BY THE AUTHOR

Crime Fiction

{The Marty Singer Mysteries}

A Reason to Live

Blueblood

One Right Thing

The Spike

The Wicked Flee

{Standalone}

Stealing Sweetwater

{Short story collection}

one bad twelve

Psychological Suspense

The Kindness of Neighbors

Fantasy & Science Fiction

{Short stories}

“Sword of Kings”

“Assassin”

“Seven Into the Bleak”

“Trial By Fire” (anthologized in Walk the Fire #2)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Text copyright © 2014 Matthew Iden

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781477829448

ISBN-10: 147782944X

For Renee, who continues to make the whole thing possible.

For my family.

For my friends.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

EPILOGUE

SAMPLE: THE WICKED FLEE

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHAPTER ONE

Killing a quarter hour on a DC subway platform is like being trapped in George Orwell’s head the day before he started writing 1984.

Back in the seventies, the transit authority tried to sell the people-mover as a hallmark of progress and cheer by calling it “the Metro,” but the stations are still drab, concrete vaults with low lighting not so different than that of a funeral parlor. Coffin-sized depressions meant to dampen the crushing noise of trains and passengers dimple the ceiling, the pattern reminiscent of a hive colony of killer insect-men from a B-grade horror flick—a joke I’m sure wasn’t lost on the thousands of drones who used the Metro to get to their jobs every day. Terra-cotta floor tiles laid in a honeycomb pattern give a fleeting sense of emotional warmth that is immediately nullified by flickering digital billboards, while a strange smell of burnt vinyl and industrial fluid hangs in the air of most stations.

Luckily, taking the Metro was unusual for me. Thirty years as a homicide cop in the city meant I had access to my own wheels at all times—waiting seventeen minutes for transportation to arrive wasn’t going to cut it when someone’s been shot. So for three decades I’d grown accustomed to traveling any way I liked, any time I liked. I’d pulled my cruiser onto sidewalks, across the mouths of alleys, on lawns with one wheel hovering off the ground.

But those days were gone. A parking ticket had made me rethink my low opinion of the Metro and now I was leaning against a half-wall in the Waterfront Metro station, brooding and thinking gray, Orwellian thoughts, waiting for the north- and westbound Green Line to chug from its endpoint at Branch Avenue and pick me up at Waterfront. I was on my way home after visiting my adopted daughter, Amanda, at her new job as a program manager at FirstStep, a women’s shelter in Southeast DC. The journey was just six or so stops, but it would be half an hour before I saw my front door.

I sighed and squirmed. I’d forgotten to bring a book—a mistake no savvy Metro-goer would make—so, to pass the time, I started naming the kings and queens of Britain after the Conquest, moved on to listing the starting offensive line for the 1982 Super Bowl Champion Redskins, and, finally, just watched people.

A gaggle of teens ate fries and laughed about something that had happened in school. A white businesswoman—youngish in a smart-looking skirt and blazer, eyes glued to her smartphone—negotiated the escalator and took a spot on the rubber mat close to the edge of the platform without once looking up. Three guys in paint-speckled work clothes, holding hard hats and backpacks, stood and talked quietly to one side, already done with the day by early afternoon. A repairman in a neon vest and Carhartt overalls jawed with a young Metro cop. The station’s elevator opened and an elderly woman exited, then moved slowly and painfully to the end of the platform. A slim black or Hispanic guy in jeans and an untucked dress shirt rode the escalator down, white earphones in his ears, head bobbing to music. He was followed by two bureaucrats with plastic ID tags on their lapels, a fat guy with a cane, and a young mother trailing two little kids, blond with blotchy red faces. After a few minutes, enough commuters had filled the platform to turn it from a collection of individuals to an indiscriminate mob of people, and I let my mind wander back to history and football.

Soft amber floor lights near the lip of the track began pulsing, a warning that the train was close. People rose from their seats to shuffle closer to the edge of the platform, trying to guess where the train doors would stop, jockeying for the best spot out of habit. I stayed where I was. Middle of the day, a handful of riders getting on, probably few people looking to exit—I could afford to lean on my wall, then walk straight onto the train.

The train, still out of view, gave an unexpected blast from its horn, a warning honk, as if we hadn’t already heard it thundering down the track. Everyone winced as the sound bounced off the cement floors, walls, and ceiling. Headlights lit the curved walls of the tunnel, then became bright points of light in the darkness. There were two more earsplitting honks and then the train shot out of the tunnel to our right like a bullet out of a gun. We watched it come down the track.

Had I pushed away from the wall and gotten to my feet, my head would’ve been down and I would’ve missed what happened. If I’d glanced at my phone or scratched my nose or even blinked, I wouldn’t have seen a thing. As it was, I was watching the incoming train like it was on a movie screen and couldn’t have had a better view of what happened next.

With exquisite timing, a man from the crowd took three running steps and exploded into the lower back of the smartly dressed businesswoman, delivering a perfect body check. The woman flew into the path of the train as though she’d jumped and, in my mind’s eye, the movie froze in place in that instant. Her head was thrown back and her mouth open like she was singing an aria, while her wrists and ankles trailed from the impact as though she were an angel learning to fly. A stylish neck scarf floated behind her like a pennon. Then, with terrifying speed and violence, she was swept away by the front of the train as though she’d never existed.

Images and sounds fractured from that one instant into jagged, discrete chunks, like reflections on a broken mirror. The train’s emergency brake slammed on, the scream of the wheels merging with the screams of the onlookers on the platform. Those who had been behind or to the left of the woman had seen everything—those to her right, watching the train approach, had only a vague idea that something horrific had happened. Some rushed after the train while others stood frozen, their eyes huge with the whites showing or their hands over their mouths in shock. The repairman had dropped his tool belt and was one of those sprinting down the platform, yelling for help, while the Metro cop stared down the track, his mouth literally hanging open. One of the bureaucrats had grabbed the shoulder of the other, the fabric of the man’s suit bunched in his fist as they both stared down the track. The teens hugged each other and started to cry.

Instinct took over and, like many of the others, I took a half dozen steps toward the front of the train before another part of me—the one that had been conditioned by thirty years of police work—kicked in and I stopped myself. The woman was dead. Or she had more help than she could possibly use. Nothing I could do would matter.

But no one had gone after the man who had just killed her.

I spun on my heel and sprinted to the escalator to the right, the only way off the platform and out of the station. I had no idea who I was looking for. My attention had been on the woman and I had only a blurred memory of the man’s shape, nothing of his age or race. I replayed the memory in my mind while the screams and shouts rose around me—my own heart was slamming in my chest and I was hyperaware of the seconds slipping away. A slim form, medium height—young?—and a red baseball cap jammed low on a head. A cap. Look for the cap.

I took the escalator steps three at a time. Another Metro cop and the station manager jogged toward me, keys and nightstick and radio jangling as they moved, already on their way to the scene. The cop yelled “Hey!” as I ran past, but I ignored him and aimed for the turnstiles that marked the first hurdle out of the station. A few commuters, unaware of the tragedy downstairs, were moving through them in my direction. Most were engrossed in books or their phones, and one unfortunate twenty-something in a suit and tennis shoes wandered unconsciously into my path. At six three, two ten, I wouldn’t have come close to making the cut for that Redskins lineup I’d been daydreaming about, but I was in full stride and highly motivated and I knocked him ass over tin cups without so much as blinking. Book, glasses, and body went flying. A plaintive “What the fuck?” floated up from the ground and followed me as I sprinted away.

I didn’t trust myself to leap the turnstiles, so I slammed through the narrow gate reserved for Metro workers and sprinted for the escalators out of the station. Luck was with me—sometimes the escalators aren’t running, in which case they are just stairs and, at fifty-four, I wasn’t about to run up three hundred steps without inviting heart failure. As it was, I barely made it to the top even with mechanized help. The escalator popped me out into the station’s glass-covered entrance and I whipped my head around, looking for the man in the cap.

The streets were crowded with mothers and their kids, retirees shuffling to the grocery store, workers on break. Roadwork blocked the right-hand lane going north on New Jersey Avenue, causing cars to choke the street for a block or more. A bored construction worker, leaning on a manual “STOP” sign and with a walkie-talkie dangling from his hand, was holding up traffic. I jogged to him, out of breath and sweating.

“You see a slim guy in a baseball cap come out of the Metro?” I asked, knowing how stupid the description sounded even as I said it. “Running like hell?”

He gave me a look. “Get away from me.”

Adrenaline kicked in. I grabbed the lapels of his flannel shirt with both hands and lifted him half off the ground, screaming into his face, “Did you see a guy in a baseball cap?”

His eyes popped out. “Jesus, man. No.”

I let him go, swearing—but halfway down New Jersey I saw a woman sprawled on the sidewalk being helped to her feet by a couple of passersby. I left the construction crew and ran toward the woman, slowing down just long enough to shout, “Baseball cap?”

Two of them looked up and pointed in the direction I’d been running, toward K Street. I waved a thanks and took off. I still had a chance to catch him—slim, yes—but still a chance. Even with the wasted seconds on the platform and quizzing the construction guy, I couldn’t be more than a half minute behind the guy. If I could keep him in sight until I could call the police, I might manage a collar.

There. I caught a flash in between the bobbing heads of pedestrians and cars. I ran after it, wondering as I went what kind of amateur I was chasing. A simple dodge down a side street would’ve thrown me off his trail, but this guy had left the scene in a straight line like he’d been shot from a catapult. I gave a mental shrug. Crooks and killers aren’t smart, and pushing someone in front of a train wasn’t exactly Machiavellian in its complexity.

And it sure would be swell if he did something else stupid, because my breath was coming in ragged gasps and my legs already felt rubbery and weak. I tried pacing myself, evening out my stride so that I could get some wind back while still keeping the baseball cap in sight. He might slow down if he thought he was far enough away, which I really wished would happen. For a second, that actually seemed to be the case as he approached K Street. But some subconscious sense of my pursuit must’ve spurred him on and I swore as I watched him run straight into traffic, causing car brakes to be slammed and horns to be honked.

He made it across K in one piece, but traffic was flowing by the time I got there and I watched in frustration as he sprinted away. I tried twice to jump into the break between cars, narrowly missing getting flattened each time. The light turned and I finally made it across the thruway, jogging down New Jersey Avenue with my head on a swivel. The rush was even heavier here and I stood on the corner, looking for any sign of the guy in the cap. But either he’d set a new world record for the half-mile dash or had finally used his head and turned a corner, because he was gone.

Now that I could give up, I bent over double—hands on knees, my heart slamming in my chest—and swore again, loudly, creatively, and with feeling. In between sucking great lungfuls of air, I cursed the guy’s mother, his father, DC traffic, cars, stoplights, the Metro, middle age, and bad luck. A few people walking by gave me a wide berth and glanced my way, checking to see how crazy I was, then moved along when I pulled out my cell phone. Not crazy enough to rate, I guess.

Hands shaking with fatigue and frustration, I dialed 911 and waited for someone to answer.

CHAPTER TWO

“Were you able to give them a description of the guy?” Amanda asked, picking a set of towels off the shelf. She glanced at the price and put them back. It was the day after my post-homicide footrace and Amanda had called, asking me to meet her at a housewares store in Arlington. In the chaos of the police interview and giving my statement, I hadn’t had a chance to even call and tell her about the madness I’d seen unfold just a few steps away.

“He was fast,” I said sourly. “Wore a hat.”

“That’s it?”

I closed my eyes. I saw a shape, an outline . . . and that was it. “I’m the typical eyewitness,” I said, disgusted. “It was over so quickly, I can’t remember a thing about the guy. I couldn’t tell you if he was black or white or Martian. My brain shuts down when I try to paint a picture of him in my head. The cap never came off his head, I know that.”

“The cops still couldn’t catch him after everything you did?”

I shrugged. “Until I called 911, they had no idea anyone was even chasing the guy. By the time they got a cruiser to my location and I explained what I was talking about, he was gone.”

She harrumphed on my behalf. “You busted your hump trying to keep up with him. The least they could do is make an effort.”

I turned to look at a display of mixing bowls, hiding a grin. Amanda was fond of using what she thought was cop and tough-guy slang, stuff she saw on TV. Like busted your hump.

“What are you laughing at?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I swallowed a bug. What are we here for again?”

We were prowling the aisles, pricing everything from cheap kitchen utensils to bath towels. It wasn’t what I preferred to do with my weekends—the sterile fluorescent light and windowless interior depressed me—but Amanda had just moved into a studio apartment of her own after living in a group house of nine recent college graduates who, as she put it, “had varying ideas about hygienic upkeep.” I knew she was excited about stocking her new home and playing house. The least I could do was help her carry stuff out to the car.

She sighed as she lifted the edge of a sample curtain. “I wish my mom was here to help with this. I couldn’t decorate a doghouse.”

“Something wrong with my opinion?”

“Marty, until I showed up, you’d had the same wallpaper for decades.”

“It was good wallpaper.”

She didn’t quite roll her eyes. “Stick to what you’re good at, please.”

“Stopping lunatic gunmen from kidnapping you?”

“Yes.”

“Not giving fatherly advice?”

“Fatherly advice is fine. Just nothing to do with colors. Or material. Or style.”

“What do I get out of this?”

“Daughterly advice,” she said sweetly. “But it’s even better than the real thing, since you’re not actually my father. If we were related, we wouldn’t be able to stand each other.”

“There’s that,” I said. Amanda had gone from complete stranger to adopted daughter in a little less than a year, pulling me out of a mental tailspin and giving me purpose. Granted, she’d done it by pleading with me to save her from her mother’s deranged killer, but the need to be useful again had helped me through one of the darker points in my life. One that I wasn’t quite out of, in fact.

As if on cue, Amanda asked, “How have you been feeling, Marty?”

“Fine.”

She stopped looking at the silicone spatulas she’d been testing and faced me square. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m great.”

“Really? Because you’re glaring at the Miracle Pillow display like you want to kick it across the store.”

“Well, who needs a Miracle Pillow anyway? Regular pillows work just fine.”

“Marty.”

“It’s true. I’ve used the same pillow for five years. There’s nothing special about it.”

Amanda folded her arms and stared at me.

I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose. Shoppers shuffled past us in a daze of commercial high fever as I tried to put words to how I felt. I settled for the direct approach. “I got the reminder for my checkup in the mail.”

She frowned. “It’s only been a few months since your surgery.”

“Yeah, but closing in on a year since chemo,” I said. “It said this is precautionary. The real checkup will be early next summer.”

“That’s great,” she said, confused. “Right? Chemo and surgery were a success, you’ve been feeling good, and the checkup is going to confirm it all.”

“Yeah,” I said, not very clear myself on why I wasn’t as excited as I should’ve been. The second I’d found the postcard in my mailbox, I’d had a funny feeling about it, a squirming in my gut that I hadn’t felt since those first days after my diagnosis of stage two colorectal cancer, a diagnosis that had ended a thirty-year career with DC Homicide. “I guess it’s just a reminder I didn’t need, you know? I’ve been feeling good, so I just wanted to feel normal again. To forget it ever happened.”

She nodded, smart enough not to argue or psychoanalyze. Too many people want to explain you to yourself, solve all your problems. “When’s the appointment? Do you want me to go along?”

“Haven’t made it yet. And, no. But thanks.” She shot me a look, as close to admonishing me as she’d get. I held up a hand. “I’ll get there, promise. I just want to be mentally ready for it. Checkups can turn out to be bad, too, you know.”

She looked like she wanted to say something, but just nodded again. “Okay, but you’ll call me when you need me, right?”

I couldn’t help smiling again. Not if you need me. When you need me. “I will. Now, seriously. Are you going to pay that much for a rubber spoon?”

We browsed for another half hour or so, passing on some great deals, like a wax that would take off your eyebrows or back hair—whichever was required—knives that never needed sharpening because they couldn’t cut through bread to begin with, and air purifiers that promised to put ions in the air. Or take them out; I couldn’t tell which. Amanda was a smart shopper, ignoring flashy displays in favor of the deals that were on the shelves in the back corner and taking her time in the clearance section. We loaded a shopping cart with sheets, dishes, and a shower shelf along with a dozen other household objects. I questioned a few of her choices, but I’d been living as a bachelor for double-digit years, so what did I know? I still used the plates my wife and I had originally received as wedding gifts—and I’d been divorced since the eighties.

The thought of plates made me think about food and Amanda giggled when my stomach growled like a caged animal. I didn’t mind since the thought of food had made me nauseous for almost a year thanks to my chemotherapy. Looking forward to eating was still a novel enough concept that it made me incredibly pleased to hear my own stomach complain.

“How are things at FirstStep?” I asked to take my mind off lunch. We had progressed to the bedding aisle, but there were still displays of random household items hanging from the shelves. I sneezed as we passed one full of potpourri.

“Good,” Amanda said as she examined a package of pillowcases. “The women that come in really need our help. I thought I would be doing more generalized social work after I graduated—trying to help out a larger chunk of the population, you know, and do more good that way—but I found out that’s exactly what happens when we help the women first. If you keep a mother from getting beaten, or help her find work, or get her to a long-term shelter, then you help her kids, too. And that’s three-quarters of the family right there.”

“Even if it isn’t the loser father or husband or boyfriend that’s the cause of the trouble.”

“Right. We’ll even try to help them if it’s clear that they aren’t the issue.”

“That happen very often?” I asked. “That men don’t turn out to be the problem?”

“No,” Amanda said.

“What’s that look for?”

“Oh, nothing. Talking about the shelter reminded me of something that happened on Thursday. The boyfriend of one of the girls who had come in caused a scene. Stood outside the shelter, screaming at the building.”

“Do you have security?”

“Not a guard, if that’s what you mean. We have a buzzer for the door. But he stayed outside all morning and no one could leave until we called the cops. Karla—the girl who came in—was terrified. Our director went outside and gave him an earful, but got spooked when he showed her a knife.”

“The cops grab him?”

She shook her head. “He was gone by the time they got there.”

We made our way to the front of the store and got in line with the rest of the shoppers. Amanda pulled out her wallet and carefully counted her money, then went through her basket item by item, trying to calculate a ballpark total. I busied myself by looking at the three thousand doodads that the store had hung around the checkout aisle in a last desperate bid to get us to spend all of our cash. There were coupon caddies shaped like sleeping cats, space pens that would work in a vacuum, and car fresheners that promised to never stop smelling. For some reason I was fascinated by an antifogging mirror for the shower even though I wouldn’t buy it if it were the last purchasable object on earth. I shaved at the sink and had since I was sixteen.

“How do you think they do it?” I asked Amanda. “Do they heat the mirror from the inside or is it just space-age plastic?”

When she didn’t reply, I looked up. The cashier had totaled the items in Amanda’s cart while I’d been distracted by point-of-purchase displays and Amanda was busy recounting her money, even though she’d done so a minute earlier. The cashier waited patiently while Amanda went through her wallet, then shook her head and pulled out a credit card, which she handed over. The cashier slipped it through the reader and we all stared at the little display, waiting for the electrons to tell us they’d done their thing. Something beeped, though, and the cashier swiped Amanda’s card again. We waited and stared once more, with the same result.

The cashier handed the card back to Amanda with an apologetic expression. “I’m sorry. The card was rejected. Do you have another card you’d like to use?”

A pink blush bloomed on Amanda’s cheeks and the tips of her ears. “No. I . . . I must be late paying the bill. Can you take off the sheets and the pan?”

“Wait a sec,” I said, reaching for my wallet. “I’ve got money.”

Amanda shook her head. “That’s okay, Marty. I don’t need all this stuff.”

“It’s only twenty bucks,” I said. “I spend that much every day on cat food for Pierre. Then again, he’s as big as some dogs.”

“No, really. I went a little crazy in the aisles,” Amanda said, then turned to the cashier. “Go ahead and take off the sheets.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“I don’t need your money,” she said, loudly, with an edge to her voice. Everyone within earshot froze.

After a second, I put away my wallet. “Okay, kid.”

We took off more than just the sheets by the end, but neither the cashier nor I said anything. Amanda—her back ramrod-straight and eyes locked ahead—marched out of the store with a bag in each hand, leaving me to handle the last one myself. I thanked the cashier and hurried to catch her, since I was the one who’d driven. I popped the trunk and we stowed the bags in silence.

I slid into the driver’s seat, she into the passenger’s seat. We sat for a minute.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she finally said.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

I started the car and backed out of the space, then headed out of the parking lot and onto the street. We made it to the second light.

“The shelter doesn’t have a lot of grant money,” she said. “So I took a pay cut to help them stay out of the red.”

I didn’t say anything.

“They’re going to pay me back if they win another grant, but I’m trying not to count on it. Women’s shelters don’t exactly pay top dollar in the best of times, so I might as well get used to living on less.”

I nodded.

She turned to look out the window. “I know you’re going to want to help, but this career was my decision. I need to know I can do this on my own.”

We were quiet again, listening to nothing more controversial than the hum of the engine and the sound of other cars on the road.

It seemed safe to talk after a minute. “I’m just going to say one thing. I’m here if you need me. Just like you’ll be there for me. That’s all. No judgments. Just help. Okay?”

She nodded, biting her lip and staring straight ahead, her eyes shiny.

“Lunch is on me, though,” I said. “You can’t cook and I’m worse than you. And neither one of us could take my stomach growling again.”

The memory almost made her smile.

CHAPTER THREE

The next day found me at home, raking leaves for the first time in years. I have an oak, twice my age, that is large enough to throw shade across my entire backyard during the summer. Every October for the past ten years it has dumped its ten million leaves onto the property next door instead of mine, much to my glee. But climate change or cosmic realignment or maybe my neighbor’s prayers to an earth goddess had caused every one of the leaves to drop, straight as arrows, and now parts of my backyard were thigh-high with the things.

Just like hunger pangs, however, physical labor was more welcome now than it had been in the past since it meant that, well . . . I wasn’t dead. So, although my joie de vivre had taken a hit when I’d gotten the doctor’s postcard in the mail, I was raking leaves with a passion, perspiring through a blue George Mason sweatshirt as I gathered bags and bags of the stuff and lined them up like soldiers along my back fence. I had to take a break once in a while to catch my breath and to rub my shoulder—aching from where I’d been shot less than a year ago—but it still felt good to be active. My little Arlington yard was tidy in about three hours, though of course more leaves were on their way down. Halloween was just a few weeks away and the trees wouldn’t be bony and bare until mid-November. But it was okay. I’d be happy to tackle the whole thing again. It was a pleasure to have a chance to do it at all. And to catch sight of my neighbor’s face through his kitchen window. What had started out as a smirk as he watched me work turned increasingly crestfallen each time I waved at him with a bag of leaves slung over my shoulder or as each patch of lawn was exposed.

I knocked off and went inside to grab a glass of water and take a shower. The Redskins were playing at noon and I had a couple of friends, Sam Bloch and Chuck Rhee, coming over to help me finish some beer and ignore the fact that our team was losing. I was standing over my sink, chugging the water, when my phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize. I answered.

“Mr. Singer?” It was a man’s voice, young and cultured.

“That’s me. Who’s this?”

“My name is Paul Gerson. My sister, Wendy, was killed at the Waterfront Metro station last week.”

I lowered the glass. “God, I’m sorry, Mr. Gerson.”

“Thank you. It’s been . . . hard to accept.”

“For what it’s worth, I was there and I can tell you that there was nothing anyone could’ve done to stop it.”

He took a weak breath, the kind that sticks in the throat on the way in. “Actually, that’s why I’m calling. My parents and I have been in constant contact with the police on Wendy’s . . . case. They assure us they’re doing everything they can, but we get the distinct feeling that they believe there’s no chance to catch Wendy’s killer.”

“I’m sure they’re doing everything they can, Mr. Gerson.”

“They’ve given up before the case is a week old.”

“Sometimes these things take time,” I said cautiously. If the case had a whiff of failure just a few days after the murder, then things didn’t look good. The lack of progress Paul Gerson was complaining about probably meant that there was no usable information at the scene. Nothing from eyewitnesses—including me—no physical evidence, and zero leads from Metro CCTV cameras. I found myself slipping into old habits of reassurance and white lies I’d honed as a homicide cop. “Television makes it look like a murder’s got to be solved in forty-eight hours or it’s gone for good, but I can tell you from experience that isn’t always how it goes.”

“Yes, you were a detective for many years, weren’t you?”

“Yes, about thirty. Give or take,” I said, then paused. “Is this going where I think it’s going?”

“Quite possibly. My parents and I would like to hire someone to look into Wendy’s murder before it’s too late. Someone who not only knows how to investigate something like this, but can work well with the police. If they’ve already written the case off, then it’s even more imperative that the person looking into it have a rapport with law enforcement.”

“So that person can squeeze all the information they can out of the cops?” I asked.

“Crudely put,” he said, “but yes. Would you be willing to be that person, Mr. Singer?”

“Before I answer, how did you get my name? My number?”

Paul Gerson didn’t hesitate. “My father knows several members of the city council. My mother knows the mayor’s wife. It wasn’t hard to get information on the only person with the guts and brains to chase a cold-blooded killer straight from the scene.”

The compliment had been lobbed like a grenade. I ignored it and went straight at the issue, trying to snuff this idea before it got started. “Look, Mr. Gerson. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about your sister’s death. If I’d been a little faster or a little smarter that day, I might’ve caught that guy and this conversation would be moot. But the MPDC knows what it’s doing. Especially Homicide. I know it’s hard as hell to wait by the phone or hear the same tired line about the investigation proceeding at its own pace—”

“We can pay you,” Gerson interrupted. “Very well. My father was the chief operating officer for some of the biggest aerospace companies in the world. He and my mother are offering a very large sum of money to find Wendy’s killer.”

I took a deep breath. “I appreciate that, Mr. Gerson. But I retired for a reason. A couple, really. And one of them was to get away from this kind of work.”

“You were willing enough to chase the man that killed Wendy.”

“That was a spur-of-the-moment decision. I had the opportunity to stop a crime—or, at least, to catch the guy who did the crime—and I took it. A full-on murder investigation is a whole different animal.”

There was a pause, then Gerson cleared his throat in a curious way, with a hum at the end. “Mr. Singer, my family dies every hour that man is on the streets unpunished. We need justice for Wendy. Even an explanation would help. We don’t even know why he killed her. Do you understand how difficult that is for us? We don’t even know why.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gerson. I truly am. But I don’t do this kind of work anymore. I’d be happy to recommend some private investigators I know, if you like. But I’m not one of them.”

“So that’s it, then? You retired, you got your pension, and you’re through. No effort to help, no responsibility, no empathy. It seems the accolades I heard about you were greatly exaggerated.”

I felt a flash of irritation and was tempted to ask him if he’d ever chased down a killer after going through chemo and surviving cancer, but the thought was self-pitying in the extreme. I took a deep breath. “Mr. Gerson, I’m not lacking in compassion or competence. But your sister’s case, while not hopeless, is going to take more manpower, time, and energy than I have right now. With no physical evidence at the scene, the next step is to start tracking down friends, family, coworkers, boyfriends—anyone who knew her personally, since most people are killed by someone they know. Including brothers and parents. Especially brothers and parents, since pushing someone in front of a moving train is a very personal act of murder. Because of that, your sister’s case is almost certainly heading for a long slog of conducting interviews at the station, fact-checking alibis, and chasing paper trails in the hopes that something might shake free. Or that someone might break down and confess six months into the investigation. That’s just not something I can commit to.”

That stopped him for a moment, but he gamely tried another salvo or two, even throwing in a couple cheap shots at my sense of manhood. I kept my cool. I’d dealt with enough bereaved families in thirty years to know that most of them weren’t operating normally after someone they loved had been taken away. If he needed to vent, I could let him. But I really wasn’t interested in taking his money. Even if I was ready and willing to accept the stress and work of a private murder investigation—and I wasn’t—the chances of it ending on a positive note were slim to none for all the reasons I’d given. No thanks.

Deflecting his request one more time, I was able to end the call with dignity, although I didn’t breathe a sigh of relief until I heard the blip that meant he’d ended the call. The world of homicides was lousy and not one I wanted to be a part of anymore. Wendy Gerson, may she rest in peace, would have to be avenged by someone else.

CHAPTER FOUR

My modest Cape Cod in Arlington, Virginia, has been my home for more than twenty years and, when I wasn’t raking leaves, I’d been undertaking a room-by-room renovation after Amanda had pronounced that every visible surface required removal or replacement. The kitchen wallpaper, with its Amish-buggy-and-iron-frying-pan motif, had been the first to go, quickly followed by the colorless linoleum I’d stepped on since the seventies. Sage-green walls now complemented a blond, faux–birch wood floor I was proud to say I’d put in myself. New appliances would have to wait, but I’d watched a few Sunday morning, do-it-yourself renovation programs and felt competent enough to refinish the cabinet doors.

I’d resisted the projects at first—I wasn’t anyone’s idea of a handyman—but now I secretly looked forward to making the trips to the home improvement store and battling the other maniacs in the parking lot for the closest space to the front door. I never thought I’d needed a hobby, but scraping off wallpaper with a razor blade or filling nail holes with spackling compound seemed like a dream when I thought back to the days—not that long ago—when I sat and stared at the TV, waiting for my oncologist to call.

But those days had come back in a rush the moment I’d read the cheap paper postcard from Dr. Demitri. Dear Mr. Singer, it began, Please call our office at your earliest convenience to schedule your annual preliminary checkup. There was Demitri’s name, a phone number, and the good doctor’s address in Old Town Alexandria. That was it.

But it had been enough. I’d sat on the letter since, unable to lift the phone and make the simple call.

“Why?” I asked out loud, sitting at the table in my recently face-lifted kitchen the day after Paul Gerson’s call. The only audience was my cat, Pierre, who was curled on the table like a nautilus shell, though this shell weighed nearly thirty pounds and, even curled in a ball, was bigger than a bread box. I survived chemo, surgery, and I feel great. Why does a simple checkup make me feel like I’m on my way to the gallows?

Pierre opened one sleepy eye, then, unmoved, closed it and wiggled in place, tucking himself into an even tighter ball of fur, with the tip of his tail covering his nose. I scratched his back and he gave a low, growling burble. We’d shared a house for five years and I still didn’t know if he liked the heavy petting or was going to sink his claws into my neck the second I turned my back.

I sighed and headed for the basement to get my bucket of tools. I needed to stay busy. Actually doing the intelligent thing and calling Demitri’s office to schedule the appointment was out of the question. No reason why; I just couldn’t do it. I’d know when I was ready.

So I dragged a stepladder, paint bucket, scrapers, and toolbox up the basement stairs, set everything down in the dining room, and started prepping the walls for some big-time scraping. No rinky-dink, amateur-hour DIY, let’s-just-wash-the-walls-and-paint work ethic here. No sir, I was all-in on the distraction thing, so before I even thought about painting, I was going to have to strip the walls down to the drywall, patch ’em, then put on a primer coat. This would keep me busy for at least a week, even taking into consideration time for backaches, feeding Pierre, and checking on Amanda. I lined up my tools, put some music on the stereo, and got to work.

I quit twenty minutes later.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the appointment. Every time I moved around the dining room, I caught myself peeking into the kitchen to look at the postcard stuck to my refrigerator. It was like a neon sign without the neon, glowing white and accusing from the fridge door.

I finally threw down the scraper I was using and pulled out my phone. I dialed Demitri’s number from memory, then asked for Leah, the nurse who’d been along for my whole ride and had helped me keep my sanity more than once. The receptionist put me on hold, where I listened to a garbled version of classic hits from the eighties, nineties, and today. Leah answered a minute later.

“Oh, hey, Marty,” she said. “How are you doing?”

“Lousy. And I’m not calling to schedule my checkup.”

“Um, okay.”

It took me a second to get to it, but then I explained to her how weird I was feeling and how reluctant I was to even make the call, let alone come in for what was surely just a routine visit, and how stupid could it be—

“Oh, yeah,” she interrupted. “That’s super common.”

“What?”

“Feeling listless, angry, sad, worried?”

“Yes.”

“Having a hard time thinking about the appointment but you can’t get it out of your head?”

“Yes.”

“Happens all the time. Post-remission depression. Nothing special.”

I tried to punch down my irritation. “Do you think maybe you could’ve given me some kind of warning? Say, after the surgery?”

She clicked her tongue. “Have you ever heard the story about the mother who told her little boy not to stick rocks up his nose?”

“No. Did he have cancer?”

“So, a mother sends her son off to his first day of school and tells him not to stick rocks up his nose. He says, ‘I never would’ve thought of that, Mommy.’”

“Uh-huh.”

“An hour later, the school nurse calls to tell her that her son is in the principal’s office for sticking rocks up his nose.”

I was quiet.

“So the moral of the story is,” Leah continued, “don’t tell your patients to watch out for post-remission depression . . .”

“. . . or they might develop post-remission depression. Or stick rocks up their nose.”

“Exactly. So now you feel blue. You seem to be through the worst of the cancer. Maybe you’ve beaten it. But maybe you haven’t, right? And a checkup is going to tell you one way or another, but as long as you don’t try to find out which, both possibilities exist. Kind of like Schrödinger’s cat.”

“Did he put rocks up his nose?”

“No. Didn’t you take physics in school?”

“I was more of a history buff.”

“Schrödinger was a physicist who said that a cat in a box can’t be known to be either alive or dead until you open the box. As long as the box stays closed, both possibilities have an equal chance to exist. I mean, a real cat would eventually starve, but for the purposes of quantum physics, that’s the setup.”

I glanced over at Pierre and envisioned somebody trying to stuff him into a shoe box. I had an easier time imagining how much blood they would lose in the attempt. “Can I point out that that’s a shitty cancer analogy?”

“Sorry. Let’s just put it this way—avoiding the doctor may seem like no news is good news, but the truth of the matter is, you need to find out sometime. If it’s good news, you get to move on with your life. If it’s not as good, we can take steps to tackle it. But paralysis never leads to a positive outcome. You’re not Schrödinger’s cat. You have to come in for that checkup.”

I took a deep breath. “I understand that logically. But I’m not feeling it.”

“That happens. It’s okay. I can put you in touch with a patient advocate who specializes in this kind of depression.”

“I’m not going to therapy.”

“Okay. It’s not for everyone,” she said, backpedaling at the tone in my voice. “Some of our patients have helped themselves, too.”

“Any tips?”

“Well, most of them start with an anxiety diary.”

I paused. “An anxiety diary.”

“Yep. You jot down how you’re feeling, analyze what you can do about it, and recognize what you can’t. We have a guide we hand out sometimes. I’ll drop it in the mail to get you started.”

I scratched my nose. “I read this thing, then just write down my inner feelings?”

“It’s more in-depth than that,” Leah said, “but yes. And be honest with yourself. No one’s going to see this except you, so there’s no reason to fib.”

I grunted.

“One other thing I can tell you from what other patients have gone through. Watch out for the news.”

“The news?”

“If you hear some celebrity has been diagnosed with cancer or even some other disease, you’ll be tempted to conflate their diagnosis with your own, even if it’s a totally different kind. You’ve got to remember that they’re not talking about you. They’ve got their situation and you’ve got yours. Your job is to do the best you can to take care of yourself. Same thing goes for taking on someone else’s burdens until you address your own. Even the non-cancer, non-medical things. They can send you into a tailspin if you aren’t ready for them.”

“What if doing that for other people actually helps?”

“Well . . . okay. Just don’t kill yourself.”

Good advice anytime, I thought. But easier said than done.

Leah tried one more time to get me to schedule the checkup, I balked, and we ended the call amicably. I grabbed the paint scraper and went back to work, thinking about what she’d said. It made sense theoretically, but I cringed at the idea of pouring out my feelings and fears, whether it was in person or on paper. It was still on my mind an hour later when I took a break and grabbed a drink in the kitchen. Leaning against the sink, I sipped water as I watched my tree drop more leaves into the yard.

“An anxiety diary?” I asked Pierre, who opened one eye again, then closed it and went to sleep.

CHAPTER FIVE

Emergency calls don’t often come at noon. They seem reserved for the middle of the night, after you’ve fallen asleep, when the jolting ring of a phone in the darkness triggers instant panic—something is wrong, someone is hurt, someone is dead. But there’s really no rule that says it always has to be that way; it’s just that the sense of dread and helplessness is stronger when you’re unprepared for it. Bad things can happen in the day, too.

I was walking to Java Hut—a daily routine that got me out of the house and put a large French roast in my hands—when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and sized up the number. Not one I knew, although that didn’t normally stop me.

I hit the little green button. “Hello?”

“Mr. Singer?” A woman’s voice.

“Yes.”

“This is Diane Brown, down at FirstStep. I’m Amanda’s supervisor.”

“Okay. Everything all right?”

“Yes. Well, no. No one’s been hurt—permanently, I mean—but Amanda was taken to the hospital about an hour ago.”

“What?”

I turned on my heel and jogged back to my house while Ms. Brown explained that, while manning the front desk, Amanda had tried to stop a masked man from coming into the clinic right after a delivery guy had been buzzed in. He’d been waiting for the opportunity and attempted to sprint past the desk to get into the back rooms of the shelter. The delivery guy and three staffers were able to stop the guy from making it any farther into the shelter than the foyer while someone else called the cops. The guy ran back out of the building, but Amanda, irate, chased him across the street to confront him, where he turned and shoved her hard enough that she fell to the sidewalk, breaking her arm.

“Did they get ahold of him?”

“I’m afraid not,” she said. “He ran away after pushing Amanda and we were busy helping her.”

“But Amanda’s okay?” I asked. I was almost back at my house and had my keys out. “She landed on her arm, not her head or anything?”

“I don’t think so. One of our staffers took her to the Capitol Hill Medical Center, but she asked me to call you. I just finished giving my report to the police, which took some time. Otherwise I would’ve called you sooner.”

“Don’t worry about it. You did okay. I’m heading out to the hospital now, but put the shelter on lockdown. If this guy is as crazy as he sounds, then he may just wait until the cops leave and try it again.”

“God, I hope not. We don’t have any volunteers to spare.”

I hung up, then hopped in my car and headed for Capitol Hill at speed. Fast enough, in fact, that I realized I was driving sixty in a thirty-five zone and had to make a conscious effort to slow down. I wouldn’t be helping anyone if I got pulled over and had to sit through a lecture and a ticket from a local traffic cop.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled into the parking garage at the hospital, took my little parking ticket, and headed in. A quick check-in at the ER desk and some back-and-forthing with one of the nurses I knew from my Homicide days got me a pass to the back where thin green curtains separated kids who had fallen off bikes, gangbangers with gunshot wounds, and staffers who tried to stop lunatics from breaking into women’s shelters.

As I walked into the heart of the clinic, however, a wave of queasiness washed over me. Too many hospital visits as a cop combined with my appointments for my cancer meant flashbacks, even after the worst was over. At this point, it was just a bit of nausea and a hard tightening the size of a walnut just behind my breastbone—nothing like the full-on sweats I’d experienced before. But it was enough to make me pull over to the side of the hallway and take a minute to collect myself. A nurse asked if I needed help back to my bed. I smiled and said no, I could make it on my own. She left and I took a deep breath, then continued the search for Amanda.

I found her in the last bay, her head on the crinkly hospital pillow with her eyes shut, resting. Her left arm was wrapped in a blue cast from her thumb to near the elbow. She looked thin and pale, with smudges under her eyes. I watched her breathing for a second, then slipped in and took a seat as quietly as I could in the chair next to the bed. I didn’t have to be so careful. A steady white noise of nurses and doctors consulting, monitors bleeping and blooping, and the rattle of wheelie carts in the hall covered any amount of noise I made.

I’d been watching her sleep for about twenty minutes when a nurse pulled back the curtain and poked her head in. I raised a hand and she waved me out into the hall.

“Are you her father?” the nurse asked.

“Uh, yes,” I lied, feeling weird saying it. “How’s she doing?”

“A simple fracture. Painful, but nothing too serious. No plates or pins. We doped her up, put the cast on, and let her sleep.”

“Can she go home?”

“Oh, sure. No need for an overnight. In fact,” the nurse said with some emphasis, “she could go home anytime.”

“You need the beds?”

“There was a stabbing down near the waterfront and we’re the best, if not the nearest. Ambulance is on the way.”

“Okay, give me a second with her.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll send someone over in a minute to check her out and get payment.”

“Payment? Like a co-pay?”

“Not exactly.”

“Sorry?”

“She needs to pay for treatment.”

I did a double take. “You mean, like, pay for the whole thing? Didn’t her insurance cover it?”

She shook her head. “She didn’t have a card when her friend brought her in, but we were too busy stopping the pain to process her correctly. Maybe she’ll give you the insurance information.”

Another nurse called for her and she sketched a short wave of apology and hurried down the hall to another bed. I went back to Amanda and called her name. Her eyes opened after a moment.

“Hey, kid,” I said. “I heard you had a rumble.”

She smiled weakly. “You should see the other guy.”

“I plan on it,” I said. “First things first, though. Let’s get you out of here. Can you walk?”

“I think so.”

I helped her sit, then steadied her as she swung her legs over the side of the bed. Together we put on her socks and shoes. One, two, one, two. I sat back and looked at her. The cast was ridiculous, a big blue block where her arm should be. “I hate to bring this up,” I said, “but the nurse out there said you didn’t give them any insurance for this.”

She looked down at the floor.

I paused. “Is that because you don’t have any to give them?”

Her mouth pressed in a firm, bloodless line. She nodded.

“FirstStep doesn’t give you any because they’re on a shoestring budget?”

“No,” she whispered.

“And you don’t make enough to pay for a good plan, but too much to qualify for subsidies?”

A nod.

“And you were across the street when this guy pushed you, so no workers’ compensation?”

She nodded again. One fat tear rolled down her nose and dripped onto her jeans.

I took a deep breath. “Okay. We’ll deal with it.”

The codeine or Demerol or whatever it was that numbed the pain gave her a bad case of the wobbles, but with a hand on my arm, she was able to make it down the hall and out of the main body of the ER. I left her in the waiting room with a cup of water, then went back to check in at the admissions desk.

A prim white lady in her fifties, wearing thick-rimmed glasses on a beaded chain, gave me the rundown on Amanda’s bill. It was enough to put me in the ER. There were bed charges, X-ray fees, biohazard disposal costs, charges for the nurse’s time, charges for the doctor’s time. Everyone but the janitor had made it onto the list of line items, which was almost a page and a half long. The total bill was nine thousand dollars.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, unable to help myself. “She was here for ninety minutes. That’s a hundred bucks a minute.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the woman said in staid, uninflected tones. She was used to doing this. “That’s the price of modern medicine. We do have an installment plan.”

She reached behind her and plucked a brochure from a rack, then handed it to me. I looked at the cover stupidly. “You can finance your hospital bill?”

“It’s a popular option for patients who don’t have or can’t provide proof of insurance.”

“I . . . Can I think about this, at least?”

“Yes, sir. If you pay the base charges and sign for the rest. But after thirty days your bill goes into default, so don’t take too long.”

There wasn’t much more to say after that. I told Amanda to hang tight while I got the car, helped her toddle out to it, then pulled out of the hospital driveway and toward Arlington. We were both quiet. My mind was busy churning over the jaw-dropping amount of the bill and what we could do about it. I didn’t realize that my silence must’ve seemed to Amanda like anger. The first clue I had was a sniffle from the passenger seat.

“I’m sorry I put you in this spot, Marty,” she said, holding back tears. “I . . . don’t know how I’ll do it, but I’ll pay you back. I can get a loan, maybe—”

“Huh?” I said, surprised, then waved the idea away when I understood what she was getting at. “Take it easy. I’m not mad, I’m just trying to figure out how to fix the problem.”

“It’s so much money,” she said in a whisper.

“We can figure this out. I know a few crack dealers I can put the squeeze on, maybe catch a couple of bank robbers and turn them in for the reward money. Stuff like that.”

“It’s not a joke,” she said, angry. “Quit making it a joke.”

“Sometimes it’s the only way to get through the bad spots.”

“I know, and usually it helps, but not this time, okay?” she said. “I already felt like shit that I’m living hand to mouth and this is just the icing on the cake. It’s not something I can laugh about.”

We were quiet. Amanda’s voice had been raw and angry. I gave her a minute, then tried again.

“Remember that time I was afraid they were going to remove my colon and that I’d have to poop in a bag for the rest of my life? And how I thought maybe I could learn to live with it as long as I had a signal or a catchphrase I could use if things got out of hand?”

Amanda bit her lip.

“Like saying ‘the cat’s in the bag’ as a courtesy when we were out at a restaurant. Or ‘fire in the hole!’ after a burrito at Julio’s.”

Amanda turned toward the window, trying to look mad. But her shoulders were shaking.

“Then there was that time I asked the doctor how big a bag it had to be and if I’d need to upgrade for things like the Super Bowl or Thanksgiving.”

A guffaw slipped out and she put her head in her hand. “My God, you’re a middle-aged third grader. I don’t want to laugh and then I do anyway.”

“I try to use my powers wisely.”

She groaned and put her head back, closing her eyes. “Seriously, Marty. What am I going to do?”

“We are going to find a way to deal with this, that’s what.” I stalled her protest. “I’m not just blowing smoke. And I’m not being charitable. We’ll get past this, but you’re going to have to take a serious look at your job. I know FirstStep doesn’t have any budget to speak of, but as long as health care costs a freaking mint, getting insurance is going to be a must-have. Either FirstStep provides some benefits, pronto, or you’ll have to find another job.”

“The chances of me getting mugged again are almost zero,” she said, as if that solved the problem. “That guy isn’t coming back.”

“You don’t know that. Even putting that aside, what happens if you get mono? Trip on the rug and break your other arm? Or just get the flu? There’re plenty of things you need insurance for and most don’t include playing the bouncer at a women’s shelter.”

She didn’t say anything. Which meant, hopefully, that she was at least giving it a thought.

“Speaking of which, who was this asshole who busted through the door?”

She sighed. “He was wearing a ski mask, if you can believe it, but we’re sure it was Karla’s boyfriend, the guy I told you about the other day. She’s staying at FirstStep while we try to find her a long-term situation. He knew she was there and just tried to bull his way in.”

“What’s his name?”

“Danny Fincher.”

“Got an address for him?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Maybe at work. Why, you gonna break some kneecaps?”

“Maybe. A stern talking-to and wagging my finger has also worked in the past.”

She got serious. “I don’t want FirstStep getting any bad press, Marty. Believe me, I’d love it if someone put this guy in his place, but Karla will be gone soon and the police know he’s there . . .”

“I’m not going to shoot him and dump him in the river, for Christ’s sake. But I think it would be handy to know who he is and where he lives. Forewarned is forearmed, you know. And, sure, if he tries something stupid again, he might find me waiting for him back at his apartment.”

“For a stern talking-to?”

I shrugged. “Or maybe I’ll break his kneecaps.”

CHAPTER SIX

“May I ask what happened to change your mind, Mr. Singer?” Paul Gerson looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and wariness. “You were quite adamant that you had no interest in taking the case when last we spoke.”

I squirmed in my seat. Gerson’s office at Schneider, Leonidas, and Humboldt Investments was outfitted in the latest Scandinavian Modern, and the chair I was sitting in felt like it was made of glass and steel like the rest of the place. A bright autumn sun shone through a twenty-foot-high cathedral window, giving me a nice view of the Potomac as it was seen from the Paper Mill building in Georgetown, but it lit Gerson’s work space in stark, clinical whites. The rooms and hallways smelled of manufactured scents with three names, like “Clean Cotton Linen” and “Blue Caribbean Spice.” Not my idea of professional comfort.

I sighed internally. I wasn’t being honest with myself. Gerson’s place of business might have all the charm of the tools on a dentist’s tray, but it wasn’t the decor that was making me uncomfortable. Or even the sight of the guy, a polished, late-thirty-something WASP with a raft of diplomas from St. Albans, Yale, and Stanford, whose ease using phrases like “when last we spoke” attested to his wealth and breeding.

