

This novel is a fantasy of the future, a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Great effort has been made, especially regarding those individuals who have recognizable positions with government, or publicly known organizations, mentioned herein, to insure they are not mistaken for past or present individuals in those positions. What the future holds, what possible outside influences may be brought to bear on future participants in those organizations, no one can say.

Copyright © 2019 Miles A. Maxwell FAB LLC  
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2nd Edition
Dedicated To The Preservation Of Human Life

Prologue

One

The bright angry mansion glowed in its corner spotlights. _Oh,_ how it burned just to look at it. The killer forced a smile. _Time to put all that to rest._

There was an important decision to be made. In the Big Cheeze's case, there were far too many options. His people had used knives, poison, guns, of course -- all shapes and sizes. Burning, garrotting -- two of his more creative bad girls had even used a snake -- a _sneaky snake_ to poison their sleazy, scuzzy victims with its venom. _Sneaky snake! Sneaky snake!_ The killer loved it! The right choice was so very important. It __ had to be appropriate. To fit perfectly.

By the time the lights finally went out, the killer had been waiting three and a half hours. It wasn't a problem. Hiding in the thick oleanders, watching the big corner bedroom with its magnificent ocean view. Listening to waves crash on the Cheeze's semi-private beach. The killer had waited a _long_ time to get here, to this exact spot. A lot of prep had gone into _the Plan,_ and more -- sometimes just convincing oneself can be the most difficult task of all. The killer gave them another thirty minutes to get comfy.

That was long enough. _Let the good times roll! Woo-hoo!_

The killer opened a backpack and pulled out a pair of night-vision goggles, and a dry-twill climbing rope tied to something that looked like three giant fish hooks welded together. Their weight swung easily in the killer's hand. One, two, _THREE_ skidoo! Up the hooks sailed. Up, up, and over. The tiniest of sounds when they caught the stone balcony. The hooks were made of graphite composite. Silence was important too. Softly, _"Woo-hoo!"_

The killer climbed. A little walk in the dark park. Leg over. _Ups-a-daisy!_ In silently through the guest bedroom's open French doors. Nothing like a little cross-ventilation.

The killer stopped. Awed at some of the rare documents hanging in the author's hallway.

_A Hofmann! A goddamned Hofmann!_ The killer remembered hearing about this -- one of the Cheeze's favorites, some of Mark Hofmann's best work, the forgery of an Emily Dickinson poem.

_Oh-my-God!_ On the wall next to it was a framed _Manson._ One of the famous California killer's written instructions to Leslie Van Houten.

Then came a gold-framed page of drivel by Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, a letter from Sirhan Sirhan, and alongside that, the Big Cheeze had an _Oswald!_ A framed original photo, it looked like, of the supposed JFK killer, posing with his rifle on one hip.

The killer moved silently to the end of the long hall and stood in the bedroom doorway. _There he is! Asleep in bed with his beautiful dark-haired wife! Mr. Big Cheeze himself! Woo-hoo!_

The killer nodded. It was time to give the world-famous Cheeze exactly what he deserved.

Two

"John, wake up!"

One of the world's most famous authors was having a fantastic dream, a nightmare, really. _What a great story! As soon as I get up, I'll write it down!_ He tried to get the dream to continue. _Get little Toonie screaming! See how the killer would use the knife_ _._ _._ _._

_"John!"_ the Cheeze's wife whispered, shaking him. _"Honey, wake up!"_

But her husband's eyes stayed closed, and now he was _smiling!_

Amy was well aware of her own active imagination. Reading her husband's first drafts for so many years had fired it and fed it oxygen until it burned bright enough for a shadow to become a serial killer, a monster -- _anything!_ She guarded against it. But she was absolutely certain of one thing: there was someone silhouetted in the middle of their bedroom doorway.

A quick flash of movement. A light in her eyes. A gasp -- and then she _did_ scream _._ A long piercing soprano that went on and on. Then stopped! Cut off, as if by a knife.

*

Twenty minutes later, the big house was silent. Ocean waves continued their indefatigable _shhh-whoosh_ against the beach. Balcony curtains danced in the gentle offshore breeze. The killer reached inside a snug leather jacket and pulled out something long and gold and exquisite. _Two maybe? Yes!_ A final touch.

The killer put them where they were supposed to go . . . and then disappeared.

Three

Five Years Earlier -- Colorado

Release!

_Thhhk!_ I pushed through the whippit gate with every pound of force available to my quads, an absolute full-range expansion of my thighs. _Clock on!_

The mountain snow was hard up here. Choppy, icy, I didn't care. At the moment I wasn't even aware I was skiing in a major competition. The only thing that mattered was _speed!_ Yeah, _speed_ baby. The snow was mighty fast today.

_Click --ffffft._ I hit the first gate exactly where I wanted, tagging the pole with my hip, making it wobble. _Click -- fwww._ The second gate -- _uh, a shoulder! Okay, okay -- it was that last mogul._ But I've got the rhythm now, c _lick -- fww, click -- fww, _My edges catching it just right.

And I'm flying --

*

"Ladies and gentlemen, Naomi _Spider_ Soul is down to the last third of the course," said the bald-headed announcer, a former Olympian. "She's not only far ahead of leader Dani Johnson's last run, but it looks like she's about to set a new course record here at Aspen's beautiful Ajax Mountain. She's _really_ moving, slicing through those gates perfectly. If she keeps this up she'll have the gold. With the aid of our Computer-Graphics Analyzer behind me, you can see that Naomi's knees are tracking straight down the mountain's fall line. _Cheryl?"_

"I'm glad you said that, Bob," his blonde _Sports Illustrated_ swimsuit co-anchor cut in. The camera zoomed in on Naomi's boots. "The camera shot we're looking at _does_ highlight one of the more controversial and contentious issues in this year's Winter Olympics. Three weeks ago Spider Soul won the right to modify her standard team uniform -- limited, as our viewers may have heard, to the area below her knees. I personally think it's very daring of her. I love that purple, black, and yellow webbing spreading upward from her ski boots. And other Olympians have followed, personalizing their outfits too. Take Lori Tynsmacher -- _Ahhh!"_

"Look's like she's caught an edge, Cheryl!"

"Yes," Cheryl gasped. "Her left boot has come halfway out of her binding, yet she's somehow managing to stay on her skis! How is she _doing_ that?" Cheryl shook her head, "She's through the next gate!"

A digital display flashed fluctuating red numbers directly over Bob and Cheryl's heads. "It's too bad, Bob. At that speed, she's _got_ to go down."

_"Cher-Chery_ l -- she-she's -- _look at that! She's back in her binding!_ She somehow managed to stay up and step back in! Naomi Spider Soul truly does have eight legs. The woman is _amazing!_ She's still on her skis!"

"It's -- _incredible!_ " the female commentator agreed. "Her time is exceptional, Bob! She's ahead of the course record by two full seconds."

_"Oh no!"_ Bob shouted. "Her -- left binding has -- it's _disintegrating!_ Look there, at the corner shot. The screws are ripping out. That ski -- is -- _gone!"_

Cheryl cringed, gasped, "Somehow -- I don't know how -- she's still _up!_ She's skiing on _one_ ski! _Look,_ in the closeup there. She's got her left boot resting on the _edge_ of her right ski as she made that last gate. And she's only got four more gates to go!"

"Ohh!" Bob said, "down to three -- look-at-her- _fly! Two gates!_ I've never seen anything like it!"

*

And that's when a little three-by-five, rock-studded patch of ice caught my remaining ski, ending my life as I knew it.

They say when you die, your life passes before your eyes. That didn't happen to me. All _I_ remember is a lot of snow coming right at my face. And for one excruciatingly long, drawn-out moment, my right leg in a helluva lot of pain.

Five Years Later

Florida

1

The thin angry scar that wandered down my right knee to my shin always burned first, a red line against my tanning skin. I didn't like it, but it was a good warning as to how much UV the rest of me could take. Funny thing about life, and sunburns, you never knew for sure how much time you had left.

It was hot that Autumn day, five years after my little "accident," as the sports magazines liked to call it, just two years before _The Big One_ would hit New York. My wing-girl Xue Sang and I were in a beautiful place. Salty air, sandy beach, the southeast Florida coast. Traditionally, Xue is pronounced "Shoe," but she prefers the way I say it: "Shooee."

"This is _so_ great," Xue laughed, turning the page of the latest Professor Of Weird thriller she was reading.

"Good one?" Xue loves novels. She reads a lot of them.

"Yup."

"How about dinner at the Parrot tonight?" I asked.

"Good call, Stretch."

I laughed. Such a silly nickname Xue thought up for me. No one else uses it. At five-seven I'm only an inch taller than she is. We were relaxed, at peace with the world, being slathered with plenty of lotion all over our reasonably decent bodies by some of the best-looking male slatherers we'd ever seen. Bagging a few rays, me in my new red, white and blue one-piece; Xue in her bright green bikini which looked just great against her mid-length dark Asian hair.

They don't call me _Spider_ Soul any more, and I don't ski professionally. A lot of pain, physical therapy, and study later, I work for the government. What the heck is an Olympic skier doing with the Feebees? Well, my accident made me kind of a poster-girl for courage. It put my face on a lot of magazine covers (with a picture of me in a wheelchair). But I wasn't about to sign up to do underwear ads like Nancy Hogshead or David Beckham. I needed something I could get my head into, as much as my body. So I went back to school -- online at George Washington University, at first. Then, when I could move around on crutches, on campus. The Bureau was practically right down the street.

It used to be the only way into the FBI was by first becoming a lawyer or an accountant. That's no longer true. An undergrad degree in psychology followed by a masters in criminology got me in. It was a lot of work but worth it. When you joined the Bureau, they changed your name from _Ms._ to _Agent._ Mine was FBI Special Agent Naomi Soul, the psychological profiler half of one of the all-female multi-cultural teams the new DC Field Office hired under the previous president's EE Mandate. _Efforting Equality._ Hiring enough women of various ethnicities to balance out the Bureau's male Catholic-Protestant majority. My best bud Xue never cared _how_ we got in, only that we _got in._ It would have bothered me, but I knew how good our test scores were.

"Ahhhh --" Xue sighed pleasantly, as we flipped onto our fronts. I ran a hand back behind me, pulling my short brown hair from my face, while someone poured a nice dollop of cool lotion across my shoulders _._

Five days ago we'd broken a fantastically vicious bi-coastal carjacking ring out of Mexico that used explosive devices to coerce people from their luxury cars. One of the attacks had resulted in a kidnapping -- a mother and her baby daughter. We got them back unharmed, and now forty-seven perps were in the slammer and thirteen more were dead. The paperwork was in, the case was closed. And we had this last glorious vacation day in the sun.

Big Kahuna Bruce and Tiny Tim (completely misnamed) spread more lotion across our backs. _Fantastic!_ I was wondering if these big beautiful boys would have been treating us so well if they knew we were federal cops, when my phone rang, _barked_ actually. Whenever I was taking time off away from home, I liked to switch my ring over to a recording of my English bulldog Winston. It helped with missing him.

Ten seconds after I answered, I knew our vacation was over. But the voice on the phone gave me no warning this was to be the start of such a personal tragedy, the most disheartening of my career.

2

"Here?" Xue asked. _"This one?"_ peering at a stone mailbox inside a tall hedgerow along Ocean Boulevard.

She slowed our little rented Ford Fiesta, as I checked the address I had in my cell phone. "I -- I think so --"

But as soon as we pulled in view of the drive, I knew we were in the right place. It was a white _castle_ , and not the hamburger variety. A huge oceanfront mansion set way back on a couple of acres of sloping green perfectly manicured lawn. Three stuccoed stories fronted by a circular palm-lined drive already filled with police cars -- marked and unmarked, two ambulances, and cops stringing yellow police tape across the bushes and trees. Forensic techs were walking the grounds.

We held our FBI wallets out the windows for the two Jupiter Police uniforms who were protecting the scene, then pulled around to the right by the massive ten car garage. We'd been ordered here by our boss Madeline Wu, who'd been commanded by FBI Director Charles Line to get some Washington eyes on site. Madeline had told us the victim was an exceptionally famous author known in the book business as the Big Cheeze. The entire mainstream media spelled it like that: _Cheeze_. Some blog writer had first used a _Z_ in the author's name, claiming she liked the way it dragged out the _eeeze_ , and it stuck. The Cheeze was everywhere -- young adult books, kids books, mysteries, and especially thrillers -- according to Forbes online -- to the tune of more the 400 million dollars a year. He sold more novels than any ten best-selling authors put together. If there was one author clogging the arteries of the New York Times best-seller lists it was the Cheeze.

The Director had acted as a consultant on two of his novels. Director Line and the Cheeze were friends. Now the Cheeze was dead. He and his wife killed by persons unknown, sometime before the maid had discovered them at eight this morning. No one had yet determined the cause of death. Which was odd.

Xue and I would have to tread softly. No federal laws had been broken, no state lines had been crossed. As far as anyone could tell, the crime had nothing to do with kidnapping or terrorism or national security. With only a pair of murders at a single location, the FBI wouldn't consider it our jurisdiction. Xue and I were here only as observers.

3

The FBI had this really great system for acquiring and organizing crime data we called _LINKS_. _Latent Investigatory National Knowledge System._ Each case had its own name, and its own numerical ID. Before we got out of the car, I turned to Xue. "What should we call this one?" We were initiating the system through my phone.

"Hmm," she thought a moment. "Big Cheeze?"

"Works for me." I chose, "LEVEL 2 -- ASSESSMENT," verbally from the drop-down menu, "INITIATOR: Madeline Wu," and pressed START. The system paused a moment, then assigned our reference ID. I showed Xue: LINKS DATA SOURCES. ENTER CODE: 14732. Xue spoke the code into her phone, hit ENTER, and the computer began uploading our video and audio streams.

"Photo," I said as we made our way through the police chaos. Nowadays we agents have it pretty easy. We used to have to make movies _and_ take still shots because movie camera resolution wasn't good enough. I've seen those old crime scene pencil drawings, too. Some of them were pretty rough. Our phones have precise built-in laser measurement, so the computer puts together enough 3D that sketching is a thing of the past.

As Xue and I climbed the grand staircase, the sound of a heavy zipper cut through the chemical-laden air. We were late. We hurried down the hall past a rogues gallery of crime memorabilia.

"Photo," I said to my phone as we stepped past another Jupiter uniform at the door to the master suite, and the famous face that had graced the backs of so many millions of novels disappeared into black rubberized plastic.

Just before the body disappeared I'd seen a word, written in red across the Cheeze's stomach:

I checked the wife's belly. Except for the trailing number, it was the same:

"Does the killer see himself as an artist?" I wondered aloud.

"Michelangelo was more than a sculptor and a painter," Xue said, "he was a poet."

"I didn't know that," said one of the detectives standing back from the big bed. We showed our credentials to a stocky Jupiter Detective in a Hawaiian shirt who introduced himself as O'Malley, and his Latino partner Detective Ray.

A two-man paramedic team lifted the wife's feet and shoulders, and a third, a woman, pushed a second body bag beneath the female corpse's hips. Right then, something gold flashed in the afternoon sun. _From between her legs._

"What's that?" I leaned in close to O'Malley and pointed.

"Hold it!" O'Malley said, squinting, following my finger.

"There's something, uh -- _Ehnt-eh,"_ he cleared his throat, "-- up there. See what _that is."_

The taller paramedic, a bruising fireman type, lowered the female corpse's feet back onto the bed and stepped away, a squeamish look on his face. The female paramedic pushed past him. Grabbed the body's right foot and pulled the wife's legs apart.

It was bright gold, gleaming in the overhead lights. The object, whatever it was, was slowly growing larger, longer, being forced out of her, working its way out of her anus. The female paramedic, with a gloved hand, reached between the woman's legs and gingerly slid it out. Held it up to the light, turning it this way and that.

"A gold fountain pen?" Xue said.

"An _expensive_ gold fountain pen." To my unfamiliar eye.

"Very expensive," O'Malley agreed.

"Do you think it still writes?" Xue asked.

"You try it," O'Malley coughed.

Xue's head snapped back to the corpse's nether regions. "What's that stuff?"

Contrasting against the black rubber bag beneath her, a white fluid was flowing out of the female corpse, from the same orifice the pen had plugged up.

"I don't know," said the ME, "but it doesn't look like anything organic to the human body."

_Organic?_

"What do you think, Doc?" O'Malley asked. "Open the other bag back up?"

The ME nodded. "Yeah, okay."

He stepped against the bed and pulled the heavy-duty zipper down. Spread the bag. Fished out a foot, pulling the Big Cheeze's bony leg to one side. When he scooped the Cheeze's genitals out of the way, barely visible, up between the Cheeze's cheeks, was what had to be the tail of another gold pen.

The ME nodded to himself. Duplicating the female paramedic's delicate maneuver, he wiggled another expensive pen out of the Big Cheeze's butt. More white fluid followed.

"Do you think the perp's trying to make a statement?" O'Malley asked.

Xue cleared her throat. I grimaced. Xue can be a little -- okay, _a lot_ -- irreverent at times. But this time she was right on the money.

She shrugged. "Live by the pen . . . die by it too?"

_"Yeeeaahh!"_ screeched the female paramedic who'd handled the woman's feet. The male paramedics were backing up. They were out of the way. O'Malley, Xue, and I already had our sidearms out, pointing between the female corpse's legs.

4

A wedge-shaped head was exiting the woman's anus, licking at the white fluid. The moment the snake had removed itself fully from the woman's body, it became clear what kind it was. I'm no snake expert but it sure looked like a rattlesnake to me. The moment it cleared the woman's butt, it coiled on the bed between her knees. Its tail lifted and began the familiar high-speed rattle.

We'd all managed to back up far enough to clear the snake's striking range -- except the female paramedic who seemed frozen in place, a deer-in-the-headlights look in her eyes, less than two feet from the coiling snake. The rattler was looking right at her.

That's when things really got out of control. A second snake's head appeared, this one from the Big Cheeze's butt, and proceeded to glide out onto the bed between the Cheeze's legs. But it wasn't content to stay with the Cheeze. It slithered over the author's kneecap and joined its friend between the female corpse's legs.

The female paramedic began to scream. The two snakes curled around each other. The other paramedics were yelling. The ME was backing away. Detective Ray, the local cop at the bedroom door, and another uniformed officer drew their weapons.

"Just back up slowly," I said in a gentle voice to the screaming paramedic, trying to calm her down. "Stop screaming at the snakes."

She wasn't listening. Instead of slowly moving away, she began a kind of jog in place, arms wrapped around her eyes, screaming louder than ever.

The snakes had had enough. They struck at exactly the same time. Six sidearms fired in unison. _BAM!_ _._ _._ _._ not just once either _._ _._ _. bam-bam_ - _bam-bam-bam-bam!_ I don't know who got what, but the two anvil-shaped heads exploded, and the snake bodies dropped in mid-air.

Smoke drifted upward. A lot of smoke. The female paramedic kept screaming. The ME went over and gently slapped her face. She stopped. He put an arm around her and pulled her to his shoulder. "There-there. Snakes all gone."

We officers of the law grinned at each other. We let out long breaths. With all the PC correctness of movie snakes, environmentalism, notices that _No Animals Were Harmed In The Making Of This Film,_ it's not every day you get to shoot a couple of snakes in a bedroom and feel good about it; heroic, even.

"Okay," O'Malley said. "Who wants to check and see if there are any more in there?"

5

We'd made a mess of the crime scene. Plaster on the floor, bullets in the walls, _through_ the walls. What were we supposed to do? We had to save the woman's life. O'Malley and Ray agreed to copy us with anything else they found. The ME agreed to email us a copy of the autopsy report. Xue and I began a walking video of the whole mansion.

I got a close-up shot of some tiny wear marks on the guest bedroom balcony rail. "Possible ingress," I recorded. Xue shrugged, then pointed them out to O'Malley.

We walked back to the beach. The main trail was bordered on either side by a jungle of sea grapes and ficuses, agaves and Boston ferns. Ocean waves were slamming into the shore. The surf was picking up. There were white caps on the wave tops.

"Think the killer came this way?" I asked.

"Maybe, but it looks like any tracks in the sand would have been blown away."

Halfway back to the house we stopped. "Pool area," Xue said into her phone, tagging three photos.

"What do you think?" I asked.

She shook her head, pulled in her lips. "Not much to go on. The snakes maybe. The chemical analysis of the victims at autopsy."

"What do you think those numbers on the bodies mean?" I asked. "And why Michelangelo?"

Xue pulled up the images she'd shot on her phone, zoomed in on the numbers: 62:4, 9:6. "I don't know."

A battalion of media people were congregating outside the property. We were on our way back to the car, when the uniforms let through a very upset-looking man in a dark-gray business suit. He was met halfway back to the house by Detective Ray. Xue and I joined them. The man handed us business cards:

There was a phone number printed on the back, as if handwritten. Curtis May was slim, with a fringe of curly dark hair circling a shiny bald pate, and a nose like a Roman emperor. "What _happened?_ What _happened?"_ he asked.

Ray and O'Malley sat May down on a short wall circling one of the queen palms. While Xue and I listened in, O'Malley told May the Cheeze and his wife were dead.

_"Dammit!_ Amy and John were my _friends,"_ May said, eyes tearing up. My _very_ good friends. We had dinner together just two weeks ago." Tears rolled down May's face. "How-how did they die?"

"We don't know exactly, Mr. May," O'Malley said. "We're working on it. Did you handle business for the, er -- uh, John and Amy?"

"No -- that's okay -- we-we all called him the Cheeze. Yes, there was a big movie deal in the works for him -- and a bidding war. What a _loss_ to the literary world!"

I caught O'Malley's eye. He nodded.

"How did you hear about the murder, Mr. May?" I asked.

"On the radio they said there were unconfirmed reports that a well-known author had been found dead in his Jupiter beach home. It's on every station. They weren't giving out details. I came over to see, hoping I was wrong."

"Your office is in Miami?" Ray asked.

"We're in New York City." May wiped the back of a hand across his eyes.

"What are you doing in Florida?" Xue asked.

"I came down to discuss the movie deal with John. We had a meeting scheduled for this afternoon."

"Where were you last night, Mr. May, after midnight?"

_"Me?_ In my hotel room."

We all stared at him, four cops giving him the dead-eye, just waiting.

_"I_ didn't kill them!" May shouted. "I-I would never -- call the damn front desk at the Breakers if you don't believe me! I ordered a-a late dinner in my room."

Curtis May was a repeater. The stuttering didn't quite fit how upset he was, though. It was just a little off. It felt forced to me.

"You'll be in town for a couple of days?" O'Malley asked.

"I w-would have been. I don't know, now."

"I'd prefer that you stick around for a day or two. Please contact me before you leave the state."

May nodded grimly.

O'Malley handed May his card. A few minutes later Xue and I drove away.

6

There's a nice little place just up Ocean Boulevard from our hotel called the Hungry Parrot, with good seafood and a dance floor. We called ahead and, when we arrived at seven, they got us a good table. We ordered drinks and dinner. All Xue and I could talk about were the murders. By now our boss Madeline had seen our LINKS data in Washington, and probably Director Line had too.

I took a sip of my Coke.

"I wonder who had it in for the Cheeze and his wife. I mean, who would want to kill an author, even a famous one?"

Xue took a sip of Heineken, one of her favorites, and held up a coconut encrusted shrimp, dripping with sweet-and-sour sauce, shook her head. "No telling. Not until the locals interview their friends and family." She bit the shrimp in half. "It's always the ones you love."

"I hate that statistic," I said. "I felt bad for that literary agent, Curtis May. He seemed pretty broken up. But by the end of our conversation, didn't something feel just a little bit off to you?"

"You'd be a bit off if your multimillion dollar account just got killed. Unless, of course, he was involved with their deaths. But, yeah, he was a little off. I know what you mean."

What an ending to our vacation.

As we finished our dinners, Big Kahuna Bruce and Tiny Tim arrived. The Parrot had a live band. We hit the dance floor. Tim was flirting pretty hard with Xue, doing the chicken walk around her, rubbing her back with his as he went by. She was having a great time, getting a lot of looks from other guys on the floor in her summery green dress cut to mid thigh. Xue looks good in green. Bruce moved pretty well for a big guy; he had his eye on me. A dance or two was okay, a couple of drinks. I wasn't interested in any more than that.

While the band took a break. I made a call and took a couple of minutes to check on my main man.

_"Hello, sweetie!"_ said my mom's voice.

"Just calling to see how Winnie is."

"Oh, Winnie's fine, but he misses you. Hold on. _Winston?"_

I heard a snuffling sound, then a couple of seconds later, a muffled kind of slobber in my ear.

"Winnie? Is that you buddy?"

_"Mruff!"_

"Are you being good for Mom?"

_Slobber._

"Good boy. Let me talk to Mom."

"Are you having fun?" Mom asked.

"It's been great. We got called in on a local case this afternoon, but --"

"On your _vacation?_ What is _wrong_ with those people?"

"It's okay, it's something for the Director. We're coming home tomorrow just like we planned."

"Was it bad?"

"They always are. I'll tell you about it when I get back."

"What's that __ noise? __ It sounds like guitars."

"Xue and I are at a restaurant. It's one of the guys in the band, tuning up, but we're making an early night of it."

I caught Tim and Bruce's frowning faces. Xue didn't look all that thrilled either. I had more than enough men in my life -- three amazing men, though I didn't see them much and didn't have enough time for any of them. The Bureau kept me far too busy.

"Okay, darling. See you tomorrow," Mom said.

"Love you," I said. "Good night."

About an hour later, against the vociferous protests of our male companions, Xue and I headed back to our hotel, alone. We had an early flight in the morning.

7

The killer known as Michelangelo came in dead quiet -- idling. The wheels coasted to a stop on the damp sand. The beach was absolutely deserted. It was that time of night. Overhead, palm fronds waved in the offshore breeze.

" _Cut the lights, cut the engine, here we go!"_ whispered Michelangelo and stepped out of the vehicle, making footprints that would wash away by morning in the rising tide.

From the back seat, the killer pulled out the tools required to execute the next step in the very ingenious plan: _"Time to get a little ca-razy! Duct tape, a little uniquely compounded aerosol, and . . ."_ with a little struggle, _". . . something ver-r-r-ry special!"_ A two-wheeled appliance cart, complete with straps. _"Time to go to work! Woo-hoo!"_

*

Fifteen minutes later the Prince slid in sloppily through the open door.

_He doesn't look this heavy,_ the killer thought.

The Prince let out a solid _"Oof,"_ as he flopped back into the passenger seat.

"There, there," the killer said, fastening the Prince's seatbelt. "It'll all be over in another moment or two."

Slamming the door, the killer ran eagerly around to the other side. "Just one more little thing; it'll take only a second --"

The killer removed something from an inside pocket and made a little jab, sucked up a little ink.

_"Ow!"_ the Prince muttered. The pain seemed to have brought him slightly out of his stupor.

"Just lay your head back and relax," the killer said softly, holding the Prince's head in place. "Signatures are so very important! _Woo-hoo!"_

Then, when everything looked just right, the killer drove off the beach.

As soon as they were up to a nice steady cruising speed right down the middle of the highway, the killer reached over, clipped something gold and shiny to the Prince's front pocket, popped the seatbelt and popped the door.

Wind _whooshed_ as the Prince's weight forced the door wider. The cool breeze seemed to bring the best-selling author around. His eyes cracked open. _"Wha?"_

"Nothing to worry about _Princie-poo,_ just a little fresh air -- one little step now . . . there we go," giving the literary genius a shove toward the night beyond.

But with surprising strength the Prince suddenly fought back, flailing wildly against the door frame.

He was too drugged out and weak, the killer too strong.

"There we _go . . . Princie!"_ And with a nice solid shove (a _SCREAM_ on the part of the Prince), he fell outward into the night. The vehicle wobbled dangerously, but the killer straightened it out. The door closed on its own.

The killer couldn't see exactly where on the road the Prince hit, but at this speed, who cared? Things were moving along. Right on schedule.

8

"Interesting vacation," Xue said. Our plane pushed back from the gate, sat a moment, then turned and made its way for the takeoff area. We were on our way home, buckled into our seats on a soon-to-be-northbound Delta 747.

"I had a great time," I agreed. Xue had dark circles under her eyes. "Are you sure you didn't let Tiny Tim sneak back to your room last night? You look a little beat."

Xue laughed. "Nope. Just couldn't sleep after that _whole_ snake thing. I was up half the night, reading the end of that Prince of Darkness thriller."

"That whole snake thing _was_ pretty disgusting," I said.

"No _pun_ intended." Xue laughed.

_"What? Ewwww,_ gross!"

"The Cheeze murders are a strange and bewildering case," Xue said. "But not for us, for the Jupiter Police."

"Never a dull moment, though . . ." I said, as we grinned at each other and bumped fists, then in unison, ". . . in the F - B - I!"

It was our little thing. We'd been doing it since we first became roomies, during our training at Quantico. Working for the FBI was a really great job, often fascinating, and sometimes, like yesterday, horrifying, sad, _and_ exciting.

The engines revved. The plane accelerated down the runway, then suddenly the breaks squealed. The plane slowed, and _stopped_.

"Mechanical problems?" Xue asked.

I shrugged, leaning down to see through the window what was going on.

One of the older flight attendants, a woman with short dark hair rushed down the aisle looking at us. She leaned over and whispered, _"Are you women with the FBI?"_

We nodded. "Yes ma'am," I said.

_"Please come with me."_

We followed her to the front galley where a second flight attendant handed me a telephone.

"Hello?" I said.

_"Agent Soul?"_

"Yes, ma'am?" I felt my eyebrows arch up my forehead. _"Madeline,"_ I mouthed silently to Xue. Madeline Wu, our boss.

"You're getting off that plane, right now," Madeline said. "We've got another murder the Director wants you to look into."

"Here in Miami, ma'am?"

"No, this one is on the other side of Florida, the West Coast. Another famous author has been killed."

_"Another author,"_ I mouthed at Xue.

Her eyebrows rose to match mine.

"Assume it's related," Madeline said. "We may end up sharing jurisdiction with the locals, but for now this will remain a level two assessment. You're still to observe only."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You'll be met in a couple of minutes at the plane." The call went dead.

"Another author's been murdered?" __ Xue asked.

"I guess so."

A flight attendant popped the door. A portable staircase was pushed against the plane. We ran down the steps. If things hadn't been so serious, I would have felt a bit like the Queen, tempted to raise a hand and give the royal wave. But a Bureau town car screeched to a halt at the bottom of the stairs, spoiling my fantasy. Fifteen minutes later we were in a state police chopper, headed west across the Florida Everglades.

9

The sun was directly above us by the time our helicopter passed over the mangroves and salt marshes of the West Florida coast. "It would have taken at least three hours to drive this," I said.

"And flying would take almost as long," Xue agreed. "Clearing our weapons through security, getting a rental at this end."

"So, while we were looking at the first murder, if it's the same perp, he's driving to the other side of Florida?"

"Unless he has a helicopter like this one."

An email trilled it's arrival on my phone. I showed the attached picture to Xue. Though both victims were authors, that in itself would not have been enough for Xue and me to be here. We were ordered here because of a definite link that had been found between the two crimes. Xue was pretty upset when she saw who the victim was.

"I'm changing the designation to Author-Author, okay?" I asked.

She sighed, "Yeah, okay."

Three minutes later the pilot circled over the crime scene. "Photo," I said to my phone as LINKS shot video out the window. Boy-oh-boy, this was some place. Two stories of white lanai balcony and stairs, surrounding something like 15,000 square feet of personal beach resort, and that was just the house. An elevated outdoor pool was built right into the center of the second floor. A private path through a private jungle led past a tennis court to the Gulf of Mexico. I guess writing novels paid pretty well.

The pilot set us down next to an unmarked state police cruiser at Captiva Island Heliport. A ten minute drive brought us back to the off-pink mansion on the beach side of the road that was owned by a very famous writer, one of Xue's favorites, known to his fans as the Prince Of Darkness. Not only were the well-known horror author's books terrifying -- I'd read a couple -- but the Prince himself was a pretty scary guy. I remembered watching him on the Tonight Show, leering into the camera, joking about people dying, bugs and graveyards, ghosts and murder. Well, now it was the Prince's turn.

There was no reason to go to the house. Not right away. The body hadn't been found there. Neighbors' cars, television vans, and looky-loos lined both sides of Captiva Drive. It was probably the most excitement the place had seen in a very long time.

Xue and I flipped open our IDs, ducked under the yellow police tape, and introduced ourselves to the local officer in charge, a tall skinny state police detective with a pointy chin named Leary. He took us twenty yards along the mansion side of the road to where the Prince of Darkness lay nestled among tall shoots of bahia grass.

"Photo, victim overview -- scene of death," I said, cluing LINKS to extract a shot of Captiva Highway and a couple of strapping ME guys getting ready to bag the Prince's body as we drew near the crumpled form.

The Prince was lying on his side in fetal position, knees almost touching his chin. I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never known the staties to let one of the victim's children hang around a parent's dead body. Yet, right there next to the corpse was this little redheaded girl, her back to us, hands on her hips, staring at the victim.

"Is that the guy's daughter?" Xue asked Leary.

The detective cringed. The little girl turned. A woman's eyes stared back at us. In the face of a very adult, very irritated, _little_ person.

_Oooh boy._

10

"Uh -- Agent Soul, Agent Sang -- please meet Dr. Essex Virga, Lee County Medical Examiner. Doc Ess -- Agents Soul and Sang of the FBI."

"Pleased to meet you," I said, trying to cover Xue's faux pas.

But Dr. Virga wasn't having any. She shook what I thought was a rather large head -- though I suppose everything is relative -- and said, "Why is the FBI here? Are you claiming jurisdiction?"

"No, Doctor. We're simply assessing the crime. A famous author was found dead on the East Coast yesterday."

"Yes, I know. Palm Beach, wasn't it?"

"Just a little north of there, in Jupiter."

"You have anything definitive yet, Doc?" Leary asked, trying to steer the conversation to our reason for being here.

"Hmmph," the ME said and turned to the corpse. There on the Prince's forehead was the same name that had been on the Cheeze's and his wife's bellies:

_"These murders are definitely connected,"_ I whispered in Xue's ear.

She nodded and whispered back, _"But what the heck do the_ numbers _mean?"_

I frowned and shook my head.

"The approximate time of death," the ME began, "was between ten and two last night. Preliminarily, it looks as if the victim was hit here, here, and across here," she said, waving the red dot of a laser pointer across the torn shirt on the Prince's mangled back. "He was probably struck in the road, then flung to the side where he is now."

"Like he was smacked by a big truck." Leary said.

_"Was_ it a truck?" Xue asked.

Dr. Virga nodded. "Very possible. Half the bones in his body were broken. I'll be able to tell you more after I get him on my table. The pattern _is_ strange, though. Other than a small hole, here," she said, gently displaying the red hole on the palm side of the Prince's wrist, "there were no drag marks. I've never seen a body this broken by a hit-and-run without a little road rash. It's like his entire back was struck simultaneously. So, very possibly a large flat-nosed vehicle of some kind."

"I've read nearly all his novels," Xue said. "If I remember correctly, he had a story about a little girl who was hit by a food delivery van."

"Really?" Leary said.

"On an island road just like this one."

"No kidding."

I studied what was left of the Prince's twisted body.

"Have you spoken with his wife?"

"She was at their house in New Hampshire. She's flying down this afternoon."

"Anyone see or hear anything?" Xue asked.

"Not so far," Leary said. "We're canvassing the area. The houses around here are pretty far from each other and a good bit back from the road. I'm not hopeful. Food and beverage trucks pass here all day and half the night. We've been examining the fronts of vehicles, trucks in particular, that were scheduled to make deliveries to local businesses."

Right then, a Florida State police officer walked a stoutly-built guy over. He had no real belly, just a huge barrel chest. He had red mutton chops and a full, red face. Right off, I could feel the guy's attitude. You could see the challenge in him, the way he walked over leaning forward aggressively.

"This is Range Tucker," the statie said. "He finished making a delivery to The Duck about an hour ago."

"The Duck?" I asked.

"The _Mighty_ Duck," Tucker answered. "Tha's uh th' restaurant just up the way, around the bend in the road."

"That's exactly like the Prince's story with the girl," Xue said frowning. _"What was the name of it . . ?"_

I leaned close to Xue and said softly, "I wonder if the Cheeze ever used snakes in any of _his_ stories?"

"We'd better look it up."

Xue walked over for a look at the man's truck. Another Florida state patrolman was over there with the hood up.

"What time did you get to The Duck?" Leary asked Tucker.

"About two hours ago." Tucker squinted at the Prince's body, pulled his lips into a tight grimace. "I guess I must have drove right by him."

Range Tucker was polite, but the type of person who wouldn't put up with anyone doubting his answers. We could use that at some point, if we needed to.

The state trooper who'd been examining the truck walked over to us. "His truck's clean," the officer said. "No blood or hair anywhere on the front." A minute later Xue rejoined us too.

"Any other trucks making deliveries while you were at the Duck?" Leary asked.

Tucker thought a minute. "Jus' a Coke truck comin' in when I was leavin'."

"Okay. Take his number," Leary said to the statie.

"Excuse me, Dr. Virga," I asked. "Do you have the victim's things?"

"Right next to my kit."

And there it was, in a baggie, the other tie-in we'd seen in the picture Madeline had sent over LINKS. This was officially a serial killing. Broken neatly in two pieces, inside the baggie I held up, was another expensive gold fountain pen.

"Murder link," I heard Xue tag a closeup shot of the pen into her phone.

We asked Leary and Virga to keep things quiet on the pen and signature. It was looking like we had a killer who could strike anywhere at any time. In the race against stopping him we were already three murders behind.

"Where was the pen found?" I asked.

"Half of it, beneath the body," said Dr. Virga. "And the pointy half --"

"The nib," Xue cut in.

"Right, the _nib_ half was sticking out of the victim's neck. Not the cause of death, I'd say."

"But still!" Xue exclaimed.

"Don't say it," I said softly.

She ignored me. "Live by the pen . . . die by it too."

11

"Who found the body?" I asked.

"That retired couple," Detective Leary pointed to a gray-haired man and woman wearing shorts, standing near the side of the road. "They were on their morning jog."

Typically, LINKS was smart enough to extract the most pertinent bits of our conversation and turn them into tags of images we might need to review later. I mostly kept quiet, let my phone record, and let Leary talk.

"They recognized the Prince immediately, of course," he said, "and called 911. Then, if you can believe it, they took a couple of selfies with the body lying there like that."

"I can believe it," Xue said.

"Yeah, well, those pictures are now all over the Internet."

Leary walked us over and introduced us to the witnesses: "Mr. and Mrs. Witmer." They seemed pretty upset.

"You live here on Captiva highway?" I asked. LINKS could have looked it up, but I wanted to get a, "Yes," to my first couple of questions, to get things flowing in the right direction.

"Over there," Mr. Witmer pointed. He shook his head sadly. "He was the _best_ neighbor, and even though we didn't really know him all that well, he was a good guy. He treated us like a friend. Invited us over to a couple of parties."

_You put pictures of your friend, dead, on the Internet?_ I thought.

Tears streamed down Mrs. Witmer's face. "We liked him. He was really great, not like his books at all, or the way you see him on TV. I don't know who would do such a terrible thing to him."

Xue and I left Leary and the Witmers, and made our way down the drive toward the Prince's home. "House, east side," I heard Xue echo my tag.

The driveway, unfortunately, was paved all the way to the house. It would produce no shoe or tire prints that would show how, or even _if,_ the Prince had been dragged out to the road. Except for these gold pens, and the word _Michelangelo_ on the corpse's forehead -- the only things that tied this crime to the Cheeze's death -- the Prince could have simply been out walking when he was hit by a truck.

By the time we got up to the front door, the local Florida lab guys were already on the house. They'd left traces of powder on the street side windows, and, "Fingerprint," Xue said, holding her phone next to the front doorknob.

As we were walking across the living room, a message popped up on Xue's phone. LINKS had already determined that the print belonged to the Prince. Years ago he'd been arrested as a student at an anti-war protest, a misdemeanor on college campus at Kent State.

"No prints from our perp. This was probably done by a professional," Xue said.

"I agree."

We went through the whole house. It was a beautiful place. Wide open rooms, except for the author's office which felt small and cramped due to the stacks of research and manuscripts. When we'd finished inside, upstairs and down, we took the trail out to the beach. Here, large circular pavers had been laid that would defeat any possible footprints. And it was windy today. The tide had come in. We weren't going to find a trail if the perpetrator had entered the property from this direction. Besides, it was most likely that the perp would have come directly up the drive from the road.

We didn't know how the fiber and hair trace analysis would come out, but it looked like the only thing this crime scene would have in common with the crime on the east coast was a dearth of evidence. Somebody knew what they were doing, which in itself was a certain type of clue. It said either he was very lucky, which I doubted, of this was a pro.

When we got back to the highway, we watched the ME's wagon pull out, K-turn, pass the crime tape, and drive off with the Prince's body.

"Hey!" Xue grabbed my arm. "Isn't that the Cheeze's literary agent?"

I blinked. "Curtis May? What's he doing here?"

"Let's go ask him."

"Mr. May," I said, approaching with a friendly smile.

"Ah, agents," he said, frowning. He took my hand.

"You know the deceased, Mr. May?" Xue asked, frowning back.

It was automatic with us. Whenever we did our good cop -- bad cop routine, Xue took the bad.

"Yes, they're both my-my clients -- the Cheeze and the Prince." May was understandably upset. Some people turn inward and clam up. Curtis May repeated. He had so much frantic emotion bottled up, he couldn't get it out. As if he couldn't express it fast enough to keep up with his brain.

"How did you hear about the Prince's death, Mr. May?" Xue said. "You got over here pretty fast."

"We were supposed to have a-a business meeting here this-this morning. _Demon Ghost_ was being optioned by a studio in Hollywood."

"Why didn't you mention that yesterday to Detective O'Malley?" Xue said accusingly.

May didn't answer. I watched his jaw tighten.

"This must be quite a blow to you, Mr. May," I said gently. "Losing two major clients in one week?"

"It is." He shook his head sadly. "They were both my good friends." May turned and walked off along the crime tape.

