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  “Ready, Dr. Cross?” she said, coming toward me and then stumbling over a loose cord and losing her balance.

  I reached out before she could fall. Binx grabbed onto my left hand and right forearm and got her balance.

  She turned from me, looking back, puzzled. “What was that?”

  “You should put your cords under rugs,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We went downstairs to my car.

  Binx got in the front seat, said, “Where’s the siren?”

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “Where am I going?”

  “Toward the Anacostia Bridge. It’s an old tool and die factory by the river.”

  I drove in silence until I realized she was studying me again.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “The object of Gary’s obsession,” she said.

  “Soneji’s sole obsession?” I asked.

  “Well,” Binx said, and turned to look out the windshield. “One of them.”

  She was so blithe and relaxed in her manner that I wondered if she was on some kind of medication. And yet, she made me feel strange, scrutinized by a cultist.

  “How did you meet Claude Watkins?” I asked.

  “At a party in Baltimore,” she said. “Have you met him?”

  “Haven’t had the pleasure.”

  Binx smiled. “It is, you know. A pleasure to see his paintings and his performances.”

  “A real Picasso, then.”

  She caught the sarcasm, turned cooler, and said, “You’ll see, Dr. Cross.”

  Binx navigated me toward a derelict light industrial area north of the bridge, and an abandoned brick-faced factory with a FOR SALE sign on the gate, which was unlocked.

  “This is where the great painter and performance artist works?” I said.

  “Correct,” Binx said. “Claude moves around, takes month-to-month leases on abandoned buildings, where he’s free to do his art without worrying about making a mess. When the building and the art’s sold, he moves on. It’s a win-win for everyone involved. He learned the tactic in Detroit.”

  It made sense, actually. I parked the car outside the gate, and felt odd, a little woozy, the way you do if you haven’t eaten enough or stayed well hydrated. And my tongue felt thick, and my throat dry.

  I heard Binx release her seat belt. It sounded louder than it should have. So did the key in the ignition beeping when I opened the door. I took the key out, stood up, felt the warm spring breeze, and felt almost immediately better.

  I called up Google Maps on my phone, pinned my location, and texted the pin to Bree along with a message that said, “Send patrol for backup when you get the chance.”

  Then I drew my service weapon.

  “Sorry to do this, Ms. Binx,” I said. “But I need you in handcuffs.”

  “What? Why?”

  “You’re technically under arrest. I’ve just been a nice guy until now.”

  The computer coder didn’t look happy as she came over. I got out my cuffs and buckled down her wrists, arms forward. She’d been cooperative for the most part and didn’t seem much of a threat.

  “What am I under arrest for?” Binx demanded. “Free speech?”

  “How about fomenting and abetting attempted murder of a cop?”

  “I did not!”

  “You did,” I said, pushing her in front of me.

  We passed through the gate, crossed fifteen yards of scrub ground where purple crocuses poked out of weeds by a metal double door. Binx seemed on the verge of tears, opening one of the doors and saying, “I would never hurt a cop. My dad was a cop in Philly.”

  That surprised me. “Was?”

  “He’s retired,” she said. “With a gold shield.”

  I looked at her differently now, the daughter of a good cop. Why would she get involved in something like this?

  “You said you wanted to meet Claude,” Binx said, trying to wipe her tears with her sleeves. “Let’s go.”

  At first a voice in my head said not to enter the abandoned factory, to wait for backup, but then the voice was gone, replaced by a surge of clarity and confidence.

  Keeping Binx squarely in front of me, I went inside.

  Whenever you leave a sunny day for a darker quarter, there’s always a fleeting moment when you’re all but blind before your eyes adjust. It’s also a time when you tend to be silhouetted in the doorway and are therefore an easy target.

  But I heard no shot, and my vision refocused on a large, airy space, ten, maybe fifteen thousand square feet, with a ceiling that was warehouse-high and crisscrossed with rusted overhead tracks for heavy industrial lifts and booms.