“It’s difficult to explain,” I said. “Some personal issues, some latent guilt, the need to see justice done. The usual cocktail.”

Gerson’s face stiffened. “Wendy’s death isn’t a matter for joking, Mr. Singer.”

I paused. “I apologize. Your sister deserves better than that.”

He inclined his head. Apology accepted. “I’m afraid I have to press the question. Would you mind telling me what your personal reasons are?”

I hesitated. I’d realized on the way to this meeting that Wendy Gerson’s death might be a welcome relief to the anxiety I’d been feeling about my checkup, about my life. Even if Amanda hadn’t been nearly bankrupted by her trip to the hospital, I might’ve called Paul Gerson at some point just to take my mind off things. But I didn’t owe him that information. “Yes, I would. I’m sorry about your loss, and would like to help you find your sister’s killer, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to bare my soul to you.”

“This might be a short meeting, then. I’m eager to get your help, but I need to know you’re not planning on exploiting my family.”

“Exploit them how?”

Gerson turned his hands over, palm up. “My family has been a part of the DC social and political landscape for decades. Wendy’s death was horrific and sensational and we’ve already had to fend off the local press. I’m not going to help the media make a circus out of our tragedy.”

I shrugged. “I’m not interested in that, either. Check my references with the DC police force. Anyone who’s been there for the last few years will testify to my discretion.”

“No reporters, no blog posts, no tell-all books?”

Question: Would it really be that hard to scare up an extra nine grand on my own? Answer: Yes. I took a deep breath. “Scout’s honor. The only money I expect to make is from you. The only one who will see a report will be you. Feel free to include that in a contract.”

“All right, I’ll do that,” Gerson said, making a note on a small desk pad. He put down the pen and looked up. “With that out of the way, I suppose this can be our first meeting.”

“Sure.”

“What’s your first step? Do you interview me? Talk to the police?”

I relaxed. This kind of talk was more in my wheelhouse. “I’ll catch up with the MPDC soon, but right now I need to know more about your sister, a starting point for her life so I can trace it to others that were connected to it.”

“Wendy wasn’t much for confessing her innermost thoughts to anyone,” Gerson said doubtfully.

“Those would be nice to have if we could get them, but I’m talking much more basic stuff, at least at first,” I said. “If you’ve got the time right now, just tell me about her.”

“That’s it? Just talk about my sister?”

“It’s a start. Murders that aren’t robbery or gang-related are almost always committed by someone the victim knew, and—as I told you over the phone—the way in which Wendy was killed was very personal. The best place for me to start is with colleagues, friends, and family members.”

“There was that killing on the New York City subway a few years ago,” he pointed out. “That was random.”

“There are crazy people everywhere,” I said. “But crazy is, by far, the exception as far as motivations for murder are concerned. And, if that’s the assumption we’re going under, then I can’t help you anyway. There are too many possibilities in that scenario for one man to cover.”

“Then what can you do for us?”

“Finding random lunatics is what the police are good at. They’ve got the resources and the manpower to sift through the reports and accumulated piles of data that would lead them to a John Doe. I’m more useful going down the other path, the assumption that Wendy knew her killer. I can knock on doors, interview people, eliminate the known quantities until we wind up with the truth.”

“Your clear, steady gaze will force a confession out of the killer?” Gerson asked. His tone, while not quite mocking, had a twist to it I didn’t like.

“It’s been known to happen,” I said and looked at him steadily. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

We stared at each other for a minute, then a smile the Cheshire cat would’ve been proud of spread across his face. “Good. I didn’t want to hire a pushover.”

Once I’d proven my bona fides to Gerson, we got down to the business of dissecting Wendy’s life. I broke out my notebook and started writing. Much like her brother, she’d been sent to some of the best schools in the country, had moved on to advanced degrees—in law, rather than business—and settled into a rewarding professional life in Washington, DC, as an attorney for one of the area’s largest law firms specializing in corporate real estate.

“Married?” I asked.

“No.”

“Ever?”

“No. No children.”

“Was she straight?”

“Yes.”

“Boyfriends?”

“None recently.”

“Stalkers? Unwanted attention from anyone?”

He shook his head. “Not that she told me.”

“Did you know her friends or colleagues?”

Gerson scratched at the arm of his chair. “Not really.”

I quirked an eyebrow.

“We both lived in DC, but Wendy and I both have . . . had . . . very demanding jobs. It wasn’t unusual for us to go months without seeing each other.”

“But you know enough about her sex life to attest that she was straight?”

“I didn’t need to see her every night to know that, Mr. Singer,” Gerson said tightly.

“All right. So you weren’t involved with your sister socially?”

Gerson cooled down. “Correct.”

“Do you have a photo of her?”

“I thought you saw her on the platform,” Gerson said.

“Only the barest glimpse,” I said. “She was just another commuter to me. I remember she was smartly dressed. Busy, looking at her phone, although that describes most people these days. I suppose she seemed impatient, unhappy to wait. Places to go, people to see. Eager to get to it.”

Gerson smiled slightly. “That was Wendy. For the record, she was quite good-looking. Here.” He reached over and plucked a photo from a modern-looking picture holder that appeared to be a bunch of paper clips glued to the ends of straws and handed it to me. I took it. The picture had been snapped as she was looking away from the camera. Long brown hair with auburn tones hung around her face in waves and her mouth was slightly open. Not quite a smile, but welcoming. Her expression was pleased and expectant, maybe surprised. It was a wonderful picture, though it would always make me wonder what or who she was looking at.

Gerson continued. “A model’s looks, but she could’ve cared less about her appearance. Work was too important. She was immersed in it—morning, noon, and night. I’m not surprised you got the impression she was impatient. A task like waiting for a Metro train would’ve driven her crazy. A total waste of time.”

“She was driven, then?”

“Whenever she asked me a question, she would snap her fingers if I didn’t answer her quickly enough. ‘Don’t be stupid’ was her favorite phrase with her family and friends. She leveled it at me all the time. Even with that”—he waved idly at the wall where his diplomas were hung—“kind of pedigree. She was summa cum laude at Yale and Georgetown Law. Made her own investments—she didn’t trust me—and had a million in the bank by the time she was thirty-five. Driven is a bit of an understatement.”

“Do you think that attitude carried over at work?”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re interested in finding whoever killed her. Aggressive and ruthless behavior in the workplace often sparks a similar response in others. In other words, it’s a good motive. Especially if her outlook cost someone a job or a pile of money.”

“I really don’t know,” Gerson said, surprised, as if he hadn’t entertained the thought before. “Wendy usually reserved her scorn for her family, to be honest. She didn’t treat our parents much better than she did me. But . . . no. Wendy was ambitious, but she was the consummate professional. She valued being good at what she did much more than making money or climbing the corporate ladder.”

“Uh-huh.” I wrote “ballbuster” in my notes and underlined it twice. “Speaking of family, I’ll need to meet with your parents.”

He nodded, plucked a business card from a desktop holder, and leaned across his desk to hand it to me. It read “PAUL GERSON – CERTIFIED FINANCIAL ADVISOR” in silver, letter-pressed characters. The material of the card felt of a higher quality than my shirt.

“Just call me to arrange a meeting. And, please be considerate, Mr. Singer. They’re as determined to find Wendy’s killer as I am, but they’re still grieving.”

“I understand,” I said, pocketing the card. “Can you get me an introduction at Wendy’s workplace? Help me short-circuit any runaround they might put me through?”

“You’re expecting trouble?”

“Attorneys—especially corporate ones—don’t let you in the door on the first knock. It would be nice not to waste my time.”

“I see. Yes, I can make some calls.”

“Let me know once you’ve made contact and I’ll head over there.”

He nodded, thoughtful. “What else will you be looking into?”

“Did she rent or own a home?”

“She rented a condo near Capitol Hill, but the police went over it for evidence and then we cleaned it out. My mother said she couldn’t stand to do it later, so it’s already been empty for a week or more.”

I grimaced. “Okay. Most people spend half their lives at the office, so the work angle is a priority. Talking to her coworkers might lead to something. If it doesn’t, I might go to her condo anyway and knock on some doors. See if she had any secret admirers or jealous neighbors. Then spread out from there. Anywhere she might’ve had personal contact with someone on a routine or even infrequent basis counts. The gym, the grocery store, the place where she got her coffee every morning before work. The dry cleaners, the Chinese takeout on the corner, her mailman.”

Gerson blinked a few times. “I didn’t think about all of the possibilities. It seems like . . . an impossible task.”

“Yeah. Maybe you can understand the attitude of the detectives better now.”

He grunted, not convinced. I guess that was a bridge too far.

I closed my notebook and made those little gestures that indicated we were finished. “I think that’s about it. I have your number and e-mail address if I need anything more. Get me that introduction at her workplace and I’ll be able to start immediately.”

Gerson looked at me archly. “Aren’t you forgetting something, Mr. Singer?”

I froze in an almost-standing position, my hands on the arms of my chair, elbows bent. “I don’t think so.”

“Don’t you want to get paid?”

I relaxed back into my seat. “Yes. Sure.”

Gerson pulled out a checkbook from a desk drawer, then plucked a silver pen from its holder. “How much?”

“How about nine thousand dollars?” I asked, joking.

He frowned. “All at once? Isn’t the standard more like half now, half when we’ve agreed you’ve solved the case?”

“Ah. I . . . okay,” I said, at a loss. Should I stop him? “That would be fine.”

“Good,” he said, then bent to the task of writing a check for a cool forty-five hundred dollars. “This should tide you over. Do you have a contract you can send? No? My assistant can e-mail you a boilerplate with some basic language, if you like. If Wendy’s case drags out, we can renegotiate the terms. And, while I understand that there may be no real answer, if you do happen to find her killer and help bring him to trial, there’s a five-thousand-dollar bonus in it for you.”

“Okay.”

He passed me the check and we shook, sealing the deal and ending the meeting. Still bemused, I shuffled to the door. My hand was on the knob when I thought of something.

“Mr. Gerson?”

He looked up from his phone. “Yes?”

“What was Wendy doing at the Waterfront station? Neither her offices nor her apartment are anywhere near there.”

He looked at me for a moment, chewing it over, then said, finally, “I have no idea.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“So,” Dods said. “What can I do for Marty Singer, PI?”

I grunted. “Gerson call you?”

“Before you shut the door to his office, probably. Couldn’t wait to tell us that he’d hired ‘one of our own’ and could we please extend every fucking courtesy to you regarding his sister’s case.”

“You didn’t do that when I worked there,” I said. “Why would you start now?”

“Good question. You want to tell me what’s going on?”

Dods and I had been partners in Homicide for more than a decade, up till the day I retired and walked out the door of MPDC headquarters. I could confide anything to him—and would’ve, anyway—but the fact that he was in Homicide made it kind of mandatory. So, I related what Gerson had asked me to do, how he had asked it, and why I was doing it in the first place.

“That’s crazy,” he said when I told him about Amanda’s hospital bill.

“Tell me about it.”

“You know, somebody with a sense of humor could say it cost her—”

“An arm and a leg,” I finished for him. “Minus the leg. Yeah, I know. You might want to avoid using that particular gem around her. She’s not exactly in a joking mood about the situation.”

“Can’t blame her.”

“But now you know why I’m willing to do this for Gerson. I don’t have nine grand under the mattress and this seemed better than putting the squeeze on my retirement account. So, whatever help the illustrious MPDC Homicide squad can send my way would go towards paying a destitute young girl’s hospital bills—”

“Okay, okay,” Dods said, cutting me off. “What kind of courtesy can I extend to you, Mr. Singer?”

“Who’s on the case?”

“Henderson.”

I groaned. “That son of a bitch hates me.”

“Sorry, Marty. He was next on the rotation. When Gerson called, it got around the office. That’s the only reason I heard about it. In fact, I’m surprised he hasn’t called you yet.”

“He doesn’t want me to stick my nose in the case, is all. He got my statement from the cops at the scene, so he’s got what he needs. But if he knows Gerson hired me, he’s going to shut me down.”

I heard Dods move some papers around. “Eh . . . let me see what I can do. Maybe I can get him to loosen up.”

“Thanks, but I won’t hold my breath.”

“Marty, by ‘loosen up’ I mean I’ll just go into the file and get what you need. Jesus, you make a lousy private eye.”

I smiled. “Thanks, Dods. You’re the best.”

“Yeah, whatever. But I catch you wearing Hawaiian shirts and driving a red Ferrari, we’re through. Hold on.”

There was a rustling sound—Dods pinning the phone to his shoulder—then mumbling as he navigated the antiquated departmental computer system. I went out to the living room and threw myself onto my couch. It could be a long wait.

It wasn’t. “Okay,” Dods said. “There are witness reports, a coroner’s brief, some forensic documentation—oh, there’s a video transcript with the title ‘man with cap,’ the station manager’s testimony . . .”

“You got nothing.”

“Pretty much. Statements from Gerson and the parents, which don’t look like they got much in them. Victim had no significant others. Her boss gave what looks to be a vanilla statement of regret and sadness.”

“Got anything else?”

“Not really. I’ll look at the tape, take some notes. See if there’s anything worth your time.”

“Thanks. I’ll give you a buzz if I shake anything extra out of her company.”

“That would be nice. Hey, you hear Bob Koblenz is retiring?”

We jawed for a while about old Homicide days and news in the department since I’d left. It was nice to talk about simple, mundane life events. I felt comfortable and congenial. Maybe I could get some advice. I cleared my throat. “Say, you ever keep a diary?”

There was silence on the other end. “A diary? Like, write to myself at night with a flashlight under the blanket? Press flowers in the back and draw unicorns on the cover?”

A mistake. “Ah, never mind. I was just—”

“Actually, yeah,” he interrupted. “A couple years ago, my cardiologist hinted that if I didn’t lose some serious weight, I’d stroke out in five years. Told me I had to write down everything I ate and all the exercise I did and how I felt about myself.”

“Really?” I said stupidly. “Dods, I didn’t know you were doing that.”

“It’s not something you toss around, you know? Telling people I’m such a fat ass that I have to get in touch with my inner child or whatever.”

I sat back. “Did it work?”

“Not for the weight thing. I mean, it started me walking two miles every morning, so I can’t complain. But write down what I ate three times a day? I barely have time to eat lunch, let alone write it down.”

“So you gave up?” I felt strangely let down. I’d expected a sarcastic laugh, then confirmation and permission to think a diary was stupid, but now I wasn’t sure what I’d wanted to hear.

“Kind of. I definitely don’t crack it open every day. But sometimes the book helps when I see a rough one on the job. You know, if it’s a kid or a baby. Stuff I can’t tell Margie, can’t talk to the other guys in Homicide. They got the same problems, you know? They don’t need to hear mine on top of it.”

“So it’s helped.”

He thought about it. “It doesn’t solve everything. But, yeah. I think so. Why the questions? Interested in pressing flowers?”

“Fears and demons, Dods,” I said. “Just my own fears and demons.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

I went back downtown to visit Amanda at FirstStep, although this time I drove. No matter what your reasons for taking public transit—saving money, living green, avoiding parking tickets—all of them evaporate in the time it takes to watch someone get launched into the front of an oncoming subway train. It would be a while before I took public transportation anywhere.

My visit wasn’t necessarily a social call. Amanda had returned to work just a day after her arm had been set and one of the first things she’d done was talk to Diane, FirstStep’s director, about how I might be able to help them with their anti-crazy-person strategies. It was a distraction from the Gerson case, but Amanda’s injury is what got me into accepting the work in the first place . . . and I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about Wendy Gerson and her killer if Amanda got attacked again.

“Thanks for doing this, Marty,” Amanda said as soon as I was buzzed in. The big blue cast was now held tight to her chest by a black sling. I gave her a hug, then we walked through the halls of the shelter, which looked one part high school, one part medical center, and one part struggling corporate office. Chairs and tables in what passed as the lobby were chipped, and the tile floor had a large, kidney-shaped stain on it. Amanda guided me down the hall to a small conference room with a Formica table and ten chairs scattered around the room. The smell of bananas and canned noodle soup hung in the air. Amanda saw me wrinkle my nose and said, “Sorry, everything does double duty here. This is the break room most of the time.”

We chatted for a few minutes, trying to ignore the smell of hastily packed lunches, until Diane joined us. She was a plump woman in her late fifties, with silver hair trimmed short and wearing a lime-green business suit with a white turtleneck. Chunky turquoise-blue rocks hung from a gold cord around her neck. She shook my hand through Amanda’s introduction.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Singer,” she said. Her demeanor was deliberate and calm. “And thank you, of course, for looking after Amanda. We wouldn’t know what to do without her.”

I grunted. As director of FirstStep, she had to have known the kind of financial state Amanda was in, thanks to her work at the shelter. Courtesies were nice, but it was hard to forget that this organization was indirectly responsible for Amanda’s injury and the hardships coming down the pike.

“Is there something wrong, Mr. Singer?” Diane asked.

I guess my feelings of irritation weren’t as internal as I thought. “You could say that. I don’t appreciate how Amanda’s been left to hang out to dry. This girl is working her butt off for starvation wages—and I know that’s not your fault if that’s how little the world values what FirstStep does. But she shouldn’t have to act as security, too. And if she ever does, she shouldn’t have to face personal bankruptcy for doing it. Is it too much to ask that you step in and help bail her out?”

“Marty!” Amanda said, her face mortified.

“It’s all right, Amanda,” Diane said, holding up a hand. “Mr. Singer, I can’t tell you how sorry I am that Amanda had to get involved and, as I understand it, you as well. If I could do something to help her, I would, but our workers’ compensation and insurance policies are as clear and as strict as you can imagine. If it was in my power to fudge a police report and say the assault occurred on the grounds of FirstStep, I would, but I can’t. And I can’t simply write a check for thousands of dollars to help her with her medical bills. Even if we could afford it, it wouldn’t get past auditors, the board, and the other staff. What else is there to do?”

I shook my head. I didn’t have an answer. “Nothing. I can’t say my anger is constructive. I just don’t like what’s going on.”

“Believe me, none of us do. Truth be told, I actually put in a request last year to hire security personnel. But we were told that, if we wanted them, we’d have to furlough the staff we had one day a week,” Diane said. “So we would’ve had guards patrolling an empty building twenty percent of the time. I’m afraid there just aren’t many margins in this line of work. But I’m sorry about what happened to Amanda and all I can say is that I’m amazed that she even wants to stay and continue to work at FirstStep. We’re lucky to have her.”

It was masterfully done. Ten minutes before, I’d been ready to chew steel and spit nails. Now I felt like a boor and Amanda was blushing at the praise. I squirmed in my chair. “I guess I needed to vent.”

“That’s perfectly understandable,” she said. “Do you still want to help us with our security needs, though? I won’t be offended if you don’t.”

“No, I’ll help,” I said. What kind of jerk do you think I am?

Diane smiled warmly. “Thank you.”

I coughed. “Why don’t we start with you telling me what you had in mind. I’ve got my own ideas, but I’d rather hear what you’re thinking.”

Diane folded her hands and placed them on the table. “I know the attack on Amanda might seem like an isolated incident, but it’s not the first time a woman we’ve been sheltering has been threatened. And we’ve got to face the fact that an attack like this will happen again. We have almost no physical security and we need to spend our money wisely—we can’t afford to try one solution and find out it’s useless. We need to get it right the first time.”

“Okay.”

“Amanda suggested that, with your background, you might be able to guide us. Keep us from making those poor decisions.”

I leaned back, but a bolt in the back of the chair popped with an alarming snap and I quickly leaned forward again. “I can try. The real test will be your willingness to adapt to the situation and your ability to follow through on my recommendations.”

She tilted her head. “What do you mean, adapt?”

“Protecting a person is not easy by any stretch, but at least they can be moved, disguised, hidden. Decoys can be used and, if all else fails, the person can be relocated.”

“All right.”

“But stopping people that want to do harm to a static location like FirstStep is totally different. Safeguards—like alarm systems, video cameras, upgraded locks, security personnel, employee training—have to be institutionalized. All of those represent a disruption to your daily routine. It may also give some of your staff and the women you help the sense that you’re turning FirstStep into a fortress.”

“It does seem antithetical to our mission,” she said. “What about the second thing? The follow-through?”

“It’s going to cost money. A lot of it.”

Amanda jumped in. “We wouldn’t have to do all the options, would we, Marty? Or all of them at once?”

“No. But few of them are cheap and most can’t be done incrementally. If you need ten cameras to cover the building, you can’t install one per year for ten years. They all have to go in at the same time to be effective. You can’t train some of the employees, but not others. And some of the options are useless without their complement.”

“Such as?”

“Installing cameras doesn’t help if no one is watching them. Who’s going to do that?”

Diane pursed her lips and Amanda looked down at the faux wood grain of the tabletop, glum. I wasn’t trying to be the bearer of bad tidings, but I wouldn’t be doing them any favors by sugarcoating the situation, either.

“This isn’t fantastic news,” Diane said after a deep breath, “but not totally unexpected. Can we work with you to get some ballpark costs on each of the options, maybe prioritize each one? Then I can go to our board and make the case for more funding.”

“Sure,” I said. “Is it that easy?”

She smiled wryly. “Not even close. But it’s more compelling going to donors with the idea that our staff might be physically assaulted than, say, asking for a new printer or replacing beds with broken box springs.”

“You’ve talked about what we can do about preventing attacks in the future,” Amanda said. “Is there anything we can do about this particular guy, the one that attacked me?”

“The cops didn’t give you anything on him?”

Diane shook her head. “They did the best they could, but he was masked and disappeared before they arrived. And I know they’ll come back in a heartbeat, but that’s not going to help if he hurts someone again.”

I thought it over. “The girlfriend . . . Karla, right? Did the cops talk to her?”

Diane and Amanda both nodded, and Diane said, “She wasn’t much help, unfortunately.”

“Did she want to help?” I asked.

“Of course she did,” Amanda replied.

But Diane tilted her head. “I know what he means. It’s not Stockholm syndrome, exactly, but many of the women blame themselves—falsely—for the failure of their relationship and the fact that it ended in violence.”

“The woman may not want to go back to him, but she doesn’t want to see him go to jail, either,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“And where does Karla stand?”

“I’d like to think that she wants her boyfriend to stop coming around, but I don’t know how far she’s willing to go to make that happen,” Diane said.

“We’re at an impasse, then,” I said. “If you have any information on this guy Fincher, though, I could pay him a visit, try to make him see reason.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Mr. Singer,” Diane said, worried. “It might seem tempting to intimidate him in order to stop him from coming here, but one lawsuit or one bad newspaper article could sink us.”

“I understand. I won’t cross any lines. But I might be able to convince this guy that his girlfriend doesn’t want to see him anymore. And neither do we.”

With the way the room was arranged, my back was half turned to the door. I heard it open and, out of habit, turned in my seat so there wouldn’t be any surprises. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Amanda’s eyes widen just as a familiar voice said, “Diane, I’m sorry to interrupt—”

It was too late; I’d turned all the way around. Standing in the doorway, leaning into the room with one hand on the knob of the door, was a good-looking woman about forty. She had shoulder-length black hair with a few strands of gray showing, a ski-slope nose, and large, dark brown eyes. Her face was . . . healthier? more animated? . . . than the last time I’d seen her, though her stance and the set of her body spoke of an impatience and need to be busy that I remembered, too.

At first, her eyes passed over me without recognition on her way to talk to Diane; then her head snapped back and we locked gazes. Her mouth dropped open, like I’m sure mine already had, as she stared at me. There was a long moment as we simply looked at each other. I stood, knocking my chair over, but by then she’d turned on her heel without a word and fled down the hall, leaving the door to shut behind her.

The blood in my face and head zinged around, doing funny things. I couldn’t tell if I was blushing or was about to pass out. I turned to Amanda. “What the hell is she doing here?”

Diane glanced between us, confused. “Is there a problem?”

Amanda turned to me with a determined look on her face. “She got in touch a few months ago and asked what she could do for the shelter. We needed the help and I didn’t see anything wrong with having her do some pro bono work for us.”

“Did you ever think about telling me?”

She shook her head. “You didn’t need to know, Marty. You two have a history, yes, but it’s not as if she dropped off the face of the earth after . . . afterwards. You moved on and so did she. And if someone wants to help, I’m not going to deny them the chance.”

“What is going on here?” Diane demanded, after following our conversation back and forth like a ping-pong match.

I ignored her, instead asking Amanda, “Does she have an office here?”

She considered, then nodded tightly. “Mine. On the right. At the end of the hall.”

I turned, wrenched the door open, and went to find Julie Atwater.

CHAPTER NINE

Julie was throwing things into a large handbag when I got to the office. Her motions were jerky, almost spastic, as she tried to grab her things and, I assume, run out of the office—and away from me—as fast as she could.

I stood in the doorway, watching her. Now that I’d followed her back here, I had no idea why I’d done it, or what I was supposed to do. I cleared my throat. “Julie.”

She ignored me, continuing to stuff pencils, notebooks, and other office products into her handbag blindly, grabbing anything she could off the desk.

“You going to put Amanda’s laptop in there, too?”

She stopped. Without turning around, she said, “What do you want?”

I did this too often, running into situations without thinking about the consequences beforehand. I cleared my throat again. “I have no idea. I saw you standing there. Following you seemed like a better idea than not following.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” Ah, you’re a silver-tongued devil, Marty Singer.

She turned to face me fully. There was a furrow of anger down the bridge of her nose. “Why not? Why not? Because you made it abundantly clear the last time I saw you that you wanted nothing to do with me. When you told me to get out of your life? Remember?”

I swallowed. It wasn’t a great memory. “I remember.”

She threw up her hands. “Then what is there to talk about?”

I ignored the question. “Why are you here?”

She turned back to her bag. “The same reason you are, I imagine. Amanda needed help, asked me, and I said yes.”

“What do you do for them?”

She sighed and turned around again. “What do you think, Marty? I’m an attorney. I give them legal advice when they need it and do pro bono work for them when a husband or a disgruntled boyfriend threatens to sue.”

I digested that. “Okay.”

She crossed her arms. “And what are you doing here?”

This felt like solid ground, but ground that was further away from what we should’ve been talking about. “Amanda asked me to check the office out and talk to Diane about security ever since Karla’s boyfriend busted in and broke Amanda’s arm.”

“So I guess you’ll be here more often?”

I thought about it. “I don’t know. I’m not doing the security personally, but I’ve offered to give Diane some tips and pointers. And see if I can run this guy down and let him know he’s not wanted.”

“Good. I hope you find him. In the meantime, let Diane know when you’re coming in and I’ll make sure I won’t be here.”

“Wait . . .” I was confused. This had gone too quickly and we hadn’t talked about the right things.

She waited. “Yes?”

“Nothing, I guess,” I said. “I just thought we might be able to . . . talk.”

“To . . . talk?” she said, mimicking me.

I frowned. “Something wrong with sitting down and chewing some of this over?”

“Because we happened to bump into each other, completely by accident? You were so interested in reviving our relationship that you waited until fate brought us together?” She shook her head. “No, Marty. You did plenty of talking last time. I got the message. And I think I’m better off for it.”

With that, she grabbed her bag, slung it over a shoulder, and brushed by me on her way out. Her heels made a clapping sound as she stomped down the hall.

Amanda found me five minutes later, still standing there. “Didn’t go over too well?”

I shook myself. “It didn’t go.”

She sighed and sat down behind her desk. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Marty. With all the craziness of Karla’s boyfriend breaking in and going to the hospital and going over security for the building, I forgot Julie was working today.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“Honest,” she said, raising her right hand.

“Okay.” I sighed. “It was just a shock for both of us, I guess.”

Amanda fiddled with a paper clip on her desk. “She was mad?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You felt strongly about what she did,” she said tentatively. “And you let her know it.”

“I know. I did.”

“Something change since then?”

I sank into a chair and put my feet on her desk, pinching the bridge of my nose to relieve the pressure building there. “Time’s passed. I’ve gotten some perspective. It was tough when it all happened. I’ve never been involved with anyone that had a direct effect on my work or, frankly, on my life.”

“You’ve been married,” she pointed out.

“Sherry had nothing to do with my work life. In fact, she and I both did everything possible to keep her shielded from it.”

“Maybe that was part of the problem.”

“Maybe. The more I sank into being a cop, the less she understood about me.” I made a face. “Anyway, that’s ancient news. I think Julie got under my skin because, back when I was saving you, she was right there, in the middle of things. After I found out she knew a hell of a lot more than she’d let on, I lost it. She’d betrayed a trust.”

“And now?”

I shrugged. “I think about it once in a while. From her point of view.”

“And?”

“I wonder, what was she supposed to do? Spill her guts? Confess all? Where would that have gotten her?” I thought about it before going on. “I would’ve raked her over the coals and that’s no incentive to open up. She went with the safest option, which was to do what she could to help me catch the lunatic going after you, and let sleeping dogs lie. Is that such a crime?”

We were quiet after my little soliloquy, each with our own unhappy thoughts of the time, just about a year ago, when Amanda and Julie both had been attacked by a man intent on re-creating the murder of Amanda’s mother. Amanda hadn’t come away unscathed, but she had at least turned her experience into positive energy. She’d been interested in women’s rights before the stalking, but it wasn’t until after we’d put the bad guy away that she’d actively sought work at a shelter. Other things had intruded in my life and taken the emotional time and space I might’ve used to think about Julie. Now I realized a small part of my head and heart had been thinking about her the whole time.

She traced imaginary circles on her desktop. “Maybe it’s worth telling Julie that. Trying again.”

I sighed and scrubbed my face with my hands. “I don’t know. Maybe you just get one shot at some things.”

CHAPTER TEN

Tartikoff and Brentwood sounded to me like two street corners in an old immigrant neighborhood. Or a steakhouse where the bar was made of dark wood and brass and they sold the beer in imperial pints. Or a folk duo from the sixties, clad in oversized fisherman’s sweaters and staring off into the distance on their faded, sepia-toned debut album cover.

This Tartikoff and Brentwood, however, was none of the above. It was DC’s leading real estate legal firm and Wendy Gerson’s former employer.

The office was downtown in the Golden Triangle, the vibrant business district in the center of DC. The office buildings rising around me sported glass, concrete, and steel on the outside, subdued geometric patterns and monolithic integrity on the inside. With their soaring atriums and uniformed desk guards, they were doing their best to look like they’d been transplanted from New York or Chicago, but since no building in the District was allowed to rise higher than the Washington Monument, the effect was muted, as if they’d all been chopped in half before making it to DC. Which was okay with me—short buildings meant more sunlight, even in the long shadows of a mid-Atlantic autumn. I’d take any kind of perkiness I could get.

The inhabitants of the Golden Triangle didn’t seem to notice. Smart-looking men and women walked with purpose along the sidewalk, chatting on phones or walking three abreast with colleagues from the office. They weren’t so different from the fast-talking lobbyists my city was famous for, but the substance of their overheard conversations tended to be more about stocks, takeovers, company R&D, and other things that were more directly related to commerce. Then again, they said that Washington lobbyists were some of the wealthiest professionals in the country, and a lot of those same topics could be coming up for a vote in Congress. I glanced at a corner sign to make sure I hadn’t wandered onto K Street by mistake.

Tartikoff and Brentwood was in the Streir building, which I knew from the four-foot-high steel letters announcing the building’s name bolted to its wall. It had the same fortresslike exterior as the buildings around it, though it was lightened by an incongruous row of waist-high, concrete flower planters in front of the building. The planters interrupted the flow of foot traffic on the sidewalk and, while the marigolds and pansies in the planters were cute—a welcome visual break in the gray and black around me—the toothed steel ridge running along the lip put the lie to it, since the teeth were there to discourage the homeless from sitting or lying down on the planters’ edges. Look. Enjoy. But not too much. No doubt the flowers had tiny alarms on them.

I walked up to the Streir and pushed the button. I wasn’t wearing the regulation black trench coat and charcoal suit of the other men around me, but the front desk guard beeped me through the door and into the marble-and-brass lobby anyway. Apparently chinos, a blue dress shirt, and a navy blazer passed the test. Maybe I was a C-level executive coming in on his day off, unable to resist the lure of the workplace. I couldn’t imagine that kind of mind-set, but I could pretend.

I signed in at the front desk. “What floor do I need for Tartikoff and Brentwood, please?”

The woman behind the desk looked up from a magazine. “Which office?”

“Tartikoff and Brentwood.”

“I heard you, honey. They own ten floors here. Which department are you going to?”

Oh. I looked down at the name Paul Gerson had given me. “Alex Montero?”

She nodded. “Acquisitions. Ninth floor. Check in with the desk there. They’ll take you to Mr. Montero’s office.”

I did the things she told me and, fifteen minutes later, found myself in a nice lobby, sitting on a leather couch, sipping coffee. Beverages were served in blue mugs that said “Tartikoff and Brentwood” in a strong, manly font next to a logo of a New World explorer peering through a looking glass into the yet-to-be-discovered distance. The coffee was good and the couch was comfortable, so I didn’t mind the wait. And Alex Montero’s office assistant was a young woman in a business suit stretched tight in just the right places, which made the wait all the more pleasant.

Until the third cup of coffee. I’d called ahead—or, rather, Paul Gerson had—so my visit couldn’t be a surprise and the reason for it had to be clear. It made me wonder if I was being stonewalled. It also made me question the influence of the precious Gerson family reputation Paul had wanted so badly to protect.

But that was speculation. Right now, I needed to make sure this trip hadn’t been a waste and only Alex Montero could do that for me. Not so long ago, when I actually had some clout, I could knock on the door, flash my badge, and get my questions answered before my coffee got cold. These days, the only thing I could flash was a library card. I walked up to the assistant’s desk, smiling and gesturing apologetically at my watch.

“I know Mr. Montero is a busy man, but I’ve got an appointment at two o’clock with a reporter friend of mine who’s covering Wendy Gerson’s murder for the Post. They’re doing a multi-issue exposé on the tragedy and they’re asking for an interview. I’d hate to be late for it. Do you think Mr. Montero’s going to be free anytime soon?”

She asked me to wait a minute, then went into the man’s office, shutting the door behind her. I went back to the coffee station, filled my cup a fourth time. I didn’t bother to sit. I was betting there’d be no need.

I’d just finished putting in the creamer when the door opened again and the assistant came out, followed by a harried-looking man in his forties. He had black hair swept straight back, a dark complexion, and black eyes. He was dressed in a suit minus the jacket, displaying a crisp white shirt and red tie with suspenders.

“Mr. Singer?” he called from the office door, then turned around and went back inside without bothering to see if I’d followed.

I smiled my thanks at the assistant and went inside. The office was everything I thought it would be. A wide wooden desk the size of a barn door held a laptop and stacks of papers scattered across its surface. Side tables, chairs, and a couch were pushed into the corners. A bookcase with the clichéd leather-bound legal tomes covered one wall. The view behind the desk was wonderful, another case of where DC office buildings weren’t like New York’s, since the same ninth-floor view in Manhattan would be of the windows across the street. Here, I could see the tops of the buildings in Rosslyn—unfettered by our silly rule about competing with the Monument—across the river in Virginia. The way his desk was situated, however, Montero’s back was turned to the view he’d no doubt worked very hard to earn.

The man in question was behind his desk, checking his phone. I sat down in one of the chairs and waited. I found it fascinating that Montero preferred to check his e-mail, or so I assumed, on his phone when his laptop was sitting right in front of him.

Eventually, he ran out of things to type or read and put his phone down. “Okay,” he said, as if I’d only just walked in. “You’re Singer?”

“Yep.”

“Paul Gerson asked me to give you a few minutes.”

“Yes, very kind of you,” I said. “So, Wendy Gerson?”

He nodded. “What about her?”

“For starters, she’s dead,” I said.

“Yeah?”

I waited a beat, then said, “I see her death has had a big impact on you.”

He threw his hands up. “We liked her. I mean, I liked her. She was a hard worker, very tough. Shame about her getting killed. But life goes on, you know?”

“Not for her,” I said. “You understand I’ve been hired by the family to look into her death?”

“Yeah.” Montero nodded several times in a row, rapid-fire. I’d just had four cups of coffee and didn’t look this jacked.

“I just wanted to get that out in the open,” I said. “Some of the questions I’ll be asking might seem impertinent or prying, but it’s really just to get some background on her life.”

He thought about it, hesitating. Weighing pros and cons. Then nod, nod, nod. “Okay.”

“First, what does your firm do and how did Wendy fit into it?”

He smiled, a flash of the teeth, suddenly comfortable again. This was stuff he knew. “Tartikoff and Brentwood is the transaction counsel for about sixty percent of the corporate real estate deals in the District.”

“And what’s a transaction counsel?”

“We’re the local team that helps put together the real estate deals that are brokered by white-shoe firms from out of town.”

“White-shoe firms?”

“Big fish. Old Yankees.”

I stared at him blankly.

“Do you know how a commercial real estate deal gets made?” he asked.

“Not as such,” I said.

“Okay, shit,” he said. He leaned forward, his chair squeaking, and made his hands into an imaginary box. “Look. A number of entities—investment firms, corporations formed for the purpose, individuals with a ton of cash—want to invest in real estate. Kind of like how you might invest in a condo in Florida. You put ten thousand down, flip it, and walk away with your initial investment plus ten or twenty grand. These guys have millions to throw around, hoping to make tens of millions.”

“Same deal, just an order of magnitude bigger,” I said to show I understood, though I thought of FirstStep, and how their lack of funds meant they had to choose between having beds or having security.

“Right. But when you’re talking that kind of money, you don’t get a doofus real estate agent out of the phone book, you get a big firm, one of the old New York or Boston groups that have been around since the Revolution.”

“Ah,” I said. “Patrician, Ivy League, yuppie. White shoes.”

“Exactly.”

“And they look out for the investors’ interests and make sure they don’t get ripped off.”

Nod, nod, nod. “Right. The investors don’t know squat, they just have money. So, the white shoes look around for a great investment. They see something in DC—it’s always been insulated from downturns in the market because of the Fed—and they want to put their money into it.”

I pulled out a notebook and a pen. “Like how big are we talking?”

He blew out a breath and shrugged extravagantly. “How big can something be? A mall, an industrial park, a stadium?”

“Why don’t the white shoes just handle the whole thing? They have to be paying you a bundle to be involved.”

“Because they don’t know the situation on the ground like we do,” he said, spreading his hands. “Most of the attorneys at a transaction firm like T and B are from right here, or at least went to law school here. They definitely pulled all of their professional time in DC.”

“So they know the permitting process, the inspections needed, the offices and officials that’ll be a pain to work with.”

“Right, right. The white shoes are investing client funds into real estate in DC, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai. They don’t have the time to learn every ordinance for each city they invest in, you know? We earn our money by quarterbacking the deal at the local level.”

“You subcontract, in short?”

“Yeah.”

“So where did Wendy Gerson fit into all of this?”

Montero leaned over and poked a button on his phone, checked the screen, then leaned back. “Hmm? Oh, Wendy was one of our transaction attorneys. One of the best. JD from Georgetown, did great work for the firm here and came up through the ranks. DC raised and bred, so she knew it perfectly. Smart as a whip, too.”

“Do you know what she was working on when she got killed?”

He raised his hands. “Sorry, I don’t.”

“Weren’t you her boss?”

“Yeah, but our people aren’t like regular lawyers. They’re part attorney, part lobbyist, part gold miner. They can research their own deals and make them happen.”

“I thought you said you were the local quarterbacks for the big firms?”

“Yeah?”

“So how do you make your own deal? Don’t you need the big firms first?”

He smirked. “How do you think the white shoes hear about those great investments? You think we sit around all day by the phone, hoping some Ivy League schmo decides to call from the clubhouse?”

“So you sniff around proactively, looking for a good setup,” I said, the lightbulb going on. “When you find something with promise, you call one of the white shoes and say, ‘You want a piece of this?’”

“Exactly. So when our attorneys aren’t closing a deal, they’re out looking for one. Which could be anywhere, coming from anyone. I only know about them when they reach the next stage, when it’s time to pick up the phone and call Boston or New York.”

I tapped the notebook on my thigh. I hadn’t written much down yet. “Your people don’t walk the streets, though, asking random strangers if they happen to know about the odd corporate development property. They have to work with someone.”

Montero poked his phone again. “Brokers. The attorneys develop relationships with local guys who keep their eyes out for a good deal coming down the pike. A tenement that’s about to get rezoned, a parking lot for sale, a row of brownstones some local slumlord wants to offload. They let us know and we start to put a deal together.”

“And the brokers get a finder’s fee?”

“Yep.”

“And you don’t know any of the brokers she worked with, I guess?”

“Sorry, my friend. Wendy liked to play it close.”

“She work with anyone here in the office who would know?”

A shake of the head. “Sorry.”

“‘Sorry’ as in she didn’t work with anyone, or ‘sorry’ as in I can’t talk to them?”

Montero just smiled, shook his head.

I tried from another angle. “Can I look at her computer? Day planner? Her desk?”

Montero gave me an I regret to inform you grimace. “Against our policy.”

“Even though it might lead to her killer?”

“There’s a lot of sensitive information about Tartikoff and Brentwood in her personal files—patented business strategies, methodologies, client financials, that kind of thing—that we can’t afford to get out into the wild.”

“We used to call that obstructing an investigation,” I said.

“If you can get a subpoena, we’ll be happy to let you look at whatever may be of help. Until then . . .” He trailed off, looking sad for me. Which I appreciated. Not a lot, since he was the source of my melancholy, but a little.

I tried a couple more sorties, but his shields were firmly in place and if he didn’t want to give me anything, he didn’t have to. I kept it cordial—who knew when I might have to come back and try again—and said my good-byes.

“Good luck with that interview,” Montero called, smirking.

“Thanks,” I said and closed the door behind me. He’d already grabbed his phone.

His receptionist looked up as I came out of her boss’s office. I smiled and walked over to her desk. “You wouldn’t happen to know the name of Wendy Gerson’s assistant, would you?”

She smiled. “I’m sorry, I don’t. But I can check with Mr. Montero. If you’ll just have a seat—”

I sighed and waved a hand, stopping her. “Never mind. I couldn’t drink another cup of coffee.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

While I’d made headway learning about what Wendy Gerson had done for a living, there was more blood to be had from this stone of Tartikoff and Brentwood, so to speak. I’d had enough caffeine for the week, but the best way to kill time surreptitiously in the modern age was at a coffee shop, the universal home away from home for newspaper readers, job seekers, and slackers. With one measly cup of joe, you could sit and write the next great American novel, read the Sunday New York Times cover to cover, or stare off into space, safe from social suspicion or scorn. The Starbucks catty-corner from the Streir building fit the bill, so half an hour before the lunch rush, I grabbed a twenty-ounce French roast, a Washington City Paper, and a window seat facing the street.

As a homicide cop, I’d kept odd hours, to put it mildly, and had eaten whenever, whatever, and wherever I could. But I’d seen enough of the DC office lunch hour to know how it worked. Until 11:55, you had your choice of restaurants and could be in and out in a few minutes if you were doing takeout. At noon, you were joining the rest of the city in making your way to the sidewalk. At 12:05, you’d better push back that one o’clock meeting to two, because you were in a line stretching out the door and around the block. Your daily productivity had just taken a hit that would take until late afternoon to get back.

For somebody doing an impromptu stakeout, though, it was wonderful. Not only could I be close to positive where my target would be within a ninety-minute window, I knew where they’d be and what they’d be doing. And once I figured out the exact where, I could close in and stand three feet away without fear of being made, just another dummy who’d gotten in the lunch line too late. Now I just needed the who.

I watched the bodies coming out of the Streir building, waiting to make my move. I passed on the stern-looking, gray-haired men in suits, the older women dressed in seven-hundred-dollar ensembles. These would be the real lawyers of the place, suspicious and tight-lipped. No mileage there.

But there wasn’t a law firm in the world that didn’t run on the efforts of its administrative assistants, paralegals, and mailroom grunts. And if Tartikoff and Brentwood leased ten floors in a twelve-story building, chances were good that anyone coming out for lunch worked for them.

At 12:17, a gaggle of millennials came out of the Streir building, three girls in knee-length skirts and trendy blouses and a guy—gawky, with a pronounced Adam’s apple and a suit that fit fine, but somehow still seemed too large for him. They burst onto the sidewalk with an unconscious self-absorption, an insouciance that was simultaneously charming and profoundly irritating. Even as I packed up my coffee and newspaper to follow them, I could see them gabbling to each other, walking four abreast, unconsciously plowing through oncoming walkers. For them, the world consisted of office complaints and post-work happy hours, random hookups and weekend party plans. And not much else.

I snorted at my middle-aged disapproval. That was the reward of youth. You got good health, a vigorous sex drive, and a worldview that encompassed you and your environment out to about three feet. In return, you got shitty pay, dead-end work, and the scorn of your elders. It’s how it had always worked.

I slid off my stool and headed out of the coffee shop, following the four to a pastry and sandwich shop on the same block as the Streir. They probably had to be back in the office before their bosses, leaving just enough time to grab a bite, gossip, then run to their cubes before their lazy behavior could be noticed and noted in their annual review as an Improvement Opportunity.

I tossed my cup in a trash bin, then joined the line two back from my targets, well within eavesdropping distance. The conversation was less than scintillating. There were a lot of likes and yeahs and I know . . . right?s. Topics ranged over the ones I’d already guessed—who was sleeping with whom, who was likely to get fired for coming in with a hangover—plus a lot of stuff I couldn’t follow about music and technology. I think. Most of it left me in the dust. I couldn’t tell if they were talking about video games or bands. Or clothes.

This occupied the entire length of time we were in line together. Each one of them picked a “make your own sandwich” option while I grabbed a premade salad out of a cooler, which let me catch up with them—as I was checking out, they were just getting their sandwiches. I poked around the condiment bar long enough to see where they were sitting, then muscled my way to a nearby single bar stool to keep listening. The effort earned me a dirty look from a guy in a gray suit who had been two seconds from planting his butt on the same perch.

I dug into my salad and kept my ears open, sitting through more of the same inane conversation as I’d been treated to in line. Not long after they sat down, though, talk inevitably circled back to work and the latest goings-on . . . including the office shake-up a visit by a certain nosy ex-cop had caused.

“Hey, what the hell was that meeting all about?” a blonde girl with bangs asked. “That’s, like, the second time ever I’ve been told to go to the main conference room. I thought they might talk about holiday bonuses. Instead we’re getting reamed out by Tartikoff himself.”

“And they made us late for lunch,” the guy said.

“And why are they so worried about Gerson?” asked a curly-haired brunette picking at a fruit salad with a plastic fork.

“That’s Ms. Gerson to you,” the guy said pointedly, and the table laughed.

“I couldn’t make the meeting,” said the last in the group, a bottle blonde with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. “That asshole Perry has had me doing data entry since I got in. What did they say?”

Blonde #1 popped another fry in her mouth. “Nobody’s supposed to talk about Gerson—Ms. Gerson—to anyone, no matter who asks. All questions are to go to Media Relations, no exceptions. Severe disciplinary action for anyone violating the directive.”

“Why now?” the brunette asked. “She died, what, two weeks ago?”

The blonde shrugged. “Something must’ve happened. Or they meant to tell everybody right after it happened and finally got around to it. They’re not exactly lightning fast on things.”

“Like approving my vacation days,” the guy said.

“You worked with her, Caitlin,” the brunette said to Blonde #2.

“Yeah,” Caitlin replied, busy scraping the bottom of a cup of yogurt with her spoon. “She was a bitch, but I learned a lot.”

“Now what are you going to do?”

A shrug. “I don’t know. I was counting on her to give me a recommendation for school. Now I have to start over with someone else and do their grunt work for a year instead. Montero sent an e-mail, though, and said he wanted to talk to me later today.”

“They find out who killed her?”

Blonde #2 shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. If I didn’t need that letter, though, I’d give them a medal.”

“God, what’s it like to get pushed in front of a Metro train?” the brunette wondered out loud.

“You know she took some sick days before it happened?” the guy said, grinning like an imp. “She said she was feeling run down.”

