– Nick saw one of the girls twisted left, blood on her back, her body in a heartbreakingly broken posture. Nathan Bowie shot the girl on the right, then shot the girl in the front, then put the gun in his mouth and blew the roof of his head off.

That was it. Med techs and cops with guns drawn raced to the vehicle, and from his perch Nick watched as the med team worked the fallen. He wanted to puke. He felt a surge of depression melt the strength out of his bones and fill his brain with self-loathing and remorse. Howard was there yelling, “Nick, Nick, my God, why did you shoot, didn’t you hear me? I told you not to shoot, God, it’s such a tragedy.”

God, what a fuck-up. What a total disaster. Nick had thought he’d be the guy with the strength and the coolness and the good decision. But no. He had to play the goat, the mistake, Quantico’s shame.

Poor Myra. He’d hit her in the spine, the bullet actually passing through her arm first, bouncing laterally off the metal of the car and clipping her spine. It paralyzed her in an instant. She never walked again and spent the next few years in her motorized wheelchair. She had deserved so much better than Nick and the FBI had given her that day, and he tried to give it to her, to somehow make amends, by marrying her. He discovered her to be a wonderful person, bright, funny, without a shred of self-pity. Once her father had gotten drunk and accused Nick.

“Why? Why did you do that to my baby girl? Oh, Nick, why, she didn’t-”

“Daddy, you stop that. I’ve said many a time that if the only way I could have met Nick Memphis was to get shot by him and lose my mobility, I’d take it even with that foreknowledge, because Nick is the best man I’ve ever met, kind and generous and gentle and honest and moral. You cannot blame Nick. You blame Nathan Bowie or the man who sold him the crack, but do not blame Nick. He was only doing his duty.”

Of the other two girls, one died, the other recovered and moved away. The bank manager recovered but died the next year, early, of a heart attack. Really, what had it proved? You take the shot and the shot goes off. It’s so amazing how much pain can be released into the world by the little six-ounce press of the trigger, how it changes everything, totally and forever.

Nick sat back.

“You can see how it would play,” said Price. “ ‘Sniper investigator had bad sniper shooting in background,’ that’s how it’ll read, and the implication is that maybe someone who had been a sniper, who’d had bad luck-”

“-Who’d fucked up.”

“-who’d fucked up, maybe he shouldn’t be in charge of an investigation involving a sniper. Maybe his judgment was clouded, maybe he was prejudiced. Maybe that’s why the investigation, which was going so well, has now bounced off in a strange new direction.”

“So is he threatening me, is that it?”

“They don’t work like that. He wants to meet you, develop a relationship. Tulsa will come up, sure. But just give him the idea of working with him, play him a little, buy us some time. That’s what the Bureau needs. Meet him for lunch. It’s just lunch.”

“Arggggh,” said Nick.

It was in the middle of the block on Fifty-third off Blackstone, what was called a row house from an earlier century, strange to the eyes of a man who thought of houses as being miles apart from each other. But it was still magnificent, with a broad stairway leading to a broad porch and vast oak door, its windows wide and deep, its gables peaked. It had the look of castle, something from Olde England, built with refined money in a neighborhood full of refined money, where everything old had been made new again, with the best in modern design, plumbing, lighting fixtures, and the best in burnished old wood and brick. Hyde Park, in southeast Chicago, in the shadow of the Museum of Science and Industry, all that remained of a White City where a hundred-odd years ago they had celebrated science, industry, and progress. A steady wind rushed in off the cold lake, throwing torrents of fallen leaves about.

“What do you expect to find?” Detective Washington asked Bob, who sat in the front seat of Washington’s unmarked Impala a couple of doors down from the Strong-Reilly house, now darkened in the falling light.

“I don’t know,” said Bob. “Evidence of penetration, I suppose.”

Washington, in his forties, 240, exceptionally black and full of unconscious tough-guy mannerisms with a sheen of graying hair that looked like gunmetal, said, “You sure you want to do this? You could get yourself in a peck of trouble, me too, and for something you ain’t even sure exists. Don’t sound like a good play to me. You could do it official and save us both time in jail.”

“I’m just looking at options,” said Bob. “If we go the route the law requires, I have to talk your department or the FBI into doing something nobody’s ready to do. Time passes. Then even if they say yeah, they got to get warrants, assemble a team, dot the i’s and cross the t’s, and that’s more time. Time is not on our side. My position is the guys we’re investigating right now-”

“If they exist.”

“Yeah, if they exist, they would have been the ones to toss the house that you picked up on, so at some level you think they exist. The point is now, they think they got away clean. They’re not taking any precautions, they think they’re so smart; this is when we have to go aggressively against them. If they sniff our interest, they’ll go into a much harder defensive position, double-check, begin to erase clues or witnesses, move against us. This is the sneaking-up part snipers are famous for.”

Washington shook his immense, wise head. “Gunny, okay, but answer me this one, then. Say, for example, you’re right. These guys had to get something, something physical, out of that house. So why do they need to go to the trouble of killing not only Strong and Reilly but also Joan Flanders and Mitch Greene? If they’re professional enough to put something like that together, they’d certainly be professional enough to hire some burglar who could take the house down, locate, and remove whatever it was.”

“Well,” said Bob, “he wants them dead. But in a certain way. If they sell everybody on the idea that crazed sniper Carl Hitchcock, fucked up from Vietnam, killed these four people, and all of that seems to add up, then that’s as far as you go, right? You got it all there-motive, opportunity, means, time frame. It’s so tempting. Everyone wants this thing solved, and there’s the solution, plain as the nose on your face. What you don’t do then is look into the lives of the victims. You don’t see what they were up to, what they had going on, who they were, what connections they had, what moves they were making. All that stuff’s off the board. So I’m putting it back on the board. My read is that something Strong and Reilly did or were planning to do got them whacked hard. The other two went down as smokescreen. Strong and Reilly were the target. If whoever he is kills just them, he knows their lives will be investigated, and such an investigation would lead to him. He needs a way to kill them in which their deaths are seen as unimportant, marginal, an afterthought, while all the focus goes on Joan. So if there’s an answer, it’s somewhere in Jack and Mitzi’s lives in the last few weeks, so I’m going to take a look-see. I’m going to shake the tree and see what falls out.”

“I got no argument except to say it doesn’t happen that way. Not hardly. Nothing’s ever that clever, that well planned, that secret in the real world. It’s just drunks getting pissed or going nuts, whacking the innocent. That’s what I see time and time again. Or some hothead kid fighting for his corner of Blackstone when Willie done took it, so he pops Willie with his nine-em and thinks he’s a hero. That’s the reality, man; you in James Bond land.”