"Something bother you about that guy?" I asked Xue.

" _Everything_ bothers me about that guy."

Part Two

Washington, DC

12

The moment I pulled my Mini Cooper into the driveway, my mom opened the door, came outside, and Winnie waddled by her. We share Mom's nice three bedroom house in Bowie, Maryland; I help with the mortgage, which was nearly paid off. Winnie stuck his big frumpy head in my open car door and put his big white paws on my legs. He leaned his cute white shovel-nosed face against me, grinned, and let his long slobbery red tongue loll out, licking my arm as only an English bulldog can. Little pointy tail whipping back and forth, he stared at me with those big baleful brown eyes that can be sad and smiling and trusting all at the same time, as if to say, "Where the _heck_ have you been?"

I'd been gone almost four weeks.

"He missed you _so_ much," Mom said.

I always feel a guilty about leaving my boy behind. I leaned over, gave him a kiss and a big hug. He wiggled all around. Unconditional love. No matter what you do, your dog will always love you.

I grabbed my bag from the Mini's hatch and we went inside. It's actually pretty cool living with Mom. She's very supportive, more like my best friend than my mother, and she makes absolutely _unresistable_ lasagnas of just about every flavor imaginable.

"Dinner's ready," she said.

Exactly what I wanted to hear. "What are we having?"

"Lasagna with beef, broccoli, and peanut sauce."

I grinned. No matter how weird-sounding they might be, Mom's lasagnas are always spectacular. She's the best chef I know. I never bring guys home to dinner, though I know Mom would like me to. If I'm seeing someone and it goes that far, I stay with him. Living with Mom is like a privacy barrier -- which no man shall cross. Right now, that's the way I like it.

While we took our time savoring Mom's latest delicious concoction, I told her about the case. She was pretty disgusted but wanted to hear every detail. She didn't care for books by the Prince of Darkness, but she'd read a few of the Cheeze's novels and thought the way he and his wife were attacked sounded awfully familiar. I was going to make a push on finding out more about that tomorrow. By nine o'clock we were wiped out and hit the sack.

13

Driving into work Monday I received a message on my phone from my boss Madeline Wu:

If it had been just one dead author, even one as famous as the Cheeze, and even with the author being a friend of the Director, Madeline would have pulled us off. But _two_ very famous dead authors, connected by three gold pens and messages from the presumed killer, Michelangelo, were an entirely different matter. These had to be serial killings, and that's where the Bureau takes over.

I went through security waving my ID and took the elevator upstairs. When Congress finally decided to phase out the old cement-cracking, wall-peeling, basement-flooding Hoover building, the Bureau crammed a bunch of us into the newer Fourth Street Office. A few poor souls are still over at the Hoov, hoping to get out before it sinks into the mud. Xue and I were among the lucky ones.

I hung up my coat on the old silver floor stand I keep by my desk. My coat was the only one so far. I was the early bird. There's an eighty-inch wall monitor I like in Conference Room C. I'd been able to reserve it for seven a.m. When I looked in at six-thirty, nobody was using it, so I sat down, typed in 14732, _Author-Author,_ and LINKS got to work.

LINKS cogitated for its typical three to five seconds, then began sliding multi-colored container boxes up on the screen. We have the ability to swap out any of the pictures LINKS pulls from our video stream but that's seldom necessary. LINKS is a learning program, and it's gotten much better in the time I've been here.

LINKS popped in names and colored container symbols: Red for dead, as we say -- for victims, yellow for witnesses, purple for suspects and people of interest. Green for motive, orange is used for MOs, and black for weapons and other evidence. Brown boxes are shaped like little Monopoly houses, or business buildings, or tracts of land, or cities. Blue is for water. The system flashed, autolinking pictures and text boxes together, making only a few mistakes.

"Put the wife in with the Cheeze," Xue said, pulling off her jacket and taking the chair next to mine, "inside the Jupiter home."

LINKS immediately moved the wife over, inside the brown house-shaped box with the Big Cheeze. I manually removed two connecting lines and two boxes that the computer had gotten wrong: LINKS had put both me and Xue into yellow boxes as witnesses. We're supposed to remain external to the system.

"That agent, Curtis May," Xue pointed. "Connects to both crime scenes."

I nodded as LINKS made the change. Now it was easy to see the relationships. Frustrating, though. One major thing was missing. There were none of the purple boxes the system usually generated. There were already multiple victims -- three of them, but not a single suspect, not even Curtis May, which surprised me a little. There were no weapons in common between the crime scenes. The MOs were completely different. The Prince Of Darkness was probably hit by a truck -- a food truck possibly; the Florida staties hadn't found a likely vehicle, other than the one driven by Range Tucker to the Mighty Duck, and it was clean. We didn't yet have a cause of death on the Big Cheeze and his wife, although Xue and I strongly suspected what that would be. Only the pens and the name Michelangelo connected the two scenes, and these elements were in black. I let it be.

Xue started typing: GOLD P -- but before she could finish, LINKS flashed a picture onto the screen.

"There it is!" I said. "Madison Ciselé."

"That's it!" Xue agreed.

"What do they cost?" I asked.

Xue swapped over to an advertisement. "They're gold-plated. Retail is . . . _EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS?"_

"Wow!" I said. "Looks like those things aren't ordinary cartridge pens; they're bladder pens."

My phone vibrated on the conference table. I looked. "Email," I said, "the Jupiter ME's report!"

With an index finger, I flipped the report up on the big screen. LINKS gulped down the new data, made a black box, and connected it to both Cheezes. I expanded it so we could read the detail.

"Death by snakebite venom!" Xue said. "Just like we thought."

"Location: _Anus?"_ we said together, _"Ewwwww_ -- _"_

"White anal discharge, both victims," I read.

"Milk probably," Xue said.

"That's what _I_ thought it looked like. But no --" I pointed to a footnote at the bottom of page two. "Looks like the Jupiter ME assumed the same thing but --"

"Snakes aren't attracted to milk." Xue read out loud, "They're carnivores."

The fluid that flowed out was, to snakes, an irresistibly seductive mixture of blood plasma and egg whites.

"What was _that_ doing in there?" Xue said.

"I don't know," I said, "but what were the snakes doing in there?"

"Very weird," Xue said. "And look -- I was wondering about that -- the ME notes that they were relatively small as rattlesnakes go. Apparently the juveniles often deliver a more toxic bite than the adults. I wonder how they managed to breathe in there."

"Good question. Uh . . . it doesn't say. It does say _Michelangelo_ was written in the Cheeze's blood, which was found in his pen."

Though we were sure these were serial killings -- because of the pens and signatures, we had only two dead authors, murders that took place in a single state. So we hadn't _officially_ been ordered to take over jurisdiction. Yet. But the Director was probably right on the verge of authorizing it.

"Do you think the deaths have anything to do with something local to Florida?" I asked. "I mean, as a location?"

"We can't rule it out," Xue said. "Let's see if we can find those stories we talked about."

Xue had read all the Prince of Darkness novels, and I'd read a couple of the Cheeze's novels over the years. Thrillers are very popular with federal agents. Sometimes they help us solve crimes, and more than one author has been pulled in for questioning because they seemed to know things they couldn't have known -- unless they were there when a crime happened, or they had an amazing imagination.

There were two keyboards, two mice. We had LINKS split the big screen between Xue and me. I googled _'books by the Big Cheeze'_ and _'snake'_ and got a bunch of hits, one of which led to a bulletin board with a fan group discussing one of his older medical thrillers called _Queens Of The Night._

"Got one with a snake!" I pointed at my side of the screen.

We read down through a _Queens Of The Night_ summary _._ Not enough people had been donating their bodies to science. The med schools at Yale and Harvard were running short of medical cadavers. Two female med students were selling corpses to pay their way through college.

The med students would hide a sneaky, highly-poisonous snake inside the anal cavity of a recently dead hospital patient. Later that night, downstairs in the morgue, the snake would exit the body and kill the morgue attendant. The med students would sneak in, steal the bodies and, at the push of a cell phone button, a tiny beeper embedded beneath the snake's tail skin would sound, so they could safely locate and recover the snake without getting bit. It was like Michelangelo had used the killing part of the story to murder the Cheeze.

Xue went back to her own search, while I looked for the book on Amazon.

A minute later, Xue said, "I've got that story by the Prince, the one I was telling you about? Where the little girl was hit by a food truck? It's called _Impact._ "

I read down through the summary. "You're right! This must be the one. You nailed it." The girl was out by herself, late at night, running down a beach road when a big truck came along, and _BAM!_ smashed right into her. Her parents were devastated.

I thought for a moment. "Do you think the numbers on the bodies could be chapter or page numbers?"

"Hmmm -- maybe," Xue said.

We bought both books online and downloaded them to Xue's Kindle.

Xue searched the text of _Queens Of The Night_ for ' _snake'._ We compared the numbers 62:4 and 9:6 -- written on the Cheeze and his wife -- with the chapter numbers the search turned up. None of the snake attack chapter numbers matched.

Xue searched _Impact_ for _'truck'._ The chapter number where the little girl's accident took place was way off from either the 32 or the 8 on the Prince's forehead. We tried counting pages as we flipped through each story. No match.

"The nine on the wife is only three pages past where the first snake attack appears in the story," Xue said. "But the numbers on the Cheeze aren't even close. Nice idea, though."

We tagged the matching parts of the stories into LINKS, then read through some articles on the authors themselves.

"I heard these guys detested each other," I said, "and despised each other's writing style. But the way they talk in interviews, it's like hate-light, like a pair of bickering brothers."

"Very sharp, Naomi," Xue said. She pointed to a newspaper article filling her side of the screen. "According to this thing in the New York Post, the disagreement was fake. The Cheeze and the Prince were actually golfing buddies down in Florida, and best friends. They even snuck each other's name into their stories. The feud was strictly for publicity."

"You can't really believe _anything_ authors say, can you?" I asked.

"Nope," Xue said. "They're _fiction_ writers. They _lie_ for a living."

She had a point.

14

Four agents from Financial Crimes had scheduled Conference Room C, so Xue and I moved back to our desks. What we needed was a suspect, at least one.

"You read a lot of fiction," I said. "Who hates authors so much they'd want to kill more than one of them?"

Xue frowned. "It could be just some guy the Cheeze and the Prince both pissed off by going a little too far in their stories. Maybe a disgruntled book club member."

"Come _on._ Book club members, killing _authors_?"

"I'm not exaggerating. From some of the more radical one-star reviews I've seen, some of the readers have probably felt like doing them in, one time or another."

"This I'd like to see."

"There's a slew of them. They're all over Amazon, iBooks, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads. I'll tell you what, how about I take the reviews, collect the best ones, and you take a look at our two author's hate mail files."

"Deal."

The FBI has tremendous power in its databases. There's an old joke around the Bureau that we have the world's biggest porno collection. If you've ever had your photo taken when you ran a red light, we have your picture. If you've ever used a cash machine, or shopped at a grocery store, we probably have your picture. And if you've ever sent a picture of your genitals to a friend, we _definitely_ have your picture. I don't know how useful those pictures might be for identification purposes, but we have them.

There were a surprising number of anti-fans in both authors' hate mail files. It's the same with actors, musicians, politicians -- any public person. Fans send letters to authors' email addresses, and their publishers sort them by type. The really explicit threats are sent on to us.

I got LINKS to compile a list of people that had threatened both the Cheeze and the Prince. The combination of names and threats that LINKS spit out was longer than I expected. As I scrolled through page after page of disgusting hate mail, it became apparent our two dead authors had a lot in common.

None of the angry fans actually identified themselves as being connected with book clubs. But a few claimed affiliation with some religious organization. Generally, threats made by members of churches, mosques, and temples were circumspect. But I showed Xue one, sent to the Prince of Darkness, that was postmarked West Virginia. Some of the wording was a bit odd:

Dear Mr. Pottymouth,

Do you think for one minute that the fowl and discusting words you put in your book Campfire For The Dead are the kinds of things we want to read around here? We want our children to read? Well they are not!!! To have a God fearing child speak those words in any book is an abomanation of innocence. But in two examples which I shall not repeat, they are against the Lord!

Jesus is watching you. He knows every thing you say, everything you feel, and every word you write. Steering the children of God in your own pathetic attempt to blind them to the truth of where they should be taken, will only take you to the damnfires of Hell, where the "campfire" is large and neverending. You will pay for your insolents hear on earth. Jesus will surely see to that.

Sincerely,  
Reverend Gladhope  
Jesus Harvest Of Purity

_"Fowl?"_ I asked Xue. "Doesn't anyone use a spell-checker?"

"The good reverend is way beyond spell-checkerland," Xue said. "A spell-checker wouldn't catch _those_ errors."

"How do these people hear about the books they're offended by?" I asked.

"I know!" Xue said. "And _why_ do they bother to read them?"

Some hate letters were worse than others. The Cheeze may not have been known for the Prince's dark and satanic writing, but the Cheeze was often called a racist, a child killer, a promoter of murder, an insult to Southern Peoples, to People of Color, and just about everybody else. One letter really stuck out:

Mr. Big Cheeze,

On October 11th of last year, my beloved wife was brutally murdered outside our door because of you. Your book Red, White, And Black described our neighborhood, our house, my wife, and the man who would shoot her dead on our front steps -- to a T, in a copycat killing. All in the name of selling a few of your tawdry novels. You wrote the blueprint; the killer simply followed it.

If it is the last thing I ever do, the very last breath I ever take, I will find you and make you pay for the pain you have caused me and my children.

Sincerely,  
Cover Your Ass

At least the grammar was better.

"Any ideas on how we track down Mr. Cover Your Ass?" I asked.

"Maybe through the crime description," Xue suggested. We could look for murders that took place on the front steps of the somebody's house in, um -- it's postmarked Van Nuys."

"California?"

"Yup. That's a long way from Florida."

"Let's focus on letters closer to the killings," I said. "Have you found any notable reviews by residents of the southeast United States?"

"Dozens. Here's one on Amazon for the Prince. The reviewer lists his state as Florida."

Kill Yourself by Critical Sight

You should put us all out of your misery. Simply taking your own life would be doing us all a great big favor! Your books suck! All of them!

"I'm surprised Amazon doesn't censor these," I said.

Xue showed me a page of Amazon reviews online. "Look at the dates on these. The number of reviews best-selling authors get in a single day is huge. Sometimes it takes a while before another reader flags one and it's deleted."

"Unless we can narrow this down," I said, "we'd have to look into every angry review written about one of these authors' books by everybody who lives in Florida. Most of them don't even list their state."

"And _then_ what?" __ Xue said. __ "We phone _thousands_ of people and interview them? These two guys have written several hundred books, the Cheeze in particular. Is _everybody_ who leaves a one-star review a suspect? That's _way_ too broad."

"It's horrendous," I said. "Don't people have to have a credit card to post on Amazon?"

_"Riiiight . . ?"_

"So, let's get LINKS to cross-reference the most threatening reviews against credit card charges for travel Saturday between Ft. Myers, the closest major airport to Captiva Island -- where the Prince was killed, and Miami, the closest to Jupiter -- where the Cheeze was killed."

"Now you're making sense," Xue said.

"Except --" I scanned down the page. "Half these reviewers don't even give a name, just _Amazon Customer_."

"I know somebody at Amazon that can help us with that."

She showed me a few more of the scary one-star reviews she'd found. I read through them.

"Some of these are _so_ vicious," I said. "I try to imagine some guy typing this stuff on a keyboard in his apartment. It's weird; I mean, how long does it take somebody to write a novel?"

Xue rubbed a hand across her chin. "I don't know. A good one, maybe a year?"

"So every day, these authors -- the Big Cheeze, the Prince of Darkness -- they beat their brains out, pouring their sweat and blood into writing the most exciting story they can. Then one day, along comes a critic and maybe he doesn't even read the whole book, __ and in five minutes he just sits down and spews out a little paragraph with as much hate as he can throw at it?" I shook my head. "For what? It's hard to understand what he might be thinking."

Xue coughed out a dark chuckle. "Of course these aren't the ultimate bad review, are they? _Murder . . ."_

I nodded. "Zero stars."

A familiar voice behind us said, "Excuse me, ladies."

I felt a thrill of anxiety as I recognized the distinctive voice even before we turned around. Everyone in the Bureau knew it well. There he was, with that beautiful ivory Meerschaum pipe between his lips, unlit, of course. I'd seen the Director only once before in person, and nowhere near _this_ close. For God's sake, there were 15,000 of us. I had to admit what people said was true. He _did_ strongly resemble the sea captain face carved into his pipe. People said he lit the pipe in the privacy of his own office, regulations be damned. With his tweed coat and distinctive elbow patches, he looked like he ought to be dean of a big university, which was, of course, what he used to be before he became a judge, then eventually was appointed by the President to run the Bureau.

Neither Xue, nor I, knew how to respond, but we rose automatically to our feet.

"Sir?" I managed.

"No, no, agents. Please, sit down."

We sat.

"I've been reviewing your LINKS files on the Author-Author case. I appreciate the fine job you're doing." FBI Director Charles Line was known for his charm. Maybe that's why he kept Madeline around, so she could be the bad guy.

"Yes, sir," Xue said.

"Thank you, sir," I said.

"I just want you to know, if you reach any personal conclusions, especially on the Chee--er, John and Amy's part of the case, I'd appreciate reading them at once. I helped John with a couple of his books."

"Nothing from the crime scene yet, sir." I looked at Xue.

She shook her head. "We're working credible threats right now."

"Good. Let Madeline know if you need anything." And he was gone.

_"Whew!"_ Xue said.

_"Double whew!"_ I agreed.

*

Two hours later we'd lined up a couple hundred of the really bad threats and hit the phones. Xue put in a call to Amazon. The vice-president she needed there was at lunch. I put in calls to the publishers of the Cheeze and the Prince. We needed to speak to the authors' reps. I wanted to find out what they knew about Curtis May and any publishing people our two deceased authors were regularly in contact with.

While we were dialing, I called out, "Sounds kind of like a British pub, doesn't it?"

"What?"

"The Cheeze and Prince!"

Xue laughed.

But by the time we went home Monday night, neither of us was laughing. We were dog tired and flooded with suspects. The tide was rising. There were _thousands_ of threats. We put in a request to Madeline for some help, but even if the Director told her to give us twenty agents, boiling our leads down to those that were harboring a grudge that might rise to the level of a homicide would be impossible.

15

Most nights I make it home by eight. Mornings, I'm usually in the office by five-thirty or six. Mom thinks I work too hard. Between Monday night and Thursday morning she told me so a dozen times. Instead of _no_ suspects, now we had far too many. It was still just Xue and me. Madeline hadn't offered us any help. How could we sort through hundreds of alibis, then cross non-serious senders of hate mail and vicious reviews off our list?

"The Director _said_ to tell Maddie what we needed," Xue said.

"Like maybe a whole room full of agents to pitch in?"

Xue had another idea. "Do you think you could get Chip to create a bot for us?" Websites were flashing across her screen.

"What's a bot?"

"It's a program that would troll all the review sites and compile the nasty one- and two-star reviews into a database for us."

"I can ask him." I picked up my phone and dialed.

The number started to ring. Sometimes it takes a while. Even calling his direct line, Chip never answers right away.

There's a reason Xue turned the request over to me. Chip Balmer is one of my closest friends, and an FBI consultant who has access to all our files. He isn't just the smartest person _I_ know, he's one of the smartest people _anybody_ knows. Chip doesn't merely understand computers, that marvelous brain of his understands _people_ , the way they think. He used that understanding to develop much of the software used by the FBI.

Chip understands _me_ pretty well, too. When I was at George Washington, all the girls wanted to date Chip. Pretty unusual for a nerd, right? But he's got these startling green faintly-Asian eyes, and at six-two, a very nice build. He's got great lips, and I swear, Chip could talk a nun into bed. Chip didn't want a nun. Strangely, he wanted me.

Chip and I were the same age when I started college. By that time he'd already earned a master's in computer science. Two years later we both left school -- me, to join the Olympics, with half my bachelor's degree; Chip, with a doctorate in computer psychology. GW didn't actually _offer_ a degree in computer psychology. They made one up just for Chip.

While I was skiing in competitions around the world, Chip Balmer made it through half the Bureau's Standard Agent Training at Quantico -- before he quit. It wasn't like Chip couldn't keep up. He did all the shooting, the self-defense stuff, the physical training, and scored very well -- then bailed when he got his first look at the Bureau's computers. Chip especially didn't like the Bureau's mainframe. He said it was _yucky._ People still laugh about it. I think he meant something like _too primitive._ He took one look and walked away.

The FBI sure didn't want to let Chip go; they tried everything -- special incentives, even offering to build a special department around him with all new computers. If Director Line had his way, Chip Balmer would be working right here on Fourth Street.

But Chip insisted that he wanted to start his own company. So he moved to New York, then, first thing, Chip built LINKS.

"Hi, Naomi!" he answered before I could say a word. "How _are_ you, and _when_ are you coming up here?" Chip has asked me at least a dozen times to move in with him. He claims he's in love with me. I guess I'm a little bit in love with him too.

"I don't know, Chip. Xue and I are on a really bad one."

As I got into the case, I could hear Chip typing. He can carry on a full conversation with somebody while working a completely different problem. I've never known another human being who can do that. I figured, right then, Chip was probably reading our LINKS files.

"Hmm. _Whoa! Snakes?_ Two dead bodies on the _east_ side of Florida, and another one on the _west?_ Reviews, hate mail? I see where you're going with this. Let me set something up for you."

"Great!"

And Chip was gone.

Meanwhile, Xue and I kept producing potential suspects. Several thousand of them. LINKS had taken us as far as it could by itself. Unless Chip worked one of his miracles, it would be up to us to study each document and do the hours of page-by-page grunt work required. Three hours after I'd gotten into the office I was getting blurry-eyed.

"I've been searching Interpol reports," I called over to Xue. "I haven't found any suspicious deaths of best-selling authors outside the United States."

Xue didn't answer. I looked over. She was staring at me with an odd expression. "Naomi," she said. "Can I show you something?"

16

I stepped around to Xue's desk. On her monitor, a vertical six-inch ruler lay on a dented stainless evidence table. To the right of the ruler was a familiar gold fountain pen. We'd seen two more exactly like it, sticking out of orifices that need-not-be-named of the Big Cheeze and his wife, and a third identical gold pen in a baggie along Captiva Drive. The pen on Xue's monitor was indexed as evidence in another crime.

"Is there a make and model?" I asked.

"Yup." Xue scrolled down. "Madison Ciselé. An exact match."

"Where was this one found?"

"Two weeks ago an editor named Nancy Deer, who's written a couple of books, was murdered in Encinitas, a beach town north of San Diego."

"California," I said, nodding.

"I know," Xue said. "First that hate-mail letter about Mr. Cover Your Ass's murdered wife, and now this. A second connection to California."

"That's a long way from Florida."

Right then a priority email popped up on my screen. Chip had the Cheeze's and the Prince's negative one-star Amazon reviews boiled down, sorted and prioritized, and cross-referenced against their hate mail.

I showed it to Xue. Six of them were from people who lived in California.

"Let's put this stuff together," she said. "The reviews, the hate mail, the fourth pen, and send it up to Maddie."

Ten minutes later we did.

Five minutes after that, our presence was commanded to the fourth floor.

17

Our boss Madeline Wu wasn't the easiest person to get along with. She wasn't what you'd call gracious or friendly, and she wasn't very supportive emotionally. It can be an angry world out there. A lot of people at FBI Headquarters were angry too -- lab people, secretaries, and agents under our Special Agent in Charge -- about something almost all the time. Much of that anger was because of the way Madeline treated everybody. I'll admit sometimes she got to me.

But Mad Maddie, as her subordinates called our SAC, had one sterling quality. She made decisions with blinding speed that were seldom wrong, and she almost never had to go back on them.

By the time we'd arrived in her office on the fourth floor, our boss was already standing behind her desk leaning on two stiff arms, fists down, knuckles on the desktop. She eyeballed each of us for a moment, then uttered just one word: "Go!"

We turned and went.

The moment we were out of her office, I called Mom, and told her we were following some leads to California.

"So you'll be back late tonight?" she asked hopefully.

"It depends how the case goes. Give Winnie a big hug for me." I felt bad, leaving my boy behind again.

"He's standing right here," Mom said. "His big brown eyes are looking so sad; you know how he gets. He can hear your voice."

Yes, and I know how Mom gets, too.

_"I love you, Winnie!"_ I called out, and then said softly, "I love you, Mom." I'm not very good with guilt.

"I love you, sweetie. Be careful. Bye."

"Bye."

Xue and I grabbed our go-bags. We keep suitcases packed and ready for times like these. Its part of Bureau life. I felt a twinge of regret as we drove away -- first that big carjacking case in the south, then our little vacation in Florida, now out to California. Mom was right. I hadn't been spending enough time with my boy.

Ninety minutes later Xue and I were vouchered and seated in coach on an American 737, lifting off the runway at Reagan National.

Part Three

California

18

Descending into Lindbergh Field it looks like your wingtip is inches from the office buildings that pass by. They couldn't possibly be that close, but it feels a little freaky.

It was a beautiful afternoon in San Diego. The fog was breaking up, rays of sun shining through. Outside the terminal two agents from the local field office had brought us a black Taurus sedan. Xue was checking out the agent named Mac who resembled an accountant I once knew. She gave him _the grin._ He grinned back, at me.

"We called ahead for you," Mac said. "You won't have to wait for them to locate the evidence you want. They're expecting you."

"Thanks guys!" Xue said.

Mac shrugged, and he and the other agent walked away. I felt bad for my partner.

Xue and I followed the GPS north on Interstate 5 then, thirty minutes later, turned off the freeway into the beach town of Encinitas and let the GPS lead us several miles inland to the North County Sheriff's office.

The moment the front desk deputy saw our IDs, we were literally _whisked_ into a small conference room that had been reserved. The personal property gathered from the murder scene of the deceased editor and author Nancy Deer had been laid out on a wide sheet of bleached butcher paper. A male deputy clunked a white two-inch-thick binder down at the end of the table.

"Here's the murder book." He frowned at it. It wasn't exactly stuffed. "You may as well know, this is as cold a case as they get. We'd appreciate any help you can give us. Take as long as you like." He smiled at me. "There's decent coffee down the hall, soda, Moon Pies -- banana, chocolate, and vanilla. Let us know if you need anything. Always happy to help the Feebees."

When he'd closed the door, I said, _"Moon_ Pies? They must really be stuck."

Xue coughed out a laugh. "Sure, but people always treat you like that, Naomi."

Before we did anything, Xue opened her briefcase and pulled out a sealed evidence bag containing a beautiful gold pen, labeled in thick black letters: CHEEZE.

"They let you take that?" I asked.

She smiled. "I talked them into it."

"Probably best to leave it in the bag," I said, considering where it had been.

Xue coughed and cleared her throat. "You _think?"_ She laid it on the table next to a pen from the Encinitas evidence box that looked exactly like it. Same color, identical in shape and length. Definitely a Madison Ciselé. $785.00 retail.

I pulled the murder book over and flipped to the first page, the Summary. We were confronted by a picture of the victim, Nancy Deer. She lay on her back against a tan carpet. She had short dark hair and petite features. She'd been pretty. She had heavy red welts around her neck like finger impressions. Strangulation, _a third_ MO, and our first female author.

"You think somebody is paying to have these authors killed?" I asked.

Xue nodded. "Could be."

Nancy Deer had been killed two weeks ago at her beach house, less than ten miles from where we stood now. I considered the time line: _a week before our vacation, near the end of our big carjacker ring bust._

The investigating detectives here had thought the gold pen belonged to the victim, but not everyone was so sure. One of Deer's co-workers, a photographer named Tom Daniels, thought the pen was a more expensive model than the pens Deer normally used. The murder book made no mention of the word Michelangelo written anywhere on her body.

We drank some of the coffee, which was actually pretty good, as we went through the murder book page by page, three times. We tried the Moon Pies. I had Banana; Xue had chocolate. The sheriff's CSI people had thoroughly photographed the house. There'd been a fiber trace and print workup. The ME had run a tox panel on Deer's body; she'd been sober, no drugs. No prints had been recovered from around her neck. There were no prints found other than Deer's in the house; nobody else's DNA or trace evidence was found; she was apparently a clean freak. Every friend or close relative had an alibi.

As with the Cheeze and the Prince, this killer didn't _leave_ evidence. This was a pro. A sick, _evil_ pro. These murders were like bringing home a new jigsaw puzzle, sorting through the pieces, and finding one of the corners missing. You match the other three corners against the picture on the box to figure out which one you don't have. Except here, _all_ the corners were missing.

I turned to Xue. "Let's go walk the crime scene."

Xue coughed. "Why not? We're here. _Ccckh --" _she hacked. "Must have picked up something -- _ccckhh!_ -- on the plane!"

Plane germs can be nasty.

The sheriff's deputy who'd set us up, offered to make us a copy of the murder book.

"Thank you." I told him. "That's very accommodating, but we scanned the book into our system as we went along."

His eyebrows rose; he was impressed. He gave us a code for the lock box at Nancy Deer's house. Five minutes later, Xue and I were driving west toward the coast.

19

The editor's beach house was on a street named Neptune that ran along the top of a hundred foot cliff in the Leucadia section of Encinitas. When we stepped through the front door the first thing we saw was the horizon: two shades of blue. The upper blue was sky, puffed with small white clouds; the lower blue was darker, broken by white caps pushing into the beach from miles out to sea. The waves were mesmerizing.

"I want to live here!" I told Xue.

"Yeah, me too. C _cchhh . . . ccchhh . . . hack."_ Xue wasn't looking too good. Her eyes were red and puffy.

Our job was simple, to see if anything more than the pens connected this crime to our two dead authors in Florida. There wouldn't be any matchbooks inside the shiny grand piano that could lead us to a helpful bartender. We didn't expect to find any DNA or leftover hair in a plumbing trap. The basic grunt work had already been done by the locals. We walked the property, shooting LINKS video, until we'd seen every room in the house and the back yard along the cliff. This wasn't any mansion like those owned by the Prince or the Cheeze. It was only a single story, maybe 2,000 square feet.

We stood at the tape outline on the tan carpet in the great room where the body had been removed. "Photo," I said to my phone.

How had someone gotten in here and attacked this woman? The body had been found a good twenty-five feet from the front door. _Was it someone the victim knew? Or had her body been moved?_ This was a basic strangulation. Something felt off about this murder. No Michelangelo signature in blood for one thing.

"We have to look at more than the _methods_ used in these killings," Xue coughed. "Why _these_ specific authors? What's so special about them?"

"Then motive and opportunity," I said.

"Okay, but what here points to opportunity?" _Ckhhh . ._. sorry." She pulled out a tissue and wiped her nose. "Please, tell me," she cleared her throat, "do hate letters and bad reviews really indicate a motive strong enough to kill an author? Who hates authors _this much_? _Chhh!_ "

"All right." I began counting ideas on my fingers, "One, maybe this is being done by a nut who found that after he invested his time reading a series, he disagreed with the author's philosophy."

Xue shrugged. _"Hmmhheh._ Kind of deep, but interesting. What -- _chhh_ -- else?"

I extended a second finger. "How about a psycho fan who feels rejected. Maybe somebody that wrote to their favorite author and didn't get a response. Or, maybe he got a response, but didn't think it was appropriate."

Xue nodded and cleared her throat, "There've been lots of movies about crazy fans like that. But then it seems like we'd have to have at least _two_ disgruntled fans working in tandem."

"Because the murders are so far apart, geographically? True. Okay, then, Three," I said, extending another finger, "what if two fans who knew each other were both offended by the language these authors used in their stories? Too many f-bombs or s-bombs all of a sudden, or too graphic sexually."

"In other words, Onomatophobic," Xue coughed out.

"Ono- _what?"_

"Onomatophobia, it's when people are afraid of specific words. Ironic, isn't it? From what I remember of the couple of college English courses I took, the one thing they tell you over and over is _be specific."_

"I remember that."

She paused to clear her throat, her face getting redder. "They say _never_ write about just a _dog,_ but add specific details until you can actually touch your squat little white bulldog, and _feel_ Winnie's rough black muzzle against your hand." She covered her mouth and coughed. "But they never tell you using detail goes for everything _except sex._ These authors can write about people, boats, houses, cars, food, even _murder -- killing_ in any number of disgusting ways -- that's all fine, but not _sex."_

"People have a thing about sex," I agreed. "Those who feel they aren't getting enough sex _want_ to read about it. Other people don't even want to think it exists."

"Anyway, _chhckk!"_ Xue said. _"_ Go on with your list."

"Okay, let's see, um . . ." I held up a fourth finger, "How about publishers who are losing money on these authors' novels."

"Doubtful," Xue said. "I mean, _mmmt-hmm,_ for one thing, _these_ authors are writing bestsellers. At least the two who died in Florida were, making their publishers a ton of money. Besides, wouldn't a publisher that's stuck with a poorly-preforming author simply do a half-assed job of putting out the last couple of books in a contract? From what I've read, some publishers don't even pay their people what they're owed."

"I've heard that, but it costs a lot to publish a book, doesn't it? Cover design, editing, proofreading -- even if the publisher doesn't do any promotion?"

"Maybe," Xue agreed grudgingly.

"All right," I said. "The one perpetrator we haven't considered -- and I like this one the best -- is other authors."

"An _author_ killed by another _author?_ Oh, come on!" Xue said, coughing violently.

I nodded. "Jealousy can be a very strong motivator. Somebody who's been unable to work their way up the best-seller list and can't take it any more."

Xue went into another coughing jag. She seemed to be getting sicker by the minute. She pulled another tissue from her pocket. She was really hacking it up. Xue was in no condition to fly home.

"Maybe it would be better if we spent the night here," I suggested. "Why don't we fly back in the morning?"

Nodding, Xue blew her nose.

I locked up the house and took over the driving. We pulled in at a pharmacy. While Xue picked up some cold medicine she'd used before, I sent a text to Madeline explaining why we were staying over. We drove down the Coast Highway and found a nice little hotel up on a hill.

As we wheeled our suitcases to our rooms, I asked, "Anything I can get you?"

"No -- thanks, _hack,_ _hack._ Get yourself some dinner. I've used this Night-Of-The-Living-Dead cough stuff before. It'll knock this thing right out, and me with it. I just need a good night's sleep. _Cough --"_

"Feel better, okay?" I said as she closed her door. "Call me if you need anything!"

I caught a muffled, _"Okay!"_ followed by a few more coughs. Then her room went silent.

I was worried about her. I also wished we could have had dinner together in such a beautiful place. My next nearest friend was three hours north, up in Malibu. Oh, well. I hopped in our Taurus and drove over to Del Mar.

*

I parked in a garage beneath a restaurant I'd been to twice before and loved. Pacifica sits high on a hill, and every table has a great ocean view. The hostess gave me a tiny table for two right in front. I ordered a nice glass of California rosé and some honey-mustard catfish that turned out to be very tasty. I didn't mind being alone tonight that much. I wanted to think.

This case was crazy. Three different MOs on opposite sides of the country. _Beach houses . . . Hmm . . . All three murders have been committed in beach houses._ A link, maybe?

I was nearly done with my fish when a couple of surfer dudes offered to buy me another glass of wine. I thanked them and politely declined. I wanted to keep my head in the case.

I left the restaurant and walked, checking out shops along the Coast Highway. Del Mar is quiet in the evenings. Touristy, monied. I let my thoughts percolate in the moist ocean breeze. My skin felt great. I looked through the window of an antiques shop displaying all kinds of colorful exotically-shaped chairs and tables and boxes from faraway lands.

There were plenty of window shoppers out in town tonight. A family of Japanese tourists walked by, going the other way, posing for their ever-present cameras. I smiled at an older couple, hand in hand as they went past, out for a romantic stroll. They smiled back. I had the feeling they'd spent many wonderful years together. I hoped they'd have many more. They made me feel a little wistful. This job took so much, and much of it wasn't good.

One thing about the Editor began to bug me. I'd looked her up on the Internet on the plane coming out here. Though she'd worked very successfully through a free-lance group of editors called SDPEN, she'd written only two books -- one, a biography about a San Diego politician; the other, a novel. Both had sold poorly. Nancy Deer wasn't famous the way our two best-selling novelists were. She was famous _within_ the industry, for _working_ with famous authors.

We had _four_ senseless deaths. I looked up into the starry sky. I'd never believed too much in a hereafter; never let it bother me. I'd always figured some night each of us will lie down and join the infinite universe to sleep forever, _so why worry about it?_ A third of our lives is spent in preparation for it, sleeping, _so enjoy every waking moment; now is all you have._ I just couldn't see any reason why these three authors had to die, and of course, the Cheeze's wife.

I called it a night. I got the car out of the garage and was back at the hotel by nine-thirty. As I got into bed, I lent an ear to my partner's room next door and felt relieved when I heard only a single cough, and it then went quiet. _Sleep well Xue,_ I thought.

20

"Woo-hoo!" the killer said softly. _The view up here is awesome! All this, paid for by imagination?_

The Professor of Weird wrote novels that were sly, crazy, compelling, scary, and sold in the millions. A lot of people died in his books, always in convoluted, horrifying ways: bugs ate his victims, lightning bolts took them out, their heads exploded, or they simply vanished into other dimensions.

_"Now it's the Professor's turn,"_ the killer chuckled softly, hiking up the sloping half mile private drive, inside the gate. The darkness was broken only by a line of solar-powered landscape lights defining the driveway's edge. _Authors have such poor security! Who would ever harm an author? Nice,_ the killer thought.

This one would be a little different. The killer wasn't alone, for one thing, but had brought a friend. As the house came into view, the friend growled deep in its throat, then padded along in silence beside the killer.

*

An hour later, the job was done. The friend was bloodied and had run off, and the killer was smiling, taking a last look at the work, "A bloody masterpiece -- so to speak."

The killer took a couple of minutes to personalize things, then turned and ran back down the hill laughing. "Time for Part Two!"

21

Playtime! Woo-hoo! This _oughta be fun!_

It was brilliant architecture, one of Huntington Beach's nicest buildings. Sandstone facings on wide steel spans, glass everywhere. _Very exciting and modern!_

A surfer riding a wave had been created in the classic tile work across the front wall. _It sure isn't easy to find oak doors like these nowadays!_ the killer thought. _It's almost a shame to destroy them!_

But the killer wasn't done for the night. _Not nearly, nope, not at all!_ The front was brilliantly illuminated by spotlights mounted beneath the corners of the eaves. The killer ran along the building's side. _This little job is at least as important as the Professor, and an opportunity for much larger results!_

The entrance by the parking lot around back was pitch black and completely deserted. From an inside pocket the killer fished out a narrow case and extracted the perfect tool. The killer was a pro, right? _Of course!_

_Click! There!_ The back door swung open. _First things first._

Back in a corner hatch, the killer found the water shutoff valve and closed it. A small black backpack was upended onto one of the many reading tables. Dimly lit, by the killer's tiny cap-mounted LEDs, were eight yellow-and-blue plastic bottles, a popular brand, the sixteen-ounce size. The killer snatched up the first two, flipped open their EZ-pour-spouts, and ran up one aisle and down the next, squirting the fragrant liquid everywhere. _Plenty of raw material here to work with,_ the killer thought, _and not a thing anybody can do about it! This will be absolutely unstoppable! "Woo-HOO!"_

Minutes later, air _thick_ with the smell of it, the main room echoed with the killer's wild laughter.

_"All ready?_ _Yes, indeedy! Just waiting . . . for that one . . ." psssst -- "spark!"_

The flame hovered a moment above the killer's fingertips . . . then the killer backed against the front door release, pushing it open, and . . . tossed the match. The moment it touched the floor -- _WHOOM!_

The killer ran, leaving a rapidly expanding conflagration. The doors burped outward, expelling a blast of heat.

_That's going to take the whole damn thing down._ The killer was halfway down the drive when the library's big glass windows exploded. _Just like a bomb! One more step in the_ Master _Plan. Whoo-hooooo!_

22

I woke up frightened, not knowing where I was, with a pounding in my head. Light was streaming between the window shades. The pounding stopped. Then resumed, louder. I ran naked to the peephole. It was Xue! I cracked the door.

Xue wasn't hacking or sneezing but she looked like she'd had a rough night. Her eyes and nose were red; her nostrils, chapped.

"What's _wrong?"_ I asked.

"We've got another one," she said. "Another famous dead author." I let her in. "And strangely," she said, "someone burned down a library."

"Near here?"

She shook her head. "Up in Orange County, where the author was killed, but I doubt they're related."

I dressed as she told me what she'd learned.

*

As Xue drove up Interstate 5, I canceled our flight back to Washington. This one sounded really bad. We turned inland and, five miles from the coast using our GPS, found the right street rising into Huntington Hills.

We ID'd ourselves past a cop at the large ornate front gates of what looked to be a huge estate.

As we neared the top of the driveway, we could see out across Huntington Beach. Xue pointed to a cacophony of flashing red lights surrounded by a cloud of smoke, not far from the ocean. "That must be the library that's on fire," she said.

When I stepped from the car and looked around at the vast beautifully landscaped trees and bushes, the first words out of my mouth were, _"My lord!_ I had no _idea_ authors made so much --"

"-- _money!"_ Xue said. "Somebody's been selling a buttload of books."

_Xue!_ I thought, rolling my eyes. _Sometimes . . ._

We walked around the garage to where we could see the huge house, and I stood there with my mouth hanging open. It was like entering a theme park. I looked over at Xue. Her mouth was open too. The house was a work of art, built from millions of books, stacked and molded together to create walls. The sides of the house were like endless shelves of books. Even the crazy massive columns were uneven stacks of books. Titles and author names were painted on the spines. I opened a browser on my phone. According to Wikipedia the lifetime bachelor and former English professor at UCLA who had lived here loved books more than people.

As we walked farther back into the property, we came upon a white clay tennis court that looked like a giant book, it's net set between two open pages. We continued on back to an Olympic-size pool with lines of text marking lanes on the bottom like an underwater novel. Lounge chairs shaped like open books were lined up on the deck.

We hurried around the pool to where a body hung upside down on a metal crucifix, the author known as the Professor of Weird.

Xue said softly, "A great tome was not had by all."

_"Not funny,"_ I whispered.