“Billy!” all three said at the same time.

The hits kept on coming and the girls groaned at every one, but they egged Billy on when he showed signs of slowing down. Apparently, Ms. Gerson was not a popular figure at the firm, at least not with the proles. I hung on for the whole thing—it was gratifying to hear my visit had shaken things up at the staid law firm—eating my salad slower and slower to maintain my façade. I needn’t have bothered. Occasionally, their eyes would slide over me as they spoke, but they were looking for other attractive or interesting people—specifically, those born since Bill Clinton was in office, not a lanky, grizzled fifty-something oddly obsessed with eating his greens and flipping through a wrinkled copy of the City Paper.

Their conversation turned to other things like Macy’s sales and what kinds of cupcakes they’d get after lunch. I kept just one ear on their table while I read the newspaper. There wasn’t anything newsworthy to grab my attention and I was almost blindly turning pages when my eyes landed on a headline: “Cancer Deaths of the Past Decade.” My breath caught in my chest in a weird way. Almost against my will, I started reading the article, which—true to the title—was a memoriam of movie stars, musicians, and politicians who had died of my disease in the past ten years. I was astonished when I saw the number of names in it, but worse was the almost physical reaction I had as I skimmed the article. In my mind’s eye, all I could see was the little white postcard on my refrigerator at home, waiting to be taken care of with a phone call to Dr. Demitri. An odd flush spread through my neck and chest. I angrily and noisily crumpled the page into a ball, nearly blowing my cover. My targets paused and looked over at me.

They went back to their conversation only after I made a big deal of ignoring them and chasing the last molecule of crouton around the edges of my plastic container. I quit after a minute, tossed my plastic fork and napkin into it, then stood and dumped the whole thing in the trash. I left the eatery, then headed back to Starbucks, where I bought another twenty-ounce ticket to sit by the window, depressed and irritable and trying to erase the newspaper article from memory. Ten minutes later, the four paralegals marched up the sidewalk exactly like they’d walked down it. While the guy and the bottle blonde turned into the Streir, the girl they’d called Caitlin and the brunette peeled away from the group and walked down a few more storefronts to a cupcake shop.

A few minutes later, each came out holding a massive pink snowball cupcake that looked as big as their heads even from across the street. They laughed as they tried to figure out the best way to tackle the things. The brunette decided to tease the icing off with a finger, one swipe at a time, while Caitlin dove into the side of her cupcake like a great white shark. They were still working on them as they walked back into the Streir and disappeared.

I opened my notebook to a blank page and jotted down a simple message: “I need to talk to you about Wendy Gerson. Please call or e-mail me as soon as possible.” I folded the page twice and tucked an MPDC business card from the old days into it. Bumming an envelope from the kid at the register, I put the note and the card inside and sealed it, then wrote “Caitlin” on the front, hoping I’d spelled it right.

The lunch hour was winding down, but that meant everyone wanted one last boost before heading back to the office, so the cupcake shop was filled to capacity. I waited patiently and, by the time it was my turn, I was the only one left in the shop.

A frazzled-looking black girl in a candy-striped apron smiled at me. “Thanks for waiting. Can I get you something?”

I smiled back. “I wish you could. I’m diabetic, but my niece is a huge fan of this place. She works over at the Streir building? In fact, I bet she was just here. Cute blonde with a ponytail? She loves your—what do you call them?—snowballs.”

“Oh, yeah. We get a lot of the Streir people coming in here,” she said. “Something about practicing law must give people a real sweet tooth.”

“Her birthday is in a few days and I was hoping to leave a surprise for her. Do you think I could buy some cupcakes now and leave a note for her when she comes in tomorrow?”

“Sure. Why not?”

We spent a minute picking out a dozen cupcakes from the list—red velvet, peanut butter crunch, death by chocolate—all of them with enough sugar to rot every tooth in my head or slow my heartbeat down to a low ebb. I made sure she picked out two snowballs as part of the bunch.

“Wow, when did cupcakes get so expensive?” I asked when the girl totaled the order, thinking I could fill my gas tank for the same price.

“They’re artisan,” the girl said.

I glanced at the twelve cupcakes. “I guess they are.”

She wrapped a purple ribbon around the box, then grabbed a pen and paper and looked at me. “What’s your niece’s name?”

“Caitlin.”

“Last name?”

“Somterbjekyan,” I said, using the name of a criminology instructor I’d hated back at the police academy. Her hand, poised and ready, wavered and she bit her lip. I gave her a second, then said, “Maybe just write Caitlin?”

She put the pen down. “Okay.”

“Would you mind giving her this when she gets the cupcakes?” I asked, handing her the envelope.

“No card?” she asked.

“Cards are so impersonal, don’t you think? I wrote her a little poem instead.”

“Oh, that’s sweet,” she said, and slipped the envelope under the ribbon.

I paid, tipped the girl excessively, and left. Getting Caitlin to talk to me with a stunt like this was a long shot, but she hadn’t seemed real pleased with her prospects at Tartikoff and Brentwood, and the way she’d attacked her cupcake spoke of a headstrong and independent spirit. Or maybe she just liked snowball cupcakes. Either way, the high-calorie bribe and the false authority of my old MPDC card might spark some curiosity in her, get her to talk to me. If I wasn’t going to get anywhere through the formal channels, I might as well bribe my way with sugar.

CHAPTER TWELVE

“That’s it?” I asked.

“Yep,” Chuck Rhee said, without taking his eyes away from the monitor. He was sitting at FirstStep’s reception desk, putting the finishing touches on a set of security cameras I’d installed for them. Amanda, Diane, and I peered over his shoulder, watching him make arcane adjustments to the settings on the screen. Rhee was a friend of mine from the Gangs division of the Arlington PD, though dressed in a black T-shirt, copper-and-twine bracelets, and wraparound shades, he looked more like a vapid club-goer on his way to a rave. Spiked hair and a couple of very obvious tattoos reinforced the impression. But he was a damn good cop and someone who would drop everything to answer a call for help.

I also knew he had a knack for computers and he certainly seemed to be doing something remarkable while we watched, though he could’ve been ordering lunch online for all I understood. While I was good on the physical security issues, like where to place the cameras, and I didn’t need help using a tape measure for the cabling, I was lost when it came to integrating the camera into FirstStep’s Internet service or, frankly, getting the most out of the $500 package we’d ordered.

“Eight wide-angle cameras, three-point-six millimeter with night vision, good out to sixty feet, all patched into this central display for live review,” Rhee said, gesturing to the segmented picture on-screen. “The feed simultaneously goes to this hard drive”—he backed up his chair so we could see the small black box resting on the floor—“and is automatically recorded with a date and time stamp.”

“Does it say which camera is doing the recording?” Amanda asked.

“Yep.” Using the computer’s mouse, he tapped a few times and the feed for the camera covering the maintenance door in the rear of the building took over the whole screen. He pointed to the words “CAMERA THREE” in the bottom right-hand portion of the picture.

“Do they run continuously or by motion detection?” I asked.

“Either one. Or a mix. Continuous recording will fill the hard drive in a week, though; then you have to offload or erase the data.”

“What about motion detection only?” I asked.

“You’ll get two months.”

“Maybe the mix,” I suggested. “Cover the front and back door continuously and set the others to motion. You’ll get a month, month and a half out of it, then.”

“Motion only should be fine. With so many people coming and going, the cameras covering the front are as good as being on continuously,” Amanda said. She’d studied everything Rhee had been doing and seemed to understand the security and tech aspects equally.

“Good point,” Rhee said. “Here’s a nice little feature, too. Since this is hooked into your network, you can have the system e-mail you when one of the motion sensors goes off. You can even patch into the active camera remotely.”

“What if you’re not by your computer?” I asked, then instantly regretted it as all three of them looked at me. Even Diane, who was probably my age, had a look on her face that was equal parts pity and amusement.

“Your phone, Marty,” Amanda stage-whispered. “You can get the alert on your phone.”

“Damn it,” I said.

“Just testing us. Right, Singer?” Rhee asked, grinning at me over his shoulder. I gave him the finger and he laughed. “You want me to set your phone to get the alerts?”

“Is that okay with you two?” I asked Diane and Amanda. They nodded and I handed my phone to Rhee.

“I hate to mention this,” Diane said, “but some of the ladies who watch the front desk aren’t the most . . . vigilant.”

“They play solitaire on the computer all day,” Amanda said.

“We can set the motion detectors to play a sound when they sense something,” Rhee said, without raising his head from my phone. “For the front door, you have the camera on the dedicated monitor, so they’ll at least be able to see when someone’s on the porch, even if they’re ignoring the other seven cameras.”

“What if they turn the sound down?” Diane asked, looking worried.

“Fire them,” Amanda and I said at the same time. Rhee grinned again. “Look,” I said, “I understand they’re not getting paid big bucks to sit at a desk all day, but we’re not playing around. If this clown Karla’s hiding from decides to do something worse than pushing his way into the clinic—like waiting by the back door to attack someone—then the least your receptionists can do is keep the volume on.”

Diane nodded. Rhee handed me my phone and showed me how to access the cameras remotely. When I saw how clear it was—how easy all of this was—I wondered how crooks got away with anything anymore. Who needed cops when you could just record it all and send it to a magistrate?

Diane and Amanda each took turns playing around with the security interface on the computer, then Rhee looked around at us. “Is that it? Think you got it?”

We said yes, Diane and Amanda thanked him, then he and I walked out to his car, an Acura Integra so hyper-modified that it was difficult to tell what was left of the original.

“You and I know a couple of cameras ain’t going to stop someone who really wants in,” he said. As we walked, he reached into his precisely ripped jeans and pulled out some matches and a pack of cigarettes. He shook the pack until one slid out, then tapped it butt-first against the front of the pack.

“I know. We’re working on some other strategies, but they don’t have two nickels to rub together. That system we just put in almost broke the bank.”

He lit the cigarette and I wrinkled my nose at the acrid smell coming off the match. “They do abortions?”

I shook my head. “No. They refer, I think, but they’re not set up for it clinically. It’s more of a shelter with some added services. A place to sleep, counseling, job training, day care, some transportation.”

He took a drag, blew it to the side. “Good. A videotape won’t discourage some numb-nuts from shooting the staff or chucking a bomb through the door.”

“I know. It’s barely enough to stop this guy that wants to break in to see his girl so bad.”

We had reached his Integra and I resisted rolling my eyes when Rhee pulled out a bandana from a back pocket and rubbed away a smudge on the chrome of the driver’s-side door trim. Satisfied, he put the bandana away. “What are you going to do when you get an alert telling you it’s more than a breeze going down the alley behind their building?”

“Hop in the car, come down here, and inquire of the miscreant as to the nature of his intrusion,” I said.

“And if he don’t want to tell you?”

“Then I may have to assert my right to know. Vigorously.”

“Out of range of the cameras, right?”

“Naturally.”

“That’s what I want to hear,” he said and he got into his car.

I leaned down to look in. “Thanks, Rhee. I appreciate it.”

He gave a chin-lift of acknowledgment. “No sweat. I got a little sister. Had her own run-ins with some guy she was dating. Smacked her around, thought he was tough.”

“Was he?”

Rhee grinned sharkily. “Nope. She’s a second gup in hapkido. Went red belt on his ass.”

“If you say so.”

“Come on, Singer. Hapkido. National martial art of Korea.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s just say she softened him up and I finished him off,” he said, making a flat gesture with his hand. “But if she wasn’t so good with her hands or I wasn’t around, maybe she’d need a place like this. So I’m happy to help.”

We bumped fists through the window, then he said, “This guy that broke in before, he’s the one that busted Amanda’s arm?”

“Yeah.”

“You need some help, uh, asserting yourself and there’s time to call, I’m in.”

“You got it.”

I watched him drive away with a roar, the Integra’s glasspack muffler damaging my hearing and threatening to break all the windows in a one-block radius, then went back inside. Amanda and Diane were still playing with the camera system. Diane was especially entranced by the doodad.

Amanda turned to me. “Thanks, Marty. And thank Chuck when you see him again, will you?”

“Sure. I think he’s looking forward to helping out more.”

“That’s wonderful,” Diane said, though I don’t think she understood the nature of the help Rhee had been offering. Amanda gave me a knowing look. I smiled back.

“What else would you recommend, Mr. Singer?” Diane asked.

“The downtown YMCA offers self-defense classes you should make mandatory for your staff. I know the managing director down there. She’ll give you a discount if you can get everyone to come in at once.”

“That would be wonderful,” Diane said, “though I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“It’s just a way to protect yourselves in a pinch, not as a solution in and of itself,” I said. “I’d also like to bring a local MPDC sergeant around to explain a couple of things. The real way to get harassment to stop is to catch the jerks doing the harassing and press charges. Some time in lockup is the best way to get them off your back permanently.”

“And the police officer will explain those things?” Diane asked.

“Right. The cameras are a good first step in evidence gathering. But then the way you respond to harassment or even an attack might help in court. If you know some of that before an altercation, you’ll have a better chance of pressing a charge and making it stick.”

“Can’t you just do it, Marty?” Amanda asked. “I trust you to explain it better than someone we don’t know.”

“Thanks, kiddo. Don’t worry, I’ll be there and I can answer questions,” I said. “But I’m retired. I can’t arrest anyone. If we get your local ward cops in here to explain things instead, they’ll remember you when you make that call.”

“Get a good rapport going, keep lines of communication open,” Amanda said. “They might give us the benefit of the doubt if it ever comes down to our word against his.”

“Exactly.” I gave her an appraising look. “Jeez, it’s like you went to college or something.”

We talked about the YMCA classes and the best time to get the FirstStep staff together for training. In the middle of our conversation, the front buzzer sounded and we all turned to look at the computer monitor to see Julie Atwater looking up at the newly installed camera. My heart went bahdum-dum-dum and I could tell both Amanda and Diane were struggling not to look in my direction. No one moved to buzz Julie in, however, and her expression went from mild curiosity to consternation and she reached out and leaned on the bell.

Diane hit the button and the front door unlocked with a loud clack. Julie walked through the door with a scowl on her face that rippled in several interesting ways when she saw who was behind the desk. I tried on a stupid smile and Diane said, “Hello, Julie,” as she walked by. Julie nodded and passed through the hall door back to the offices without a word. The three of us stood in an awkward semicircle, with nothing to look at except the monitor, which stayed stuck in time, recording a gray patch of empty sidewalk.

Diane cleared her throat. “Well, I should get back to work. Thank you for all your help, Mr. Singer. Perhaps you can arrange the details of that training with Amanda?”

“Sure,” I said, still staring at the monitor.

Diane said her good-byes and followed Julie through the door back to the offices. Amanda was quiet for a moment, shuffling from foot to foot, then asked, “Are you okay?”

“Sure. I’m eating right, go for a run once in a while. I cut salt out of my diet—”

“Marty.”

I sighed, glanced at her. “What do you want me to say? We had a forty-five-second conversation in your office. She told me what an asshole I was, I basically agreed, and then we had nothing else to talk about.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“A plan?”

“Are you going to try talking to her again?”

I leaned against the desk, my hands in my pockets. “Because the first time went so well.”

“How was it supposed to go, Marty?” she asked. She went to flick a stray lock of hair away from her face, a patented Amanda gesture, then realized she was trying to use her broken arm and blew it away instead. “It was the first time you’d seen or talked to each other in more than a year. She was surprised, you were surprised. What’d you expect? That she’d fall into your arms?”

“No, not exact—”

“You have to keep trying,” Amanda rolled on. “These things don’t get solved with just one chance encounter.”

“I didn’t think—”

“She’s been thinking about this as much as you have, you know. And she might seem like she’s in control, but I can guarantee you, she’s scared, angry, and nervous, too.”

“Okay, maybe what I can—”

“You can’t simply barge into her life and expect to pick up where you left off, which was a flaming ruin after you threw her out of your hospital room—”

“Jesus, I get it,” I said in exasperation. “I have to try again, go slow, and be persistent.”

Amanda got a coy little smile on her face. “Good. Glad to know some of this is getting through.”

“Thanks, Coach,” I said sourly. “Any tips for how to start?”

She pursed her lips, thinking. “Treat it like one of your cases.”

“Sorry?”

“You wouldn’t arrest someone without collecting evidence, interviewing suspects, looking over the situation, would you?”

I folded my arms over my chest. “You want me to build a murder case against Julie Atwater?”

“No, just the process. Think hard about how you want to approach things, don’t let them happen to you. Call her. Proceed cautiously. There’ll be some setbacks, some problems, but hopefully you’ll be able to move forward, make some progress. At some point, you might even meet for coffee or something.”

“Then slap the cuffs on her.”

“Marty, be serious. I’m trying to help,” Amanda said, then got a wicked look on her face. “Though if you get her in handcuffs, I’d say you’ve closed the case.”

“Oh my God.”

She laughed and put her hand on my arm. “Think about it and give her a call.”

“She probably changed her number after I kicked her out.”

Amanda sighed. “Murder case, remember? Try role-playing.”

“Like what?”

“You need information you don’t have, right? How’d you get it before?”

“What, you’re my snitch now?”

She looked at me expectantly.

“You . . . work with Julie,” I said haltingly. Amanda nodded, eyes bright. “So you probably have access to her contact information.” She made a keep going motion. “Uh, can you get me her number?”

“I’d be happy to, Marty.” She plucked a FirstStep card from a holder on the desk, flipped it over, and scribbled a number on it from memory, then handed it to me. “I’m so glad you asked.”

I took the card, looked it over. “You don’t sound like a snitch.”

“It’s just a metaphor,” she said. “Anyway, I have to get to work. Is this enough to get you started?”

“I guess so.”

“Great,” she said, gave me a hug, then shoved me in the direction of the front door. “Don’t back out on this. You’re both worth it.”

I walked out of FirstStep, staring at the card in my hand, bemused. It was only when I got to my car that I realized my confusion had been caught on tape . . . and that wasn’t something Amanda was likely to erase anytime soon.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The next day, when I didn’t get a call from a cupcake-laden Caitlin, I phoned Paul Gerson and asked him to arrange a meeting with his parents. He told me to give him fifteen minutes, which I did, then he called back to ask if a midmorning visit would work. I told him it would, hung up, and went to put on my preppy best. The result was a blue oxford tucked into dark jeans with loafers and a tweedy something-or-other patterned blazer that hid my gun and the fact that my belt was cinched down to the second hole.

The upgrade to my normal attire was required because the Gersons lived in McLean, a wee little burg on the Virginia side of the Potomac that routinely makes it into all of the top ten lists of wealthiest neighborhoods in the nation. It’s old money, made generations ago. The kind that is accustomed to having a place at the table on matters of state, business, and culture. Ethel Kennedy had kept a home there for decades, as had half the cabinet members of the past three administrations. Oddly, it’s also home to CIA headquarters, but the campus was so buried in a thick forest of pines, sweet gums, and tulip poplars you wouldn’t know it was there unless you caught sight of the agency’s discreet sign along the George Washington Parkway.

While the parkway has its charms, I came at McLean from a different route, Old Dominion Drive, which took me through the more pedestrian suburbs of Arlington County. Modest single-family abodes and garden apartments fell behind as I wound through the lawns and parks and playgrounds of Northern Virginia’s upper middle class. And while the redbrick and white-pillared homes along the way were still out of the price range of a retired cop, they wouldn’t have cut the mustard as garages for the homes that lay on the outskirts of McLean . . . and those were still a tier below the estates that were tucked out of sight along the ridge overlooking the Potomac, protected by high walls, security cameras, and key-coded gates.

The Gersons lived in a home somewhere between the second and third tier. It had a gate, but not much of a wall, and you could see it from the road—a detail that brought its value down by the price of an Aston Martin or two. The style was Swiss chalet, with an unsettling hint of Teutonic castle. It was a ponderous, traditional look, but one that I was betting had graced more than one magazine cover. I drove to the gate and buzzed the VISITOR button. The telltale electric buzz followed a moment later and the gate swung away.

Although there was a triple-stall garage, a boxy white Mercedes and a steel-blue Jaguar sat in the circular drive not far from the front door. I parked behind the Jag and turned the car off. I pulled out the picture Paul Gerson had given to me of Wendy and looked at it for a moment, trying to imagine her growing up in the house in front of me. I wondered if the picture had been taken here, in the backyard, or somewhere else. My speculation was interrupted when the door opened and a tallish, older man—thinning blond comb-over, golf course fit, Bermuda tan—came out to the stoop to greet me. I put away the picture and got out of the car.

“Mr. Singer?”

“Mr. Gerson?”

He nodded curtly. “Terry.” I shook his hand and he motioned me to come inside. I glanced around a stone foyer with a Turkish rug on the floor that seemed a shame to wipe my feet on and a dim light coming from burnished wall sconces. Gerson shut the door and showed me to a living room featuring a vaulted ceiling and more of the medieval decor. The room was misnamed, since the chairs and couches had almost certainly never been sat in, and I was relieved when we passed through it and into a side room that was instantly recognizable as the place where people actually spent some time. A comfortable-looking couch and two well-worn chairs—one an original Eames, with a Navajo blanket thrown over the back—nuzzled a coffee table where, judging from the scuff marks, feet had been propped up on more than one evening. The furniture was placed in a semicircle around a homey fieldstone hearth. A burnt-down pile of cherry-red logs popped and snapped in the fireplace.

A slender woman in her early sixties sat on the couch with her hands clasped, staring into the fire. Straight blonde hair going gray fell to her shoulders. She wore an emerald-green sweater that was matched with a knee-length windowpane tweed skirt. Her head came up sharply as I walked into the room, then she stood, hand outstretched.

“Mr. Singer. I’m Sarah Gerson.”

“Mrs. Gerson,” I said. Her handshake was firmer than her husband’s. They gestured me to have a seat and I lowered myself into one of the recliners, while she sat back on the couch, with her husband taking a seat beside her.

“Thanks for seeing me. I think Paul filled you in?” They both nodded. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you,” Sarah said. A tremor went through Terry’s face. “Paul said you were actually there when Wendy was killed?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Can you tell us about it?”

Terry paled and I hesitated. Many survivors of homicide victims ask how “it” happened, but they don’t want to know, not really. Or shouldn’t. There’s a natural human desire to deconstruct the scene and the situation of a murder because, in the normal course of our lives, to understand something is to control it. To stop it. To undo it. And, not to be unfair, this was especially true for people like the Gersons, who were probably accustomed to saying “how?” or “how much?” to change the circumstances of their lives.

But murder is like an icy spot on the road, or a fall down the stairs, or a plane crash. Understanding the hows and whys might help society at large—might even stop the next one from happening—but having all the facts has never helped a grieving individual or a family in distress, not in my experience. And it often did more harm than good. Just because you had all the pieces didn’t mean you had the glue, and often the only thing that remained was desolation.

Sarah saw my reluctance. “I’m not interested in torturing myself, Mr. Singer. I want to catch whoever killed my daughter. That’s all.”

“The details aren’t pretty, Mrs. Gerson,” I said. “They never are.”

“I understand.”

I gave them a brief, abridged version of the events. Terry rubbed a hand over his face almost continuously and Sarah Gerson’s mouth turned steadily downward as I spoke, but neither interrupted until I finished by describing my meeting with their son.

“There was nothing you could do,” Terry said, his voice hovering between statement and question.

“Of course he couldn’t, Terry,” Sarah said tartly. “No one expects to see someone get pushed in front of a train. It must’ve happened in seconds.”

Her husband colored at her tone, but said nothing. Most people would jump in at this point, to try and alleviate the awkwardness, but I waited. The victim’s parents aren’t typically suspects in a case like this, but you never count anyone out.

There was a pause, then Terry cleared his throat. “The police have told us that they don’t have a suspect.”

“That’s what they’ve told me, as well,” I said. “It happened quickly, with plenty of eyewitnesses and even some video footage, but no one got a good look at the killer. Even when I chased him, I couldn’t get more than a general sense of his build and his health. He covered five hundred yards at a run, which tells me the man’s an athlete. But that’s about it. And when you don’t get anything from the scene, you have to turn to old-fashioned detecting.”

“Such as talking to the family,” Sarah said.

“Exactly.”

“What can we tell you?”

“The thing that stands out about Wendy’s killing,” I said slowly, choosing my words, “is the intimate nature of it.”

“Intimate?” Terry asked, frowning. “You mean someone she knew?”

“Not exactly. Friends and acquaintances are definitely part of that circle. What I mean is, someone emotionally involved with Wendy, even briefly. Paul told me Wendy wasn’t seeing anyone, but normally in a case like this the first person we’d look at would be a jilted husband or an angry boyfriend.”

“As far as I know, Paul is right,” Sarah said. “And I think she would’ve told me.”

“Intimate could also mean a homeless man she’d told to get away from her or a guy trying to make a pass that she rebuffed,” I said. “Truly random murders are rare. Most people are killed by someone they know. But in the few instances when the murder is committed by a complete stranger, the method is often different. Impersonal.”

“Pushing someone in front of a train doesn’t fit that description,” Sarah said.

“No. It’s also incredibly spur of the moment, which implies rage or passion. If she was like any other daily commuter, we would start looking for someone who knew her schedule and had planned the thing in cold blood. But Paul told me Wendy almost never took the Metro, that he couldn’t remember the last time she had, in fact. This scenario was almost a singular occurrence.”

Her eyes narrowed. “The killer followed her.”

I inclined my head. “So the question is, who knew Wendy well enough—and hated or loved or was attracted enough to her—to follow her and kill her right then and there? No planning, no forethought. Just rage.”

Not having known Wendy personally, the conjecturing was nothing more than part of a working process for me, not an emotional one. And Sarah had been fairly businesslike and quick to grasp much of what I was saying, so I’d felt almost as if I’d been talking with another objective soul about Wendy’s murder. But I hadn’t been paying much attention to Terry Gerson. Without warning, he shot to his feet and walked stiff-jointed, like a tin soldier, out of the room.

Sarah’s eyes followed him out of the room, equal parts worried and irritated, though she said nothing as he disappeared out of view. She turned to me. “How can we help you with that question, Mr. Singer?”

If she was going to ignore her husband, I guess I had to, too. “Paul told me that Wendy was smart, driven, and no-nonsense, and that attitude could seem abrasive to just about anyone. Family didn’t appear off-limits, so I assume friends, coworkers, and neighbors weren’t, either. With the circumstances I just described about her murder, it would help to know if she’d had any run-ins with confidants or anyone close to her.”

“Paul didn’t know?”

“He intimated that he and his sister didn’t see much of each other,” I said, “and that he was the target of her scorn from time to time. So he may not be the best source. Sometimes daughters will confide things in a parent that they wouldn’t tell a sibling, and vice versa.”

She sniffed. “Paul was always too sensitive. Wendy just wanted him to try harder, that’s all. He’s been skating by his entire life.”

I said nothing. She tapped a fingernail on the wooden arm of the couch. “I can’t think of anything specific. I know she was excited by something happening at work, which was unusual for her. She liked to try and impress me by understating her accomplishments, not celebrating them, so I knew whatever this thing was, it was important to her.”

“No specifics?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I’m sure Paul could get you an appointment with her firm.”

“Been there. They were less than, uh, loquacious.”

“Really? I’ll have to have a talk with someone down there.”

I thought about my hook in the water, the cupcakes I’d bought for Wendy Gerson’s assistant, Caitlin. “Please hold off until you hear from me. That might come in handy later, but I’m working an angle down there and would like to see if it pans out.”

She shrugged. “Very well. Please let me know if I can help. I passed the bar with Brentwood and won’t hesitate to pull strips off him if he won’t cooperate.”

“Peachy,” I said.

I pulled out a notebook and we proceeded through a list of Wendy’s former boyfriends, employers, bosses, law school professors, and so on. It was useful, but frustrating, as nothing and no one stood out to Sarah Gerson as a threat to Wendy from any of those areas, but good detective work demanded that each avenue be explored. After forty minutes, we’d exhausted most of the possibilities that I could think of. The fire had died down and was little more than a pile of scarlet lumps on the hearth. One of my shoulders was toasty, the other chilled. I stood and shook Sarah Gerson’s hand. “I’d like to come back and talk to your husband later, Mrs. Gerson.”

She tsked and shook her head in exasperation. “I’d better go see if he’s even capable of talking. He’s such a gentle soul. Paul takes after him.”

“And I guess Wendy, after you,” I said.

She smiled. “So I’ve been told.”

When I got home, I set out for a light jog.

I resist exercise like anyone else my age. I know it’s good for me, but that’s a very distant benefit when I’m sitting on the couch, watching the second half of a Redskins game or reruns of The Rockford Files. The biggest encouragement had come from Leah at the oncologist’s, who had practically ordered me to work out during my chemo regimen, since it helped rebuild the white blood cells that had been nuked by the stuff that was fighting the cancer. Since then, I’d tried to keep a twice- or thrice-weekly exercise regimen, and it had helped everything from my appetite to my self-confidence.

Right now, though, what I needed was some time to think. My verbal tête-à-tête with Alex Montero and subsequent sleuthing with the junior staff of Tartikoff and Brentwood had kept me occupied for a day or so, and my trip out to McLean to see the Gersons had been mildly illuminating, but I knew I needed to give some serious thought to one particular subject that had nothing to do with Wendy Gerson.

And had everything to do with Julie Atwater.

I trotted down the front steps of my Cape Cod, went out to the street, and turned left, my breath already visible. I set a sedate pace that would hopefully leave me with enough in the tank to finish two or three miles. Enough time to think about things I’d rather just solved themselves. But wouldn’t.

In 1996, Julie had been the defense attorney for a dirty cop named Michael Wheeler, the guy I’d been convinced had killed Amanda’s mother. The case against Wheeler had appeared airtight . . . until the loss of a very incriminating recording, damn near identifying him by name. But even if the tape had made an appearance at the trial, I learned later that it might not have made a difference. A milquetoast performance by the prosecutor that I’d originally put down to apathy because of the missing evidence turned out to be intentional sabotage. And not only had he been holding back, he’d been doing the unthinkable: feeding the defense—feeding Julie—everything he knew and everything he was planning.

Only afterward, when the dust had settled and I was recovering from a gunshot wound, had things slipped into place. That Julie was not only guilty of collusion in that trial so many years ago, but that she also had known about so much more in the midst of our trying to stay alive. It had felt like an unforgivable betrayal at the time, made even more painful by the fact that she and I—pressed together by the shared danger—had gotten involved both romantically and physically.

The memories hurt. We’d spent hours talking to each other about our lives, our pasts, our futures. She’d shared memories of her mother dying of cancer while I thought I was in the process of being killed by it, too. She’d spent a decade trying to overcome the fear and disgust created by working with Wheeler, a case that should’ve launched a successful career as a defense attorney but turned out to be a black mark against her. She’d been tough under fire, showing courage in the face of real danger, and smarts when it was called for.

All of it had been irrelevant the night I’d figured out what she’d known. What she’d done. That she’d hidden what she knew from me. The fact that she’d been regretful, but not contrite, about what she’d done had stuck in my craw, made her transgressions seem perhaps worse than they really were. And I’d tossed her out of my life, just like she’d said in Amanda’s office at FirstStep.

A pain like an icicle sliding in and out of my lungs stopped the reminiscing. I was sucking wind like I’d just run a forty-yard dash, not set out on a serene three-mile jog. So much for leaving some gas in the tank. I didn’t remember any of the past ten minutes—I’d probably run at a full sprint the whole way. Hands on hips, I walked for a block before trying to pick up my pace again.

Which gave me time to examine some things, ask myself some questions. Like, who the hell was I to pass judgment on someone else? And, how long could I hold Julie accountable for what she’d done? And, did I really give a shit anymore or was I just grandstanding for the sake of my own pride? Julie hadn’t been interested in talking at FirstStep. Not that I could blame her, but I wasn’t even sure what I wanted out of a conversation with her. Did I just want to apologize and leave it at that? Or did I want something more?

Unfortunately, there wouldn’t be any answers to my questions, at least not right away, because that’s when Dods called to let me know that Alex Montero had been found in his car, shot four times in the chest.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Walk me through it.”

“Nothing to walk through, Marty,” Dods said, having to raise his voice over the roar of an industrial HVAC system. “Guy waits for him to park and open the door or he does it himself. Unloads the magazine in the guy’s general direction.”

I grunted. “As long as he aimed between the steering wheel and the seat . . .”

“One fish in a very small barrel.”

Dods and I were standing on the P2 level of the Streir building’s parking garage, looking at the body of the recently caffeinated and verbally evasive Alex Montero. Jittery no more, Montero slumped in the driver’s seat of a black Viper SRT. The exotic car sat at an angle in a reserved parking space with the door open. Montero had one outstretched foot on the ground and the other still near the gas pedal. His crisp white shirt was sprinkled with four red blossoms the size of my open hand over the chest, left shoulder, and neck. One round had taken him near the back of the skull—probably the one that had both killed him and pitched his upper body forward so that it slumped over the middle console. Two shots had missed and had starred the windshield five feet apart.

Dods unwrapped three pieces of gum and jammed them in his mouth. He was nearly a foot shorter than I was and outweighed me by forty pounds, looking perpetually rumpled and sloppy. A moon-pie face and a sallow complexion didn’t help. The harsh fluorescent lighting of the garage and the flat gray cement walls gave him nearly the same coloring as the body in front of us. And Montero had been dead for hours.

I glanced around the stark, subterranean level, checking the ceiling.

Dods answered before I could ask. “Cameras at the parking entrance and elevators only. Attendant’s printing the entry log.”

“Security?”

“None down here, no patrols. Single guard at the front desk. She doesn’t remember anyone out of the ordinary. Claims everyone who walked in, signed.”

“Lovely,” I said. “You’d think a law firm that turns over millions of dollars in real estate deals might have tightened the place up.”

Dods shrugged. “Thoughts?”

I looked at Montero’s body. “Sitting duck. Reserved space with his name on it. Drove a car that would stand out in Las Vegas. He was upper management, so he probably got to work an hour later than the worker bees, which means there was no one around.” I did a slow turn, looking at the pillars and electrical stanchions and other weird contraptions all garages seem to have. “The guy could’ve hidden anywhere. Could’ve been close enough to kiss.”

“Amateur or pro?”

“Amateur,” I said, gesturing at the windshield. “He’s arm’s length away and his two misses are five feet apart? And he empties the magazine? He was panicky. You’ll find a couple slugs buried in the dashboard.”

Dods nodded. I hadn’t said anything he didn’t know. “You saw Montero, what, a couple of days ago?”

“Yeah,” I said. I described our conversation.

“Evasive, you said?”

“Not in a nervous way,” I said. “More like . . . professionally. Lawyer evasive. Well-rehearsed. Like he was going to fight me for every scrap of information out of habit.”

“I thought you said he had a lot to say about the whole real estate shebang?”

“It was all information I could’ve gotten from the library,” I said. “As soon as I wanted to talk specifics about what Wendy was working on, he shut down.”

“You getting anywhere with her case?”

I shook my head and shrugged at the same time. “Haven’t spent enough time on it. I talked to her parents this morning, Montero a few days ago, like I said.”

Dods stared at the Viper, pursed his lips. “They don’t feel anything alike. But.”

“But the connection is too much to ignore.”

“Yeah.” He took a deep breath and rubbed a hand over his head. He glanced at me. “How’ve you been feeling?”

“I’m good,” I said, stumbling on the words. The one-eighty had caught me off guard. “Nervous about a checkup in a week or two, but I’m expecting to hear good things.”

“You look good,” he said. “Trim, fit. I mean, it’s not the diet I would’ve picked, but . . .”

“Me neither,” I said, oddly appreciating the fact that Dods could joke about my cancer. It wasn’t that long ago no one would even say the word around me. Still, the topic made me wince, and I had to force a smile. “Personally, I would’ve rather done the Atkins diet.”

“Speaking of food, swing by for dinner, you get a chance, okay? Bring Amanda.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Okeydokey, Marty. Tell me if you find anything about Gerson or Montero?”

“You know it.”

We gave each other a left-handed salute, then I took the stairs out of the parking garage, passing an MPDC forensics team. I nodded to a junior ME I knew from back in the day and she waved back, smiling. I hid a grin. They still remembered me. It gave me a spring in my step—which came in handy trying to make it to street level. I made it, slightly out of breath.

A buzz in my pocket stopped me as I came out of the Streir garage door and I fished out my phone. Voice mail, from an unknown number—no cell service in the garage, so the call hadn’t come through. I punched the right buttons and listened to the message, jamming my finger in my other ear to block out the noise of midafternoon DC traffic.

“Mr. Singer,” the message began. It was a girl’s voice, young and unsure. “This is Caitlin Carpenter. From Tartikoff and Brentwood. You bought me the, uh, cupcakes. I think I need to talk to you.”

I picked the DC Convention Center at Mount Vernon Square. I wanted Caitlin to feel like we were meeting in a public setting for her safety, but I didn’t want anyone from Tartikoff and Brentwood seeing her rendezvousing with a former MPDC detective who had last been seen expressing an interest in two employees who had, in turn, been murdered in dynamic fashion. So the Starbucks across the street and the lunch bistro I’d followed her to were out. The convention center was about as anonymous as one could get.

The place has always been a source of fascination for me. As big as it is, it feels even larger inside. Walking around the cavernous interior, you get the feeling that the architects who built it must know the secret to how those tiny clown cars at the circus work. It takes a map to get around the place. Soaring walls of glass rising a hundred feet expose whole sides of the building to the street. A constant bustle and hum fill the building, as though it’s a small city unto itself.

I’d asked Caitlin to meet me on the south side, facing New York Avenue, so I could look out across the street at the Carnegie Library and its tidy, parklike grounds so at odds with the concrete-and-granite superstructure I was in. At 1:45, fifteen minutes before we’d agreed to meet, I took a spot on one of the dozens of backless, padded seats that the convention center thoughtfully provided for guests, and waited.

There was a booksellers’ gathering in town and dozens of conventioneers milled about, murmuring about the changing face of the industry and the emergence of e-readers, mobile devices, and a bunch of things I didn’t understand—but would be told I couldn’t live without by next year. The faces were all shapes, sizes, ages. Dress ranged from formal to slackerwear, though everyone had a smartphone or other gewgaw that was more important to them than where they were going or, in some cases, the people they were with. They moved with surprising competence. And I spent several amusing minutes watching endless streams of people set on a crash course for each other—eyes glued to tiny screens—avoid catastrophe without so much as blinking.

At 2:05, I spotted Caitlin and the brunette from the lunch bistro acting cool and casual near a plug-in terminal, a funky tower filled with electrical outlets and trays for charging and holding one’s personal gadgetry. They stole sidelong glances at me whenever they thought I wasn’t looking, then they’d confer. This went on for a few minutes while they summoned the courage to come over and talk. I sighed. How could I look less threatening? Unbuttoning my shirt and sprawling on the bench Playgirl style seemed ill advised. Deep knee bends or handstands would probably scare them off.

I settled for pulling out my phone like everyone else around me and acting like I was reading e-mail. I was hoping it was a familiar enough gesture that it would instill trust. Some part of the message got through. The two of them walked across the intervening fifty feet and stopped in front of me.

“Mr. Singer?” Caitlin asked, ducking her head like she was going under a beam.

I raised my head and smiled. “That’s me. You’re Caitlin?”

She nodded and tucked a strand of hair behind one ear. She was wearing a filmy yellow dress with an uneven hem and a white sweater with a waist so high that it looked like it had shrunk in the wash. Her friend was dressed more conservatively, in tight gray slacks and a black knit short-sleeved sweater with a high, rolltop collar.

“This is Becky,” Caitlin said. “I know you meant for me to come alone, but . . .”

“But we don’t have a clue who you are,” Becky finished, her face stern.

I forced more wattage into the smile. “This isn’t a ransom drop,” I said. “But you’re right. You have no idea who I am or what I want. It was a smart move to bring a friend. I tried to pick a public place, so hopefully this is okay with you. If not, I’m happy to go wherever you like.”

“Who are you, first off?” Caitlin asked.

“And what do you want?” Becky seconded.

“I was a DC cop for about thirty years, working Homicide for almost twenty of it. Believe it or not, I was standing on the Metro platform when your boss Wendy Gerson was pushed in front of that train. Because of that, and my background, her family asked me to look into her death.”

“How do we know you’re a cop?”

“Was a cop.” I got out a card and handed it to her. “That’s old, but call DC Homicide and ask if one Marty Singer ever worked there. Ask them to describe me. Physically, I mean. Don’t ask for their opinions.”

They glanced at each other.

“Alternatively, you could hear me out, then decide later if you want to help me. You can always say no. The only thing you’ve got to lose is about half an hour.”

Becky, still suspicious, said, “Why did you retire?”

“Personal reasons,” I said. When they looked skeptical, I said, “Cancer.” That stopped the questions. To lighten the mood, I continued, “I’m six foot three, have a cat named Pierre, and like long walks in the woods. I’m a Capricorn, my favorite color is blue, and prefer sitting down to standing. Would you ladies care to have a seat?”

More sideways glances, a lifted eyebrow, a decision. The three of us took a corner where the padded benches came together. We were close enough that our knees almost touched.

“You said you’re looking into Ms. Gerson’s murder for the family?” Caitlin asked.

“That’s right.”

“How do you think we can help?”

“I know you were Wendy’s assistant, so it makes sense to talk to you. I spoke to Alex Montero the other day, but he wasn’t interested in giving me much information, which is why I resorted to the cupcake trick. Sorry. And now that he’s dead, I guess we should talk about him, too.”

“Why do you care about him?” Becky asked.

“Two murders at the same law firm, a supervisor and his supervisee, two weeks apart? That’s too weird to be unrelated,” I said. “And while I might’ve been hired to look into Wendy’s death, the cop in me wouldn’t mind nabbing whoever killed him, too.”

“Why would we know anything that could help?” Caitlin asked.

“Like I said, I talked to Alex Montero a few days before he was killed, hoping he could clue me in on anything about Wendy Gerson, but he was tight as a clam on the subject,” I said. “I know through my sources that a message went out very soon thereafter telling employees not to talk about her murder with anyone outside the firm”—the two girls exchanged glances—“so I imagine Montero’s murder has shaken the place up?”

They nodded. Caitlin, looking worried, said, “The same day they told us not to talk to anyone, Mr. Montero asked me to come to his office. Mr. Brentwood was there and a few other higher-ups.”

“What’d they want?”

“They said as Ms. Gerson’s assistant, the directive applied especially to me and that I should come to them directly if someone should try to talk to me.”

“Trying to head me off,” I said. “Why did you decide to meet with me, then?”

She gave me a wan smile. “The same guy who told me to keep my mouth shut was found shot to death in our parking garage. If they can’t protect him, what are they going to do for me?”

“Good point.”

“And the way they talked to me,” she continued. “They weren’t concerned for me, they were threatening me. Don’t talk or else, was the message. And I didn’t appreciate it.”

I gave her a new look, impressed. “There’s a tiny chance that the two killings aren’t connected, but I wouldn’t bet on it. So, if they’re connected, then it’s safe to assume something odd is going down at Tartikoff and Brentwood. And since you two work inside, you might be in a position to tell me what that something is.”

“And then get shot or pushed in front of a train?” Becky said. “No thanks.”

“Whatever got Gerson and Montero killed, it’s got to do with how close they are to something, how involved they were with something shady. No offense, but you two are probably pretty far down on the totem pole over at good ol’ T and B?”

“You can say that again,” Caitlin said, glum.

“Did you work directly with Wendy on cases?”

Caitlin shrugged. “I filed and typed and did a lot of crap work for her.”

I glanced at Becky. She shrugged, too. “I didn’t work with her. I’m in another department.”

“Did you have direct contact with clients, Caitlin? Ever call them, or use your name on e-mails, or go to meetings with Wendy?”

She shook her head. “No way. Strictly grunt work. Out of sight. My cube wasn’t even on the same floor as her office.”

“Then I doubt either one of you are targets. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to take a couple of precautions,” I said. “But if things get too hot, we’ll stop.”

“If Caitlin is so low in the pecking order, how is she any help to you?” Becky asked.

“I just need a lead. I don’t need you to do anything that would get you fired or hurt. I want a string I can pull on and run down. And it could be something really innocuous.”

“Like what?”

“I’d be interested in a list of the real estate deals they were both working on, for instance. Where were they located? Who was involved? That kind of thing.”

“Ms. Gerson was working on a dozen deals at the same time,” Caitlin said. “How do I know which one to look for?”

“If both murders are related to work and related to each other, and since both Gerson and Montero were killed within weeks of each other, we can assume it was a deal or a job or something at Tartikoff and Brentwood that concluded recently or was close to it.”

They nodded.

“So the natural place to start would be to look at what motions are needed to start a big real estate deal. Or finish one. What’s the paperwork, what are the permit applications, who would they have to contact at city hall? Follow me?”

They nodded again.

“Is that something you can dig into for me? Strictly stuff you can get your hands on during a normal workday. No stealing documents or corporate espionage or anything.”

They looked at each other, then Caitlin shrugged and said, “Like I said, I don’t like being pushed around. Not to mention the work is shitty and we’re both leaving at the end of the year, anyway.”

Becky nodded. “Yeah, this crap isn’t for me. I want to go back to art school.”

“Thanks. Remember, though, no heroics, okay? If you see the end of something interesting, just hand it off to me and I’ll tug on it. Don’t stick your neck out for me.”

“You don’t have to worry about that, dude,” Becky said. I had apparently not won her over completely.

“Operations locked down Ms. Gerson’s e-mail right after she was killed, but I’ve got copies in my Sent folder,” Caitlin said. “It’s not like they can keep me from reading my own e-mail. And I might be able to find the loan applications and tax deferment letters she filed for some of the developers in the city.”

“Did she keep notes about the work she was doing?” I asked.

“On her laptop,” Caitlin said. “She jotted stuff down in an old-fashioned day planner as a backup, but I haven’t seen it since they cleared her office out. I’ll keep an eye out for it.”

“I know a guy who works . . . worked . . . with Mr. Montero,” Becky said. “I bet he saw a couple of juicy bits go across his desk he might be willing to share.”

“Great. Just be careful. Be smart.”

We exchanged cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses, then the two girls left together, chatting excitedly as they went out the New York Avenue door. Hopefully they wouldn’t keep talking about it at the office. They seemed smart enough, if dippy around the edges.

I waited five minutes, watching more librarians and bookstore owners worry about the future, then headed out, wondering if I was going to slam-dunk this case for the price of a box of cupcakes.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I pressed the phone to my ear. The line rang three times. Four times. Five times.

A prickle of heat started around my hairline. My stomach was doing flip-flops. For the past year or so, those would’ve been symptoms indicating a medical situation in need of attention. But this had nothing to do with cancer. Though it would make a nice entry in my anxiety diary.

The rings stopped on number six, as they had the other two occasions I’d called this week, then Julie’s dry voice came on the line and instructed me on how to leave a voice mail if I wanted to get in touch with her. I ended the call before the beep. That would be the last time today. I tried to put her out of my mind and turn to other things, though it was hard not to speculate. Was she just not available, or had she seen my calls and just not answered? A part of me pined for the days before cell phones and caller ID, when you just had to say hello to find out who was on the other line.

I shook my head and forced myself to think of other things. Like the murder case I’d been hired to solve. Instead of calling up old flames, I should be following the leads that would be coming to light soon, if Caitlin turned out to be good at snooping.

And getting the information was its own source of worry. After talking with Alex Montero, I realized that I had barely scratched the surface of how corporate real estate worked. If I was right and both victims had been killed because of something to do with their work, I might not recognize a clue if it came up and bit me. Caitlin and Becky could hand me the lead that broke both cases wide open, but if they did, I’d better make sure I knew what they were giving me. Wendy Gerson’s professional world was weird, murky, and completely out of my depth.

