James Patterson - I, Alex Cross

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

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

"This them?" she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is this her, Hannah?" I asked.

She nodded, and the tears started to come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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