I aimed my phone at the first author we'd encountered killed in a way that suggested religious overtones. I thought of the Prince's hate mail, Reverend Gladhope out of West Virginia. Had we been blind to the religious angle?

"Is this some type of biblical retribution for sins committed?" I said. That was about all my psych education could suggest.

Xue shrugged and shook her head. "Maybe."

It looked like the crucifix had been built from a short piece of pool-skimmer rod lashed sideways to the top of a flag pole. The flag lanyard had been used to raise the Professor by his ankles. The rest was _really_ grizzly.

I'd never seen anything like it. The Professor's head was waist high. There were what looked like bites on his shoulders, and more bites on his widespread arms which were pulled apart by two ropes staked into the ground. His face was bathed in blood, with a wide pool of blood on the ground beneath his head. His right hand and nose were missing. _Something_ had chewed his throat out of his neck. I could actually see the white bone of his spine. His shirt had been torn open. A message similar to those on our Florida victims had been hand-printed across his chest:

The letters were tall and crisp and slightly slanted. There was no artistic feeling to them like those of Michelangelo in Florida.

"What happened to _Michelangelo?"_ Xue asked. "Are there _two_ killers at work here?"

I nodded. "It looks that way."

"What do you think the name means?" Xue asked.

"Maybe the killer thinks he's doing people a favor," I suggested. "But what's _with_ these numbers?"

"Maybe it's a code to the next victim," Xue said.

The strangest part was the Professor's blood-coated pale-blue eyes. They were wide open, staring in defiance, with a gold fountain pen, obviously a Madison Ciselé, stabbed into the right eye.

"Do you think this is an animal bite?" Xue muttered, studying the neck wound.

"Correct," replied a female voice behind us. "Bear or possibly cougar."

We turned to find a statuesque model type, with a long flat brown braid down her back, dressed in plain brown slacks and a brown shirt. She was carrying a standard black medical bag. She peeled a glove off her right hand, and we shook.

"Constance Meriweather," she said, "Orange County Medical Examiner."

Xue and I introduced ourselves.

"What time do you think this happened?" I asked.

"Somewhere between midnight and four a.m. last night."

One thing they have to correct when you join the Bureau is how ridiculous the cop shows are when it comes to time of death. There are just too may variables to actually pinpoint TOD any more precisely than an hour. Those shows have created tremendous pressure on MEs to tighten their time estimates unrealistically. Meriweather wasn't one who'd given in to the pressure. She was giving us the best she had.

"Why do you say a bear or a cougar did this?" Xue asked.

"The bite radius, mainly, and these long gashlike striations here on the face," she pointed, "and the sides of the neck. And these marks, here, adjacent to the shoulder bites."

Under Merriweather's guidance, I could see what she meant. The way the Professor's upper body had been ripped and torn. It was very hard to look at.

Merriweather added, "I suspect he was alive when the attack took place."

We stood there trying to deal with _that_ idea. I could see what must have happened. He'd been disabled somehow, a drug probably, tox would tell us. His feet had been tied to the flag lanyard and raised, his arms tied, one at a time a time, then forced apart. With the blood rushing to his head, and his body fully exposed, he'd been offered as an evening meal to some type of beast.

If he was aware of what was happening, he must have screamed bloody murder as the animal chewed at his shoulder, took off his hand. No one heard his pitiful screams -- the property was too big -- and finally the animal ripped out his throat. He had to have been dead by the time the killer shoved the pen into his eye. I hoped so.

Xue shook her head, "He's been one of my favorite authors for years." She watched as the cops lowered his body down. "What's even stranger is, this looks a lot like what happened in his breakout novel, _The Creature Of Fierance."_

_"Really!"_ Merriweather said.

Xue nodded. "In the woods outside a Mexican village called La Serenidad, lives a creature that hunts unwary travelers. To stop the creature from hunting in town, each month a religious sacrifice of one male victim raised upside down on a cross is made to the creature to keep the town safe. The creature always killed by ripping out the throats of its victims."

"Wait a minute. Wasn't that made into a movie for TV?" Merriweather asked. "I-I think I might have seen part of that . . ."

"The movie made from the book was called _When Darkness Falls."_

_"Right!"_

The ME introduced us to a couple of Huntington detectives and we told them about the other deaths in our investigation. Sometimes, with the right people, the more you can share, the more you get back later on. They didn't have any on-the-spot insights, but they appreciated the information. We traded business cards and asked everyone to withhold information on the pen and signature from the media.

Xue and I spent another three hours filming and tagging the Professor's huge estate. This was a _fourth_ completely different MO.

"Why are none of these pen crimes like the others?" I asked Xue as we walked back to the car. "And now, _two_ signatures?"

"I know. Is this some kind of coast-to-coast club that hates authors?" she asked.

"Maybe," I said.

Though we needed to stay on top of the interviews of relatives, friends, and employees, I knew they would turn out to be a waste of time. The pens and signatures said so. This was a nationwide serial, plain and simple. So I laid out my hypothesis from last night, weak as it might be, that maybe all these killings were related to beach homes.

Xue stopped on the way to our car, coughed, and looked back at the crazy house of books, then turned and looked way out to the sun over the distant ocean. She shook her head. "There goes that theory. The beach is too far away."

23

We drove back across Interstate 5 to the Huntington Beach Library fire. We couldn't get very close. Firemen had the building surrounded, blasting it and the neighboring buildings with hoses. The fire was nowhere near under control. The heat was intense. We watched as the roof collapsed.

It took us ten minutes of showing our IDs to various firemen and one firewoman before we could locate the portly man in charge, the fire chief. He was managing the fire himself. The library fire was a big deal. Huntington Beach didn't get many fires. We introduced ourselves.

"Do you have a cause yet?" Xue asked. _"Cccck! -- _excuse me."

"We do. Arson."

The chief told us his people thought someone had shut off the valves to the automatic sprinkler system. He said they hoped to have the fire mostly put out in the next two to three hours. I looked at the blaze doubtfully, hoping it didn't spread down the block. We thanked him and left our cards. We had no reason to think the fire was related to our author murders. Still, the timing _was_ odd.

It was Friday afternoon. We'd done what we'd been ordered to do. We had the weekend off. Xue sounded better, but was occasionally still hacking.

"Are you sure you want to fly home tonight?" I asked.

"Not really."

Xue knew I had my own reasons for not wanting to rush back to Washington. We found a nice Hilton that offered a government discount, and checked in.

"Anything I can do for you, hon?" I asked Xue in the hall outside our rooms.

_"Hack!_ No -- _Ccccccck -- _I'm -- _coughhhh_ -- _okay!"_ she said opening her door. "I'm going to take some more of that zombie cough medicine and -- _hccccch_ -- just sleep. Go have fun, Naomi. This sounds worse than it is. I think I'm getting better. _"_

"Want me to leave the car? I can find another way up north."

"You take it. _Hcccccccchk."_

"No, I'll call a car service if I decide to go. I'm going to stay here for an hour or so and see how you do. I'll be right next door if you need me."

She nodded, hand over her mouth, turned and wheeled her bag into her room. "If you don't hear from me in half an hour, then just go. _Cccckhh!"_ She let the door slam behind her.

The front desk had put us next to each other. I could hear her coughing in there, but after a while, it slowly eased off and became quieter. She must have taken her cough medicine.

I wondered whether I should stick around to watch over my best friend. I argued with myself, _Hey, she told me to go!_ _She has my number if she really needs me. Besides, the hotel has concierge and room service if she wants to order food or medicine. She'll have the car . . . maybe I should stay . . ._

I laid down on the bed, called Mom, and told her what I was doing. I asked her to kiss Winston goodnight for me, and we disconnected.

I didn't have much of a love life. No FBI agent does, not even the married ones. We worked too hard. In the past six months I think I'd had three dates. None of the men I'd seen lived in the same part of the country as the others. I hadn't seen any of them in more than two months. One lived less than two hours from where I was right now.

I waited another hour, then set the guilt and worry aside the best I could, and, hoping he wasn't out of the country, I called Tommy.

24

The Uber was expensive, a hundred and fifty dollars, but worth it to make certain Xue had a car. Unfortunately, the driver got me to La Paloma Restaurant in Hollywood before Tommy did, because a couple of minutes after my drink arrived I had to experience the raw naked envy I see every time I'm out with Tommy. The moment he entered the room, every female head swiveled in unison like a tennis audience following him over to my table.

Tommy L'Place is one of the most beautiful human beings I've ever seen. Millions of women obviously agree. It's probably the second most important reason his films are so popular. Every one of those women wish the world was full of Tommys, but there's only one.

"Hi Noms!" he said, sliding into the booth, leaning over to kiss me. He grinned, and I swore I could hear, across the room, the estrogen being released like steam. Tommy was dressed in a pair of tight jeans, a black shirt open at the collar, a black leather jacket, and snake skin boots. His startling blue eyes searched mine, looking for something. His straw-colored hair was short on the sides and brushed back on top. I'm not immune either. I've known Tommy since my Olympic days, and that charming bad boy grin called forth my own reaction _._

A female server materialized at our table.

"What are you having?" Tommy asked me.

"A margarita."

Tommy smiled at our server and she melted. "Make mine a golden?" he asked, "With a little Grand Marnier on top?"

"Yes, sir." I swear she curtsied before she walked away.

You wouldn't think someone who looks like Tommy would be interested in anything but himself. That's not Tommy.

What most of the horny women in the restaurant probably didn't know about him was something he didn't advertise, that Tommy says has helped his career more than acting school or even his looks. It's the number one reason we're friends. Tommy's not just another A-List Hollywood face. He has a masters in psychology from UC Berkeley.

It was no surprise that night when the next thing out of his mouth was, "So, you're out here on another case, Noms? Want to talk about it?"

25

When I didn't answer right away, Tommy said, "It's great to see you again. I've been thinking about you, a lot."

I grinned back. "Nice to know."

"So, what's going on?" he asked. "What are you working on?"

I hesitated. Fortunately, the server returned right then with Tommy's margarita and a big smile, which gave me a minute to consider just how much of the case I wanted to disclose. She stood there waiting, a lot of suggestion on her lips while he tasted the drink. Her mouth moved as though she were tasting it with him. Or tasting something.

"Mmmm. Perfect!" he smiled. "Thanks!" But there was no flirtation in his words. He turned back to me. The server waited like she was hoping for more, then gave a disappointed little shrug and walked away.

Tommy paused as he set his drink down and let out a, "Hmph." In a nice big scrawl on his bar napkin was _Beth,_ written over a phone number. Tommy shot me a lopsided smile, flipped the napkin over, and set his drink back on top. _"Now, Noms,"_ he said, you were just about to tell me all about this new case."

Tommy knows me well. In the last couple of years, I've talked over my tougher cases with him when I'm in town, one psych major to another. He knows more about psychology than me; I know more about crime. I wanted his help on this one badly, if nothing more than to bounce the case off another perspective. I looked into those baby blues and nodded. "Yeah, I'd like to talk with you about it, Tommy, but you can't say anything to anybody."

He feigned being hurt. "I never do."

"I know, but if this thing continues to grow like it has been, it's going to be real high-profile. The press haven't connected the dots. You can't even tell your _grandmother_ what we discuss. I could get in a lot of trouble."

He shook his head and held up three fingers: "Scouts honor. My lips are sealed. And _you_ know my grandmothers are both dead. So, go on, then. Tell me."

I let out a breath and, keeping my voice down, told him softly about the first two murders, the Cheeze and the Prince on opposite Florida coasts. I described the snakes crawling out of the Cheezes' you-know-where, until Tommy was choking on his margarita while I told him about six cops blowing away the snakes in the Cheeze's bedroom.

"Understandable," Tommy gasped. "I'd be scared too. I hate snakes, especially the poisonous ones."

I told him about editor Nancy Deer's death, and that she'd written no best sellers. That her murder felt different from the others, since it was missing the signature in blood.

"If it feels different to you," he said, "It probably is. Trust your instincts."

I walked him through the horrifying scene at the Professor of Weird's mansion-of-books, _The Benefactor,_ written in blood on his chest, the makeshift crucifix he was hanging from, and the author's torn throat, another pen, this one stuck in his eye.

_"Yeesh!"_ Tommy said. "That's incredibly vicious. I saw a news story about his death this afternoon. There was nothing about an animal. I liked the Prof's stuff. The studios are always trying to make movies out of his work."

Our server returned. I asked for a taco salad; Tommy ordered two chile rellenos.

When she left with our order, I told Tommy what the pens cost and compared where each one had been found. The pens hadn't been in the news. We were holding that back. I told him about the fire at the Huntington Beach Library not far from the Professor's house.

He sat there, staring at me. _"Wow!"_ he said, "It's too bad I can't give this stuff to a screenwriter I know. He'd make a terrific film out of it!"

"You can't."

"I know," he said reluctantly. He leaned back, eyes on the ceiling.

I let him think.

When he focused on me again, his eyes were dark and serious. "You better be careful, Nom's. Whoever is doing this crap sounds like one tough hombre." His voice dropped to a whisper, _"These murders sound like they're professional."_

I nodded. _Just what Xue and I thought._

Our dinner came. Tommy took a thoughtful bite. "I imagine you're already putting a profile together on what kind of people would _do_ this?"

I put a hand on his arm and nodded. "Does what I've told you turn on any light bulbs? What kind of people we might be looking for?"

"It seems personal, doesn't it?" he said. "Like there's a lot of hatred involved? A group of professionals, I guess, with one very angry person behind them."

I nodded.

"See," Tommy said, "when I work my way into a complex part, I have to get into the character's head."

"Sounds like basic psychology."

"It is. Acting school calls it _method._ The first thing I figure out is, what's the goal of the guy I'm playing?" He took another bite of chile relleno. "What is this guy trying to accomplish? Doesn't it seem like there's a plan behind these murders?"

I played with my salad. "That's the way _I_ thought of it."

"I don't see how the library fire is connected, though."

"I've never been much for sluffing off coincidences," I said.

He nodded. "Me neither." Tommy held his fork in midair, thinking. "The thing I don't get is, why kill authors? What have they ever done to anybody except entertain people? As a group, aren't they pretty harmless?"

Suddenly, I felt the _WHY_ of these deaths almost within my grasp. I reached for it . . . but it was gone. It felt nice to have Tommy on the same path I was on. What _was_ this killer trying to accomplish?

When we'd finished eating, Tommy said, "There was once this bad guy I played, years ago, my first major role, a murderer who escaped from prison. The guy seemed to be killing randomly as he traveled, but that wasn't it at all. He was actually putting a team together to break his brother out of prison."

"Jonny Waco."

"That's right!" Tommy smiled, "You've seen it? It's pretty old. The critics panned it."

"I've seen all your films; it was great. Waco went on a killing spree from Oregon down to San Francisco -- before the FBI figured out where he was headed, of course, and shot him down."

"Yeah." Tommy's face changed. Suddenly, Tommy wasn't Tommy. There was a look in his eyes that scared me. He wasn't my friend, he was a killer, on the Bureau's Most Wanted list. His mouth snarled. His hands went for my throat. I shrank back. I felt terrified.

"Leave her _alone!"_ said a voice.

I looked up. Two guys were leaning over our table, scared and angry, ready to grab Tommy and pull him off me. Everyone in the place was watching, frozen.

Tommy sat back and laughed. "It's okay, guys. I was just doing a bit. Something from an old movie."

The two men frowned, not buying it.

"Really," I cut in before things went any further, "I'm with the FBI." I flipped open my ID. "Mr. L'Place is helping us with a case."

The guys' heads jerked back like they'd been slapped. They looked at Tommy, looked at me, and laughed, embarrassed. "Sorry about that," the shorter one said.

"No problem," Tommy laughed. "It's flattering, really. Thank you."

One person began clapping, and in a moment it spread to fill the restaurant.

Tommy smiled, waved to the other diners.

"Uh --" one of the guys muttered.

"What?" I asked.

The taller one pushed over a pen. "Do you think we could have your autograph, Mr. L'Place?"

Tommy shined that wide Hollywood grin on them. "Sure, guys."

I lifted our empty glasses off the cocktail napkins, and Tommy signed.

He turned to me. "C'mon, Noms." He scooted out of the booth, threw some bills on the table, and grabbed my hand. "Let's go."

I laughed as I got up.

"What?" Tommy said.

"You know you just gave that guy Beth's phone number?"

26

Tommy has one of those fabulous Malibu beach houses with a spectacular view when the moon drops down on the ocean and casts its long beam across the water right up onto your back door. The waves were roaring in when we arrived. We undressed and got into Tommy's big bed. I slid back and Tommy slid forward until he was spooning me.

He kissed my shoulder, then whispered, "You are _so beautiful, Naomi."_

_The most beautiful man in the world telling me_ I'm _beautiful?_

He planted little kisses on my neck once, twice, and I expected to feel him to harden against me, but he didn't. I was still waiting, beginning to feel kind of disappointed, when I drifted off to sleep.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I became aware of something touching me _down there,_ his hand sliding back and forth between my legs.

"Mmmm," I murmured.

I felt him slide forward as he opened me. This time he was hard, and I was ready for him. He glided right in. "Ahhh," we said together.

As we pushed apart, then close again, his hand slid over my hip, around front cupping my belly, up over my breasts. We went on like that, Tommy sliding his hand all up and down the front of me, as we moved apart and together, his lips against my neck, my shoulder -- until neither of us could take it anymore, and we just let go, him barely a moment after me.

Locked together, we drifted back to sleep.

27

Woo-hoo! It was a big beautiful two-story located on a corner lot, right beneath the Hollywood sign. Driving along the side street, the killer known as the Benefactor checked out the indoor-outdoor pool with its retractable sunroof that took up most of the back yard. Inside the house was supposed to be a very nice formal dining room and _six_ bedrooms. The Benefactor hoped to own something just as grand one day.

According to an interview in Publisher's Weekly, the house had been built by the inventor of the Quonset hut, which had tickled the famous author who now owned the place, nicknamed the Marine, into buying it for historical reasons; the turtle-like metal Quonsets dotted U.S. military bases everywhere in the world. There was no fence, no gate. The killer simply parked down the street, walked up the front walk, and rang the bell.

A minute later, the outside light came on. The door opened and there he was. That strong face, that broad forehead, the brain that had produced so many bestsellers. Author Number Five wore a black T-shirt that proclaimed his goofy message: _NO YIELD!_ The motto belonged to the Marine's storybook hero.

_Well, okay!_ the killer chuckled inside, _No yield! Quite essential tonight!_

"May I help you?" the Marine asked.

"You certainly may," the killer smiled, pulling a silenced automatic from behind a leg. Aimed dead center, middle of the forehead, and pulled the trigger. _Pfffew!_

"Won't be any more bestsellers out of that gray matter!" the killer laughed.

The moment the Marine hit the floor, the killer squatted over his supine body, sucked up the fresh red ink, and quickly signed the evening's work. As the killer put the gold _calling card_ in the appropriate place, a female voice called out the Marine's name from another room.

The killer rose, turned, and quickly walked away, into the dark and quiet night. A quiet that was broken moments later by one long piercing female scream.

28

I woke in the dim morning light to a sound I love, the ocean washing up on the beach. Until it was interrupted by a phone ringing. Fortunately, it wasn't mine; this was the weekend, and the phone didn't bark. I sighed, " _Ahhh . . ."_ but an uncomfortable worry intruded.

I forced myself out of bed, fished my phone from my blazer. "Hmmm," I mumbled, "battery's dead." It rang again. I gave Tommy's shoulder a gentle shake. "Tommy -- please wake up! Your phone's ringing. I'm worried it might be for me."

A hand snaked out from beneath the sea-blue comforter and reached for the night table. The hand found Tommy's phone. _"Hello . . ?_ Hi, Xue. Yeah, she's here. Hold on." He handed it to me. The FBI has everyone's number.

"Are you okay?" I asked. "How are you feeling?"

"Did you forget to charge your phone?" Xue's voice frowned at me. She didn't sound sick anymore. "I've been trying to call you for an _hour._ While you were getting laid, someone was getting dead. We've got another one."

"Who? _"_

"A big name author in Hollywood known as the Marine."

I was feeling kind of irritated. "You make it sound like it's my fault. Like God's punishing me for enjoying myself."

"No," Xue coughed out something suspiciously like a laugh, "I didn't mean it like that, Naomi. Of course I didn't."

"Never mind. Can I meet you at the crime scene?"

"That'll work. I'm in the car headed north and I've got your bag." She gave me the address. "As soon as you can, Naomi, okay?"

"See you there."

We disconnected.

*

An hour later in Tommy's Porsche, I thought I was hallucinating. A silver Mercedes flashed by, driven by a guy I was surprised to see in Hollywood. Not that he wouldn't be here, but the timing was sure odd. I watched as he was quickly swallowed by the heavy traffic on La Brea Avenue.

Tommy pulled into a street filled with blue and red flashing lights -- police cars, a white van that said LA County Coroner on the door, and an LAPD CSI van. I spotted Xue on foot making her way through the chaos toward a large white two story house. I called her name.

She turned and smiled and walked back to us. "Hello, Tommy," she said.

"Hi, Xue."

"I better go," I told Tommy. "I'll call you later."

"Okay." He gave me a big smooch. I got out and waved goodbye.

"Why do you get all the good ones?" Xue said, watching him wistfully as he drove away.

"I could be wrong," I said, but I think I just saw Curtis May drive past."

_"_ The literary agent? _Here?"_

"I'd swear it was him, turning off Franklin onto La Brea in a silver Mercedes."

"Are you _sure?_ Right after two more big name authors are murdered?"

"I think so. I only got a quick look before the car disappeared."

"All right. When we're done here, we'll look into Mr. May again."

Xue and I approached the front door. We were here later than we would have liked; the Coroner's people were already laying out a body bag. The Marine's body lay on its back just inside the front door, likely where it had fallen. Would knowing this was his body's original position help us? It hadn't helped with the Professor.

"He was quite an attractive guy," Xue muttered, as we walked over for a closer look.

I nodded grimly. The Marine had what appeared to be a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. Other than the dark stippling around the bloody wound, it was difficult to tell. "A close shot."

" _Another_ MO!" Xue said. "What is _with_ these killers?"

"And another pen, this one stuck in the hole in his head."

"At the price those things go for, they're like gold watches," Xue said. Permanent retirement gifts, so to speak."

I nodded. "Interesting idea."

The Marine's black T-shirt had been pushed halfway up his chest, exposing a tight six-pack. Through the top of the T-shirt I could make out the shape of a pair of bulging pecs. I was surprised to see that he had no tattoo on his torso. On the way over this morning I'd used Tommy's phone to do a little research. The Marine was supposed to have a large red _No Yield_ tattoo on his chest. Instead, there was the now familiar signature:

with _another_ number, slashed there in red. The slanted capitals were similar to those on the Professor, though not so neatly drawn, as if the killer hadn't had time to do the job properly.

I leaned over and smoothed down the Marine's shirt. A _NO YIELD!_ sign was printed on its front. I knelt near the Marine's left hand. He was wearing a wedding band. There was a blond woman in a red dress seated across the living room, crying. _Must be his wife,_ I thought.

A voice over my shoulder said, "The pen in his head probably rules out the wife."

I looked up to find a gnarly gray-haired man wearing an LAPD detective shield on his belt. He introduced himself as Howard Stern. Xue and I showed Stern our IDs. I could tell Xue was bursting to say something.

" _Please,_ no radio jokes." Stern said.

"How did you know about the pen?" I asked.

"We heard a rumor about a similar pen stuck in a vic in Orange County," Stern said. "I assume that's why the FBI is here?"

"We're trying not to disclose that or anything about the signature to the media," Xue said.

"No problem." He glanced at the Marine's wife. "We'll back-check her, of course. She was the only one here. See what she has to gain by her husband's death, and we'll run her phone records to see what outside calls she's been making. But I don't think she had anything to do with this. We haven't found a gun; the bullet's in his head. From what we can see of the entry wound, we're probably looking for a nine."

_Nine millimeter parabellum,_ I thought. _Latin: Para bellum -- meaning: for war._ This was certainly a war on authors. The successful ones. If Stern's guess turned out to be correct, the bullet would our first bit of traceable evidence. Maybe. Ballistics wasn't the exact science TV shows made it out to be; another thing the Bureau taught us.

"There's a reason we always look at close relatives and friends before anybody else," Xue said, gazing at the wife. "Murderers are monomaniacal."

"Mono- _what?"_ Stern asked.

"Focused on some emotion to the exclusion of all else. Think of a time you've had a fight with somebody you loved, when nothing else mattered; not love, not family, not your personal history together. Often, you don't remember what you argued about."

"Yeah, I've had a few of those with my ex-wife," Stern said. "So?"

"That's monomania. Taken to an extreme, that may be the mind of this killer, what we're looking for here."

"I'll keep that in mind," Stern said doubtfully, and moved off.

I hated to disagree with Xue, but I, too, doubted her analysis. "Maybe," I said. I was thinking of what Tommy and I had talked about.

Xue gave me an odd and disappointed look I'd never seen on her face before.

"I'm wondering if these killers," I said, "don't really care one way or the other about their victims. Maybe this killer, or group of killers, are focused on some kind of goal."

Xue stayed silent. I knew her pretty well. We rarely argued, but when she didn't agree, she could keep her true feelings bottled up inside. Still, I thought she was taking my idea seriously, so I went on.

"I have the feeling that whoever's doing this is out to accomplish something specific. We don't know _what_ yet, but _whatever_ it is, they're highly intelligent, _and_ they have a plan. I'd bet on it."

I hated to offer my appreciation for the brilliance of whoever was thinking up these murders, and their lack of crime scene contamination, but I could almost _feel_ a thoughtfulness, a sort of intelligence behind them. The whole thing was -- I don't know -- _diabolical, and_ professional. So far, there'd been no fingerprints, no DNA, no fibers left behind -- and in this particular murder there probably wouldn't be because it was a 'shoot and go'. Not much time for transference to take place. Except the bullet. Maybe. If it wasn't too deformed, and if we had one like it in the Bureau's database. I doubted it.

"Remember that idea you had yesterday?" I asked Xue. "The coast-to-coast author murder club?"

"I'm not sure I was serious."

"But what if this _is_ something like that?"

Xue frowned but didn't answer.

"These murders are being executed far away from each other," I said, "linked only by the fact that all the victims are authors."

Xue nodded. "You have a point. Authors, and these crazy gold pens."

29

My cellphone had a partial charge from Tommy's Porsche. When it rang I pulled it out on the first bark. Xue smirked. _I better change that,_ I thought, _now that we're working on the weekend._ Caller ID said it was Madeline.

"Special Agent Soul," I answered.

"I've been speaking with the Director. Have you or Agent Sang personally conducted any witness interviews at any of the crime scenes out there?"

"No, ma'am. You instructed us to observe."

"You're still in Hollywood?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"What potential suspects were on the property when the murder took place?"

"Just the wife, ma'am."

There was silence. A male voice said, "This is Director Line, Agent Soul. I've been viewing your LINKS files. We're raising these murders to Level Three. We're not taking over jurisdiction yet, but we are moving this case to a more active level of participation. I want us to begin recording our own interviews, starting with the victim's wife, whether or not she's already been talked to by LAPD. Can you handle that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. You've been at the other scenes. You'll know what to ask."

"Yes, sir."

The line went dead. My signal showed five bars. It wasn't the battery.

*

Stern gave us the rundown on the wife, Sally Ann. She and the Marine had been together thirty years, and married for twenty-five. They had two daughters, nineteen and twenty. Both girls were away at college, the younger one not far, at UC Santa Barbara; the older one up at Berkeley.

Xue and I walked over. Sally Ann's clingy red dress hung limply on her hunched frame. Her shoes were discarded to one side. She was keening softly, a thin wail that went on and on as she rocked back-and-forth on the white leather couch, head in her hands.

There'd been no need to move Sally Ann outside the house. She couldn't contaminate what she'd already touched. According to Detective Stern she'd held the body in her arms. The murder had taken place in the doorway, the body falling back on the foyer floor. The killer had probably spent very little time inside the house.

"Hello, Sally Ann," I said. "I'm Special Agent Soul with the FBI. This is my partner, Special Agent Sang. May we talk with you?"

Her only response was an increase in the volume of her keening. LA detectives had already been working on her for more than an hour. She'd probably had enough of everybody.

"Sally Ann," I tried again, "we're very sorry for your loss. May we ask you a few questions, please?"

There was no change. I wondered if she could even hear us. I wondered if she could speak.

"Ma'am," Xue tried, "we're on a very tight timetable. The sooner we get information, the better our chances of finding the person that did this to your husband."

I nodded. Xue was right on track. Shifting focus from someone's loss to the perpetrator can help. It's the reason revenge is so powerful.

But Sally Ann's only response was a drop in pitch to a long deep moan. She stopped moving, remained bent over, and began to shake. I like to think I'm pretty tough, but the pain coming from this woman was overwhelming, and it began to infect me. Xue and I looked at each other, wondering if there was some way to get through to her, when a small sobbing voice came from the huddled mass before us.

"T-they _idolized_ their father. He was _everything_ to them. Every boy they've ever met, they compared to him. This will wreck them both."

She remained bent at the waist where she sat, face pressed against her knees. I could barely stand to sit there as her anguish roared over me.

"Did you see anything?" Xue asked. "Did you hear anyone at the door?"

Her answer was a long wracking sob, then a whisper: _"We'd just made a toast to each other, a special bottle he'd saved for a whole year."_ More strongly: "This book was _so_ difficult to write. It was already Number Four on the _Times_ list. Everything -- was _so_ -- Oh, _God --_ _perfect."_

Xue and I waited. Sometimes it's better to say nothing.

_"The doorbell rang,"_ Sally Ann whispered. "I remember him getting up from the table, swearing, 'Who the _fuck_ can that be? At _this_ hour?' Sometimes his fans would get our address. _Ohhh --"_

We waited.

She cried softly, "He went to see. I heard him say 'May I help you?' He's always so _damned_ polite."

"Was there any response?" I asked.

"I -- I think so. I didn't hear it clearly."

"Could you tell if the voice was male or female?" Xue asked.

"I --" She looked up, squinted, shook her head, tears leaking from her eyes. "I-I don't _know!_ I heard this odd sound, a little _pop,_ like air being released from a balloon. I heard a voice, I think, and a thump. I called to him, but there was no answer. I ran to the hall. My _God_ -- he was there on his back, on the floor, so still. And that pen, in his head! I wanted to just pull it out!"

"Did you touch it?" Xue asked.

"Of course not! _Oh, God!"_ She hugged her knees.

_Her husband wrote about murder. Even in her anguish she knew better than that._

We tried to talk with her for another ten minutes but couldn't get a coherent word.

Her doctor came. The woman sat down next to Sally Ann. A few minutes later, as she took Sally Ann from the house, all Xue and I could say was, "We're very sorry for your loss."

I doubt she heard us.

30

When we left the Marine's house, I was breathing hard. I couldn't help it. I didn't want to let these horrible murders take me down to a place where I couldn't think. I wanted to stay rational. Letting my emotions run wild wouldn't help us find the next victim before the killer did.

I tried to focus on the tiny bits of evidence we had, but my mind kept running over the horrible things I'd seen this week, especially the Professor of Weird. I couldn't get the man's bloody throat out of my mind.

Xue and I got back in our bureaumobile. As I pushed my phone adapter into the car's lighter socket. Something gold flashed in the sunlight on the dash.

Xue reached for it.

"No!" I shouted. I wanted to throw the damn thing out the window, but I pulled a pair of latex gloves and a baggie from my blazer. I pulled a pair of tweezers from my little kit and gingerly picked up another Madison Ciselé. Xue's instinct to use her hand was the more rational response, mine the obsession. There probably wouldn't be a single print. Still, you never knew. I bagged it.

"Is it a taunt?" Xue asked. "Or a challenge?"

"Maybe a threat," I said. We looked around to see who might be watching. This vicious killer was now targeting _us. Well let him come, dammit!_

"Curtis May?" Xue asked.

"Let's go find him. Right now."

31

"I want to know if Curtis May is really out here," Xue said.

I nodded. "LINKS has his number." I put the call on speaker.

"Taylor and May," said a female voice

"This is Special Agent Naomi Soul with the FBI. I need to speak with Mr. May."

_"FBI?"_ I heard her swallow. It does that to some people. Sometimes it makes things easier, sometimes more difficult. "I'm sorry, ma'am," she said, "Mr. May is out of town. You've reached his service."

The weekend wasn't doing us any favors. "I need to speak with him right away."

"I'm sorry, that's not possible. He's in meetings all day, in California."

Xue raised an eyebrow, tapping a curved forefinger downward in the air.

"I need his cell phone number," I said. "We're investigating the death of two of his clients."

"That may be," she said, suddenly finding a little gumption. "But I have no way to verify that from here." She probably had fans and wannabe authors pretending all sorts of things.

"Please have him call me, as soon as possible." I gave her my name again and my number.

While we waited, we thought we might swing by the LA Field Office. Xue K-turned out of the Marine's street, turned right, and we soon found ourselves on Hollywood Boulevard, the Walk of the Stars, when Curtis May returned my call. I put him on speaker.

"Mr. May, you're in California?"

"I am."

Xue whispered _, "He sounds a lot more calm than he did in Florida."_

"We'd like to speak with you, if you don't mind, Mr. May," I said.

"I do mind." He sighed. "But I'm willing to meet you. I'm at the Beverly Wilshire."

We made an appointment for an hour from now, then drove directly to his hotel.

Fifteen minutes later, after showing our IDs at the front desk and asking them not to alert Mr. May to our arrival, we took the elevator up and knocked on the door to his room.

"Mr. _May?_ It's Agents Soul and Sang!" I called. "We're a little early."

He cracked the door. The chain was on. He was wearing a bathrobe. "A lot early, I'd say. I'll meet you down in the bar in ten minutes." He closed the door.

Five minutes later the _SuperAgent To The Stars_ came out of his room dressed in a light-gray suit, surprised to see us waiting in the hall. We all took the elevator down together.

"I'm out here negotiating movie rights for the Prince's heirs," May explained when Xue asked him what he was doing on the West Coast. "For his latest bestseller, _Demon Ghost."_

Xue studied May's face, with undisguised doubt.

"There's been another author killed," I said, as the elevator slowed.

"I heard," May said, sweat beading on his bald head, a first sign of anxiety. "The Professor, down in Orange County. The industry is in an uproar; it's why I agreed to talk with you today, though he wasn't my client." Curtis May stroked his chin. "I wish he had been, though. He was a great writer."

_Did May ever think of his clients as just people?_ I wondered. _Somebody he cared about, whether they lived or died? Or were they simply products?_ "You're a little behind events, Mr. May," I said.

Xue told him about the death of the Marine.

_"What? No!"_ Either May was truly shocked or an excellent actor.

"Where were you last night, Mr. May?" Xue asked as we slid into a corner booth.

"Right here in the hotel."

"Any witnesses?"

"I ordered a late supper in my room. The server should remember."

"Just like the night your client the Cheeze was killed," Xue said.

"I-I had nothing to do with the death of the Marine! He was a great talent. I've only spoken to him at-at a party or two, maybe twice in my life. I have no reason to want him dead!"

When the server came, Xue ordered a coke, I asked for a club soda, and May ordered a gin and tonic, probably to calm his nerves.

"What about the two gentleman who _were_ your clients?" Xue asked. "Would you have any reason to want _them_ dead?"

"None at all. I had every reason to want them to live long and productive lives. Their brands were strong; they were still producing bestsellers!"

We studied the roving eyes, the suddenly shaking hands of the best suspect we had. Unfortunately, we had not a shred of evidence tying him to the killings, only proximity, which meant, presumably, opportunity. If we could pin May down.

From her blazer, Xue pulled out the baggie with the Cheeze's pen. "Have you ever seen anything like _this,_ Mr. May?"

We watched him carefully. He hadn't been allowed to get close to any of the bodies in Florida.

He shrugged. "A gold pen. So?"

"The Marine," I said, "was shot and killed at quarter after eleven last night. What time was your late supper, Mr. May?"

"I-I don't know exactly. I think it was delivered around eleven."

Xue and I gave each other _the nod._ She rose from her chair. "Excuse me a minute, please," she said.

As Xue walked away, I asked casually, "Didn't I see you over on La Brea Avenue this morning, Mr. May?"

"I had an early breakfast meeting over that way."

"Who was your meeting with?"

May stared at me.

"Would you rather go somewhere else to talk?" I asked.

"I've got nothing to hide. Jack Sabre of Universal Studios."

For a good fifteen minutes, I questioned May on his whereabouts of the last few days. I asked where he'd been, hour by hour. Who he'd met with, who he spoke to on the phone, where he ate his meals. Finally, he glanced at his watch and looked around. "Is your partner coming back?"

"She'll be returning shortly." I continued digging into to his schedule, recording everything on LINKS.

A few minutes later Xue returned and stood at the side of the table. She shook her head. The signal was clear.

"I think we're done here, Mr. May," I said. "You're free to go."

"Well, its about time." May rose from his seat, said, "Good _-bye!"_ and stalked off.

"So?" I said. "What have you got?"

"Not much." Xue handed me the printout of a room service order.

"Curtis May," I read. "Salmon salad, rum and coke. Exactly what May said he ordered."

"See the times listed."

Below the name, I read, " _Ordered: 11:03."_

"And look at the right corner," Xue pointed. _"Delivered 11:22._ Seven minutes after Sally Ann said the Marine was killed. There's no way it was Curtis May."

"Unless," I said, "he hired someone to do it for him."

Xue stared back. "Unless."

32

Xue stayed in Tommy's guest suite, and we spent what should have been a nice Saturday and Sunday with Tommy at the beach -- his back deck has a drop-down staircase, but nearly all we could talk about was the Pen Killer case. Bodies stuck or stuffed with gold pens, bloody signatures, ripped throats, and dead authors don't mix well with margaritas, surf, and sand.

I couldn't imagine what Sally Ann, the Marine's wife, was going through, her grief and pain. How would she tell two daughters that their _hero,_ the love of their lives, was gone forever?

By Sunday afternoon Xue was feeling a lot better. Her cough had disappeared. I was relieved to have my partner back, full strength. Sunday night we moved to a Holiday Inn close to the LA Field office.

Monday morning, Special Agent in Charge Randy Michaels lent us two spare desks and an eighty-inch screen on which to run our LINKS data. I turned to Xue.

"Author-Author isn't really cutting it for me anymore as a designator."

"What did you have in mind?"

"Pen Killers."

She nodded. "Works for me."

I changed it.

Orders appeared on my phone from Washington, assigning us four local agents named Jim Charles and Helen Monroe, Sam Dolup and Tila Jackson. While Xue and I waited for them to show up, we sent a message to the Handwriting Section in Washington, asking them to speed up analysis of The Benefactor signature, comparing it with that of Michelangelo. FBI handwriting experts are the best in the world. Ten minutes later they sent us back a message:

Our four new team members arrived. Xue and I introduced ourselves and got everyone's name right. We moved into a conference room, activated the big overhead screen, and while LINKS arranged the investigation, we brought everyone up to speed on the red boxes, chronologically:

_Editor Deer._ Strangulation, Encinitas, San Diego area, Southern California.

_Big Cheeze and wife._ Snake venom, Jupiter, east Florida coast; Michelangelo 62:4, 9:6.

_Prince of Darkness._ Vehicle collision, Captiva Island, west Florida coast; Michelangelo 32:8.

_Professor of Weird._ Animal attack, Huntington Hills, Orange County, Southern California; The Benefactor 5:3.

_The Marine._ Gunshot to the head, Hollywood, LA area, Southern California; The Benefactor 3:1.

Until we knew differently, I insisted the burning of the Huntington Beach Library be included, because of its proximity to the Professor's death, and the fire's timing, if nothing else.

Our handwriting report came back. Unlike the more artistic Michelangelo script, the uniformity of the Benefactor's letters pointed to a well-organized mind, a substantial planner. We all agreed we had two killers, at least one in Florida, and at least one in California. We told the team about the research Xue and I had begun in Washington on the authors' threatening reviews and hate mail.

Xue's phone rang. She picked it up, then held up a hand. I watched her face. She had something good. She hung up.

"The Captiva police are putting out a warrant on Range Tucker," she said. "The day the Prince died they think he washed the front of his truck down at the Great Duck after he delivered, but he didn't do a perfect job. One of the sheriff's deputies had a lab guy take a second look at the truck. He found blood spatter, three drops, behind the truck's engine block. The DNA matched the Prince."

"Finally!" I said. LINKS had added our first purple box.

Helen said thoughtfully, "What about the Cheeze and his wife? The way they were killed had nothing to do with a truck."

"One step at a time," Xue said. "First, we pull in Tucker, sweat him, and find out who hired him. It's probably the same person that hired whoever took out the Cheeze and hired the killer of our dead authors here in California. We're on the trail now."

These killers had been one step ahead of us. Now it was our turn. Things were beginning to go our way.

We continued the discussion. How many Pen Killers were there? Were they still moving north in California? Would one or more authors up in the San Francisco area be next? Until we could talk with Range Tucker, or find some bit of evidence we could use to predict who might be at risk, the Pen Killers would go on killing.

Sam asked, "Are these deaths really because of the things these authors are writing, or is it something else?"

"Like what?" Jim asked.

"I don't know," Sam said. "But I don't want to lock into one direction until we're sure it's the _right_ direction."

"Any other ideas?" I asked. "Anybody? _Anything?"_

"Well," said Tila hesitantly, "this is kind of off the wall -- but, well, Florida is under the sun sign of Pisces, while California is it's opposite, Virgo."

"Astrology?" Jim scoffed.

"Agent Soul said _anything."_

"No, that's fine, Tila. I _did_ say _anything."_

Jim laughed. "How does knowing these two states are opposite astrology signs help us find the killers?"

I could tell Tila wanted to say something but was holding back. "Tila?" I prompted.

She sighed. "Well, remember the Zodiac Killer? I'm not saying I take astrology seriously, but some people do."

"Okay." I typed up Tila's idea and put it on the screen. "Good one, Tila."