I called Paul Gerson, someone whose field of expertise was more in line with the one I was missing. He listened to my request, asked me to hold for a minute, then came back with a number. I thanked him, hung up, and in two shakes of a lamb’s tail I was making an appointment with a Stanford chum of his, one Channing Faraday, a former corporate Realtor turned campaign director and politico. He’d run the race for Rob Rudman, a mayoral candidate who’d been left holding the losing end of the stick several years before. Faraday agreed to meet me at Longfellow Park.

“Longfellow Park?” I asked, frowning. I thought I knew every open space in the city. “Where is that?”

“Eighteenth and M,” Faraday said, his voice a pleasing baritone. “The park’s tiny, but there’s a statue of the poet on a big block of granite. Hard to miss.”

“Oh,” I said, then bit back the next words that came to mind. I knew the park he was talking about, but back when I’d worn a uniform there used to be a less respectable name for the place. It had long been a hangout for junkies because it was an easy place to panhandle office workers for money or food. Maybe the place had been cleaned up since then.

Not so much. When I got to the little wedge-shaped park—neatly squeezed into the angle created by Connecticut Avenue, Eighteenth Street, and M Street—half the benches were occupied by the homeless, the other by office geeks trying to get a jump on the lunch crowd. At eleven o’clock there were still seats available, and I took one directly across from the statue of Longfellow. I gazed at the thing for a few minutes. I’d never actually looked at it in all my time on the MPDC. In fact, I would’ve found it impossible to tell you who it was a statue of unless I saw the inscription on the base. There were a lot of those places in DC, landmarks I knew only by their intersection or who got shot there and not their import or meaning. I’d have to make some time to visit a few of them once I finished the whole business with Gerson.

“‘This is the forest primeval,’” a voice said from behind me and to the left. I turned to see a youngish white guy, balding but in good shape, with gold-rimmed spectacles and dressed in black dress pants and a brown merino sweater. He grinned. “Is it wrong I only know one line out of the whole thing?”

“I didn’t even know a statue of the old boy was here, so you’re one up on me,” I said, then stood and shook his hand. “I’m Singer.”

“Faraday,” he said and we sat. “Paul said you could use a crash course in the interaction between our illustrious city government and the boisterous, yet oh-so-aboveboard corporate real estate industry.”

“I sense you are being ironic.”

“I am indeed. Sarcastic, even. You have to be if you don’t want to go insane.”

“A guy I talked to in the game said it attracts money from out of town,” I said. “And that it’s so impossibly complicated at the local level that there are entire firms that just handle the permitting process for the investors.”

“That’s true,” he said. “But there’s a political angle that takes it to a whole new place. What else did your friend tell you?”

“Not much. He stopped talking recently. So any info you can give me about the game would really help. Assume I don’t know a thing.”

He leaned back and crossed his legs. “We’ll be here all day, then. DC is unlike any other municipal government in the country, especially when it comes to real estate. It’s like a city in some ways, like a state in others, and like a medieval fiefdom the rest of the time. Tell me what part interests you and I’ll know where to start.”

I gave him the high-level of what I’d found on Wendy’s case so far and how, with Alex Montero’s murder—as a former Detective of the Year—my intuition told me there was a good chance that the killings led back to the business they both worked in.

“Does that help at all?” I asked. “I’ve got some potential, er, informants who might produce some good intel, but I’m afraid I won’t even understand what they bring me. I need to get a handle on how this thing works beforehand.”

He thought about it. “If your friends are checking e-mail and dipping into paperwork, they’re going to find loan applications, LDAs, TIF and PILOT requests, pleas for tax exemption or abatements, those kinds of things.”

“In English?”

“They’re all incentive deals of one kind or another,” Faraday explained. “Everything starts with the LDAs, the land disposition agreements, but a PILOT might be easier to explain.”

“Okay.”

“PILOT stands for payment in lieu of taxes. Sometimes as a concession, sometimes as an incentive, a property owner pays the city cash instead of taxes. And that includes the Fed. Like . . . let’s say the Department of Energy takes over the block between Eleventh and Twelfth along E Street for a new expansion,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder. “The DOE would pay the city once for the sale—and that’s swell—but DC would never see another cent from some of the most valuable tourist property in the country, because a local municipality can’t collect taxes from a federal agency. See the problem?”

“The same block could house restaurants, shops, and an office building,” I said. “All of which would normally send tens of thousands of tax dollars to the city. But now it can’t.”

“Right,” Faraday said as he watched pigeons swirl around the base of the Longfellow statue. “So the Fed generously pays a cash amount to the city as a consolation prize for all those juicy tax dollars it will never see. Payment in lieu of taxes. The kicker is that it’s never as much as the taxes would bring in, which is a permanent sore point between the Fed and the city.”

I worked that over for a second. “Okay, a PILOT for the Fed makes sense, but why would a developer get that kind of break instead of being forced to pay taxes like anybody else?”

Faraday said, “The incentive part, remember? Let’s say there are two empty parking lots, one in Southeast DC, one ten miles away in Fairfax County. Both locations are practically begging for a big-box store that’s going to bring in two million dollars a year, cut local unemployment by two percent, and revitalize a neighborhood. A developer is ready and willing to build the property that will bring in the store . . . but he doesn’t care where it goes. What do the municipalities have to tempt him with?”

“A tax break.”

“Right, and they can do that in a bunch of different ways, from a partial tax abatement to full exemption. But one of the most popular is a PILOT.”

“Because,” I said, the dawn starting to break, “by making the developer pay something, even a pittance, it looks like the city council is holding the developer accountable. Voters don’t like a freeloader.”

“Yup. In reality, though, the builder is saving tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of dollars on taxes each year. That’s money that stays in their pocket. While they’re also raking in rent from those big-box stores or mega office complexes.”

“How much are these token payments the developers make to the city?” I asked, curious.

“With other incentives and financing . . .” Faraday made a show of adding numbers in the air, “. . . nothing.”

“Nothing,” I said. He nodded. “So, if they’re not paying a dime . . .”

“. . . the taxpayers are footing the bill for the development,” Faraday said, then got a toothy, evil grin on his face. “And the city council member looks like a hero because he or she brought another Walmart or Home Depot to the neighborhood. Of course, there’s more. In fact, it’s the more part that’s the real benny. Extra votes are just a nice-to-have.”

“What else?”

“The other side of things. Have you ever donated to a DC election campaign?” When I snorted, Faraday said, “I’ll take that as a no. If you had, you’d know that—as an individual—you are limited to a onetime contribution of five hundred dollars per candidate per election.”

“Okay.”

“But would it interest you to know that if you registered a limited liability corporation, it could also donate five hundred dollars?”

“Big deal,” I said. “I’m limited to giving a thousand dollars. Five hundred as a person, five hundred for my corporation.”

“If you were the head of just one LLC, that would be true.” He looked at me expectantly.

“There’s no limit to how many LLCs can contribute? No matter who owns them?”

“Nope.”

I sat back. “I’m no expert on campaign finance law, but that sounds like a crock of shit.”

“It is. There is no legal limit on the number of LLCs that can contribute to a campaign in an election cycle. Would you care to know how many LLCs most corporate developers control, on average?”

“As many as they need?”

“Exactly,” Faraday said. “Usually, they have a dozen or so already created for each development project. Like, the Eighth Street Renaissance Corporation or the Southwest Wharf Corporation.”

“All of them able to act as a front for a five-hundred-dollar campaign contribution.”

“Hey, you’re catching on. Ever thought about getting involved in DC politics?”

“Jesus, no.”

“Okay. Last question on our quiz. How often do you think corporate real estate donations to city council members’ campaigns coincide with PILOT, LDA, and TIF awards the developers have won?”

“Let me guess . . . every time?”

“Ding-ding-ding. Or so close to every time that the ones that don’t aren’t worth mentioning.” Faraday raised a finger. “To recap, boys and girls. Someone decides a large slice of District land needs a new mall. A city councilman offers a developer a huge tax break at taxpayers’ expense to build said mall. The developer is awarded the contract as well as the tax break and, magically, several dozen five-hundred-dollar checks marked ‘Campaign Contribution’ arrive at the councilman’s office the same day.”

I watched as a homeless guy with a long gray-and-black beard and wearing a green army coat checked each of the garbage cans at the points on the edge of the park, then wandered across Eighteenth Street to shake a cup at a lady walking by. “This is a hell of a system they’ve got going. Why hasn’t anyone cracked down on it?”

Faraday tilted his head. “Crack down on what?”

“Ah,” I said. “None of this is illegal?”

“Not in the least. Every bit of what I just described to you has been legislated into being on the up-and-up.”

“To paraphrase someone I heard on TV, we’re not questioning if what you’re doing is against the law, we’re wondering why it’s not.”

“Precisely. This kind of crap is why Rob Rudman lost his bid for mayor.”

“He backed campaign finance reform?”

“Yeah. We ran on a message of anticorruption and cleaning house on the city council—Rob will rip ’em—but voters got bored ten minutes after the outrage.”

“It’s an old story,” I said.

“True. Rob ain’t no saint, but even he was blown away when he caught on to how development in DC was being handled. He thought he’d be able to make a difference, yadda yadda, but when election season started, his opponent had about twenty times the campaign budget that we did. We were toast before we started.”

“Is there anyone in particular who has all ten fingers in this pie?”

Faraday nodded. “They’re all complicit at some level, but Toby Waites is the master.”

“Waites?” I said. “He’s been on city council since the end of the First World War or something.”

A pretty, young office worker in a gray pencil skirt and red blouse sat catty-corner to us and started nibbling at a croissant. Watching her eat, Faraday said, “Twenty-nine years next April. The magic of not having term limits.”

“Are there any developers not in this up to their ears?” I asked.

Faraday tore his eyes away from the girl long enough to shoot me a disappointed look. “And you were shaping up to be such a good student. There are one or two crusaders out there, plugging away on contracts the old-fashioned way—you know, with sterling references and rock-solid track records, that kind of thing. They get a contract here and there, but only once the big dogs have had their chance to sniff it over.”

“That’s crazy,” I said.

“I told you so,” Faraday said, then slapped his hands on his thighs and took a deep breath. “Does that give you a good outline of how things work?”

“Yes, unfortunately,” I said. “Can I call you if I have any other questions?”

“Sure. But if you plan to brace any of these guys, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use my name.”

“Are they that connected? Are you afraid of them?”

“Oh, no,” Faraday said, laughing. He stood. “I just started a one-man lobbying firm and I don’t need to get blackballed before I even open the doors, you know?”

“Joining the dark side, then?”

His smile was resigned. “If you can’t beat ’em . . .”

“‘Virtue is insufficient temptation,’” I said.

Faraday looked at me quizzically. “Longfellow?”

“Shaw,” I said. “Longfellow was too optimistic. And this case calls for a cynic.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I was in the perfect armchair-detecting environment. The problem was, I didn’t feel like detecting.

Pierre was asleep on my desk, John Coltrane—a new discovery for me, the former punk rocker—was on the stereo, and I was going over my notes with a cup of coffee safely within arm’s reach. My foot found it impossible not to tap to A Love Supreme, which would normally distract me, but the intricate pattern and sophisticated repetitions gave me mental elbow room to think.

Until the chanting. Somewhere past halfway through the opening number, John starts mumbling the title of the album. I knew that jazz purists thought nothing bad could be said about the piece, but Coltrane’s murmuring made me uneasy. The speakers of my stereo made it seem like his voice was coming from behind the office door and I had to keep myself from checking to see if there was a jazz legend standing in my hallway. I reached over and snapped the stereo off.

I spread out my notes again, trying to reset my brain and my focus. Okay. C. Faraday . . . city council corruption . . . campaign donations. My coffee was cold. I clomped downstairs, warmed the coffee, came back. Pierre wiggled in his sleep. Disturbed, maybe, by my moving around. Back to the papers. LDA/PILOT/tax incentives . . . LLCs: $500 per . . . Should I paint the living room next?

I sat back in my chair, rubbing my eyes and groaning. I couldn’t care less about what I was reading. It had all seemed interesting yesterday, talking to Faraday. The potential for corruption was enormous, and where there was corruption—and money—people found plenty of reasons to kill each other. It was about as solid a trail as I could ask for, short of the killer’s address and phone number or a crumb trail leading right to his door. I’d needed some background on the whys and wherefores of corporate real estate and had gotten it in spades from Faraday. What more could I ask for?

My phone went kerplunk, drawing me out of my funk for a second. It was the sound Amanda had chosen for my e-mail notifications. She had suggested that it was appropriate since I read my e-mail so infrequently that it was like throwing the message down a well, ha-ha. The e-mail was from Caitlin and had been sent, thankfully, from a personal and not a work account. I opened the e-mail and scrolled through her message.

The girl had been busy. While Gerson and Montero had both been involved in a scattering of deals in various stages of closure, she wrote, the one that had caught her attention was an investment proposal for a large plot in Southeast called the Quarters. It was by far the largest and costliest deal of the bunch, and the one that seemed closest to getting the green light. I was surprised. I knew the Quarters. While the neighborhood had always had a rough-and-tumble reputation, it was an active, densely populated community and not one I would’ve thought as a good candidate for plowing under and starting over. There had to be a thousand people living in low-income housing there.

Caitlin ended the short e-mail by apologizing that, since she was cobbling her information from e-mails and loose notes, she couldn’t find the name of the developer. She suggested that, with the name of the location, finding who that was should be a piece of cake.

I slipped my phone back in my pocket and leaned back in my scuzzy office chair again. I laced my fingers together and looked at the ceiling. Piece of cake, huh? Okay, so time to head out the door and chase down the lead or call someone for more information. Caitlin had handed me a bona fide clue and, while it didn’t answer anything by itself, with Faraday’s information it was exactly the kind of thing I’d sought out when I took on the Gerson case.

But what I actually wanted to do was ignore her e-mail. The thought of this information leading to another clue and that one leading to a third tidbit, and so on, exhausted me. I tried to imagine how I’d feel if her information pointed me directly to Wendy’s killer—no paper chase, no hours of endless legwork, just BOOM, the case finished off in one easy snap . . . and I realized it barely even mattered to me. I had to fight the urge to go downstairs, flop down in the living room easy chair, and watch TV until it was time for bed. I hadn’t felt this unmotivated and lethargic since my days of heavy chemo.

I did get up and go downstairs, where I poured myself another cup of coffee, but I intentionally avoided looking at the TV or the chair as I went through the living room. As I sipped, I leaned with my back against the sink, which put me facing the refrigerator and staring straight at the little white postcard Dr. Demitri’s office had sent for my checkup. Irked, I ripped the card off the fridge, crumpled it into the size of a golf ball, and threw it into the trash. I grabbed my coffee and started back to the office. Halfway through the living room, I swore, turned on my heel, and marched back to the kitchen to fish the postcard out of the garbage.

I jammed the wadded paper into a pocket and retreated to the office, where I flattened it out on my desk and stared at it for ten minutes. I put it to one side, then sifted through my accumulated mail from the past week. Midway through the stack was a large white envelope from Dr. Demitri’s office. I made a face, then opened it. It was the anxiety diary Nurse Leah had promised to send me. It had come days ago, but I’d slipped it to the bottom of the stack and tried to forget about it.

I leafed through the guide. It couldn’t have been more than fifteen pages long and I was done reading it in less time than it had taken to heat my coffee. It was full of the sanctimonious self-help crap that had always made me cringe whenever I’d been unlucky enough to see it on TV or in a glossy magazine. I gritted my teeth and forced myself to read through it again.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said out loud, unable to help myself. The guidelines wanted the reader to ask themselves questions and answer them on paper. What makes me worry? How do I feel when I get worried? On a scale from one to ten, how worried do I get? Communicate your answers with someone you trust.

I looked at Pierre. “Can I talk to you about my anxiety?” My cat opened his eyes at the noise, yawned big enough for me to fit my fist in his mouth, and went back to sleep.

Sighing, I pulled out a sheet of paper and started jotting down the questions, giving myself five or ten lines in between each. Then I went back and started filling in the answers, starting with my typical smart-ass replies. I slowed down, however, as I got away from the fuzzy-wuzzy questions and on to more open-ended, thoughtful ideas. Identify a moment when you were worried. What set you off? Can you pinpoint it?

That newspaper report I’d seen at the Starbucks, I thought. I’d been engaged, eavesdropping on Caitlin and her friends, thinking about the case, then out of nowhere I saw the stupid article about celebrity deaths and it had felt like a bruise since then, a nagging ache just under the skin. Leah had warned me to not watch the news and to not take other people’s fights—or results—as my own. And then Dods, in the garage, asking how I was doing. Meaning well, naturally, but that didn’t make talking or thinking about the checkup any easier.

I filled out the rest of the questions, getting less cynical with each one, until I looked at my watch and realized I’d been writing for almost an hour. My confession covered about three pages of a legal pad. I put down the pen and rubbed my wrist; it had been ages since I’d written anything longhand except my signature. I couldn’t say I felt better, but that was the nature of a diary—I’d have to keep at it to see any results. That’s what the guide said, at least.

For the time being, though, I was done. My head felt like it was stuffed with hay and my feet were falling asleep. I went to the bathroom and splashed and scrubbed my face with cold water, trying to force some energy into my body. I was toweling off when my phone buzzed in my pocket.

I answered without looking, my voice muffled as I continued to dry off. There was no reply and I said hello again, then looked at the screen, trying to place the number.

“Singer?” It was a woman’s voice.

I froze, towel held in mid-swipe. “Julie?”

“Yes.”

I straightened, fumbling for something to say. “How are you?”

She cleared her throat. “Fine. You called me?”

“Yeah,” I said, hanging the towel on its rack. “A couple of times.”

“What do you want?”

“I guess I wanted to talk.”

“Obviously,” she said.

“Do you have a minute?”

“That’s why I called,” she said.

I sighed and sat down on the toilet. It seemed like an appropriate place to talk about our relationship. “Look, seeing you at FirstStep made me think. About a lot of things. Time’s given me some perspective.”

“That’s nice,” she said, her voice thick with sarcasm.

I scowled at the tone in her voice. “Some of the decisions you made won’t ever sit right with me, but I’m not exactly proud of some of the decisions I’ve made in my life, either. I’m trying to say I said some stupid things and made some mistakes. If you don’t want to hear it, that’s fine, but you should at least know I regret the way I acted towards you. I ruined what we had going instead of talking it out with you.”

There was a deep silence on the other end of the phone. I waited a beat, then said the hardest part. “I’m trying to say I’m sorry.”

Silence. I waited some more. This wasn’t the time to press. Finally, I heard her take a shaky breath and say, “Thank you.”

I was squeezing the phone and I forced myself to relax—I hadn’t realized how much her answer had meant to me. “Thanks for hearing me out.”

“You’re welcome.”

More silence. I swallowed. “Okay. I should let you go—”

“Do you want to get coffee?” she interrupted. “Sometime?”

My heart thumped offbeat and a rush of warm blood raced up my neck. “I . . . yes. I really would.”

“Is sometime this week all right?”

I swallowed. “Sure.”

“I’ll call you,” she said.

“That’d be great,” I said, ready to say more, but she’d already hung up, leaving me sitting on the commode, wondering what had just happened.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“That was quick,” Faraday said, shoulders hunched into his coat collar. “Change your mind about getting into politics?”

I’d waylaid him coming out of the Wilson Building—DC’s city hall—as he plied his trade with the city’s elected officials and appointed bureaucrats. A gray wind picked up just as I shook his hand, however, and he gestured for us to take the measly shelter provided by a divot in the building’s architecture. Unlike any other edifice in the capital, the Wilson Building didn’t have one damn pillar to hide behind in bad weather. It was within sight of the White House, though, which did have pillars, so that was worth something.

“I would rather re-enroll at the academy,” I said.

“What’s on your mind, then?”

“If I had the name and location of a particular plot of land that was being considered for development and knew that it had probably been the focus of an LDA application, how hard would it be to get the name of the developer?”

“Is that all?”

“So far, yep.”

“Piece of cake,” he said. “Office of Public Records.”

I searched my memory. “Naylor Court?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But don’t go there. Do the search online.”

“Okay.”

He gave me a look. “It really is easier than going there.”

“Sure.”

Faraday must’ve heard something in my voice. “It can be hairy for someone not used to their system. Want me to do it?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll see if I can muddle through.”

“Okay,” he said, his voice doubtful. “If you can’t figure it out, though, give me a call. I’m happy to do it, if it means helping find whoever killed Wendy.”

I promised I’d give him a shout if I ran into trouble, we shook, then parted ways. A DC power meeting, quick and dirty. I shoved my hands in my pockets and walked back to my parking space. In the shelter of my car, I turned my phone into a computer and searched for the DC Office of Public Records on a screen just slightly larger than a pack of gum. The experience was, as an MPDC captain had once said about my attitude toward superior officers, “suboptimal.” The end of my thumb, about the size of a large olive, was a particularly poor tool for “clicking” on links, and the two-point font wasn’t doing my middle-aged eyes any favors—although, after spending several minutes trying to navigate the site, I had the distinct impression that I would’ve had trouble finding what I wanted at any font size.

I gave it my best shot. I really did. Imagining Amanda standing, looking over my shoulder and shaking her head, I poked and squeezed and prodded my phone, trying to fill out an online “General Request for Information” form. I pecked at BACK buttons, FORWARD buttons, shook the phone, waved it in arcane patterns in the air . . . nothing. Twenty minutes, down the drain. Wasn’t the Internet supposed to save time? Finally, when the website reloaded for no apparent reason on the third page, losing many long minutes of agonized typing, I yelled a two-word, four-syllable expression that my mother would not have approved of and tried to put my foot through the floor of my car.

I was wasting time. Ignoring all the links, I scrolled down to the bottom of the page and found the address, memorized it, then started the car and wheeled into traffic. To hell with computers. I was going to rely on that old standby of detecting—waiting in line.

The nice ladies at the Office of Public Records seemed genuinely puzzled that I hadn’t tried to submit my request using the online form on their website. I refrained from telling them what I really thought about their system and explained that I was too old for that kind of thing. They were about my age and laughed, then we spent the next ten minutes reminiscing, reminding each other of the shows we used to watch as kids and how cheap gas used to be, how you could see a movie for under a buck and how big the first microwave was.

“What was it you wanted?” one of the ladies asked after we had exhausted our war stories. She had a pageboy cut that was blonde going gray. Her figure was thin and she sported a beige skirt-and-blazer combination that, combined with her hair, made it seem as if she were fading into the background.

“I’m looking into an LDA application for a particular property in the District called the Quarters,” I told her. “I can’t find the developer that was awarded the bid for the property nor whether they got approved for the LDA.”

“All right,” she said. “May I ask who you are and why you want the information?”

I gave them the supercharged version of the case I was working on and my illustrious three-decade career as a DC homicide detective. I wouldn’t say they were cooing and pawing at the buttons of my shirt, but I definitely had them on my side by the end of it.

“Things have been slow today,” the woman said, deflating me a little. “We might as well give you a hand.”

I gave her the meager pieces of information I had and watched as she turned to her keyboard and tip-tapped her way through the city records. Like a lot of people who have either worked for or lived in the city, I didn’t expect any miracles. In fact, I was bracing myself for complete and utter failure. If even half of the horror stories coming out of the DC Department of Motor Vehicles applied here, I’d be leaving with exactly the same amount of information I came in with.

Which is why I was startled when, before I could say Jack Sprat, the helpful lady brightened, then, with a few keystrokes, handed me a sheaf of printed pages.

“That’s it?” I asked, impressed.

She smiled. “Charlotte and I”—she nodded toward the other woman—“have been organizing these records for more than twenty years.”

“And no one from city hall has come down and stopped you for being so efficient?” I asked, then looked at the form. “Uh, which one is . . .”

She plucked the papers out of my hands, rifled through them, then showed me a box on the third page. It said “Atlantic Union, Inc.” and their offices were in Reston, Virginia, west of the city.

“Oh,” she said when she saw the name. “I know that company. They’re redoing the condos across the street from me, over in the West End. And I think they did the revitalization plan near Logan Circle. Charlotte?”

The other woman looked up from her desk. “Hmm?”

“You live near Logan Circle. Didn’t Atlantic Union do the redevelopment there? The new mall and that pretty courtyard with the fountain?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Mary,” Charlotte said, thinking about it. “Who pays attention to who the developer is? They did a beautiful job, whoever they were. Shops and a redbrick promenade and all these new town houses. They painted them bright colors, like in the Caribbean.”

“What was there before?” Mary asked.

Charlotte chewed her lip. “You know, I can’t remember. Parking lots?”

“About these papers,” I said, glancing through the printouts. “It looks like just the preliminary paperwork. Is there anything more substantial we could find? Loan applications, tax deferment requests, approval notices, that kind of thing?”

Charlotte glanced at her watch. “We usually take a short break around now . . .”

I smiled. “Milk and cookies, on me. What’ll you take?”

Even with one of those little cardboard trays to carry everything, my fingers were nearly singed when I got back to the little office from picking up Earl Greys and a double latte from a nearby coffee shop. Both ladies were looking, heads bent at right angles, at a set of printouts. “Yow,” I said, almost dropping the drink tray on the counter.

Charlotte took a crocheted coffee cup sleeve shaped like a miniature winter coat and wrapped it around her drink. Mary was made of sterner stuff: she grabbed hers and took a long swallow.

“Any luck?” I asked.

“I . . . think so,” Charlotte said. “Here’s the bid proposal for the development. It was submitted about a year ago. It includes the rough outline of the plan and who will be affected.”

“Did they get a tax incentive for it?”

“No way to tell,” she said. “That’s a different search.”

I didn’t press it. “And what does this tell us?”

Charlotte bit her lip again. “It looks like there were about six or seven hundred residents living in public housing and fifty or so private residences.”

“There’s a community center they’re supposed to tear down and replace, too,” Mary said, pointing at a paragraph with a skinny finger.

So no parking lots, I thought. Just a thousand people living there, told to scram and make way for a row of town houses. “Are there any low-income apartments or houses now?”

She shook her head. “This search wouldn’t tell us, I’m afraid.”

“Does the proposal say anything else?”

Charlotte scanned the printout. “Hmm, a portion of the labor was going to be drawn from DC, and it looks like most of the homes and public housing were supposed to be replaced.”

“Doesn’t sound like that happened,” I said. “When was the bid approved?”

“About four months later.”

“Fast,” I said.

“Very,” Mary said. “Someone on the city council must’ve wanted this to get started badly.”

I felt like I’d found something to work on, so I thanked the ladies and left them with their Earl Greys. Before I made it through the door, Charlotte called after me, “Did we help you find what you were looking for?”

I smiled. “More than you know.”

I walked back to my car slowly, chewing on what I’d just learned. The last time I had a whiff of a lead, it had led to Tartikoff and Brentwood. And when I’d chased that lead headfirst, I’d not only learned very little, it appeared as though I’d precipitated a second murder.

Lesson learned. Now that I might’ve pinched the tip of another tiger’s tail, something told me to proceed with caution. Atlantic Union was a large, nine-figure-a-year corporate developer that seemed to have some swing with the DC city council and might be at least peripherally involved in two homicides. If that wasn’t enough bad mojo to tell me to tread carefully, I needed to find another line of business.

But while it was all very interesting and my gut told me I truly had a hold of something, it didn’t make much sense in terms of finding Wendy’s killer. Sure, it was tempting to think the big, bad corporate giant was involved in something dastardly and needed to shut some people up, but both Gerson and Montero had been playing on the same side as the developers. Unless they were both about to blow the whistle on some kind of shady deal on the scale of a federal indictment or RICO charge, it seemed unlikely they would be targets. For sure, nothing about Montero had said whistleblower to me. If anything, the guy seemed like a full-time cheerleader for corporate America—and any dirty tricks they might pull in chasing the dream would be just all right with him.

I was still sitting in the driver’s seat, the engine off, when my phone rang. I took it out, checked the number, and my whole lower half turned wobbly. It was Julie. I answered.

“Singer,” she said with no preamble. “Where are you?”

“Downtown,” I said. “Near Naylor Court.”

“Do you want to get that coffee?”

“Sure,” I said. That was quick. “You have someplace in mind?”

“Politics and Prose bookstore,” she said. “You know the basement coffee shop there?”

“I can find it.”

“Meet me in half an hour,” she said, then hung up.

“Do I bring the drugs or the money?” I said into the silent phone. Our exchange had had all the charm of a dead drop, but it was something.

The popular DC bookstore was on the other side of town on a wide, tree-lined section of Connecticut Avenue, and I made my rendezvous with about a minute to spare. It was too far from my house in Arlington to become a favored hangout, but I knew some Washingtonians who would’ve committed hara-kiri if they had to do without the place or its basement coffee bar. I pulled around back and counted it as a sign of good luck that I found an empty space in the tiny parking lot. I got out of my car, took a deep breath, and went inside. I followed my nose downstairs to the coffee shop.

Julie was sitting at a corner table with her back to the stairs, looking at her phone and sipping from a small porcelain cup. I watched her for a second. She looked great in a cable-knit sweater and jeans. Her long black hair was pulled back and tied at the base of her neck. She’d crossed her legs and the upper foot was bobbing in time to the soft music playing over the coffeehouse’s speakers. Seeing her like this—relaxed, unself-conscious—made me feel funny and I was happy I’d had a chance to adjust without being seen . . . then the detective in me kicked in and I realized she’d taken her seat to give me just this kind of inspection. I walked over.

“Is this seat taken?” I asked.

She raised her head and I got instant dry mouth. Her look was neither friendly nor dismissive, but she gestured with a hand for me to sit. I did. We looked at each other.

She asked, “No coffee?”

“Let’s see how long this lasts,” I said. “You might tell me to go screw myself, in which case I’ll go to Starbucks. I like their coffee better.”

A smile flitted across her mouth, disappeared, then she looked down into her cup. She was quiet. I was quiet. We sat like that for a minute; then—unable to take it anymore—I said, “What’s new?” at the same time she said, “What are you doing now?”

It was a classic awkward moment and one which, in the movies, led to embarrassed laughter and a breaking of the ice. In real life it was just uncomfortable. We each coughed, then I motioned to her. “You first.”

“You saw me at FirstStep,” she said. “It started out as just volunteer work, something to make up for the years of defending scum down at the courthouse. But it’s turned into something more important in the last few months.”

“How so?”

A shrug. She looked in her cup. “Helping anybody but myself was new territory. It felt good. It still feels good. Most of these women don’t have a clue what their legal rights are, how they can protect themselves. Once their husband or their boyfriend dumps them, they feel lost. Abandoned.”

She cut herself off abruptly and I looked down at the table. After a moment, I took a deep breath and said, “I think I’ll get that coffee. Want anything?”

Steam rose in plumes from behind the bar as the barista took her time pouring my coffee. I rocked back and forth on my heels, listening to the convivial chatter of the people around me. The place had exactly the right kind of bohemian feel for a coffeehouse in the basement of a bookstore, with the dim lighting just so and a closeted smell of paper and ink and coffee and human closeness that was oddly comforting. The glow of laptops and the lopsided drone of cell phone conversations took some of the romance away, but it still beat a downtown office building or the quiet desperation of a bar.

I walked back and sat down, wrapping my hands around my cup. “Look, I meant what I said on the phone—”

“So, what are you working on now?” she interrupted, staring at me, her eyes a tad too bright.

I paused. “Is that really what you want to talk about?”

“No,” she said. “But I need a neutral topic. Something mundane. Or I’ll get up and walk out.”

I leaned back in my chair. “Wow. Great.”

She shook her head. “Not out of spite. You’re extending yourself, making an effort. I understand that, even appreciate it. But I don’t want to reciprocate.”

“Just bury everything and move on?”

“For now. If we get past this, maybe we’ll dig deeper. But if you want to talk, we’re going to have to keep things on the surface. I can’t handle anything else. If that doesn’t interest you, we should stop now.”

I swallowed. “It interests me.”

“Okay,” she said, then let out a pent-up breath. I realized she’d feared I might take the stand-and-walk-out option. “So, what are you working on?”

It was tough, but I put blinders on what I was feeling and instead focused on the Wendy Gerson case, giving her the details from the moment of the horrific scene that took the girl’s life to what I’d been doing the minute before she’d called me to arrange our coffee date. Just as she had when we’d been on better terms, Julie listened intently, without interrupting, soaking in the details. She’d been both a defense attorney and a prosecutor and had been privy to her share of horrible crime scenes and situations. She looked thoughtful when I ended with what I’d found out from Charlotte and Mary at the records office.

“What do you make of it?”

“The developer,” I said.

“Care to explain?”

“Wendy Gerson and Alex Montero acted as the legal counsel that helped put together megadeals for out-of-town, white-shoe real estate investors. The last large deal they did was the Quarters.”

“The bid for which you find out was won by Atlantic Union,” Julie said.

“A firm that doesn’t have the most sterling ethical standards,” I said.

“Don’t assume,” she said. “You’re basing that on some guesses about Gerson’s and Montero’s deaths and a quick exchange with a few old biddies down at the Office of Public Records.”

“They weren’t old biddies. They were almost my age.”

“Whatever. The point is that Atlantic Union might be a five-star, triple-A corporate developer compared to its competition. You can’t take guesses like that.”

“Okay. But Atlantic is still the best lead I have. I don’t see how or why they’d want to ace Gerson and Montero—they all seem to be making money hand over fist together—but I’ve barely scratched the surface. For all I know, they were blackmailing Atlantic’s CEO and he had them taken out.”

“How is it that Gerson was so involved? Wasn’t she just the transaction attorney? Her job is to grease the skids and that’s it.”

“True, but I’m getting the impression that Gerson and Montero were more involved in this than just being the well-paid grunts that pulled the papers together. It seems that in this business, the attorneys are very close to the deal making. Maybe the temptation to play all over the board was too tempting.”

“You need more information about Atlantic,” Julie said, her voice musing. “And not the kind you’re going to find in their corporate brochures.”

“No kidding.”

“Let me do some digging,” she said. “When I went to help Amanda at FirstStep, I did some groundwork on how to help nonprofits and associations. The kind of legal aid they needed, their biggest challenges, that kind of thing. There was a list of grassroots organizations here in the city. If there’s a watchdog group or a citizens’ association, they might know about corporate development, Atlantic Union, and anyone else involved in shady lands deals in DC.”

“You don’t have to—” I started.

“Don’t read into it,” she said sharply, then her voice softened. “Look, it’s work I’ve already done. It’ll take me two seconds to e-mail. You do use e-mail?”

“Yes, I use e-mail,” I said, peeved. “In fact, I’m pretty tech savvy. I managed to botch an Internet search just this morning.”

“Keep an eye out this afternoon. I’ll try to get it to you when I get back to the office,” she said, then pushed her cup to one side and looked at her watch. “I have to go.”

“Do you . . . want to do this again?” I asked. I traced the rim of my paper cup, picking at the seam where it folded over on itself.

She looked at me until I raised my head. “I want to think about this. Maybe you should think about it, too. Give it some time.”

“A definite maybe?”

She put her purse over her shoulder and stood. “Look for that e-mail.”

“Okay,” I said, but she’d already turned and headed for the door. I watched her go. As rapprochements went, it wouldn’t have set anyone’s heart pitter-patter. But at least we were talking.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I’m unhappy that my cancer isn’t gone, I wrote, going slow, being deliberate with my words. I’m used to being presented with a problem, analyzing ways to tackle the issue, then solving it. I don’t know what to do with an ongoing situation that becomes a story, with chapters that continue to expand long after I thought I’d closed the cover on the book—

A loud kerplunk announced another e-mail making an appearance in my in-box, causing me to glance up from the legal pad. I looked at the clock—I’d been writing for almost two hours. I cracked my neck and stretched my hands over my head until my elbows popped, then picked up my phone and looked at the screen.

It was from Julie. In a few short, terse sentences, she told me about a group she’d researched, People Over Power, PoP for short. The organization was the premier DC watchdog group that kept one eye on the city government and the other on private institutions to make sure the two didn’t cozy up any more than the law would allow. She included some basic information like their address, phone number, annual revenue, and an index on the amount they spent on activism versus fund-raising and overhead. The last number was impressively high. PoP either worked on a lot of volunteer effort or they’d found a magical way of accomplishing their goals with almost no cash outlay. Or maybe both.

Julie’s e-mail ended there, so I went from e-mail to the web. I did a quick search on PoP, clicked on the line to their website, and kept reading. Founded just a few years before, they’d quickly garnered a reputation for effective action, bold demonstrations, and scrupulous bookkeeping. Or so their website said. The testimonials were far ranging and passionate, especially in regards to their president and founder, Michael Denton. I jotted down the most pertinent information, chewing the end of my pen, thinking, until I realized I was getting ink on my tongue. Julie’s info and the website were helpful, but I was still feeling cautious. Look before you leap. I called Channing Faraday.

“You again?” he answered.

“Ever vigilant,” I said. “Quick question. People Over Power.”

Faraday groaned.

“Something I should know?” I asked.

He sighed. “No, not really.”

“You’re not very convincing.”

“Their heart’s in the right place.”

“But?”

“You know that friend in college who read an article on saving the rain forest or ending poverty and then got so involved with the cause, so fucking earnest, they couldn’t see straight? The one that wouldn’t stop talking about their thing, trying to get you to read a pamphlet or go to a talk or donate your entire paycheck? And if you said no, you were part of the problem?”

“Yeah.”

“PoP is that kid. When Rob couldn’t be one hundred percent for them—just ninety percent—they picketed our offices.” Faraday sounded disgusted. “The other guy was shutting city services down, robbing the city blind, and they’re waving signs outside our door.”

“What’s”—I glanced at my notes—“Michael Denton like?”

“Denton is the head honcho. Founded PoP. He is PoP, really. There are other full-timers and a bunch of volunteers, but he’s the heart and soul of the place.”

“Personality?”

“Everything I just described about PoP as an organization applies to Denton. He’s driven, opinionated, effective.”

“But does good work,” I said.

Faraday took a breath. “Yes, damn it. Denton has made a lot of bad people uncomfortable since PoP started. I just wish he’d have a reality check one of these days. Getting things done in politics takes more than a my-way-or-the-highway approach. Crusaders never get that.”

“Maybe he’d say the same about compromisers,” I said.

“Denton never had to run for public office or satisfy a constituency of fifty thousand people,” Faraday said. “Protestors only ever have to point out what’s wrong, crusaders only ever have to wage a war. They don’t have to fix the broken pieces afterwards.”

“Sounds like you’re still a believer, Faraday.”

“Eh,” he said and made a rude noise. “I gave up when Rob lost the election. Politics will take the heart out of you every time.”

People Over Power’s global headquarters was located in the Atlas District on H Street in Southeast. The whole neighborhood had been undergoing a renaissance in the past few years, drawing in bars and edgy restaurants with the siren song of cheap rent and a kind of seedy cachet that was made genuine by some of the truly borderline buildings and people still haunting the place.

The office was on the second floor of a sketchy remnant of those good old days, a three-story brick walk-up that had been around when H Street saw more shootings than happy hours. But today, I parked on the street and went through the street-side door without a problem, climbing uneven steps carpeted in a moldy blue-green shag until I found myself in front of a door emblazoned with the PoP logo: a man stick figure holding hands with a woman stick figure, both of them standing over a fist clutching a stylized twenty-dollar bill, a sword, and a gavel. A happy sun rose in the background, signaling a new day was at hand. I went in.

An open-plan office, the smell of printer ink heavy in the air, greeted me on the other side. Six desks were crammed into a space better suited for two or three, but natural light streamed in through an old-fashioned triple-pane window, keeping the place from feeling dim as well as cramped. Two doors, shut, provided exits on either side of the room. A neglected rubber tree plant drooped in one corner and the walls were covered with different posters announcing demonstrations or decrying the excesses of certain corporations. They were all highly designed, with the hip, splashy feel of sixties protest art. The PoP logo was in the bottom-right corner of each.

Four of the desks were occupied by young people of both sexes and several different ethnicities, most of them working on laptops and with headphones plugged in or covering ears. One young Asian kid was standing, leaning over a young girl’s shoulder as they both read something on the screen of her laptop.

He glanced up when I came in and walked over, wary. No surprise. I still looked like a cop, and law enforcement wasn’t always welcome in the inner sanctums of subversive protest groups. “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Michael Denton.”

“Is he expecting you?” he asked, doubtfully.

I smiled, trying to put him at ease. “No. A mutual friend recommended him to me. I’m looking into some potential abuses by a corporation here in DC and she told me PoP might know more about the company than I could find myself.”

The kid hesitated. I pushed it, saying, “I might have some proof that this company has been systematically kicking out residents of poorer neighborhoods in the city and replacing them with high-income housing and big-box stores.”

“What do you mean, you’re looking into it?”

“A friend was one of the people displaced by this company. I thought if I could find more information, have it all ready to go, I could hand it over to a reporter and get them to go public.” I paused. “But I don’t want to waste your time. If you’re not the right people to talk to—”

“No, hold on,” he said. “I’ll ask Michael.”

The kid went to one of the doors and knocked. A voice told him to come in, and he disappeared. Two minutes later, his head popped out and he waved me over. I snaked my way through the maze of desks—none of the residents of the desks so much as twitched—and went over to the door. The Asian kid waved me through, then went out and shut the door behind him.

I was in a tiny office on the other side, neat and tidy. Windowless, but well lit by three soft lamps. Two large file cabinets, a desk, and a small side table held up the walls, upon which were hung several certificates and diplomas, including a law degree I could see was from the University of Virginia, since the thing occupied one-third of the available space. On the side table was a framed studio portrait of a black woman, smiling beautifully. It had that slightly grainy cast and hyper-real colors that said it was from the seventies or eighties.

Seated at the desk was a black man in his thirties—difficult to tell his height, six one, maybe?—with short hair. He was dressed conservatively, with a crisp blue shirt, black tie, and understated leather-band watch. One finger sported a class ring and a small white shell hung from a cord around his neck. He stood as I entered. I was right: about six one, broad-shouldered but proportional.

“Michael Denton,” he said, holding out a hand. He had a wonderful voice, an anchorman’s rich baritone—full of timbre, but without the smarm. His manner was calm, in control, his face stoic.

“Marty Singer,” I said, and shook.

“Jerry said you had some questions for me?”

“I do.” He sat, so I did, then I gave him a quick rundown on what I knew about Atlantic Union. With Julie’s warnings still fresh in my mind, I refrained from making any assumptions, just laid out what I’d learned at the Office of Records. Denton sat through it all, his face noncommittal and blank.

“So,” I said, “I want to know more about this company that’s so big and has so much pull with the city that it can do these things.”

“And why do you want to know all of this, Mr. Singer?”

I sensed a load of malarkey—while sufficient to bamboozle the volunteer out front—would not go very far here. “I’m looking into the murder of a woman who might be connected distantly to a development project Atlantic is involved with.”

“And who are you doing the looking for?”

“The woman’s family.”

He leaned back and steepled his fingers. I felt like I was being examined. “And who are you to be doing the looking?”

“I was there when the woman was pushed in front of a train,” I said.

Denton’s eyebrows moved upward. “That qualifies you as an eyewitness, not an investigator.”

“As luck would have it, I’m a former detective with DC Homicide. Retired now. The family found out about me in the police report and contacted me when the official investigation sputtered.”

“But you’re not a licensed private investigator?”

“Only if a driver’s license counts,” I said. “Look, I’m not here in any official capacity. I don’t do this for a living anymore. The family is desperate and they figured my credentials and the fact I was standing there qualify me to look into this. I can get you the name and number of the head of DC Homicide if you need somebody to vouch for me.”

Denton’s face had gone even stonier—if that were possible—when I’d mentioned the nature of the murder. “Was the victim Wendy Gerson?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Did you know her?”

“I knew of her. And I read about the murder, of course.”

“You don’t sound like a fan.”

“She was connected to some of the most rapacious developers in Washington, DC,” he said. “Atlantic Union is just one of a battery of crooks dressed as real estate firms. And Wendy Gerson was involved with all of them at one time or another.”

“So the name Atlantic Union isn’t unknown to you.”

“It is not.”

“Is it one of the developers PoP is interested in exposing?”

“Yes.”

I paused, waiting for more. When Denton didn’t say anything, I said, “No offense, but you seem less than forthcoming about a company that’s on your shit list. I’m offering to see if they might be connected to a murder investigation. Seems like something you’d be interested in.”

Denton adjusted his watchband. “Mr. Singer, there are many more people interested in getting a commercial advantage than there are in seeing justice and fair play prevail. I’ve had three or four phone calls or visits from developers in just the last week, trying to sic me on a rival or pull us onto their side. In fact, Atlantic Union itself has tried four or five times in the last year to co-opt us by making large donations to our general fund. But we always send the money back, because we know it’s going to be followed by a request for a favor.”

“Dirty pool,” I said.

Shrug. “They know PoP is tenacious and can do some damage to a company that is pursuing a bid or applying for a tax abatement. What’s the cost to them if I decide PoP should investigate a developer that also happens to be competing with them for the same project? So we have to be judicious about the information we accept and the information we give out. I refuse to be played.”

“I can respect that,” I said. “Can you at least tell me how PoP goes about exposing the wrongdoing?”

Denton said, “Several years ago we started a database tracking the major developers. The bids they won, the incentives they received, and the campaign contributions they made. That’s why all the kids in the front room are on laptops ten hours a day. Most of the information is public, but it has to be harvested from a dozen different sources.”

“Tax records, applications, notices . . . that kind of thing?”

“Yes, but even then, the information is structured in arcane ways or can be buried in the wrong document. We connect the dots, but it takes dozens of work hours to do it.”

“And I imagine the developers would like it to stay that way,” I said. “Obscure and scattered.”

“They would. And so would the city. We also keep track of the building sites and neighborhoods that get replaced or destroyed as a result of the development. Since it’s the city council that decides what wards get the projects—they have a quaint term for it, ‘surplusing’—they’re just as culpable.” Denton made a squaring motion with his hands, like he was framing a picture. “A ‘revitalization’ project that wipes out a functioning neighborhood and installs a lineup of restaurants. A ‘business improvement zone’ that displaces five hundred families for a new mall.”

“The database helps you keep track of the victims,” I said.

He nodded. “In six months, nobody remembers what was there. And when nobody remembers, complaints die out, and the cycle of corruption starts again. Without a protest or an institutional memory, the city can point to the new neighborhood and say, ‘Crime is down, employment is on the rise, and just look at how much money this new row of clothing stores is bringing in.’”

“Maybe that’s just progress.”

He shook his head. “It would be progress if the developers and the families that got pushed out for it shared in the wealth. But not one in ten of the original residents can afford to buy back in their old neighborhood.”

“Where do they go?” I asked.

“You’ve heard of ‘white flight’? The great urban migration, when June Cleaver wanted to go out in the suburbs to get away from all the blacks and Hispanics in the city?”

I nodded.

“Reverse it. Today, those same suburban developments are run down, outdated, and half an hour away from the urban dream that is the new, exciting Wash-ing-ton, DC.” Denton emphasized each adjective with jazzy intonation and a jog of his head. “Can a developer sell those suburban lots for top dollar three decades later? Hell, no. White folks don’t want to live there anymore. They’re heading downtown. But—hey, what do you know?—a whole bunch of poor black and Hispanic families just got shoved out of their homes in Southeast. It’s a perfect match. The rich return to a sparkling new city and suburban real estate brokers pawn off broken-down neighborhoods to a whole demographic that can’t afford anything else.”

Denton’s voice had taken on an almost evangelical rhythm and tone. I paused, giving him a chance to ease down from the rhetoric. Not that I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t want to hear the sermon, I wanted to get to the meat of the issue. “So that’s the general state of affairs. Can we talk specifics?”

He took a breath. “You want the skinny on Atlantic Union.”

“It would be nice, yeah.”

Denton steepled his fingers again, like a young professor about to deliver some bad news about my last exam. “You seem like a nice man, Mr. Singer, and you ask the right questions. But that doesn’t mean I trust you.”

“Shucks.”

“Give me your phone number and a couple days. I’ll do some checking. If I think you’re everything you say you are, I’ll give you some information that will knock your socks off.”

