"Sorry. I just think you better start taking this more seriously."

Rachel looked at her until Dei had to look away.

"You really think I'm not serious about this?"

"I know you are. I shouldn't have said anything."

Rachel looked back down at the I-15 freeway. They were long past the black Mercedes. Bosch was gone, far behind them.

She studied the terrain for a while. It was all so different yet all the same. A moonscape carpet of rock and sand. She knew it was full of life but all life was hidden. The predators were underground, waiting to come out at night.

"Ladies and gentlemen?" the pilot's voice said in her ear. "Switch to channel three. You've got an incoming call."

Rachel had to take her headset off to figure out how to change the frequency. She thought that the headset had a stupid design. When she put the set back on she heard Brass Doran's voice. She was talking rapid-fire the way Rachel remembered she always did whenever something big came up.

"-cent integrity. It definitely came from him."

"What?" Rachel said. "I didn't hear any of that."

"Brass," Dei said, "start again."

"I said we got a match from the bite mark database. With the gum. It's got ninety-five percent integrity, which is one of the highest matches I've ever seen."

"Who?" Rachel asked.

"Rach, you are going to love this. Ted Bundy. That gum was chewed by Ted Bundy."

"That's impossible," Dei said. "First of all, Bundy's been dead for years, long before any of these men went missing. And he was never known to have gotten to Nevada or California or to have targeted men. Something's wrong with the data, Brass. It's a bad read or-"

"We ran it twice. Both times it came up Bundy."

"No," Rachel said. "It's right."

Dei turned and looked back at her. Rachel was thinking about Bundy. The ultimate serial killer. Handsome, smart and vicious. He was a biter, too. He had been the only one to really give her the creeps. The others she just felt a loathing and disgust for.

"How do you know it's right, Rachel?"

"I just know. Twenty-five years ago Backus helped set up the VICAP database. Brass remembers. Over the next eight years the data was collected. Agents from the unit were sent out to interview every serial killer and rapist who was incarcerated in the country. That was before I was there but even later, when I was there, we kept doing interviews and adding to the base. Bundy was in- terviewed several times, mostly by Bob. Right before his execution he called Bob down to Raiford and Bob took me with him. We spent three days interviewing him. I remember that Ted kept borrowing gum from Bob. It was Juicy Fruit. That's what Bob chewed."

"Then what, he'd spit it back into Bob's hand?" Zigo asked incredulously.

"No, he'd throw it in the trash can. We interviewed him in the death house captain's office. There was a trash can. When we were done each day, Bundy was led out. There were many points when Bob was alone in that office. He could have just taken the gum out of the can."

"So you're saying Bob more or less went Dumpster diving for Ted Bundy's gum and then held on to it so he could put it in a grave all these years later?"

"I'm saying he took the gum out of that prison, knowing it had Bundy's teeth marks in it. Maybe it was just a souvenir then. But it became something else later. Something maybe to taunt us with."

"And where'd he.been keeping it, in the fridge?"

"Maybe. That's where I'd keep it."

Dei turned back around in her seat.

"What do you think, Brass?" she asked.

"I think I should've thought of it myself. I think Rachel is onto something. I think Bob and Ted actually got along. He went down there several times to talk to him. Sometimes alone. He could have gotten the gum any one of those times."

Rachel watched Dei nod her head in agreement.

Zigo cleared his throat and spoke.

"So this was just another way of him coming out and telling us he did this and how smart he was about it. To taunt us. First the GPS with the prints and now the gum."

"That's what I would say," Doran agreed.

It wasn't that simple, Rachel knew. She unconsciously shook her head and Zigo, sitting next to her, picked up on it.

"You disagree, Agent Walling?"

She noted that Zigo must have attended the Randal Alpert school of building relations among fellow colleagues.

"I just don't think it is as simple as that. You are looking at it from the wrong angle. Remember, the GPS and his prints came to us first but that gum was in that grave first. He might have intended for the gum to be found first. Before there was any direct connection to him."

"If that was the case, what was he doing?" Dei asked.

"I don't know. I don't have the answer. I'm just saying, don't assume at this point we know what the plan or even the sequence was supposed to be."

"Rachel, you know we always keep an open mind on things. We take things as they come and never stop looking from all angles."

That sounded like a line taped to the wall in the public information office in Quantico, where agents always had pithy policy and procedure statements to deliver over the phone to reporters. Rachel decided to step back from tangling with Dei on this. She had to be careful not to outstay her welcome and she sensed she was nearing that point with her former student.

"Yes, I know," she said. "Okay, Brass, anything else new?" Dei asked.

"That was it. That was enough."

"Okay. Then we'll talk to you at the next one."

Meaning the next conference room case session. Doran said good-bye and broke off and then the onboard communication link remained silent as the helicopter crossed the dividing line between the harsh undeveloped landscape and the beginning of the sprawl of Las Vegas. As Rachel looked down she knew it was merely a trading of one form of a desert for another. Down there, beneath all the barrel tile and gravel roofs, predators still waited to come out at night. To find their victims.

The Executive Extended Stay motel was off the south end of the strip. It had no neon lights flashing in front of it. It had no casino and no floor show. In fact, no executives stayed there. It was a place populated by the fringe dwellers of Vegas society. The addicted gamblers, the take-off men, the sex trade workers, the kind of people who can't leave the place but at the same time can't put down permanent roots either.

People like me. Often when you meet a fellow tenant at the Double X, as the longtimers call the place, they'll ask you how long you've been there and how long you're staying, as if you're working off jail time. I believe that many of the tenants of the motel have had the real experience of jail time and I chose such a place for two reasons. One was that I still carried a mortgage in Los Angeles and could not afford to stay over time at a place like the Bellagio or the Mandalay Bay or even the Riviera. And two was that I didn't want to get comfort- able in Las Vegas. I didn't want things to feel right there. Because I knew when it was time for me to go, I just wanted to turn in the key and leave.

I got to Vegas by three and knew my daughter would be home from day care and I could go to my ex-wife's home to see her. I wanted to but I also wanted to wait. I had Buddy Lockridge coming in and I had things to do. The FBI had let me out of the RV with my notebook still in my pocket and Terry McCaleb's map book still in my car. I wanted to put them to good use before Agent Dei maybe realized her mistake and came back to me. I wanted to see if I could make the next step in the case before she did.

I pulled into the Double X and parked in my usual spot near the fence that separated the motel from the private jet stalls on the McCarran tarmac. I noticed that a Gulfstream 9 that was parked there when I left Vegas three mornings earlier was still in place. There was also a smaller but sleeker-looking black jet parked next to it. I didn't know what kind of jet it was, only that it looked like money. I got out and walked up the steps to my one-bedroom efficiency on the second floor. It was neat and functional and I tried to spend as little time there as I had to. The best thing about it was the small balcony off the living room. In the brochures they offered in the rental office it was called a smoking balcony. It was too small a space to actually fit a chair. But I could stand out there and lean on the extra-high railing and watch the billionaires' jets come in. And I found myself doing that often. I found myself standing there and even wishing that I still smoked. Oftentimes one of the tenants from the apartment on either side of my unit would be standing on their balcony smoking when I was out there. On one side was a card counter-or an "advantage player," as he called it-and on the other a woman of indeterminate means of income. My conversations with them were perfunctory. Nobody wanted to ask or answer too many questions at this place.