  Ten-foot-tall partitions carved the space up like a broad maze. The cement floor right in front of us was cracked, broken in places, and bare but for stacks of pipe and sheet metal, as if a reclaiming operation was under way. Thick dust hung in the air. Waves of it danced and swirled in the weak sunlight streaming through a bank of filthy windows high on the walls.

  “I’m not seeing any paintings or studio,” I said. “Where’s Watkins?”

  “He and the studio are in the back,” Binx said, gesturing into the gloom. “I’ll show you the way.”

  For the second time that day, that internal voice of mine, born of years of training and experience, raised doubts about following her until I had someone watching my back. And for the second time that day, I felt my heart beat faster, sensed more sharply my surroundings, and surged with another rush of complete confidence in my abilities.

  “Lead on,” I said, smiling at her, and feeling good, real good, like I was perfectly fine-tuned and ready for anything that might come my way.

  Binx took me down one dim hallway, and then another, passing empty workroom after empty workroom before I smelled marijuana, fresh paint, and turpentine. The smells got stronger as we walked a short third hallway that dog-legged left and opened into a large, largely empty assembly-line room with dark alcoves off it on all four sides.

  The only lights in the room were strong portable spots trained on one of several large paintings hanging on the far wall about fifty feet away. The painting showed a crane lifting a coffin from the ground. The headstone above the grave read “G. SONEJI.” Two men stood by the grave. A Caucasian in a dark suit. And an African American in a blue police slicker. Me.

  I almost smiled. Someone who’d been at the exhumation, probably Soneji or one of his followers, Watkins, had painted this, and yet I had to fight to keep from grinning at all the goodwill I felt inside.

  The furthest of the three spotlights went dark then, revealing a man I couldn’t see before because of the glare. He wore paint-speckled jeans, work boots, and a long-sleeved shirt, but his face was lost in shadows.

  Then he took a step forward into a weak, dusty beam of sunlight coming through the grimy windows, revealing the wispy red hair and distinctive facial features of Gary Soneji.

  “Dr. Cross,” he said in a cracking, hoarse voice. “I thought you’d never catch up.”

  Chapter 28

  Soneji moved his arm then, and I saw the gun he held at his side, a nickel-plated pistol, just like the ones he used to shoot Sampson and me.

  Take him!

  The voice screamed in my head, ending all of those strange good feelings that had been inexplicably surging through me.

  I raised my service pistol fast, pushed Binx out of the way, aimed at Soneji, and shouted, “Drop your weapon now or I’ll shoot!”

  To my surprise, Soneji let go the gun. It fell to the floor with a clatter. He raised his hands, studying me calmly and with great interest.

  “Facedown on the floor!” I shouted. “Hands behind your back!”

  Soneji started to follow my orders before Binx hit my gun hand with both her fists. The blow knocked me off balance, and my gun discharged just as a spotlight went on from above the paintings, blinding me.

  There was a shot.

  Then all the lights died, leaving me disoriented, and blinking at dazzling blue
spots that danced before my eyes. Knowing I was vulnerable, I threw myself to the floor, expecting another shot at any moment.

  It was a trap. The whole thing was a trap, and I’d just walked into…

  The spots cleared.

  Soneji was gone. So was Binx. And Soneji’s nickel-plated pistol.

  I held my position, and peered around, noticing for the first time a metal table covered in cans of paint and paintbrushes. And then those alcoves all around the room. They were low-roofed and dark with shadows.

  Soneji and Binx could easily have slid into one of them. And what? Escaped? Or were they just waiting for me to make a move?

  I had no answers, and stayed where I was, listening, looking.

  Nothing moved. And there was zero sound.

  But I could feel him there. Soneji. Listening for me. Looking for me.

  I felt severely agitated at those ideas, almost wired before an irrational, all-consuming rage erupted inside me. Standard protocol was gone, burned up. All my training was gone, too, consumed by the flames of wanting to take Gary Soneji down. Now and for good.