We got LINKS to compile a list of the days the authors had been killed and their birthdays, convert the dates to astrology signs, then combine that with the sun signs that Florida and California were thought to be "under." Leo, Sagittarius, Cancer, Virgo, Pisces . . . two authors had been born during the sun sign of Leo. One of those was the Prince, but he was killed during the sign of Libra, in Florida, a state which was supposed to be under the sign of Pisces. LINKS couldn't find a pattern.

Tila shook her head and shrugged. "It was worth a shot."

"If you see another angle on this," I told her, "let us know and we'll pursue it."

She nodded.

"Anything else, anybody?" I asked.

"These numbers, written on the victims," Helen said, "no one has any idea what they mean?"

"Michelangelo was known for the David statue in Florence," Xue said, "and his paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Both of which are religious in nature."

"The Benefactor, as a name, sounds religious," Jim said. "Considering the way the Professor was killed, maybe this thing has a religious aspect to it."

Sam said, "Did you notice that the second number is always lower than the first?"

I looked at the list of signatures and numbers on the screen . . . _62:4, 9:6, 32:8, 5:3, 3:1._ Sam was right. _Does that mean something?_

"They could be biblical quotes, chapter and verse. Like Matthew 3:1," Tila suggested.

I located a copy of the Christian Bible online, and put Matthew 3:1 up on the big screen. Tila read it out loud: "And in those days, John the Baptist came and preached in the wilderness of Judea."

"The Marine lived in Hollywood," Xue said, "not some wilderness."

"Some of the characters around Hollywood can be pretty wild," Sam laughed.

"Okay," Xue said, "But what's this verse got to do with shooting someone in the head?"

"Maybe it's not from Matthew," Tila said. "Maybe it's from another book of the Bible."

We looked at Mark, Luke, and John. Nothing from any of the Chapter 3, Verse 1s contained a description similar to the Marine's death.

"The number on the Big Cheeze was 62:4," Sam said. "Do any of the gospels even have a Chapter Sixty-two?"

We split up the Bible, each of us taking a section, returned to our own computers, and went through the books of both testaments, some of which did have a Chapter 62. "Remember," I said, "we aren't looking for a gun, exactly. The verse may be a metaphor using a spear or something."

Jim laughed, "Since they didn't have guns in those days."

No Chapter 62 in any book of the Bible mentioned snakes.

"Is there any possibility . . ?" Helen said, hesitating.

"What?" I asked.

"Well . . . I don't know," she said, "maybe the numbers relate to the methods of death, a method used by the authors themselves in one of their novels."

Xue shook her head. "We tried that in Washington. We did find, on my Kindle, a story using snakes for the Cheeze called _Queens Of The Night,_ and a story for the Prince about a little girl hit by a food truck called _Impact._ But the chapter numbers didn't fit, and none of the page numbers matched, either."

"No offense," Helen shot back, "but the electronic version of a book isn't the best way to look these up. An ebook has chapter numbers, but changes in the font size or the type of eReader and the page numbers would be completely different. A Kindle won't come out the same as an iPad. We need something more stable."

"Like paper?" I asked.

"Exactly."

"How quaint," Xue said.

"Wait a minute," Jim said, perking up. "What about the Marine? Since Three-One would be right at the beginning of the book, even the electronic version should be able to tell us whether we're on the right track."

"I haven't read any of the Marine's novels," I told our team. I looked to my partner. "Xue?"

She shook her head. "I think his stuff is mostly men's fiction."

"Anybody?" I asked.

Tila and Helen shook their heads, but Jim and Sam both nodded.

"Is there a story in any of his books where someone get's shot just inside the front door of a house?" I asked. "With a single shot to the forehead?"

"I don't recall any," Sam said.

But Jim was frowning at the ceiling. He took the mouse and pulled up Amazon's website. In a moment he had a long line of tiny covers running down the screen. "I think . . . ahh . . . here it is, one of his earliest novels, written twenty years ago. I haven't read this one in a long time, but I'm pretty sure it starts . . ."

He clicked on "Look Inside The Book."

"Here! Listen to the opening paragraph: _The front door opened,"_ Jim read, _"The owner of the house said, 'Hello?' The visitor raised a gun, held it against the man's head, and pulled the trigger."_

"Excellent, Jim," Helen said. Nods all around.

"But that's page one," Tila said, "not page three. Page one always starts where the text begins."

"Not necessarily," Xue said. "If there's a cover page for the prologue --"

Jim scrolled upward. "Like here in this novel."

Xue nodded. "That would be page one if it were printed on paper. Page two would be blank."

"So the beginning of the Marine's novel you just read on Amazon would actually start on page three?" Sam said. "Three-one. It fits!"

"Do you notice that most of these numbers are relatively low?" Jim asked.

"That could mean they're shock killings from early chapters in the books," Helen said.

"What's the closest place we can we get paper copies of these?" I asked. "Is there a library around here?"

"Barnes and Nobel is right down the street," Sam said. "They should stock most of _these_ author's books. They're all big sellers."

"What about the Editor?" Tila asked. "She had no signature and no number."

"Editor Deer was the first one killed," Xue said. "Maybe these signatures were a later addition to the killers' MOs. By the way, B and N restaurants always have excellent chocolate cake."

It was nearly lunchtime, so, two birds with one stone, the six of us walked down the street to a huge Barnes and Noble.

We had four dead authors with numbers written in blood on their bodies. We assigned two of our team to each author and pair of numbers. I took the Cheeze and his wife. We'd already found a book of the Cheeze's, _Queens Of The Night,_ that seemed to fit their murders. I would start there. Xue took the Prince.

"The Cheeze had 62:4 on his belly," I said. "His wife was 9:6."

"Right," Xue said. "And I remember which book we want for the Prince."

Back in the fiction section were four-and-a-half shelves of the Cheeze's novels. I located _Queens Of The Night_ and flipped through the pages. "Mmm. Guess that's not what the numbers mean," I muttered. "There's nothing about snakes, or poison, or killing on page sixty-two."

From the other side of the shelves, Xue's voice called out. _"What version are you using?"_

I held the paperback above the shelves.

_"Try the hard cover!"_

Next to the paperbacks by the same title, I found the hard cover edition. Pulled it out and leafed through. And there it was, on page sixty-two, paragraph four: a snake. We found an earlier mention of a snake on page nine _._

Xue joined me. I showed her what I'd found. In _Impact,_ she'd found the story of the little girl hit by the truck, right there on page thirty-two, paragraph eight where it was supposed to be.

Helen, Jim, Tila, and Sam came over and showed us what they'd found. They'd turned up page and paragraph numbers where their authors' descriptions matched the circumstances of their deaths.

"So, except for this Editor, Nancy Deer," Helen said, "where there was no signature or number at her crime scene, we've got a definite pattern."

"Right," I said. "All the victims, except the Editor, wrote a best-selling novel with a method of killing that fits their own murder."

We took a lunch break for sandwiches in the Barnes and Nobel coffee shop, followed by the delicious chocolate cake Xue recommended.

"So, now that we know where these numbers came from," Helen said, "how can we use this to predict who's going to be attacked next?"

The sound of smacking lips was Helen's only answer.

*

When we got back to our desks, we found LAPD had sent over summaries of the trace evidence they'd collected. The Marine had a calico cat. Hair and fiber from the house identified five individuals: two daughters Melanie and Stacy, his wife Mary Ann, the maid, and our dead author. There were other traces of DNA from the bathrooms, most of which came back _Incomplete,_ probably from house guests. Of the three samples the lab ran successfully, none were a match with the FBI LINKS master database.

A trace of blood spatter confirmed the murder had taken place in the front doorway, which backed up what the wife had described. The Marine had fallen backward right where he'd been executed, onto the foyer's slate tile. Other than his wife's postmortem hug, the Marine's body hadn't been moved. As far as I was concerned, the gold pens, one stuck in the bullet hole in the Marine's head, and another on the dash of our car, let Sally Ann out completely.

We received photos of the bullet. Ballistics confirmed the murder weapon was a nine millimeter just as Detective Stern had predicted. The bullet was distorted and came back _No Match._ There were _millions_ of nine-millimeter guns out there.

I received a report from the medical examiner down in Huntington. Based on a hair sample, ME Meriweather determined the bites had likely come from a large cat, definitely feline. I forwarded the report to LINKS.

"Why a _bullet_ for the Marine, when the other murders were so unique?" Tila asked.

Her question was a good one, but none of us had an answer. This case was crazy. At times I felt like pulling my hair out. The Cheeze's execution -- and that's exactly what these were, executions -- was as exotic as the murder in Huntington Hills.

But the Prince's death wasn't that unique, almost like a car accident. In a way, a car collision was closer in method to the Marine's murder. Simple, direct, nothing exotic or religious. But there was no denying that the half a pen found in the Prince's neck, and the signature on his forehead, said his death had to be connected.

*

We were going through the previous Friday's news reports on the Internet, when Helen noticed one about San Diego Safari World and a missing cheetah. Someone had broken into the cat-keeper's facilities. The big spotted cat, along with a tranquilizer gun, had gone missing the same night the Professor of Weird was murdered. Helen was already googling cheetahs. The big cats were known for ripping the throats out of their prey.

I put in a call to ME Meriweather. One of her assistants answered and put me right through.

"Special Agent Soul?"

"Hello, Doctor."

"Call me _Constance,_ please."

"Certainly, Constance. Call me Naomi. Is it possible the bites on the Professor could have been made by a cheetah?" I emailed her the web address of the article Helen had found.

"Hmmm," Meriweather said. "Hold on a minute." I heard the sound of a keyboard.

_"Bite radius?_ Yes . . . it is. As I said in my report, the hairs we found were feline. The bite radius is within the correct range. Cheetahs have a fairly small head, as large cats go."

I directed her to the paragraph in Tila's article on how cheetahs killed their prey.

"You may have found what did that damage to our victim, Naomi. Have they found the cheetah?"

"Not yet."

"I'll ask our CSI lab to modify their tests, and see that they've got samples of Cheetah fur and DNA for comparison. I do have some influence over there. I'll see we get priority. If there's any difficulty, I'll push to have the evidence sent to your lab."

"Thank you, Constance."

"Don't mention it. I'll get back to you as soon as I know something."

33

The six of us worked late into the night, pounding down Starbucks lattes to keep going (mine was Chocolate Chai). We were starting to break through, but all the indicators said the Bureau was about to be in big trouble. These killers were able to strike anywhere in the United States, and Sam found that questions in online media articles were beginning to percolate upward, tying our famous authors' deaths together.

"How can we find the next victim before the killers get to him?" Helen asked.

_That_ was the right question.

"How many potential victims are we talking about?" Tila asked.

"How many authors are there on the New York Times best-seller lists?" Jim said. _"That's_ where we should be looking."

Xue and I turned to each other. It was something we should have thought of days ago. Could it be that simple? This might be all it took to get ahead of the killers.

Sam pulled up the _New York Times_ fiction lists online. I was surprised to find there were only five -- Hardcover, E-Books, Paperback, Trade, and Combinations. We counted up the author's names.

"Only sixty-one places!" Helen said.

Then Tila burst our bubble. "Fifty-two weeks in a year," she shot back. "We're a team of six. No way! We can't possibly track three thousand people."

"Let alone protect them," Jim huffed. "The Bureau only has fifteen thousand agents."

But I didn't think the idea was dead. "I wonder--"

I reached over, picked up Sam's mouse, and scrolled through the lists for the last few weeks. "I think the number of authors we have to worry about is actually a lot smaller than three thousand. Look -- the number of weeks a book has been on the list runs from a week to --"

"-- to the real hogs," Xue cut in, "who've been on there for more than a hundred weeks. So --"

Sam opened the computer's calculator and totaled the number of weeks for all the books on that week's list, then divided by sixty-one places. "A book's average stay is only about seventeen weeks!" he said.

Three thousand, divided by seventeen?" Jim said. "So in any year a hundred and eighty authors can be on one of these five lists?"

I tapped the screen with my finger. "That's our target. One hundred and eighty potential victims."

"But some of these authors are on more than one list at a time," Helen said.

We did some more figuring. "Call it a hundred and fifty," I said.

"It's still too many." Sam said, looking at the ceiling. "But maybe we can narrow it down further. These killers probably wouldn't target authors who've only been on there a week or two, would they?"

"Nope," Xue agreed. "Most of these aren't as famous as our vics."

"So we take the top half," Helen said. "Seventy-five authors."

"Just the top quarter!" Tila said."

"Forty authors, max," Jim said. "We can do something with _that."_

It was satisfying to have a manageable list of those authors who were in danger right now. But that was as far as math could take it.

"I think we have to go back to their reviews and hate mail," Xue said. "We need to connect the dots between disgruntled, irritated fans and these forty potential victims. Four or five of which are already dead."

One thing struck me, not by being on the list, but by _not_ being on it. _The Editor, Nancy Deer._ And I said so to the team.

Xue found the Editor's two books on Amazon. We searched the historical _Times Lists_ in the weeks immediately following her books' dates of publication. Nancy Deer's name wasn't on any of the lists. The Editor hadn't written a best-selling novel. Then why had she been killed? _Practice? Convenience?_ It was odd.

Helen and Sam took over compiling a table of our thirty-six authors' whereabouts from book tour schedules on their websites. We divided up the remaining potential victims and began studying their Wiki pages, locating their publishers and agents.

We sent out a standard email asking the agents to warn their authors not to put themselves in situations that mimicked killings in their stories. We stated that we would appreciate the authors' help in compiling a list of those types of dangerous scenarios from their books. We offered them protection. That day, not a single author or agent got back to us. Nor the next day. It was looking like we weren't going to get much help there.

This thing was now at least bi-coastal. We couldn't sort through hate mail, vicious reviews, and keep safe thirty-six authors all around the country, not without using two hundred agents that Madeline or SAC Michaels would be reluctant to give us. But I knew someone who could do the sorting and matching part. I picked up my phone and called Chip.

34

"You're still in LA?" Chip said when he finally answered.

"Yup." Chip has some way of determining where my phone is.

"That case you're on looks like a mess, Naomi."

"It is." Chip didn't sound like himself. He sounded -- _worried._

_"What's wrong?"_ I asked.

"You probably won't be back east anytime soon, will you?"

"It depends on how this goes."

"Naomi, I don't know what I'm seeing, exactly. I've been looking at your LINKS files." He paused, which Chip hardly ever does. "There's -- _something wrong_ with the data. I want you to be extremely careful."

"Don't worry. I am being careful."

Chip expressed his doubts over my caution, but liked what we'd come up with from the _Times_ lists and said he'd get right on it. We disconnected.

Not waiting for Chip, Tuesday afternoon we began to search manually for potential killers of our thirty-six potential victims using their hate mail and vicious review files. We worked all day and into the night again, then continued the search on Wednesday.

Chip sent me a web address. While his people were working on condensing and sorting a much larger pool of suspects, he'd begun digging private numbers out of phone company databases for our thirty-six authors and said he'd placed them on a map of the U.S.

I brought the website up on my phone. There were already eleven flashing dots scattered around various cities. Tapping any dot displayed that author's present location. As I was using the map, another dot blinked into existence. Twelve authors: Tracked. Was this even legal? I didn't want to ask.

A few minutes before four o'clock that afternoon, feet came pounding down the hallway.

"Bring up Fox News!" Xue yelled.

I found it online as Xue got to my desk. Jim, Tila, Sam, and Helen crowded in. The video was live. A cheetah had been found in a suburban area of Orange County. Was it our cheetah? It wasn't like there were a lot of spare cheetahs walking around Southern California. This wasn't Africa.

The news camera did one of those pull-in things, zooming from over the shoulder of the narrating female reporter. The picture moved beyond a parking lot, past a group of RVs and a bunch of cops standing behind their squad cars, to a group of Fish and Game wardens. The reporter, speaking frantically off-camera, was staying well back. I didn't blame her.

The cops had their guns out. The big beautiful spotted cat was pacing back and forth in front of a little wood building with a sickle moon cut in the door. The news crew must have had a shotgun mic. You could hear the cheetah growl, and what sounded like a young girl screaming.

The reporter said, "This big cat has twelve-year-old Amy Wilson cornered inside an outhouse in the Escape Country Campground near the old El Toro Air Force base."

The picture moved back. "Sheriff's deputies are restraining the girl's parents, Troy and Tina Wilson of West Hollywood, here in the parking lot."

The man, in his twenties with dusty brown hair, was trying to get past two deputies. A thin woman with a pockmarked face and orangy-blonde hair was screaming, struggling against a female cop. Was there no end to the misery these Pen Killers would cause?

The picture zoomed back in. One of the game wardens fired a dart at the cheetah and missed. The cat growled, dropped low on its haunches and turned toward the game wardens. Now it appeared to be stalking _them._

A second dart flew over the cheetah's back as it picked up speed. I'd read they could do more than sixty miles an hour. Two more wardens fired. A dart glanced off the big cat's shoulder, but another caught in the top of the animal's hindquarters. It made no difference. The big cat came on fast, right for the Fish and Game people. It was ten yards away when it fell on it's face, sliding on its crumpled front paws. The cheetah was down.

Game wardens rushed in, zip-tied its paws together, and put a muzzle on it. Cops came in right behind them and pulled open the outhouse door. A little blond girl rushed hysterically into the first cop's arms.

Amy Wilson turned her head away from the big cat on the ground as they ran by. The cop handed her off to her mother. They were crying, the little girl's father hugging them both. _Whew!_ Around my desk, we all cheered.

I fired off an email to ME Constance Meriweather, in case she didn't know about the cheetah.

*

That night I was on Tommy's back porch, staring at the ocean, when he got out his industrial-strength stainless blender known as a Vitamix, his pride and joy. _Guys._ The moment the whir of the motor died -- signaling that the first batch of _perfectly-blended_ margaritas (according to Tommy) was ready -- my phone barked. It was Constance.

She'd seen the news report on the cheetah. I held a hand out to Tommy as he came outside toting two chilled glasses and the frosty blender. He handed me a glass and poured. _Good service!_ I put Constance on speaker.

"I'm sorry to say they had to put the cheetah down," she huffed. "It was seen as a potential mankiller. They sent the body over to the morgue. I cut its stomach open myself."

Tommy and I grimaced.

"Among the incompletely digested food inside, I found several human fingers, plenty of DNA." She paused. "We got a match. They belonged to the Professor."

"Uhhh," Tommy said softly.

"I know --" Meriweather said, thinking it was me she'd heard. "But at least now you know for sure."

"That's true," I said. "Thank you for calling me so soon, Constance." We disconnected. _Cheetahs?_ _Snakes?_ When it came to these Pen Killers, I didn't feel I knew anything for sure.

35

A profile of these killers was emerging. It's one thing the Bureau does pretty well, and probably the reason my undergrad studies in psychology had made me an attractive hire: my ability to understand the mind of a killer.

When we learned Tila Jackson had a PhD in psychology, Xue and I began bouncing ideas off her, while the other members of our team put in their two-cents. The only weak member was Jim Charles. Until recently he'd been quite helpful. Suddenly he didn't have much to offer -- whenever Tila was around. I didn't understand the change, but there was no time to deal with personality clashes.

The profile we constructed said there was likely a mastermind behind several killers. That person was male -- female serial killers being nearly non-existent -- twenty-five to forty years of age, enjoyed fiction, and possibly obsessed over it. He was well-educated, reasonably well-financed, and a psychopath. In less than a month, his killers, and possibly the mastermind himself, had been in Encinitas, California, traveled to Jupiter and Captiva Island, Florida, then back to Orange County and Hollywood, California. Likely the mastermind was based in California since this was where he began (as far as we knew) to kill, and to where he had now returned. Probably his plan was still evolving, as the murders had begun with the attack on the Editor -- a kind of warmup -- then become more advanced with the Michelangelo and Benefactor signatures.

In nearly a week we'd had no more killings. No one in Florida had located our suspect Range Tucker. Someone must have warned him. The jury, I'd begun to think, was still out on Curtis May.

Unfortunately, the moment we assembled our profile, the _LA Times_ put the whole thing together without our help. They'd linked the five killings. The author murders hit the national media. Like barbarians at the gates, they clamored to be let in. The phones in the LA media center rang all day long. We had bona fide serial killers on our hands and they wanted a piece.

But there was a silver lining, or at least a gold one. The press still didn't know how else the cases were linked, and we weren't going to tell them. At least the pens, the bloody signatures, and the page numbers hadn't leaked out yet.

We needed to use the media as a tool. There was no choice, really, we were getting desperate. Typically serials kill one or two victims, then rest, regroup, and kill again -- their timetable accelerating as they become more experienced and get a taste for it. Based on the timeline of the previous killings, we all agreed we were due for more murders soon, likely within the next couple of days. If not in California, then somewhere else.

Five days after the Marine was killed, SAC Michaels called a media conference at nine a.m. The moment the Bureau puts you on TV you know you can never again be used for undercover work, so Xue and I were relieved that morning to be allowed to remain in the shadows. To the media's glee, the first thing Michaels did when he stepped to the microphone on the front steps of the Federal Building was confirm everyone's worst fears.

"Yes, we have serial killers active in both Florida and California. Yes, the cases are linked. Yes, nearly all the victims are highly-successful authors."

Michaels did something I'd rarely seen done by the Bureau. He'd had flyers printed up which were handed out to the media, laying out the profile we'd come up with, and then walked them through it.

"We're looking for a twenty-five to forty year old male," Michaels began, "a financially secure, frequent reader of fiction, traveling on these specific dates between two states far apart from each other geographically."

That was the moment some hag from the _LA Times,_ who was a hundred years old if she was a day, chose to yell out, "Do you think there's some kind of _ORGANIZATION_ behind these murders, Agent Michaels? Florida and California are pretty far apart!"

Everyone stood there in the cool morning air, staring at the LA FBI boss for five long seconds while he struggled for an answer. And then, pandemonium. Reporters shouted questions, not even listening to the SAC's answers.

"Was the cheetah in Orange County what killed the Professor of Weird?" one yelled.

"Is it true that snakes killed the Cheeze?"

Michaels tried to regain control, but the battle was lost. He got his message out but not much else: "If anyone knows of any individual that fits the profile, who has traveled between these specific parts of Florida and California within the dates on the flyer -- Miami-Jupiter-Fort Meyers-Captiva to San Diego-Huntington-LA, please contact the FBI tip line at this number. No, we're not answering questions regarding our evidence _or suspects!"_ he shouted, as the media clamored for blood. "The investigation is ongoing!"

That was it. Michaels mumbled a, "Thank you," into the mic and stalked off the steps. What a mess.

And that wasn't the worst of it.

*

As the media dispersed, and Tila pulled Xue and me aside to say she wanted to purchase copies of Nancy Deer's books, a voice called out. "Does this belong to somebody?"

The cleanup crew was taking down our public address system. A Bureau worker at the lectern was holding something. We walked over.

It was a gold Madison Ciselé pen. He claimed he'd found it on the lectern.

Nobody knew where it had come from. SAC Michaels certainly didn't. We checked into the worker's background. He'd been with the Bureau for five years. His record was impeccable. He hadn't flown to Florida recently.

We immediately contacted three news stations and got copies of videos they'd shot of the conference. One station had been recording when the lectern was set up. We watched it from the beginning. The last video crew to leave had been shooting exteriors when the pen was found. There was just nobody on any of the videos that could have left the pen there on the lectern. _Were these killers magicians? Was the Benefactor targeting the entire LA Bureau?_

None of us could understand it. People on our team became touchy and irritable, snapping at each other, particularly Jim and Tila. We were all uneasy. Somebody was watching us.

*

A calming voice came out of the dark at the side entrance to the building. "Excuse me."

"Yes?" the woman said nervously, about to leave her place of work for the day. Not many people needed to see her so late in the evening.

The Benefactor stepped into the light and she relaxed immediately. "Oh, hello," she said. "What can I do for you?"

The Benefactor handed her a document. "I need take a look at your records."

"I suppose I could do that. Will this take long? I have to get home."

"Not long at all."

"Very well, this way."

The Benefactor followed her back to her office. When they got to the room, they were alone. The Benefactor closed the door behind them and told the woman what was required.

The woman shook her head. "That doesn't make any sense."

"Perhaps this will make things a little clearer?" The Benefactor displayed a silenced 38.

Minutes later the woman had found the requested files and made the required changes.

"I-Is that all?" the woman asked. The instant she was alone she would report this. Tomorrow morning she would change everything back.

"That will do very nicely," the Benefactor replied. "I'll walk you out."

36

Among the 5,000 crank calls we received, the media conference did produce one valid tip, a duesy, a lead on the Benefactor.

The tip came in from an animal handler at San Diego Safari World named Dave Rosco who had been dating a relatively unknown Hollywood screenwriter named Dasha Cummings. Dasha was described as a strong, tough, dark-haired woman, with a hard edge to her personality. She supposedly adored animals and had been asking Dave Rosco some very specific questions about his cheetahs.

Tila volunteered to drive down to Safari World and interview Rosco. Jim Charles said he'd go along. Tila didn't seem pleased.

Two hours later we began receiving a live LINKS video transmission as Tila and Jim began Rosco's interview. Rosco was a blond-haired surfer type in a tan Safari World uniform. He looked no more nervous than any other person being interviewed by the FBI.

"How did you meet Dasha?" Jim asked.

"She came to one of our Big Cat Shows at the park. After the show she snuck back stage and struck up a conversation. We hit it off."

"And you asked her out?" Tila asked Rosco, glancing at Jim oddly.

"Actually, she asked me out." Rosco grinned. "It happens."

Jim laughed strangely and, glancing at Tila, asked Rosco, "How long ago was this?"

"About a month ago."

Dave Rosco admitted to being mainly interested in Dasha for sex. During their pillow talk Dasha had flatteringly dug deeper into Rosco's job, wanting to know how certain drugs and devices were used to control the big cats. Rosco hadn't thought much of it until he saw the FBI media conference and realized he hadn't heard from Dasha since the day before the cheetah went missing. Rosco appeared to be forthcoming, believable, and easy-going, his answers replete with specifics, but without excessive explanation.

The interview continued until Jim asked, "Do you have Dasha's address?"

Rosco hesitated. "I, uh, don't actually know where she lives. We always went to my place."

Jim asked Rosco to try Dasha's cell phone, on speaker, and not to mention the FBI. The call went to a recording that said the number was no longer in service. Rosco hung up.

Jim told Rosco it wasn't a problem. We'd find Dasha's address and surprise her. Shortly, Tila terminated the transmission.

I called Tommy and asked if he'd heard of a screenwriter named Dasha Cummings. Tommy said no, but spent a minute looking her up on the Internet Movie Database. He said he knew someone who'd been in a movie she'd written and he'd see what he could find out.

An hour later Tommy called me back. A friend of Tommy's had also been dating Ms. Cummings. Apparently the screenwriter had lost two major scripts to other writers recently, potential franchises for scripts made from two books -- one by the Marine, the other by the Professor of Weird. According to Tommy's friend, Dasha had thought those authors were responsible for her being fired. Checking with Nancy Deer's friends and associates, there was no apparent connection between the screenwriter and the Editor.

Based on Rosco's dating timeline, Dasha had been in Orange County the night before the Professor's death, but had left Rosco's house early. Through the screenwriter's guild, Helen obtained an emergency contact number and called Ms. Cumming's family home, back in Lincoln, Nebraska. Her father, Scott Linde (Linde was Dasha's birth name), said he was worried about Dasha. He hadn't heard from her or been able to get Dasha on her phone in a week, which according to him was unusual. The call from us didn't help.

Dasha Cummings nature, her actions, and her disappearance added up to strong circumstantial evidence. We listed her as a person of interest and asked the LAPD and Orange County Sheriffs to put out all-points wants on her. We sent an email to our Communications Department and requested a back-trace on Ms. Cumming's cell phone locations. LINKS generated another purple box.

I sent Chip what we had on Dasha Cummings, and asked if he could look for a connection to our extreme reviewers and hate mail senders. Ten minutes later he sent a text back:

Ten minutes after that, an email arrived from Chip, nothing to do with Ms. Cummings. His supercomputer had trawled Amazon for the Big Cheeze's vicious reviews, then those of the Prince, the Editor, the Professor, and the Marine. Chip's program had come up with _writing style_ matches -- repeated words weighted by usage, preferred verb choices, and unusual adjectives. Chip had searched for IP addresses that had posted _any_ Amazon one-star reviews on _all_ five dead authors' books.

Any hate mail sent to our thirty-six author victim pool which was postmarked _California_ in the last six months, and any vicious email that originated from an IP address in California over the same time period was included. Everything was cross-referenced against Florida airline records, creating a small group of suspects.

There were only sixteen.

I passed fifteen of those on to our team which was now expanded by SAC Michaels to eight agents.

One suspect had posted similar vicious reviews to each of our dead authors' books on Goodreads. Chip had traced the Goodreads account to an Amazon account we had our eye on: _Critical Sight;_ that same _Kill Yourself -- your books suck! _account Xue had found while we were in Washington.

Unbelievably, Chip _hadn't_ been able to locate the owner of Critical Sight. The account had been established using a fake address, fake phone number, and an Amazon gift card. The posts had all been made from restaurant WIFIs. Someone was being extremely careful.

"Wow," Xue said. "These reviews are incredibly threatening. Critical Sight could be one of our killers. Maybe when these authors didn't tone down their writing styles he decided to go after them!"

I nodded. I was thinking the same thing myself.

Another email arrived from Chip. He hadn't found anything linking Dasha Cummings to any bad reviews or hate mail.

"I keep thinking we ought to take a closer look at Curtis May," I said. "Even if he appears to be in the clear."

"Does May even have a motive?" Xue asked. "You'd think he would want to keep his million-selling clients happy and producing best sellers."

I wished I had a sample of one of May's business letters, something he'd written that I could send to Chip for analysis. I looked up the phone number for the Cheeze's publisher, one of the New York Big Six, a huge place called Panda House. Xue came over as I punched in their number and put the call on speaker.

While the line rang I said, "What do you call a panda that gets really fat and becomes a polar bear?"

"What?"

"An ex-panda."

She laughed.

"Panda House!" answered a cheerful receptionist. _She_ sounded perky.

"This is Special Agent Naomi Soul with the FBI. We're calling for information on a literary agent that represents two of your authors."

"Which authors?"

I told her we were investigating the murders of the Big Cheeze and the Prince of Darkness.

"Everyone here at Panda is extremely upset by their deaths," the receptionist said. She wasn't perky anymore. She put me right through to the Cheeze's editor, Marigold Lane.

The first thing I wanted Lane to verify was that the Big Cheeze's agent, the man who'd been at both Florida crime scenes, the man I'd seen in Hollywood not far from the Marine's house the morning after his death, was the Prince's agent too.

"Yes, Curtis May has been the Prince's literary agent for the last five years." Lane hesitated. "But . . . I guess it won't hurt to say anything now . . ."

"What is it?"

"The Prince was considering letting him go."

_"Why?"_

Xue wrote on a pad, _Curtis May implied their relationship was good. He lied to us, Naomi._

I nodded. _Very possibly,_ I wrote back, pressing my toes back under the desk to relieve the tension. _And we let him go!_

"They weren't really getting along," Lane said, "The Prince of Darkness wanted Mr. May to focus less on movie deals, and more on improving his international distribution."

"So, what is happening with the Prince's estate and Mr. May?" I asked. "Now that the Prince has passed away?"

"They're keeping Mr. May on, I think. The Prince's wife feels that changing agents is just too much to cope with."

I thanked Ms. Lane and hung up.

"If not for his Friday night alibi -- the time his dinner was delivered," Xue said, "Curtis May would be our number one suspect."

"Yes, he would," I said.

Xue and I high-tailed it back to the Beverly Wilshire. A maid's cart was holding the door to May's room open. The closet was empty. There was no luggage. We stopped by the front desk. Curtis May had checked out. We tried calling his agency in New York, but he hadn't been in contact with them for more than two days. Where was Curtis May?

*

As Xue drove us to work Thursday morning, I pulled up Chip's author locator map. He now had sixteen dots scattered across the country. Three of those were presently in LA. I called SAC Michaels and asked that he assign agents to keep an eye on them in the evenings and overnight. He agreed, and we disconnected.

I considered the flashing dots on Chip's map. "This really is starting to look like an invasion of privacy," I said.

"Who cares?" Xue shot back. "We're trying to save their lives!"

Xue pointed to the Starbucks half a block up Wilshire we'd been frequenting all week. "Coffee? My turn to buy."

"Sounds good," I said.

Starbucks looked jammed as we drove by. There was no parking in the lot next door or anywhere close on the street. Half a block away Xue eased into an open red zone and flipped down the visor displaying our FBI car ID.

When we got to the front of the coffee line, Xue ordered something complicated, Cappafrappa whatever, and I asked for a Colombian with lemon spice, my new favorite since Tuesday.

While we waited, I grinned at Xue and said, "I read this thing in the FOIA BUZZ yesterday." The Buzz was the FBI's internal newsletter.

"Something related to the Pen Killers?" she asked, her ears perking up.

"Maybe."

She frowned.

Still grinning, I said, "One of our people answered a phone at a field office the other day in Alabama, and the caller said, 'I want to report my neighbor. He's hiding marijuana inside his firewood.'"

Xue looked at me like, _Huh?_

"So," I went on, "the next day Alabama sent a team out there. They busted up every single piece of wood in his shed and didn't find a spec of marijuana. Alabama got a court order for a tap on the neighbor's phone.

"The guy who called us called his neighbor back. 'Did you get all your wood split?' he asked.

"'Yup. Now it's your turn to call. I need to get my garden plowed.'"

Xue chuckled. "Good one!" A few other agents in line I recognized laughed.

"That's not funny!" said a male voice in front of us.

Xue and I looked over. It was Jim Charles from our team.

Xue whispered, _"Tila warned me about him._ _He can to be a real prick. He has a girlfriend, but he was dropping hints that he wanted Tila to go out with him. She said that driving down to the interview about Dasha Cummings, he pressured her. When Tila turned him down flat, Jim didn't take it well."_

_Ahh._ I'd wondered why Jim had been a good contributing member of the team at first, and not so much lately.

"Marijuana may be legal in California," Jim said, "but it's still a federal crime!" He got his coffee and headed for the front door in a huff.

"It was only a joke!" __ Xue called after him.

Jim left the restaurant. The door swung wide. The handle hit the window behind it with a smacking sound. Luckily, nothing broke.

Our order was ready. We paid and headed back to the car.

"Don't let him get to you Naomi. It _was_ funny."

"Mmmm," I said, taking a small sip. "Hot."

Xue said, "Did you hear _that?"_

"What?"

"Get down!" she screamed, grabbing my blazer, coffee flying, pulling me to the ground.

_"Wha --_ _!"_

_BOOM!_ I felt a hot ferocious wind blow hard right over my back. All I could think was: _Bomb!_

37

I couldn't hear anything but the roaring in my head. If you've ever been nearby when a bomb goes off, you know what I mean -- I didn't have any idea which way was up, what day it was, what city I was in. And I wasn't terribly sure of my own name.

Somebody jerked me off the ground. I looked up. Xue's lips were moving. "Are -- _-kay?"_

_POP!_ Like a whirlwind, the sounds of the world came rushing back in -- distant sirens . . . and a burning car . . . ours. What was left of it.

*

"How could you possibly have known there was a bomb?" I asked Xue. A dozen agents had taken charge of the scene, commanded directly by SAC Randy Micheals. There was one good thing. No one would have to drive our car back down to San Diego to return it. The black Taurus was demolished.

"I heard a cell phone ringing," Xue said, "an odd combination of things -- tone, direction, the bounce of the ring off the concrete." She winced. "I've heard that exact sound only one other time in my life."

"When that carjacker bomb went off in Houston last month," I said.

She nodded.

"Well," Michaels interrupted, "that was certainly a brilliant move, Agent Sang. You saved your partner's life." He frowned and looked at the discoloration on the brick building where our car had been. "Jim Charles wasn't so lucky. He was next to your car when the bomb went off." Michaels blew out a long breath. "I want both of you checked out by medical."

Xue nodded.

"Yes, sir," I said.

This was the second time I'd been near a bomb, and Xue had saved me that time too, knocking me behind the corner of a building moments after someone had thrown an IED into a trash can in front of us and walked away. If someone ever saves your life, even _once,_ it's a bond that can never be broken. That person is your friend forever.

Most of Jim's body, it turned out, was _stuck_ to the building. We were close enough to hear the sucking sound when a female CSI tech scraped what was left of Jim off the wall, reminding me of the Professor of Weird. The tech suddenly gasped. _What could be worse than what she was already dealing with?_ I wondered.

Jim's body had _glued_ something bright and shiny to the brick wall. She held it up. A gold Madison Ciselé pen.

_Dammit!_ Who _were_ these killers?

"It's more than a pen on the dash this time," I said to Xue.

"I know. We're in their sights."

We scanned the rooftops and nearby recently broken windows. There was nothing to see.

It turned out to be a long morning -- reports, crime scene evidence, tagging everything into LINKS. Finally, after delaying as long as we could, Xue and I let the LA Bureau's Senior Operational Medic, Dr. Johnny Magashitu check us out. The doc used a penlight to verify that my eyes were okay and asked me a bunch of questions. He checked my balance. My ears were still ringing faintly. He said he didn't think I had a concussion but wanted me to let him know if the ringing hadn't stopped by tomorrow.

My phone barked. I was surprised _that_ was working. I checked the number. _Oh, boy._ I answered. "Hi, Mom."

"Did I just see you on _TV?"_

Mom was freaking.

"It was only a glimpse," she said. "I _thought_ it was you; it was so quick. _Was_ it you? Winston and I are watching a news report about a car bomb in LA. Were you and Xue near that? Winnie was worried."

_Winnie was worried?_

"We're okay, Mom. We weren't hurt. We were about half a block from where it went off. We're fine."

"It wasn't your car was it?"

_How does she know?_

"Well, uh, actually, it was the Bureau's car, the one we were using --"

_"What!"_

"Mom, we're fine."

It took me another ten minutes to calm her (and Winnie) down. I promised we would be more careful. We hung up.

*

Late that night the killer known as the Benefactor pulled out a disposable phone and made a call. It was time to let someone else take over. _"Woo-hoo!"_

In a Maryland town, inside a hollow book on a bottom shelf, a small nitrile glove full of gasoline had been waiting. A signal was received. The glove burst. A moment later there was a spark . . .

38

The funeral for Jim Charles was a sad affair. The people on our team were there, and SAC Michaels, but from Jim's family and friends only three came. His mom, his brother, and a woman named Chantrel Choirman, a beautiful blonde dressed in black that introduced herself as Jim's fiancée. Chantrel was the only one crying.

Xue whispered, _"How could someone have gotten a bomb into our car?_ _We always parked in the field office garage."_

" _Not while we were asleep at the hotel."_ I whispered back.

She nodded.

After the funeral, Xue wanted another look at our news conference. We went back to the office, and she brought up our copy of the video at the end.

"Right there!" she pointed.

"What?"

She backed up the recording and let it roll forward at half speed. _"There!"_

Now I saw it too. Very briefly, at forty-nine seconds after the conference ended, when SAC Michaels was trying to leave the lectern surrounded by reporters, someone had walked close behind him. _Jim Charles!_ We couldn't see his hands as he walked by, but it looked like, for just a moment, Jim had leaned in close to the lectern. I thought of the pen that had been pulled from the brick where his body had been scraped away. Could _Jim_ have left the pen? Could Jim _actually_ have been the Benefactor?

Somehow it just didn't seem right. I asked Xue, "Why would Jim have been involved in these killings? He was killed by his own bomb? Jim would have had to trigger the bomb; he'd have _known_ it was about to go off."

"Unless he had help," Xue said. "Unless there's more than one killer out here."

It made sense. If someone, the true mastermind, was trying to clean things up and get rid of Jim. Unless the phone call had been on a timer. Or if someone had called the number randomly, by accident . . . I stopped.

This whole thing was getting to me. I needed badly to get my head out of this case, however briefly. I would have liked to have spent the weekend with Tommy, but that morning he flew to Australia for three months to make a movie. He'd begged me to go with him. I was owed some vacation time but I'd had to tell him I couldn't. I had to stay and close this case.

Tommy had told me I should walk away from this one, that this killer was vicious beyond ordinary evil. He said he was worried about me and seemed very disappointed when I turned him down. When we kissed goodbye, I got a sad strange feeling that the next time I saw him things might not be the same.

That night I made a call to Mom and told her about Tommy's invitation, me not going, and the way it had felt when he'd left without me.

"You have to do what you think is right, dear," was all Mom said.

I talked to Winston over the phone. He seemed down. He didn't even snuffle at me. I felt guilty being away from my boy for so long. I missed him, and Mom too.

After the bomb that killed Jim Charles, we were constantly checking our vehicles for explosive devices. The Benefactor was definitely responsible for Jim's death; no one doubted that. But I couldn't believe Jim was the Benefactor. Could the real Benefactor be Dasha Cummings, or was she just a tool? Were the killers still in LA, or had they moved farther north to San Francisco? Chip's locator was showing three major authors up there.

*

The Director expanded our team to twelve agents. We began interviewing hate mail senders and angry online reviewers related to our thirty-six authors at risk, with emphasis on the top ten.

Sam finally located one of the Cheeze's hate mailers that Xue and I had wanted to talk to when we were in Washington -- exactly the way Xue had predicted. A police report described the murder of the wife of _Mr. Cover Your Ass_ on the street in front of their house. He lived up in the San Fernando Valley on the north side of LA.

The vindictive reviewer's real name was Anson Shepherd and he lived not in Van Nuys where his vicious letter had been posted, but next door in Sherman Oaks. Mr. Shepherd was wheelchair-bound and hadn't been out of California in years. He'd never been to Florida as far as we could tell from the banking records he supplied when we visited his home to interview him. Helen ran it by the Airlines. No Anson Shepherd had flown anywhere in the last three months.

Everyone on our team felt the assistance of the big-name authors would be extremely useful, and we kept trying to contact them through their agents and publishers. So far, we were being universally stonewalled. Unlike newspaper, magazine, and online media writers, no best-selling author would get back to us. They were reclusive; they used pen names; they disappeared for weeks into cabins in the woods or tropical island hotels. Apparently it took an introverted soul to live in a land of fantasy.

One literary agent I called apologized, "I'm sorry Agent Soul, I can't even get her to answer her _Facebook_ fan posts once a week _._ She just wants to write and be left alone."