“What if it turns out I’m working for those rotten real estate sons of bitches?” I asked.

“Then I’ll throw you down our front steps myself,” Denton said, his face breaking into a smile for the first time.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I was swinging my legs out of bed and had turned on the light before I was awake. My head was scrambled for a minute as I tried to sort out why I wasn’t sleeping and, more importantly, why I was getting paged. I wasn’t supposed to be on duty and I could feel the burn start, angry that someone in the department had dropped the ball and now they were calling Marty Singer to fix things—

I put my head in my hands. I wasn’t a cop anymore. No one had paged me. I didn’t have a pager. Nobody did anymore. I was retired and should be able to sleep in until at least six or seven. The clock said 3:00 and the darkness meant in the morning. Why was I awake? I listened, looked around. No sounds. Pierre was asleep at the foot of the bed wrapped in a ball the size of a catcher’s mitt.

My phone. I turned it on. One e-mail. I clicked and flipped until I got to the right screen, and that’s when I actually woke up. It was the automatic alert from the security system at FirstStep. It had probably kerplunked loud enough to wake me. More flipping got me to the web browser screen, where I was stymied—rubbing my temples and swearing—until I remembered the login for the site. More fumbling, then I got to the screen in question, the live feed for camera three.

And there it was, in grainy, black-and-white glory. A man crouched near the back entrance looking around furtively but not high enough to spot the camera. His head was bowed as he fiddled with something on the ground, a box or a bag maybe. He wore a jacket, a baseball cap with a flattened brim, and jeans. He wasn’t trying to break in, but I doubt he was tying his shoe, either. We’d caught our first fish.

I thought about it. I could throw some sweatpants on, jump in the car, and—at three in the morning—be at FirstStep in fifteen minutes. Or I could call 911 and there would be a cruiser there in four. If I was looking at Karla’s boyfriend, and the guy who broke Amanda’s arm, I would desperately like to twist the guy’s nose upside down. On the other hand, if I called the cops and they caught him in the act putting something unsavory or even dangerous on FirstStep’s back stoop, he might get more than a reprimand this time.

Just as I moved to call 911, however, the man stood and walked out of the frame, finished with whatever tinkering he’d been up to. His face was obscured by the cap and there wasn’t anything remarkable about the jacket. In less than a second, he was out of sight. I swore. He would be long gone by the time any cop got there, so why call? But he hadn’t had anything in his hands when he’d left. Whatever he’d been so busy with was still sitting by the back door.

With images of homemade bombs waiting to be discovered—or triggered—by Amanda or someone else at FirstStep, I dialed 911. In a couple of short sentences, I explained who I was, what I’d seen, and agreed to meet the patrol car at FirstStep in twenty minutes. As I was slipping those sweatpants on, however, my phone went off again. I grabbed it. It was Amanda.

“The alert woke you, too?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Should we call the police?”

“Already done. I’m heading down there now, see what that guy left us.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

“You don’t have to,” I said. “It’s going to be routine and boring and done in fifteen minutes.”

“What if it’s a bomb?”

“It’ll take longer than fifteen minutes, then. But what I saw of the guy on the tape didn’t seem to suggest a highly technical approach. It’s probably a pile of dog poop.”

“Either way, I should be there. Between the two of us, I’m the only FirstStep employee.”

I rubbed my eyes. I didn’t want an argument. “Okay. I’ll see you there.”

The cop on the scene wasn’t impressed with the call and I can’t say I blamed him. We looked at the brown bag from the end of the alley, lit by a solitary spotlight over the back door. It had been positioned so anyone exiting the building would step right on it. It took the cake for being unassuming and plain—just a small, crumpled brown bag like one of thousands blowing around the city.

It didn’t matter what it looked like, though. Even the hint of an explosive device required a call to the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit—or bomb squad, as any sane person would call it—and that meant standing around, waiting for the squad to get there and do their thing. Assuming all went well and it was just poop, we could all relax, but the patrolman would have a raft of paperwork to go through back at the station.

And Amanda and I were going to stand there for the whole thing, too. It was why I had tried to get her to stay home. But she had a point—if it was going to be anything more dangerous than canine feces, then someone actually associated with FirstStep was going to have to answer some questions and press charges. But three and a half hours and two cups of convenience-store coffee later, the EODU squad gave the all-clear sign, hopped in their saddles, and left.

“What’d they find?” I asked the patrolman after he’d come back from talking to the squad leader. His tag said Cochran. “Poop?”

“No. Dead rat with a pink ribbon tied around its neck.”

“Did you dust it?” He gave me a look and I shrugged. “Sorry. Sometimes laughing helps.”

“Sometimes,” he said. He didn’t seem to mean it, though.

Amanda had her arms crossed, scowling down the alley. “There wasn’t anything else in the bag? Nothing to identify it?”

“No, ma’am. It didn’t have a wallet.” The cop glanced at me. “Just the ribbon.”

“That’s the spirit,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said, then looked at Amanda. “You want me to dump it for you?”

“But we know who this was. It had to be Danny Fincher, Karla’s boyfriend,” she said, incredulous. “That’s all you can do?”

“I’m afraid so, miss.”

“There’s no crime, Amanda,” I said, trying to explain. “Except littering.”

“But we caught it on camera,” she protested.

“You caught him littering on camera, ma’am,” Cochran said. “If he had done some damage, vandalized or sprayed the door, smashed the lightbulb, something, then maybe we could bring him in. Make him sit in the pokey for a night. But it isn’t really worth it if he hasn’t done anything serious. Especially if we can’t ID him positively.”

Amanda opened her mouth to complain and I stepped in, thanking Cochran before Amanda could push it. Filing a weak charge, even if Cochran played along, would just mean more paperwork for the poor guy . . . and hurt any chance we had of building that rapport I’d talked to her about. Amanda got the hint and thanked him curtly, then he took off, leaving us staring down the mouth of the alley at the scene of the crime.

“A rat,” Amanda said. “Wearing a ribbon.”

I nodded.

“As threats go, it’s not exactly a horse head under the covers,” she said.

“No.”

“Are you thinking we shouldn’t take it seriously?”

“No. This guy and his threats seem rinky-dink, but that doesn’t mean he won’t turn to something more extreme tomorrow or a month from now, if what he’s trying to threaten us about is important to him.”

“It’s just like before,” she said, getting a sad look on her face that cut right to my heart. “We can’t do anything to him until he does something to us. Something that can’t be fixed.”

“Hey,” I said and squeezed her arm. “It’s not that bad. For one thing, we actually know who’s doing this. Second, this guy is no murdering stalker, like the last guy. He’s just a loser, pure and simple, not a psychopath with police training, an influential father, and multiple homicides under his belt.”

She nodded, but looked unconvinced. “I guess we just lock up and go home?”

I scrubbed my face with both hands, feeling queasy. A white, scuzzy dawn and the bad coffee brought back memories of too many mornings just like this one. At least the body in question wasn’t human. “I could use a couple hours of sleep,” I said. “But before we go, you said Karla didn’t give you any information on this guy Fincher, right?”

“Why?”

“It’s time I did something proactive here. Not personally, necessarily,” I said when I saw a protest start to form on her lips. “But if I have a name and an address, I can call in some favors and at least learn more about the guy. See if he’s got a record, where he works, that kind of thing.”

“That’s all? You’re not going to hunt him down, right?”

“Yeah. But you said you don’t have any information on the guy, so . . .” I trailed off.

“Karla did say they lived together,” Amanda said, suddenly speculative. She tapped a fingernail against her teeth. “It stands to reason that whatever she listed as her residence is probably his, too.”

“Sure,” I said. “Stands to reason.”

“Let’s go check the records. They’re a total mess, but her address should be in there somewhere.”

“Okay.”

Inside, Amanda led the way back to her office. Ever the conscientious worker, she’d brought her laptop with her, so she sat down, powered it on, and started sifting her way through to the information we needed. It was slow going with her broken arm and I walked in circles around her office, trying to stay awake on three hours of sleep until she finally snapped at me to find somewhere else to kill time or she’d throw the computer at my head. The halls were boring, so I nosed around FirstStep’s conference room, other people’s offices, and the tiny kitchenette that everyone shared. Sharing, according to the state of the refrigerator, meant they all ignored cleaning it equally. I shut the fridge door just as Amanda called my name. I hurried down the hall.

“North Carolina Avenue,” she said, and rattled off an address. I borrowed a pen from her desk and jotted it down on the back of my hand.

“Phone number?”

“She only gave us her cell . . .” she said, searching. “No, wait. Here we go. Looks like they shared a landline.”

I jotted that down next to the address. Amanda watched me, then said, “Do you want a piece of paper? This is an office, you know. We might not have health insurance, but we’ve got paper.”

“Nope. This keeps me honest. I have to do something about this guy before the next time I wash my hands.”

She closed her eyes.

“Now,” I said. “Physical description. Remember much from when he pushed his way in here?”

“He had a mask on, remember?”

“How about the first time? When he showed Diane the knife?”

She closed her eyes, remembering. “White. Skinny. Blond hair. Maybe my height.”

“How long was his hair?”

“Short. Spiked, maybe?”

“Age?”

“Midtwenties,” she said. “And looks like it, if you know what I mean. A young face.”

“Mustache? Glasses? Eye patch?”

“No facial hair, no glasses,” she said, thinking about it. “I think. The whole thing was over so quickly, I almost can’t remember details.”

“I know the feeling. Speaking of description, do you think you could print off a few of the best still shots from the video?”

“Probably,” she said. After a few minutes of fiddling around, I heard the printer down the hall click on and start spitting out pages. I went and snagged them all, leafing through them as I walked back.

“Will those help?” Amanda asked doubtfully.

“There’s no direct shot of his face, but you never know.” I stole a folder from her desk, put the stills inside, then clicked the pen shut and put it back on her desk. “Okay, that should do it.”

“That’s it?” she asked. “Now what?”

“Go home, get some sleep, come back into work,” I said.

“No, what are you going to do?”

“Oh. Go home, get some sleep, call in those favors.”

“Nothing pyrotechnic?”

“Promise,” I said, crossing my heart. “The key here is to make Danny Fincher go away quietly, not with a bang. At least, that’s the plan.”

She propped an elbow on her desk and rested her forehead in her hand, looking resigned. “I can’t tell if I’m disappointed or not. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone pushed him around for a change?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, it would.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

If my snazzy smartphone and recent Internet searches made me feel twenty-first century, then sitting in my car holding a fat digital camera with a telephoto lens in my hand made me feel downright space age. Next stop, flying cars and robot butlers.

It was borrowed technology, though; Dods had received it as a birthday gift from his wife, Margie. It had been a wonderfully obtuse gift, as Dods was more technophobic than I was. He’d lent me the camera months ago, suggesting that someone with time on their hands—say, a retired homicide cop—might be able to figure out the thing’s ten thousand features and not leave it in the back of a drawer like he’d been planning. To date, I’d learned how to turn it on, take a picture, and look at it for three seconds before the screen went dark. Amanda had told me that there was a way to look at the pictures for as long as you wanted and even print them, but I hadn’t advanced to that stage. I’d probably end up asking her to do it.

But the camera was coming in handy now. Following what I’d scribbled on the back of my hand, I drove straight from FirstStep to Danny Fincher’s address, pulling up to a spiffy row of four-story brick townhomes bookended by an empty lot on one side and a Popeyes on the other. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood, just one of those DC anomalies where one section had undergone a three-million-dollar makeover while cheap restaurants and down-in-the-mouth retail outlets were the norm for five blocks in either direction. I cruised past the front of the buildings, checked the address, then circled the block. A parking spot halfway down the street gave me a view of the front door, so I whipped into the space and shut off the car.

The number for Fincher’s landline, scribbled on the back of my hand, was smudged, but still legible. I took out my cell and dialed, waiting through seven rings before a man answered, groggy and pissed off.

“Yeah?”

I made a clicking sound, then said in my best salesman’s voice, “Hello! Are you sick of the daily grind? Do you dream of white sands, umbrella drinks, and falling asleep to the soothing sounds of crashing waves? Are you interested in the vacation . . . of a lifetime?”

He swore and slammed the phone down.

Okay, he was home. I got out of the car and popped the trunk. I keep a few indispensable items in the car at all times. Spare tire, jack, first-aid kit, and thermos. I grabbed the thermos, locked the car, then walked over to Popeyes, where the nice people there filled it with coffee that smelled like fried chicken. I walked back to the car, opened the thermos, and poured the first quarter cup of what was probably going to be a long day’s stakeout.

Considering Fincher’s late-night shenanigans, it was likely he was going to sleep the day away, which meant it was tempting to go home, catch forty winks myself, and come back around three o’clock. But his bag o’ rat prank might be the preamble to something more vicious, in which case I wanted to be ready to intercept it. Even if he didn’t have anything else up his sleeve, it wouldn’t hurt to do a little surveillance.

At least, that’s what I kept telling myself one, two, then three hours into it. The brownstones and the street they were on saw plenty of traffic, but none of it was Danny Fincher. By one o’clock, it had already been a long day for me and I was beginning to nod off. I’d finished the coffee and done a few cautious passes on foot down to the end of the block to try and wake up, but as early afternoon passed by and midafternoon began to creep away, I knew I’d have to call it or risk passing out. I took a trip to Popeyes to relieve myself of the coffee I’d bought there and headed back to the car.

Just in time to see Fincher, or someone fitting his description, come out of the house I’d been watching. I swore and hurried my steps without trying to look conspicuous, then hopped in the car and grabbed the SLR. But it was too late to do anything except take pictures of the back of his head. I started the car and whipped into the street, raced down the alley next to Popeyes, and circled the block as fast as I could, barely stopping for signs, cars, and pedestrians.

I found a space two blocks down North Carolina where I could point the car at the direction I’d seen Fincher walking. Sure enough, less than a minute after I’d pulled away from the curb, I saw him walking jauntily down the sidewalk toward me. As inconspicuously as I could, I picked up the SLR and took about thirty shots. It was my lucky day: he’d traded the sweatshirt for a zip-up sweater, but he was still wearing the baseball cap he’d had on in the security video.

As Fincher neared the car, I lowered the camera and pulled out my phone, acting engrossed. He passed by, oblivious, and turned the corner on the next block. I put the phone down and thought about my next move. Sure, I had pretty good evidence that he was on the scene, had trespassed, and littered. But I had to be honest with myself, I really didn’t have enough to do much more than make him mildly nervous. I wasn’t a credible threat. And if he knew anything about the law, he’d laugh in my face. Even with the photos, I just didn’t have the leverage to scare him.

You don’t know enough about him, I thought. Operating in a vacuum wouldn’t work. You can’t find leverage if you don’t know who you’re dealing with. Dealing with. Yeah, he didn’t know who he was dealing with . . .

I woke with a start. I’d fallen asleep in the car with the motor running. At least it was in park. A little girl on the sidewalk, sitting astride a pink bike with training wheels, was watching me. I scrubbed my face until the skin tingled, waved at the little girl, then put the car in gear and headed home. Justice would have to wait until I could keep my eyes open.

“Yes, that’s him,” Amanda said. I’d returned to FirstStep after a few hours of sleep, feeling like hell, but wanting to keep my momentum. She shuffled through prints of the best pictures I’d taken of Fincher, then handed them back to me. “So you didn’t punch him in the face while saying, ‘This is for FirstStep’?”

“I thought about burning his building down,” I said, “but that seemed a little callous.”

“What now?”

“Well, we’ve proven he lives in this building and that he buys his hats at the same place as the guy on your security tape. That’s it. If I’m going to apply pressure, I need more info on him.”

“You want to speak to Karla?”

I nodded.

Amanda sighed. “I hate to even remind her of him, let alone talk directly about him. And we’d be asking her to essentially betray him. At least, that would be her outlook.”

“I understand. But if anyone’s got the story on Danny Fincher, it’s going to be her. And it doesn’t have to be something that’s going to ruin him. We’re just looking for a setback, something to convince him to take up a hobby or look for a job in another state. Maybe he’s violating parole or his mother would disown him or he’s got a fear of the color blue. If there’s something we can use to give him pause, she’s going to know it.”

“Hold on.” Amanda picked up the phone and dialed three numbers, an interoffice call. She waited a minute, then said, “Hi, Karla. Can I come talk to you for a minute? No, nothing serious. No, nothing’s happened. Well, something has, but I want to chat with you about it. Okay, I’ll be right there.”

Amanda hung up the phone and stood. “Karla’s doing some secretarial work for us right now, just down the hall. Let me talk to her about this and see if she wants to do it.”

“I’ll wait here.”

“Yes, please. And, Marty, she’s been scared and pissed off since she got here. No jokes, okay?”

“Sure.”

“And try to look . . . I don’t know . . . smaller or something.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“I don’t know. Sit down, for starters. Slouch a little.” She left the office.

Grumbling, I sat in the corner chair and slouched, but it made me feel like I’d been called to the principal’s office. I tried sitting straight and drooping my shoulders, but then my hands hung lower than the seat of the chair, like a gorilla with a fashion problem. I settled for crossing my legs and acting normal.

Heels clacked in the hall and I composed myself, trying my best to look like the nicest, friendliest guy in town. The door opened and Amanda showed a young woman into the room. She was twenty-something with frizzy black hair. Dark eyes in a thin, sallow face made her look perpetually skittish. Or maybe she really was skittish after having the shit beaten out of her by a guy who called himself her boyfriend.

“Karla, this is Marty,” Amanda said.

“Hi, Karla,” I said, then realized a little too late that the acrobatics in the chair had been for naught, since I had to stand anyway in order to shake Karla’s hand if I didn’t want to look like a jerk. She was easily a foot shorter than I was and I sat as quickly as I could after shaking her hand.

Amanda shut the door and took her seat behind the desk. “Karla, like I said, Marty is looking into some things for us here at FirstStep. He used to work for the DC police and I’m not kidding when I say that, not long ago, he saved my life from someone who wanted to hurt me.”

We were both looking at Amanda while she spoke, but Karla snuck a glance at me. I wasn’t expecting the accolades and I think I blushed.

“One of the things he’s helping with,” Amanda said, “is Danny Fincher, unfortunately.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Karla said. Her voice was high-pitched, but strong and certain. “Not for me.”

“I know. And we were hoping that the episode when Danny attacked me was an isolated incident, but last night we caught Danny leaving us some . . . unsavory gifts by the back door. Nothing serious, but the bomb squad had to be called to clear the area.”

“Oh,” Karla said.

“We can’t afford to have this escalate into something worse, something destructive or dangerous. So Marty is trying to find a way to convince Danny to leave FirstStep—and by extension, you—alone.”

“Oh,” Karla said again and her voice, no longer strong and certain, wavered. “Maybe . . . maybe I should leave—”

“No,” Amanda and I said at the same time. We glanced at each other and she nodded at me. “Karla, that’s not what we’re saying. And, frankly, it wouldn’t help. FirstStep should be a place of safety for you and all the women here. Even if you left, I’d still want to follow up on this, because the shelter can’t afford to be bullied by anyone who gets it in their head that they don’t like what’s being done here. As long as I’m doing that, you might as well stay.”

Karla bit her lip and looked at her hands for a minute. “What can I tell you? I mean, Danny never did anything illegal or crazy.”

Except beat the living—I thought, then caught Amanda’s warning glance. I cleared my throat. “It doesn’t have to be something that puts him in jail, necessarily. And I don’t want to threaten him if I don’t have to. Threats don’t last. I’m looking for something that will change his mind for good, something that will convince him that it just doesn’t make sense to harass you or FirstStep anymore.”

“Like what?” Karla asked.

“Let’s start with the simple stuff,” I said. “We don’t know anything about him. Where is he from? What does he do? Is there a family member or friend he respects who we could talk to? Is he in trouble with the law, even for something minor?”

“He gets a lot of speeding tickets,” Karla said, doubtfully. “He’s from Kentucky and was always complaining that they’d never stop him back home for doing sixty in a twenty-five.”

“Okay,” I said. “Where does he work? He’s got a pretty nice place for, no offense, someone so young.”

“He’s a consultant.”

“With a firm?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “He’s got his own company.”

“Really?” I said. “What kind of consulting?”

“Political stuff. Something to do with elections.”

“Like managing campaigns? Raising money?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Who’d he consult for last?”

She snorted. “He’s only ever worked for his father. He always complained about how shitty the job is, but he never did anything to find another gig. Never would, either.”

“His father?” Amanda asked. “His father works in town?”

“Well, yeah,” Karla said, looking confused. “Of course.”

“Fincher?” I asked and something that had been tickling my brain since I’d heard Danny’s last name now marched to the front lobe and began banging on the door to be let out.

The same thought occurred to Amanda. “Karla, is Danny’s father . . . Gordon Fincher? The congressman?”

Karla cocked her head quizzically. “Yeah. I thought you knew.”

The office chair popped and squeaked as I sat back. It was all I could do not to put my hands behind my head and prop my feet on Amanda’s desk.

Karla looked from Amanda to me and back. “Does that help?”

A huge smile split Amanda’s face, matching my own.

“Oh, just a little,” I said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“Mr. Singer,” the voice whispered, so low and strained it sounded like the person was being strangled.

“Caitlin?” I asked. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I’m in the bathroom,” she said. “At work, I mean. It’s the only place I can talk.”

“You can’t go outside to call?”

“No. Billy’s been following me around, hanging all over me. And one of the partners might hear me in the office.”

“Let’s make it quick, then,” I said.

“I was snooping around Ms. Gerson’s office, looking for that day planner I told you about. A paper one from, like, the seventies.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking about how I still kept my notes on a desk blotter. “You said she kept most of it on a laptop, though, right? Why the day planner?”

“She had a computer crash last year that wiped everything out, so she kept a duplicate in case her hard drive got hosed or she lost her phone.”

“Did you find it?”

“No, they cleared her office out a few days after she was killed,” Caitlin said. “But Becky talked to that boy she knows who interned with Mr. Montero and he told her it was in his desk.”

“Montero’s desk?”

“Yes.”

Okay, made sense. Montero wanted Gerson’s notes about anything and everything she’d ever done, so when her office had been cleaned out, he got all the goods. “They haven’t cleaned Montero’s office yet?”

“No. The firm is freaking out. They’ll get around to it soon, but right now everyone’s looking over their shoulder.”

“Do you think anyone else knows about the day planner? Like, someone who might come looking for it?”

“I doubt it,” Caitlin said. “I was the only one who saw her use it and I think Mr. Montero only knew about it because everything from her office was brought to him.”

“Dynamite,” I said, feeling my pulse quicken. “So you have it now. Anything interesting?”

“She had a name written down several times,” she said.

I waited for more, but my ear was suddenly filled by hurried muffling and scratching sounds, like she was dragging the phone across a pant leg. I gripped the phone tighter, resisting the urge to yell to Caitlin. The logical conclusion was that someone had come in the bathroom and she’d shoved the phone in her pocket. It wasn’t like she was hiding, of course, but yelling at the top of my voice wouldn’t help her stay inconspicuous in a workplace that was no doubt jumpy after the murder of two of its staff.

The muffled clothing sounds were replaced by a soft click that told me the line had been dropped. I sat there for a minute wondering if it was time to either run down to Tartikoff and Brentwood myself or call the MPDC to do it. As I glared at the call panel, a text message appeared. It was from Caitlin’s number. Hold on. I breathed out and stared at the panel for the world’s longest two minutes until she called back.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Just a lady from Accounts. She took long enough. I was afraid she was going to knock on my stall.”

“They’re going to think you’ve got a real problem if we don’t wrap this up soon.”

She giggled, then stifled it. “The guy’s name is Pat Zimmerman. He shows up next to five different entries for the Quarters project.”

“Doing what?”

“It doesn’t say,” she said, sounding unhappy. “She put her real notes in her phone and only jotted a phrase or two in the day planner.”

“No worries,” I said, trying to reassure her. “No phone number listed for him, then? E-mail? Mailing address?”

“Nope.”

“Okay, Caitlin. Don’t sweat it. This is great information. How are things at work? Have you had any more warnings from the partners at T and B?”

“No, but I have a friend in Operations that said they were given instructions to log my e-mails and web surfing. It’s kind of freaking me out. I think I’d like to stop for a while.”

“I understand,” I said. “Take a break and definitely don’t e-mail me. Call me if you feel like they’re threatening you and we’ll come up with a plan to get you out of there.”

“Okay,” she said, not completely convinced. We said good-bye and hung up.

I looked at my notepad, where I’d scribbled the name “Pat Zimmerman” and underlined it twice. As generic names go, it wasn’t the worst in the world, but it was damn close. I rubbed the back of my neck, thinking. How many Pat Zimmermans could there be in the world? A million? No way, not even a quarter million. Say, a hundred thousand. Sure. So, split amongst the fifty states and scoop a little off the top for the District, I was only looking at maybe . . . what? Four hundred in the Metro area? No problem. If I started calling each one, I could be done by dinnertime—next year.

I sighed. The days of scanning the phone book under Z were long gone. I looked at my smartphone with distaste, my recent Internet failures fresh in my mind. The web was a strange place, though, my conscience told me. What if a search on Zimmerman’s name came back with a map and an arrow? A big, red, blinking HERE HE IS! beside a picture of the guy? I punched in Zimmerman, Patrick Washington DC.

No luck. Or, to be more accurate, too much luck. I didn’t get the four hundred names, but might as well have. After scrolling through eight pages of meaningless results, I closed the window. With apologies to Pierre, there was more than one way to skin this cat.

An hour later, calls to Paul Gerson, his parents, Dods, and Channing Faraday were all strikes. No one had heard of anyone named Pat Zimmerman in connection to Wendy Gerson or otherwise. I sat and thought. Then, on a hunch, I called them all back and asked if they knew a Patricia Zimmerman. All answers—slightly annoyed this time—were negative.

Okay, last gasp. I went into the bedroom and rifled through my jeans from the previous few days until I found the business card for People Over Power. I dialed the number as I went back to my office and sat down, waiting for the pickup. I asked for Michael Denton, got a bit of a runaround, then Denton was on the line.

“Mr. Singer,” he said in his perfect voice. “I was just going to call you.”

“Really? Did I pass the test?”

“Somewhat. There are enough people who vouch for you officially, that’s for sure. Some cops I know nearly gushed about you. But I had to stop my background check early.”

“I understand,” I said. “My fans can get a little out of control. It gets embarrassing, to tell you the truth.”

I thought the serious young activist I’d met in the office would disapprove, but I could hear the smile in his voice. “Actually, Atlantic Union has a new development going in at Columbia Heights. We’ve organized the community protest. I thought you might like to see the effects of their work firsthand. And what we try to do to stop them.”

“Is this my field test?”

“Maybe. I’ve got to be there in any case. Interested?”

I reached for my keys. “Where can I meet you?”

Denton gave me an address about six blocks from the Columbia Heights Metro. The neighborhood had always been a safe and homey mix of black and Hispanic families, if somewhat alien to the whites in the city. As a young cop, I’d responded to plenty of calls in the area—domestic disputes, rowdy drunks, a break-in here or there—but when I graduated to Homicide, I almost never saw the place.

Rather than drive right to where Denton had told me, I parked on Eleventh Street and took my time walking the two or three city blocks to his location. I wanted to see a slice of the neighborhood before someone else told me what they thought.

It was mostly as I remembered. Two-story, brown-brick, single-family homes with modest front porches and space between them that wouldn’t be tolerated in most modern urban landscapes were the norm here. The front yards ran the spectrum of attention, from carefully tended flower beds—with bean and tomato plants sometimes tucked in amongst the ornamentals—to weedy, overgrown plots. While none of the homes would make it into House Beautiful, very few were in need of work. Even the stuff that usually got neglected, like the paint under the gutters and the upkeep around the window trim, was sound on nearly every house. The day was a crisp fifty degrees, but bright and sunny, and people sat on the steps of their porches, elbows propped on knees, watching the world and me go by.

The action increased as I cut left on Park toward Fourteenth Street, a main north–south artery for the District. I was still solidly in a residential space, though just a five-minute walk south was a shopping zone full of big-box stores and chain stores that had gone up several years before in a spate of renovation and revitalization. The few times I’d driven by, I’d just found it ugly—they were the same shops and warehouse-sized mega-stores you could find repeated in any part of the country. Based on what I’d recently learned about commercial development in Washington, DC, I couldn’t help but wonder if the whole shebang was as shady as the other developments I was looking into.

The address Denton had given me was off Newton Street. As I walked on Fourteenth toward my destination, I could see a crowd gathered on and around the steps of an old school. Even from this distance it had the coordinated vibe of a protest. I slowed down as I came within earshot and sauntered toward the crowd, watching faces and bodies.

There were two main groups, that was clear: the protestors and the . . . protestees? The occasion for the brouhaha seemed to be a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the development, with chagrined guys in suits trying valiantly to read from prepared statements and smile for the photo op while a small horde of T-shirt- and jeans-wearing twenty-somethings I recognized from the PoP office—bolstered by a modest gathering of locals—yelled abuse and waved signs. A few news stations had their two-person teams there, covering the local color for this evening’s news hour. The reporters had their arms crossed, looking bored, while the cameramen busied themselves getting wires and cords just right. One good-looking field reporter I knew from too many hours spent watching the tube was smoking a cigarette like it was her last, tapping the ash against the links of a nearby cyclone fence.

Now that I knew who was in what camp, I looked at the broader context, searching for outliers. One pair came to my attention quickly, a Laurel and Hardy combination of a whip-thin Hispanic guy and a heavyset white dude with white hair and a white goatee. They were on the protestee side of things, dressed in suits like their counterparts, but sporting wraparound shades and looking more wary and alert, with that certain professional look that said they were more likely to smack people around than schmooze them. Their gaze was passive, but locked on the protestors.

I looked around for Denton and spotted him pacing along the fringe, directing Jerry, the PoP volunteer I’d first talked to at their office, to take pictures of the event. Where his minions sported the latest in casual wear, Denton was looking sharp in a gray suit and tie. He saw me, said something to Jerry, then headed in my direction.

“Singer,” he said in greeting.

“Denton,” I said back. “What evil is being perpetrated today?”

He turned to stand beside me, so we were both facing the ruckus. “You’re looking at the dedication of the brand-new Newton Integrated Business Scene.”

“NIBS? Are you serious?”

“Yes. Brought to you by the one and only Jeremy Rheinsfeld, president of Atlantic Union—he’s the short guy with the curly gray hair on the right.”

I squinted. “And Toby Waites on the left?”

“The one and only,” Denton said, shooting me a glance. “You’re current on your city council politics, Mr. Singer.”

“I try. He was indirectly responsible for my employment for almost thirty years.”

“Well, Waites is directly responsible for the eviction of about three hundred families today. Atlantic Union was just awarded the contract to infuse new life into this tired old neighborhood by knocking down a school and community center, plowing under hundreds of occupied homes, and replacing all of it with a sorely needed shopping district that is precisely like the one eight blocks away.”

Something occurred to me. “This isn’t Waites’s ward, is it? What’s he doing here?”

“No, it isn’t. This is John Cruz’s ward. He’s standing in the back, there. But Waites is the rainmaker, the one who brings in the developers, so he’s the one who gets to talk to the cameras.”

I grunted. On the steps, Rheinsfeld had relinquished the mic to Waites, a pudgy man of middle height and a comb-over. “If they’re at the dedication stage, it’s a little late to protest, isn’t it?”

He made a face. “It’s a done deal, unfortunately, but we want to raise a stink anyway. Try to draw some media attention to it, get some city residents thinking.”

“Does that really work?”

“You’d be surprised. We’ve been able to block Rheinsfeld from getting his hands on about a half dozen different major properties in the city, usually by getting to the community groups before he does. Or before Waites can make his empty promises.”

“I’m surprised AU doesn’t own the city by now,” I said.

“Nah, they just think they do,” Denton said. “But I do know they take their failures personally. One property, the old Trumble Theatre, you know it? Yeah, it’s gotten to good old Jeremy something terrible that he hasn’t been able to level the place and put in a renaissance plaza or some other strip of shops. He’s been trying to get around us on that for years.”

“He must have a hell of a network to catch wind of all those potential deals.”

“Yep, although half of his brokers work in city hall. They just pick up the phone when they hear about a block being condemned or a councilman eager to get a fresh look in their ward. Always in time for an election, of course.”

“Speaking of brokers, you know the name Pat Zimmerman?”

Denton, distracted and watching the steps of the school, held up a hand. “Hold on a sec.”

He started forward, having heard or seen something I hadn’t, circling the outside of the pack until he was in a small empty space of his own. He nodded to Jerry to make sure he had a clear shot of the suits on the steps, then glanced toward another one of the PoP volunteers who was in the pack of protestors. Obviously working off a script, the volunteer made a quick hand motion and the chanting and yelling suddenly stopped. Jerry raised the barrel of the lens. The reporters, bored and checking their phones a moment earlier, lifted their heads.

In the stark silence that followed, Denton—in his operatic voice—yelled, “Mr. Waites, Atlantic Union’s redevelopment of the Newton Street neighborhood is going to unnecessarily displace hundreds of families, destroying a community and DC institution that’s been in place for more than seventy-five years. Why did you ignore the public petition, signed by more than four hundred residents, that People Over Power brought to you over a year ago?”

The news cameras swung to cover Waites, who blinked owlishly before replying. “My office reviewed the petition the instant it was received, Mr. Denton. While I appreciate the emotional impact the development will have on the residents here, they’ll be able to return to an even better Newton Street than when they left it. The local civic and homeowners’ associations agree with me. They all support the project.”

“The local civic and homeowners’ associations were bought off before the ink on the paperwork was dry, Councilman,” Denton boomed. The TV cameras were now split between covering the charismatic protestor and the squirming, middle-aged politician. “And speaking of bought off, some might question the timing of Atlantic Union’s contributions to your own campaign fund-raising. Like the check that arrived at your office the day Atlantic Union was awarded the contract for this project.”

Waites swelled in place. “I have not been influenced by campaign contributions and there’s not a shred of evidence that I’m aware of to suggest that I have. If you don’t want to find yourself on the wrong end of a slander suit, Mr. Denton, I suggest you consider your next words very carefully.”

Denton replied, Waites responded, and they had a lively back-and-forth with Denton getting the better of it, until Rheinsfeld leaned forward and tapped Waites on the shoulder. They had a quick conference out of range of the microphone. Waites put his hand over it automatically, anyway. Then the councilman spoke again. “Thank you for coming out today, ladies and gentlemen. We’ll have a proper press conference at my office tomorrow. Press corps only.” The last line was delivered toward Denton. The party began to break up. The PoP kids began chanting their slogans again, but the news teams had snagged their five minutes of footage and B-roll and were already walking their gear back to their vans as the suits filed off the steps and into waiting cars.

I’d followed the exchange with something between amusement and admiration, but my attention shifted when—the second after Denton had started speaking—I saw Laurel and Hardy, the two gorillas masquerading as city administrators, ease off the steps. Hardy began circling the crowd while Laurel went over to a nearby Cadillac and pulled out a camera with telephoto lens as long as my forearm. Moving together, with Hardy pointing and writing down notes, the two started systematically taking pictures of the PoP volunteers. The kids, watching raptly as their hero took on Big Bad Toby Waites, were completely unaware they were being documented and cataloged like some rare species of butterfly.

Halfway through the Denton-Waites tête-à-tête, I pushed away from the telephone pole I’d been leaning on and circled behind Laurel and Hardy. When I got within sniffing distance, I pulled out my phone and started taking pictures of them taking pictures. I got three before Laurel heard me and glanced over his shoulder. I focused on him and got a great portrait shot of his long, greyhound mug scowling.

“Fuck are you doing?” he asked. Hardy turned around, his pen hovering comically over his notebook, like he was taking dictation from his friend.

“Just taking some snaps,” I said. The camera was fast. I got three more stills of both of them while we stood there. “Seems like the thing to do on this side of the street.”

“Don’t do that,” Hardy growled, no longer looking like a secretary with a hormone problem. He was taller—and substantially wider—than he’d appeared on the steps.

“Do either of you guys know how to change this to video?” I asked, squinting at the screen. “I’m always stuck taking pictures.”

I had their attention now. Hardy had put his pen in a pocket and started to walk toward me, his hand outstretched. Did he really think I was going to hand over my phone?

“This is going to make an awesome collage,” I said, backing away at a slow pace, taking pictures as quickly as I could tap my finger. They chased me in slow motion, unwilling to cause a scene, until we were on the opposite sidewalk. I slipped the phone in a pocket and stopped abruptly. They pulled up short, unsure.

I dropped my cute face. “Not so cool when it’s your picture being snapped, huh? Want to tell me why you’re so interested in the junior members of PoP? You wouldn’t be collecting information so you can build files on them, would you? To start tracking them, make their lives miserable maybe?”

“Who are you?” Hardy asked.

“Nobody,” I said. “Just an amateur photographer. I mean, thirty years as a cop means I can pick a couple of gene-pool rejects like yourselves out of a crowd, but I really just like taking pictures.”

“Shit,” Laurel said, apropos of nothing. By now, Denton and Waites had finished with their grandstanding. Over my two admirers’ shoulders, I could see Rheinsfeld making his way toward us.

“Harmon! Martinez!” he barked. The two of them turned around obediently and the Atlantic Union mogul made a curt gesture toward the Cadillac. I thought they’d shoot me dirty looks as they walked away, but they spun on their heels and headed back to their boss like they were on strings. It hurt my ego—I thought I was worth a bit of bluster, after all, maybe even a threat or two—but I was mollified a few minutes later when, as the Cadillac pulled away, Laurel leaned out the open window and took a dozen pictures of me, pointing the barrel of the lens in my direction like a gun.

“Enjoy the show, Singer?” a voice asked.

I turned. It was Denton. He looked pleased with himself. Behind him, his PoP crew was milling around, high-fiving and stacking signs. The news vans pulled away, heading back to the studio.

“It was bombastic,” I said.

“You don’t approve?”

“Both of you seem born to the stage. But I like your character better.”

“A little bit of theater gets us on the news,” he said, spreading his hands. “Nobody listens to a boring activist.”

“You know those two lug heads that were with Rheinsfeld?” I described them.

“No. Should I?”

“Not necessarily. But one took pictures of your PoP gang while the other took notes. They were about as subtle as a flying brick. Looked to me like they were putting together files on your people. I was wondering if it was the first time.”

“Rheinsfeld’s never bothered us before,” he said, his face darkening. “Maybe we’re touching a nerve.”

“Maybe. You might want to send a memo to the loyal few. They should know if they run the risk of getting their heads knocked in or their tires slashed. Or their next credit application revoked. Who knows what kind of reach Rheinsfeld has?”

Denton was biting his lip, obviously thinking of something, but scowled at my last line. “Maybe you should think about what it’s like to have your house plowed under while you watch, you think this is all so funny, Singer.”

He had a point. “Sorry. I make fun of things too much sometimes. You’re doing good work. I guess I would just go about it a different way.”

“Like how?”

I patted my pocket. “Take a couple pictures, make some people mad, see what tumbles out.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Driving back from the rumble in Columbia Heights, I sighed and squeezed the steering wheel, wishing I had something half as solid to hold on to when it came to this case. Crashing an activists’ protest and making Jeremy Rheinsfeld’s hired thugs angry was fun, but it didn’t get me anywhere on the case.

Part of the problem was that there wasn’t any place to this thing. A lifetime ago, as a homicide cop, I hadn’t been any more enamored of getting out of bed at 4:00 a.m. to go to the crime scene than the next guy, but at least the alley or the bedroom or the car gave me a concrete place to begin. It was a zero point from which to start adding things, the where to which physical evidence and rumors and tidbits of information adhered themselves until you had something real and solid, a grounding sense of where to begin. This thing had lots of people to talk to and reams of tangential information, but it all seemed to float in the air, never landing, never coalescing into something tangible.

Okay, reset. Wendy Gerson had been killed in spectacular fashion, but beyond the significance of the crime scene being a train platform, there wasn’t anything I was going to glean from walking the Waterfront Metro again. Any other places that I might start from were either gone or inaccessible—her office was out of reach, her condo stripped clean, her childhood home of no help.

I eased the car to a stop as I joined a line already waiting at the light on Columbia and Fifteenth. A rare breeze was blowing north from the river today and I had the windows down. The radio chatter was like a jar of flies buzzing near my ear, so I snapped it off and listened instead to the sounds of the city. I was in a mixed-use area, where mom and pop stores grew in between swaths of two-story homes. A vacant lot was a mild blight on the otherwise homey urban landscape, though a large sign planted dead center in the lot like a flag laying claim to a new world promised development was on its way. Glancing around, I saw the windows of the brownstones on the edges of the lot were boarded and city notices had been tacked to the doors.

The view tripped a thought, which in turn caused a creeping sensation to steal over me. I swore. Why wasn’t I thinking straight? There was one really important place—maybe the most important place—that I hadn’t even seen yet that had factored in Wendy Gerson’s life.

Or, more to the point, her death.

There was nothing to announce the location, no yellow tape or picketing college kids. A year, a month, or even a week ago, I would’ve blown past the micro-neighborhood without a second glance, attributing the deserted buildings to the normal swing and sway of urban development and shifting economics. Now, my recently educated eye saw a pattern in the types of homes condemned, the presence of empty yards turned into parking lots, the boldly placed signs with Atlantic Union’s blue and white tidal wave logo.

But the Quarters Renovation and Rejuvenation Project wasn’t much to scream and shout about, at least not yet. While the signs promised scads of renovated townhomes suitable for smart urban living, the neighborhood I was looking at was five square city blocks squashed against the high, octagonally bricked wall that hid the two-mile-long Southeast Freeway from view and dampened some of the sound. The plots seemed caught between abandonment and development, eerily reminiscent of Hollywood scenes from a post-nuclear holocaust movie. Brick, two-story tenements, an apartment building, and even a school appeared as though their inhabitants, warned of some impending doom, had simply stood and walked out one day. Most of the buildings weren’t even boarded. Not worth it since many of them would be knocked down anyway.

I parked, got out of my car, and started walking the streets of the Quarters, trying to picture what the neighborhood had looked like, what it had felt like, in decades past. The buildings seemed from the 1930s and ’40s, and I could imagine the story of a vibrant DC community—friendships, rivalries, affairs, births, deaths—flowing in and around the simple city blocks. A sense of displacement settled over me, a wrongness in place and time. The hum of tires on the nearby freeway told me that the city was still alive, but what I was walking by seemed to contradict that simple truth.

I strolled through the neighborhood, taking lefts and rights at random, until I came to an abandoned lot. Encircling it was a hastily erected chain-link fence, sagging in the middle, which held a sign advertising parking for the Washington Nationals stadium games. Rubble in the corners of the lots spoke to the fact that this hadn’t been empty all that long ago.

Continuing, I came to the edge of the Quarters at Eighth Street south of the freeway. No double white line demarcated one neighborhood from the other—I could just tell from the amount of life, traffic, and noise on the other side of the street that I was leaving the project. I was turning around to head back to my car, no further ahead on the case than when I’d arrived, when I caught a peek of a storefront on the farthest edge of the development, nearly straddling the two neighborhoods, one live, one dead.

Battered Pepsi and neon lotto signs told me this was one of the catchall convenience stores you can still find in a few places in DC, selling everything from Budweiser to Black Flag. There were bars on the windows, and its faded white vinyl siding gave it a kind of sad parity with the neighborhood I was walking through. Two old black men sat at a metal bistro table on the sidewalk in front of the store, watching traffic go by. Based on their stares, I must’ve been the first living thing to walk the streets of the Quarters in a while.

I took my time and sauntered their way, not wanting to look like I was making a beeline for them. They watched my every step. All the way until I was standing in front of them, in fact. I nodded a greeting, they nodded back, and I went past them into the store.

The inside was dimly lit by two overhead fluorescent lights missing several bulbs. Low shelves offered two or three of everything, like I’d guessed, and a refrigerator unit along the back wall—humming to itself—held sodas, juice, and a selection of malt beverages of dubious taste and quality. Handwritten signs told me that I’d have to talk to Herbie if I wanted cigarettes or lottery tickets. A calendar from a local insurance company, stuck on June 1997, hung on the wall by the door. Neither Herbie nor anyone else appeared to be in the store. I went back outside.

“Either of you know where Herbie is?” I asked the two guys.

The one nearest me, dressed in dark blue jeans and a green short-sleeved shirt, scrunched his mouth and shook his head. He had a wispy white mustache and goatee. The other man shook his head, almost sadly. He wore a battered fedora, thick glasses, and a worn beige suit thin at the knees.

“You know when he’ll be back?”

Shaking of heads. I looked back and forth. “Does Herbie work here?”

The guy with the hat shook his head a third time.

“Not anymore or not today?”

The one with the goatee said, “Herbie dead.”

“Well . . . shit,” I said.

Goatee guy kept talking as if I hadn’t spoken. His voice was hoarse, like he’d been shouting for a week. “He and Miss Tammy were carrying on, but Tammy’s man George found out. He up and cut Herbie at the Fourth of July barbeque.”

“When was that?”

“Nineteen seventy-eight.”

Hat-and-Glasses said, “Herbie make a sound something awful, going huh, huh, huh, trying to hold himself together.”

“Made like to get to the hospital,” Goatee said, “but he ain’t never had a chance.”

They both wagged their heads at old Herbie’s predicament. A dump truck barreled past, hitting its air brakes and drowning out all sound. I waited for the noise to fade. “So, who runs the store now that Herbie’s gone?”

“James,” Hat-and-Glasses said.

“Okay, when will James be back?”

“I’m James,” Goatee said.

Jesus Christ. I rubbed a hand along my jaw. “How you doing, James. You live here?”

“Yep.”

“All your life?”

“Not yet,” he said and laughed with a sound like sheet metal being cut. He held out a palm and Hat-and-Glasses gave him five.

I gave them a second to yuck it up. “What I mean to say is that I guess you’ve been around the Quarters awhile.”

“Damn straight,” he said, then reached to the ground and took a pull from a Coke can. A small flask sat next to it and he reached down, unscrewed the cap, and poured from the flask into the can with a practiced hand, then put them both back on the ground. The burnt-vanilla smell of bourbon wafted to me a second later.

“I thought you said you was done offering any money for the store,” the hat guy said to me, pushing his glasses higher on his nose and looking at me meaningfully.

“What?”

“You said you wasn’t going to buy out James here.”

“I might’ve driven past here once or twice,” I said, mentally tacking on in a squad car, “but I haven’t been in the Quarters for a decade or more.”

“He ain’t the man, you dumbass,” James said to his friend, then turned to me. “Dennis can’t see but five feet away.”

“Some other guy was here, offering to buy your store?”

“No,” James said, reaching for the Coke can again. “Offering to not buy my store.”

“How does that work?” I asked. Talking to these two was making me dizzy.

“When that company bought the school, anybody who was still here packed up and left,” Dennis said. “Quarters was already dead, half the folk gone.”

“But you held on?” I asked James.

He shrugged. “I live over the store, thought maybe they would come offer me some money for the place. Saw the man walking by, handing out vouchers for the other folk. Told me I didn’t qualify.”

“Vouchers?”

“To get yo’self a new house in ten years,” Dennis said, laughing. “In case you come into a million dollars in the meantime.”

I looked back at James. “And what’d you say to the man?”

“I said, you damn right I qualify. The whole neighborhood’s gone. Who am I supposed to sell goods to? This place a ghost town. Huh? Who am I gonna sell to?”

“Dennis?” I suggested.

He snorted. “Dennis don’t buy shit.”

“But the man didn’t agree?”

“He get annoyed and say, man, we don’t have to buy your place. Once everybody vacates, you gonna go broke and leave, too.”

“Die on the vine,” Dennis said in a singsong voice. “Die on the vine.”

“When did all this happen?”

“A year ago, maybe more.”

“They haven’t done much with the place,” I said.

Dennis laughed again. “That’s cuz of Miss Tonya.”

“Who’s she?”