  I lurched to my feet and ran hard at the nearest alcove on the opposite wall. Every nerve expected a shot, but there was none. I got to the protection of the alcove, gasping, gun up, seeing the remnants of machine tools.

  But no Soneji.

  “I’ve got backup, Gary,” I shouted. “They’re surrounding the place!”

  No response. Were they gone?

  I dodged out of the alcove and moved fast along the wall to the next anteroom, the one directly beneath the painting of the exhumation. At first I saw only large rolls of canvas laid on sawhorses and tables made of plywood.

  Then, in the deepest shadows of the alcove, and in my peripheral vision, I caught a flash of movement. I spun left to see Soneji stooping forward on the balls of his feet as he took two halting steps, and straightened up.

  His mouth opened as if in anticipation of some long-awaited pleasure. His gun hand started to rise.

  I shot him twice, the deafening reports making my ears buzz and ring like they’d been boxed hard. Gary Soneji jerked twice, and screamed like a woman before staggering and falling from sight.

  Chapter 29

  My heart boomed in my chest, but my brain sighed with relief.

  Soneji was hit hard. He was crying, dying there on the canvas-room floor where I couldn’t see him.

  My pistol still up, I took an uncertain step toward Soneji, and another. A third and fourth step and I saw him lying there, no gun in his hand or around him, looking at me with a piteous expression.

  In a high, whimpering voice, he said, “Why did you shoot me? Why me?”

  Before I could answer, Soneji went into a coughing fit that turned wet and choking. Then blood streamed from his lips, his eyes started to dull, and the life went out of him with a last hard breath.

  “Oh, my God!” Binx screamed behind me. “What have you done?”

  “Soneji’s gone,” I said, feeling intense, irrational pleasure course through me. “He’s finally gone.”

  Binx was crying. I started to turn toward her. She saw the gun in my hand, turned terrified, and leaped out of sight.

  Binx had led me into a trap, I thought. Binx had led me here to die.

  I ran after her into the main room, saw her running crazily back the way we’d come in, and heard her making these petrified whining sounds.

  “Stop, Ms. Binx!” I yelled after her.

  As I did, I caught a shift in the shadows of an alcove at the far end of the room. I looked toward it, shocked to see that beyond two fifty-five-gallon drums, Gary Soneji stood there in the mouth of the alcove, same clothes, same hair, same face, same nickel-plated pistol in hand.

  How was that…?

  Before I could shake off the shock of there being two Sonejis, he fired at me. His bullet pinged off the post of one of those spotlights trained on the paintings. On instinct, I threw myself toward him, gun up and firing.

  My first shot was wide, but my next one spun the second Soneji around just before I landed hard on the cement floor. Doubled over, he went down too, gasping, groaning, and trying to crawl back into the alcove.

  I scrambled to my feet, and charged his position. A spotlight went on above the alcove, trying to strike me in the eyes again. But I got my free hand up before it could blind me.

  From high and to my right, a gun went off. The bullet blew a chunk of cement out of the floor at my feet.

  I dove behind the fifty-five-gallon drums, glanced at the second Soneji, who was still crawling, and leaving a trail of dark blood behind him.

  The voice in my head screamed at me to use my phone and call it in. I needed sirens coming now.

  Then I heard the sirens, distant but distinct, before another gunshot sounded from up high and to my right again. It smacked the near barrel, the slug making a clanging noise as it ricocheted inside.

  I winced, rolled over, and peered up through the narrow gap between the barrels, seeing a third Gary Soneji standing on the roof of the alcove above the exhumation painting. He was trying to aim at me with a nickel-plated pistol.

  Before he could fire, I did.

  The third Soneji screamed, dropped his gun, and grabbed at his thigh before toppling off the roof. He fell a solid ten feet, hit the cement floor hard enough to make cracking sounds. He screamed feebly, then lay there moaning.

  I stood up then, shaking with adrenaline, and feeling that beautiful rage explode through me all over again, searing-hot and vengeful.

  “Who’s next?” I roared, feeling almost giddy. “C’mon, you bastards! I’ll kill every single Soneji before I’m done!”

