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  My Glock was still out, and I figured I had time for at least one shot. I squeezed the trigger. A bullet punctured the car’s windshield with a pock sound. The speeding vehicle kept coming. Right at me! I dove and hit the hotel wall, then rolled onto the asphalt. Banged the hell out of my shoulder and my chin.

  I fired another shot. A taillight shattered. It was a small coupe, I saw now. A blue Miata. A neighbor of mine had one, and I recognized the size and shape.

  The fast-moving car hopped the curb, then bounced forward into the street.

  Then it stopped abruptly! A taxi’s tires squealed on the pavement. The cab had just missed nailing the coupe. Inches from total destruction. And capture!

  By the time I was on my feet and running, the blue sports car had taken off again.

  My badge was out, and I threw open the taxi driver’s door. “Police! I need your cab.”

  All the cabbie saw was my gun, but I guess it was enough for him. He was out of his seat immediately, hands held in the air. “Take it!”

  The taxi was a V-6. Good, I’d probably need all of that. I clicked off the radio and AC to funnel extra power.

  “Alex? Where the hell are you?” Bree’s voice sounded in my ear, faint against the straining engine of the cab.

  “In pursuit, I hope. West on O’Donnell,” I called out. “I’m chasing a dark-blue Miata. Maryland plates. One taillight out. I’m looking at it right now. Female driver—though she’s big enough to be a man. Strong enough too.”

  “Maybe it’s a man in women’s clothes. He likes to play roles.”

  “Yes, he does. But I think this really is a woman. We have to get her!”

  The coupe shot past the ramp for I-95 and straight through another intersection. The driver was doing at least seventy—and accelerating.

  “Bree, if you can hear me, we’re both going west on O’Donnell. You copy?”

  “Okay, Alex. Still got you. We’re on it, on our way. What else do you need?”

  “Shit!” I yelled. “Shit!”

  “What?” Bree yelled back.

  I swerved to miss a yellow VW Bug as it tried to squeak in a left turn. Idiot. “What I need is a siren. Or some backup,” I clarified for Bree.

  “Medallion 5C742, what’s your location?” The taxi dispatch suddenly crackled at me. Another country heard from. “Come in. Do you hear me?”

  “Alex, what’s happening now?” Bree asked. “Are you all right? Alex?”

  The coupe barely slowed as it pulled around a UPS truck and straight into oncoming traffic. Cars swerved to the side as the coupe barreled at them. I gunned the cab and squeezed in behind.

  “Maryland 451JZW,” I told Bree. “I’m fine. So far, anyway. Still in pursuit.”

  I kept my foot down—and managed to nudge the Miata’s rear bumper. The sports car jerked but then surged forward again.

  “Bree? Did you get that license number? Bree? Bree, where are you?”

  There was no response from her. Maybe I’d gone out of range. The only things in my ear now were my own pulse and the taxi’s racing engine.

  Chapter 69

  I KNEW THAT the sports coupe could outrun me on a long straightaway, but that was the one advantage the driver didn’t have here. In fact, I could swear she was letting me get closer. Was that really happening? Was it a trap? Was that what this was about? Separating, then grabbing me? Was I the target? Kyle Craig would think up something like that. Was Kyle here? Was he involved?

  Then I saw what was actually going on. With no warning or brake lights, the coupe shot left onto a narrow side street, shimmied twice, and kept moving like a Pocket Rocket.

  I missed the intersection completely. No way I could have made the turn. Another came up fast, though, and I took it, hoping for a grid somewhere up ahead.

  Tall apartment buildings rose on either side of me so that I couldn’t see over to the next block. Straight ahead, the road came to a T with another main artery. Boston Street, I thought. I knew that beyond Boston was the harbor. That cut off some options, anyway. Made this a little easier. I hoped.

  I can get her—take her down. And that’ll be the biggest break yet in this case.

  The coupe whizzed by as I approached the intersection, and I accelerated blindly around the corner. This could be it. One way or the other.