“Miss Tonya live in the Quarters damn near her whole life,” James said. “Told the man she ain’t leaving. He could build around her he want, but she gonna sue their ass if they drop so much as a nail on her yard. Said she didn’t need their damn money, she had someone looking out for her.”

“She held out, then?”

“She try,” Dennis said, looking sad.

“Did she take the money?”

“Not Miss Tonya,” Dennis said. “She die. Four, five months ago.”

“People start to leave for real, then,” James said. “With Miss Tonya gone, ain’t nobody else with the heart to fight.”

I felt a tingle start around the base of my skull. “How’d she die?”

They both shrugged. “Heart attack, I guess,” James said. “Her heart ain’t no good.”

“What was her last name?”

“Jackson.”

I made a mental note. “The guy, the one who walked around handing out vouchers. You know who he was? Ever see him again?”

James said, “He around a few more times, trying to tell people to hurry and get out. Gave me a bunch of his cards, told me it would be worth my while, I convince anybody to sell. This before he told me to go fly a motherfucking kite.”

“Got any of those cards left?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I threw ’em all out. Pissed me off.”

My heart sank, but Dennis dug around in his wallet, then said, “Here you go,” and reached across the table holding a card.

“What you carrying that for?” James demanded.

“Thought he might change his mind,” Dennis said. “You always angry, James. The man might come back, offer you fifty large for the store, but you don’t have his number, cuz you tossed all his cards.”

“He ain’t coming back,” James said, and the two launched into what sounded like an old argument. I didn’t hear the rest of it, because I was staring at the cheap, print-it-yourself business card in my hand, feeling the tingle all over now. Spelled out in a blocky, sans serif font on the card was a name.

Patrick Zimmerman.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The card had just three pieces of information on it: his name, the simple occupational title of “Broker,” and a phone number. I could’ve tried my hand at another Internet search, but I went one better. I called Dods and offered to scratch backs.

“Hey, Junior,” I said when he answered.

“What’s going on, Marty?”

I gave him the abbreviated version of my exchange with James and Dennis, and the discovery of Pat Zimmerman’s card.

“So, this Zimmerman shows up in two places,” he said, sounding slow, but I wasn’t fooled. “He’s all over Wendy Gerson’s day planner like a hot date and also happens to make an appearance at the site of a huge development she’s helped put together.”

“Right.”

“So you want a reverse lookup on the number, go stake him out?”

“That would be a nice start.”

“And you keep me in the loop if it turns out he did Gerson or Montero.”

“Naturally.”

“You think he did it?”

“I have no clue, Dods,” I said. “I don’t even know what the guy looks like. He could be a hundred and three years old. Or in a wheelchair.”

“You never got a good look at the guy you were chasing,” he pointed out. “So he could be anybody, anyway. I could be the guy.”

“It’s definitely not you.”

“Yeah? Why not?”

“Because you’re shaped like a doughnut, Dods,” I said. “Though, I got to say, you’re not missing anything in the middle.”

“Har, har.”

“The guy I followed was slim, fast. I’m not in bad shape, but I could barely keep him in sight.”

“So what’re you going to do to ID him? Ask him to run away from you?”

“Jesus. Are you going to help me or not?”

He chuckled. “Hold on.”

I heard him put down the phone and I smiled. Busting on Dods and getting busted on by him felt comfortable, almost like the old days. All without the shitty hours and lousy work. Not a bad trade. A few minutes passed, then I heard a clatter as he scrambled for the phone.

“Zimmerman’s last known good is 1203 Ordway Street, Northwest.”

“That’s in Cleveland Park, right?” I asked.

“Yep. You want me to give you directions? It’s west of the zoo, which is a big park where they keep all these animals—”

“Your childhood home, you mean? The ape house?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You going to do a full stakeout?”

“I’m not really built for that anymore,” I said. “I want to take my time, observe the situation.”

“Low and slow, huh, Marty?”

“Running into traffic with a bag on my head hasn’t produced the best results,” I said. “A smidge of discretion may go a long way here.”

Cleveland Park was a fun little corner of DC, with a more pleasant, stately vibe to it than most neighborhoods in the capital. It was a favorite of young professionals and staid bureaucrats alike, chock-full of modest brick apartment buildings and affluent Federal- and neocolonial-style homes. I cruised up and down the shaded back streets until I found Ordway. Zimmerman’s address wasn’t a house; it was the English basement apartment of a midrange, ivy-covered townhome sporting a rich garden of zinnias in the front. Despite the pleasant neighborhood ambiance, however, bars on the basement and first-floor bay windows told me I was still in the city.

Armed once again with Dods’s whiz-bang digital camera, I found a spot that gave me decent sight lines to the short flight of basement stairs that led to the apartment. The townhome was west of Connecticut Avenue, a main north–south drag that held the shops, restaurants, and Cleveland Park Metro stop. I’d oriented the car toward all of that, betting Zimmerman would be coming from that direction at the end of the day. If he did, I’d have plenty of opportunities for head-on shots with the camera before he got to his apartment steps. How would I know it was Zimmerman walking toward me? I wouldn’t, but Dods had assured me the newfangled camera could hold just under a bazillion pictures, so I was free to take a hundred snaps of every human that walked down the street until I knew I had Zimmerman.

While I waited for my target to appear, I put in a quick call to Channing Faraday. I dove into my questions before he could grouse too much.

“In the context of big corporate real estate deals, what’s a broker?”

“Nothing special,” he said. “It’s a broad title without much specific weight behind it. Anybody can call themselves a broker.”

“What do they do?”

“Some are sophisticates that discreetly put deals together for old money without too much leaking to the press. But most are bottom-feeders, trying to find the next big deal before it breaks. They’re the eyes—and the hands and the feet—of the big firms that put the pricey deals together.”

“They get a commission?”

“Yeah.”

“How do they find the deals?”

“They trawl neighborhoods in transition, watch the news for industrial bankruptcies, try to cobble together different pieces that don’t occur to other developers. Like a dockyard, a warehouse district, and a manufacturing plant being turned into a new office park with an ice-skating rink in the middle.”

“Do they ever buy into the plot themselves? Like, before the developer or investors get interested?”

He thought about it, humming to himself. “Doubtful. Too much personal risk. Maybe if a firm would walk away from a whole megadeal if there was one missing link, but probably not even then.”

I watched the street. A young girl in a blue dress and pumps was walking my way. Good thing the card had said “Patrick” and not just “Pat” or I’d be arrested for taking pictures of every woman walking down Ordway. “Would a broker attempt to . . . influence . . . the sellers to seal a deal?”

“I’ve never heard of it being done, but I’m sure it goes on all the time.”

“Stick or carrot?”

“Like, do this deal or I’ll burn your house down?”

“Or give you a thousand dollars for signing away a house that the city’s going to knock down anyway.”

He snorted. “Both. Either. Whatever it takes to get the deal, Singer. A couple of points on a multimillion-dollar deal will make people do desperate things.”

I thanked him and hung up. Faraday’s description fit with what Zimmerman had been doing in the Quarters, according to James and Dennis. Encouraging some folks to leave, promising a voucher for a return at a later date. Offering a bounty to residents who talked others into going. Telling James his business was going to dry up, so why not leave anyway, before things got really lousy?

Various scenarios where the broker of the deal murdered one of the lead transaction attorneys on the deal still didn’t make a lot of sense, however. There were possibilities, of course. Gerson might’ve backed out on the commission, or given the deal to another broker, or something else I couldn’t imagine. More information would help.

I sighed and settled deeper into my seat. Stakeouts had always been my least favorite part of detective work. Nobody liked them, but at least some cops had a way of zoning out without actually falling asleep. I started taking pictures of random things just to pass the time, taking Dods at his word that the gizmo in my hands could hold more pictures than I could actually take in an afternoon. A woman approaching my car from behind shot me a curious look as she passed, however, so I cooled it and put the camera on the seat before I got busted by the local beat.

At 5:20—before my back started to ache, but after my butt had gone numb—the foot traffic on Ordway started to increase. It was a mix of young go-getters and old government hands, sharp-looking attorneys with sharklike smiles and ground-down bureaucrats, everyone outfitted in the latest professional garb in a wide array of colors—as long as that color was gray, black, or blue. They came in waves, bunched and released by the dictates of the Metro line.

Besides their attire, they had one thing in common. None of them turned down the path toward Zimmerman’s apartment. Each stomped past the spot with the same blank look on their face, came down the sidewalk and past my car, then beyond and out of sight. By 7:10, the waves had slowed to a trickle and I was getting bored and frustrated, although, as stakeouts go, I hadn’t even gotten out of the gate. I’d been on plenty that had needed multiple twelve-hour shifts to produce something worthwhile. But I wasn’t building a case that could stick in court; I was looking to put together some answers by whatever means I deemed necessary. I kind of liked the change. Except my ass was numb now, just like a stakeout in the old days.

So when three more peds came down Ordway, I decided to take a chance. There was a tall, thin, balding guy with glasses followed by a short, thin guy around the same age, but with sandy hair touched with gray. A younger guy with tousled blond hair brought up the rear. Like the earlier commuters, the three had the requisite uniform of black or blue suit and trench coat thrown over the arm and had given the guy in front of him a healthy lead of twenty feet or so. It was the considerate thing to do in the city.

My bet was on the tall, bald guy. I pulled out my phone, the card Dennis had given me, and punched in the number. It rang twice. I smiled as the tall guy slipped a hand in his breast pocket and pulled out his phone. Gotcha. My smile faded as he put the phone to his ear and began talking . . . while my line rang three and four more times.

A young voice answered, “Hello?”

My eyes flicked down the line. The young guy with the messy hair had his phone out as he was walking. I glanced back at the tall, thin man. He was still talking, but it wasn’t to me.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Zimmerman?” I asked.

“Yes. Who’s this?”

I hit the little red button to end the call and raised Dods’s camera. Zimmerman was framed nicely in the first two dozen pictures. He appeared to say hello a few more times, then scowled at his phone while clomping down Ordway the whole time. He might’ve said a naughty word before slipping the phone back in a pocket, but he’d reached the path to the apartment by then, so I didn’t have a chance to lip-read. With a quick pivot, he swung off the sidewalk and onto the path, trotted down the steps, and entered the subterranean apartment.

I got out and put the camera in the trunk of my car, under the spare, hoping that was good enough security for the $1,200 digital SLR. Chewing my lip, I walked to Zimmerman’s apartment as the sun dipped behind the trees. My midgame stance had turned to caution and discretion, and the smart thing to do would be to go home and e-mail the pictures around to see if any of my contacts knew more about the Zim before I cornered him.

But something told me not to hold back, to complete the play. It wasn’t all hunch—there was some logic to it. Bracing a high-level executive at one of DC’s largest corporate real estate firms had gotten him killed and nearly shut down an entire avenue of investigation. But this was a solitary dude living in someone’s basement, printing his own business cards, and scaring up the odd real estate deal for development firms that forgot his name a minute after paying him his commission. If there was one target I’d found so far that was out on his own limb, Pat Zimmerman was it.

That much navel-gazing got me to the apartment steps. Light, muted by venetian blinds, glowed in slivers where the edge of the blinds didn’t quite meet the sill. Flickering lights of different colors told me the TV was on. Inside, a pot hit the floor with a bong. Pasta water for a cheap, midweek meal? I took a breath, went down the steps, and knocked on the door.

The lights of the TV died and I saw a shadow block some of the light spilling out the glass panes at the top of the door. The peephole darkened for a moment, then the door opened, revealing Zimmerman wearing a University of Maryland T-shirt flecked with pinhead-sized stains of tomato sauce.

“Yes?” he asked, frowning and suspicious. He was younger-looking in person than he had looked through the lens of the camera, a scruffy five-day beard—so blond and thin I hadn’t even seen it through the camera—notwithstanding.

“Hey,” I said. “Rheinsfeld sent me.”

“Who are you?”

“Ed Gibbon.”

“What happened to Harm?” he asked, surprised. “And Marty?”

I flinched, thinking he was talking about me, but a memory squirmed into my consciousness: Rheinsfeld calling for Harmon and Martinez at the press conference just as they were getting ready to jump me. Marty, Martinez. I shrugged like I could care less. “He put them on Denton and his crew of idiots. Decided they needed some stomping on. They caused a shitstorm over at the Columbia Heights thing.”

“I heard it didn’t go so bad,” he said, doubtfully.

“We didn’t think so, either, but then one of the channels ran something like a full ten minutes of tape of those a-holes protesting,” I said, shrugging again. “Guess it was a slow news cycle. Anyway, fuck that. What’s going on down at the Quarters?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, but his face rippled with suppressed fear and anxiety.

“What do I mean? I just walked the plot and there is shit for progress. Just two old black guys getting bombed off whiskey and Coke on the porch of that little store on Eighth.”

He made a face and blew out a huge breath. “That lady put everything six, seven months behind. I told Rheinsfeld that. She was as good as a spike, sitting in the middle of the development with that crappy little house. And she was starting to talk a bunch of the neighbors into passing on the displacement fee and vouchers.”

“Jackson, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But she’s dead. What’s the problem?”

Zimmerman threw his hands up. “How should I know? Gerson was supposed to pay the old lady a visit and unstick all that shit, but then she goes and takes a flying leap into a train. We can’t even figure out who owns the house now, for chrissakes.”

“What do you mean?”

He scrubbed his face with his hands. “Turns out the old lady wasn’t on the deed, okay? It wasn’t hers to sell.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“I wish,” Zimmerman said, glum. “So even though she kicked, the deal’s frozen.”

“Gerson didn’t know who was on the paper?”

“If she did, she didn’t tell me.”

“Go online and find out,” I said. Yeah, right. “How hard could it be?”

“I did, but you should see the website,” he said, a note of desperation coloring his voice. “It’s like a brain-dead monkey put the thing together.”

“Okay,” I said. “So the spike was in the way, but the old lady is gone, which should be a good thing, but it looks like someone else owns the plot, which means . . .”

“. . . until I know who owns it, I can’t buy them off. And if I can’t buy them off, the development doesn’t happen,” he said, finishing my sentence. He put a hand to his head. “I can’t believe how this thing’s gone to shit. I found the deal—no, I made the deal—and brought it to Gerson. And now it’s gone belly-up in less than a year and a half.”

“We got any friends on the council who could grease this?” I asked, really fishing.

He shrugged. “Eminent domain? They don’t like the optics. Buying people’s houses and giving them vouchers is okay, but you get caught having the housing police drag someone out of their house kicking and screaming, you lose votes.”

“And now there are two bodies on this.”

“Yes,” he exploded. “And while I don’t mind cheating a bunch of losers out of their loser homes, I’m pretty fucking unhappy about being anywhere near a murder rap, let alone two.”

“Who is?” I asked, then waved a hand. “All right. Stay cool. I’ll talk to Rheinsfeld, tell him you’re doing what you can.”

“God,” he said, his shoulders slumping. “You’ll take care of him for me? That would be great.”

“It might take me a while to get to him,” I said, “but consider it done.”

I turned, climbed the steps, and walked down the street to my car.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“And what is it you wanted to see Representative Fincher about?”

I looked at the congressman’s first line of defense, a forty-something aide with short, graying hair, manning the front desk like it was a pillbox on the sea cliffs of Normandy. She looked to me to have a permanent “No” ready upon her lips, but perhaps I was being unfair. The Longworth House Office Building was home to a lot of Congress-folk, and they were surely under a constant barrage of requests for favors, demands for action, and complaints from irate citizens. If I had her job, I wouldn’t even unlock the door. Aides and interns—did they still call them pages?—scuttled in and out of doors around us, barely pausing to raise their eyes from papers and smartphones as they passed through the outer office.

“It’s a personal matter,” I said, choosing my words carefully. If I said something like Your son is going to get himself hurt, I’d find myself facedown on the floor with a Capitol Police security detail sitting on my back. “I don’t mean to sound ridiculous, but it would probably be better if Mr. Fincher heard me out in person.”

The guardian shook her head. “Not possible, I’m afraid. I’m sure you understand we can’t just allow everyone who shows up unrestricted access to Representative Fincher.”

“How about I jot down a few words about the nature of my visit and then let the congressman decide?”

“I’m sorry. Representative Fincher is a very busy man. I’m sure you understand we can’t just stop the day’s business for him to read every note that comes across my desk. But if you want to visit our website—”

“Ma’am, the information I have for the congressman will have a direct bearing on his reelection chances next year. And let’s just say Gordy Fincher isn’t the only one in this building who would be interested in hearing what I have to say. That’s not a threat. I’m just trying to let you know the gravity of the situation.”

Of course it was a threat and she knew it, but there are few elegant ways to respond to something like that. Luckily for her, one of the older aides who’d already passed through the office twice overheard my last few words and stopped in his tracks. He walked over to stand behind the desk.

“Hi, Mary,” he said, then looked at me directly. He was tall, about thirty, with the kind of self-assurance that swimming in political life gives people. “I’m Randy Towson, Representative Fincher’s communications director. Can I help you?”

“I think we can help each other. Is there a private place we can talk? I need five minutes.”

He gestured me to a set of chairs in the corner of the office, which seemed about as private as a cafeteria, but I got the sense that this was take-it-or-leave-it territory. I walked over and eased myself into a chair, he did the same, and we leaned forward conspiratorially. I had a weird, momentary feeling of being a Washington insider, talking about international trade deals or sending military aid to East African rebels.

“What can I do for you, Mister . . . ?”

“Singer,” I said.

“And why are you here today?”

“I’d like to speak to Gordon Fincher,” I said.

“I got that much from your conversation with Mary,” he said, smiling. “But why would Representative Fincher want to talk to you?”

“I think I can sum it up in a couple of words,” I said. “Danny Fincher. Karla Mongelli. Assault. Photos. Midterm elections. Is that enough to get started?”

Towson went very still, his eyes searching my face. I returned his look. He stood abruptly, saying, “Wait here,” and walked directly to the office door behind Mary. I leaned back and crossed my legs, ready to wait, but I didn’t need to. In under a minute, Towson leaned his head out the door and waved me to come on back.

Gordon Fincher was a stocky man with a moon-pie face. Despite having just been briefed on a potentially career-ending issue, he wore a broad smile and a wide-eyed, just-us-folks expression. He didn’t go so far as to jump out of his chair and press the flesh, but I had the strange feeling that he’d ask for me to vote for him, once we’d gotten the little matter of my blackmail scheme out of the way.

Towson closed the door behind me and leaned against it. “Congressman, this is Mr. Singer.”

Fincher gestured to a seat, which I took. “Randy tells me you claim to have some pictures that you think concern me somehow.”

In reply, I leaned forward and put the manila folder I’d brought with me in front of him. Towson left his station by the door and came to look over Fincher’s shoulder. Inside were the enlarged stills of Danny Fincher’s late-night escapade behind FirstStep, as well as a handful of the best digital pictures I’d taken that emphasized the similarities of Danny’s appearance to the figure on the security tape. Fincher turned each over, one at a time, like the leaves of a book. He raised his eyebrows at the first few—the grainy black-and-whites meant nothing to him—then went very still when he obviously recognized the first more specific shot of Danny. He shuffled through the photos twice, then closed the folder and glanced up at me. The smile and guileless face were gone.

“You’ve got thirty seconds to tell me what this is about before you have an FBI team on your ass,” he said.

I nodded. I’d expected something like that. “About a week ago, your son’s girlfriend, Karla Mongelli, fled to a women’s shelter here in DC called FirstStep, trying to get away from the beatings he was giving her—”

“Alleged beatings,” Towson interrupted.

I turned to look at him. “Towson, pretty this up on your own time. We all know what Danny Fincher is and what he does. If you want to hear what I have to say, and not walk down the hall and hand these photos over to the chairman of the DNC, let’s not put lipstick on this pig.”

Towson’s face tightened around the eyes, but he said nothing.

I looked back at Gordon Fincher. “Danny didn’t like the direction things were going so he tried to, I don’t know, spring Karla out of prison or something, even though she’d gone there to get away from him. In the process, he injured a social worker, frightened the staff at the shelter, and put their mission in jeopardy. Not quite finished, however, he came back a few nights later and left a gift on the back stoop. Luckily for everyone involved it wasn’t dangerous, but, as a precaution, a bomb squad was called in. That was two nights ago.”

Both men were quiet.

“The social worker who was injured is my adopted daughter. I believe in her and I believe in what she does. Getting attacked while trying to protect other women shouldn’t be—and, going forward, won’t be—part of her job description. Violence also shouldn’t be something that the shelter has to guard against. I’m helping make sure that things like this don’t happen again.”

“How much?” Fincher asked.

“What?”

“How much money do you want?” Fincher asked.

“I don’t want money,” I said. “Allow me to repeat that for the recording you’re making. I don’t want any money. I want you to make it clear to your son that this is going to stop. Karla needs to be able to live without fear of retaliation—from him and from you—and so does FirstStep.”

“And, we can guess what you’ll do if we don’t,” Towson said. “But why don’t you tell us yourself?”

“You are a conservative Republican espousing a creed of family values and old-time morals. Next year, you’ll be facing a midterm election against a liberal feminist who has women’s issues as her primary focus. What I’ve got in my hands is not only repugnant to your constituents, it’s raw red meat for your opponent. If I don’t get a promise from you that this stops now, and I mean today, then she will get all the information I’ve got on your son with plenty of time to use it in the run-up to the election.”

Fincher smiled and gestured to the folder. “A few fuzzy pictures? Her word against his? In a state like Kentucky? Mr. Singer, I think you’re overestimating your position.”

“Congressman, I put in thirty years with the DC Homicide squad before I retired,” I said. “I’ve got experience, motivation, and a whole lot of time on my hands. Exposing your son could be the only thing I eat, sleep, and breathe for the next twelve months. And, frankly, I doubt Karla is the first woman Danny’s smacked around or that this is the first time you’ve heard of it. Should we take odds on whether there’s a family or three back in your home district that got a check in return for keeping their mouths shut?”

They both looked at me, the smiles frozen on their faces while the wheels turned. I watched them for a moment, then decided they’d gotten enough stick. Now the carrot.

“But why even go there when the alternative is so simple?” I asked. “Both of our problems could be solved before I leave. Talk to your son. Send him home if you have to. But tell him to stop. Leave Karla alone. Leave FirstStep alone. While you’re at it, you might want to suggest that beating women for the hell of it isn’t an option, either.”

The three of us were quiet. I’d talked enough. I was happy to give them all the time they needed, but I wasn’t leaving until I heard something that sounded like “okay.”

Gordon Fincher looked up at Towson. “Randy?”

“This is thin,” Towson said slowly. “We could agree to your terms and you could turn around and wire this to every newspaper and blogger in the country anyway. What’s our guarantee you won’t do that?”

“Like anything else in politics, gentlemen,” I said, smiling and spreading my arms wide. “Trust.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“He looks familiar,” Faraday said, glancing up from the photo. “What’s his name again?”

“Pat Zimmerman,” I said. We stood in the middle of the campaign-manager turned lobbyist’s new office on—where else?—K Street, trying to stay out of the way as a small army of workers put the finishing touches on the place. Two painters, working with meticulous care, applied the main room’s crown molding while a third worker fiddled with the wiring for an overhead dome light. The smell of new paint and expectation was thick in the air.

“He was the broker for the Quarters?”

“Yeah. He’s a little clueless about the business, but a lot nervous that the development on the Quarters is going nowhere. Oh, and the fact that two people connected to this thing were killed.”

“You blame him?”

“No, but the point is that he obviously didn’t know why they’d been killed or who had done it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Gerson and Montero were higher on the food chain than Zimmerman is. And if someone was knocking off my betters, personally I’d be worried that it was their boss doing the killing.”

“You’re saying Wendy and Montero made some colossal mistake and Rheinsfeld took them out? To cover something up?”

“Or punishment of some kind. For stepping out of line or something.”

“That’s assuming Rheinsfeld isn’t just dirty, he’s actually criminal,” he said, doubtfully. “And that he’s willing to kill people over a land deal that’s just one of a dozen Atlantic Union is involved with. He’s a lousy excuse for a human being, but he’s no Mafia don.”

I sighed. “I know. And just because Zimmerman is clueless about who killed Gerson and Montero doesn’t mean he should know.”

He flicked the picture with a finger. “I’ll show this around, make some calls to see if the name Zimmerman rings any bells with anyone. But it might be a while. I’ve got my hands full with getting the new practice on its feet.”

“Thanks. I’ll take anything you can find. I don’t think Pat here is a major player, but you never know. He might give me sideways access to something.”

“Will do.”

“One more question. He mentioned to me that this woman Tonya Jackson was ‘as good as a spike.’”

“Yeah?”

“I played along and guessed that a spike was a holdout, someone who wouldn’t sell. Is there any more to it than that?”

He waved his hand, an idle gesture. “Not much more. A spike usually refers to someone who’s done it on purpose, though, not someone who just refuses to budge. Competing developers who lose a bid might sneak in and buy a spike after a bid’s been won, but before development starts. They hold out, stalling the project, until the competitor pays them ten times what it’s worth.”

“Why don’t they hold out for a hundred times?” I asked.

“Bid winners usually have friends in high places, remember?” he said. “If you’re being a real pain in the ass and not just playing the game, the place gets condemned and eminent domain is invoked.”

“Do individuals get in on the action? Try to extort the developer by buying their own spike after they know the developer is committed?”

“Maybe, if they’re ballsy enough.” He wagged my picture of Zimmerman. “Brokers, in fact. They’re the ones that know about these places to begin with, right? If they don’t think they’re getting their fair cut, they buy one condo in the middle of the block and stop the project in its tracks. But they also know better than most when to cut a deal. I can’t see one of them hanging on until people start getting killed. Or did you mean someone else?”

I was quiet.

The surprise was plain on Faraday’s face. “Unless you’re talking about . . . who, Wendy buying the spike? To hold up Atlantic Union for the money?”

“Montero, too,” I said.

He rubbed his jaw. “God, I don’t know. It would be tempting, I guess. The kind of money Atlantic Union thinks of as a rounding error could make one or two individuals very rich. But Wendy? I can’t see it. It would be a one-way trip. She’d never work again, that’s for sure. Not in this town, probably not anywhere.”

“She wouldn’t have to. The spike is worth millions, maybe tens of millions. And it supplies a good motive for some powerful people to see her removed from the game, as well as Montero.” I took a deep breath. “Anyway, it’s as much a guess as anything else I’ve come up with, so don’t take it to the bank. If you could find anything out on this Pat Zimmerman, I’d appreciate it.”

We both jumped as one of the workers dropped his toolbox on the floor. Faraday said, “Hey, careful with that. That’s real parquet, damn it.” I slipped out as Faraday marched over and started bitching at the guy.

One down, one to go. On my way back to the car, I pulled out my phone and called Michael Denton. The number was to the main office and I had to weasel my way through his phalanx of volunteers, but eventually the man himself came on the line.

“Singer?”

“Denton,” I said as I unlocked my door and got in the car. “I was wondering if I’d made a strong enough impression on you yet.”

“You should be worried what kind of impression you’re making,” he said.

“That bad, huh?”

“Not really. Like I told you, I know a few people at city hall and the odd law-enforcement officer. The city hall folks who knew you thought you were a bullheaded prick. The law-enforcement types loved your style.”

“Can’t please all the people all of the time.”

A voice intruded in the background and Denton said, “Hold on.” There was that funny sound when someone puts their hand over the phone, followed by a muffled conversation. I started the car and pointed the nose toward H Street and the PoP office. I think I knew where this was going.

Denton came back on the line. “Singer? Sorry about that. Tell you what. I’ve got some time. Why don’t you swing by and pull up a chair. Put your feet up awhile. I’ll pour some hot cocoa and tell you the story of how big, bad Atlantic Union gobbled up the city council, sank their claws into Washington, DC, and never let go.”

“Is there a happy ending?”

“That’s up to you,” Denton said and hung up.

“What’s this?” I asked. I’d barely sat down in Denton’s office when he handed me an inch-thick manila folder. I opened it and leafed through the papers, skimming charts and text-heavy reports rife with dates and dollar amounts.

“That is a copy,” Denton said, leaning back in his chair, “of a report we put together charting every intersection of Atlantic Union and District government for the last ten years. The ones that involved money, at least.”

“That’s a hell of a report,” I said, looking up. “Want to give me the sound bite?”

He steepled his fingers together. A favorite gesture, apparently. “Without fail, on the same day a District development bid was won by the company, a check was cashed by a sitting city councilman’s campaign finance officer. Sometimes more than one councilman, almost always more than one check.”

“Different donors, thanks to the LLC loophole?”

“I see you know your campaign finance swindles, Mr. Singer. Yes.”

“And they’ve done this every year for ten years?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure it goes back longer, but DC records aren’t digitized that far back. We’re working on the paper records now, but it will take us a year or more to research.”

“What kind of money are we talking about?”

“You’re going to have to be more specific. Just the politicians? Or do you mean the other side, like how much in tax credits and incentive money Atlantic Union and the other developers are getting?”

I hesitated. Money was flying around everywhere. “Let’s start with the big picture. What have the pols been getting?”

“Over ten years, the total campaign contribution outlay by developers we tracked was about two million dollars.”

“And what did the developers get?”

He smiled. “About one-point-five billion.”

I was quiet as I let that sink in. “That’s everything, right? Tax breaks, incentives, waivers.”

“Don’t forget undervalued property,” Denton said. He smiled when I looked quizzical. “Like that Columbia Heights thing I was kicking Waites’s ass over the other day? The value of the property—which we believe was lowballed to begin with—is about one-point-eight million.”

“How much did AU pay?”

“One dollar.”

I blinked, but tried to play devil’s advocate. “They’re on the hook for the development, though, right? They buy it, they gotta build it.”

“Of course. That’s their argument. And they’re also contractually obligated to the city to put in affordable housing and use local labor for the job and throw in a community computer center or a school or a playground.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Want to know how often that happens? And in any kind of time frame that actually matters to the people that live there?”

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “I can guess.”

“You understand, this is just the stuff that’s public. We can’t even talk about gifts, trips, dinners, and business hookups because, of course, none of that’s public record. But it does make you wonder how Toby Waites paid for three vacations to Vegas last year on a councilman’s salary. Though, to be fair, I’m sure he had the means to pay for them himself. DC city council members have the second-highest average salaries in the country.”

“This is big money,” I said, holding up the folder.

“It surely is. And while I know no one hired you to take down dirty developers or a city council on the take, you might want to take a hard look at what you’re getting into and what it means for your case.”

“What do you mean?”

He leaned forward. “There are players in this, Singer, that will kill for a lot less money than we’re talking. A lot less.”

“And?”

“And Wendy Gerson was mixed up in the middle of them.”

I left PoP’s office with Denton’s report tucked under one arm, though I really wanted a lead-lined case to put it in. And an armed guard wouldn’t be unwelcome, either. Denton was a crusader and I wouldn’t put it past him or his earnest followers to inflate some numbers, mix in stray facts, and generally paint developers and the city council in an unfavorable light, but if even a fraction of what he said was true, Wendy and her boss and probably anyone at their firm were part of one of the dirtiest systems I’d encountered in a long time.

I wasn’t entirely surprised. Politically agnostic though I was, thirty years at MPDC had put me awfully close to council infighting and city gamesmanship. Money and power flowed outward from the politics and, as an arm of the council, the police force felt the ripples. But this deal for developers was beyond anything I’d caught a whiff of before.

What to do with the information, though? Denton was right. I’d been hired to find Wendy Gerson’s killer, not beat a drum and wave a sign. But the kind of money Denton was talking about was enough to get anyone killed if they blabbed, rocked the boat, or made a big enough mistake.

An idle glance in the mirror told me that, apparently, there was also enough money to hire halfway decent help, too. Most of my brain had been chewing over what Denton had said and what to do with it, so I hadn’t been paying nearly enough attention to my surroundings. It was only after the tail had been on me for five or ten minutes that I noticed the silver Avalon hanging back, taking the same turns I was, slowing down to keep its distance, speeding up to make it through red lights. I’d seen it earlier, but my forebrain had told my subconscious ringing the alarm bell to go away.

Good thing it finally listened. To be sure I wasn’t just being paranoid, I hooked a left on Eighth Street, which I hoped would drive the guy nuts with its illogical mix of stop signs and stoplights at every intersection. I drove erratically, slowing down, cruising, then completely blowing through one stop sign altogether—not so different than any other driver in DC. I came to almost a complete stop around Eastern Market to look at the backside of the flea market stalls, then hit the gas again.

The Avalon kept pace, and at one point even hung a right and got off my tail, but we were nearing the Marine Barracks and close enough to the wall cordoning off the Southeast Freeway again that I knew he was faking—in this part of town, there were only two places that went under the highway, so my tail knew that all he had to do was speed up, get to the wall, and follow it left again to find me at the next traffic light.

So he knew the area. I slowed down as we got to the bottleneck at Eighth, giving him a chance to catch up. There he was, two deep, stopped at the light. We all waited for the cycle until it was my turn to go. I eased through the light and continued toward M Street, watching for my tail in the mirror. To my surprise, the Avalon went straight through the intersection, giving up on me.

I chewed that over. Either I was excessively paranoid or . . . I glanced in the mirror again. A green Land Rover, a powder-blue VW Bug, and a boxy-looking sedan I couldn’t figure the make and model of were behind me. I slowed to a crawl, working a hunch. The SUV gave me twenty seconds before it whipped around me and passed in the oncoming lane. It slowed down long enough for the driver, a young brunette, to yell “Learn how to drive, asshole!” out the passenger window before it sped past. The VW’s driver seemed to be made of more tolerant stuff and gave me to the next block before he politely turned down a side street to get away.

The sedan—okay, now I could see it was a black Lexus—was next. I kept the speed pegged at fifteen for another block, then suddenly whipped into a parking spot and put the brake on. The Lexus had no choice but to keep on rolling past. Unfortunately, it had tinted windows, but so far they hadn’t invented tinted license plates.

I pulled back on the road and showed my disrespect for modern driving etiquette by taking out my phone and calling Dods. He picked up on the second ring.

“Hey, Junior. Want to run a plate for me?”

“Shoot.”

I rattled off the plate number, he told me to drive in circles for a while, then hung up. I headed home at a leisurely pace. I could’ve caught up with the Lexus and tailed them in return, but they knew I’d made them . . . and they really would drive around in circles, trying to lose me, for as long as it took to make me want to kill myself. I’d be more productive heading home while Dods did the legwork.

He called back as I was crossing the Memorial Bridge out of the District. I fumbled with the phone as I zipped over the Potomac and into the state of Virginia. “Got anything?”

“Sorry, Marty. It’s registered to a driving service. I could get a name if you give me a couple of hours, but there’s nothing like Harry comma Oil Can attached to the record.”

“Okay. Chase it down, you got the time.”

“Will do.”

I ended the call and headed home. There wasn’t anything else I could do if I didn’t want to drive around aimlessly, trying to pick up the tail again. I kept half an eye out for trouble and gave myself permission to go on autopilot. The drive to my house from DC had been routine for decades now, changing only when the roads themselves were altered. I’d surprised myself before by remembering taking a seat in the car and showing up at home, with nothing in between.

Letting memory and instinct take over, however, gave me time to get back to the thought process I’d been following before I caught the tail. To wit, that Wendy Gerson was involved in the fairly normal business of corporate development, but seemed to have deep connections to one of the dirtier players in the game. And her particular role was attached to a failing development potentially worth millions or even tens of millions of dollars—if there hadn’t been, and continued to be, a spike standing in the way of the development and those millions.

I kept bumping into the same question, though. Namely, why kill Wendy Gerson and Alex Montero? Even if they were preparing to go public with what they knew . . . there was nothing to go public with. The city council buyoffs were disgusting, but the situation was legal, so there was nothing to hide or fear having exposed. Making public just how unethical Atlantic Union and the council were behaving would simply cause a temporary stink that would settle in a few weeks like a dust cloud kicked up by a passing car. So there was something else, some knowledge or experience the two of them shared that was dangerous to another interest involved in the development of the Quarters.

It all came back to the place. And the single thing that had stalled development was the land that Tonya Jackson had refused to sell. The spike. That was the key. Find out who owned the property now and I’d have a good idea of what was really going on.

I wondered if Jackson had known what kind of trouble she might be drawing to herself by fighting the good fight. Maybe she had, and had the foresight to set up a trust to keep her home out of the hands of bottom-feeders like Atlantic Union. Or had simply sold the house to someone beyond their reach in a bid to keep it safe. I shook my head. Unlikely. But holding out as long as she had had taken some guts. The spike, like a fortress, standing against the surge, the lone holdout against a corrupt system instead of being pulled into it, compromised and compliant.

I shook my head and looked around. Autopilot had done its job. I’d pulled up to the curb in front of my house and was shutting off the engine, all without much conscious thought. I got out and groaned as I stretched my legs—I’d been in the car a lot in the past week. Twirling my keys around my index finger, I let my mind relax and think about dinner, feeding the cat, and watching some TV.

As I climbed the steps to my house I heard a scuffing noise behind me. I turned, reaching for my gun, but froze as I saw Harmon and Martinez—Laurel and Hardy—coming from around the corner of the house. Martinez covered me with a big, chrome-plated gun that would’ve been more at home mounted on the back of a Humvee. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten I wasn’t the only one with the connections to run a license plate and get an address.

Harmon smiled at me as they approached. “Hello, asshole. Take any good pictures lately?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“Open the door and go inside,” Martinez said. “Do it.”

I turned slowly in place and put the key in the lock. The two came up on the porch, close, making sure I didn’t jump inside and slam the door. Martinez had lowered the elephant gun, but it was still out and pointed in my general direction. Given the size of the hole at the end of the barrel, that’s all the aiming he needed to do. Harmon held the screen door open, but with his head turned to watch the street.

“Anyone else at home?” Harmon asked, his voice a rasp on wood.

“No.”

“Coming home later?”

“No.”

“You sure, now? It’ll be better for them if we’re not surprised.”

“One cat. That’s it.”

“All right. Inside.”

I opened the door and Harmon shoved me in the back. Pierre was in the living room, attracted by the sound of my keys in the door and driven by the desire for dinner. When I stumbled in, he backed up suspiciously, but the cat likes his food and was willing to tolerate just about any strange behavior to assuage his hunger. Harmon and Martinez, however, were not part of the normal arrangement and when he saw their ugly mugs walk in behind me, his ears flattened to his head like they’d been glued there and he hissed with the sound of a radiator letting loose.

“Cats, man,” Martinez said, looking down at Pierre with disdain. “I fucking hate cats.”

“Have a seat,” Harmon said to me. “And put your hands on your knees. I don’t want to shoot you. Yet.”

I sat on the couch and carefully placed my hands over my kneecaps. They hadn’t frisked me yet, which was a positive sign. We were going to talk. Maybe.

Harmon sat down on my ottoman, looking physically uncomfortable with his bulk stuffed into his tailored suit, although it didn’t seem to faze him mentally. He made sure he wasn’t in line with Martinez, who had taken a spot by the door, holding the gun down at his side and eyeing Pierre—who had retreated to the steps to watch.

I looked at Harmon. He had a tiny gold teardrop earring I hadn’t noticed before. Boy, the things you notice. “Got a message for me?”

He nodded. “You probably know what we’re going to say, so it’s boring saying it. Probably boring to hear it. But we gotta do it.”

I waited.

“Okay, here goes.” He cleared his throat and chanted, “Stay the fuck away from the Quarters. Stay the fuck away from Mr. Rheinsfeld. Stay the fuck away from Denton. Stay the fuck away from anything to do with Wendy Gerson.” He looked at Martinez expectantly. “How was that, Marty?”

Martinez shrugged, looking bored. Then he sneezed and rubbed his nose with his gun hand.

“Great. I’ve been working on it,” Harmon said, then turned to me. “Say it back.”

I said it back.

“No sass? Nothing smart to say about gene pools or taking pictures? You’re a disappointment, Singer.”

“You have a fine voice,” I said. “Though I wouldn’t quit my day job, if I were you.”

“That’s better,” he said approvingly. “Showing some spunk. Now I won’t feel so bad when I have to beat the shit out of you.”

“Harm,” Martinez interrupted, his voice funny. “I gotta go.”

“I’m working here.”

“Harm.”

We looked over. Martinez’s eyes were streaming. He coughed, phlegmy and loud, like a ninety-year-old.

“Fuck’s your problem, Marty?” Harmon said to his partner.

“Cats, man. Can’t take ’em,” Martinez said. He started scratching his neck, but if he was allergic, the itch was on the inside. His eyes were streaming and seemed to swell while I watched. “Shit, I gotta go.”

I watched in amazement as Martinez opened my front door and stumbled outside, wheezing audibly. Harmon, just as flummoxed, was halfway to his feet when he remembered something and looked back at me. I was holding my SIG Sauer in my hand and had it pointed at his belly button. At this range I didn’t need to aim for center mass, but why take a chance?

I smiled. “Sit down and put your hands on your knees. I don’t want to shoot you. Yet.”

Arlington PD found Martinez on my front steps, eyes swollen shut and with his head between his knees, trying to breathe. Harmon had been carrying a Glock in a shoulder rig, but I had the impression he was more of a hands-on guy. The two of them were cuffed and carted, shooting me dirty looks this time—Harmon did, at least, since Martinez couldn’t see anything—as they were pushed into the backseat of a cruiser. A nice female officer named Griggs took my statement, recorded my wish to press charges, then asked to see my gun permit. Everything checked out on my end and my two assailants were whisked off for booking.

It wouldn’t stick and, even if it did, my hunch was that Rheinsfeld would post their bail by the end of the news hour. That was okay. It was enough to stick a finger in their collective eye and let them know I wasn’t going to roll over. It was an interesting development, I thought, as I dumped not one but two cans of food in Pierre’s bowl, then topped it with crunchy treats as a special thank-you. He yowled and grunted as he ate, fully recovered from the shock of seeing two strange guys burst into the house. My cat was nothing if not resilient.

“Who’s a good kitty?” I asked, then backed off as he raised his head from the bowl and glared at me. “Never mind.”

I watched as he finished off his food, then blasted out of the kitchen like he’d been shot from a cannon, probably to go take a dump in the litter box upstairs, thereby rendering the second floor of the house off-limits for at least an hour. It was a shame, I thought, that I couldn’t get him to crap on command or I wouldn’t have had to deal with this afternoon’s events. Martinez’s head would’ve popped off from the allergic reaction and Harmon would’ve passed out from the smell.

I was getting punchy. It was relief and a delayed adrenaline rush and some embarrassment to boot. The two jugheads had gotten the drop on me with very little effort and, while I didn’t think they had orders to stick me in the ground, Harmon seemed like the kind of guy who would’ve been okay with accidentally forgetting that. If things were getting this out of hand, I needed more backup than I’d had—which is to say, none—to this point. I called Dods.

“Who did what?” he shouted into the phone when I gave him the rundown of the afternoon’s events.

“Two of Rheinsfeld’s goons. They were supposed to give me a warning to lay off, but one of Atlantic Union’s finest turned out to have a severe allergy to cat dander.”

“Rheinsfeld is going to have them out in no time. In fact, they’ve probably been at home with a beer in their hand since before you called me.”

“I know,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s something to worry about unless Harmon gets it into his head that he wants some personal payback. Rheinsfeld’s got too much on his hands to add a dead ex-cop to the list. The warning really was just a warning.”

“You don’t think they’re serious?”

“They might get there, sure, but I can act like they did their job. Skulk some. Be more discreet. Tread lightly.”

“What’d you have in mind?”

“I was going to go to Rheinsfeld’s office and ask what he’s hiding.”

Dods swore. “You son of a bitch—you want me to go with you and cover your ass.”

“Well, duh,” I said, trying not to laugh. “How else can I make sure he doesn’t try to ace me when I’m not looking?”

“A senior homicide detective is just what the doctor ordered, huh?”

“Protect and serve, Dods. Protect and serve.”

He said something unsavory about my nighttime hobbies and this time I did laugh. “Come on, Davidovitch. It’ll be like old times. And you’ll be protecting an old buddy while possibly cracking open an outstanding double homicide.”

He sighed. “When do you want to do this?”

“Pick me up at nine tomorrow.”

“This man is not a proper police officer, Detective,” Rheinsfeld said pointedly from behind a desk of burled walnut and tiger maple, with inlays of who knows what other rare wood. It looked like it cost more than my house. The rest of the room followed suit. In the course of investigating Wendy Gerson’s murder, I’d been in some fairly swank offices, but none of them could hold a candle to Rheinsfeld’s sanctum sanctorum. By size alone, it took the cake. Most of the MPDC bullpen could’ve fit in the space the president and CEO of Atlantic Union claimed for himself.

“He wasn’t a proper police officer when he had a badge,” Dods said. “But former detective Singer isn’t why I’m here, really.”

“Why are you here, then?” Rheinsfeld said, then we all looked over as the door opened and Harmon stepped in. He looked at me with a dead, flat look and took a position beside Rheinsfeld. His boss nodded at him, then turned back to Dods. “Ah, Harmon. Glad you could join us. Detective, this is my chief of security, Cedric Harmon.”

“Cedric?” I asked.

Dods shot me a look. He was looking especially rumpled, which was saying something, since I’d never seen the man when he didn’t need a shave. The disparity was accentuated by Rheinsfeld’s impeccably tailored suit. Even Harmon, who looked like a Hells Angel forced to buy his gear at Pierre Cardin, outclassed the two of us put together.

“I’m glad Mr. Harmon could join us,” Dods said, “seeing as how he was released last night from jail pending an assault charge on Mr. Singer here.”

“Oh, please let’s not talk about charges, Detective,” Rheinsfeld said with a pained look. “I don’t want to have to get my counsel in here. No one likes bringing lawyers into things if they don’t have to.”

Dods nodded. “I can live with that. Here’s the deal, Mr. Rheinsfeld. Mr. Singer is helping my department on the Wendy Gerson and Alex Montero murders. He’s doing so unofficially, but that doesn’t mean he’s a walking target. I hope we understand each other when I stress to you that I consider an attack on Mr. Singer an attack on my department and my investigation.”

Rheinsfeld nodded, though the gesture didn’t seem to indicate agreement. “And I hope you understand, Detective, that I can’t just allow Mr. Singer here to launch a personal vendetta against myself or my corporation without defending myself. Perhaps Mr. Singer could agree to stop making Atlantic Union the focus of his investigation.”

“Odd that you should say that, since you weren’t actually my focus before,” I said. “But now you’ve got my attention.”

Rheinsfeld raised his hands in the air. “Detective, how am I supposed to respond to that? Mr. Singer obviously has a single-track mind, obsessed with finding Atlantic Union guilty of something. This is unacceptable. It appears to me that Mr. Singer is perhaps transferring his guilt in not being able to stop the murder of Ms. Gerson when he could have and turning it into a crusade against Atlantic Union. I believe he wishes he were still a police officer, with all of its attendant privileges.”

I smiled tightly. Dods put a hand on my arm. “If Mr. Singer behaves inappropriately or illegally in any way, you’ve got every right to file a complaint like any other citizen, Mr. Rheinsfeld. I just want to make sure that’s where it ends.”

“And, I repeat, I will take whatever steps I deem necessary to protect myself, my employees, and my company, Detective.”

The room went still. The conversation, circuitous and empty, had run its course. We either walked out now, satisfied with our thinly veiled insults and warnings . . . or we took it up a notch. Harmon shifted from foot to foot. Rheinsfeld seemed unperturbed, as though he were observing the start of a tennis match. I watched them both.

Dods leaned forward. “Maybe I’m not being clear. Let me clarify. I don’t consider this man a retired police officer. I think of him exactly the way I think of any of my brother police officers. Which means, you insufferable, humping asshole, that if I find your chief of security and his candy-ass hired gun, or any other thug your company decides to hire, near Mr. Singer again, I will bury them. And your company. And you.”