  I swung all around, my pistol aiming high and low, finger twitching on the trigger, anticipating another Soneji to appear on the roof of the alcove or from the darkness of the three remaining anterooms.

  But nothing moved, and there was no sound except for the moans of the wounded and of Kimiko Binx, who sat in the far corner of the main room, curled up in a fetal position, and sobbing.

  Chapter 30

  Kimiko Binx was still crying and refusing to talk to me or to the patrol officers who arrived first on the scene, or to the detectives who came soon after.

  Not even Bree could get Binx to make any kind of statement, other than to say sullenly, “Cross didn’t have to shoot. He didn’t have to kill them all.”

  The fact was, I had not killed them all. Two of the Sonejis were alive, and there were EMTs working feverishly on them.

  “Three Sonejis?” Bree said. “Makes it easy for them to cover ground.”

  I nodded, seeing how one of them could have shot Sampson, while another staked out Soneji’s grave, and the third could have driven by Bree and me outside GW Medical Center.

  “You okay, Alex?” Bree asked.

  “No,” I said, feeling incredibly tired all of a sudden. “Not really.”

  “Tell me what happened,” Bree said.

  I did to the best of my abilities, finishing with “But all you really need to know is they set up an ambush, lured me, and I walked right into it.”

  Bree thought about that, and then said, “There’ll be an investigation, but from what you said, it’s cut-and-dry. Self-defense, and justified.”

  I didn’t say anything because somehow it didn’t seem quite right to me. Justified, yes, but cut-and-dry? They’d tried to kill Sampson, and me, twice. But some of the threads of what had happened just didn’t—

  “By the way,” Bree said, interrupting my thoughts. “The labs came back on the exhumation.”

  I looked at her, revealing nothing. “And?”

  “It was him in the coffin,” she said. “Soneji. They compared DNA to samples taken when he was in federal custody the first time. He’s dead, Alex. He’s been dead more than ten years.”

  One of the EMTs called out to us before I could express my relief. We went to the Soneji in the far alcove, then the one who’d been crawling away, leaving blood like a snail’s track.
They’d shot him up with morphine and he was out of it. They’d also cut off his shirt and found the raised latex edge of a mask that could have been crafted by one of Hollywood’s finest.

  After photographing the mask, we sliced and peeled it off, revealing the ashen face of Claude Watkins, painter, performance artist, and wounded idolizer of Gary Soneji.

  The second Soneji was up on a gurney and headed for an ambulance when we caught up to him.

  We tore open his shirt, found the latex edge of an identical mask, photographed it, and then had the EMTs slice it off him. The man behind the mask was in his late twenties and unfamiliar to us. But as they wheeled him out, I had no doubt that, whoever he was, he’d been worshipping Gary Soneji for a long, long time.

  We waited for the medical examiner to arrive and take custody of the dead Soneji before we cut off the third mask.

  “It’s a woman,” Bree said, her hands going to her mouth.

  “Not just any woman,” I said, stunned and confused. “That’s Virginia Winslow.”

  “Who?”

  “Gary Soneji’s widow.”

  “Wait. What?” Bree said, staring at the dead woman closely. “I thought you said she hated Soneji.”

  “That’s what she told me.”

  Bree shook her head. “What in God’s name possessed her to impersonate her dead husband and then try to kill you? Did she shoot John? Or did Watkins? Or that other guy?”

  “One of them did,” I said. “I’ll put money one of the pistols matches.”

  “But why?” she said, still confused.

  “Binx and Watkins and, evidently, Virginia Winslow made Soneji into a cult, with me being the enemy of the cult,” I said, and thought about Winslow’s son, Dylan, and the picture of me on his dartboard.

  Where was the kid in all of this? Seeing Binx being led out, I thought that if we leaned on her hard enough, she’d eventually want to cut a deal and tell all.

  “You look like hell, you know,” Bree said, breaking my thoughts again.

  “Appreciate the compliment.”