  We were in two lanes of inward-bound traffic now. The Miata wove through other cars expertly, passing on both sides, but it couldn’t slip away from me. I was holding on so far. And I had my Glock out again.

  When the driver tried another surprise right, I was ready for it. The taxi’s outside wheels barely held the pavement, but I made the turn with an inch or two of safety.

  A tree-lined residential block appeared ahead. I spotted pedestrians.

  My chest tightened up. Kids would be out on a nice night like this. The coupe wasn’t slowing down. She was barreling straight ahead, even picking up speed.

  I laid on the horn! Maybe I could keep the road clear of people. The coupe rocketed up several blocks, and all I could do was follow at a close distance. If you ain’t first, you’re last. Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights.

  When the driver tried the next turn, the street was too narrow for the speed. The Miata slowed sharply—and I came up fast on her.

  I slammed into the back fender again, not exactly on purpose this time. I knew I’d just messed up the taxi pretty good.

  The coupe fishtailed around the corner and hopped up onto the sidewalk, then somebody’s lawn. I heard a woman’s scream in the darkness. Two people dove out of the way.

  My focus narrowed and also intensified. I saw the Best Western up ahead. What the hell? On top of everything else, I had just been taken on a giant circle jerk ride around Baltimore and the harbor area.

  It wasn’t until I saw the highway up ahead that I got it. The driver had figured out how to outrun me.

  And I couldn’t let her do that!

  Chapter 70

  BREE’S VOICE WAS BACK in my earphone. “Keep all exits secure. Repeat. Keep all exits secure!” She was obviously in control. I wished I could say the same. “Alex? Alex? Can you hear me? Alex?”

  “Bree! I’m here!”

  “What’s going on? Talk to me. Where is here? Are you okay?”

  The coupe took exactly the turn I thought it would and paralleled the thruway toward I-95. We were only a block from the hotel now, our starting point. This whole trip had been another game, hadn’t it? Was that right?

  “Whoever it is, they’re going for the highway! The Miata’s headed to I-95! I still might take her.”

  “Where, Alex? Which entrance?”

  “Right by the damn hotel!”

  I gripped the wheel, ready to take the ramp, but then the coupe flew right by it! A second later, so did I.

  Now what?

  Almost at the same time, the coupe’s brake lights showed. I heard the skid and saw the car do nearly a one eighty.

  Even as I slammed my brakes, the Miata accelerated back in my direction. It swerved to miss me, and before I could even get turned around, the coupe was up the ramp, still accelerating. And gone in a cloud of dust.

  “North on 95!” I yelled for Bree. “I’m still on her tail! For the moment.”

  I sped up to the highway and maxed out the taxi at close to a hundred for a couple of exits. Eventually, I took my foot off the accelerator and slammed my fist into the passenger seat.

  I turned around at the next exit.

  Back at the hotel, Bree and Sampson were waiting out front, along with half a dozen Baltimore cruisers, their roof lights flashing in the darkness. Most of the Unhinged crowd was outside too, loving every second of this chaos and madness.

  A three-hundred-pound biker with a white beard came charging up to me in the parking lot. “Hey, man, what the hell happened out there?”

  “Get away,” I said without stopping. The biker cut me off again. He had on about a hundred-year-old Grateful Dead T.

  “Just tell me—”
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br />   I was in his face now, and I wanted to pop someone. I might have if Sampson hadn’t grabbed me from behind. “Hey, hey, hey!” he was shouting—at me.

  Then Bree came running up to us. “Jesus, are you okay?” she asked. “Alex?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, trying to slow my breathing. “Listen, that might have been DCAK I was chasing. Another of his—”

  “It wasn’t him,” Bree said, and shook her head. “And we’ve got to go right now.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked as she pushed me away from the crowd and all their eerie questions.

  “I just got a call from Davies. Somebody was murdered at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Stabbed to death in front of a crowd of people. He punked us, Alex. He got us real good this time. This whole thing was planned.”