Rheinsfeld listened to the entire tirade, nodded once, then smiled. “I appreciate your honesty, Detective. But consider who it is you’re talking to. I’m the man that writes the checks. Not the checks to your boss and not your boss’s boss—I pay the men that sit at the top of the food chain. They come begging to me, my friend. As for burying someone, well. City councilmen come cheap and I’ve got money. If you like working Homicide, Detective, and not checking parking meters downtown, maybe you should think about who you’re threatening. Have a good day.”

Five minutes later, Dods and I were on the sidewalk in the bright, cleansing morning sunlight. We’d met, threatened, and been threatened back before ten o’clock. Some office wonks hadn’t even sat down at their desks yet.

I clapped my hands together and rubbed them briskly. “That went well.”

Dods took out a pack of gum, folded a stick neatly in half, and popped it in his mouth. “Yeah, I thought so, too.”

“Think he’ll make a move?”

“On you?” Dods said, chewing the gum like a horse. “Nah. He was blowing smoke. You’re safe. Rheinsfeld’ll call a councilman and bitch, the councilman will make promises, and nothing will happen. Eventually, he’ll simmer down as long as we don’t pull him directly into the case.”

“That could happen,” I said. “In fact, it looks like that’s exactly where this is going.”

“So, we play it close until it’s almost wrapped up. I’ll smudge the reports until we’ve got everything the way we want it, act like the case is going nowhere until we’re ready to press charges. If Rheinsfeld is in the crosshairs, it’ll be too late to swing his weight with the council.”

“You want me to cool it?”

“Maybe don’t try to antagonize Rheinsfeld directly. But you’re going to have to keep pushing to figure out the Gerson thing and whatever you find helps my case, so . . . use your best judgment.”

“My best judgment hasn’t always worked out so good,” I said.

Dods shrugged. “Omelet, broken eggs. You know. Where you going from here?”

I ran a hand through my hair. “This crap with Rheinsfeld is a distraction. Everything I need to know is connected to that spike in the Quarters. I need to find out who really owns it.”

“And what Wendy Gerson and Atlantic Union were willing to do to get it.”

I wagged a finger. “You’re going to make assistant deputy chief one of these days, you know that?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

We walked a few strides, quiet. Then I looked at him. “‘Insufferable, humping asshole’?”

We both cracked up.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“No, we haven’t seen him,” Amanda said, her eyes glued to her laptop screen. “It’s like an alien abduction. Fincher’s just disappeared.”

I was leaning on the door frame of her office at FirstStep, my arms crossed. “Great. That’s what we wanted.”

“Yeah,” she replied, drawing it out. “As long as it isn’t a sign that he’s about to do something worse.”

“I doubt it.”

That made her look up. “You sound really sure about that. Like, too sure.”

“Just experience talking. Punks and bullies wilt under pressure.”

“What kind of pressure?”

“Nothing I could do or say,” I said.

“Who? Wait, you actually went to his father?” Amanda asked, her eyes wide.

“Danny doesn’t know me, so there’s no fear or respect there,” I explained. “There’s no basis for changing his behavior. A single threat from me, even a violent one, wasn’t going to make him stop. I had to take it upstairs.”

“What did you say to Gordon Fincher?”

“I implied there were certain political niceties I was more than willing to violate if he didn’t have a talk with his idiot son.”

“You threatened a sitting congressman?”

“Threaten is such a distasteful word,” I said. “I prefer to call it a gentlemen’s agreement.”

“As in, Danny better be a gentleman or you’ll trash Gordon Fincher’s political career?”

“I see you’re familiar with the way things are done in our nation’s capital.”

“Wow,” she said. “It was the logical thing to do, I guess, but . . . just, wow. I thought you were going to tell me you’d caved and were considering the breaking-kneecaps approach.”

“Not my style,” I said. “Though the option exists if we need it.”

“Unbelievable,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “You had to blackmail a US congressman to stop his son from hitting his girlfriend. Why is it this hard to keep women from getting abused? What is going through Danny Fincher’s head?”

“He wants to push someone around. Got pushed around himself somewhere along the line. It doesn’t excuse it. I’m just saying that’s the end of the psychology. Once someone shows him that beating his girlfriend is no longer an option for him to exercise his ego, he’ll stop.”

“When someone bigger and badder pushes him around, you mean.”

“Unfortunately, yes. Guys like Danny Fincher aren’t going to respond to a pamphlet and some counseling. I wish we could do something more permanent to help the next girl he sets his sights on, but his father’s threats should be enough to protect Karla. And FirstStep.”

Amanda was about to reply, but I heard footsteps behind me, coming down the hall. Before I could straighten, Julie Atwater had walked past me, her perfume hanging in the air after she’d gone. Frozen to the door frame, all I could do was gape.

I looked back at Amanda. She put her hand over her mouth and her shoulders started to shake.

“What?”

“You look like you swallowed that rat from the alley,” she said. “Ribbon and all.”

“I’m glad you find my discomfort amusing,” I said, peeved, and crossed my arms to prove it.

I looked at her that way until, after a minute, she asked, “What are you doing?”

“What do you mean?”

She jerked her head in the direction of the hall. “Go talk to her, dummy.”

I made a face. “She didn’t even say hello. Why would I go talk to her?”

Amanda closed her eyes and sighed. “Marty. Do you think she walked by my office by accident? You can see the entire length of the hall the minute you come through the foyer door. She saw you leaning in the doorway forty feet away and still made the choice to walk down here when she could’ve gone straight into the conference room. Get it?”

My mouth opened and closed like a fish’s.

“You were a detective, right?” Amanda asked.

“That’s what they told me.” I shook my head to clear it. “Okay, I’m going to do this.”

“Go get ’em,” Amanda said with a smirk I didn’t care for. “She’s using Diane’s office.”

The hall was longer than I remembered. I fiddled with the collar of my shirt, which was old and comfortable, which meant it probably looked pretty shabby. I could take the shirt off, I supposed, but it might send the wrong message. What was underneath the shirt was kind of shabby, too. I’d been working out lately, but it’s not like I was going to make the covers of any magazines. Going shirtless was doubtless poor etiquette in a women’s shelter. If you were a man. Or a woman, for that matter. Frankly, gender didn’t really enter into it. Let’s just say it was poor etiquette to go shirtless in public anywhere, anytime.

I was babbling in my own head. Then I froze, because it seems while I was having a running mental monologue, I’d reached Diane’s office and Julie was looking at me, one finger holding her place in the papers she’d been reading. She sat behind the desk with a pen in her hand and her hair falling down like a curtain. Stylish glasses with medium rims sat on her nose, giving her a sophisticated, sexy look. Her eyebrows arched in an unspoken question.

“Hi,” I said. “I saw you pass by and thought I’d drop in.”

She put down the pen. “Hi.”

“How are you?” I asked from the doorway. It seemed a respectful distance.

“I’m fine,” she said. “How are you?”

“I’m good.”

“That’s nice.” We looked at each other. Seconds ticked by. Julie seemed confident and in control. “I heard you might’ve been able to convince that guy who broke in here to stop.”

“It didn’t take much,” I said, downplaying it. “He’s a bully and bullies are wimps.”

“You sound like you know him personally.”

“I’ve seen his type,” I said. “A little bit of persuasion from the right corner goes a long way.”

She frowned. “You didn’t assault him, did you?”

“Why does everyone think I go around breaking fingers?” I asked. “No, I didn’t assault him.”

“You threatened him?”

I shook my head. “Nothing so crass. He owes his paycheck, car, and house to his politician father.”

“So, you threatened his father.”

“Obliquely, yes.”

She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. “FirstStep doesn’t need a lawsuit on its hands. It’s barely keeping its head above water as it is.”

“Believe me, I know,” I said, with an edge to my voice. “Better than you do.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“Who do you think is paying for Amanda’s broken arm?” I asked, then regretted it. You don’t talk about that kind of thing. It was self-serving and sounded like it.

“I see,” she said. “How noble.”

“It’s not noble, it’s what had to be done,” I said, angry and confused. This wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I’d walked down the hall. “Look, let’s talk about something else.”

“All right,” she said. “How’s your cancer?”

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

For the first time, the mask of confidence slipped from her face. “Amanda said you were in remission. That you were doing better.”

“I am. I just . . . can’t we talk about football or something?”

“Isn’t that a positive thing? I mean, if you’ve beaten it . . .”

Julie once told me that her mother had died from cancer, so a part of me understood her impulse to ask, but—hey—I was the one we were talking about. “I don’t know that I’ve beaten it. All I know is that it hasn’t come back.”

“Aren’t you going to your checkups?”

“Yes, I have one coming up,” I said. “But they might say it’s back, or it’s not, or they don’t know and just keep an eye on your stool, Marty, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“What, no news is good news?”

“Something like that,” I said. I felt like I was on a downhill slide and couldn’t stop myself if I’d wanted to. “Most of my news to this point has been lousy.”

“You’re alive,” she said simply. “There are a lot of people who aren’t lucky enough to say that.”

For a second, I couldn’t believe I’d heard her correctly. Blood rushed up through my face and an ugly feeling took over. “Lucky?” I pointed at my chest. “I’m lucky?”

“Yes. Not everybody is—”

“Lucky is finding a five-dollar bill in your dresser drawer. Lucky is winning tickets to a baseball game. Lucky is not getting cancer.”

Julie swallowed and put her hands up. “I didn’t mean—”

“If I’m lucky, I’ll live to see sixty. I won’t have surgery again or have to shit in a bag for the rest of my life.” I was shouting now. I couldn’t help it. Something had been ready to pop and Julie had been the one with the opener. “If I’m lucky, the best I can hope for is that my life gets back to normal, where it should’ve been all along.”

Julie stood, came around the desk, and brushed past me on her way out of the room. I said the last sentence to her back. Her face had been still and flat, like she was holding herself together. I swore and followed her into the hallway, but stopped when I saw Amanda and three other people peering out of their offices, alarmed by my shouting. The looks on their faces were not friendly. There was an understandably low tolerance for men who shouted at women in this building. On top of feeling angry and depressed at whatever bile Julie had pulled out of me, I also felt like a creep. Maybe for an encore I could kick a door down or tip over a watercooler on my way out.

Julie had disappeared around a corner. I walked down the hall. It was time to go.

“Are you okay?” Amanda asked as I walked past her. “Marty?”

“I’m fine.”

“How did that fall apart so quickly?” she said. “You were in there for two minutes.”

“Just lucky, I guess,” I said over a shoulder as I walked out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Caitlin was nervous.

It wasn’t any one thing; it was the combination of the flipping of the hair, the quick glances at her phone, the way she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Things getting rough at the office?” I asked. We were back at the convention center, sitting on the strange cushioned bench again, but apparently even this wasn’t far enough away from her bosses at Tartikoff and Brentwood.

“It’s getting really freaky,” she admitted. “External e-mail was shut down a few days ago. We can only communicate inside the office. And they started searching bags at the end of the day, which is really bumming everyone out. It takes twenty minutes to get out of the building.”

“How’d you smuggle Gerson’s day planner out?”

She smiled and for an answer, reached into her handbag and pulled out a tampon box.

“Nice job,” I said. “Though a female guard isn’t going to think twice about looking in there.”

“Maybe not,” she said, “but I’ve been an attorney’s bitch long enough to know that if they open this box they’ve got a lawsuit on their hands. And they know it, too.”

“I really appreciate this, Caitlin,” I said. “We’re closing in on something and a big chunk of it is thanks to you.”

She smiled again and blushed a teeny bit. “Thanks. But I can’t do this much longer. I’m starting to wig out that they’re videotaping me, or bugging my phone, or something.”

“I know. Like I said, we’re getting close. The day planner might have some answers.”

“I can’t let you take it,” she said, handing it over. “I’m the first person they’re going to think of if they find it missing.”

“Give me fifteen, twenty minutes to leaf through it. We’ll get you back to the office before lunchtime is over.” She nodded, looking subdued. I opened the little book. “Looks like a diary, not a day planner.”

“She tried using one with dates and times, but didn’t like that some days were almost empty, others too full. So she just started buying blank journals and putting the date at the start of the entry.”

“So she could fill in as much or as little as she needed.”

“Right.”

I started flipping through pages, eyeballing dates. “Still looks like she only used a line or two per day. That’ll help. But there must be weeks—no, months—here. What’s a good starting point?”

Caitlin leaned over and turned the pages until we were about a third of the way through the planner. “Here’s where I found out about that guy Zimmerman.”

I started from there, scanning the pages and flipping the pages quickly while Caitlin read over my shoulder. The notes were scribbled, jotted down in haste, and most of the entries were single letters and symbols.

“She had her own shorthand?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Caitlin said. She pointed to an entry. “M is for meeting. M with a circle around it is a meeting with a partner or someone else higher up in the firm.”

“Like Alex Montero?”

“Mmm . . . no, she didn’t really think of him as her boss,” she said. “She marked meetings with him M-AM. If that’s circled, they both met with a partner or someone else important.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s not complicated. C is for call, the circle is a call to someone senior. L is for lunch. CC is conference call?”

“Yep, though she didn’t always put down who was there. She might if she thought it was important.”

“What about the slash?”

“That was something she added later if it hadn’t gone well or if she didn’t like something else about the call or meeting.”

My phone buzzed and I pulled it out reflexively to check the number. It was Julie. A flush started around my nose and zipped up to my forehead. My thumb hovered over the screen, ready to answer.

“Somebody important?” Caitlin asked.

“No,” I said, and silenced the call, then slipped the phone back in my pocket. I flipped more pages, trying to wade through weeks of a workaholic corporate attorney’s schedule. In under fifteen minutes, no less. Flip, flip. Scan. Ten minutes passed and I didn’t see anything that jumped out at me. Caitlin sighed several times, simultaneously bored and anxious.

“Why don’t you start at the back?” Caitlin finally asked after her longest sigh.

“It’s tempting,” I said. “But I want to get a sense of her days. Look for patterns. We’ll be done soon.”

She sighed again and I started turning pages faster. Wendy Gerson had packed the planner almost full. Flip, flip, flip. Then my hand froze in midair as I went to turn the page. A morning entry, 10:00 a.m. M-TJ with a circle around the letters. And an angry slash through all of it and into the entry above.

“Holy . . .” I said out loud. “She met with her.”

“Who?” Caitlin asked.

I sighed and glanced over. “Tonya Jackson. The woman who wouldn’t sell her house to let the Quarters development go through.”

“It didn’t work out?”

I shook my head, seeing the entire scene encapsulated by those three simple letters and a slash. “She turned her down. Gerson probably went there personally to buy her out after Zimmerman got the door slammed in his face. And Jackson told her no, too.”

Several meetings and calls followed, including one M-AM around noon. “She met with Montero to tell him the bad news. Where’s the M with a circle around it, though? Wouldn’t they have wanted to take this upstairs?”

Caitlin shrugged and I scanned the lines, going slower now, trying to make sense of time as it slipped backward and forward through Wendy Gerson’s life. Two lines later, a C-AM with a circle and next to it, in parentheses, the letters JR. I whistled.

“She and Mr. Montero called someone together?” Caitlin guessed.

“Not just someone,” I said. “The only JR that makes sense here is Jeremy Rheinsfeld.”

End of the day. I flipped the page. More work history for a busy corporate attorney. Then, halfway through the day, an entry: CH/RM-TJ. Three or four angry slashes nearly obliterated the letters.

I tapped the initials, thinking. CH . . . then my blood went cold. Cedric Harmon? I’d never caught Martinez’s first name, but it would be easy to find out if it was Raul or Ramón or Rick. I groaned.

“What?” Caitlin asked.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Your old boss couldn’t buy the old lady out, so she went running to Rheinsfeld. Who then sent two scumbag knee breakers to talk some sense into her.”

I pulled out my phone and dialed Dods’s number.

He answered. “Hey, Marty. You get attacked again?”

“I wish, actually,” I said. “Hey, can you run down a death cert for me?”

“Homicide?”

“Not yet. Natural causes.”

“Name?”

“Jackson, Tonya.” I rattled off the street address. “I just need a date and time, if they got it.”

“Okay, I’ll call you back.”

I hung up. I didn’t like where this was going. I went back to the day planner and ran my finger down the page. More meetings, calls, lunches. Several were with Montero, others with higher-ups, but I couldn’t pin any special significance to the entries. Weeks went by with the same pattern. I flipped the page.

The last written page was dated the day she’d been killed. Early in the morning, there was an exclamation mark with a box around it. I showed it to Caitlin.

“Know what this is?”

She glanced at it, then shook her head, confused. “No. I never saw her use that before. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. The rest of the morning and lunch hours were as chock-full of appointments as the rest of the book. The last entry was for 2:30 p.m. It stood out. There was an M with not one, but three circles around it. I held the book up to Caitlin. “Who rates three circles?”

She shrugged and I stared at the entry for a long time. So long that Caitlin leaned in and said, “Was it important?”

“Hmm?” I said, distracted.

“It was an important meeting, right?”

“Oh, it was important.”

“How do you know?”

I tapped the circled M with my finger. “Because that’s who killed her.”

Pots the size of bass drums, when dropped onto a drying rack, make a sound like a church bell. But I had trouble concentrating on the sound because the steam from the industrial washing machine and the spray from volunteers rinsing dishes made the air feel like a hot soup. And that, I also found, was difficult to focus on because the constant hustle of bodies bringing new dirty dishes in and taking others full of food out to the hall made it impossible to stand in one place, begin a conversation, or even hold on to a thought, no matter how hard I tried.

On any given day, Libby’s Kitchen served meals to about five hundred homeless men, women, and children and all five hundred seemed to be here tonight. I’d been to the kitchen before—to pick up snitches or put the bracelets on a suspect; not to volunteer, I’m ashamed to say—and I’d never seen it so busy.

It was also the last place I thought I’d find Paul Gerson making his civic contribution. Writing a check or hosting a fund-raiser at the Mayflower Hotel, sure, but not actually wearing a stained apron and dragging plastic racks of glasses in from the hall and loading them into the washer. After much cajoling on my part, his office had told me about his monthly volunteer work and I’d driven down to see for myself.

Weaving my way through the long tables, I passed through rows of homeless folks waiting patiently for their turn to go to the counter. A volunteer stopped me before I’d made it to the kitchen, but when I dropped the Gerson name, I was ushered into the chaos and directed to go back to the sinks.

Gerson was blank-faced when he first saw me, a look that quickly changed to irritation. “You couldn’t call?” he asked as I walked over to him, interrupting as he lifted three racks of clean plates out of the automatic dryer and set them down on a tower of ten others with a clatter. He had on a pink, pin-striped button-down beneath the same stained apron as everyone else wore. I had to give him credit, though; the sleeves were rolled to the elbow and he was sweating like hell.

“There’ve been some breakthroughs in your sister’s case,” I said, “and I wanted to get in touch with you personally.”

“You couldn’t wait?”

“If I could’ve, I would’ve,” I said, not happy at the attitude. “Look, is there a quiet place we can talk?”

“Hold on,” he said, then walked to a middle-aged Hispanic woman who, though as sweaty and fatigued as everyone else, seemed to be some kind of manager. He explained something, she nodded, then he waved me toward a thick utility door in the back. We wound our way through counters, food cartons, and carts. Gerson grabbed a flyswatter off a nail on the wall, then held the door for me. I found myself in an alley behind the kitchen. The air was blessedly cool, if rank from the garbage cans surrounding the exit, and the noise was a manageable city din.

Gerson followed me out, then jammed the flyswatter into the door latch to keep it from locking behind us. He turned in time to see my appraising look. “Surprised to find me volunteering at a soup kitchen?”

“I pictured your philanthropy to be more along the lines of a charity golfing event.”

He dragged his sleeves across his forehead, trying to find one last dry patch to wipe the sweat away. “Mother always insisted we pay back to the community, and the more hands-on, the better. Wendy hated it.” He shook his head, as if clearing it of a memory. “What’s this about, Singer?”

“I feel like I’m closing in on something. It may lead us to Wendy’s killer or it might not, but either way, I wanted to update you.”

“You didn’t answer me inside. You couldn’t phone this in or wait to catch me in my office?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

I described most of what I’d found to this point, from the dry paper chase at the records office to the Columbia Heights press conference to the pissing contest with Rheinsfeld and his goons.

“It sounds like you’re making progress,” he said, “but you still could’ve sent that in an e-mail.”

I hesitated. “Look, I’m pulling on a string here. And the string is tied to various things and people. The more I pull, the longer I pull, the uglier the things are that are tied to that string.”

“Christ, Singer,” Gerson said, fatigue in his voice. “Spill it.”

I put my head back, looking at the thin patch of night sky the alley allowed. “Understand that, in my book, murder is never justified. Whoever killed Wendy needs to be found and get put away. Period.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said wryly.

“But your sister wasn’t just working with some bad people doing some bad things,” I continued. “She was one of the bad people doing the bad things. If this were five years ago, I’d be investigating her, not just the person who killed her.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m almost certain she was instrumental in planning a massive development project meant to evict and relocate an entire low-income neighborhood in order to flip it into a multimillion-dollar renovation. The development shoved almost a thousand people out of their homes and turned a community into a ghost town.”

Gerson backed up to the brick wall next to the door and leaned against it. “That’s distasteful, but there’s nothing illegal about that.”

“Illegal? No, unfortunately not. Unethical? Yes.”

He crossed his arms and scowled, the gesture oddly childish. “If everyone who did something unethical in this city were arrested, there wouldn’t be anyone left. Is that all?”

“The development is currently in limbo because of one woman who wouldn’t sell out.”

“What’s this got to do with Wendy?”

“The people she was dealing with were both more experienced and less scrupulous than she was. When your sister couldn’t get this woman to sell, she called her associates in the deal, who sent two goons to change the woman’s mind. According to Wendy’s own notes, the two guys met with the woman that night. She was found dead the next day. A heart attack. Or so the coroner said. My former partner is going over the autopsy report now and I have a feeling that ‘cardiac arrest’ is not going be the final determination when he digs a little deeper.”

Gerson didn’t say anything.

“This woman was the last obstacle, now removed. Or so they thought. The only reason the development still hasn’t gone anywhere is that it turned out the property wasn’t actually in the woman’s name. But you understand that’s not the important part, right? If what I think happened, happened, then your sister precipitated this woman’s murder. Your sister had someone killed for money.”

As I’d spoken, Gerson’s head had dipped lower and lower until it now almost rested on his chest, his arms still folded. My last words died and we stood, silent. Around us, the city’s night sounds found their way down the alley. The honk of cars, raised voices from the street, the closing and opening of doors. Failing spotlights lit the alley in weak splashes. A rat, one of the city’s million, raced across the top of one slick black garbage bag to another.

Gerson took a deep breath and raised his head. “Are you telling me something or asking me something?”

Good. Gerson understood why I was here now. “Both.”

He paused, then said, “I need you to finish this. I want whoever killed Wendy caught, prosecuted, and punished. That part’s not going to change, no matter what gets revealed.”

I nodded.

“If, in the process, you discover things I’d rather I hadn’t known, I have to accept that. I hired you because you’re the kind of investigator that’s going to see that part through. Just do me the courtesy of bringing things to me first so I can do some damage control, if I can, all right?”

I thought about it. Damage control, in most cases, meant cover-up. “As long as we’re not talking about sweeping murders under the rug, or giving crooks like Jeremy Rheinsfeld or Toby Waites a pass.”

“I couldn’t care less about them,” he said. “I only want to protect my parents.”

“Okay.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “Do you think Wendy’s murder and this . . . deal . . . she was involved with are connected?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “They may be more than just connected. She might’ve been killed precisely because she knew about this woman’s murder. It would fit, as would Alex Montero’s killing. Pushing hard on this might unearth something you don’t want to know about Wendy, but it might also be exactly what gives us her killer.”

“You’d push on this no matter what I said.” It wasn’t a question. “You just wanted to know where I stood.”

“You hired me to do a job and I’ll do it,” I said. “But leaving this unfinished isn’t an option.”

“Is it the notion of the spike that appeals, Singer?” he asked in the mocking tone he’d used when we’d first spoke. “A lone hero, holding out against the forces of corruption and evil? A solitary figure railing against the darkness?”

I shrugged.

He was silent for another long moment, then pushed himself away from the wall. “I’ve got to get back. The shift ends at nine. Keep me posted.”

“Okay.”

He pulled out the flyswatter and opened the door, then stopped to look back at me. “My only other warning would be to make sure you have the evidence to prove what you’re saying. A DC councilman and the CEO of a major real estate enterprise are two people you don’t want to anger, but if you drag Wendy’s name through something she didn’t do, my family will skin you alive.”

Gerson went inside, leaving me to find my way out of the darkened alley on my own.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I gave Michael Denton a buzz early the next day.

“I may be on to something,” I began as soon as he answered, “that might give Atlantic Union more than a black eye. In fact, it might be big and bad enough to land Rheinsfeld and Waites in court.”

“You’ve got my attention.”

“Problem is, I need help running down some of the info that might help build a case against them.”

“And PoP might have the data you need.”

“Something like that, yeah.” I went on to explain what I knew about how it was Wendy’s involvement in the Quarters project that had gotten her killed and how I was leaning toward Rheinsfeld’s goons as doing the killing. “The question, though, is exactly what about her involvement was it? Was she killed because she screwed up and the development stalled? Or because she knew about this woman Tonya Jackson getting killed—had essentially set it in motion?”

Denton was quiet for a moment, then said, “Those kinds of questions sound more like your specialty.”

“They are, but the one thing that might help is something PoP is good at. Namely, there’s still the question of who owns this spike piece.”

Denton grunted. “Is that relevant? If Rheinsfeld or Waites had her killed like you say, then it wasn’t who owned the spike, just the fact that it was there. You should be looking at how and when they killed this woman Jackson.”

“Maybe so. But more information is always better than less. If you find the owner’s name, there might be a missing link somewhere that hooks into the other questions. If nothing else, it would be nice to find out who was willing to pass on the money just to tell Atlantic Union to shove it.”

“All right. I’ll put one of my staff on it, see what they can find out.”

“Thanks, Denton. It might be a brick in the wall we build around Rheinsfeld and his goons.”

He promised to get me anything his intrepid PoP volunteers found, then we hung up and I got dressed to go downtown. Denton was just my first salvo.

I came prepared this time, armed with two steaming, sixteen-ounce paper cups of Earl Grey along with a blueberry tart, a sticky bun, and a slice of lemon chess pie. It had seemed to work wonders last time.

“Oh, Mary! Come out here,” Charlotte said. “Mr. Singer’s back and he’s brought treats.”

I put on a smile worthy of any toothpaste commercial. “I thought you two ladies might enjoy a warm beverage and a few sugary delights on a slow afternoon at the office.”

“Those look so fattening,” Mary said, eyeing the sticky bun. The woman weighed marginally more than my cat.

“I won’t tell if you don’t,” I said, and bit into the bear claw I’d brought for myself. Combined with a twenty-ounce French roast, it was a slice of indulgent, over-caffeinated heaven.

“Why do I get the feeling that these are a preamble to another document search?” Charlotte asked as she smiled and reached for the blueberry tart.

“Can’t a guy just drop by with a couple of drinks and some empty calories?” I asked. Both of the women shot me looks. “Okay, hopefully this isn’t anything too strenuous. There’s a single, lonely plot in the new Quarters redevelopment whose owner won’t sell. I was hoping I could find out from you who this mysterious person might be.”

“Is this part of the work you were doing before?”

“Yes.”

“Does this make us your snitches?” Mary asked, seeming excited by the prospect. “Are we confidential informants now?”

“Um . . . not as such,” I said diplomatically. “You’re more like expert witnesses. Though if I can bribe you with tea and crumpets every time, you’ll be cheaper than any expert witness or snitch ever hired.”

We got into the down and dirty of my search. Mary started typing on her computer before I was even done describing what I needed. She hummed and tapped her cheek with a finger as she worked. “The parcel itself is easy enough to find in the tax records,” she began, “but it looks like it’s owned by a holding company. So we’ll have to run down the incorporation records and charter for that company and, if we’re lucky, we’ll get a list of officers’ names.”

“Let’s say whoever bought this plot didn’t want to be found, so they used a fake name and personal information. What’re the odds of being able to find that someone?”

Mary tsked. “Not great. There’s got to be a mailing address, but it can be a PO box or dummy address, of course. And the rules are rather lax in all other regards. The states don’t mind taking the fees and leaving it at that.”

“No background checks?” I asked. “No unwarranted inspections?”

“Not that I’ve ever seen.” She looked at me. “Does that mean we have to give the pastries back?”

“No, consider that payment for service rendered. Would you mind digging a little longer, though, just to make sure? I’ll buy you a year’s supply of Earl Grey if you don’t make me go online and do it myself.”

That got a couple smirks. They told me it could take a while, which I took as a signal to leave them alone. I bade them adieu and walked out of the Office of Records and down the steps to my car. I was wearing a smile I didn’t really feel, since I was back to waiting to hear from sources instead of acting on real intel. It was nice to toss a few irons in the fire, but it wasn’t quite the same as racing to a murder scene or leaning on a witness. Hurry-up-and-wait had never been my favorite pastime.

I started the car and snapped on the radio, hoping to catch the weather. Instead of a forecast, however, I got my wish for direct action, because the nice newsman on the radio interrupted the weather guy to announce, breathlessly, that Toby Waites had been shot in his own home.

Tourists driving by the scene in front of the councilman’s expansive manse would’ve been forgiven thinking that a nuclear bomb had been found on the manicured green lawn. No fewer than fifteen MPDC cruisers, plainclothes cars, ambulances, and other official vehicles surrounded the home. They were pulled up on sidewalks, parked in the driveway, and arrayed along scenic Fox Chapel Road north of Georgetown, blocking traffic. Three local TV station vans and a national news network truck were pulled over illegally on the gravel shoulder. I recognized one of the field reporters from the press conference a few days before, the smoker. She was smoking now, in fact, and arguing with a woman wearing a cream-colored jogging suit in the front of a gated drive—apparently an irate, if well-to-do, homeowner who didn’t appreciate the hubbub hubbubbing itself all over her front drive.

I parked five gates down, wary of the circus—if it was still like this two or three hours after the shooting had been reported, it must’ve been serious bedlam right after it happened. Taking my time, I sauntered along the road, catching glimpses of the ongoing mess on the other side through the wrought-iron fence.

The real work could only be done by one or two detectives, maybe a handful of badges searching the scene, an ME who was probably already gone, and a forensics crew to go over the whole thing. At least a dozen people milling about were unnecessary, unneeded, and unwelcome from an investigative standpoint, but that’s the way it went in a high-profile, politically explosive case.

Aides, reporters, staff, and PR folks were clamoring to get inside the fence so they could ruin the detective’s day with inane questions and meaningless demands. City politics made sure there were three times as many cops on the scene than it needed, yet—despite being bored out of their skulls—they couldn’t seem lazy sitting on the hoods of their cars or smoking a cigarette, so they’d wander the grounds and the house, getting in the way and destroying the integrity of the scene. And if the chief herself weren’t already standing on the front porch with her hands on her hips, demanding an update and threatening to knock all the officers and detectives down to beat cops and the badges down to Southeast sewer patrol, the mayor was going to want to know why. Speaking of which, if the mayor thought he could score some points in the next election—or just snag a decent photo op—he’d be here in a few minutes, too, growling into the chief’s ear and suggesting she might find gainful employment in another city, preferably in another time zone, maybe even another continent, if she screwed the pooch on this one.

With all this in mind, I watched from across the street and planned my approach carefully. If I tried to waltz in as former detective Marty Singer, I’d get a boot up my ass from one of the patrolmen itching for something to do. So some discretion and observation was in order. I took a spot across the street, not far from where the field reporter and the irascible homeowner had been arguing when I’d driven by.

I watched the all-too-familiar scene. Gaudier than most that I’d been part of, but still unremarkable at its core. Frankly, despite the bright lights and ongoing sense of drama, it was boring. To pass the time, I took out my phone and thumbed my way through screens until I got to my voice mail. I tapped on the last one I’d received, just like I’d tapped on it ten times already. There was a click, then a cough.

“It’s me,” Julie said. “I . . . I just wanted to say I’m sorry. What I said at FirstStep, it was thoughtless. You aren’t lucky, Marty. You’re tough. Resourceful. Bullheaded, yes. But that’s what’s gotten you through this. I guess when I said ‘lucky,’ what I really meant to say was ‘exceptional.’ My mother had all those qualities, but she didn’t make it. And I just wanted to say . . . I’m glad you did.”

There was a long pause.

“Let’s try again. Your call where and when. We’ll talk about football this time.”

I turned off the phone. There hadn’t been time to call her. Actually, there had, but I hadn’t felt like it. Putting things back together with Julie, so important a few days ago, seemed like a lot of work now. I poked and prodded how I felt about our situation, but no answers popped out for me. Maybe it was time to let this fade into the distance.

“I don’t care who you’re with, I want your goddamn van out of my front yard,” a loud voice said, interrupting my musing.

I turned. The irascible homeowner I’d seen wrangling with the reporter was giving it another go. When I’d first walked up, she’d retreated to the shelter of her garage to fume, but hadn’t gone inside her palace. She’d apparently gotten her second wind. The reporter, weary, turned and faced off with her.

“Lady, a man got shot four times this morning in the house across the street,” the station reporter said, then took a drag from her cigarette. She pointed with it as she exhaled. “And when that man happens to be Toby Waites, it’s news.”

That seemed to give the woman pause, but she soldiered on. “That doesn’t change the fact that you’re going to have to move that van somewhere else. Park on his lawn.”

“Are you married?”

“What does that have to do with anything? Yes, I’m married.”

“Does your husband own WXPI?”

“No.”

“Then the van stays where it is,” the reporter said, took a last pull from the cigarette, and flicked the butt over the lady’s fence and into her yard. “We’ll be out of your hair in a couple of hours.”

“You bitch! I’m calling the cops,” the woman screeched, balling her hands into fists.

The reporter had already turned to walk away, but she gestured toward the morass of police around Waites’s house. “Let me know how it works out.”

The lady shook like she was going to spontaneously combust . . . then she wheeled in my direction. “You! Who the hell are you?”

“Time to go,” I said under my breath, then headed across Fox Chapel. I’d rather jump through a dozen fiery hoops to get to Dods than stand and listen to a millionaire’s bored housewife heap abuse on me. I pushed my way through the mess in front of the gate, getting a couple of glares along the way. An MPDC badge—big and tired of telling reporters and muckety-mucks to go away—held up a hand before I got within ten feet.

“Sir, no one’s being allowed on the scene. I’m going to—”

“—have to ask me to step away,” I finished for him. I reached carefully into a breast pocket and brought out my old MPDC card and handed it over. “I understand, Officer. Detective Davidovitch asked me to come down and lend him a hand.”

The badge glanced down at the card, looking confused and torn, then my heart sank when he seemed to be leaning toward the beat cop mantra, When in doubt, say no. I was getting ready to make a second pitch when, from the side of the gate, I heard a laugh and my name being called. The beat cop and I both turned to see a middle-aged black guy in sergeant’s stripes walk over to us, a big smile on his face.

“Patches,” I said, grinning back and shaking his hand as he came up to me.

“Marty the man,” he said. The badge at the gate took a step back.

“How’d you get pulled in on this?” I asked. “You’re supposed to be telling tourists where the White House is and making sure all the bars on M Street are stocked.”

“City councilman gets capped, they call out the cavalry, man.” The little crowd gasped, then started to buzz at his words. “Homicide, Major Narcotics, you name it. Dog catcher’s gonna be here in a minute.”

“Waites actually bought it?”

He motioned me to come through the gate. A collective grumble rose from the crowd outside the fence as they watched me enter the inner sanctum. Patches and I went for a walk along the grass bordering the fence. “I just said that to cheese off the vultures by the gate. Waites is still breathing. At Georgetown ICU as we speak. But he took four in the chest, so the diagnosis is poor, you catch my drift.”

I nodded. “Dods is out of pocket?”

“’Fraid so. I saw you at the gate and came over to give you some grief. But now it sounds like you got an interest in this. You turn into some kind of newspaperman since you retired?”

“No, thank God. But this might be related to something I’m working on,” I said and gave him the quick rundown on what I’d been looking into, emphasizing the fact that Dods and I had been scratching backs, so to speak.

He gave me a sympathetic look. “I hear you. But Davidovitch is up to his asshole in alligators at the moment. I can go ask, you want . . .”

I waved it off. “He’s got enough to worry about. What can you tell me about the scene?”

“Are you asking an officer of the law to divulge pertinent details regarding the ongoing investigation of the attempted murder of a DC city councilman?”

“I surely am.”

“In that case, what do you want to know?”

“Waites took four?”

“Yep.”

“Handgun?”

“Probably.”

“Where?”

“In the chest, man. I just told you.”

“No,” I said. “I mean, where in the house was he shot? The conservatory?”

“Oh. The foyer. Just inside the door.”

“Guards? Security cameras?”

“No guards,” Patches said. “They’re looking at the tape now, but the camera literally starts coverage about five feet inside the door and the shooter was in the doorway, so maybe no dice.”

“Witnesses? Family at home?”

“Nope. Dog running around in the backyard, barking its head off. Wife and daughter in New York City, shopping.”

“Door still open when MPDC got there?”

“Yep.”

“Close-range shooting, with an inaccurate sidearm, two steps in front of the victim’s front door. All of the rounds in the guy’s chest.”

“Paint by numbers, ain’t it?”

“Yep,” I said. “Time to check the guy’s Christmas card list. He knew whoever shot him.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

“Nothing?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Singer,” Charlotte said. She sounded as disappointed as I felt. “Mary and I traced it as far back as we could go, but every record was a dead end. Whoever owns that piece of property knows how to cover their tracks. Tax records, charters, business applications . . . all of it led nowhere.”

“Thorough job, then?”

“Damn near invisible,” she said, then sounded surprised that she’d used a bad word. “Maybe someone with more real estate savvy or more resources could do better. I’m sure you could stake out the PO boxes or serve some kind of court summons to get a name to surface, but that would take a good bit of clout.”

“That definitely doesn’t describe me,” I said, then thanked her and ended the call. I leaned back in my chair and put my feet up on the edge of the coroner’s slab of a desk I used at home, thinking. I’d still swing by their office and drop off some Earl Grey and another box of pastries. The two ladies had uncovered more leads chasing paper in a few days than I’d managed to find in a week.

No, that wasn’t entirely true. I’d managed to draw inconclusive and unsubstantiated connections between two previous murders, another murder that I was sure had been misreported as a natural death, and an attempted murder of a prominent DC city councilman, though Waites was hanging on by the skin of his teeth in ICU and might bring the tally to four by sundown. I had the threads for all of the crimes bunched in my fist, but every one of them seemed to lead off in a different direction.

I banged my fist on the desk, making my jar of pens jump. It all came back to the damn spike. It might not be the be-all, end-all of the problem, but knowing who owned it would bring me a hell of a lot closer to something I could grab with both hands.

I picked up my phone and dialed the PoP office.

“Michael Denton, please,” I said when the voice on the other end answered.

“I’m sorry, he’s not here right now.” It sounded like Jerry, Michael’s second in command.

“Gee, I thought I’d been accepted into the inner circle,” I said. “Could you let him know it’s Marty Singer?”

“Michael’s really not here, Mr. Singer,” Jerry said. “He left earlier. He said he wanted to get ready for a special meeting later.”

“Special meeting? Like another protest?”

“I don’t think so. He would’ve taken some of us along in that case. Sometimes he likes to work solo, attend city council meetings, sit in on hearings, that kind of thing. It gives him a feel for how the developers present themselves to the public, before he brings PoP into it formally. It helps with the strategy when he organizes the protests.”

“Huh,” I said. “He didn’t happen to leave any information for me, did he? About some property in the Quarters?”

“Hold on,” the kid said, and I heard the rustling of papers. “Yeah, there’s a note. Okay, he said . . . to tell you that he doesn’t know, whatever that means.”

“Great.”

“But,” the kid continued, “that you, quote, might find what you need back at the source.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Singer. That’s all he said. Go back to the source.”

Paper bag in one hand, six-pack of Coke in the other, I walked up the same tired street I’d scuffed along a few days before, the shadows of a late-autumn afternoon leaning in front of me. The Southeast Freeway hummed and honked like a grumpy giant half a block to my left. I wondered what it was like living and sleeping beside it all of your days and nights.

The same feeling of displacement settled in as I took the long way through the Quarters, though not as strong as it had been my first time. I had to fish around for it, try to reimagine what I’d felt before. The sense of a living community was already fading away. And if that was being lost, with the homes and buildings still standing, it really would be completely obliterated when the bulldozers plowed over the last pile of bricks.

I rounded a corner and saw the convenience store squatting on the corner just as I’d left it. James and Dennis were still holding down the front stoop. They watched me, as they had a few days ago, every step of the way. Again, I had to be the most interesting thing they’d seen today. Probably since the last time I’d been here.

I stopped in front of them. “Afternoon, fellas.”

James tilted his head. “Herbie still ain’t here, mister.”

“You can check inside, you want,” Dennis said. This broke both of them up something fierce.

I smiled. “Mind if I join you?”

James eyed the bag in my hand. “Depends. If you in a sharing mood . . .” Dennis looked at me. His eyes behind his glasses looked enormous.

There was a stray plastic chair on its side next to the door to the store. I grabbed it, set it upright at the table, and sat down, then pulled the quart bottle of Virginia Gentleman out of the bag and put it next to the Coke.

“Dang man, not out in the open,” James protested. “What’s wrong with you?”

I gave him a look. “When’s the last time five-oh rolled up in the Quarters, looking for an open container?”

James’s face went blank. Dennis laughed and said, “When Clinton bombed Iraq.”

“That was Reagan,” James said disdainfully.

“You’re both full of it,” I said, cracking the safety seal on the bourbon and handing it to James. “It was Carter.”

James’s eyes twinkled. “Ain’t he the one that lied to Congress?”

Dennis opened a can of Coke, poured half of it on the ground, then held it out to James for a hit of the bourbon. “I heard tell he traded them hostages for weapons of mass destruction.”

I copied Dennis’s example and held out my can for James to fill. “Can’t trust a politician.”

“Amen to that,” James said and we clinked cans. It was the kind of cocktail that made me want to gag but, when in Rome, you drink bourbon and cola.

My drinking buddies seemed to be okay with it. They each took a long pull, belched quietly, and cradled the cans in their hands. Dennis gently squeezed his, distracted, and it made soft plinking sounds. James leaned back dangerously far in his chair and gave me a long look down his nose. I waited for it.

“So what’s a white boy like you want, sharing your premium liquor with two beat-down homies from the Quarters?”

“James,” Dennis said. “No need to be rude, now.”

“He white,” James protested. “What you want me to say? Motherfucker glows like a lightbulb.”

“It’s all right, Dennis,” I said. “I know I’m white. I mean, look at the way I dress.”

Dennis leaned out from the table so he could take a gander at my duds. “You do be lacking any sense of style.”

I hunched forward, putting my elbows on the table. “I need your help. Some people have been hurt, some killed, because of something that’s going on down here.”

“Here? In the Quarters?” James asked. “We told you, ain’t nothing going down here. Dennis and me is it.”

“Just us chickens,” Dennis laughed.

“I understand. What I’m looking for might’ve happened before then, back when the Quarters was really humming.”

“What do you mean?” James asked. “Nothing happen in the Quarters.”

“Tell me about life twenty, thirty years ago. What kind of place was it? Was it dangerous?”

“Oh, you mean back in the day?” James asked. “Man, all kind of shit went down. Beatings, stabbings, robberies. Numbers, drugs, hookers.”

“It wasn’t all bad,” Dennis said. “Don’t give the man the wrong impression. Quarters no worse than any other part of the city.”

“Nah, but the man asked what get a person killed. He don’t want to hear about no barbeque or dance party.”

“Let me narrow it down,” I said. “Somebody is real interested in Miss Tonya’s property. The same people that guy Zimmerman was working for. You guys know if there’s anything special about her place?”

They looked at each other, bewildered. James made a face and shrugged. “It just a house.”

“Did she have parties?” I asked, trying to give them a place to start. “Did she keep the place locked tight or did the neighbors walk in whenever they wanted? Kids throw rocks at her house or hang out on her step? Did folks hate her or could she have run for mayor?”

“Them last two ain’t mutually exclusive, you know,” James said. I shrugged, conceding the point.

They were quiet, casting their minds back. I sat still, taking small sips of my drink, listening to the cars in the distance.

“Kids used to play out front her house,” Dennis said, his eyes unfocused as he remembered. “When they wasn’t playing ball down at the Chain Court or over at Garfield. She always real nice to them. Hand out lemonade in the summertime.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” James said, paused, then got the same misty look. “She put the radio on in the window. Old Motown. Kids used to fun with her, holding their hands over their ears.”

Dennis clapped his hands to the side of his head. “Miss Tonya, that music old.”

James chuckled. “She come out and dance with the older boys, make them all bashful. But they stick around for the lemonade and cookies.”

“She married?” I asked.

James took a pull from his can. “Nah. Kept a couple of men around. Nobody for all the time.”

“She a looker,” Dennis said. “She very fine.”

“That she was,” James said. “Right up to the end, in fact.”

“You remember we thought she had some new sweetheart couple years ago?” Dennis asked. “She get a new car, new TV, new clothes. Seem like every year, she’d turn the old car in and get new.”

“Ain’t nobody come around, though,” James reminded him. “Who’s gonna pay for all that and not come calling?”

I had to get this back on track. “Miss Tonya have any family? Sisters, brothers? Kids?”

“She have a sister?” James asked Dennis. “In Baltimore?”

“Yep,” Dennis said, then pushed back his hat and scratched his head. “She have a boy, too.”

“A son?” I asked, perking up.

James nodded. “That’s right. Little boy, running around for a while.”

“A while?” I asked.

Dennis cleared his throat. “Miss Tonya have a health concern.”

I took an educated guess. Early eighties. “Health concern” in Southeast DC. “This, uh, problem come in a pipe?”

“Maybe,” Dennis said, reluctant. “She kick it, eventually. But the daddy took the boy when he about ten, maybe.”

“He from around here?” I asked.

Dennis shook his head. “Richmond, maybe.”

James looked at Dennis like seeing him for the first time. “How do you remember all this shit?”

“Clean living, I suppose,” Dennis said, taking a long pull of bourbon and Coke.

“He and the boy ever come back?” They both shook their heads. “So, Miss Tonya had a son, but no husband and no family. She develops a habit and the boy’s father comes back and takes the kid away. You know the boy’s name? Or the father’s?”

James gestured at Dennis. “Ask this mofo, here. He the one with the pho-to-graphic memory.”

Dennis stared at the ground, his lips moving silently, then he lifted his head and squinted at James. “Her boy always running everywhere?”

“That’s right,” James said slowly, pointed at Dennis. “That’s right.”

“Even when he could walk, he run. Other kids always yelling for him to slow down. They calling him something . . .”

A fire engine flew through the streets a few blocks away, its siren ripping the air. Someone wouldn’t move out of the way, and the engine hit the air horn that could make your heart stop. Three blasts and then the way must’ve cleared, as the siren faded east into the distance.

“Shoe!” James said, snapping his fingers.

“Hell, yes,” Dennis said, giving James a high five. “Shoe, slow down. Shoe, quit running.”

“Shoe have a real name?” I asked, pouring more Virginia Gentleman for everyone.

“What the . . . ?” James said, annoyed. “Man, we just reach back thirty damn years and pull some kid’s name out of the back of our heads and you want more?”

“Well, his name wasn’t Shoe Jackson, was it?” I asked.

We all sat, quiet once more. I watched as James and Dennis scratched their memories, digging deep, lifting the rugs and floorboards of their past. What they remembered about the neighborhood and the people in it was colossal. But they might simply not know it.

“Michael,” Dennis said suddenly, raising his head. “Miss Tonya hate calling him Shoe. She used his real name to bring him in for dinner, that kind of thing.”

“Michael Jackson?” I said, looking at one, then the other. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Nah,” Dennis said. “Miss Tonya want him to take his daddy’s name.”

