this one, not in the annals of police history, definitely not in my police history.

We convened on the Kennedy Center 's River Terrace just outside the Grand Foyer, where the party was in full swing. I'd already seen a handful of movie stars floating by the sixty-foot-high windows, but as yet there was no sign of Teddy Vance. No sign of Zeus?

Luke Hamel from the Bureau had brought another senior agent with him, James Walsh, whom I didn't recognize and didn't think I'd met before. My old boss Ron Burns was keeping his distance on this one, but he'd also made sure there was a place here for me and Mahoney. I'd return the favor someday if I could.

From Secret Service, we had Riordan and Ridge in addition to the operational team already on site. That meant agents in tuxes paired up on all the doors, a heavy MPD presence down at street level, and a chopper and EMTs on standby, all standard for any presidential event.

Other than the White House, there wasn't a more secure building in Washington tonight. I could feel the tension spreading everywhere in my body.

Once we were in place, Riordan put the center on a temporary "crash condition" – no one in or out until the First Gentleman was away. Next, traffic was routed away from the building. A lot of drivers were about to be seriously inconvenienced, but that was the least of our problems right now.

The First Gentleman was in all probability a murderer.

Less than a minute passed before Dan Cormorant stepped outside in his tux. He reported straight to Angela Riordan and ignored everyone else.

"Ma'am. We're good to go inside."

"All right. I want a nice, quiet exit on this, understood, Dan? Montana will come out this way, and we'll proceed to the EEOB."

"Yes, ma'am."

He caught me staring at him as he turned to go. I didn't know how much Cormorant had already been told, but my presence spoke for itself. He'd have to know what this was about. Still, I couldn't get a read on him, and he was already headed back in, radioing orders into his cuff.

"This is Cormorant. I need Montana detail ready to move, on my lead. Command, we're going to need full transport from the North Plaza. Immediately."

On instinct, I leaned over and spoke quietly to Agent Ridge.

"You should go in with him," I said.

He didn't look at me. "Thanks for the tip, Detective."

"I'm serious," I told him, but he put a hand out to keep me back, more like a straight-arm.

"Cross, someday you're going to be king of the world, but in the meantime, just keep your damn shirt on."

I was finding that hard to do. I didn't like this scenario one bit – not if Theodore Vance really was our killer.

Chapter 111

SOMETHING WAS WRONG. Teddy could feel the tension coming off Cormorant before the Secret Service agent even spoke into his ear. "Excuse me, sir. Would you come with me, please? It's kind of important."

Maggie saw it too, and knew exactly how to respond. She smiled her best Big Party smile. "Don't keep him long now, Dan, okay?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Governor, hold that thought," Teddy told his and Maggie's guest. "I'll be right back."

Then, not knowing quite why, he leaned in and kissed his wife on the cheek. "I love you, darling," he whispered, and she winked back.

Sweet Maggie. The world would probably never know how good this woman could be. Not that he really loved her, exactly, or could even tell himself what that was supposed to feel like. But it worked. They worked. However much about him she would never know, it couldn't erase what was true between them. Sum of the parts and all that. Complicated, like all relationships.

He double-stepped to come alongside the agent as they moved across the foyer.

"What's going on, Dan?"

"Sir, I need you to stay calm," Cormorant said. "The FBI have a few questions for you. They're waiting outside to follow us to the EEOB."

Teddy stopped short. "Hang on a second. Are you trying – " He cocked his head to one side and smiled at a couple of passing gawkers. Then he turned his back to the room. "Are you trying to give me a fucking heart attack here?"

"Sir, I know what I'm doing. I really do. I need you to trust me."

"Trust you? You're walking me right into them!"

Cormorant shoved his radio hand into his pocket, and his voice dropped to a fierce whisper. "Haven't I proven anything to you by now? For God's sake, Teddy, get it together. They just want to ask you some questions."

"Why don't I believe that, Dan? This is bad. This is very bad, isn't it?"

"Listen to me." The agent's eyes traveled to the farthest exit and back again. "The only viable way out of this is straight through those doors. We either keep moving or they're coming in after you. There's nowhere to run, Teddy. If they come in here, it will be an embarrassment for the president."

He could see them now, a collection of dark suits out on the River Terrace – including that MPD detective who had been dogging him. Alex Cross. The one who should have been dead and disposed of a long time ago.

"Sir, we have to go."

"Don't rush me, goddamnit! Are you forgetting? I'm Teddy Vance."

Teddy straightened his tie and took a fluted glass off a passing waiter's tray. It was a struggle not to down it all at once. Just a swallow for now, and another casual smile for the room, while the blood pounded in his ears.

"All right," he said. "Let's do this. I can certainly answer a few of their questions."

Chapter 112

DAN CORMORANT WAS smooth and efficient, I'll give him that much. He disappeared into the Grand Foyer and reappeared about forty-five seconds later with Theodore Vance at his side. Everything seemed to be right on track so far.

Then Vance stopped before they actually reached the door. He turned to say something to the Secret Service agent. Cormorant pocketed his mic. This wasn't good, not good at all.

Next to me, Angela Riordan cupped a palm over her earpiece, trying to hear. "Dan, what are you doing?"

He didn't respond.

"Cormorant, keep it moving. Dan! Get Montana out of there now," said Riordan.

She motioned to Agent Ridge that he should go in, but then pulled him back when Vance turned on his own and started to come our way. He was looking right at us now.

Was he Zeus? According to Hannah Willis he was. And I believed her.