  Part Three

  THE AUDIENCE IS LISTENING

  Chapter 71

  I HAD VISITED the National Air and Space Museum many times with my kids but had never seen anything like this. As we arrived, the building looked dark and foreboding from the outside, except for the glass-walled atrium of the cafeteria. Upon entering, though, we saw dozens of shell-shocked people sitting at tables, waiting to go home. Witnesses, I knew. To a person, they had seen a horrific event tonight. What made it worse: at least half of them appeared to be children, some just two or three years old.

  A bulging army of news reporters and photographers had been cordoned off over on Seventh Street near the Hirshhorn. At least it made the vultures easier for us to avoid.

  Sampson, Bree, and I had come in directly from Independence Avenue. Gil Cook, one of our D-2s, met us at the cafeteria entrance. He approached Bree on the run, waving one arm over his head.

  “Detective Stone, the museum director would like to speak with you before—”

  “After,” Bree said, and she kept walking. She was on the Job now, somebody not to be trifled with. I liked how she worked, how she took control of the homicide scene.

  Gil Cook followed her like a chastened pup looking for table scraps. “He said I should tell you he’s on his way out to talk to the press.”

  Bree stopped walking and pivoted toward the D-2.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Gil. Where is he?”

  Cook pointed her in the right direction and then kept pace with Sampson and me. The three of us passed by the darkened Milestones of Flight exhibit, with its life-size planes like giant toys hanging from the ceiling. Very cinematic—right up our thrill killer’s alley. More and more, his work was reminding me of Kyle Craig’s. The theatrics, the viciousness. Had he studied Kyle’s crimes?

  “Victim’s name is Abby Courlevais. Thirty-two years old. White woman, tourist from France. Worst thing about it, she was five or six months pregnant,” Cook told Sampson and me.

  The murder had taken place inside the Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater, which showed museum fare during the day but sometimes Hollywood blockbuster stuff at night. The actual killing had occurred right in the middle of my Baltimore speech. And then I’d gotten the note: Guess again, smart guy. I’m not psychotic! . . . See you back in DC, where it’s all happening. . . .

  He was really going out of his way to mock us now—getting into it good. And the killer seemed to be topping each act with the next. Who was the woman in Baltimore? The Indy race-car driver who had taken me on a wild-goose chase, only to get away on I-95.

  A pregnant victim, a visitor from another country—and a more “civilized” one—would capture media attention in a new way, and that wasn’t the half of it. The killer had just pulled off another very public execution inside a national institution. In a post-9⁄11 world, that meant a new level of intensity for everything—press coverage, public paranoia, pressure on the police to get this thing under control, to end it before anyone else died. No one would care that it was an almost impossible assignment. How many years had it taken them to get the Green River Killer—and had they ever gotten the Zodiac?

  As to where DCAK might try to take things from here, I didn’t even want to speculate about it.

  Right now, I had a body to see.

  Two bodies, actually.

  Mother and child.

  Chapter 72

  “GODDAMN HIM TO HELL!” Sampson said in an angry voice that he managed to keep under his breath. “That son-ofabitch! That miserable fucker!”

  As homicide scenes go, this one was particularly obscene and troubling. This was a place where families went to be entertained. The IMAX theater had soaring walls, textured only with directional lighting. The rows of high-backed seats were steeply raked in a concave arch across the auditorium, like a modern take on an old medical-lecture theater—right down to the cadaver, right?

  The victim had apparently been killed near the base of the five-story-high movie screen. That seemed odd to me, but it was the advance word we’d gotten from Gil Cook, and no one else was questioning it so far. I probably shouldn’t have either. Not yet.

  The poor woman’s body lay faceup now. Her hands had been tied behind her back, and even from a distance, I could see silver duct tape wrapped across her mouth. Just like at the Riverwalk. I also spotted a wedding band on her hand.

  As I got closer, I saw that the tape was stained dark over her lips where blood had been unable to escape. Probably after internal injuries. Mrs. Courlevais’s white dress was discolored and looked rusty brown all over. She’d obviously been stabbed . . . repeatedly.