I opened the author locator on my phone. Chip was tracking twenty-two authors. Within a few meters we knew exactly where they were -- at least where their phones were. So far, Chip had limited the authors we were tracking to those inside the United States.

No one had bothered the authors we had agents watching in LA. The Director hadn't authorized agent surveillance on any authors outside LA. What else could we do with this information? If a phone didn't move for a day or two it didn't necessarily mean the author had been attacked -- even if someone disappeared off Chip's map. Maybe they'd forgotten to charge their phone. Maybe the phone didn't move because they hadn't used it. Maybe they'd pulled out the battery and didn't want to be disturbed.

For whatever reason, no more famous authors were killed in California or anywhere else over the next five days. A best-selling author in Boston died at his desk. That was all. His death was ruled to be the result of natural causes. He'd been eighty-eight years old.

The killers might have gone quiet, but someone was busy burning down libraries in the greater LA and San Diego areas. _Two_ more libraries _and_ a bookstore.

Xue said, irritated, _"Why_ burn _libraries?_ Can they really be connected to these murders?"

"It feels that way," I said.

We had to find some way to move this thing forward. Did Curtis May know more than he'd told us? Why was he always wherever the killings were taking place? What about the Editor? Had Curtis May been in California when she was killed? We needed to find May and talk to him again.

But the next day Xue and I were ordered back to Washington to provide an oral update to Director Line, personally. Two libraries had been burned down in College Park and Baltimore, Maryland. These fires, the Director thought, _had_ to be related to the author killings.

Part Four

Washington, DC  
and Utah

39

Xue and I were helicoptered from Reagan National right to the back lawn of FBI Headquarters. We were told at security, "They're waiting for you up in Conference Room A, the big one." When we got up there, Xue and I took seats at the table and immediately began narrating LINKS data up on the screen for twelve Washington agents, Madeline Wu, and Director Line.

In thirty minutes we covered most of what we'd done on the case, and Director Line finally interrupted. "No word on Range Tucker?" he asked.

"He's still missing, sir," Xue said.

"And Curtis May?"

"His office hasn't heard from him," I said. "And his cell phone goes straight to voice mail. The next step would be a visit to his home."

"Chip Balmer hasn't been able to track down this reviewer, Critical Sight?" Madeline asked.

"Not yet."

Then Madeline brought up a news report on the Library fire in College Park, Maryland.

Five minutes into the report, I said, "To me that looks identical to the Huntington Beach fire."

Madeline turned to Xue. "Agent Sang?"

"Exactly the same, ma'am. A superfire, possibly started by some type of accelerant that lit the tremendous amount of burnable material inside."

Madeline nodded. "We agree."

When the other agents had dissected every murder in Florida and California, Madeline looked to the Director. Line nodded.

"There's been a development," Madeline said stonily to Xue and me. "While you were flying back here today, Dasha Cumming's body floated to the surface of the Hollywood Reservoir. The Los Angeles ME hasn't been able to determine how long it was down there. The body was quite bloated."

Xue and I turned to each other. _Oooh boy. Not good. There goes the best suspect we had in LA._

But then I wondered, _Could Tila and Jim have actually come face to face with one of the real perpetrators, the Benefactor?_

Xue was thinking the same way. She looked at me. "Do you think that Safari Park guy, Dave Rosco, could have killed Dasha Cummings?"

I nodded. "Then made up that story about her. Is Dave Rosco the _real_ mastermind?"

"Or is he only in charge of the California killings?" Xue asked.

With a sympathetic grimace, Director Line said, "I think you've been working too hard, agents."

Neither Xue nor I disagreed.

The Director said," It looks like you need a little time to gain a fresh perspective." He sent us home for a long weekend. No one said so, but I wondered if they were going to take the case away from us.

I drove home and pulled my Mini Cooper into the garage. No one came out to greet me. I didn't expect it; I hadn't called. But _still._ Minis aren't all _that_ quiet.

I popped the hatch, grabbed my go bag and headed inside. The moment I opened the front door, I heard a _"Mrrruff!"_ followed by scampering paws on tile, over the sound of a television news report, and a _"Whaaaat!?_ You're _home?"_ Mom's smiling face appeared around the corner of the kitchen. "I didn't hear the garage! Why didn't you _tell_ us you were coming?"

"I wanted to surprise you."

"Well, you sure _did!"_

Winnie got to me first, his paws on my legs, his tongue trying to reach my face. I leaned down and let him. Mom put a hand on my shoulder and hugged me as I stood up. Oh, it's nice to be loved.

I changed into an old pair of jeans and set my ring tone to _Winston,_ then spent the next hour telling Mom about the case, petting Winnie, and giving him his share of the perfectly-aged two-day-old zucchini lasagna Mom reheated with a little parsley sprinkled on top. _Ahhh. Home cooking._

I kept the things I told Mom about the Professor, the Marine, and Jim Charles pretty vague, I didn't want to gross her out. Around nine o'clock we called it a night.

Thursday morning I woke up looking forward to having two full days off, with the whole weekend ahead of me. We had a great time that afternoon playing ball with Winnie outside in the forty degree Fall weather. We watched an old Jeff Bridges movie, _Tucker,_ about a brilliant guy who took on the big car companies, though the name, of course, made me think of our missing Florida suspect. I don't know if Winston knows what's going on when he stares at the screen, but he likes to watch. The Tucker family had a pack of trained dalmatians, and Winnie barked back whenever the dogs barked.

The only down moment was that evening, after the movie. I slept a little, then read half a novel by the Marine on my iPhone. Mom looked over my shoulder at what I was reading and related it to what she'd seen on the news describing the Professor of Weird's missing hand and shredded throat. Stuff I'd tried to hide she already knew. You can't fool Mom. Winston picks up his emotions from Mom and me. If he felt like we did, we were all pretty grossed out. The Pen Killers, it seemed, had invaded our home too.

Friday morning, having breakfast in my PJs, I caught Mom watching me, frowning. I must have looked pretty grim. She could see how the case was getting to me. I finished eating and took a nice long warm shower, then got dressed in another pair of old jeans.

When I came out to the kitchen, Mom asked innocently, "So what do you have planned for this weekend?"

"Not much. I guess I'll just hang out with you guys."

"Is that so? I happened to speak with your friend Geoffrey Martin while you were in the shower."

"You did?" I smiled. "How would _he_ know I was home? You called him? All right, what are you up to?"

Mom grinned. "Maybe a little bird told him you were here. He said _something_ about a bird. A _Snowbird,_ maybe? _Utah?_ He's coming over here to pick up you and Winnie at ten o'clock, unless you call and cancel."

_"Mom!"_ I checked the clock above the fireplace. It was too late for that.

Until I'd seen Tommy just two weeks ago, I hadn't seen Chip, Geoff, or Tommy in months. It never rains, it pours, and it was pouring men. _Now Geoff? Oh, why not?_ I didn't know if I'd be seeing Tommy again. The Bureau kept me far too busy for a relationship. I hadn't had the time, nor really the inclination, to see anyone in months. A couple of agents had asked me out, but I'd turned them down. Why bother? Frankly, no one could compare with the three guys I'd dated over the last year.

"Don't forget your long underwear, _"_ Mom called as I ran upstairs, laughing, the biggest smile on my face in days. I packed.

*

The front bell rang at ten a.m. sharp. I ran and got the door and Geoff kissed me hello.

"Hi, Doris," he said over my shoulder. He stepped over to kiss her cheek, knelt down, and petted Winnie.

"Hello, Geoffrey!" Mom loves Geoff. "I hope you're well."

"Very well, thank you."

Winnie's tail was in hyper mode. Co-conspirators, all of them against me, and appreciated very much. I was disgusted with this case, every murder a different brutal method of killing, and no suspects in custody. It was making me ill.

I'd been feeling pretty guilty about my lack of buddy time with Winston, all those days I'd left him behind -- the long carjacking case, a week of Florida vacation, then two weeks in California. It had been torture for both of us. I needed some serious doggy make-up time on my dance card. Winston's my boy. I hadn't seen Geoff in a long while either, but I knew if we did get together it would have to include Winnie. Love me, love my dog. Geoff knew this, so though Mom had plotted for me and Winnie to go with him for the weekend, I was pretty happy about it.

Winston reached Geoff's Jaguar first. Geoff put my luggage in the boot, as he calls it, along with Winnie's doggy bag. We got Winston into his harness, clipped him to the rear seatbelt and off we went, Mom waving a cheery goodbye from the front porch.

*

Geoffrey Martin is a great looking man. He's not unbearably beautiful nor fascinated with the psychology of criminals the way Tommy is. And when it comes to brainpower, Geoff's no super-genius like Chip Balmer. But what Geoffrey has is _class._ Wavy salt-and-pepper hair, he's a tall and rangy nicely-muscled man, who is always impeccably dressed. And Geoff's street smarts and business sense have produced an incredible amount of wealth.

Geoff was once very poor, growing up in the slums of east London -- until he got his first break as a kid carpenter assistant, then built his fortune up from nothing. Geoff, it turned out, had two gifts: the ability to recognize a great bargain, and the ability to find people who could appreciate it.

When Geoff first left home, he lived like a pauper for two years before he found the perfect burned-out house in the expensive Kennsington section of London and got three subcontractor buddies -- a plumber, an electrician, and a drywaller -- to go in with him. Together they scraped up enough cash to make a down payment. Geoff slept nights on the floor in a sleeping bag, keeping out the homeless squatters, and the four of them spent months gutting the place and doing all the work themselves, turning the building into a very nice bed and breakfast.

Geoff spent the next twenty-five years building hotels -- in New York, London, one in a beautiful spot halfway between Paris and Lyon, France; Tuscany, Sidney -- you've seen them: _Martin:_ _Stay In Perfection._ Oh, and Hong Kong and Honolulu. Those are the seven he's taken me to visit. There are two dozen more.

Today, Geoff was taking me skiing in the Rockies. I was game as long as it meant taking Winston. Geoff never flies commercial. He owns two jets, which works out well for taking Winnie with us. I forget the type of jet that's his main aircraft, but it's roomy and the interior is mostly wood and leather. He has a full-time crew of three, two pilots and a flight steward, but Geoff likes to do a little of the flying himself. Once he even let me steer.

So, an hour after we waved goodbye to Mom, we were settled into the cabin at thirty-some thousand feet, sipping delicious Veuve Clicquot champagne. Winnie had a bowl of rabbit treats. My boy's got to keep up his strength.

I'd actually met Geoff before my Olympic accident. His company Martin is a major sponsor of the Ski Team. But Geoff became my _friend_ in the days _after_ the accident.

It was a slow process, as true friendship is with me. I don't make real friends quickly, but I keep them for life. My recovery was very painful at first. Surgery and metal pins. I couldn't walk. Geoff stopped by two weeks after the accident. Strangely, unlike most people, he didn't ask how I was. Instead, he suggested I might like to go back to school during my down time, to figure out what I might like to do with my life. Assuming I did recover. It was far from certain I'd ever walk again. I scoffed at the idea.

But Geoff persisted.

During those early depressing weeks, he kept stopping by. Little by little an old idea took shape in my mind. I had half my undergrad degree already. Long before skiing became the main thing in my life, I'd had a secret desire. It was still there, tucked away and nearly forgotten, waiting for an opportunity to emerge. I had nothing to do but vegetate in that dang hospital room, so one day I opened the iBook Geoff brought me and looked around. George Washington University had an online program I liked the sound of. With Geoff's help behind the scenes (I'm pretty sure), I was readmitted as a psych major and picked up my studies where I'd left off.

As my leg grew stronger, weeks that had been filled with only pain and physical therapy, now included study. Every week or so, Geoff would stop by, check on my physical progress, and ask about my course work. He'd tell me about where he was building and discuss the problems he was having with the people working for him. He seemed to value my opinion, my empathy, and understanding.

As soon as I could handle a wheelchair, every couple of weeks he began to fly me places for a day or two. The first was Lyon, France. The next time it was Hong Kong. I'd study on the plane. I guess he knew I'd never been to France or Asia. It was fabulous. In China we took a short detour. Geoff got two burly Chinese guys to carry me in my wheelchair up to the top of the Great Wall.

I sat there looking at miles and miles of beautiful Chinese countryside, and that ancient ribbon of block snaking away into the distance, apparently the only man-made structure on earth you can see from the moon, and cried. My life really wasn't over.

A month later, I managed a pair of crutches, and finally, one beautiful night in Tuscany, Geoffrey took me into his bed.

Now, on the plane, as we relaxed and talked and sipped our bubbly, the Pen Killers should have been miles away. But images kept popping into my mind, nagging me. The Cheeze, his wife, the Prince. The Editor, the Professor, the Marine. Faces of the dead that wouldn't let me enjoy myself.

The first thing a competitive skier does on a new hill is check out what's called the fall line -- the slope, the moguls, -- she determines the best way through the gates. But the gates in this damn Pen Killer Case were invisible, a total whiteout, lost in the blizzard. There's no one, except Xue and Mom, I trust more than Geoff, so somewhere over Nebraska, I told him about the dead authors and burned out libraries.

When I was done Geoff sat there next to me on that plush white leather couch with a confused look on his face.

"I don't know," he said, "if I've ever told you this, Naomi, but I don't support political causes. I've always felt it's better to encourage knowledge and learning. Did I ever tell you I make donations to certain libraries in this country, in France, and in England?"

"You didn't."

"In the last two weeks, two libraries I've supported have been burned, right to the ground. One in Florida and one in Virginia. Have you heard about them?"

I shook my head.

"I'm still angry about it," he said. "To a book lover, burning a library is like burning a church of knowledge."

I went over to the desk and sat behind Geoff's computer. It's great to have a friend whose jet has an Internet connection. I ran a search and found articles describing the libraries Geoff was talking about. Someone was burning more libraries, all right. Not five -- but _eight_ in the last three weeks. I found news stories on three in California -- the one Xue and I had seen in Huntington Beach, one we already knew about north of San Diego, and one in Palm Springs. I found the two in College Park and Baltimore that had caused Director Line to bring us back to Washington.

Then I clicked on a week-old article on the two libraries Geoff had been making donations to, one in Miami, the other in Hampton, Virginia, and an independent bookstore burned down not far from the Virginia library. The article said the bookstore had gone out of business permanently; no new premises, no restocking the shelves. The owners had decided to take the insurance money and close up. Bookstores weren't making money anymore. The eighth library was in West Palm Beach, Florida, burned just before we left California.

Were _all_ these arsons related to the Pen Killings? Most of the locations seemed to say so. Except for Geoff's library in Virginia and the bookstore, and the libraries in Maryland, the others were in parts of California and Florida not far from where famous authors had died. _Our_ famous authors. What the heck was going on here?

*

Friday afternoon Geoff's pilots set his jet down at Salt Lake International. A white Mercedes SUV was waiting for us. I relaxed as Geoff drove, winding our way up Little Cottonwood Canyon into the Wasatch Mountains.

The outside of Geoff's ski chalet was built of wide slabs of unfinished concrete. But inside, well, it was beautiful, finished in warm wood and comfortable leather, much like his jets.

We unpacked. I took Winston out for a quick walk and gave him dinner.

By a roaring fire that night, Geoff and I dined on venison steaks, sweet potatoes, and asparagus with an apricot glaze, accompanied by a delicious chilled California Chablis. We relaxed by the fire, sipping cognac for half and hour or so. Then, in preparation for a big day tomorrow, we went early to bed.

40

Within the killer flowed a deep river of artistic talent and unbearable enthusiasm for what was about to happen. With the news of each successful murder, the flow had increased until this killer felt ready to explode, much like the burned out libraries the others had left behind. Was this what authors felt when their latest books appeared on the best-seller lists? The killer wanted to _scream_ it was so exciting! It was too much. It had to be released. _WOO-Fucking-HOO!_

_Maybe a little song is in order, hmm? HMM? Yes, indeedy!_ A little _Frankie-baby?_

"If I can make it here, I'll kill them ev-ree-where,  
it's up to you, New York, Ne-ew _YORRRK!"_

_Okay, okay -- that last bit was a little too exciting . . . just calm down and get on with the job!_

*

The Brawler stood on his hotel balcony, looking out across the lights of Central Park, exhaling a long contented cone of gray cigarette smoke into the cool autumn air. The tour was _spectacular!_ Lines of fans outside bookstores that ran around the block; overflow rooms in libraries to handle the huge crowds that couldn't get into the main rooms to hear him speak. He still couldn't get over his surprise last week when he looked up to ask the next of his Austin fans in line, "Who should I make this out to . . ." and found the eyes of his baby sister looking back --

_"Debbie!"_ he'd exclaimed.

_How they'd laughed!_ Since that stupid falling out they'd had, he hadn't spoken to his kid sister in four years! _And now she's a big fan of my main boy, Masher? What a bloody trip!_

After the signing, he'd taken Debbie out to dinner. They'd had _such_ a great time, catching up on each other's lives. She'd got married and divorced. And Debbie wasn't a Born-Again anymore, she was into Zen! _Zen? Come on! Oh, whatever._ He was just glad to have her back.

All his signing events had been like that. Old friends stopping by, people he hadn't seen in years. Often, the events went late into the night until his left arm felt ready to fall off. They were selling every book the organizers brought with them. The tour was going to break _all_ his records!

The Brawler snapped out of his reverie at a knock on the door. He flicked the cigarette off the balcony, strode across his lavish hotel suite, and opened it.

_"Hel-lo, sir!"_ said a pleasant muffled voice. Dressed in a hoodie with its back to him, the person immediately began pulling a cart loaded with what appeared to be a portable red massage table into the room. The Brawler stepped aside and let the person in.

"Uh, I didn't order a massage," the Brawler said.

"It's a gift from your publisher, Marc, for all your hard work!" came the muffled voice as the cart was stopped at the room's center. "They know how tense you get."

_That is really nice of him,_ the Brawler thought. _What a considerate gesture!_

As the masseuse _(masseur?)_ turned to face him, an alarm went off suddenly in the Brawler's head -- he couldn't see the person's face. _What is this person wearing?_

The heroic character in the Brawler's stories, Ken Masher, was always quick to react, but the Brawler himself was not, which was the reason he was an author and not a superhero. He required time to edit -- while his mind struggled to make sense of the heavy white mask and built-in HASMAT filters to either side. The person's hand came up, and a white cloud of spray hit the Brawler full in the face. He choked on his first breath and fell backwards, smashing a wide glass coffee table, and onto the plush red carpeting.

"Just relax," said the muffled voice, "and it will all be over soon."

The last thing the Brawler was aware of as he lost consciousness was his attacker popping out the legs on the padded red table, and humming a little tune: " _It's up to you, Ne-ew . . ."_

The killer stopped. Considered.

_This is going too fast, isn't it?_ Waaaay _too fast. Slow down a little, enjoy life! Of_ course _the goal has to be reached. Of_ course _the plan has to be followed. But the timeline is intact. Everything is perfectly on schedule. Success, success, SUCCESS! Isn't there time for just a_ little _fun?_

_Maybe . . . what I need . . . is a great new name! The others use such wonderful pseudonyms, pen names, as it were! But what should_ I _pick?_ _What's in a name? How can one choose from the endless myriad of possibilities? Something like the Brawler, only snappier! Something with a bit of pizzazz that can be signed in blood. Something . . . tantalizing . . ._

The killer ran down through the alphabet. _A . . . B . . . C . . ._ stopping finally at _T._ The killer knew a bit of Latin. An old old name came to the tip of the tongue, the kind of name to be admired. A _call-me-Ishmael_ kind of name, but with a Greek-Latin flare. There was an old myth the killer could almost recall . . . something about thirst and hunger and an overhanging rock of doom. _Hmm, what was that old tale . . ?_

_Tant . . . yeah -- TANTALUS! Perfect! Beautiful! Let the others find their _own _names! Tantalus will be_ this _killer._ This _killer will be TANTALUS!_

The killer said softly, "Once the killer, _no, Tantalus . . . Mmmmmuh! . . ._ had muscled the unconscious author . . . _Mmmmmuhh!_ . . . up into position on the massage table . . . _Tantalus_ pulled out a five-pound sledge hammer . . . and went to work . . ."

Twenty minutes later, when everything was done, dark blood and bits of pale bone sparkling the carpet, the killer unwrapped a gold pen, dipped it in the fresh red ink, and signed a brand new name.

41

I slept poorly that night surrounded by killers throwing snakes at me and releasing pet cheetahs everywhere I turned.

Early Saturday morning we woke to a knock on the door. We pulled up the covers and Geoff called, _"Come in!"_

Jeeves, a graying taciturn old man, Geoff's caretaker, served us breakfast in bed: Spanish omelets, toast, bacon, and orange juice. Simply scrumptious. It was energy food, skiing fare.

The greatest snow on earth doesn't touch down in Aspen where I broke my leg, it floats from the sky, fluffy and feather light in Utah. Park City may be Utah's party town, but if you _really_ want to ski, you go Snowbird and Alta, sister resorts that had just received twenty-eight inches of fresh powder.

Winnie loves it here. We spent the early morning bounding around on the bunny hill.

Once Winnie was worn out -- which for a bulldog is about an hour -- Geoff and I hit the slopes. Geoff's ski chalet is across the road from Snowbird. You walk over, step into your skis, and glide right onto the chairlift.

I still wore the knee brace on my right leg as a precaution. We planned to take it easy. We skied a gentle slope over to the tram, took it to the top of Snowbird, then warmed up with a run down the wide slopes of Regulator Johnson. Geoff skis expert; not as good as I once was, but he gets around. We took a chairlift to the top again and skied over the back, into the bowls of Alta.

When we got off the chair at the very top of Alta, we moved out of the way of those getting off the lift, and just stood there, our arms around each other. You can see for miles from that point, way out into the Utah Desert. Finally, in one long breath, I felt the tension leave my body.

"About damn time!" Geoff said. "I was wondering if that would _ever_ happen. You must have been carrying that stress around with you for days! That's no good for anybody. Definitely not for someone I care about so much."

I smiled. "Can't argue with that, especially when you're right." I let go another long breath. "I've been letting these crazy killers get to me." I smiled and kissed him. "Thanks so much for bringing me up here, Geoff, for taking me away from all that. It means a lot."

"My pleasure. You deserve it."

_I do,_ I thought, _don't I?_

The air wasn't that cold, but the ground was, and it kept the snow light. With rays of sunshine poking through the clouds, our jackets unzipped and flapping behind us, we cut sweeping turns down the wide fluffy slopes. There's nothing like it. " _Yahooo!"_ I shouted, listening to my voice echo off the mountains around me. _Shshshshoooosh!_

*

"You can purchase anything on the dark web," Tantalus muttered, grinning, waiting, watching through the rain from the entry of a building across the street from the Mail-Is-Us on Lexington Avenue. __ "But when it absolutely, positively has to be there, you don't use FedEx. FedEx scans and sniffs. There's a more dependable way: hand delivery.

_"Ahhh, there he is!"_

Wearing an honest-to-God Mexican sombrero and poncho, the courier walked up to the building. The key was right were it was supposed to be, under the rock in the potted plant out front. The courier stepped inside, placed what appeared to be _two_ FedEx boxes in the extra-large mailbox, then walked off into the downpour. It wasn't safe to pack the detonators in the same box with the plastique.

An hour later it wasn't raining. After making certain no one was watching, the mailman came -- blue cap, gray mustache, blue uniform, even an old-fashioned leather mailbag. It wasn't the mailman, however, it was Tantalus. _The things you can rent these days at a costume shop -- woo-hoo!_

The mailman wasn't delivering, he was picking up.

*

Three hours later we rode a chair back over to Snowbird and skied halfway down the mountain to the Mid-Gad Restaurant for some hot cider by a calming fire and lunch. For an hour we relaxed on a cushy loveseat and enjoyed the mountain view, then stepped back into our skis, took a couple more powder runs, and then, that long easy glide all the way back to the bottom . . . and Winnie -- who ran out with his tail wagging the moment Jeeves opened the door.

Winnie did his doggy business. He was starving. He made a bowl of PureVita Salmon disappear in about forty seconds. The moment Winnie finishes dinner, he conks out. We had a good solid hour before his end of the evening walk, so, _why wait?_ After pounding our bodies on the slopes, there was one part of us skiing didn't touch. I pulled Geoff into the bedroom, and our clothes went flying. I fell backward onto that big fluffy bed, pulling him with me, wrapping my legs around him as we landed, locking my lips on his, my hands around his back as I felt him slide forward and enter me. _"Ahhh -- fantastic!" _I muttered.

Geoff looked into my eyes. "You mean so much to me, Naomi," he said warmly. "I _love_ your strength and your intelligence."

I was shocked. This man, one of the kindest, strongest men I have ever known, saying this to me.

Geoff is an amazing, patient lover, and his exquisite passion draws me to him. His hands are magic, and his lips are, well, out of this world. I love the feel of him. He rode me like we were up on the slopes again, hopping moguls, hips making each turn with perfection. I loved the way his strong back felt as his ass worked and he penetrated me more deeply, me pulling him closer with my legs. Geoff brought me right to the edge, then slowed, pulled back, barely inside me, moving the tiniest amount -- slower, faster, deeper . . . backing away, then closer, harder-faster, until we ro-o-o-ose -- and _fell_ over the crest of our hill -- into one long _shshshshsh_ -- gliding all the way down.

*

Tantalus found slipping past security to be a cakewalk. A homemade ID that referenced an obscure company division in London and an employee on vacation allowed an elevator ride fifty stories to the top occupied floor.

For a Saturday afternoon the halls were a madhouse. Tantalus was surprised to see so many people running hither and thither. Quite an unexpected advantage. Nobody paid any attention to a stranger. Shortly it became clear why. They were on deadline. A big new release was due out Tuesday.

A lock pick and a staircase brought Tantalus up to the quiet three-story room that held the big device. Much like the nearby former Citibank Building, the tower on West Fifty-fifth Street had been built on the architectural edge. Extremely tall and slim, shortly after it rose into the cityscape, it was found to be unstable. Like Citibank Building, high winds from the right direction could cause its top to sway dangerously back and forth across the sky.

A simple solution had been found: mass water damping. Two giant U-shaped concrete and stainless ballast tanks were built into the tower's top three floors. When the building swayed right, a million pounds of water flowed across the bottom of the U, and up the left tube. When the building swayed left, the water flowed right. The second U-shaped tank allowed water to flow front to rear. The tower became amazingly stable.

Tantalus worked steadily in the tight space behind the tanks where notice was unlikely to occur. Communication was invisible, wireless through a relay placed up high in the corner. The charges were now shaped and colored to resemble the maroon heads of the heavy bolts that held the mass damper together.

In an hour the job was done. _Perfect!_ No one could possibly notice. It might be a while before the charges could be used, but everything was ready. Just waiting for the right conditions.

Ten minutes later Tantalus left out the front door, walking away on the rainy street with only a single glance up over a shoulder. _Talk about an overhanging rock of doom! Woo-hoo!_

*

After another scrumptious dinner, this time roast duck, I slept well for a change. We spent two glorious days in those powder-covered mountains, and two wonderful nights in Geoff's big fluffy ski bed, me getting that damn Pen Killer case out of my head. My doggy guilt, too, disappeared; Winnie gave me absolution.

Late Sunday afternoon, Geoff and I drove out of the canyon and had dinner on the plane. We'd skied hard and I was so tired that the moment I got into the plane's king size bed, I dozed off.

Sometime later it seemed, Geoff woke me, smoothing his hands over my body, which quickly turned to another round of hot steamy sex. I don't know why making love on a plane is different than anywhere else. I felt myself go quickly over the falls.

_"Ooooh_ -- _wow,_ Geoffrey! The earth moved on that one!"

He grinned. "I can't take all the credit. The pilot was just backing the plane around for take off." We laughed.

"In a few minutes we'll be heading home," Geoff added more seriously. "In a few hours we have a stop to make. I want you to see something."

42

That Sunday night, according to the jet's big moving wall map, Geoff had his pilot set us down in Virginia, at a small airport fifty miles west of Washington. A town-car pulled up to the jet's stairs. As we traveled through the dark countryside, Geoff wouldn't tell me where we were going.

Finally, he sighed and said, "Ever since you let go of all that stress up on the mountain, I wasn't sure whether it was a good idea to bring you back to your case right away. Then I realized it was unavoidable."

I puzzled a look at him, but that was all Geoff would say.

We came into the town of Hampford. The moment we made a left into a parking lot, I knew where we were. I'd seen the pictures of it on our flight to Snowbird. The car stopped, but Geoff's driver kept the headlights on. Geoff got out and held the door for me.

Before us was a sign, the only undamaged thing on the blackened grass. I walked over.

I looked up at the charred pile of rubble behind it. There wasn't much left. Just like at Huntington Beach, the fire had been extreme. Only two stone corners and part of the rear block wall remained standing. The rest had caved in.

"The temperatures must have been fantastically high to do so much damage," Geoff said.

"All those books," I agreed. "It must have been unstoppable."

I pulled out my phone, filmed and tagged everything. The only vaguely identifiable remains from inside I could make out were some twisted metal strips that must have been shelves. For some reason I felt unbearably sad.

"There are others just like this," Geoff said.

Didn't I know it. _Seven more!_ The photos from Florida and California were just as bad. Were our Pen Killers doing this? Dead authors and burned-out libraries, they seemed to fit together. Why the _hell_ would a group of people kill authors and burn books. To what end? For what reason? To achieve what goal?

At least no one had died in the library fires. The libraries had all been burned at night. So far.

Our driver took us down the road twenty miles to the town of Wolverton. The middle of a block on the town's main street looked much like the library. We stopped before what had been a three-story building, and was now a blackened wreck.

"This was the bookstore you found online?" Geoff asked.

I nodded. There was nothing more to say.

*

On our way back to Washington, Geoff told me he had to go to France, then Germany, and to Dubai. He took my hand and said, "I want you to go with me, Naomi."

_Oh, my God. First Tommy, now Geoff?_

"I'm sorry, Geoff, I can't."

"It's this case, isn't it? You can't just walk away, can you?"

I shook my head. But it wasn't just the case. It was also my loyalty to, and love of, the Bureau. The FBI was now my life. A sadness crossed his face -- I think Geoff knew he was partly responsible for me not being able to go with him.

He looked into my eyes. "Can't you see how dangerous this case is becoming? What it's doing to you? I'm worried."

We parted on Mom's front porch with a kiss. "Please be careful, Naomi," he said.

I went inside. At least he didn't say he loved me. I don't know if I could have taken that, though I knew he did. I did too. I had no idea how long it would be before I'd see him again.

43

Monday morning I left the house early. By four-thirty I was checking in through Bureau security right behind Xue. My long weekend had focused me on how desperately we needed a new way to beat these killer-arsonists to the next punch. We knew it was coming. They weren't going to just stop. We had to quit being reactive and start being predictive. But when we entered Conference Room C, LINKS already had bad news waiting.

While I'd been out west, skiing, another library in Virginia had been burned, this one in Dormont. That made nine. I showed Xue the LINKS videos I'd recorded: the Hampford Library mess I'd seen with Geoff, and the bookstore burned in Wolverton.

"I'm still having trouble connecting these fires to our author murders," Xue said, frowning as LINKS assembled a map of the fires and murders up on the screen. But before I could answer, she nodded and said, "It does look that way geographically, doesn't it?"

My phone beeped. An angry text appeared from Madeline Wu, increasing our frustration. Now she wanted _daily_ reports that _included_ the fires. This thing was insane.

Madeline was offering us more agents, anything we wanted. The twelve agents from our meeting with the Director arrived. They were to be our new Washington team. Amazingly, Xue and I were still in charge. We put two of the Washington agents on safari guy Dave Rosco's background. We put everyone else on analyzing the data, in the hope that someone might come up with something new. It wasn't only the number of agents we had, it was the number of brain cells that could work in harmony to attack the case. We had our LA team, Chip's supercomputer, and the LINKS system on the problem too.

We turned to the crime scenes. I put LINKS on assembling a murder photo tree, so everyone could have a visual timeline and description of each dead author's history tied to their hate mail and negative reviews. There had to be a common thread. The killers had to have made a mistake somewhere, given something away. None of the victims, beyond the covert friendship between the Prince and the Cheeze, connected directly.

At eight-thirty Xue and I took a Bureau car out to Virginia. Xue drove while and I made calls to California, Florida, and Maryland. I got people out of bed where I had to. I got the SAC in Baltimore on the phone and asked him to have someone make a record of the burned library. I sent two new agents on our Washington team over to College Park. I already had video of the burned out Huntington Beach Library. I put in a call to Mac, the cute agent that Xue had liked that had brought our car to the airport in San Diego, and asked him to shoot video of the burned library up in nearby Clairemont. Miami agents would make LINKS recordings of the libraries that had been burned in West Palm Beach and Miami. I sent Helen Monroe and Sam Dolup from LA out to Palm Springs. They said they would swing by the burned LA bookstore on their way back.

LINKS sent me a message. Tila Jackson had already updated some LINKS files related to other aspects of the California burnings -- the Palm Springs and Clairemont libraries were already in the planning stages of being rebuilt. They'd sent advance orders to Baker and Taylor, a company that sells most of the books that libraries purchase. They were ordering by the truckload. However, when I got a call through to Tim Jones, the mayor of Huntington Beach, where the first Library we knew of had been burned, it was a different story. They were going all-digital.

Jones asked, "Why _should_ we rebuild? We won't have any more late returns. We'll simply withdraw the books when they expire from our patrons' eReaders. Besides, we've long had a homeless problem around our library."

"But you won't be able to collect any more fines either," I said.

"We've got that covered. We're going to charge a small monthly fee."

Jones told me he'd heard that Baltimore and College Park were not planning to rebuild their burned down libraries either. Their city councils felt they were no longer needed. They would be replaced with virtual libraries like his that were managed by tiny server rooms with one or two employees located in city offices. They were ordering thousands of books, alright, but all purely digital. The rest of their librarians were being laid off. We disconnected. Somehow, I felt disappointed.

Xue yawned.

"Long weekend?" I asked.

She nodded, smiling. "I had a great date with a guy from the State Department named Chris."

_"Oh?"_ I smiled, my eyebrows rising.

"I'm going to cut out right at five tonight," she said, "if I can. I'm seeing him again."

"A nice, _normal_ guy for a change?" Her last one had been a real loser, big time. His pillow talk had led to his arrest.

"It's only our second time out, but I think so."

"Where'd you meet him?"

"At the coffee shop around the corner from my apartment."

_Hmmm._

"Don't worry," she laughed. "He's been with State for nearly three years."

"What's he look like?"

"Kind of a blond California guy with a real nice build." She tilted her head. "He's only two inches taller than me, but he's funny, and he thinks I am. Nothing like your three supermen, but _I_ like him."

"I hope it works out," I said sincerely. Xue deserved a great guy. She worked hard not to let her jealousy for the guys I dated show, and she seemed to have been getting a little desperate about not having anybody lately.

"I hope it works out too," she said. "I might take a look at the LINKS files later. I want to go over the Professor's blood results from his autopsy." She grinned. "If I'm not too busy. What are you doing tonight?"

"Just spending a little time with Mom and Winnie. Maybe I'll dig through the case a little more."

*

We were met in Dormont by Fire Chief Walter Conrad. I could see little difference between this charred wreck, and the one I'd seen yesterday with Geoff. Both were the remains of a building destroyed by an incredibly hot " _superfire,"_ as Chief Conrad put it. "The sprinklers were disabled," he told us.

Xue and I looked at each other. _Just like Huntington Beach!_

"Once the fire got going," Conrad said, "the heat was so intense it was near impossible to extinguish until all the fuel was exhausted."

We recorded everything on LINKS.

*

On the way back to Headquarters I muttered, _"_ What damn reason could someone possibly have to kill authors _and_ burn all those books?"

"If they're connected," Xue replied. "I still wonder --"

"These killers, _and_ arsonists," I insisted, "have been brilliant and organized. Every move is being thought out in advance, leaving barely a trace of themselves behind."

Xue nodded. "What you're saying _does_ make sense," she said. "The map of fires LINKS put together backs it up. But I don't know what we can do that we're not already doing."

We _had_ to be missing something. We had more hate mail and bad reviews than LINKS knew what to do with, but no understanding as to why, or who, was executing these attacks. Range Tucker? Curtis May? Who had killed Dasha Cummings? How had the killers been choosing their victims? Simply from the _Times_ best-seller lists? And why were certain libraries were being targeted? Some, it seemed, were being chosen by their proximity to the murders, but not others.

Xue thought we needed to push harder to interview _somebody_ on the _Times_ lists. We were still having trouble there.

As we approached the DC Beltway, I made more calls to literary agents and publishers. Best-selling authors still didn't want to talk to us. They were taking sudden vacations, going off to Europe _("Those sons-a-bitches'll never find me here!")._ And understandably, according to one agent, some authors were drinking more than usual. Their output was slowing. Publishers were worried but had no power to do anything about it. Was this what the killers _wanted,_ to destroy the publishing industry?

"Ironic how afraid these authors seem to be," Xue huffed, after I'd made a dozen calls to agents and gotten as many brush-offs. "Judging by the hate mail they receive, a lot of readers feel the victims in their stories resemble their own loved ones."

Then Maddie sent another text: Talking heads in the media were beginning to pump the library-fire side of our case, and they were blaming the FBI.

*

At my desk, I checked what videos LINKS had received. Mac had shot the Clairemont fire. Palm Springs was in. Baltimore too. The rest were pending. I ran the ones we had. Each included a news clip of the blaze. The charred remains were similar, the fires looked like Huntington Beach -- super hot and out of control.

Xue called out, "I've got something on the pens!"

I stepped over to her desk.

"Madison Ciselé," she said, "has filled only one order in the United States large enough to include all eight pens. It was shipped to the Nananx Corporation. Every year at Christmas they purchase a large quantity as gifts for their top executives and get a discount. Five hundred dollars a piece! Wholesale! They bought a dozen this year for six _thousand_ dollars."

"Did any pens go to non-employees?"

"I _asked._ Nananx says no. And my contact at the pen factory says all their other U.S. sales have been through shops, one and two at a time."

"Then where did these pens come from?" I asked. "Do you think a company employee stole them?"

"Maybe," Xue said. "I'll run that by Madison Ciselé. I'm going to look into Nananx this afternoon."

*

I'd just finished wolfing down half a turkey and Swiss at my desk when the other shoe dropped, the _worse_ news.

There hadn't been any authors murdered in more than a week. Just as we'd begun to think maybe the Pen Killers were done, my phone rang. It was SAC Joan Proxmire of the Manhattan Field Office. An author had been killed in a New York City hotel. The body was two days cold. I put the call on speaker. Our new team gathered 'round.

Proxmire told us the Brawler had been on a book tour. His most recent stop? New York. He'd left a Do-Not-Disturb sign _taped_ over his suite's door handle. No maids had gone into the room all weekend, not until he didn't show up that morning at La Guardia Airport for the next flight on his tour, _and_ the hotel room had begun to stink. Then the hotel's management, prompted by his publisher, Panda House, got the hotel detective to open the door. Word was, the number of flies disturbed inside the suite was tremendous.

At Madeline's request, SAC Proxmire's agents weren't letting the New York City ME remove the body, or letting the local cops touch the scene. It was being held exclusively for Xue and me. Lucky us. The Pen Killer was now officially an FBI serial case, Level Four. We were taking over.

Proxmire disconnected.

As the team began hashing this new murder around. I received a text message from Chip. He already knew about the Brawler.

Without telling me, that morning he'd modified the author locator. It didn't matter anymore if the authors cooperated or not. Now, if a phone wasn't moved and no calls were made or received, and if there had been no messages sent by the phone or any data used -- within five hours -- LINKS automatically made an anonymous call to that phone.

If the phone was answered, LINKS would hang up. If there was no answer, LINKS would call twice more. Still no answer? We'd send someone to check it out. This was obviously going to irritate an author who was in some kind of lockdown writing marathon, but it was the best we could do. I wondered, Is Chip using this same tech to keep an eye on me?

Unfortunately, Chip's new mod hadn't saved the Brawler. The locator had been tracking the Brawler's phone, but the new changes hadn't been made until after his death.

The moment I finished reading Chip's message, my phone beeped. I picked it up.

"Agent Soul?"

"Yes, ma'am?"

By my voice Xue knew instantly who it was, and we both had a pretty good idea of what Madeline wanted. She had only four words for us.

"New York City. _Go!"_

Two minutes later Xue and I had our bags in the elevator. Two minutes after that we were in a Bureau helicopter headed north.

Part Five

New York City

44

In the back of the helicopter my phone was going crazy. Text messages and guesses about the latest author death showed the story spreading like wildfire across the publishing and media world. The blame was being placed squarely on the FBI with labels like incompetent, bumbling, useless, and inept.

screamed the _New York Times_ headline.

Xue and I put in more calls to literary agents, asking for help on the case, but time after time we were told how the crème de la crème of crime fiction were pulling their heads even further into their shells. With one exception: the Playboy. His agent called _me._

In LA I'd studied the Playboy's Wiki pages. The author was famous for writing about a crime-busting accountant that women supposedly adored. Over many novels, his _numbers man,_ as the Playboy called him, had slept his way up the social ladder right to the top -- an affair with the First Lady that took place during a consultation in Washington with the U.S. General Accounting Office. The President's wife hoped to seduce the accountant to keep her husband from being impeached. The seduction succeeded, but the President failed his audit and was forced to resign. Through it all, where it counted, the numbers man stood firm.

The Playboy had told his agent he wanted to face these serial killers head on, to help in any way possible. The _Playboy_ wasn't scared. He wasn't going to run or hide. Okay, he wouldn't give us his phone number (we had it anyway -- he was on Chip's locator), but at least his agent said he was willing to meet with us. He wouldn't say when, but he said he would call me. Soon.

I moved to the seat next to Xue's so I could tell her what we might have: the Playboy's help, but she was on the phone.

"Got it!" she said. "Thank you very much!" She ended the call.

I said, "I think I've got a major author who'll talk to us."

"Great! One second, Naomi." She held up a finger. "Let me show you something." She tapped and swiped her phone, leaned over and held it where I could see.

"Look at this."