Cormorant followed a step behind, with three other members of the spousal detail just ahead and on either side of the First Gentleman. An agent at the door pushed it open and stepped out first, then held it for Vance to come through.

The next happened in a blink. One of those instants that comes and goes but is photographed in the mind, then never, ever forgotten.

Cormorant was mostly obscured behind Vance, and I just saw the back of his jacket flip up.

My Glock came out an instant later, but already it was too late.

The.357 rose in Cormorant's hand, and he fired into the back of Theodore Vance's head. Vance flew forward and landed hard on the cement outside.

Chaos followed. Incomprehension. Terror. Disbelief. Almost immediately, Cormorant took some number of simultaneous shots from the agents around him. Within seconds, he was down too and the place had erupted into sheer madness.

Hundreds of people were screaming and trying to run for the exits. Right away, the foyer drapes started to close, cutting off the scene of the shootings.

As they did, I spotted a tight cluster of Secret Service agents, running with what I assumed was the president toward whatever nearest hard room they had set up. I wondered if she knew her husband had been shot.

Riordan was shouting into her radio, trying to be heard over the other noise. "Shots fired! Montana is down; I repeat, Montana is down! We need an advanced life support team to the River Terrace. North side. Now!"

Teddy Vance's detail had formed two circles around him, one close on the ground and the other facing out, weapons drawn. Mahoney and I spread out as part of a wider perimeter.

Already, the press corps was pushing in at the edges, frantic to get their stories, to get anything. Cops were everywhere, sirens were blaring in the street, and there was deafening shouting coming from all sides, all at once.

It was too early for official theories, but I thought I knew what we'd just witnessed. Cormorant was a veteran agent, a patriot, at least in his own mind. He'd waited for Teddy Vance to clear the building, then fired one lethal bullet, knowing he'd take kill shots in return. It was a suicide as much as an assassination – the last act in a bloody cover-up and, in Agent Cormorant's own way, the last piece of damage control he could offer his president.

Chapter 113

SHAKEN AND EXHAUSTED, I got home around four thirty that morning, maybe the last of my vampire hours for a while. If Bree wasn't already up, I was going to wake her and tell her what had happened -

But she wasn't even there. Bree wasn't anywhere in the house.

I realized this as soon as I saw Aunt Tia's big knitting bag on the floor by the kitchen table. Tia had come to stay with the kids, and Saint Bree had gone to cover my overnight at the hospital. Of course she had. She wouldn't have wanted Nana to be alone any more than I did.

I almost got back in the car, but it made more sense to spell Bree first thing in the morning and let Tia go home then. We were stretched thin as it was.

So I went upstairs and lay on top of the covers, wide awake and buzzing with everything that had happened, not just tonight but in the past few weeks. The scope of it all was going to reverberate for months, even years, I was sure. We still didn't know how many others like Caroline there had been, and maybe never would. Nor did we know the extent of the cover-up for Zeus, or who had been doing the covering. Theodore Vance had been a successful and very rich businessman on his own. He'd had the resources to do whatever he wished or fantasized about. Apparently that's exactly what he had done.

Later in the day, I'd have to call my sister-in-law, Michelle. I'd also have to decide how much of her daughter's story I was going to tell her. Some of the details had no place in a mother's memory. Sometimes I wonder about the place they have in mine.

It hadn't been half an hour since I'd gotten home, if that, when the phone rang out in the hall.

I jumped up to catch it before a third ring. Considering the events of the past twenty-four hours, it might have been any number of people looking for me.

"Alex Cross," I answered in a whisper.

And just like that, life changed again.

"Alex, it's Zadie Mitchell calling from the hospital. How soon can you get over here?"

Chapter 114

I RAN.

I ran out to the car in the driveway.

I ran my siren all the way to St. Anthony's, and I ran up four flights of stairs to Nana's room.

When I came in, Bree was there with tears streaming down her face. And next to her, in the bed, with eyes like slits – but open – was Nana Mama.

Regina Hope Cross, the toughest person I've ever known in my life, wasn't done with us yet.

Her voice was just a crackle, static almost, but it nearly bowled me over. "What took you so long?" she said. "I'm back."

"Yes, you are." I was beaming when I knelt down to kiss her as gently as I could. She still had two IVs and the A-V line to her heart, but the vent and feeding tubes were off, and it was like seeing someone I hadn't laid eyes on for weeks and weeks.

"What did I miss?" she asked.

"Nothing much. Hardly a thing. The world stopped spinning without you."

"Very funny," she said, although I was kind of serious. Everything else could wait.

Zadie and one of the cardiologists, Dr. Steig, were in the room monitoring Nana's condition. " Regina 's going to need what we call an LVAD," the doctor said. "A left ventricular assist device. It's the next best thing to a transplant, and it'll help get her home sooner rather than later." He put a hand on Nana's shoulder and spoke up a little. "Looking forward to anything in particular, Regina?"

She nodded groggily. "To not being dead yet," she said, and I laughed with everyone else.

Her eyes fluttered closed again.

"She'll be in and out for at least a few days," Steig said. "Nothing to worry about."

He took a few more minutes to go over the care plan with Bree and me, and then gave us some time alone in the room.

As we sat together by the bed, Bree told me she'd seen the overnight news. All the major channels were broadcasting live from the Kennedy Center, the White House, and the Vances' home in Philadelphia. Already, a kind of awkward mourning had begun and was spreading around the country.

"So, is that really it?" Bree asked. "Is it over?"

"Yeah," I said, thinking more about Nana than about Teddy Vance. "As much as anything ever is. Zeus is dead. That much we know for sure."