James Patterson - I, Alex Cross

"Prints and fibers came up with nothing. So we went to luminol."

That explained the portable UV lamps set up in the room. Mahoney turned off the ceiling light and closed the door. "Go ahead, guys."

Once they powered up, the whole room seemed to go radioactive. The walls, the floor, the furniture, all fluoresced bright blue. It was one of those occasions when my life actually did feel like an episode of CSI.

"Someone cleaned in here professionally," Mahoney said. "And I don't mean Merry Maids of Washington."

One of the limitations with luminol is that although it can bring out traces of blood, it also responds to some of the things people use to get rid of blood, like household bleach. That's what we were looking at. It was as if the room had been painted with Clorox.

This looked like a crime scene for sure. And maybe a murder scene.

THE NEXT THING that happened, nobody saw coming. It was maybe half an hour later, and I was still on the case at Blacksmith Farms.

A rumble of conversation came from the apartment's living room, and Ned and I went out to see what was going on. Several techies were gathered around a bearded guy on a short ladder near the door. He had the plastic cover of a smoke detector in one hand, with the exposed unit on the ceiling above him. That's what everybody was staring at.

The tech reached up with a pencil and pointed at an innocuous plastic nub tucked into the circuitry. "I'm pretty sure it's a camera. Fairly sophisticated."

Talk about grinding the gears.

Immediately, Ned ordered a second sweep of both buildings. Everyone turned off their cell phones, and all the televisions and computers we could find were disconnected. That would keep them from interfering with the radio-frequency detectors.

Once the search got going, it was fast work. Ninety minutes later, most of the on-site personnel were gathered in the main house foyer for a briefing. I saw a few familiar faces, including the assistant director in charge, Luke Hamel, and also Elaine Kwan from the Behavior Analysis Unit, my old office.

I was surprised the case hadn't been graded major yet, just based on the firepower in the room.

The special agent in charge of ERT was Shoanna Spears. She was tall and big boned, with a heavy Boston accent and a tiny ivy tattoo that just peeked over the top of her white oxford collar. She stood on the grand staircase to address the group.

"Basically, there's nowhere in the house that isn't covered. We found cameras in every room, including the bathrooms and the apartments out back."

"How do we find out what all those cameras have been filming ?" Hamel asked the question percolating in everyone's brains.

"Hard to say. These are wireless units; they can transmit to any base station within a thousand feet, maybe more than that. We did find a hard drive on the third floor with the right software, but no archived files. That means either that all the surveillance was done live or, more likely, that somebody took the files off site."

"In which case we'd be looking for what?" Mahoney spoke up from the back of the room. "Disks? A laptop? E-mails?"

Agent Spears nodded. "Keep going," she said. "There's nothing terribly sophisticated about those files. They can pretty much be stored anywhere."

You could feel the energy in the room dip. We were all ready for some good news. And then we got it.

"For what it's worth," Spears went on, "there seems to be only one set of prints on the hardware upstairs. We're running them through IAFIS now."

"I DON'T UNDERSTAND any of this, Tony. Why can't you at least tell me where we're going? Is that too much to ask?"

The truth – and Nicholson had only come to realize it that afternoon – was that he didn't have the stomach for cold-blooded murder. Not by his own hand, anyway. He'd always believed that if he had to, he could easily put a pillow over Charlotte 's face or slip something lethal into her morning coffee, but that wasn't going to happen, was it? And now it was too late to have her hit by someone else, which would have been a snap.

He threw a few last things into his duffel, while Charlotte harped at him from the far side of the bed. The Louis Vuitton bag he'd set out for her was still empty, and his patience was running out. He badly wanted to punch her in the face. But what good would that do?

"Darling." The word nearly caught in his throat. "Just trust me here. We have a plane to catch. I'll explain everything once we're away. Now, pick out a few things and let's go. Let's go, sweetheart." Before I get really angry and murder you with my bare hands.

"It's about those men from the other night, isn't it? I knew something wasn't right with them. Do you owe somebody money – is that it?"

"Goddamnit, Charlotte, are you listening at all? It's not safe here, dimmy. For either of us. The best we could hope for would be jail at this point. That's the best, do you understand? It only gets worse from there."

" Depending on who gets to us first was the rest of his thought.

"We? What do you mean, we? I haven't done anything to anyone."

Nicholson rushed around the bed and threw an armful of clothes from her closet into the bag, hangers and all.

Then the red leather jewelry box he'd bought her in Florence, forever ago – a lifetime ago, when he'd been young, in love, and most definitely dumb as a bag of bricks with a hard-on.

"We're leaving. Now ."

She trailed after him, more afraid of being alone than anything else, which he was counting on. That got them as far as the front hall before Charlotte melted down completely. He heard something between a moan and a scream, and turned to see her half-crouched on the polished slate floor. Black lines of makeup ran down her cheeks with the tears; she always wore too much of the stuff, like some kind of tart, and he should know.

"I'm so scared, Tony. I'm shaking all over. Can't you see that? Can't you see anything besides your own needs? Why are you being like this?"

Nicholson opened his mouth to say something bland and conciliatory, but what came out instead was "You really are too stupid for words, do you know that?"

He dropped her bag and took her up roughly by the arm, didn't care if he yanked it from its socket. Charlotte pulled back, kicking and screaming, literally, as he started to drag her across the floor. All he had to do was get her to the car, and then she could pop an aneurism for all he fucking cared about the dumb, stubborn cow his wife had become.

But then the first slam came at the front door.

Something – not someone – had just smashed into it from the outside, hard enough to leave a long, forked crack down the middle. Nicholson looked out a window just quickly enough to realize what it was – a battering ram. And he knew then that it was probably too late to save even himself.

The second vicious and powerful swing came right away. It popped the lock set and dead bolt like children's toys, and the door exploded open.

"RUN."

That was the only advice that Tony Nicholson had for his wife before he dropped her arm and sprinted toward the back door himself. All priorities were now relative. Survival was not, and it definitely could go to the fittest.

He got as far as the kitchen, where he came face-to-face with a short, solid-looking Hispanic man coming the other way. Now, who the hell was this?

There was a blur of motion, then an excruciating crack at the side of his knee. Nicholson vaguely registered the pipe wrench in the man's hand as he went down hard and stayed down.

At first there was only pain, a big red ball of it exploding up and down his leg.