It was a closing statement for Curtis May's room charges at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I scanned the list, down to where an asterisk marked a charge for a _Late Supper._

"This is dated the day _after_ the Marine was killed?" I asked.

"Exactly," Xue said. "If Mr. May had ordered his dinner before midnight, the charge would have been entered on the same day the Marine was killed. But it wasn't and there was no charge for earlier that night. Here's the original charge." She stroked the screen.

"A 1:03 a.m. order delivered at 1:22 a.m.? That's not what you showed me when we met with May. Who sent you this, the bookkeeper?"

"No, the hotel comptroller, the bookkeeper's boss. He retrieved it from their off-site backup. It's worse than you think. The comptroller's just filling in. The bookkeeper's been missing -- for six days!"

I stared at her, blinking. "I'm getting a very bad feeling about Curtis May."

"Me too," she said. "I'm wondering if May could have forced or bribed the bookkeeper to change the room service record --"

"Then gotten rid of her," I finished. "Now we have two reasons to be in New York."

Xue nodded. "In addition to the Brawler's crime scene, we need to go to Curtis May's agency and talk to his partner as soon as possible. We need to find out what she knows. She _really_ has no idea where May _is?_ _Come on!"_

But shortly we had a third reason.

*

I was just telling Xue about our possible luck with the Playboy as we began descending over New Jersey, when NO CALLER ID popped up on my phone. After a moment LINKS automatically changed it to a number I recognized. I answered. "FBI Special Agent Naomi Soul."

"Is this the agent who wants to talk about the recent spate of killings in the publishing industry?"

"Yes, it is," I said, hope building.

To my growing excitement, the Playboy introduced himself. I nodded at Xue. We had a live one!

"Do you mind if I put you on speaker?" I asked. "So my partner Special Agent Sang can hear you? Do you mind if we record this conversation?"

"Please do. Whoever is committing these murders," the Playboy said, "I want them _stopped!_ I just heard the news about the death of a major author in one of the St. Regis Balcony Rooms. It's the Brawler, isn't it?"

Xue leaned in to the phone. "How did you hear that, sir?"

"That's where the Brawler always stays when he's in town. I've met him there for a drink several times when we went out to dinner."

"This is Special Agent Sang speaking, sir. We've had a difficult time getting any popular authors to talk with us."

"Most of the people in my industry have great imagination," the Playboy responded, "but very little gumption. The Brawler was a good friend. His death causes me such volcanic anger as I've rarely felt before."

Xue whispered, _"Very Dramatic! Proper English?"_

I nodded. The Playboy had beautiful diction. He reminded me of Geoff, without the accent.

"Actually," the Playboy said, "There are two reasons I called. I've been looking for someone to help me with a little research. I'm working on a story about an FBI agent. When can we meet?"

"Will over the phone do?"

"I'd prefer in person, if possible. I'm at my home in New Hampshire (we knew that) until late this afternoon, but I'll be in New York City tonight. I understand you're in Washington? That's not all that far."

"Actually, we're on our way to New York right now."

"Excellent! Could we meet at my brownstone on the East Side tomorrow morning at, say, nine?"

"Nine a.m. will be fine, sir." He gave us an address on East Fifty-third Street.

"See you then," I said.

"Looking forward."

45

Fall afternoons in New York are beautiful, even the rainy ones. From a balcony high above Central Park, I took in the energy, the fragrance, the colors, and tagged them into LINKS. Too bad twenty feet away another best-selling author lay dead. What was left of him.

I made certain LINKS recorded the cigarette burns along the railing. _The Brawler must have stood here,_ I thought, _perhaps only minutes before a very painful death._ LINKS had brought up his Wiki page on the way uptown. I remembered now. The Brawler had been a heavy chain smoker.

I went back inside.

Cigarettes didn't end the Brawler, the Pen Killers did. The Brawler had one main character all his books were written around, Ken Masher, a nomad who traveled the world with a hammer in his backpack beating the crap out of bad guys. One of the Pen Killers had done just exactly that to the Brawler, killed him using the methods in his stories, the same as had been done to our other six victims.

The Brawler's corpse lay face up on a padded red massage table. It looked as though every bone in his body was broken. A shin bone protruded below the Brawler's knee. Where there should have been fingers, bloody raw phalange bones stuck out of his hands. The Brawler's face had been smashed. One eye socket had pooled with blood. The surface of the pool was already dry.

There was a short-handled sledge hammer on the floor. I doubted we'd find any prints.

"Open comminuted fracture of the right clavicle," the ME recorded, standing beside the massage table. "Uh -- left one too." New York SAC Joan Proxmire's agents had gotten the Assistant ME to wait for us, though he didn't look too happy about it.

These Pen Killers had a sick sense of something, what I couldn't say. Another of the fine gold writing instruments lay discarded atop the author's stomach. There was a red hole in the Brawler's skinny chest, used as an inkwell, and a message scrawled directly above where the blood-filled pen lay -- a single word, elegantly scribed, in two-inch-tall flowing letters, and two numbers:

"For whatever reason," I said, _"this_ Pen Killer wants us to call him Tantalus _._ Not good."

"No, it's not good," Xue agreed. "That makes _three_ different killers. Florida, California, and now, New York."

I nodded. _"Tantalus?_ Some old Greek, wasn't he?"

"Very good, Naomi. Not many people know that. A Greek king that served his son's flesh to the gods."

"That's strange," I said. "Michelangelo is world famous. The Benefactor seems generic, yet religious, in a demented sort of way. But the name chosen by _this_ Pen Killer seems more obscure, more advanced than the others."

Xue nodded. "I agree."

*

We stopped by the hotel's security office, where Security Manager Larry Bean took us through video recorded two nights ago on the service elevator. The color system had captured someone with a red massage table on a hand truck getting out on the author's floor. The person had worn a hoodie and a gas mask that completely covered his face and the sides of his head. He kept his back to the camera. There was not even a frontal shot of his eyes through the mask's lenses. There'd been no gas mask found in the room. He was wearing a long white raincoat.

"How tall do you think he is?" I asked Bean. The smooth stainless wall of the service elevator behind the killer wasn't much help in judging.

"Difficult to say. Probably five-eight to five-ten."

I nodded. His guess would probably be a little better than mine.

Three times we watched the video as the killer rode up to the Brawler's floor and got out. The time coded video an hour later showed our perp taking the elevator down without the massage table, the raincoat as clean as it was going in. Our New York trace team had found small amounts of blood residue in one of the suite's bathroom sinks.

We picked up our unknown subject again on the first floor video. He zigged, he zagged, and deliberately avoided looking directly at any cameras.

Mr. Bean made us a copy. From six murders this was the best evidence we had. Maybe Chip could improve on the visual recognition and our height estimate. This guy, like whoever had executed the authors in Florida and on the West Coast, was a pro. Such a clean crime scene told us two things. This Pen Killer, too, knew what to watch for and how to be careful, and he knew our methods. Where were these killers coming from? Who was recruiting them?

There was no rush in looking for the story related to Brawler's death. I'd seen trailers for movies made of his books. Those who came up against the author's hero Ken Masher were beaten severely. We knew what we'd find in the first paragraph of the seventh page: A massage table and a bad guy beaten to death.

It was getting late. Xue and I had an appointment to see the Playboy tomorrow morning. We decided to call it a night. I could feel the pressure building again, this terrible frustration. I _needed_ to step back from this case.

Xue sing-songed, "You're not staying at the hotel, are you?"

"I'll see you there later."

"No, you're staying with Chip, _right?"_

"Probably not."

_"Have fun!"_ she grinned impishly. "You deserve it, after dealing with _this_ today. I'm going to borrow a Bureau car. Call if you want me to pick you up tomorrow morning."

I wasn't going to argue with my partner. I wanted to talk with Chip, but had no intention of staying there. I wanted to see if Chip had anything new. We needed a breakthrough.

Timewise, I'd never dated even two of the men I'd seen over the last year so closely together, let alone all three. I didn't feel there would have been anything wrong with it, really, but I wasn't going to. A guy can date three women casually, but if a woman sees more than one man, even weeks apart, that's a big no-no!

Still, I missed Chip; I hadn't seen him for months, only speaking to him on the phone. I wanted to get his take on what we'd seen today and brainstorm what else he thought the locator might do to protect these people. I grabbed my phone and dialed.

Ten rings later, Chip answered. "Naomi!"

46

When I got to Chip's lab in Soho late Friday afternoon, the front blinds were closed and the lights so low, I could barely make out the black granite sign cut with his company name:

Start up is what Chip helps other companies do. He thinks it's funny. There was no receptionist up front at the white granite desk. I wandered through the door on the right, into the back. Across the huge open space, the sky blue walls were broken only by the row of tall windows with their shades pulled down.

" _Chip?"_ I called out. _"Where is everyone?"_

All the computer screens in their workstation cubicles were dark. Pens sat atop notepads scribbled with gibberish. The place was deserted. I'd never seen it like this. It was usually busy until well after six. People loved working here. When interviewed, Chip's employees admitted to feeling like they were part of a big video game. One of the programmers once told me it was like making a living at her favorite hobby. I walked farther back, toward the rear, into the shadows.

Behind a wall of privacy screens, was an open area that hadn't been set up like this the last time I was here. They'd created a large space by pushing the work desks to the wall beneath the darkened windows, leaving only a square of beat up children's school desks with slanted tops, in the middle, and an old teacher's desk and chair in front of them. I wondered what those were used for.

_"Chip?"_ I called out. No answer. This felt . . . weird!

I checked my watch: four-fifteen. No, it was still within business hours. _Shouldn't Chip have a full crew here coding some project? Where were they? Is Chip cutting back?_

Suddenly, a dim light above the school desks began to shimmer. _"Chip?"_ I called.

"Can I help you?" asked a voice.

I looked down. A young boy stood there, eleven or twelve years old. His dark hair was cut short. He had faintly-Asian green eyes and an impish grin. The face was strangely familiar. He looked exactly like a younger version of --

The room dissolved. _What the --?_

The windows along the side changed, became shorter, wider, older. They were no longer shaded, but letting in bright sunlight. The walls glowed in a yellow pastel. Writing at a blackboard behind the teacher's desk, with her wide back to the class, was a heavily-built woman. I looked around. I was standing in a classroom full of children. I felt confused, but I _knew_ these kids, this place.

I felt a tug on my arm. The boy stood there smiling at me. He was the only one in the room who didn't belong, but nobody noticed either of us.

"Sit here," he said, pointing to a vacant desk with a built-in seat, far too small for me. I ran a hand across it's scared surface and froze. That was not _my hand,_ but the hand of a child. I looked down at myself. My spindly legs stuck out beneath the knee-length lavender dress I was wearing, I was in the slightly glowing body of an eleven year old girl. _What the --?_

The boy tugged my arm toward the desk and I sat. I fit perfectly. He took the seat on my right as if he were my protector and guide. The teacher stopped writing and turned to face us. My mouth dropped open. She was a woman I'd long adored, my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Simpson.

"And this is the reason we have three branches of government in our country," said the friendly voice I'd loved. "Each as a balance against the other branches."

"So, the Army, FBI, and CIA are all part of the Executive Branch?" asked Joel, one of the skinniest, smartest kids in the class, his big ears poking out from behind thick dark plastic frames.

"Yes! Very good, Joel! That's exactly right."

I checked the big round wall clock. Quarter after three. I suddenly had a funny feeling about what day this was. If I was right, today and tomorrow weren't going to be very happy for me. That old feeling of dread came flooding back. This was a day better off forgotten.

When the bell rang, my teacher Mrs. Simpson asked if I'd stay after to help clean up. It wasn't a punishment; Mrs Simpson liked me.

"Sure," I said. I didn't mind; I liked her too.

I helped her wash the blackboard, clean the erasers, and straighten the desks, while she spoke about the other kids: who was doing well in spelling, who was having problems with long division.

When I was done, I got my jacket, and she wished me a goodnight.

Out on the grassy playground, known by us kids as _the Battlefield,_ directly on the path to the street my house was on, were two boys from my class: Jerry, a big heavy boy who always wore a smirk on his face; and a smaller, pleasant boy named Huck who played trombone. Huck was on his back, on the ground, his trombone case nearby. Jerry was sitting on his chest with Huck's arms pinned back over his head. Huck swung his legs back and forth, trying to twist out from under Jerry, but Huck was gasping, having a hard time breathing.

I don't know why, but that day something just snapped. It wasn't the first time I'd seen Jerry doing this to Huck; it was every day after school, but I couldn't help myself. I ran straight for that big bully and, hard as I could, I slapped Jerry's ears.

Jerry screamed and fell sideways, holding his head. I helped Huck to his feet. He grabbed his trombone and we ran away.

Everything around me dissolved. I was back in the classroom. It was morning. First thing, of course, I got called to the principle's office; Jerry had a ruptured eardrum. He was having balance problems, trouble hearing and walking, and was expected to be out of school for at least a week. Principle Shrike (three Shrike's and you're out) asked me to explain what happened.

I told the principal my side of things -- how every day after school Jerry had been torturing Huck while nobody did anything about it. After the principle verified my story with Huck, they sent me back to class.

All that morning I was feeling extremely uncomfortable. Every few minutes I checked the big slow-moving clock, then looked out into the hall through the little window in the door. I hadn't even had one Shrike; I'd _never_ been in trouble. It was such an awful feeling. I might be kicked out of school, or worse, have to go to reform school or something.

I felt a tug on my right sleeve. It was that boy again, the one who'd brought me here. He whispered, _"Don't worry. It'll be okay. Trust in yourself. You did nothing wrong and everything right. Jerry deserved what happened to him. Ultimately, he'll heal and be better for what happened. He won't ever be a bully again._

_"But more than that,"_ the boy whispered, _"you saved Huck from years of self-torment, from a life of regret and insecurity, from hatred and a never-ending desire for revenge. Huck will recover too. He'll slowly regain his self-confidence until one day he realizes that everything is possible."_ As I stared at the boy, a warm sense of comfort spread through me; the worry I'd felt drained away.

Late that afternoon, again I was called down to the principal's office. Mr. Shrike gave me a stern look. I was not going to be punished. "But," he said, "the next time you see something like that happening, Naomi, _please_ come and tell me about it, instead of taking the law into your own hands."

Everything around me changed. I was back in the living room of our little house. After dinner, a strange and wonderful thing happened. I found a show on television about the FBI. _Fidelity_. _Bravery. Integrity. Yes!_

At that moment I knew what I wanted to do. Some recruits, the show said, joined the FBI for excitement. Others, because they wanted a sense of power in a powerless world. Personally, my desire was for the opportunity to make things right, to protect the Hucks of the world who couldn't protect themselves, to stop those who use force from violating another's right to live as what they truly are -- not prey animals -- but humans beings. That, to me, was the greatest show on earth.

Suddenly, I was back in the classroom, waiting to be called to see Principal Shrike. I no longer felt worried; I felt good, happy. I turned to the desk next to mine. This boy had let me see and understand what I'd done for Huck, and, more importantly, what I'd done for myself.

The boy pulled me to my feet and gave me the sweetest smile, crinkling those twinkling bright green eyes. And then he leaned in . . . and kissed me. I heard the rest of the class go, _"Ooooh,"_ the way little kids will do. It was fantastic, the best, as if it were the only kiss I'd ever had, which of course, it was. But as I watched his eyes (I kept mine open through the whole thing), and felt his hands caress my face, he changed. His face became broader. The two of us grew taller. The room shrank around us, and my old sixth grade class melted away.

I was in Chip's arms, in that huge empty space in the back of his computer lab. I didn't know how he'd done it, but it felt like my birthday. Like the best present, the best date, I'd ever had.

47

Wow! I thought. What _did you do to me?_ How _did you do that to me?_ But at that moment I didn't really care. After having Chip in my head, I wanted to stay in his arms. If you've never made love with a _really_ intelligent man, when all that creativity and awareness is focused on you, it's indescribable. And then, if you can somehow surprise him, it'll make you feel like you're the smartest woman on Earth.

A little voice in my head said, _Geoff? Tommy?_ I told the voice to shut up. They were both out of the country and quite possibly out of my life. I pulled Chip backwards till my butt hit the wall, my mouth hard on his, my hands opening his shirt.

I thought I'd shocked him just a little, but he was so quick to respond I didn't know for sure. He undid my pants, turned me toward the wall, slid down my panties, and with my hands against that sky-blue plaster, took me from behind. _Ohhh!_

"I love you, Naomi," he whispered just behind my ear.

Now _I_ was surprised. He'd never said _that_ before, not that way. _"Mmmmmmm."_

We stayed on our feet, his hands on my hips, back and forth -- until I could barely stand, and then we went down to the floor locked together, Chip tight behind me, me to my knees, his hands stroking my back . . . up to my shoulders . . . all the way down, around my rear . . . so slow . . . then fast -- faster, until I felt like I was going out of my mind, and finally . . . I . . . did -- _ahhh -- ooooh . . ._ we both . . . _"Ahhhh," I heard him gasp . . ._ did . . . until we were completely spent.

*

After something like that, who wants to go out for dinner? It was cuddlin' time and Chip is an Olympic class cuddler. He has this gorgeous apartment upstairs, where his furniture favors strange shapes in wood and glass. While I got in the shower, he ordered Chinese.

For years Chip and I had been occasional lovers, long before I knew either Geoff or Tommy. Yes, I know, three of them, the most amazing men on the planet, though usually well-separated by time and space. I'd like to see _anyone_ choose between them.

Does that make me greedy? Maybe so. Does it say I want too much out of life? I don't think so. My job kept me far too busy to date anyone steady. I'm never in one place very long. If I were to commit only to Tommy, or Geoff, or Chip, I might see him once every three months. They're my very good friends, and I love them all -- rarely, but exceptionally well.

After a nice warm shower together, and a little hanky-panky, Chip and I were toweling off, when our dinner arrived. _Perfect._ Chip answered the door in a towel.

He set everything up in bed -- trays, silverware, white cloth napkins, and General Tsao's Chicken. _Mmm._ Broccoli with snap peas. Hot sake on a cool Autumn night. Just the way we like it.

"Okay, now tell me," I asked, holding a fork in the air, a slice of water chestnut on the end. _"How_ did you do that? What was that _hallucination_ -- whatever the _heck_ it was -- it's _amazing!"_ I had a million questions.

"It's brand new tech," Chip said. "I call it Holographic Morphology. Pretty good, eh?"

"Fantastic!"

"It actually projects an alternate you onto the real you. You like?"

_"It's spectacular!"_

"The people -- the other kids, they're not perfect -- not _yet._ Did you catch the occasional shimmer?"

_"Mmm --"_ I thought back. "Well, I guess so. A kind of glow, on my legs?"

"That's it. In another month I'll have that corrected."

"But how did you know about Jerry and Huck and Mrs. Simpson? How could you _possibly_ know what I went through with Mr. Shrike? I mean, my Mom knew most of it, I guess. There are probably school records."

"Well, I'm not going to admit to any computer hacking with an FBI agent in my bed, but I will say your mother helped."

"She did?"

"Once I explained what I had in mind."

_I_ was going to have to talk to Mom about _that._ Of course, if she didn't help, there wouldn't have been the fantastic surprise, nor the psychological healing I'd experienced.

Then Chip told me about his long-term goal for the Holographic-whatchamacallit. His new system wasn't going to be limited to psychotherapy; he planned to turn over a version of his invention to the FBI, to re-enact crime scenarios. To help agents get into the _heads_ of killers.

_Hmmm._ I thought, _Maybe I can get Chip to take what Xue and I learn tomorrow from the Playboy and combine it with what LINKS already has on the Pen Killers._

But tomorrow, as it so often is, would be nothing like I'd planned.

48

Tantalus walked the quiet streets tonight, looking not much different than anyone else, just another isolated soul in the big city, out for an evening stroll, and . . . _Ready for a two-fer! Mmm-hmm, two in one night!_ _Is it even possible?_ _Bam_ . . . _BAM? If things don't get too fancy, then absolutely. Woo-hoo!_

*

The moment the next-to-be-dead author on _the List_ opened his front door with a puzzled expression on his face and a _"Yes?"_ on his lips, Tantalus sprayed him -- _TIM-BERRRR . . . no woo-hooing around tonight! No time for it!_ Tantalus was on a very tight schedule, _just let him drop, and walk right in after him. BAM! Back of skull meets tile floor. Nice one! Who gives a damn what kills him?_

Tantalus turned and quickly closed the door.

He was a good-sized man, lying there on the floor, nattily-dressed in an expensive tan sports jacket, sharply creased pants, and what looked to be thousand dollar loafers.

"All those women you've had," Tantalus chided, looking at the victim. "Looks like you just got _laid_ for the last time."

The big guy's eyes fluttered like he was trying to blink his way back to consciousness!

_He isn't out? That isn't supposed to happen! Is the spray working right? The formula's always been one hundred percent effective -- until now. Could he be resistant?_

_No matter. No time._

Out came the seven-inch serrated blade. "Time for a little _editing,"_ the killer laughed. "Snip, snip, snip! Time to cut things down to size!"

_"Please,"_ the author croaked, jerking his head away.

_He's talking?_

"All the _._ . _. women_ I've had?" he asked. "You're . . . confusing me __ with __ my character. I haven't __ had _._ . . sex in a year."

Tantalus laughed. "Your main character beds a different woman every other chapter."

"That's not me . . .that's my _character._ "

_"_ No sex? _Really? Awww,_ that's so sad. None of your author bullshit now, and no mercy." Tantalus had a job to do and was falling behind schedule, so . . .

_"Please._ Please, don't."

A single slice, a spray of blood that the killer barely dodged, then waiting for the author to bleed out. _Quick, efficient, mostly painless. Almost done. Just one little thing more._

And then Tantalus got to work.

"Now comes the _fun_ part that makes all that pain and frustration disappear. Really gets those woo-hoos _out!"_

49

Only a few blocks south and a couple to the east, the Waldorf loomed tall and red -- up ahead, _tall and red,_ _soon another author will be dead._ Tantalus had always wanted stay at _Waldo's Dorf!_ No time like the present! _WOO-HOO!_ _And Number Two will soon come true!_

*

The Romantic didn't even notice the suite any more. Most people, even the wealthiest of world travelers, would have felt some quantum of childish wonder at the huge king bed draped with fluffy goose comforters in queenly red and gold and sage green; the fortress of pillows soft as air against the broad headboard; certainly at the plush Louis the Fourteenth chairs that filled the main salon. And what about that gleaming stainless kitchen? The Romantic felt nothing.

No, the _Romantic,_ as the front desk had her registered, had stayed here too many times. The beautiful penthouse was less than home, it was ordinary, invisible, simply her due.

The front bell dinged and she went to answer it (the maid and her assistant were both off tonight). "Who _is_ it?" she called sharply through the intercom, releasing the talk button.

"Delivery," came the muffled voice.

"I didn't order anything tonight," she called back.

"Flowers. The front desk sent them up."

The Romantic peered at the video monitor. A collage of off-white filled the screen.

"Oh, very well," she huffed, opening the door. The hotel was always trying to stay in her good graces. A mountainous array of calla lilies completely obscured the delivery person.

"Is there a card?"

"Oh, _yes,_ ma'am."

Their scent _was_ intoxicating. _But that's odd._ She'd always thought calla lilies had no scent. As the Romantic leaned in to take another wonderful breath, sweeter than any she'd ever known, a fine mist of white poured from among the stems and bells and enveloped her head. She fell to the floor.

_White lilies!_ It was the last thing she remembered when she woke -- a moment before realizing she was tied spread-eagle to the bed. Stark naked. With a ball gag in her mouth.

50

"The prose of great modern fiction lie -- _lay_ if you're Bob Dylan or Eric Clapton -- somewhere between poetry and history."

Tantalus had to admit, _this one had been more fun than the others combined!_

Tantalus wore a smiling Harlequin mask and carried a gun casually pointed at the floor, while the next victim poured her heart out as if her life depended on it, which of course, it did.

"Strict grammarians," the Romantic reflected, "can't tolerate an implied subject. 'Each sentence,' they argue, 'must have its _own_ subject. No subject,' they whine, 'may be carried over to another sentence, must _never_ be casually picked up by the next paragraph.'"

_At first,_ Tantalus thought, _the Romantic had been so interesting and educational._ Tantalus had just wanted to soak it all in. _A female author is so much more authentic and emotional!_ Tantalus felt a moment of loss that there hadn't been quality time like this with the other victims before their demise; each one, a missed opportunity. _Oh, well._

"Some of these self-appointed guardians of the temple of language," the Romantic went on, can't even abide a sentence _fragment._ They try to force the subjunctive mood on the rest of us, attempt to make us use the objective case."

But now, the Romantic's highbrow lecture was beginning to annoy. Tantalus couldn't do anything to stop the _snoot_ -- the Romantic just couldn't _help_ it, even naked and tied to the bed. _Best-selling authors?_ S _nooty, snoot, SNOOT!_ There were only two things that would stop the it: the ball gag; simply push it back in her mouth. And the other, a bullet to the brain. The gun firmed up in the killer's hand.

As if the author realized she was running out of time, she spoke faster, _emoting_ on certain words, head rolling back and forth on the scarlet sheets.

"The more experience an author has, and the less they care about their subject," the Romantic said, "the better the story."

Tantalus was suddenly interested. "The _less_ they care about a subject? Why?"

"Because the best fiction isn't based on truth. Readers don't care if a story is true, as long as it _feels_ real _._ They only _really_ care about one thing."

"What's that?"

"Conflict. Conflict is what generates emotion. Emotion is what the reader pays for. And the strongest conflict comes from love and death."

The Romantic had a point, a damn good point. Well-timed, even. But the _tone --_ it was beyond pedantic!

"How much _popular_ fiction," Tantalus agreed, "do any of those wannabe authors employed by _The New Yorker_ actually consume? I mean, how many books do they _buy_?"

They both laughed together, killer and victim. "You know, my dear," Tantalus said, still laughing, "I'm almost sorry you have to die."

"But, but -- _why?"_ the Romantic cried. "I haven't seen your face. I don't know who you are. I'd never recognize your voice. I don't even know if you're male or female! And I've _helped_ you! I've given you my very best secrets, my rules of thumb! Ways of looking at things it's taken my whole professional life to understand! My _Master_ Class!"

"That's true. But as they say in Hollywood: What have you done for me lately?"

And then Tantalus did what killers do -- stepped over to the bed and moved seven inches of something hard as steel into the Romantic's field of vision. "Let's just see what this'll do!" __ And as the Romantic began to scream, the ball gag went back in.

51

As Xue pulled up in a green convertible, Chip kissed me goodbye outside his computer lab. It had been a fabulous and unexpected night. Chip called out, "Hi, Xue!" They waved to each other.

"Sorry about the car," Xue said sourly as I got in. "The Bureau's New York vehicles were all tied up. It was all Budget had." She pulled into traffic.

I shrugged. I didn't mind. It was warming up nicely outside. Having the top down was a refreshing change. Xue seemed grouchy. She got like that once in a while. "Sleep okay?" I asked.

But she wasn't having it. "How do you split yourself in three like that?" she huffed, shaking her head, turning a corner a little sharply toward the East Side. "How do you give equal attention to all three of them?"

I looked at her, bewildered. She'd never been critical of my relationships before.

"What's _with_ you?" I asked. "I don't think of them like that. I hardly ever see them. They're very good friends. I love all of them."

"Friends with benefits?" Xue laughed sarcastically. "I guess if you don't sleep with your friends, that only leaves relatives, enemies, and animals."

She turned east on Thirty-fourth Street.

"Things okay with the new guy?" I asked, trying to remember. _"Chris?"_

"Fine. He didn't call last night."

She took a left on Sixth Ave.

"You're jealous?" I asked.

"Maybe a little. Okay, a lot. You know, the Qur'an says Muslim men can have up to four wives, as long as he treats them all the same. Men get away with it. Why not you?"

"What's that suppose to mean?"

She laughed. "I don't know, exactly. Equality, I guess. Some sort of exclusivity. Maybe you could offer each one a different port of entry?"

I pressed my lips together, afraid to even ask what she meant by that.

"Like maybe you could have straight sex with one, only give blow jobs to the second, and reserve rear entry exclusively for the third."

"That's disgusting." Okay, Xue can be difficult to take. But she'd saved my life -- twice. As far as I was concerned she could say whatever the heck she wanted.

"Just trying to help." She smiled. "You're the one banging all three of them."

"Not at the same time. I'm not even dating them on a regular basis."

"Well, that's something." She shrugged. "If you ever get tired of one of them let me know." She smirked. "Tommy, especially. What a doll. It really not fair. Why do you get the three best guys on the whole damn planet?"

"I never went after any of them."

"That's _always_ the way it is. People who have a little success, the world keeps heaping it on."

I didn't know what to say.

"It's because everyone loves you, Naomi -- I can't help it myself. Things may piss me off about you, but you'll always be my best friend."

*

Xue and I tried to find a parking spot in the heavy traffic. It wasn't even rush hour. We were already ten minutes late for our appointment.

"Maybe we should find a garage," I said and pointed. "Looks like there's one on the end of the street."

Right then, just ahead of us, a Smart Car pulled out, opening a tiny spot. We were only a block over from the Playboy's address.

"This'll work," Xue said.

I didn't see how, but I got out to call our bumper distances. "That has to be at least two feet too short," I said.

"Don't worry, Naomi," Xue laughed at the look on my face, "I've _got_ this. Just a little _nudge,_ the way they do it here in the big city."

She cranked the wheels and reversed on a forty-five and -- _CLUNK!_ the bumpers collided. I grimaced as she used our rented convertible to _nudge_ the metallic brown Toyota behind us backward. I looked away and closed my eyes.

"I've just about--" she pulled forward and -- _BAM!_ "-- got --" _Bam-Bam-BAM!_ "-- it!" as she pushed the car ahead of us forward and forced her way into the slot. _There's no place like_ _the Big Apple. Where else would people put up with something like this._ From what I've seen, _everybody_ here does it.

My phone began to beep. I pulled it out.

"What's that?" Xue asked.

"A locator alarm. The Playboy."

We ran.

The street was crowded. People bumped into us. I can still remember thinking that day, as we hurried down Second Avenue to the Playboy's brownstone, how a disaster could trap all these people, how impossible it would be to escape. Who knew such a disaster was less than two years away.

My concerns turned suddenly to the present. The door to the Playboy's brownstone was wide open. A uniformed cop stood at the top of the stairs. We knew what that meant. Probably called in by the locator.

We flashed our IDs and she stepped aside. There were several other uniformed cops already inside, and we introduced ourselves, but NYPD detectives were not yet on the scene.

There on the foyer floor, Author Number Seven was dead. It would have been difficult to say whether the Brawler or this victim was more gruesome. The Playboy was naked from the waist down. Blood had pooled between his legs. Was the case mutating again, from religion into a sex thing?

_Okay,_ I thought, _where is it?_ It was the first thing Xue and I looked for now. In sync mentally, as we so often were, we both snuck a look between the Playboy's legs. Nope. No gold pen there; there was, in fact, _nothing_ there. No penis, no scrotum. A lot of blood, but the Playboy's family jewels were gone. It appeared they'd been hacked off.

"None of the other victims were --" I began.

"I know," Xue said. "This killer cut off the whole kit 'n caboodle. He's a unique eunuch."

I winced. The things Xue blurts out -- but it was her way of dealing with stuff that was worse than what most people could ever imagine.

An ambulance arrived out front, followed by an old friend, New York Assistant ME Frannie Minor. After explaining to Frannie what we were looking for, the various places we'd found pens, I persuaded her to take a quick look.

With a sucking sound the body made as the genital area lifted out of the blood, Frannie reluctantly rotated the hips up on one side, then moved the right leg forward. _Nope._ No shiny gold pen that I could see. Then again, it was pretty gory in there. Was this murder really linked to the others, or was this a copy cat?

"Hold it!" Xue said before Frannie could roll him back.

There in blood, on the white travertine floor beneath the Playboy's buttocks, were a large smeared letter and some numbers, a reverse of what we now saw had been written on the man's butt cheeks.

_"T,"_ Xue said grimly.

I nodded resignedly. " _Tantalus._ Like the Brawler. We definitely have a third serial killer here in New York."

Frannie Minor gave the time of death as between eight and nine last evening. I knew she was good, but such a narrow window had to be unrealistically accurate.

Xue entered the Playboy's death into LINKS as Author Number Seven in the Pen Killers case. Over the next fifteen minutes, six New York agents joined us, swarming the Playboy's brownstone as the FBI took over his murder investigation. I received a text message from Chip:

I tapped the attachment and we listened to LINKS play a call of the Playboy's voice answering his phone at two in the morning. _"Yes?"_ the Playboy had said, before LINKS hung up. Frannie Minor was pretty far off on the time of death. Nine o'clock wasn't even close. The Playboy had been killed sometime after two a.m.

Of course we were upset by the grotesque death of another victim, but also tremendously frustrated to lose the help of the only major author that had returned our calls. Chip's locator had alerted us to a possible attack on the Playboy too late.

52

Xue and I were nearly done tagging LINKS recordings on the first floor of the Playboy's residence when a voice called down the stairs to us.

Up on the third floor, next to the master bedroom, in what had been the Playboy's office, Agent Lars Thomassen had found a sodden, partially burned mess. Tantalus, presumably, had made what looked like a pile of the Playboy's manuscripts in the middle of the room and lit them on fire. Automatic sprinklers had come on, put the fire out, then cut off. No alarm had been sent.

"What would make Tantalus do something like this?" Lars asked.

"Looks like rage, doesn't it?" I said.

"But over what?" Lars asked.

None of us had an answer.

"You know," said Xue thoughtfully, standing at the side of the office window, peering at the buildings across the street, "we're never far away when these authors are killed, are we?"

I grabbed her arm and pulled her back. "These Pen Killers have to be watching us, stalking us," I said. "Since California I've been keeping a lookout for anyone unusual."

"Me too," Xue said.

We'd been close to one of the killers in California, the Benefactor, when he'd left that pen to taunt us on the dash of our car. And very close when the bomb went off.

"We're getting close again," I said. "I can feel it."

Xue sighed. "Two dead authors here. So far."

"It's a very big city," I said, "and except for London, maybe the biggest publishing city in the world. There are going to be more, possibly a lot more."

As we walked back downstairs, several messages came in from Chip.

I'd heard the New York Department of Motor Vehicles had begun another war against United Parcel Service. UPS had let millions of dollars in New York City traffic tickets go unpaid.

_So?_ What was I missing? _A ticket was written, and a UPS van was towed around the time Frannie thought the Playboy had died. Did that mean anything --?_

The second text cleared things up:

_"Holy --!" _I said, showing both messages to Xue. "Just before eight o'clock Shinbo must have been casing the Playboy's brownstone, then stupidly let his work van get towed." LINKS had already added another purple box.

"But wait a minute," Xue said. She explained what she didn't understand. I texted Chip:

Chip's answer came right back:

"Could this Marvin Shinbo have taken off when his truck was towed," I asked Xue, "then come back to finish the job when the street was quiet? A little after two in the morning?"

Xue nodded. "Makes sense." Her phone rang.

"It's Tila Jackson," she said, tapping the screen. "Hi, Tila . . . hold on."

Tila was now heading up our investigation in LA.

On the first floor, the Playboy's body was being removed. We followed it out. Nodded to the front door cop, walked down the steps, and away from the crowd of reporters forming up out front. When we were clear, Xue tapped her phone.

_"Tila,_ you're on speaker with Naomi and me."

"Hi, Naomi. About an hour ago the body of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel's missing bookkeeper floated to the top of the Hollywood Reservoir."

_Ooh, boy._ "The same reservoir Dasha Cummings's body was found in?"

"That's right," Tila said. "I spoke to the comptroller at the hotel. He said their computer logs show the original times, 1:02 and 1:22, respectively, were changed to read 11:02 and 11:22 by the bookkeeper, late Tuesday night."

"Thanks, Tila," Xue said.

"No problem."

Xue disconnected.

"The Marine was murdered just after eleven," I said. "Right?"

"Right," Xue said. "And May's supper didn't arrive until 1:22 in the morning. The death of the bookkeeper makes it look like he was covering his trail. Curtis May has some heavy explaining to do."

I called May's office. _Dammit!_ My call was picked up by voice mail. "You've reached Taylor and May. _(What happened to their answering service?_ I wondered _)_ No one is in the office right now . . ."

I didn't leave a message.

We walked to the car. _Was_ one of these killers Curtis May? And if so, which one? Tantalus? Michelangelo? The Benefactor? Or was May the mastermind that had hired all three? We needed to find him. I called Chip and asked him to get me Curtis May's home address.

We went back to the car. Xue pulled into traffic. Using my phone I went to the literature discussion boards and found some of the Playboy's fans talking about a novel he'd written that included genital mutilation.

Xue drove us to a garage on Forty-second Street. We parked and walked over to the huge Main Branch of the New York Public Library. I remembered reading that the names of the two stone lions out front were Fortitude and Patience. I was running out of both. But often this is the way the FBI closes cases. Indefatigably sifting evidence until things begin to stack up in one direction, against one perpetrator, and from there the others fall like dominoes. The case had been almost impossibly tough, but I reminded myself that this steady way of solving cases was among the first things the FBI makes you study during your initiation, the way the Bureau has always tackled even the toughest serials -- Dalmer, Bundy -- and the way we get them all.

We wandered around inside the library, finally asking directions, and made our way to the relatively new Hugo Fiction Wing. Back in the stacks, surrounded by millions of books, we found shelves full of the Playboy's novels. I ran my finger across the hard cover spines until I came to the title his fans had been discussing: _The Number Red._ I opened the book, and Xue and I looked through the pages together. There it was. Page eighteen, paragraph seven. The victim had been emasculated.

53

As we were leaving the library, Madeline Wu called me. She'd already seen our LINKS data on the Playboy. She ordered us to stay in New York.

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

"You can have whatever resources you need, up to and including twenty agents to assist," she said, but terminated the conversation, as usual, on a terse note: "Close this case!"

It was an irrational demand. She knew what we knew. We'd do our best, as always, but if that wasn't good enough . . . well, I didn't say it.

Xue got the car out of the garage while I tried to call Curtis May's office again. No one answered, not even voice mail. Chip hadn't got back to me yet with May's home address. No one knew where Marvin Shinbo might be at the moment, but UPS gave us his phone number and address in Queens. Google Earth showed a row of six apartment buildings on his block. Madeline wanted results. _Okay --_

Instead of calling Shinbo, Xue and I went over to the Bureau's New York Field Office and quickly assembled a team of six agents, geared up, and drove out fully armed to Queens. We planned to surprise Shinbo. Maybe he would be the first domino to fall.

On the way out there, I called Tila Jackson and she put our California team on speaker. Xue and I brought them up to date on the deaths of the Brawler and the Playboy.

Tila had news. "Remember Dr. Johnny Magashitu?" Tila asked. "The guy that checked you and Agent Sang out after the bomb?"

"Mmm-hmm."

"Well, Dr. Magashitu, with the help of SAC Michaels, made LAPD give us Dasha Cummings's body. Magashitu ran our own blood tox."

"Find anything?" Xue asked.

"He did. Faint traces of a chemical opioid complex. In the next ten minutes, he'll have the formula up on LINKS. Since the body was so long in the water, he says he can't say for sure, but due to concentrations he found in the lungs, it may have been delivered as an aerosol. Today and tomorrow Magashitu is going to be running blood on the Marine, the Editor, and the Professor."

"Thanks!" I said. We disconnected.

We arrived in Queens, wove through the surface streets using lights but no sirens, and pulled up at Shinbo's address.

_"Dammit!"_ Xue said.

There was a building to either side -- and nothing but weeds in the middle! Shinbo lived on a vacant lot? _I don't think so._

"Google Earth is out of date," I said.

Xue was angry. I think maybe I'd almost been expecting it. We tried Shinbo's phone. It had been disconnected. Madeline's pressure wasn't helping.

We spent the afternoon analyzing LINKS data and creating a timeline on Shinbo, until we'd had more than enough. Amazingly, Chip couldn't find a current address on Curtis May, only an out of service cell phone. The man knew we were looking for him.

Xue dropped me off down in Soho at Chip's place that evening and she went back to the Marriott Marquis up on Broadway. I would have liked her to stay with us, but Chip didn't have a guest room. It was a cold Autumn night. Chip lit a comforting blaze in the fireplace and we went to bed early.

The bedroom was warm and cozy, and Chip was soon snoring almost silently, but _I_ couldn't sleep. The fire burning safely across the room made me think of fires that had burned so unsafely, of libraries burned to the ground.

I pictured each of our dead authors in my mind. For the first time, a pen hadn't been found at the scene of an author killing. The Pen Killers weren't perfectly consistent. No signature had been found at the Editor's murder scene either. But the Playboy's death had to be connected. The large scripted _Ts_ in blood on the author's buttocks, linked the murder to the word _Tantalus_ on the Brawler's midsection. It was no copycat. No one outside the Bureau's investigation knew the latest killer's pen name. Well, except the ME at the Brawler's hotel. And the cops. And the hotel detective . . .

I got up and stood naked at Chip's big window and stared out at the City. Far in the distance, above everything, were the yellow- and red-lighted sides of the Empire State Building. Out there somewhere three killers were working together, at least one of them in New York City, destroying lives and families, killing literary artists. For _what?_ Some bizarre motive no one could understand? It was driving me crazy.

*

She thinks it _too dark to see her, but I do, as she stands there naked at the window in the flicker of her boyfriend's firelight. I know all about her. Agent? Psychological Investigator? She thinks she's so smart, with those pretty eyes, that pleasant attitude. She thinks I'll feel guilt and give her what she needs to know. But her technique is nothing. She has no idea I'm here, watching from the shadows of the street. Tomorrow it will end, all of it, for only I decide. I am Tantalus, and the world is mine._

_*_

An hour before closing time, Tantalus stepped through the rear service entrance of the New York Public Library's Main branch, wearing an appropriate pair of gray coveralls, a cap pulled down low over the eyes, a mustache, and the correct ID tag hanging from a metal clip off the coverall's right pocket. Anyone closely scrutinizing the ID would have been instantly concerned with the photo's poor quality, but the guards were busy listening to the Knicks face-off against the Celtics. Boston was a fierce rival.