I was taking a pull from my own can when what Dennis said hit me. My hand froze in midair. It was as if I’d been looking in vain for all my answers in one direction until someone grabbed my chin, turned my head around one hundred and eighty degrees, and said, There. That’s what you’ve been looking for. All the disparate elements of the case that had been dancing in the air around me—unrelated, unconnected, frustratingly incomplete—floated to the ground and landed in their proper places.

I swallowed and said, “Was his daddy’s name Denton?”

James looked at me like I’d sprouted two heads. “How in the hell? That’s right, ain’t it, Dennis?”

I didn’t wait to see Dennis nod. I was running for my car, cursing that I’d parked so far away.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Running and dialing aren’t the easiest things to do under the best of circumstances and it was absolute hell now as I sprinted to my car and speed-dialed Dods’s number. I tripped over a loose chunk of asphalt and nearly went sprawling, but righted myself and jammed the phone to my ear as it started to ring. It beeped three times on the other end and Dods’s raspy voice told me to leave a message and my number if I wanted to hear back.

I tried three more times, hoping that the rapid calls in succession would jog him into dropping whatever he was doing and answer the phone, but no dice. Either he didn’t have the phone with him or—more likely—he was buried under the avalanche of paperwork, interviews, calls, and meetings caused by Toby Waites’s shooting and he wasn’t going to answer a call—or three or five or ten—from me.

Plan B. I redialed the number for the PoP office as I reached my car. I hopped in, with the phone still pressed to my ear. Two rings, then I heard Jerry’s post-teenage voice come on the line.

“Jerry, it’s Marty Singer again,” I said. “I know Michael isn’t there, but it’s incredibly important for you to tell me where this event is, the one that Michael went to.”

“He might already be gone . . .” Jerry began.

“I don’t care,” I shouted into the phone. “I need to know where he is.”

Maybe the tone of my voice or the fact that I’d raised it to two hundred decibels must’ve communicated the urgency of my need to him. “I really don’t know for sure, Mr. Singer. But before he left, I did overhear him talking to someone on the phone, something about the Trumble Theatre, in the Brickyard neighborhood, which I thought was odd when I heard it, because it’s one of the few places we’ve put on our green list.”

“What’s your green list?”

“The properties and plots that we consider safe, at least for now. Either we’ve gotten a no-sell commitment from the owner or some kind of city injunction against development. The Trumble, especially, is one of those places that we wanted to protect, because we knew a bunch of developers have been licking their chops over it since it was condemned.”

Click. Things fell into place. “Including Atlantic Union?”

“Especially Atlantic Union.”

I started the car and pulled away from the curb at speed. “Okay. Jerry, this is important. I don’t want you to panic, but Michael is in trouble. If he calls the office, have him get in touch with me the second he does so. If he won’t do that, I need you to call me directly.”

“What . . . what kind of trouble?”

“Nothing I can go into right now,” I said. I came to a red light, glanced in both directions, and blew through it. “But it’s important we make sure it doesn’t get any worse. And it could get a lot worse.”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Look, Jerry. I know your loyalty is to Michael. I can respect that. And I can’t give you details right now, but if we don’t help him through this, Michael won’t be coming back to PoP. He won’t be coming back at all.”

Jerry was quiet. This was definitely going against his instinct. Finally, “Okay. I’ll have him call you if he comes in.”

“Thanks, Jerry. If I’m wrong, none of this will matter. If I’m right, we might be saving the guy’s life.”

I hung up and concentrated on driving recklessly and at high speed through the back streets of Washington, DC. On a good day, in an MPDC cruiser with a light on top, I would’ve made it in eight, maybe nine minutes—I also wouldn’t have been using the back streets. But I’d seen a digital road sign on the way that had warned that this evening’s events featured both a Gay Pride celebration and a Washington Nationals baseball game. And I wasn’t in a cruiser and I didn’t have a light.

The first obstacle came in the form of a broken-down float on Eighth Street, just a few blocks past the prosperous restaurant district that was in stark contrast to the Quarters, its sister neighborhood on the north side of the 695 cut-through. Athletically built men in Speedos and spandex grinned and waved at drivers who honked as they inched past, trying to convince oncoming traffic that two lanes should become three. Stuck behind a panel truck that didn’t seem to mind the wait, my own honking became something less than friendly and congenial, which led to an offended float passenger to comment, “Ease off, bitch,” as I swung out around the truck and gunned it.

When lights and signs made it hazardous to go any faster than twice the speed limit, I pulled out my cell and tried Dods’s number two more times. No answer, just voice mail. I was starting to hate the sounds of Dods’s voice.

Decision time. Actually, past it. I should’ve called 911 the second I couldn’t raise my old partner on the horn. Maybe a senior detective in Homicide wasn’t available, but there were a few thousand or so regular cops in the department that I could’ve gotten to intervene.

But was it the best move? Let’s say I called 911 and told the dispatcher that the man who had recently killed two people and shot a third—a DC city councilman, no less—was conspiring to kill the CEO of a major regional corporation as we spoke. By the time I got to the good old Trumble Theatre, the place would have either been shot to shit by an MPDC tactical unit trying to flush Michael out or surrounded by enough cops to shut down a small country. There wouldn’t be any talking, no chance to communicate . . . and if I was wrong about the whole thing—if I’d put two and two together and gotten five—Denton would sue me and Dods would shoot me himself.

I skidded onto Georgia Avenue, nudged the car through traffic, then gassed the car north through the city as fast as I could go. The Petworth neighborhood on Georgia Avenue was just six or seven blocks away and the Brickyard section just beyond it. Cars choked my path. I used my horn, the turning lane, and the sidewalk more than once to shove past the traffic and finally enter the Brickyard. The Trumble—an elegant three-story theater from bygone days—was easy to spot, as its marquee towered over the one- and two-story shops around it and I came to a bucking stop right in front of the picturesque building.

I jumped out of the car and ran to the doors, noticing as I did Rheinsfeld’s stretch limo parked across the street. There was just one set of double doors, steel with narrow bottle-glass windows, and they were locked tight as a drum. I might be able to break the glass, but I didn’t want to tip Denton off and there was no guarantee that the lock was something I could find or fiddle with through the tiny window anyway.

Swearing, I ran back to the car, put it in gear, and did a wild U-turn in the middle of the street. Two quick lefts and I was in the narrow alley that ran behind the shops of the Brickyard. I swerved in and out of trash cans and unidentifiable piles of junk. Based on the number of beer kegs lining the alley wall, I was behind the bar flanking the Trumble. I jumped out of the car, pulled my gun, and jogged down the alley. Dusk was starting to settle in and a stiff wind ripped through the narrow draw, making me squint and hunch my shoulders to protect myself.

I scanned the rusting fire escapes and eyed the darker corners. The slightest feeling of claustrophobia crept up on me when I thought about how close the walls of the alley were. The smell of urine was strong, thickest near the alcoves and nooks formed by the backs of the other buildings. Empty drug vials and foil packets were strewn along the edges of the alley. This close to the row of buildings and the marquee of the Trumble was out of sight. I glanced back at my car to get even an approximate idea how far I’d come.

The alley widened, becoming less of a rat hole and more of an actual thruway, and the claustrophobic feeling eased. At the alley’s widest point, I came to a solid steel door with no handle. With one hand, I traced faded lettering, the white paint long since gone. STAGE ENTRANCE. From a time when the Trumble was an actual theater, I supposed, not just a movie house.

I put away my gun and pulled out a penknife and slid it into the crack of the door near where the lock should be. There was a one-in-a-million chance that the thing was old or decrepit enough that I could finagle it open. Five minutes of frustrating fiddling led nowhere and I put the knife away.

Time was running out. A voice in my head was yelling for me to call the MPDC and let them take it from here. I ignored it and tilted my head back. The Trumble had an old fire escape like the other buildings, but was as out of reach as the rest of them. I wasn’t about to make the fifteen-foot vertical leap to the first rung of the ladder. And there were no Dumpsters or other props to help. I dismissed that idea and jogged down the alley, looking for other entrances. There were two more doors like the first—solid steel with no handle—and one of them was plainly soldered shut. There were no windows on the back of the theater at all and the alley spilled into a thoroughfare just a few yards beyond.

I cursed and headed back for my car at double time, planting my feet into the ground angrily, stomp stomp stomp. It was time to call this one in. I pulled out my phone, my finger on the 9—

And my feet went plonk plonk plonk.

I stopped in my tracks and looked down. I was standing on top of a matrix of thick glass squares, the kind that, back in the old days, were set in an inch of concrete so they could stand up to the abuse of being walked and driven over. But they were specifically there to let the light in. Into a basement.

Feeling a surge of excitement, I retraced my steps, looking down this time, kicking trash out of my way as I went. Between the first and second doors, I found it, a small freight door set in the ground with inset handles. Trash had blown over the door, which explained why I hadn’t seen it on my first go-round. I cleared away the garbage and pulled out my knife again, praying for a simple latch. I wiggled the blade as deeply in the crack as I could get it, put both hands on the handle of the knife, yanked up with all my strength . . . and fell back on my ass in the middle of the alley. There’d been no resistance. I got back to my feet, leaned over, and pulled on the handles.

The doors swung up and open. The fading daylight revealed a ramp heading into the earth. I paused, looking and listening. Why had it been unlocked? Was it the local junkie’s den or squatters’ pad? Or had someone beaten me here?

It didn’t matter. It was my only way in and there was a good chance that I was too late as it was. I pulled my gun, took a deep breath, and followed the steps into the darkness.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

I’ve been exposed to my share of odors and, while I’d smelled worse than the basement of the Trumble, I’m not sure I’d ever smelled anything stranger. There was the same predominant whiff of urine as in the alley, but it mingled with the tang of rainwater, rat droppings, must, and old papers to mix a cocktail that had my eyes tearing. I took a deep breath, pulled out a small pocket flashlight, and headed down the freight corridor.

The tiny beam of the flashlight showed that the short hall spilled into a larger room. I moved forward cautiously, panning the flashlight from wall to wall. I was in a basement full of rotting cardboard boxes, old popcorn machines, and the relics of a once-successful theater now forgotten except for the name. Crumpled paper and rolls of old paper tickets littered the floor. Ratty movie posters, decaying curtains, window-washing tools, open buckets of paint now dried solid, and the red velveteen ropes with their brass poles littered the cellar, giving me a glimpse into a storied past that was going to find its way into a collector’s inventory—or a landfill—if Atlantic Union got its hands on the place.

A set of concrete steps led up to a wooden door. I crept up the stairs and put my ear against the door. Nothing. I eased it open, cupping my hand over the light. Beyond was total darkness. The air was musty—a drier, dirtier smell than the moldering basement—and I fought down a sneeze. I cautiously opened my hand over the flashlight, letting just enough light spill out until I could see that I was in a narrow backstage corridor running left and right. I bobbed my head out and back. Nothing. I listened again. This time, a faint murmuring reached my ears, coming from the right. I squeezed the grip of my gun and set off toward it.

The murmuring got louder and, on a hunch, I turned off the flashlight. A gray, muddy light spilled along the corridor. The Trumble didn’t have windows . . . skylights, maybe? I crept along, feeling my way cautiously, afraid of kicking something or stumbling in the dim light.

The light and sound continued to grow—the voices raised and angry now—and I got that strange, intuitive sense we all have of burgeoning space opening up in front of me. My outstretched hand touched something soft and yielding and I yanked my hand back until I realized I’d touched the back of the colossal curtain that separated backstage from front-and-center. If I’d kept my bearings, I was stage right. With infinite care, I edged along the curtain until I found the glowing seam that told me I’d found its end. I peeled it back an inch.

The dishwater light was stronger here, illuminating a drama not on the stage, but in front of it, the open space between the orchestra pit and the first row of seats. Michael Denton, his back to the curtain, was pointing a pistol at Jeremy Rheinsfeld. The real estate baron was standing very still, with his arms at his sides like they were sticks, not taking his eyes off Denton’s face.

Next to and slightly behind Rheinsfeld was Harmon, looking more relaxed than his boss—this was more his kind of situation—but his face was stony and I knew he was making every calculation necessary to save his own skin, reach his gun in time to shoot Denton, and rescue his employer, in that order. But Harmon hadn’t moved yet and I could guess why. As notoriously inaccurate as handguns were, and as much as Denton was an amateur, the gun was still just twelve feet away from its target. It wouldn’t take a pro to hit something from that distance.

“I don’t care what your reasons were,” Denton said, shouting the words. “I don’t care what you meant to do. She wasn’t a statistic. She wasn’t an asset to be moved from one goddamn column to another.”

Rheinsfeld mumbled something inaudible. I frowned. The CEO was remarkably composed. He had to know Denton hadn’t arranged the meet to talk—he was here for some exposition and a final reckoning. Rheinsfeld must know by now that Denton had killed Wendy Gerson, Alex Montero, had tried to kill Toby Waites . . . and wouldn’t be stopping there.

Then a thought slipped through my mind like ice water down my neck. There was a reason why Rheinsfeld was so stoic and not down on his knees, begging for his life. And it wasn’t just the poor odds that kept Harmon from going for his gun.

Martinez wasn’t with them.

The cellar door. A pro like Martinez would’ve been cautious—he wouldn’t have waltzed in with the two of them, and Rheinsfeld wouldn’t have gone in alone. Harmon had volunteered or been picked to play bodyguard while Martinez had slipped around back to recon the place, found the freight door, and snaked his way through the basement, just as I had.

I risked moving the curtain back another half inch to get a better view of the seating and scanned the mezzanine and the far corners of the theater, or as much as the dim light would let me. Nothing overhead on the wide balcony, no movement near the doors, although Denton would’ve seen him coming through the entrance.

My eyes flicked to look across to stage left, the twin to my position across the open theater. I squinted, trying to will my eyes to see in the dark. There. A glint from just beyond the curtain. Martinez’s chrome-plated pistol. Being raised.

I brought up my own SIG, zeroed in on that glint, and yelled, “Denton!”

Denton’s voice had been rising on a crescendo and I felt, as I’m sure Martinez did, that the activist was psyching himself up to carry through with his last act of justice. But my entrance froze everything. Denton’s gun wavered, then steadied. Somehow, he summoned the force of will to keep from turning around.

“Martinez!” I said at the same volume. “My gun’s pointed at you, not Denton. Put that elephant gun down and walk out onstage. Now.”

Martinez’s gun winked at me from the darkness, in and out. Was it a trick of the light? Or was he ignoring my warning and moving slowly out of range?

“Singer,” Denton called, his gun trained on Rheinsfeld. “There’s no reason for you to be here.”

“I’m trying to keep you from getting shot,” I said, keeping my eyes glued to the far side of the stage. I swallowed. The longer we talked, the less confident I was that this would end well. “Just like I’m trying to save you from making a huge mistake.”

He laughed. “That ship sailed a while ago. Rheinsfeld here saw to that. But we’re going to finish this little Greek tragedy right.”

“Denton, don’t do it. Please. These scumbags aren’t worth it,” I said, then saw the glint again, moving. “Martinez, put that fucking gun down.”

It all went to hell so fast I hadn’t gotten the last word out of my mouth before the first shots rang out, like there were a handful of people in the audience, clapping for our performance. Martinez came halfway out from behind the curtain and fired two oblique, booming shots at Denton, who—at the sound of my yell—had straightened his own arm and squeezed the trigger at Rheinsfeld. Denton staggered, hit. Rheinsfeld collapsed. Harmon sprang forward, reaching out for the activist with those trunk-like arms.

Martinez took his shots at Denton, then swung his cannon toward me and pulled the trigger. I threw myself to the floor and squeezed off three wild shots, locking onto the gleam of his chrome-plated gun as my target. One hit him center mass. Martinez took two drunken steps backward into the dark and, almost comically, sat down with a thud. His legs splayed awkwardly from his body, like a doll dropped to the floor, then he fell back, flat on the stage.

I scrambled to my feet and stepped from behind the curtain, trying to get a better field of view. Harmon had Denton in a bear hug and was squeezing the life from him. The activist was screaming—hit by one of Martinez’s shots, maybe. I ran forward, trying to get a bead on Harmon, yelling at him to stop. But Denton, who’d never dropped his gun, raised it, put it under Harmon’s chin, and pulled the trigger. The two of them collapsed in the aisle.

I leapt off the stage and ran over to the trio of bodies. The back of Harmon’s head was missing and Rheinsfeld lay in an awkward tangle of his own arms and legs, telling me that both were beyond help. Denton rested on his side, his chest rising and falling in incredibly short, shallow intervals. A golf-ball-sized hole oozed blood just under his left shoulder blade. I turned him over gently to find the plate-sized exit wound that Martinez’s weapon had created.

It was the ultimate in futile gestures, but I took off my jacket and pressed it to his belly while I dialed 911 with the other hand. His pulse was feeble, barely there, but his lips moved slowly, rhythmically. I bent close, trying to pick up what he was saying, but there was no sound and, watching his mouth, the only thing that made any sense was Mama, Mama, Mama.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Four of us described a cozy drawing room tableau, a scene that could’ve been lifted from a Wilkie Collins novel. I was seated in one of the easy chairs, while Terry and Sarah Gerson sat, knees touching, on the sofa. Paul stood by the fireplace, resting one hand on the mantel. A coffee service with three full china cups growing cold rested on the table in front of me. Mine was empty. A fire crackled in the stone fireplace again, the flames larger than the first time I’d come and more appropriate for the bite of late October. I’d just finished describing what I knew about Wendy’s death and the three of them were quiet, digesting what I’d told them. I’d left out Caitlin’s name and anyone else who was alive and functional, but had otherwise given them every sordid detail of the case.

I leaned back in the chair, surprised to find I needed to relax—my hands had balled into fists around a copy of the printed report I’d made for them. I’d had to deal with the families of hundreds of homicide victims before, but never in such an inclusive and comprehensive way. It’s not like I’d been insensitive as a cop, but there’d always been an invisible wall between myself and the victims I’d had to inform, update, or sometimes arrest. This was a tiger of a different stripe and I wasn’t sure I liked it.

Sarah spoke first. “So, this man . . .”

“Michael Denton,” I said.

“Denton,” she said, rolling the word around. “He blamed Wendy and her superior for the death of his mother.”

“Yes, although he didn’t know their role at first. But then Wendy discovered that he owned the spike and arranged to meet with him to get him to sell.”

“And sometime during the pitch it came out that she’d turned to Jeremy Rheinsfeld for help,” Paul said without looking away from the fire. “And Denton put two and two together and figured Rheinsfeld had had his mother killed.”

I nodded. “I don’t know if he was initially suspicious of her death or not. My guess, from the way he snapped, is that he wasn’t. Not at first. There might’ve been a nagging thought that something didn’t seem right, but until Wendy came out and told him about Rheinsfeld’s involvement, he was going under the assumption that his mother had died a natural death and that Wendy was just another part of the corporate development machine.”

“How did she know to contact him in the first place?” Terry Gerson asked.

“There was tremendous pressure to find out who owned the spike in order to get them to sell,” I said. “In my own search, I came up empty. But Wendy was a real estate expert with all of Tartikoff and Brentwood’s resources at her disposal. Based on what I saw of her notes, I think she figured it out, then called Denton to propose a meeting. Unfortunately, she had no clue he was Tonya Jackson’s son. And, believing that he’d simply been holding out for money, let it slip that they’d been pressuring his mother to sell, something he didn’t know.”

Paul said, “He must’ve been shocked. Wendy saw it, knew something was terribly wrong—”

“—and left,” Sarah Gerson finished. “Why did she take the Metro?”

“She’d gone to the Quarters to make the pitch,” I said, “hoping that the location might give her some kind of edge. When she saw the deal disintegrating in front of her eyes, she turned and headed for the nearest way out of there. But, believe me, there are no taxis cruising that neighborhood. She didn’t have a car. So she headed for the closest Metro station.”

“Denton followed her and killed her,” Terry Gerson said hoarsely, speaking for the first time since he’d shown me through the front door. His face was more deeply creased, it seemed, than when I’d been here last. A stony despair emanated from him.

“I’m afraid so,” I said. “A spontaneous, enraged murder. Once he cooled down, he realized she was just one link in the chain that led to his mother’s death. So he started working backwards from what she’d told him and what he himself knew about how corporate real estate works in DC.”

“Montero was her boss, so he was responsible,” Paul said, turning around and looking at me. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. “But why not go higher up the ladder at her firm?”

“Denton knew that anyone more senior than Montero probably didn’t have personal knowledge of the deal,” I said. “They’d simply signed off on it, given your sister and Montero an attaboy, then went to lunch. But he knew enough about the way neighborhood development works in DC that there had to be at least two other players involved—the city councilman who’d approved the deal and the developer who’d wanted the deal in the first place.”

“So Waites and Rheinsfeld had to die, too,” Sarah said, then shook her head. “Didn’t he understand that she was just doing her job? She was just the attorney, that’s all.”

I grimaced. “I’m not sure about that. Zimmerman told me he brought it directly to Wendy. I don’t know this without checking her financials, of course, but I think Wendy put her own stake into the redevelopment plan. It’s why she was so close to Rheinsfeld and why she handled so many elements of the deal personally.”

“She wasn’t just counsel, she was an investor, too,” Paul said, musing. “The stake must’ve been worth millions.”

Sarah Gerson dismissed the statement with a wave. “That man was still full of hate.”

“Denton was primed from his work as a community activist in just this kind of thing,” I said in tentative agreement. “That fire was already burning. But when he found out his childhood home had been put on the chopping block by these people, then to discover that his mother had very possibly been murdered by them . . . with all due respect, Mrs. Gerson, his hate is understandable.”

There was a stiffening in the room, not surprisingly. Sarah Gerson looked at me with a glare that had doubtless sliced other people in half. I sat there and looked back at her equably. With Wendy’s death, the Gersons had suffered a loss, and they should be allowed their grief. But I wasn’t going to gloss over the circumstances that had brought it about. Their daughter’s actions had not only led to the destruction of a neighborhood, they had led to a woman’s death. Had Wendy Gerson been alive, she would’ve been arrested for being an accessory to murder. Her death had been tragic, but they’d get only so much sympathy from me for that.

Sarah Gerson opened her mouth to let me have it, but her husband surprised her—surprised all of us, I think—when he reached out and put a hand on her knee to stop her. “He’s right, Sarah. Wendy wasn’t the only victim here.”

The look she turned on him should’ve curdled his blood, but he held her stare steadily. Paul shifted uncomfortably, but said nothing, and the moment passed.

Terry glanced at me. “What happens now?”

I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees. “Denton is in a coma. The prognosis is not good. If he recovers, he’ll stand trial on four counts if they pin Harmon’s death on him, too. And attempted murder for shooting Waites, since he looks like he’ll recover.”

“With no death penalty in the District,” Sarah said bitterly.

“Murder with aggravating circumstances will net him twenty to sixty years for each count,” I said. “If Michael Denton lives, he’s going to be in prison the rest of his life.”

“What was Rheinsfeld’s plan?” Terry asked.

“I think he actually anticipated Denton doing something crazy, just not that crazy. He assumed that with Harmon and Martinez nearby, he was safe and—frankly—if there was even a hint of violence, they’d gun him down, then fabricate a self-defense story. The result would be one incredibly annoying social gadfly out of the way.”

“And when you showed up, it all went to hell,” Paul said.

“Unfortunately, yes,” I said. “Not the result I would’ve picked.”

“So Atlantic Union keeps on doing what it does best,” Paul said, with more bitterness than I’d expected.

“I’m afraid so,” I said. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if they find a way to have me charged with something, the way things went to hell at the Trumble. I’m the only real survivor. They may want to extract a pound of flesh on Rheinsfeld’s behalf.”

“If it comes to that, you will call us,” Sarah said, with no room for argument in her voice. She smiled frostily at the surprise on my face. “I don’t appreciate your attitude towards my daughter, Mr. Singer, but I’m not going to have you harassed by that nest of snakes. Criminal defense wasn’t my specialty, but I know plenty of attorneys who are particularly competent in the field. Mr. Rheinsfeld’s successors won’t be bothering you if they value their skin.”

I could live with that. “Thank you.”

We fell silent and the only sound was the subdued snapping of the flames in the fireplace. I gave them a minute to ask any follow-on questions, then took a deep breath and stood. It seemed to break the spell. The Gersons rose and thanked me. Paul showed me to the door. We paused for a moment in the doorway.

“I can’t believe it happened this way,” he said, groping for words. The swaggering, sometimes mocking tone he’d used in the past was gone. “But nothing else fits the situation. Just a horrible, terrible thing. All for a piece of land smaller than my office.”

I didn’t say anything and Paul told me awkwardly that a check would be mailed out later that day and would I mind e-mailing him the report? I said no, turned up my collar against the wind and the cold, then walked out.

I took my time going down the drive. Before I got in my car, I pulled out the picture of Wendy that Paul had given me. I stared at it for a moment, glanced up at the mansion, then tucked it deep in an inner pocket and left.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The neighborhood was as deserted as it had been before, though it had changed in one very substantial way—half the town houses and tenement apartments had been knocked down. The lives and memories of hundreds of people were now so much redbrick dust and twisted metal that rose in mounds six and seven feet high, waiting their turn to be shoved onto a dump truck and hauled away for fill. The few homes that had been left standing were made obscenely isolated by the destruction of their neighbors. They seemed like bystanders at a parade who hadn’t been told yet that the march was over and the band had gone home.

I wrinkled my nose as I walked. The demolition had left a dusty residue in the air that had no smell, but reminded you all the same that you were breathing the last bits of the life of this neighborhood. A large sign, ten feet by eight and supported by two-by-fours pounded into the ground, announced that this was the site of the Quarters Renovation and Rejuvenation Project, LLC, underwritten by Atlantic Union, Incorporated. The tentative date of completion was an optimistic two years from now and promised the finest in urban living and a safe environment for low- and middle-income families. A stylized architect’s sketch dominated the largest portion of the banner, showing kids and families of indistinct race walking with balloons past a green park and into homes and a state-of-the-art community center.

I moved on, tucking the paper bag under one arm like a football and holding the six-pack of Coke by the plastic rings with just a thumb and my middle finger. It was early evening and urban noises floated on the cold late-autumn air. Nothing too clear, just the hum and murmur of a city on the move, plans and ideas and raw energy bumping into and against each other, sorting themselves out, and moving on.

I turned the last corner and headed up the last street but, when I lifted my head to look where I was going, I slowed down, then stopped. The table I’d been expecting to see was gone. The two plastic chairs lay on their sides, legs sticking up into the sky, forlorn. A few scattered soda cans had been left on the steps. The door to the store was boarded over with a sheet of plywood with a bright orange neon X painted on it, sloppily enough that I didn’t know if it was graffiti or a sign for the demolition crew.

It didn’t matter either way. I looked the scene over for a minute, memorizing it, then turned around and walked back the way I’d come.

EPILOGUE

Jutting up between the sidewalk and the asphalt of the street were baseball-sized cobblestones, polished by the wear of more than three centuries of foot, horse, wagon, and tire traffic. Old Town Alexandria sported two or three avenues that had kept the original cobblestones along their entire length as a throwback to Colonial days, but every thoroughfare in town had the things buried underneath the layers of tar and macadam, too. Once in a while, like here, they managed to avoid getting smothered by the latest roadwork or found a way to poke their way up in the spaces in between. Like any Metro resident with any sense, I avoided driving down the full-cobblestoned streets—the bouncing was enough to knock your teeth out if you weren’t careful, and your car’s transmission even if you were—but now I couldn’t help wondering about a time when they were the norm and, in fact, were preferable to the mud that had been there before.

I sighed and raised my head, looking across the street at a row of handsome antique brownstones that were a mix of residences, lawyers’ offices, and doctors’ practices. Leaning against my car with my hands shoved in my coat pockets, I noodled on the state of the Colonial cobblestone street for a few more minutes, then spent a few more brain cells asking myself other questions relevant to Old Town, like why did it stink once every ten days and who in their right mind would believe George Washington had thrown a silver dollar across the Potomac once they saw how wide it was? Or how could Virginia be so damn hot in September but cold enough to freeze the ass off an Eskimo in late October? And why the hell couldn’t I cross the street and walk into my oncologist’s office?

The wind, coming from the river just a few blocks away, blew straight through the street, swirling the leaves around me. I had the sudden craving for a cigarette, an urge I hadn’t felt in years, maybe decades. The day of my cancer checkup probably wasn’t the best time to pick up that particular habit. I burrowed my head deeper into the folds of my peacoat. Warmth was leaving me at an alarming rate as I leaned against the car’s metal door and my feet were aching from standing in place for so long, but I simply couldn’t push myself away from the car and head for Demitri’s door. I felt welded to the spot. Excerpts from my anxiety diary appeared in my head and I tried to rationalize my fears away like Leah’s guide had advised, but each time I tensed my muscles to stand and head for the far side of the street, a lump formed in my stomach that melted away only when I gave myself permission to wait ten more minutes.

I closed my eyes, feeling lousy. I cleared my mind, inviting the sounds of the town around me to fill my head. An occasional honk from Washington Street to my right as it carried traffic north to the city and south to Mount Vernon. The revving of engines as cars geared up, then down, passing through the endless sets of stop signs along Old Town’s back streets. A smart clip-clop as someone in heels negotiated the brick sidewalks and loose cobblestones. Colleagues and office mates chatting as they came back from a long lunch or a coffee break at one of the overpriced eateries on King Street.

The clip-clop came closer and I waited for the woman to pass behind me or cross the street to my right, but instead the sound stopped close by and a familiar voice said, “You didn’t fall asleep, did you?”

My eyes snapped open. Julie was standing a few feet away, dressed in a camel’s-hair coat and a knit cream beret that set off her hair. She looked at me with an unreadable expression. Amused? Critical? Worried? Scared? The knot that had formed in my stomach for one reason did a half twist with a somersault for an entirely different one. I straightened without actually standing. “Julie.”

“Marty,” she said, and looked at me for a moment. “Are you going to stand out here all day?”

I took a deep breath. “I was thinking about it, actually.”

She came over and leaned against the car next to me. Our arms touched. “Amanda called and told me about the checkup. She was going to surprise you and come herself. She knew you’d tell her to stay home.”

Julie paused and I said, “But?”

She looked down, crossed her feet. “But I wanted to come instead.”

A tumult of emotions spilled out of my head and collided with the ones coming up from my heart. A bruised ego won out. “I don’t need your sympathy.”

She sighed. “I’m not offering it, you nitwit. I’m offering you my support. If you’d stop feeling so goddamned sorry for yourself, you’d get that.”

No one would accuse Julie of having a cozy bedside manner, but she spoke the truth when she saw it. I huffed and thought about it for a second, then cleared my throat. “I guess my pride gets in the way sometimes.”

She turned her head. “Sometimes?”

I glanced at her, then away. “Okay. Most of the time.”

“Most of the time?” she pressed. I growled and out of the corner of my eye, I saw her smile quickly and then it was gone, like a wink.

We were quiet for a second, then she said, “So, are we going in? Or are we going to stand here until they break out the Christmas lights?”

“You don’t have to do this,” I said.

“I know.”

I was still for a moment, listening again to the sounds around me, then said, “Thank you.”

She put her hand on my arm and squeezed. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and stood. Then we walked across the street, our shoulders still close enough to touch, and went inside.

PLEASE CONTINUE READING TO SAMPLE THE NEXT MARTY SINGER MYSTERY, THE WICKED FLEE.

CHAPTER ONE

LAST NIGHT

Trooper First Class Sarah Haynesworth pulled her cruiser over to the side of the road and peered through the darkness and falling snow at the dented mailbox in front of her. The second number of the address was missing, but even through the flakes she could make out the stark white outline of where it had been, like a tan line from a bathing suit. On the cruiser’s roof, her lights spun silently, lighting the yard in splashes of red and blue.

She pulled out the small white notebook she carried everywhere and traced her finger down the page, confirming the address from the information the girl had given her. This is it. But Sarah slipped the pad of paper back into a breast pocket and continued to sit, making no motion to get out of the car. Not yet. She swallowed and looked at the house, reluctant—despite her authority, her training, and the gun at her side—to leave the warmth and security of the car.

The house was like a hundred others in this part of rural Maryland. White siding gone dingy gray. A black shingle roof, swaybacked and sagging. On the side nearest her, a garage had been converted into an interior room then converted back again, although the work was all for naught, as the right-most face of the renovation slumped toward the ground, its windows broken and a section of the wall simply missing. On the far left side of the house—to call it a wing would be stretching things—feeble yellow light spilled from a window. In the front yard, a rusting blue Ford pickup sat close to the house at a haphazard angle, as if the driver hadn’t felt like parking on the street and instead had driven directly to the door and hopped out. The house was silent. There was no movement other than the softly falling snow.

Sarah sighed. That door isn’t going to knock on itself, girl. She either had to leave or investigate . . . she hadn’t driven here to check out the real estate. And, if she was going to investigate, she needed to get her butt in gear—whoever was inside would have to be blind not to have seen her cruiser’s lights.

Get out or leave.

That pretty much said it all. Moving decisively, she zipped her regulation parka up to the chin and planted her hat firmly on her head. She stepped out of the car, squinting as icy air hit her face. She reached back inside the car and turned off the reds and blues, although she left the headlights on. The light might stop after only twenty feet—it was arrested by the snow tumbling in thick, fat flakes through the beams—but it was the only outside illumination. Streetlamps were a luxury that had stopped three miles back.

The ground crunched underfoot, not only from the snow, but from the road itself, made of cinder, gravel, and ground pieces of coke residue brought in from the steel mills and coke plants just over the border in Pennsylvania. It was what many of the roads in this end of the state were made of once you got away from the highways, though she hadn’t seen the ugly, reddish rocks since she was a little girl. Poor counties, left to their own devices, used whatever they could get their hands on to pave the roads.

She shut the car door and resisted the urge to lean against it, to keep steel and glass between her and the house. At five feet four and one hundred fifteen pounds, she was fully covered by the vehicle’s bulk and it made her feel secure, like she was in a tank. But hiding behind her car wasn’t going to give her any more answers than sitting in it.

Moving cautiously, she circled the cruiser and followed a broken slate walkway to the front of the house, sweeping her eyes left and right in continuous motion, taking in details, making assessments. Despite the winter temperatures, the screen door was still in place, the material ripped and hanging away like a dog’s ear. For safety’s sake, she took a half step to the right of the doorway to get herself out of the most common line of fire as she reached the door. She pushed a small doorbell, then rapped firmly on the metal frame of the screen. The sound was shockingly loud in the stillness of the winter night. She tipped her head, listening carefully for noises or movement. Her hand squeezed and resqueezed the butt of her pistol. If she wasn’t careful, she’d get a cramp in her hand and she made a conscious effort to relax her arm and shoulder. She’d taken her gloves off when she’d climbed out of the car, and the butt of the gun was cold in her hand.

When there was no answer, she knocked again using the fat of her fist and shouted, “Maryland State Police!”

She cocked her head. A muffled thump had made its way to her from inside. A chair tipping over and caught a second too late? She unsnapped the holster’s safety strap on her sidearm.

A distant bang now, farther away than the thump. Not like a gun or a backfire. Like . . . like an old-fashioned screen door, the kind that didn’t have the piston to keep it from slamming shut after it had been opened too far. The ones they used to put on the back door leading from the kitchen to the yard.

She took off running around the side of the house, pulling both her Maglite and her gun as she went. The flashlight lit the night in a twenty-foot circle and she played it left to right, trying to cover as large an area as she could while sprinting for the back of the house. Her breath plumed in the night air.

Sarah rounded the corner at a jog. Fifty feet away, a pale form was hunched over a pile of something, dragging it to the back of the property. A wide trench in the snow led in a straight line from the house’s back door to the deep mountain woods that edged the yard.

“State police,” she hollered, training both her flashlight and her gun on the form. “Hold it!”

Without a sound, the figure dropped what it was doing and ran straight into the woods. An arrest, not a fatality, was the goal, so Sarah took up the chase, cursing at the gear on her belt that jangled and swung as she moved. She tried keeping the man pinned in the beam of the Maglite, but her own movement jerked her aim back and forth off her target. The man was a stark white blur and she realized with a start that he was shirtless. And a quick glance at the footprints in front of her told her a shirt wasn’t the only all-weather gear he was missing—he wasn’t wearing any shoes.

She stopped when she reached the thing the man had been dragging. The pile had arms and legs, long blonde hair, a glassy stare. Sarah knelt, checking the neck and wrist. Cold, no pulse. Gone. She got to her feet and sprinted after the form, slipping in the foot-high drifts. The blur dashed into the woods and out of view. Sarah reached the tree line a second later, ducking her head under a low-hanging pine bough loaded with snow. Tears streamed from her eyes from the cold and she had to continually wipe her running nose as she peered at the ground. Deer trails—some faint, some pounded flat—snaked away in all directions, but the man’s tracks pointed the way dead ahead.

She flicked the flashlight back and forth, searching for the ghost-white form, but the Maglite’s beam splashed against the trees closest to her, ruining her night vision. Playing it along the ground instead, she followed the barefoot trail, alternating the cone of light from a middle distance to directly in front of her every few seconds. Underfoot, the forest floor swelled and dipped from the gnarled pine roots hiding beneath the drifts, and she had to fight to keep her balance as the hillside dipped into a gully.

The tracks chased the line of the hillside down. Snow was thinner here in the thick of the woods, lying in patches on the ground rather than blankets thanks to the shelter of the trees, but slick Piedmont granite and inch-thick ice made running even more hazardous. She scrambled down the trail awkwardly, using one hand to aim the Maglite, the other to keep her service pistol at the ready. At several points, though, the pitch was too steep, and she had to use her gun hand to hold on to saplings and branches for support, violating every commandment she’d ever been taught in books or classes.

Slow down, girl. This is a marathon now, not a sprint. Time was on her side. Barefoot and shirtless? In January? This guy wasn’t going to make it ten more minutes. She slowed and placed her feet self-consciously. All she had to do was stay alert, keep herself safe, and follow the tracks.

But halfway down the slope, the beam showed her the prints simply . . . vanished.

She whipped the flashlight from left to right, but the ground revealed only virgin snow. She pointed the beam overhead, above where the tracks disappeared, but saw only thin, horizontal pine branches going across the deer trail, too fragile to support a climber. She slowed, shuffling in a circle to pan the area to the left and right of the path—then cried out as her ankle caught on a raised tree root, snagged as firmly as a noose.

Her feet went out from under her and she landed belly-first on a slab of granite, with her head pointing down the slope. Both the Maglite and her gun flew from her hand like she’d thrown them. She could only watch as the gun hit a patch of bare rock and skittered away while her flashlight tumbled to the bottom of the gully, the beam spinning crazily in the darkness as it fell.

Moving painfully, Sarah struggled to her hands and knees. The skin of her palms was on fire from where she’d scraped them on the ice. The impact knocked the wind from her and she gulped and hiccupped, trying to keep calm as her body convulsed in the effort to breathe. It was hard to remember that having the wind knocked out of you was medically harmless when it felt as if you were being suffocated. With an effort, she rose to one knee, her eyes pinned on the Maglite below, and was getting ready to make the push to get to her feet when a dark form passed in front of the beam.

Then the light went out.

Sarah froze. Adrenaline shot through her system and she fought to keep the panic down, but without the flashlight, the night instantly closed in around her, cold and vicious. No moon lit the sky. Stars were hidden by the pine boughs overhead. Complete blindness was held at bay only by the high contrast of the snowbanks against the darker tree boles, but the shapes were indistinct and threatening, as likely to be a man as a tree.

Everything she had went into the act of listening. To reduce the noise, she breathed through her mouth. Her pulse sounded heavy and loud in her ears. She was painfully aware that her blue uniform was a dark blob against the snow and that the rough synthetic material sounded like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together when she moved. The night was deadly quiet . . . then her head snapped around at the sound of a dull thump on her left. Just a raft of snow, too heavy for a bough, falling to the ground.

She moved to a large tree on her right, trying to melt into the darkness of its bulky shadow. Slowly, she lifted the wide-brimmed campaign hat off her head and set it on the ground beside her. It hindered her vision at the best of times and right now it was making her positively claustrophobic. Ice crystals she hadn’t felt before tickled her cheeks and ears and a wider range of sounds came to her. A barred owl hooted in the distance, and there was a light ticking noise nearby—a frozen branch rubbing against a neighbor, maybe, or a single beech leaf fluttering in the wind. Otherwise, the night had the crystal depths of deep winter, marred only by the crunching of the snow.

Crunching?

Sarah spun in place at the sound of footsteps to her right, then a figure sprang at her. She saw the silhouette of a raised arm and threw her own up instinctively to block the blow, but it was desperate and late and most of the force from her own Maglite slammed into her shoulder. The blow landed on the meaty part of her upper arm and not bone, but she yelled out at the pain. The man came at her, breathing in ragged gasps as he swung the flashlight in wide, wild arcs. She ducked and dodged blindly, guessing as much as sensing where to go to keep from having her head caved in. He raised the flashlight overhead for a colossal swing and she backed away desperately, only to trip over another tree root.

The swing was close enough that she felt the air move as it passed her face, then she was tumbling backward, landing painfully on her back. The man’s complete miss threw him off balance too, however, and his momentum carried him forward to trip over the same root that had dumped Sarah. He landed with a gasp next to her, near enough that she could feel his breath on her neck. Rather than get to her feet, she reached out to grab a wrist or an elbow, but the instant he felt her touch, he hollered and threw a wild punch.

Their struggle became a wrestling match in the snow, a grunting tangle of twigs, arms, and dirt. Academy training had given her a good ground game—something she’d needed since she was routinely a foot shorter than everyone else—but the man had hung on to the Maglite and rained blows on her back and neck. With no shirt, he was harder to grab than any opponent she’d had to collar on the mat before and as she clutched at him, a lucky kick caught her in the stomach, stunning her. The man scrambled away, trying to get the necessary distance to swing the flashlight for a knockout blow.

Desperately, Sarah clawed at her belt with her good hand. The man shouted and whipped the flashlight over his head once more. But she ripped the stun gun from its holster, lunged forward, and stabbed it into the man’s ribs. His shriek drowned out the sound of the flat, electric zap. A second later he was down on the ground, writhing and flopping like a fish on a hook.

She stayed on her hands and knees for a minute, her chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath. Her belly and back ached and her hands burned with scrapes, while her fingertips were starting to go numb with the cold. She kept an eye on the man as she sucked in great lungfuls of air, trying to recover. The stun gun was in one hand, and she was ready to apply the business end to the man’s body all night long if she had to.

After a long minute, she felt good enough to stand. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and looked down at her prize. The man was flapping his arms like a bat in slow motion, desperate to run but unable to make the motion translate into effective movement.

Relying on her sense of touch in the darkness, Sarah patted down the parts of him that were actually clothed, then flipped him over in the snow and cuffed him. Leaving him facedown where he was, she began a crawling search for the Maglite. Blind, she moved in small arcs away from the spot of their fight, sweeping her arms back and forth until eventually she found it under an inkberry bush. She flipped it on with a sigh. It felt like the first break she’d gotten all night. With the help of the flashlight she found her gun under a rock shelf and breathed a second sigh of relief—more of the administrative sort, this time. Lose your sidearm, no matter what the reason, and you could expect an ass-chewing to remember from Lieutenant Kline.

“H-h-hey,” the man said, finally recovered enough to speak. “I’m-m-m freezing to d-d-death over here.”

She ignored him, busy looking for her hat, which she found at the base of the tree where she’d left it. When she had it safely on her head, with the brim squared just so, she walked over to the man and pulled him to his feet. Despite an odd, jutting potbelly, overall he was a scrawny thirty-something, with his ribs showing prominently through the pink, nearly frozen skin of his chest. As she thought, he was shoeless and shirtless and if she hadn’t caught him, he would’ve been lucky to make it through the next hour alive.

“Are you Kevin Handley?”

“G-g-go f-f-fuck yourself,” he said. “Nig-g-ger.”

She hooked a foot around one ankle, pushed him in the opposite direction, and pitched him face-first into the nearest snowbank. Her boot kept him in that position as he squirmed and shouted muffled obscenities into the snow. She counted off twenty seconds, then grabbed his hair and pulled his head back.

“No one’s going to know the difference between you running naked into the woods in the middle of the night in January and me holding you down in a snowbank for the next half hour,” she said. “You want to lose your nose to frostbite, it’s okay by me.”

He stuttered another curse and she pushed him back into the snow. She counted to twenty-two this time and pulled him out. “Kevin Handley, yes or no?”

“Y-y-y-yes,” he gasped.

“Is that Tiffany Chilton in your yard?”

His mouth worked in a funny way and Sarah moved to push him back down. “Yes! Y-y-yes. Tiffany something. That’s all I know.”

Sarah smiled for the first time that night. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Handley. Now let’s get you somewhere warm and secure. I think I know a place.”

Please visit www.matthew-iden.com to find out more about The Wicked Flee and the other books in the Marty Singer Mystery series.

NOTES

Many of the specific locales and situations in The Spike—the Brickyard and the Trumble Theatre, for instance—are purely fictional. Others, like the Quarters, are there; the names have been changed. Still others—the Eighth Street corridor, the Atlas District, the Chain Court, the Golden Triangle—are real and worth visiting.

Marty’s battle with post-remission depression describes a very real condition among cancer victims and survivors. It was first brought to my attention in a conversation with Eric Cohen and Drucilla Brethwaite of Life with Cancer (www.lifewithcancer.org). Details of Marty’s struggle, such as the anxiety diary and the advice Nurse Leah gives him in chapter 4, are taken from the excellent book The Cancer Survivor’s Companion by Dr. Frances Goodhart and Lucy Atkins.

All errors in locales, procedure, and function of corporate real estate (especially as it pertains to local government) are my own. Some of the broader sociological concepts (like Michael Denton’s theories in chapter 18) are my own.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Spike began with an idle question while driving through Washington, DC: How can we be tearing down ten-year-old buildings to build new ones when there are so many empty lots, depressed neighborhoods, and undeveloped potential in other parts of the city?

My path to answering those questions led me to some amazing people and gave me an education on just how convoluted and consequential simple “real estate” really is. Aaron Herman was the first to give me an inkling of corporate real estate’s breadth and depth—in the time it took to drink a beer with him, I realized I’d peeled back a layer of life in DC that I had no idea existed.

Following my nose, it didn’t take long to discover a wonderful, and incredibly timely, multipart exposé by investigative journalists Julie Patel and Patrick Madden, “Deals for Developers” (http://apps.npr.org/deals-for-developers-wamu/). This revelatory piece of journalism formed the basis for much of the research for the book and is worth a close read no matter where you live. Over several cups of coffee, Patrick helped me tie it all together and I’m indebted to him for connecting the dots for me.

I am inspired by the stories of the survivors, the displaced, and the abused who have refused to submit. I hope The Spike represents your struggle accurately and with integrity.

My editors Bryon Quertermous and Michael Mandarano helped whip into shape a rough bunch of thoughts into a comprehensive, flowing story. Gentlemen, thank you.

Finally, to the team at Thomas & Mercer and especially my editor Kjersti Egerdahl—thank you for giving me the opportunity to introduce Marty to a wider world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2014 Sally Iden

Matthew Iden writes hard-boiled detective fiction, fantasy, science fiction, horror, thrillers, and contemporary literary fiction with a psychological twist. He is the author of the Marty Singer detective series:

A Reason to Live

Blueblood

One Right Thing

The Spike

The Wicked Flee

Visit www.matthew-iden.com for information on upcoming appearances, new releases, and to receive a free copy of The Guardian: A Marty Singer Short Story—not available anywhere else.

IF YOU LIKED THE SPIKE . . .

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STAY IN TOUCH

Please say hello via e-mail, matt.iden@matthew-iden.com, through Facebook (www.facebook.com/matthew.iden), or Twitter (@CrimeRighter). I also enjoy connecting with readers and writers at my website, www.matthew-iden.com.