  Next to the mutilated body was an oversize canvas rucksack. There were metal grommets around the top. The sack was laced with a thick cord, presumably for tying it closed.

  Another present from DCAK? Another clue for us to follow nowhere?

  More bloodstains and several perforations showed me what I already knew instinctively, that the victim had been stabbed inside the sack. The vicious killer had left Abby Courlevais in there, either dead or dying. The EMTs had taken her out in hopes of reviving her, but it was obviously too late.

  When I lifted the empty bag to look for markings, I found U.S. POSTAL SERVICE and a long string of numbers stenciled on the side in faded black letters.

  So was this the latest calling card? Had to be. But what was it supposed to mean? What was DCAK saying to us this time? And was this murder committed by him or possibly his copycat?

  Witness accounts had already described a blue uniform and cap on the killer. Maybe that was DCAK’s version of an in-joke—he’d “gone postal” on us. He had also left us “holding the bag.”

  I walked to the far side of the floor, near the entrance the killer had used to come in. From here, I tried to imagine the events as Detective Cook had described them. The killer had needed to catch Mrs. Courlevais unaware—long enough to bind her hands and mouth—and to get the cloth bag over her head. A mat of dried blood in her hair indicated some kind of blunt trauma but probably not enough to knock her out. Conscious would be better, anyway. More effective for DCAK’s purposes, for the theater of it.

  And, in fact, witnesses had seen the bag moving when he’d dragged it into the theater.

  I walked back to the woman’s body again and looked around at the empty auditorium. This audience was closer to him than any of the others had been, so he’d needed to work quickly. No time for lengthy speeches or the usual sickening grandstanding. He hadn’t been able to make a full star turn tonight. So what had been so attractive about this particular location, this audience, this French woman?

  The impact seemed to have been mostly visual. He’d shouted, “Special delivery!” and then got right to it—half a dozen vicious swings with a blade large enough to be seen from the theater’s back row.

  I looked down at Mrs. Courlevais, then back at the empty sack next to her.

  Suddenly, another angle occurred to me. What else might be tucked inside there? Was there something else in the mail sack?

  I worked the bag open, dreading what I might find. Finally my hand touched a flat piece of plastic. Something was definitely there. What?
>
  I pulled the object out. What the hell? It was a postal worker’s ID. A second photo had been pasted over the original. The name was changed too. It said Stanley Chasen.

  The image on the ID was a match to the preliminary description we’d gotten: elderly white man, possibly in his seventies, silver hair, bulbous nose, horn-rimmed glasses. Heavyset and tall.

  “Who’s Stanley Chasen?” Sampson asked.

  “Probably nobody,” I said. Then it hit me. I knew what he was doing—I was thinking like him, and not liking the feeling. “It’s a figment of this sick bastard’s imagination. He’s creating characters, then he’s playing them, one at a time. And all the characters inside his head are killers.”

  And . . . what? He wants us to catch them all?

  Chapter 73

  I DIDN’T GET TO LEAVE the National Air and Space Museum until five in the morning, and we weren’t even finished with our workday yet. Bree and I sent Sampson home to his wife and little one, and then we drove back up to Baltimore—where there was still a mess of paperwork to finish up and a situation to try to make some sense out of, if we possibly could.

  On the drive, we talked about the woman who had been DCAK’s accomplice at the Best Western—the driver of the blue sports car. Had he hired her just for the night? Or had she been in on the murder spree all along? No way to tell yet, but the scenario led to lots of speculation on the ride up I-95, some of it connecting to Kyle Craig and his escape from ADX Florence.

  When we finally got back to the Best Western, Bree and I hugged for a minute in the car, but that was about all we did—a hug and a kiss. Then we were needed inside. It was too early to call my house, so I waited until later—well into the morning, as it turned out. When I finally called, I got the answering machine.

  I decided to keep my message light, the exact opposite of what I was feeling. “Hey, chickens, it’s Dad. Listen, I’m working through the morning, but I’ll be home later this afternoon. Promise. Seems like a good night for a movie. That is, if I can convince anyone to join me.” And if I can stay awake.