Tantalus handed over a work order and, in a hoarse androgynous voice, gave answers to a guard's questions about the work to be done. The guard waved Tantalus through.

Carrying a gray tool box, Tantalus followed a well-memorized route toward the one nexus in the maintenance tunnels where, for thirty-three feet, two dissimilar pipes would be found to travel side-by-side.

About halfway there, in the poorly lit tunnel, Tantalus checked ahead and behind, then quickly climbed three rungs of an ancient iron ladder bolted to the concrete wall, pried open a control box, and unscrewed two wires, disabling a pressure alarm. Closing the box, Tantalus stepped back to the tunnel floor and moved onward a hundred feet to where Tantalus closed a valve on a three-inch iron pipe running overhead, then pulled a wrench from a coverall pocket and removed the valve wheel, stowing it in the tool box.

A hundred feet farther on, Tantalus followed two bends in the tunnel. Locating another overhead valve, turned it counter-clockwise until it was wide open. Liquid rushed through the iron pipe. Outside the building in the dark, unseen, the pipe began disgorging hundreds of gallons of water into the sewer.

There was no time to waste, but Tantalus moved slowly, carefully running gloved fingers overhead along a three-inch yellow pipe that traveled parallel to the water pipe.

_"Ahhh . . . right here!"_ Softly, _"Woo-hoo!"_

Tantalus shut two valves in the yellow pipe, opened the tool box and pulled out a four-foot piece of yellow flex-pipe of the same diameter. This was the most difficult part of the plan.

Setting the toolbox on end, Tantalus stepped up and used a wrench to unscrew a pressure gauge teed into the yellow pipe, then screwed in one end of the flex-pipe in its place. Tantalus removed a second gauge from a nearby tee in the old water pipe, replacing it with the other end of the yellow flex-pipe.

Tantalus ran quickly back to the water pipe exterior valve and listened. All was quiet now. The old water pipe was empty. Tantalus closed the valve then ran back to where the flex pipe was connected, opened the valves on the yellow ceiling pipe, and discarded the toolbox at one side of the tunnel floor. It was no longer needed.

*

Twenty minutes later, a person dressed in heavy rags, obviously homeless, entered the library's huge main research room and made his way _(her way -- who could tell?) _back into the stacks of the Hugo Fiction Wing.

_"The library is closing in fifteen minutes,"_ a voice said over the public address system. _"Please take your selections to the check-out machines and exit the building. Have a good night. Happy reading."_

Locating a likely spot immediately below one of the water sprinklers, Tantalus pulled out an unfiltered cigarette, lit the end, took two puffs, stuck the unlit end into a book on the top shelf, then quickly exited the library.

*

A patron stepped up to a matronly help desk attendant. "Uh, excuse me," he said.

"May I help you, sir? The library is closing shortly."

"Yes, I know, but do you smell gas?"

The attendant took a sniff. "I, uh --" She wrinkled her nose and sniffed again. "Yes . . . yes, I do!" She lifted the phone. "I'm calling security."

They were the last words the librarian ever spoke, the last thought she ever had. _BOOOOM!_ The room exploded in a fiery bomb, blowing skylights out of the roof and the windows from their frames. The second largest library in the United States -- third largest in the world, with its miles of irreplaceable art and ancient texts, including the first Gutenberg Bible in the United States -- would burn unstoppably for hours.

*

Chip and I were jarred from a deep sleep by a loud noise.

"What was that?" I asked.

"I don't know," Chip said.

We looked at the clock: 9:40 PM. For a moment it was as if the City had gone silent . . . and then, sirens blared, somewhere uptown.

_"Tantalus!"_ I swore softly.

"Can't be," Chip said.

When we heard the firetruck horns we dressed quickly and hit the street. Chip whistled up a cab and, as we jetted north toward the growing sounds of disaster, I called Xue.

"What's up?" she said. "Can't sleep?" a smirk in her voice. In the background I could hear her TV, some old movie. I guess she couldn't sleep either. I'd stayed at the Marriott Marquis; the hotel was almost soundproof, too quiet and probably too far uptown to hear the sirens. Maybe, whatever it was, was between us.

I told her about the _boom_ we thought we'd heard, and the other sounds. "Maybe it's none of our business," I said, "but I have to know. Something tells me this is too coincidental for it not to be related."

"I'll meet you there," Xue said, "whatever and wherever it is," and we disconnected.

*

At Forty-second Street the main library was surrounded by cop cars, firetrucks, and ambulances. Two whole city blocks were on fire. The keyword was terror. Xue was already there. She ran over to our cab as we got out a block away.

"I didn't hear a thing," she said, "until I got out front of the hotel. My room is on the back side."

One uniformed police officer thought the fire had begun as the library was closing. A comparatively small number of people, just over a hundred at last count, had exited the building right before the fire ignited. About half were being hauled off by ambulances.

The old building's marble façade was standing, though probably not for long. The library's roof, its windows, and presumably everything inside were nothing but flames, reaching twice the height of the enormous building. The blackened stone lions on their pedestals out front, Patience and Fortitude, were daring us to solve this crime.

Xue located the Fire Chief, a big heavy guy in his mid-fifties named Reed Collins.

"This will be one of the worst fires New York has ever seen," he told us. "Hundreds had to have died tonight -- there's no other possibility. Librarians, patrons, old people, students, researchers are still in there."

There was no way any of Collins's men could get inside to rescue someone, with or without oxygen. The heat was too intense. The losses to art and history would be incalculable. From speaking with surviving patrons, Collins couldn't determine from which part of the library the fire had spread. No one knew for sure. Every wing was on fire, and there was little Collins's crews could do to stop it. While we watched, the walls began to come down.

The way the Chief Arson Investigator described it, a slim, dark-haired man named Matt Demarso, it had to be a gas explosion.

"The fire spread too far," he said, "and to too many buildings too quickly to be anything else. Wherever the gas was, books would have instantly reached their flash point and --" Demarso spread his hands suddenly. _"Whooom!_ With this much fuel it probably took less than ten minutes for the building's steel to reach critical temperature, around 523 degrees C, and begin to melt."

As the walls continued to fall, Chief Collins said regretfully, "Anyone inside has to be dead. I sure hope so."

While the growing pile of rubble burned, fire crews tried to keep it from spreading to the surrounding city blocks. The three of us backed up Fifth Avenue as the fire grew hotter. The Director had to be right. These fires had to be connected to the Pen Killings. Chip found the library's security videos stored off site in the cloud. He had the directory sent to Xue's and my phones.

We scanned the time-coded recordings for the hour prior to the time Chip and I woke up. We collected images, especially of those people that seemed to have avoided looking at the cameras. A homeless person that caught my eye was dressed in too many layers of clothing for the time of year. He entered the library bent over, face covered by the multiple hats he wore, and disappeared from view.

Just after three a.m. we called it a night. Without a little sleep, we wouldn't be any good to the damn investigation tomorrow. Xue grabbed a cab back to the Marriott, and Chip and I cabbed it down to his place and fell into bed.

54

In Florida, California, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and New York, twenty-two libraries were burned that night. The fires had all been started between nine p.m. and midnight, Eastern Standard Time.

"How is it being coordinated?" Xue asked when I called to tell her. She already had the data I had.

We didn't know. One thing we did know, a library was a huge natural fire hazard. Except for the big New York Library, the arsonists were striking in small towns that could ill afford to hire security guards to watch their book collections at night. They had little choice now.

"How many people are we talking here?" Xue said.

"At least one for each library," I suggested. "This has to be some kind of _reverse_ book club of people who _hate_ books."

"Makes sense. But the group still has to be led by one mastermind."

I wanted to run up to the big main library again, to see what else we could learn about the way the fire was started. Investigators were, no doubt, swarming the site. Xue wanted to track down Curtis May, put out an all points bulletin on the man if we had to. But at six a.m. we both received texts from SAC Joan Proxmire and our boss, Madeline Wu. Another author had been found dead in the City, Number Three, at the Waldorf Hotel. It gave me no satisfaction to be right in my guess that more authors would die.

Half an hour later Xue met me in the Waldorf lobby. Two agents I hadn't met before, plus Lars Thommasen, Jan Vincent, and a CSI from the New York Bureau came in right after us.

We pulled up the dead author's phone history on Chip's locator website. The phone number was a recent acquisition. The author's phone had spent yesterday and last evening traveling around the city until just after one a.m. when, on the Upper West Side in the middle of Broadway, the phone went dead. There'd been no way to send agents out to investigate.

"Likely the battery," Chip told me over the phone, while we rode the elevator up. LINKS had issued no alarm. Chip still couldn't locate the phone.

The dirty smell of old death hit us as we entered the suite and activated LINKS. According to Proxmire, the maid had been barred from the suite at the request of its famous occupant. The body had been found by the author's screaming assistant more than a day after the murder. Including the Editor, this was the second female author killed, and the first famous female.

"Vaginal tearing is quite evident," a male voice echoed out to us as we stepped into the penthouse suite.

"Looks like somebody got fucked with a ten-inch dick," another male voice said.

Xue grimaced. I winced. But no one was there. The beautiful main room of the suite was empty, the middle of the floor covered in white lilies. Our team followed the voices back to the master bedroom.

Two NYPD detectives in suits, an NYPD CSI tech, and New York's Chief Medical Examiner looked up as we entered. We held up our IDs.

"Ooops," said one of the NYPD dicks.

"Sorry, ladies," said the other.

The ME's lips were pulled in. He glanced at the cops and shook his head disgustedly.

Xue waved it away. It wouldn't help us do our jobs to be overly critical of local law enforcement. Everyone deals with the job differently. The Bureau trained us to treat these situations more professionally, but we'd heard it all before, and worse.

From the research our team had done in LA, the victim was sixty-six years old. She was beautifully preserved. If sixty was the new forty, in the right light she could pass for thirty-five. Her hair was laid out, deliberately, I thought, around her face like a halo of light-brown, that expensive salon sheen, except where the ends had tangled in her blood. Her makeup was perfect, but for the tears that had made mascara tracks down her cheeks to the sides of her surgically tightened neck. If you looked carefully you could see the tiny scars beneath her armpits where a plastic surgeon had done an elegant job of tightening her breasts.

was signed in blood across the top of the left breast. A gold pen lay on her stomach, blood drooling from its nib. Her thighs, too, were tight and toned, probably a combination of lipo and exercise coach. There were no spider veins visible, even around the ankles. Her eyes were wide in shock and horror.

"The Romantic," I said. She was certainly on our hit list, right near the top, number nine at last calculation. Xue nodded. We were becoming pop-literary experts.

The Medical Examiner pulled out a swab, took a sample. Snapped it into the plastic container.

"Rape kit?" Xue asked the ME.

He nodded. "Looks like there's semen present. I'll know better when I get this back to the lab."

_Tantalus,_ whoever this bastard was, had mutated again. Until now, no women had been sexually assaulted. I pulled up Amazon on my phone. The Romantic's catalog of books was more than three hundred titles: country, scifi, historical -- with one thing in common: _romance._

There was no romance here, just blood, a lot of it soaked into the mattress. The Romantic's neck had been opened in a single, wide, under-the-chin slice.

The FBI had to take control of the crime scene. I didn't like doing it but we had our orders, straight from the top. Fortunately, our CSI took his own sample, saving me from being the bad guy.

"Will we get copied on your evidence," one of the NYPD detectives asked.

"Why?" Lars asked. "These killers are operating in at least three states. It's our case now."

"You're taking jurisdiction?"

"We are," I said in the most conciliatory voice I could muster.

"And please keep your mouths' shut on this one, guys," Xue said. "The name Tantalus and that number there," she pointed, "aren't out in the media yet."

They agreed, still every agent in the room wondered how much we could count on their discretion. The NYPD had been known to leak like a sieve, though they'd been better lately.

The Romantic's wrists and ankles were tied to the bed posts with purple sashes.

"Silk?" I asked our CSI guy.

He nodded. "I think so."

"I wonder if anyone will ever stay in this room again." I mumbled.

"A few sick puppies, probably," Xue mumbled back. "Some people go in for that sort of thing."

We exchanged business cards. The ME stared at the ball gag. "A pretty unpleasant way to go."

*

This case was becoming, if possible, even more ugly and horrible. An hour later, with our CSI tech and agents collecting what little evidence there was in the Romantic's suite -- the sashes, the ball gag, the white lilies -- Xue and I left for a look at the hotel's video. I wondered how much more of this we could take.

Out in the hall, Xue said, "This is _identical_ to what happened in one of her novels. There were two or three that were similar, but in the one I'm thinking of, the victim was raped, cut, and bled out. The title was, um . . . I forget . . . it's a big series, more than a hundred books. _Ahh!"_ Xue said suddenly, _Death In The Afternoon_."

"Some afternoon," I muttered, as we approached the elevator, "we'll check." Hopefully this time Hotel Security would offer us a lead to the perpetrator's identity.

I'd never seen so many MOs in one case -- in addition to the three different signatures, and the eight page and paragraph numbers scrawled on the victims bodies. _Who_ was this group of killers working for? _What_ was drawing them together? And if Curtis May _did_ fit in, _how?_ As the elevator fell toward the first floor, I went down the list of horrors we'd encountered.

"One author and his wife, killed by snakebite," I said, "or more precisely, by snake venom. Another one killed by a vehicle, and an author strangled. One with his throat ripped out by a Cheetah."

"We have one author," Xue took over, "killed basic execution style -- a bullet to the head, and another one with his bones shattered. One emasculated. Then today we find an author exsanguinated --"

"Ex- _what?"_ I interrupted.

"Exsanguinated. Her throat cut and left to bleed out."

I nodded as the elevator doors opened.

*

Security Video quality was excellent, but every image of the person we liked for the killing was basically the same; I wanted to scream with frustration: first floor hallway, elevators, penthouse vestibule -- someone had carried a huge array of white flowers past every camera and into the suite, his face completely hidden.

"Blocked by the calla lilies," Xue said.

The ones we'd seen scattered on the floor. I looked at Xue. Our mutual frustration was almost unbearable.

Using her phone Xue brought up Amazon and found the book she remembered. _Death In The Afternoon._ We were getting faster. From the description offered, the story sounded like a match: Tied to the bed with silk, raped, and bled out. _Exsanguinated,_ just as Xue had called it.

"What was the number written on her?" Xue asked.

"Tantalus, 4:3," I said.

Both numbers were very low, presumably near the beginning of the story. She tapped _Look Inside The Book_. The page and paragraph numbers were about right.

Xue looked at me and shook her head. "Just tell me one thing, Naomi." She pointed at the text. "How the devil are these numbers supposed to help us predict which author is most likely to be next?"

I had no answer to give her.

My phone barked. It was not the weekend. The security guys gave me an odd look as I swiped the phone's screen. My phone schedule was all messed up. It was Chip.

"That Amazon account," he said without preamble, "Critical Sight? The one tied to all those threatening reviews I've been looking for the owner of? I had a search running last night."

He hadn't said a thing about it. "Really?"

_"_ The posts were routed all over the place," he went on, "Moscow, Nevis, Rio, some lawyer's office in Kansas City, a tiny town in Chechnya, then back through Beijing, and over to Newark. And it's never the same. The IP links change every post. Some of the posts circled the world three times."

"You can't find the account's owner?"

Chip chuckled. "Somebody made a mistake; I cracked it. With a friend at Amazon I tracked it to one IP address and was able to link it -- based on the device's MAC address -- to an iPad. That same iPad logged onto a Starbucks WiFi over on Amsterdam Avenue last night. During the three minute period immediately before that log-on took place, six charge receipts were rung up at the coffee counter. One of those receipts belonged to a credit card owned by someone you know."

I held my breath, looked at Xue. She nodded. "Who?" I asked.

"Eighteen of those Critical Sight reviews originated through the same WiFi hub in an office on Broadway." Chip paused for dramatic effect, then dropped his bomb: "Curtis May, Naomi. That charge account and receipt were Curtis May's."

_"Dammit!"_ I said, "Well, we finally have him."

"One more thing," Chip said. "I was able to hack into Range Tucker's phone call logs. A month ago Curtis May and Range Tucker were in contact."

"They _know_ each other? How?" I asked.

"LINKS found it. The most recent call was a _week_ before the Prince of Darkness was killed. Curtis May's cousin is married to Range Tucker's sister."

55

Xue tried a call to Curtis May's office. Someone answered. _Finally._ Xue hung up. We didn't want to tip off May.

By phone we pulled two New York agents off the Romantic killing -- Jan Vincent and Lars Thomassen -- and requested two more from SAC Proxmire. The Taylor and May Literary Agency was just south of the Theater District on the third floor of 1457 Broadway. When we pulled up in front of the building, two new agents were waiting. Jan and Lars pulled up right behind us, eyeballing our stylish green convertible.

"It's a rental," Xue said. "It was all they had."

Introductions were made. We were loaded, bulletproof vested, and prepared for whatever psychological bull Mr. May might try this time. We took the elevator up.

When the six of us entered, the office was quiet. A young dark-haired woman, seated behind a mahogany reception desk with a huge vase of roses on top, spoke into a chin mic in a normal voice. She had her head down, seemingly unaware we'd entered; just an average day, nothing out of the ordinary.

"No I'm sorry," she said, "Mr. May is not in today . . . Would you like to speak with Ms. Taylor? . . . Certainly, Mr. Perkins, I understand. The edit has been completed and you want to be paid . . . I certainly will see that he gets the message . . . Yes, I understand, it's not a problem. They'll probably get a check out to you later today or tomorrow."

She hung up. Raised her head and did a double-take. Her mouth dropped open.

"We're here to see Mr. May," I said, all six of us showing IDs.

Her eyes were as big around as Moon Pies. The letters _FBI_ do that to some people. Then again, maybe it was just having so many federal cops in her office. She stuttered nervously, "As I -- as I said t-to the editor who just called, I-I -- Mr. May isn't _in_ the office. Would you like to speak with his partner?"

"Yes, we would," Xue said.

"One moment, please."

She picked up the phone. "Ms. Taylor, uh, uh -- you'd better get up here! We have a _situation!_ There are --" she eyeballed my ID -- " _FBI agents,_ looking for Mr. May!"

A plump woman, about five-feet-five-inches-tall flew down the hall from the right. She extended a worried hand. "Hello, Valerie Taylor."

"We're looking for Mr. May," I explained.

"Can I ask what this is about?" she said.

"I'm sorry, ma'am," Xue said, "we're not at liberty to discuss that. Where is Mr. May, please?"

"I, uh, don't know, exactly," she said, the back of her hand brushing her nose. "I haven't heard from him today."

I glanced at Xue. Every agent in the room knew Valerie Taylor was lying. Whether it originated with that old Pinocchio movie, or the fact that people get an increased blood flow to the nasal capillaries when they lie, it didn't matter. _Valerie Taylor's tell_ was Bureau Body Language 101.

"Would you try his cell phone, please?"

"Yes, I can do that." She glanced at the receptionist, then back to us. "Please follow me."

Xue gave _the nod_ to Jan. He and the two agents new to the case waited in reception while Lars, Xue, and I followed Taylor back to her office.

Taylor moved behind a battleship of a desk and punched a number into her desk phone. At Lars request she put the call on speaker.

"Don't tell him we're here," Xue said.

Taylor nodded nervously.

On the fourth ring it was answered: "This is Curt May. I'm not available right now. Please . . ."

Taylor took in a breath, about to leave a message, but Lars waved a hand, shook his head, sliced four fingers across his throat.

Taylor disconnected.

"If you do hear from Mr. May, please don't inform him we stopped by," I said.

"Okay," she said.

"And please contact me immediately." I handed her my card.

As Taylor turned to take it, the corner of my eye caught Xue leaning over to tap a finger beneath the corner of the desk. _Bugged._

We said our goodbyes.

The six of us stood in the hall while Xue fished her phone from her jacket and punched in a code. Just in time a tinny voice came from the phone's speaker: "Grand Hyatt, may I help you?"

"Mr. Johnson, please," Valerie Taylor's voice said clearly. "Room 2115."

"One moment, please."

The line rang.

"Hello?" said a worried male voice that Xue and I recognized immediately.

"The FBI were just here --" Taylor began.

"Did you tell them anything? Did-did you tell them where I am?"

"Don't worry! I didn't!"

"Okay. I'll be in touch." The call ended.

Taylor was a liar. It was the voice of Curtis May. Now we knew where he was.

"Let's go," Lars said. We hit the elevator.

56

We called the NYPD for backup and asked them to run silent, not to use their light bars. Curtis May could leave at any moment. While Xue wove through crosstown traffic to the Grand Hyatt, I made phone calls: finding out how many rooms were occupied on the twenty-first floor, getting the hotel layout and developing a fast plan of action. I lined up cops and additional agents and assigned locations.

As we passed the charbroiled stone lions Patience and Fortitude in front of the burned down Main Branch of the library, I wondered. _Did May cause that fire himself? He doesn't seem the type. Did he pay to have it burned? If so, why? And dammit, why kill authors?_ We were about to find out.

I was told by the Hyatt front desk that only three rooms were occupied on the twenty-first floor. Room 2115 was occupied by a "Mr. Johnson." The Hyatt's manager said she thought Mr. Johnson was in. I asked the manager not to book anyone else onto that floor.

Things were popping. At a light Xue caught a message from LINKS on the LA screenwriter we thought was a good fit for the Benefactor, Dasha Cummings. Her agency, it turned out, had also been Taylor and May. How had we missed that?

My phone made an odd trill, a LINKS message I'd been waiting for.

_"What?"_ Xue asked, looking over, almost clipping a silver Bentley as she wove through traffic. The rear plate said only SB.

_Who pays for a vanity plate like that?_ I wondered.

Xue chin pointed at my phone.

"The sample taken from the Romantic," I said. Most people think we only have fingerprints in our database. But like our facial recognition files, the Bureau has the best collection of DNA profiles anywhere. I'd asked for a prioritized search on the sample. "Sperm, but no match."

"So, this killer has never been arrested or in the military," Xue said.

"Curtis May doesn't have a record," I said. "I checked."

"A negative doesn't prove a positive," Xue said. "It doesn't matter. We have his lies about his business relationships with the Cheeze and the Prince, his proximity to deaths in three states. He's always in the area where these killings take place. He's posted dozens of poisonous reviews from his office on Broadway, and hidden himself as the source. _And_ his alibi for the time the Marine was killed was phoney."

I had to agree. It was more than we needed, at the very least to have a long long conversation with Curtis May. And to obtain some warrants. The details would come later.

A text came in from LINKS. "Range Tucker is dead," I said.

_"How?"_ Xue asked. We were both upset by the news. We'd been looking forward to talking with the guy. He'd been one of the best leads we had. He could have been the first domino and connected a lot of dots. Was Curtis May tying up loose ends? Getting ready to run?

"It was a freak highway accident," I read to Xue off my phone. "The Florida staties were trying to pull him over when he hit a flock of geese. His truck jackknifed and rolled."

"It had to be Curtis May's fault," Xue said. "May hired him."

"We don't know that."

"Tucker ran. Nothing says guilty like running."

I nodded. It was the one thing that was always true. Could Range Tucker have been Florida's Michelangelo?

Then another message. "Wow!" I said. "LINKS found Tucker's name online in the membership list of the Actor's Guild."

"Range Tucker was an _actor?"_ Xue said.

"He _was._ And a screenwriter."

The big-chested man's resume had him doing Shakespeare in the Park with a Miami troupe earlier this year. Driving truck was only his day job. LINKS was going crazy with new connections. It was all coming to a head.

"Tucker never said a word about it," Xue said.

"Guess who represented him?"

Xue nodded. "Taylor And May."

"Yup."

Finally, LINKS generated a _new_ purple box. Inside was the name Curtis May.

By the time we pulled up in front of the Grand Hyatt, New York City squad cars were spread out across the front. More NYPD cars arrived as we did. The officer in charge said they had the rear of the building covered too. He ordered officers around the side to seal off the alley service entrance. Curtis May wasn't getting out. We were going to take him alive.

Despite a large and growing NYPD presence, the FBI would be in control. More of our agents arrived. We sent them up the escalator to the lobby on the second floor. Jan Vincent and Lars Thomassen took the ground floor. Lars found a maintenance worker and got him to lock down every elevator as they came down except Number Six, which we left active. Jan positioned himself at the door to the emergency stairs, and he was joined by four NYPD officers along the ten car elevator bank.

It was our bust, Xue's and mine. We took elevator Six up to the twentieth floor. Xue dropped me off on Twenty, then continued up to Twenty-one. I would take the stairs up and meet Xue in the hall: piggy in the middle. May was our little piggy.

I ran for the glowing red EXIT sign at the hall's end, passing door after quiet door. It was still early. The hotel wasn't busy. At the end of the hall, I took the stairs up two at a time. I peered out cautiously from the landing on Twenty-one. The hall was empty. Where was Xue?

I took my time walking the hall back on Twenty-one, the opposite way I'd come on Twenty. The place was a tomb. I heard no televisions playing through any doors, no phone conversations.

Up ahead a door on my left opened. A man in a gray suit stepped out, rolling a black bag. He turned and looked at me.

"Mr. May!" I called.

Without hesitation, May dropped the handle and ran. _Nothing_ says guilty like running. _Nothing._

"Stop right there, Mr. May!" I yelled, "You're under arrest!"

If anything, he ran harder.

I wasn't worried. Curtis May was trapped. I jogged after him. He was going to try the elevator, and he wasn't going anywhere. He hit the down button on the middle car. It lit.

"Stop right there Mr. May! You can't get out."

He stabbed at the call button like a woodpecker. The doors opened. Xue wasn't there! _Where the heck is Xue?_

May stepped inside, turned and punched a floor button. _Now_ I ran. I was a quarter of the hall away from him and the doors weren't closing. I ran faster. The next thing I knew, the next thing I saw, May had a gun in his hand. _Where the hell did that come from?_

I flattened myself to the right wall to present a thinner target, and reached for my weapon, as he raised his.

Time. Slowed. Down. I had to move faster.

It was no use, I'd had it. My weapon was halfway out of its holster. May pointed the gun at me. It wasn't that difficult a shot. He was just too far ahead of me time-wise. I only hoped he aimed for my vest.

_BANG! Zing!_ I felt a bullet whiz past my left ear -- from _behind!_ The shot struck May in the throat, slamming him against the back of the elevator car, and the elevator door closed.

"Are you okay?" my favorite voice in the whole world called out from behind me.

_"What the -- Xue?"_

She put a hand on my shoulder, out of breath. _"Yeah."_

"Oooh, boy. Thanks, partner! _Again!"_ I pulled the radio off my belt, brought up the volume. "Lars," I said a little shaky. "Soul here on Twenty-one --?"

"Lars here." _Click._

"Curtis May is on his way down in Elevator Six. He's been shot in the throat and he's armed. Watch it."

"Okay. We're ready."

I put an arm around Xue and hugged her. "You saved my life again, partner!"

"You'd have done the same for me, Stretch. Come on, let's go find Mr. May!" Xue went back and grabbed the roller bag, and we took the stairs.

The case was heavy. It was a long way down. We swapped off carrying May's case every few flights. "What happened?" my voice echoed. "Why weren't you on the elevator?"

"The car wouldn't go. When the doors closed, it froze on Twenty. They must have done something to that car when they locked them out."

"Nice shot! I owe you _another_ one -- big time!"

"No problem," she smiled shyly.

The second floor lobby was empty and, except for some distant voices, fairly quiet. We continued on down the stairs.

On the ground floor we peered cautiously out the stairwell door and found a gigantic mess. People were yelling; reporters were trying to get closer to the elevators. There were cops and FBI suits everywhere, all centered around Elevator Six, which was cordoned off using hotel stanchions and yellow police tape. May was still in the elevator, bleeding from the neck, gagging on his own blood as it flowed onto the floor. They'd got the gun away from him. A paramedic had a compress around his throat and was trying to hold him together. May wasn't going to last long.

Xue unzipped May's bag. Pulled his stuff out on the floor. Under several pair of socks, there they were. Two very expensive gold Madison Ciselé pens.

That was it, as far a I was concerned. The other pieces would fall into place. We put May's stuff back in his bag and zipped it up. We'd let the lab guys dig though it. Case closed.

But Xue wanted answers. She walked over.

"Why, Mr. May?" she asked. "Why did you kill all those authors?"

There was a wild look in May's eyes. They stared at Xue for a moment, moved to me, then back to Xue. He shook his head and tried to rasp out something, silent words blowing a large red blood bubble at his lips. His eyes went huge. And then he died.

Part Six

Washington, DC

57

Xue and I worked another week in New York trying to figure out how May had been running his operation, and if the things he'd done could lead us to any of his collaborators.

We grilled Valerie Taylor for a day and a half, and got every bit of information we could on May. She gave us the address to May's home, a bland Upper East Side apartment. There were dozens of pictures of the literary agent with famous authors, but not much else. We found no library blueprints, hotel floor plans, or maps to the murder houses.

We went through May's office computer and credit card bills, but found no charges for lighter fluid or expensive gold pens. His phone had been purchased only the day before his death and held no trace of the reviews he'd posted. His iPad was missing. We did obtain letters from the Cheeze and the Prince firing the agency. Both letters had been countermanded by the authors' estates.

Taylor claimed she hadn't known what May was up to, that he'd seemed very paranoid the last couple of weeks. She stuck to her story so we let her go and put some agents on her.

Marvin Shinbo's body turned up, of all places, in the vacant lot where his apartment house had once been in Queens. He'd been strangled, much like the Editor, Nancy Deer, at least three days before the body was found, probably the day after we'd been out there. With Range Tucker and Dasha Cummings dead, our options became more limited.

When the big library fire was cool enough for the backhoes to dig deep into the rubble, we learned for sure it was arson. Chief Investigator Matt Demarso had been right on the money. It was ingenious, really. Someone had drained the water from the sprinkler system and connected it to a natural gas line. The gas must have been slowly leaking from the old sprinkler heads -- until something ignited it, which, of course, would have opened up the sprinklers all the way. The result was a gas bomb that ignited hundreds of thousands of books simultaneously.

"How could Curtis May," I said to Xue, "have come up with such a brilliant method of causing so much destruction?"

"Maybe May was a lot smarter than he looked," she said.

There were a lot of unanswered questions. Was May really responsible for the library and bookstore burnings? How _were_ they connected to the author killings? What was May's motive for killing so many authors? It eluded us. The Prince and the Cheeze made sense, we figured; May was being fired. But the other authors? Dasha Cummings? Range Tucker? Marvin Shinbo? _Patience._ I told myself. _Fortitude. The pieces will come._ What none of us expected, once Curtis May was gone, was that this mastermind would leave us with one more nasty surprise -- a great and terrible one.

*

No helicopter home for Xue and me. We flew back commercial and headed for the baggage claim area with everyone else. I missed the old days traveling with the Ski Team, when I could pack light and take all my clothes in a carry-on. Even FBI agents don't usually carry guns and ammo on commercial aircraft anymore unless they have some active duty that requires it, like transferring a prisoner. We usually do that on our own aircraft.

"I can't wait to get home," Xue said, as we passed the Homeland Security guard protecting the exit side of Concourse B. "I'm sure glad _this_ one's over."

"Me too."

We were both tired of trying to save victims we couldn't save. At least May had taunted us with his last gold pen. It felt good to be able to close such a diabolical case and leave any remaining pieces in the hands of our local teams in Florida, California, and New York.

The carousel started moving as Xue's phone rang. She checked the display and grinned. "It's Chris, my new guy! Finally!" she laughed.

"He's got good timing!" I said, smiling. "Go ahead and take it. I'll get the bags."

"Thanks! Hello," she said, walking away.

Now _my_ phone rang. I looked at the ID and answered. "Hey, Chip!"

"Naomi, something's wrong with your case."

"The Pen Killer case? It's basically closed."

"I'm not so sure. I've been transferring all your LINKS data into the Holographic Morphology System and it won't run. It won't create a single image."

"Well, that Holo-thingy's new, isn't it? Couldn't something be wrong with it?"

"I don't think so. I've checked. The system appeared to be working perfectly when I input your carjacking case. It produced very nice images of your team arresting people and saving Mrs. Goodman and her daughter. But when I try to run the Pen Killer data I get nothing but a room full of ugly swirling colors."

"What would cause that?"

"That's what I've been trying to figure out. There's an internal logic to the system that it depends on. When the data is so far out of wack that a big chunk doesn't fit, it pukes up something like this. Something isn't right here. The only time it's ever produced this type of thing is when I've tried to program in religious or political stories, where the logic is so weak the computer flat out rejects everything because it just can't visualize events the way they were supposed to happen."

"I don't know what to say, Chip. Other than tying up a few loose ends, we're done."

"See," Chip went on like he didn't hear me, "I can change the ending of a story _a little_ -- like when I put myself as a kid into your personal history. The computer accepted that as make-believe, a fantasy. But if I step _too_ far over the line, the computer rejects the whole thing."

"We got the mastermind, Chip. It was Curtis May."

"That's just it, Naomi, I'm not sure it was. You need to be careful. I think you may have gotten the wrong guy; the killer may still be out there. I'm going to keep trying to push your case through the system, but meanwhile, please, don't let your guard down."

"Uh-okay, I guess."

"No guessing. Be careful! You may be in danger."

"Okay, Chip."

And he was gone. _Weird._ But I was glad to have him looking out for me.

Bags started coming down the metal slide. Ours look pretty much like everyone else's -- black roller bags with small _F_ stickers on the sides. We're supposed to get special handling, though I suspect the baggage people ignore that.

_Ahh, great!_ Out they came, right at the front of the pack. I checked to make sure they hadn't been tampered with. We have small combination locks on the outside and lock up our firearms and ammo inside, in slim gun-vault cases. I grabbed one bag off the carousel, then the other.

As I set them on the floor to roll over to where Xue was on the phone in front of the widows, one bag's zipper popped.

"Oh, crap." Stuff started sliding out onto the floor.

I couldn't tell whose it was, Xue's or mine. A gun vault slid out, then a second one, followed by a toiletries kit, and a small white box -- three inches wide, eight inches long, two inches thick. When it hit the floor the box split apart, and out rolled half a dozen very familiar expensive gold pens, still wrapped in plastic. Brand new.

I looked up. Nearly silhouetted by the front windows, Xue was staring at me with terror in her eyes. The loss of hopes and dreams, our friendship. In her face I saw the pain I felt growing in my heart.

_"Noooo --"_ we cried at the same time. The betrayal, the lies. _"Nooooo --"_

And then she turned, and ran.

58

I could have gone after her, but I stood there watching her disappear into the crowd. Sure, her gun cases were lying on the floor among the people waiting for bags, but that was just an excuse. Maybe it was a way of saying goodbye. Xue had been my best friend. I stood there in the airport, shaking.

Every agent, if they were any good at their job, had some kind of superpower: they shot exceptionally well, or they could beat the stuffing out of anybody. Maybe they ran really fast. I liked puzzles. I was usually good at putting the pieces together the right way and figuring out what was really going on. I had to admit, I was completely blindsided. I doubted I'd ever get over it, even with a hundred psychotherapy sessions on Chip's damn magic holo-whatever machine. I was too trusting. It was a major flaw. I didn't ever want to stop trusting people, giving them a clean slate to start with, because I _liked_ trusting people.

There were a lot of things I would ask Xue if I ever saw her again. How she'd gotten that damn cheetah into the car, for one thing. For another, how she set off a bomb while pulling me to the ground. More than anything I wanted to know if I was making a mistake. Was Xue really the one guilty of all these crimes? Had I really been played by an expert, by someone that was supposed to be my best friend, someone I loved? I felt very bitter.

It reminded me of an old swimming pool game I used to play with my dad when I was a kid, Splash War. It was a lot of fun, but a lesson, apparently, I hadn't learned.

The goal of Splash War was to drown the other person. Not literally, just until your opponent turned her back, leaving you victorious. Dad always won -- until I caught on. Experienced Splash War players moved their hand slowly to the side as they splashed, while the opponent, that would be me, unable to see where she was splashing with so much water in her face, kept on aiming at the _hand,_ splashing by _feel._ The experienced player happily watched in the clear from one side.

I felt maybe that's what had been happening with Xue. Had I been _splashing the hand? Following a false trail?_ While Xue, who'd been killing authors and leading me on, _watched everything?_ The worst thing was that she was someone I'd trusted more than anyone in the world, with my life, just like my old dad.

_This is no game,_ I thought, _this is murder! Could it be? Really? No, it's impossible! The logistics of the Prince of Darkness killing, if nothing else: the Big Cheeze and the Prince were on opposite sides of Florida. How could someone get over to the West Florida Coast, kill the Prince, and get back to our East Coast hotel, all in one night?_

_But then, if Xue isn't behind this, why did she run? And why did Curtis May? What about the Nancy Deer killing in Encinitas --?_

_Wait a minute! Was I set up on that one? Was it just a way to get to the Professor and the Marine?_ Suddenly, a lot of things began to fit: the timeline, the pens Madison Ciselé had supposedly never sold --

We couldn't test for cheetah hair or DNA in the Taurus -- the thing had burned to a cinder. _Smart._ I could begin to see how Xue could have had more than one reason for everything she did. The bomb not only killed Jim Charles, someone Xue didn't like, but had thrown the light of suspicion in my mind more strongly on Dasha Cummings and Range Tucker, our only real suspects at the time. GIGO -- Garbage In, Garbage Out -- that's one of the few computer terms Chip had ever explained that I remembered. If she was guilty, from the beginning Xue would have had to make damn sure LINKS was working with bad information.

I didn't know how Xue got over to Captiva Island and back to our hotel our last night in Florida, but I did know the Editor's murder had never felt as though it fit with the others. Had Xue found the Editor's crime report on the National Crime Database? Simply used the Editor's murder to get us to California so she could spread her killing spree out across the country, between three different killers? _But why would Xue_ possibly _want to kill authors? And dammit, why the fires?_

I needed a warrant. As distasteful as it would be, I had to search my best friend's apartment for evidence. To make sure. To answer these questions.

I found a cab and called Madeline. "I have to talk you right now, ma'am," I said. "It's urgent."

"You and Agent Sang?" she asked.

"No, ma'am. Just me."

She told me to come right up.

59

"I can't understand what Xue was thinking," I said. "All those libraries. All those people, dead."

I was seated in Madeline's office trying not to cry, and not doing a very good job of it. Anger would have been my best defense, but I was too unsure of everything to summon any.

"If it _was_ her," I said. "I don't know _why_ she would have gone after novelists, though some of them aren't completely innocent. I know Xue thought a lot of those authors' stories inspired killings." I shook my head. "Maybe Xue's ill, maybe something just snapped -- hell, maybe I'm _wrong!_ "

"Your loyalty is misplaced," Madeline said, seated at her old metal desk, leveling a stern look at me, dark eyes flashing. "Your loyalty must be to what you know to be right and true. Your loyalty has to remain with the law and the Bureau."

What could I say to that? She was right.

I gave her Xue's roll-on bag. Madeline made phone calls, issued orders.

When everything was in motion, Madeline said, "That same precarious balance that once kept you upright on one ski in the Olympics now requires that you see justice done. Agent Sang's future victims must be protected." She pushed herself out of her chair on two fists, her lips pulled in, her shoulders hunched around her neck. "Unfortunately, I can't keep you as lead investigator on this anymore."

"But --"

Madeline held up a hand. "Xue Sang means too much to you."

I bobbed my head reluctantly.

"The new team will need to know what you know. We have to move as fast as we can this afternoon. Even if Ms. Sang were not your partner, I'd have someone more senior replace you. Xue Sang is a federal agent."

"Of course, I understand. But I want to stay involved."

Madeline took a deep, angry breath. "I don't know. Today, yes. Tomorrow, probably not."

60

I pulled my Mini out of the FBI garage and headed straight for Xue's apartment. As if to increase my misery, it was raining and began to pour until my wipers could barely keep up. On the way over I called Frannie Minor, the New York Assistant Medical Examiner.

I said, "Frannie, do you have any way to run a DNA sample from the Playboy?"

"Let me check."

I heard typing.

"We do. We still have blood in storage. Why?"

"Just a hunch. Can you get me a DNA profile?"

"That shouldn't be a problem."

"Today?"

"Well, for you Naomi, I guess I can sneak one in."

"Thanks!" Frannie had my email address.

*

Xue's apartment was a small two-bedroom with one-and-a-half baths. In the time I'd spent with Madeline and taken to get to Xue's, eight agents had already begun tearing the place apart.

I suddenly realized I hadn't been there in six months. Not much had changed. Everything was out in the open. There were no keys or money in the cookie jar. There was nothing unusual in the kitchen drawers or the end tables with the white-shaded lamps on top. There was little in the bath cabinet but tampons, Advil, and Crest. Nothing strange anywhere.

Except for the pair of locked white closet doors in her bedroom. A female agent named Molly Biggs I'd seen around Fourth Street was kneeling before the doors with an electric lock pick.

When she opened the doors, nobody moved. We stood there staring into a small room. I felt like I was looking into a secret part of Xue's mind. On the oak desk sat a gold Madison-Ciselé. On a little shelf were hardcover editions of each of our dead authors' novels -- _Queens Of The Night, Impact, The Creature Of Fierance, The Color Red,_ and those of authors who hadn't been killed.

A flat-screen monitor was mounted on the wall behind the desk, and on the floor beneath the desk was a computer. An agent named Kirk Dennis turned on the powerstrip, then sat in Xue's chair and waited for the machine to boot up, while the rest of us checked out the walls. They were covered with color printouts.

In one was a stack of gold bullion. Another was of a sailboat in the aqua waters of the Caribbean. There was a picture of two women in bikinis walking along a white sandy beach with two men in tuxedos. Three pictures of older couples -- the men, bald; the women, white-haired. I had no idea what any of it meant.

A Windows logo appeared on Xue's computer screen. "If there's a timer on the password," Kirk said, "we're screwed."

On the floor was a stack of blank white notepads; blue bands across their tops said OfficeMax. A stack of the same pads on the left side of the desk were filled with Xue's handwriting in pen. The top pad was titled: _Wanted, Chapter One._ It appeared to be a story.

In the top drawer on the right we found a stack of rejection letters from New York publishers, along with one from the agency of Taylor and May. A little light went on in my head.

