James Patterson - I, Alex Cross

"I agree, sir," Cormorant put in. "We're way too much in the dark right now, and that is unacceptable."

Tillman took a deep breath that Reese read as both resignation and assent. "I want you two working together on this. No phone calls, though, and for God's sake, no e-mails. Dan, can you assure me that absolutely none of this goes through the Crisis Center?"

"I can, sir. I'll have to speak to a few of my men. But it can be contained. For a while."

"Gabe, you mentioned exit strategies?"

"Yes, sir."

"Think dimensionally here, all possible scenarios. Anticipate everything. And I mean everything ."

"I will, sir. My mind is going at about a million miles an hour right now."

"Good man. Any other questions?"

Reese had already started scanning his memory for historical or legal precedent, more out of habit than anything. There were no questions of loyalty here. His only reservation was situational. Good God Almighty – if there was a serial killer connected to the White House? Any kind of killer?

"Sir, if there's word out on this, what's to keep anyone else – God forbid a reporter – from picking up on it?"

Cormorant looked offended, but he let the vice president answer.

"It's the Secret Service, Gabe. We're not talking about an open-source intelligence here." Cormorant stood down and Reese tensed.

"But that's not the kind of insurance I'm going to depend on either. I want this done fast, gentlemen. Fast and clean and thorough. We need some real facts. And clarity . We need to find out who the hell Zeus is and what he's done, and then we have to deal with it like it never happened. "

THE PUNCHES KEPT coming, hard ones. Despite the Rhode Island driver's license, Caroline had been living in Washington for the last six months, but she'd never tried to make contact with me. She had an English-style basement apartment on C near Seward Square – less than a mile from our house on Fifth Street. I'd jogged by her building dozens of times.

"She had nice taste," Bree said, looking around the small but stylish living room.

The furniture and decor had an Asian influence, lots of dark wood, bamboo, and healthy-looking plants. A lacquered table by the front door held three river stones, one of them carved with the word Serenity .

I didn't know if that felt more like a taunt or a reminder. Caroline's apartment was nowhere that I wanted to be right now. I wasn't ready for it.

"Let's split up," I told Bree. "We'll cover the apartment faster that way."

I started with the bedroom, forcing myself to keep going. Who were you, Caroline? What happened to you? How could you die the way you did?

One of the first things that caught my attention was a small brown leather date book on a desk near her bed. When I grabbed it, a couple of business cards fluttered out and onto the floor.

I picked them up and saw they were both for Capitol Hill lobbyists – though I didn't recognize the names, just the firms.

Half of Caroline's date book pages were blank; the others had strings of letters written on them, starting at the beginning of the year and going about two months ahead. Each string was ten letters, I noticed right off. The most recent, from almost two weeks before Caroline had died, was SODBBLZHII. With ten letters.

The first thing I thought of was phone numbers, presumably coded or scrambled for privacy.

And if I asked myself why at that point, it was only because I was putting off an inevitable conclusion. By the time I'd gone through the big rosewood dresser in her walk-in closet, there was little doubt left about how my niece had been affording this beautiful apartment and everything in it.

The top drawers were filled with every kind of lingerie I could imagine, and I have a good imagination. There was the more expected lacy and satin stuff, but also leather, with and without studs, latex, rubber – all of it neatly folded and arranged. Probably the way her mother had taught her to organize her clothing as a kid.

The bottom drawers held a collection of restraints, insertive objects, toys, and contraptions, some of which I could only guess about and shake my head over.

Separately, everything I'd found was no more than circumstantial. All together, it got me very depressed, very quickly.

Was this why Caroline had moved to DC? And was it the reason she'd died the way she did?

I came out to the living room in a fog, not even sure I could talk yet. Bree was down on the floor with an open box and several photos spread in front of her.

She held one up for me to see. "I'd recognize you anywhere," she said.

It was a snapshot of Nana, Blake, and me. I even knew the date – July 4, 1976, the summer of the Bicentennial. In the picture, my brother and I were wearing plastic boaters with red, white, and blue bands around them. Nana looked impossibly young and so pretty.

Bree stood up next to me, still looking at the photo. "She didn't forget you, Alex. One way or another, Caroline knew who you were. It makes me wonder why she didn't try to contact you after she came to DC."

The picture of Nana, my brother, and me wasn't mine to take, but I put it in my jacket pocket anyway. "I don't think she wanted to be found," I said. "Not by me. Not by anybody she knew. She was an escort, Bree. High-end. Anything goes."

BACK AT THE office, which was buzzing with activity and noise, I got word from Detective Trumbull down in Virginia. Prints on the stolen car matched up to a John Tucci of Philadelphia, now at large.

I played some fast connect-the-dots – from Trumbull in Virginia, to a friend at the FBI in Washington, to their field office in Philly and an agent, Cass Murdoch, who threw down another piece of the puzzle for me: Tucci was a known but small-time cog in the Martino crime family organization.

That information cut both ways. It was a specific lead early in the case. But it also suggested that the driver and the killer might not be the same person. Tucci was probably part of something bigger than himself.

"Any guesses what Tucci was doing all the way down here?" I asked Agent Murdoch. Bree and I had her on speakerphone.

"I'd say he was either reassigned or else moving up in the organization. Taking on bigger jobs, more responsibility. He'd been arrested but never served time."

"The car was stolen in Philadelphia," Bree said.

"So then, yeah, he was working from home, emphasis on the was . My guess is he's probably dead by now, after a screwup like that, whatever the hell happened out there on I-95."

"How about possible clients in Washington?" I asked. "Does the Martino family have any regular business down here?"

"Nothing I know of," Murdoch said. "But there's obviously someone. John Tucci was too small-time to have drummed this up on his own. He probably thought he was lucky to get the assignment. What an asshole."

"I hung up with Murdoch and took a few minutes to scribble some notes and synthesize what she'd told us. Unfortunately, every new answer suggested a new question.

One thing seemed pretty clear to me, though. This wasn't just a homicide anymore, and it was no individual act. Maybe it involved a sex-and-violence creep – but maybe it was a cover-up? Or both?

THERE WAS MORE, of course, lots more, the kind of upsetting detail that keeps certain stories in the news for months, and some of it came right away for a change. Dr. Carbondale reached me in my car on the way home. Bree was driving her own car. "Toxicology shows no known poisons in Caroline's system," Carbondale told me. "No drugs of any kind, other than a.07 blood alcohol level. She couldn't have been more than tipsy at the time of death."