Kirk's phone rang. "Hello?" . . . Yes . . . I'll tell her." He hung up.

"Madeline said to let you know that one of Xue's gun vaults was empty."

That meant Xue had a gun with her. _What is she doing? Where did she go?_

The computer came up. There was no timer, only an old Windows screensaver -- a rolling green meadow with a place for password entry in the middle. Kirk had a copy of Xue's personnel file. He began with the obvious: Xue's birthday. That didn't work. He tried her mother's birthday. _No._ Then the various digits in her social security number. He shook his head. He tried her Agent ID forward, then backward, on and on; Kirk got nowhere. I went back to checking out the pictures taped to the walls. There was one of two Ferraris -- one red, one black . . .

_Xue could have simply lied,_ I thought. _Said that the killer must have set her up by hiding those pens in her bag. Or she could have said that she took them from May's bag at the Hyatt. I wouldn't have approved, but still! Instead, Xue ran._ Nothing admits guilt like running. Nothing.

A sign to the right of Xue's wall monitor was three handwritten lines in green with long dark lines ruled through the middle:

A sign to the left of the monitor was a very familiar list of names:

It wasn't necessarily an admission of anything. Xue could have simply collected the names to look at.

_Not Tantalus,_ though, I realized. As far as I knew she hadn't been back here since we left for New York. Had she taped up this latest version while I was in Utah?

Our last two dead authors, the Playboy and the Romantic, were missing. Xue hadn't known who she would go after when she went hunting in New York.

My head jerked. Directly to the left of the second sign I recognized an aerial photo of the Professor of Weird's house in Huntington Hills. Alongside it was the Cheeze's mansion in Jupiter. And next to that, what appeared to be a Google satellite map of the Prince's house on Captiva Island -- road on one side, beach on the other. Taped above it was an aeronautical chart with a route drawn across South Florida and a photo of a small airplane I recognized as a high-winged Cessna.

Then I could see it: The Prince hadn't been hit by a food truck. **** I pictured Xue flying west to the Florida coast in that little airplane, landing on the beach, taking control of the Prince somehow, maybe drugging him. I imagined that plane tracking right down Captiva Highway, where Xue shoved the Prince from the passenger door. I could see the Prince falling, half-conscious, through empty air, his back toward the ground, limp arms and legs trailing above him as the sudden rush of wind brought him to full consciousness. He would have experienced a terror like no story he'd ever written. Falling . . . falling as the ground rushed up to meet him, without even the time to scream before he hit the roadway.

These were crime _planning_ photos.

Missing pieces of the puzzle dropped into place. Xue must have been using LINKS to hunt her victims.

"Got it!" Kirk called triumphantly. Two more agents squeezed into the closet.

"What was it?" Molly asked.

Kirk looked at me. "Soul."

On the hard drive we found a copy of a pilot's license I never knew Xue had. A file was titled, "Blueprints." The legend on one said New York Public Library, Main Branch. An offshore bank account in Nevis had a balance of twenty thousand dollars.

In a file named WORK, we found a completed manuscript for a novel called _Wanted,_ written by one Xaviera Scott. _X.S.? Xue Sang?_

My cellphone trilled. It was an email from Frannie Minor.

To: FBI Special Agent Naomi Soul

From: NYPD Assistant ME Frances Minor

Subject: Sperm Sample

Was this your hunch?

Regards,

Francis

At the bottom was a comparison between the Playboy's DNA, and that of the sperm found inside the Romantic, a match. A third image, a mass spectrometer analysis, showed traces of _ink._

_Ink? Xue used one of the bladder pens to transfer the -- ? Sheesh!_

*

When we'd searched every inch of the apartment and I was on my way home, Chip called.

"Range Tucker was innocent!" was the first thing he said. "I found where data on Tucker had been entered into LINKS by someone. I had to dig into a bunch of old Florida birth records to make sure. Range Tucker didn't _have_ a sister."

"How could --?"

"GIGO, Naomi -- garbage in, garbage out. LINKS can only process what it has in its data banks."

"Xue must have put that phony information into the system," I said.

_"Xue?_ Why?"

I told him what had happened, what we'd learned.

"Not _Xue?"_ he said. Chip couldn't believe it.

I went through the whole thing, until reluctantly, finally, he began to see the truth. Just as I was.

"Xue killed all those people?"

"From what we've seen so far, it looks that way." I felt sick saying so.

He was silent.

"Thanks, Chip," I said, and we disconnected.

When I pulled into my driveway, I sat in the car and put in a call to the State Department. Gave my ID number and asked my questions. I got shuffled down to personnel and told a woman working late what I was looking for. There were two Chrises, and one Christopher. I called each of them. None of them knew Xue. Twenty minutes later I was pretty certain there _was_ no guy at State who'd been dating her.

For two years, my best friend had been lying to me. I'd thought we could talk about anything -- Tommy, Chip, Geoff, the Agency, Mad Maddie. Obviously, we couldn't talk about _anything._ Not anything to do with Xue's mysterious life.

When I opened the front door, Winston ran to me snorting, licked my hand, and when I knelt, my face. He always knows when I feel down. I can always count on Winston. _"I'll never lose you Winnie!"_ I cried. _"Never!"_

61

Like Chip, Mom didn't believe Xue was behind it all, not at first. But as I told her about what had happened at the airport and what we'd found at Xue's apartment, the air went out of her.

"Oh, honey, _"_ Mom cried. She gave me a long hug.

*

Wednesday morning I was officially off the case. Madeline called early and said word had come down from the Director himself. I was out. She gave me the day off.

I moped around the house. Winnie could tell I was miserable. Part of me wanted to walk away from Xue, just open a bottle of wine and let the Bureau handle things. Another part of me couldn't leave it alone. I kept running Xue's behavior over and over in my mind. _Poor Curtis May!_ Losing his clients to murder! Then being framed by Xue. An innocent man who was killed to hide the truth. LINKS hadn't put Curtis May in a purple box until right at the end. Maybe LINKS was smarter than we were.

And what about Jim Charles? Xue might have considered him _a prick,_ as she put it, but killing a fellow agent, for what? Being _rude?_ The library fires, _oh,_ I couldn't stop thinking about them. Were they really connected to the author murders? Could Xue really have killed all those innocent people in New York? I just couldn't see what Xue had to gain by burning libraries or killing authors. Was it simply a release of anger at the failure of her own work? Had I not known my friend at all?

I called the manager of the New York Marriott Marquis and got them to dig out Xue's door record. Her hotel room hadn't been opened the day of the big library fire until after midnight at four-seventeen a.m. Right then I received a text from Madeline.

A call had come in to the NYPD from the dispatcher of the Yellow Cab Company. A phone had been found in the crevice of the back seat of a taxi. When the dispatcher had the phone charged, he determined that it belonged to the Romantic. _Xue!_ I thought grimly.

*

Xue Sang checked her watch. She had one more great and terrible surprise for the wonderful publishing industry. The charges were set and waiting.

That afternoon the wind in New York City was howling. A hurricane from Haiti was making its way up the East Coast. The forecast said the wind was likely to double in strength. Today was definitely the day.

It was quitting time at Big Six publisher Panda House, headquartered in Panda Tower. As Xue pulled out the throwaway phone she'd reserved for one purpose only, she imagined the terror that would soon be on the faces of the _thousands_ of people -- editors, designers, distribution and sales reps -- that were rising from their desks, putting on their coats, grabbing their umbrellas, getting ready to make their way home in the gale force winds.

She pushed SEND.

*

I wondered if Xue had gotten out of the country. The Bureau was working with people in Nevis to freeze her small offshore account. She should have already moved that money and been long gone.

But she wasn't. Bored and confused, I just happened to turn on the television when the most awful news came up.

CBS was running a video someone had shot with their phone. There'd been an explosion on top of Panda Tower, the offices of publisher Panda House. It was believed the liquid mass damper that stabilized the building was the bomb's target, and that the damper had failed. The slim tower was already swaying back and forth ominously in the growing hurricane by as much as three feet.

Employees that got on the first elevators were trapped when the shafts bowed too much to let the cars descend. The computer froze them on the way down, trapping their occupants inside. Scared to wait in the swaying building, the rest took the stairs. CBS News played a recorded phone call.

A senior marketing director named Eleanor Marx, who worked on the fiftieth floor, had called her husband, an anchorman at CBS. She told him, "The emergency stairs are scary, Bill! They're swaying back and forth so bad I can barely stay on my feet!"

The clanging of hundreds of footsteps echoed in a background of creaks and screams. As Eleanor reached the twenty-sixth floor, she told her husband the tower's concrete around the staircase was crumbling.

"Bill, it's starting to shatter in long spikes!"

She told her husband she loved him and the kids, which was followed a moment later by a scream.

It couldn't be, could it? One of the world's major publishers? _"Xue!"_ I cried. _"No!"_

CBS switched to an image from six blocks away. Moments later, Mom, Winnie, and I watched in horror as the tower leaned farther and farther to the right, then ever so slowly just kept on going in that direction. In a way it was worse than the World Trade Center, because Panda Tower didn't collapse straight down. Panda slammed into a skyscraper across the street, starting a chain reaction. Three smaller buildings were smashed, and many nearby towers had pieces knocked out of them.

A female anchorperson said it was presumed that as many as 2000 of Panda's employees worked on the upper floors.

Had Xue really caused this terrible disaster, or was I losing my mind in blaming her for any deaths that were publishing related? _Where the hell did Xue go? Is she in New York or Washington? Could she have caused the tower's collapse remotely?_

I wanted to do something -- anything. I couldn't sit on my hands and wait for the Bureau to find her. I had the feeling Xue was still here in town somewhere. But why would she be? She would be insane to go back to her apartment. Her local bank account was frozen.

There was no news of any libraries in greater Washington having been torched. On Google I found four libraries in the Washington area with large fiction sections. I called each one to make certain none of them had been burned down. None of them were supposed to be open that night, and nobody answered, just voice mail. I decided to swing by each one anyway, just to make sure. It beat sitting around the house watching the news.

As I went out the front the door, Mom yelled after me, "Bad weather out there, dear. Be careful!"

"I will, Mom!"

I got my Mini out of the garage and headed for the closest one.

*

Northwest Washington Library was a bust. Its parking lot was empty. So I drove over to Northeast Library, and then Martin Luther King. Same thing. I was wasting my time. Xue had to be gone. Madeline was right; I needed a vacation, and not with Tommy, Geoff, or Chip. Somewhere by myself. I had to get my head together.

I could skip the last library on my list. This was an exercise in futility, nothing but anger at my friend's betrayal, and guilt for having been a part of it. _Oh, what the hell!_ I dialed the Library of Congress one more time. Somebody answered.

_"Jeb?"_

"No, this is Special Agent Naomi Soul calling, with the FBI."

"Oh, I thought you were my husband. I'm sorry, most of the library is closed tonight."

"Nobody's there?"

"The main research section is open with minimal staff. We're holding a general meeting of our librarians across the street tonight, at the Jefferson Fiction Annex. No library card holders will be allowed in because we're hosting two world-famous authors who are promoting their new books. I'm heading over there now."

"Which authors?"

She told me. I recognized their names immediately. They were right at the top of the _Times_ list -- the English Children's Mystic and the Goofball.

"Don't go!" I said.

_"Why not?"_

"I'm worried the person responsible for a number of authors' deaths in Florida, California, and New York may be planning to burn the place down."

"I just spoke to a friend who's already over there. She didn't mention anything like that. The authors just arrived. Everything is fine. Does the FBI have an actual _threat_ against us?"

"No, but --"

"Are you _crazy?_ Do you know how lucky we are to have these two women, _together, on the same night?_ They're my all time _favorites!_ I've waited my whole _life_ to meet them. I'm _going!"_ She hung up.

I put my Mini in drive, hit the gas, and swerved out of the parking lot.

*

Three presidents are represented by buildings at the country's largest library, the second largest in the world: Adams, Madison, and Jefferson. The huge main Jefferson Building bisects Pennsylvania Avenue, just southeast of the Capitol Building. Its Jefferson Fiction Annex, across the street, is _all_ fiction, from all over the world, the largest physical collection of novels on Earth.

When I pulled into the Annex parking lot, it was filled with cars. Nobody was outside. I got out and ran to the ornate front doors. They were locked. All I could see through the squares of wire mesh embedded in the windows were two wide staircases ascending to the second floor. I ran around the side and tried the door next to the drive-through window. _Closed!_ I pounded on the flat metal book return drawer. There was no answer.

I brought up Chip's author locator map. The English Children's Mystic wasn't listed, but the Goofball was. Her dot, however, wasn't flashing. Her phone's last location was in downtown Washington not far from where I was standing, but the dot showed "Not in service." What does that mean? I wondered.

All those librarians inside. Was I wrong or just obsessing over Xue? But as I turned back for my Mini, the book drawer made a clapping metallic sound as a burst of air burped out. __ Up above in the second floor windows something yellow flashed. _Fire! She's here! Xue is inside! This is where it has to end, one way or the other._

I tried Madeline's cell number. It went to voice mail. _Dammit! There's no time!_ I looked up at the windows and caught the yellow flare again. I didn't know how to get in.

But _Tommy_ knew the Jefferson. I'd seen him in a play here two years ago. _He_ would know, if I could reach him in Australia. I dialed his number.

_"Noms?"_

He sounded sleepy. I could hear waves crashing in the background. They made me wish I were there with him.

"How're you?" he mumbled. "Bin sleepin'. Late shoot yesterday -- uh, today -- whatev'."

"Hi, Tommy -- do you remember when you played _King Lear_ in Washington?"

"Sure, mmmm, at the Librar' 'f Congress. Open' fer th' new Franklin Theater? Wus goin' on?"

"I think Xue's inside. She's gone rogue, Tommy. She's already murdered hundreds, possibly thousands, of people! She's the Pen Killer!"

_"Xue? No way!"_

I told him what we'd found at her apartment. He was floored.

"Tommy, I need to get inside the Jefferson Fiction Annex. The place is locked up and there are people in there. It may already be on fire."

He went silent. Was he falling asleep? _"Hello? Tommy?"_

"No -- no I'm awake, Noms -- _I'm up!_ If you can get into the main reading room, or even the Franklin Theater -- they've got access to the tunnels. The tunnels go everywhere."

"Across the street? To the Fiction Annex?"

"Probably."

"Thanks, Tommy."

"Be careful."

"I will."

Maybe I couldn't reach Madeline but I needed backup. I called the duty officer. The moment she said, "FBI --" my phone went dead. _Dammit!_

I cut across the street, jay-running through the traffic; ran up the walkway and in through the big front doors. The Main Reading Room was almost deserted, only twenty patrons or so.

Way in the back corner I found a red velvet rope hanging between two stanchions, guarding a descending staircase. I unhooked the rope and started down.

Two floors below I saw that Tommy was right. Here were the famous tunnels of Washington, DC. I followed the signs. The long gray concrete shaft was deserted, lit by an endless bank of fluorescents that glowed into the distance. I followed them as fast as I could go, and a sign slowly became legible:

I got inside the basement of the building through the loading dock and took a staircase up three flights. At the top were two locked metal doors. On the right side was a narrow vertical window. I couldn't see anyone, but somewhere back in the stacks, I caught a yellow flicker. _Fire! Was I too late? Dammit!_ The door wouldn't budge. I ran back down.

In the basement I turned the corner into an alcove where I found a freight elevator wide enough to take a whole pallet of books. I hit the button for the second floor. The elevator was really slow, humming, grinding, but up it went.

When the doors finally slid open, the first thing I noticed was the thick smell of lighter fluid -- and then, the distant crackle of fire. I pulled my sidearm.

The fire was still contained in the back corner. I'd interrupted Xue's plan. Dozens of librarians were lined up head-to-toe on the floor between the stacks, along with the queens of fiction -- two of the greatest-selling authors of all time: the English Children's Mystic and the Goofball. Their wrists and ankles were zip-tied, their mouths duct-taped shut, snot leaking from their nostrils as they tried to breathe. I bent over and ripped the tape from the mouth of the closest one, the Goofball.

She didn't say a word, not even, _"Ow!"_ But her deep brown eyes were huge. She wasn't looking at me, but over my shoulder.

"Where is she?" I asked.

"Hello, Naomi," said a voice I knew, as I felt cold steel press against my neck.

62

I straightened up and turned around to face her.

"Hi, Stretch," Xue said. She reached out and took my gun.

"I figured out how you killed the Prince of Darkness," I said. "We found your pilot's license."

She smiled.

"I saw your blueprints and pictures."

She chuckled. "Amazing what you can find at the library online."

"Obviously you planted the pens inside Curtis May's suitcase," I said. "But the gun, how did you get him to --?"

"Simple. I called May's room and told him, 'A hired assassin from LA, posing as an FBI agent, is setting you up for the author murders. She's in the hotel to kill you,'" Xue laughed. "What a dummy."

"Where did May's gun come from?"

"The Safari Park. It was in the same cabinet as the tranq gun. I left it sitting on the elevator trash can."

"Brilliant," I admitted, not showing her how upset I felt.

She smiled. "Thank you." The sound of fire in back grew louder.

I shook my head. I had to think Xue really did have more than one personality.

"I didn't know you were writing a book," I said. "You did every part of this _yourself?_ Michelangelo, the Benefactor, Tantalus -- all of them were _you?"_

She nodded, that wry modest grin on her lips. "Every author is always _all_ of the characters they create."

"What about Dasha Cummings?"

"She had nothing to do with it. I knew her from school. We'd stayed in touch over the years. She was asking that safari guy questions about a plot I gave her. Of course, I had to get rid of her. The bookkeeper too."

"Range Tucker?"

"Completely innocent. Too bad he ran into those ducks."

I reached back to Florida in my mind. "You put those drops of blood on his engine when you examined his truck!"

Xue smiled. "I had a little left over from the Prince."

"And Marvin Shinbo?" I asked.

She chuckled. "Shinbo's timing was perfect. He showed up at the Playboy's place to deliver a book I ordered from Amazon. _Impact,_ by the Prince," she giggled. "It's a good thing you never needed the trunk of our convertible. Shinbo's body was in there for a day and a half!"

I blew out a long silent breath. I couldn't believe we'd been partners.

"But that Playboy thing was really tricky." Xue laughed. "I had to record him when he answered the door that night, saying _'Yes?'_ Then play it back at one in the morning when Chip's locator called his phone, to delay the alarm. After I filled a pen with his you-know-what, I threw his family jewels in the East River." She laughed. "Quite a _splash!"_

It was in that moment I began to wonder if my partner wasn't just messed up, but positively evil.

She said, "The most difficult part was finding out where some of the top authors were. You solved that little problem for me with our analysis of the _Times List,_ by calling their agents, and Chip's locator."

I didn't know what to say to that. Xue had to be mentally ill. It was the only thing that made sense. "We saw your stack of rejection letters."

She was suddenly serious. "Yeah, well, that was before I gave up on the big publishers and tried to do it myself. I didn't get very far that way either. Self-publishing -- _ha!_ My book _Wanted_ was rejected by BookBub, the number one Internet promoter, _eighteen_ times. Their two hundred million readers have never even heard of my book."

"Two _hundred million_ -- _?"_

"I couldn't find a damn distributor to put my book in the grocery stores, and libraries wouldn't put it in their catalog unless the distributor did it first."

"So, that's why -- the fires --"

"Screw _them!"_ Xue glanced angrily at the wild-eyed librarians on the floor and pointed. "Those people have all the power, all the connections. I couldn't take it any more!"

Xue had lost her mind. And I was smelling less lighter fluid, a lot more smoke.

"They have a secret word, you know, Naomi."

"Word? What word?"

"It has to be used somewhere in a book's text. Only books that _contain_ their damn word get on the _Times_ Lists." She gave a head tilt at the two authors on the floor. "Ask them!"

The Goofball said nothing. The Children's Mystic closed her eyes and shuddered.

"No one really _likes_ the word," she went on, "no one ever uses it in normal conversation. But only books with this particular word get good reviews and broad distribution. It's a secret signal, a code to industry insiders. It can be used as an adjective, even an adverb, but it _has_ to be there in the text."

I'd heard some weird conspiracy theories around the Bureau, but this --! "You're _crazy!"_

Xue looked at me like I'd slapped her. "Don't say I'm crazy!" she said. "The word is _palpable._ Whenever you see _palpable_ in a story you know the author's got the inside track."

"That's insane."

"I _know!_ But that's how it works! Think about it," Xue urged. "Is there something wrong with _tactile?_ Or _touchable? Or_ _physically present?_ Fucking _palpable?_ When was the last time you used _palpable_ in a sentence? When was the last time you thought to yourself, 'Oh, she's so upset, the feeling is just so _palpable_?' Or, 'Hmm, the tension here in the library tonight certainly is _palpable?'_ Or how about, 'It's _so_ hot in this room, the air is becoming _palpable_?'"

"Maybe never," I heard my voice rising. "But you're still out of your mind!"

The smoke was thickening overhead. Xue looked at me, frowning. I had to stay calm, figure out some way to distract her. I had to get the gun out of her hand before we were all burned alive.

"So, the publishers rejected you, and this big promoter, Book Bog rejected you --"

"Book _Bub."_

"Whatever. _Publicity?_ _That_ was your motive for all these killings?"

"No, not _publicity,"_ she said condescendingly. "Well, not exactly."

_What, then? Why_ kill all those authors, all those people in New York? _Why_ burn those libraries and book stores? It was you, burning them, wasn't it? You brought down Panda Tower?" I still didn't want to believe she'd killed all those people.

She smiled. "Of course it was me. Most artists only make a good living after they're dead. I wasn't willing to wait that long."

That was it. She'd admitted it. There was no turning back. I felt my mouth pull into a rictus of pain at what my best friend had become. "How could you -- you were investigating _yourself! Rattlesnakes?_ A _cheetah?"_

"I know. Pretty cool, right? I had to use a dog muzzle and a cart to get that thing into the trunk of our loaner car!"

"All to -- to _what?"_ I stopped. "You planned _all_ of this, didn't you? Even getting found out."

"I've asked myself that a few times," Xue laughed. "Maybe I really _did_ want you to know."

"You just didn't plan on getting found out quite _yet,_ did you?" I nodded, beginning to see. "You still think you can get away with this. To reap whatever benefits the press will bestow on your novel. What were you thinking, _Brazil?_ "

She gave me that wry smile. "You've never been stupid, Naomi -- the exact opposite, in fact. No extradition treaty, right? But this is only the second largest library in the world. First, I'm going to England to do the largest one."

She smiled, no irony this time. "You should come with me, partner."

My mouth dropped open. First _Chip_ wants me to move in with him. Then _Tommy_ wants me to go to Australia. Then _Geoff._ Now _Xue?_ I breathed out slowly, carefully, not sure how to answer, not realizing I was subtly shaking my head.

Xue nodded, bunching her lips. "Never mind. I understand."

"Please tell _why,_ Xue?" I said. " _Why_ have you been doing this?"

She sighed. "Two words: shelf space."

"Shelf _what?"_

"Groceries stores, drug stores, airport bookshops -- the shelves are clogged with books written by old has-been legacy authors." She pointed. "Like these two on the floor. The Big Cheeze couldn't write his way out of a paper bag. The Prince is about as scary as yogurt. It's time for some new blood," she chuckled, "so to speak. It's time to edit the field down to size, make room for the newcomers. Wipe out the top-level competition and increase the demand? That's not crazy, it's logical."

Then she gave me the same argument I'd made to Madeline: "Besides, how many psychopaths have those dead authors created? How many readers have dead loved ones that were paralleled by victims killed in those author's stories? _Screw them!_ Live by the pen . . . die by it too!

"Meanwhile," Xue complained, "the Big Cheeze authors of the world live comfortably behind the gates of their huge fancy dream mansions while people like me struggle to write something good enough to afford to buy more pens."

I kept my gaze on Xue, but my peripheral vision picked up the librarians on the floor shaking fearfully, the same thing going through all our minds: Xue was going to kill every one of us: the librarians for not carrying her book, the authors simply for succeeding when Xue hadn't.

I shook my head and pointed at the librarians. "Xue, you actually burned down _libraries,_ thinking that when these people replaced their collections they would include _your_ books? You killed off authors to make room for yourself on the best-seller lists? What is _wrong_ with you?"

"Hey, Naomi," she whined, "you're supposed to be my best friend! After all the work it took to write _Wanted_ , I found out the book wasn't worth anything! I worked so hard! I ran paid promotions, did online interviews, spent every spare dime of my salary. _Wanted_ barely sold two thousand copies -- while the Big Cheezes of the world are out there selling their crap like _hotcakes?"_

"Maybe readers have had enough." I said. "Maybe people don't want to read any new crap."

"That's _mean_ Naomi! Of _course_ they do!"

63

Xue took a deep breath and began to pace like an angry jungle cat, back and forth in front of the stacks. She was more stressed than I'd ever seen her.

"But the tide on my work is turning," she said. "I started sneaking my paperbacks into Costco. I put a sticker on each one --" she held up two fingers on her left hand, the pinkie alongside her gun on the right, to make a quote sign -- _"Free with the purchase of any novel!_ and just gave them away. Did you know, Naomi, that you can get regular paperbacks printed for less than twenty cents a piece, if you buy enough of them?"

She shrugged. "I felt a little bad about stealing that shelf space from the stores, but what the hell."

_I_ felt the increase in temperature, another of the stacks back there beginning to catch fire. "You felt bad about using someone's shelf space for nothing?"

"Technically, it's stealing. But it worked! People, they loved the books! Remember yesterday at the airport when I told you it was my _new guy?"_

_"Yeah?"_

Her lips curled into that old smile. "Well, his name's Chris but he's actually a book distributor, and he was calling _me!_ He was pissed off about finding so many copies of my books all over their system. Giant, Safeway, Kroger, Walmart," she laughed. "But he wanted to distribute my book anyway! They have no scruples, not so long as a book sells! Nobody gives a damn!"

I shook my head and gave a bitter snort, barely able to understand how for two years this person had been my friend. "You were uncomfortable using shelf space that wasn't yours, but you could _kill_ people? _Murder_ authors? All those people that died at the New York Library? _Panda House?"_

Xue grinned, "After all the crap they've written and published, the lives their stories have paralleled and ruined, they deserve it!"

In a twisted way it made sense -- to a total psychopath.

And then she aimed the gun at my heart and prepared to do to her friend what killers always do. I'd never been in a situation like this before. Neither had she. We stood like that, staring at each other while more shelves of books crackled and caught, smoke filling the grand old building, librarians and authors, bound on the floor, coughing, trying to scream through the duct tape, and Xue's finger tightening on the trigger.

Then it loosened. She shook her head, stepped over and hit the elevator button.

"You mean too much to me, Naomi," she said. "I can't do it." The freight elevator doors opened. "There's always a chance they'll get you out of here before the flames take you. I love you, Naomi, and I always will."

"Xue! _Stop! The elevator --!"_

She stepped backward . . . into empty space.

As long as I live, I'll be troubled by the fact that I said too little too late. I'll never forget that look of surprise and terror on my dearest friend's face as she realized there was no elevator car behind her. The ancient service elevator hadn't come. Xue and I both screamed all the way to the thud at the bottom.

64

I ran to the edge and called to her, " _Xue!"_ There was no answer.

The shaft was a bottomless black hole. I hit the call button a dozen times. The elevator wasn't coming back up. The fire was still way back in the room, but the air was growing hot.

I stepped on something that almost caused me to slide into the pit, after Xue. Under my right foot, at the edge of the empty elevator shaft, it reflected the sunburst of growing fire behind us. Maybe it had fallen from Xue's pocket; maybe it had jammed the door mechanism. Maybe she'd tried to stop herself from falling but slid backward on it. But there on the floor, with her words, ". . . die by it too!" echoing in my ears," was a gold Madison Ciselé.

In a cup on the reference desk I found a pair of scissors and cut the closest librarian loose, a gray-haired old lady in a lavender print dress.

"Oh, thank you!" she said after painfully pulling the duct tape from her mouth.

I handed her the scissors. "Release the others!" I shouted over the sound of fire.

I hurried back to the open elevator shaft and held up a hand. Air was coming in, feeding the flames in the back of the room. The elevator button was still lit. When Xue landed on top of the car she must have broken something. We wouldn't be getting out that way.

I ran to the left side of the room, as far from the burning stacks as possible. The doors to the wide front stairs had been chained. I pushed one door open as far as it would go. The air flow increased and the fire way back behind me roared. Could we squeak through the crack?

There's a rule for someone in reasonably good shape getting through a tight space: if you can get your head through, the rest of your body can follow. I pushed my head into the opening until my ears hurt, straining against the chain. I couldn't get my head . . . past the opening. It was too tight, and many of the librarians were built a lot heavier than me!

I let the door go. The fire's roar dropped, but not back to its level before my head test. The smoke was thickening. The fire was using up our air. I was having difficulty seeing the back wall. I looked at the high windows. _Dammit! Reinforced with that damn screen mesh!_ _Can we break the glass? Gnaw through it with the scissors? In a year, probably._

Half the women had been released, and they followed me, coughing through the smoke, over to the single fire door in the room's far right corner in front of the stacks. I couldn't believe it. Xue had outdone herself this time. She'd used one of those car-theft devices called a Club. I stood there staring dumbly at the thing, not feeling quite so bad about her fall down the elevator shaft. The U-shaped part of the Club had been shoved hard to the left, around the hinge side of the door's release arm, and the Club's rod extended past the wall frame on the right. I tried the door. It wouldn't move an inch.

I ran to the front desk and tried the phone. _Dead!_ A librarian handed me hers. _Zero bars!_ I knew what that meant. Xue must have brought one of the cell phone jammers the Bureau used to stop terrorists from triggering bombs. I looked around. Where had she put it?

I asked everyone, "Did you see the woman that tied you up hide any electronic devices? In the back, maybe? Did she put something in one of the trash cans?"

They shook their heads.

There wasn't time to look. The heat was growing hot on my back. We were trapped.

65

All the librarians and authors were loose now, running around like I was, trying to find some way out. Two fire extinguishers we tried beat the flames back, then ran out. The other two coughed out a brief white spray. They were empty. It wasn't enough.

The fire began to grow again. The heat was becoming unbearable. The next shelf of books would start to smoke, and a minute later they'd be on fire too. Smoke was sprouting from the rear wall paneling. The building was about to burn. Librarians began screaming at me.

"You're with the FBI! Do something!" screeched a voice I recognized from our earlier phone call.

I ran to the back, as close as I could get to the burning stacks. They'd been built in eight-foot-wide sections, six feet tall. The rows ran about three feet apart, all the way to the front, the first one less than three feet from the door with Xue's _Club_ locked across it.

The stacks looked beat up; in places there were cracks in the wood. They didn't seem to be bolted to the floor.

I remembered a story by one of the world's most famous authors, the Religious Historian, an idea I figured he'd borrowed from an old movie called the Mummy.

_Would it work?_ I leaned against the nearest stack. It wobbled. I pushed harder. It moved farther. I put my legs into it and it leaned forward several inches, but that was as far as I could push it on my own.

"Help me!" I shouted to the librarians, waving them over.

They shrank back in fear of the flames behind me. But the two authors saw what I had in mind and ran to me hunched over to avoid the smoky air. Maybe the three of us would be enough.

"One, two, three --" I said, and we shoved.

The stack gave, leaned over -- __ five . . . eight inches.

"Back now! Rock it! -- okay _. . . again!"_

It teetered, forward . . . then back . . . then forward . . . but ten inches was all we could get out of it. The base was just too thick; we didn't have the muscle. We were going to die here _unless --_

"Come on, _dammit!"_ the English Mystic roared at the librarians. Fame has its rewards, and the librarians came scampering over, young women, old matronly women, coughing, choking.

We shoved . . . we backed off. "Harder," the British author commanded.

We had the rhythm. "Okay, _quick . . . now, back again!"_

And _this time_ . . . w _e had it! Over_ it went -- _BANG!_ Into the next one. _BANG!_ and the next. _BANG!_ Out of control, shelves tilting into the next stack up the line. _BANG!_ Would it --? _BANG! . . . BANG!_ -- _be_ enough? _BANG!_ The last shelf _SLAMMED_ into the fire door.

We ran up there. The Club hadn't broken. It had bent.

"Wow! Those things are tough!" said the Goofball.

The door would open a mere two inches and that was it. The bend wasn't enough to slide the Club's U-bracket around the door arm. So much for that idea. The fire was moving forward, faster as the room heated.

Another librarian tried her phone. Still zero bars. _Where the hell did Xue put that jammer?_ I ran back to the elevator. "What's that door on the other side of the elevator shaft?" I asked.

"That goes to the Children's Wing," said the head librarian. "The elevator has doors on both sides."

"Is there any way out of the building over there?"

"A staircase, like the one here." She pointed at the chained double doors. "But without the elevator car their's no way across the shaft."

It was too far to jump. The librarians and the two world-famous authors were all watching me. I looked at the tilted book shelves, and the shelves on the opposite side of the aisle.

"There must be a million books in here," I said.

"More than a million," said the head librarian. "Why?"

I looked down into the pit. _How deep is it?_ I wondered. _Three stories, probably._ We had about fifty people -- _if_ there was time before the fire got us. I hated to bury Xue's body. We had no choice.

"That's the dumbest idea anyone's ever come up with," said the Goofball, catching on.

"No dumber than some of your plots," the Children's Mystic shot back.

The Goofball laughed. "Good to know you're reading my stuff."

I hurriedly led them to the rear of the room, as close as we could get to the fire. We formed two brigades, but instead of passing water buckets, we passed books, six at a time, and threw them into the shaft. The first books we took created a fire break, we hoped. It slowed the fire's spread but didn't stop it. It was too hot back there. The shelves were made of wood.

As the distance between where we took the books and the elevator decreased, we made a third line, then a fourth. We sped up but so did the fire, the smoky air becoming unbreatheable. People were choking. "Stay low!" I yelled. We hunched over and pulled shirts across our mouths. One of the few male librarians took off his shirt and tied it around his face. Shortly, several female librarians followed suit and were in only their bras.

The closer the fire came, the faster the books went, until half of us were literally standing at the elevator pit, heaving in armloads of books. We weren't going to make it. It was too large a shaft, too deep.

We were really having trouble breathing, the heat almost unbearable, when one of the librarians yelled, "I -- I see it! It's coming up!"

The floor of books rose into the firelight. We kept heaving in books until the top was a foot below the edge.

I hopped down. The books sank and shifted to my left and right, but I wobbled my way across to the opposite side as the books settled. The floor at the doorway was up to my thighs. If I couldn't open these doors, we'd had it. There was a vertical rod hooked to some kind of linkage arms. I pulled down on it. Nothing happened. I pushed upward hard, and it _popped!_ I shoved at the right door. It moved! I shoved at the left door, until they were far enough apart to wedge my arm in between. As I pushed, and the doors separated, I heard the fire roar furiously behind me, a wind building in my face. Air was rushing from the children's wing into the adult wing.

"Come on!" I shouted, waving them in. "Jump! And throw in some more books. It's sinking."

As they jumped down in their dresses and slacks, they pitched in armloads of books to make up for our lowering walkway. I helped them across. I pushed the first couple of butts up onto the floor of the Children's Wing. They turned and helped the others out.

Behind us the air-fed fire blasted. The librarians moved faster. The authors jumped down and got across. Finally there was only one woman left, the head librarian. She appeared uncertain, disoriented. She was looking for something.

"Come on!" I yelled, reaching for her hand.

"No!" she cried, pulling back, "We have to save the duplicator!"

_"What?"_

"It's in the case over there!" she pointed. "The Jefferson Writing Duplicator! But only the caretaker has the key!"

"Break the glass!" I yelled. "Or forget it!" The fire was really close and moving fast.

She pulled a monstrous dictionary off a table, ran to the slanted case, raised it over her head, and dropped it. The glass shattered.

"Hurry!" I yelled.

She gingerly fished out a wood framework, a spindly thing of crisscrossing strips pinned together at the corners, the nation's first copy machine. She handed it down to me, its wooden arms flopping around. I helped the woman down one-handed, duplicator in my other hand.

But as we wobbled across the uneven books, I tripped, and the damned duplicator caught on the edge of the doorway. I could feel the heat of fire burning my back. _The hell with it!_

I shoved the woman up on the edge, and as they pulled her out something on the duplicator went _CRAACK!_ They grabbed the thing, then me, and we were out!

We ran down the wide staircase, out the doors, and into the beautiful fresh rainy air. "No! Don't stop!" I yelled. "Keep going!"

We ran into the parking lot like Hell was after us, because it was. Behind us there came a long crackling sound like a peel of thunder, and the building _BOOMED,_ a glass-shattering explosion that brought flames rising from the open windows.

Epilogue

"Welcome to my new place. Come on back to my office . . . I find the City exciting, don't you? Please sit down.

"Do you find these white leather chairs comfortable? I'm a little insecure about this setup; I'm not used to it. My friend Geoff said I should get some high-quality furniture in here. This desk? Thank you, it's Italian. I really like it. It's not too modern, is it? Good. I found it in Copenhagen. No, not Denmark, the furniture store. This stuff is supposed to create confidence in a new business.

"Yes, well, after I quit the FBI and moved to New York . . . that's right, _quit_ the Bureau . . . No, I just couldn't be there anymore. Too many things reminded me of Xue. A month after I helped save the librarians (a spot of glue on the Jefferson Duplicator and it was good as new), despite the commendation the Director gave me, and perhaps because of it and Xue's death, I turned in my resignation and started organizing this business.

"Yes, I'm a private investigator now. My first client isn't scheduled til nine-thirty. Let me catch you up with what's been happening over the last few months. They've gone by in a whirlwind.

"The Jefferson Fiction Annex burned for nine hours until there was nothing left. Despite the rain, twelve firetrucks couldn't put it out. Another superfire. I sometimes wonder if Xue was still alive at the bottom of that shaft when the heat and the building came down on top of her. Sometimes I dream of it. They still haven't found her body.

"Xue sure was wrong about one thing, her book _Wanted,_ when she said it wasn't worth anything. Two months after I quit the Bureau, I got a huge check in the mail in the name of Xaviera Scott. Remember, the pen name Xue wrote under? In her will she left everything to me. I still don't know how I feel about that. I guess both terrible, and grateful. At the rate _Wanted_ is selling, I'll receive a substantial check in the name of Ms. Scott every three months for years to come. I'm donating it all to her victims. Her death was worldwide news. All Xue's book needed was a little publicity. She finally found a way to make it an instant best-seller. All she had to do was die.

"It's been three months since a second hardcover book was released, this one was true crime, the story of how Xue killed seven famous novelists. They say everyone's got a book in them. With the help of two world-class co-authors, so did I. _The Pen Killer_ wound up with three names on it. The English Mystic and the Goofball wanted to write the story, but in the end they both asked that the three of us do it together. Inasmuch as (do I sound like an author?) I rescued them, I guess they figured they owed me. And maybe they felt it was really my story to tell. With the English Mystic and the Goofball's names on the cover, everyone wanted to review the book, though Xue's murder spree was the real draw. The irony was that sales of our book passed two million copies day before yesterday, outselling Xue's novel two to one. The income allowed me to start this agency.

"Winston and I found we like New York better than Washington (there would come a time later, of course, when I would feel pretty stupid for moving here; if I had known that the City was less than two years from total destruction, _well_ --).

What did I learn from all this? For one thing, a government is made of people just like you and me, no better and no worse. Each of us with the potential to go bad, and nothing but the pretense of a balance-of-power to stop them. Only good people can stop injustice, and sometimes that can be pretty difficult to do.

"Do I sound bitter over losing Xue? I am. Does that mean I'm going anti-government? No, not really, I'm simply trying my best to stay positive and giving private practice a chance. I'll see how it goes. It worries me, though, when someone like my best friend, a person I cared for so deeply and have known for years and trusted, can turn against our core values.

"Xue was right about one thing. Morals are deteriorating. Torture, due process of law, individual rights. Government is merely people with their own desires, fallibilities, and errors of judgment. They aren't superhuman. The big G draws all types: some are good, some are bad, and many, a bit of both. Power is seductive, but when people in our government act like criminals, the way Xue did, where does that leave the rest of us? Is there a better solution than the government we have? I don't know. I hope so. Let me know if you figure it out.

*

The doorman opens the door for me. I've never been to Michael's Restaurant before. It's supposed to be a popular writers' hangout. A reporter is supposed to interview me about my new PI business. At some point I'll probably run this PR thing by Geoff. I'm optimistic. If I can pick up one or two good clients, maybe I can build up the agency by word of mouth, simply by doing the job right.

The restaurant looks nice -- white tablecloths, track lighting, large abstract paintings on the walls. I'm dressed appropriately -- a conservative white blouse, a pair of dark slacks, sensible shoes.

A pretty, blonde hostess asks, "May I help you, ma'am?"

"Uh, Naomi Soul. I'm meeting Doris Gladstone, of the _New York Days Blog_?" _Yes, I'd better get Geoff's opinion. Maybe Tommy's too; Tommy_ knows _publicity._

"Ms. Gladstone left a message. She said to tell you someone else will be taking the meeting."

_Someone else?_ "Uh -- okay, I guess."

"This way, please," the hostess says, smiling.

I follow her back to the garden.

"They're right back here," she says.

_They? They who?_

And then my heart goes from sixty beats a minute to more than a hundred, in two seconds. They're _all_ here, the three most amazing men on the planet, seated together at a table with one empty chair. They turn to me with the oddest of looks on their faces. Chip. Tommy. Geoff. I'm breathing hard. How do they know each other? _Chip --_ it has to be. I feel my head start to turn back and forth. _No --!_

They rise from their seats. Smiling, eyes beckoning me. I pause . . . then do what any normal intelligent woman would do in this situation. I run.

NAOMI'S STORY CONTINUES

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_Miles_ _A. Maxwell, out of Cheyenne, Wyoming, is the author of the State Of Reason and Naomi Soul mystery-technothrillers. They all have just one goal: the preservation and enhancement of human life._

An IFR certified private pilot and student of Traditional Chinese Medicine for more than ten years, he speaks bits and pieces of ten languages, surfs, skis, sails, and scuba dives.

A Note From Miles

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_Thanks!  
Miles_

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