Rainie glanced down. “They don’t look that complicated to me. Couldn’t someone just swipe one?”

“You have to sign a badge in and out. And believe me, the FBI police keep tabs on that sort of thing. None of us would feel particularly good if just any Tom, Dick, or Harry could swipe a card.”

“Just asking,” Rainie said mildly.

Kaplan scowled at her anyway. Their earlier conversation had obviously wounded his ego. “You can’t steal a badge. You can’t just walk onto this base. For God’s sake, we take this kind of thing very seriously. Look, you’re probably right. It probably is an insider. Which really depresses me, though I don’t know why. If all the good guys were really good people, I wouldn’t have a job, would I?”

“That’s not an encouraging thought,” Rainie said.

“Ma’am, it’s the worst thought in the world.” He glanced at Quincy. “You know, I’ve been thinking… Given the lack of sexual assault, and that the ‘weapon,’ so to speak, was a drug, shouldn’t we be looking at women, too?”

“No,” Quincy said.

“But women are the ones who predominantly kill with poison. And the lack of sexual assault bothers me. A guy doesn’t just OD a woman and dump her body in the woods. Men are sexual predators. And did you see how this girl was dressed?”

Quincy drew up short. “The victim,” he said curtly, “was wearing a short skirt, not uncommon for this time of year. To imply that a certain manner of dress invites sexual assault-”

“That’s not what I was saying!” Kaplan interrupted immediately.

“It’s not about sex for any predator,” Quincy continued as if Kaplan hadn’t spoken. “It’s about power. We’ve had many serial killers who were not sexual-sadist predators. Berkowitz, for one, was strictly a triggerman, so to speak. He picked his victims, walked up to the car, opened fire on the couple, and walked away. Kaczynski was content to kill and maim long-distance. Even more recently, we had the Beltway Snipers, who held most of the East Coast in absolute terror by picking off victims from the trunk of their car. Murder isn’t about sex. It’s about power. And in this context, then, drugs make perfect sense, as drugs are weapons of control.”

“Besides,” Rainie spoke up, “there’s no way a woman carried a dead body half a mile into the woods. We don’t have that kind of upper-body strength.”

They finally emerged from the relative comfort of the woods. Immediately, the sun struck them like a ball-peen hammer while waves of heat shimmered above the paved road.

“Holy Lord,” Kaplan said. “And it’s not even noon.”

“It’s going to be a hot one,” Quincy murmured.

And Rainie said, “Fuck the Academy, I’m putting on shorts.”

“One last thing,” Kaplan said, holding up a hand. “Something you should both know.”

Rainie halted with an impatient sigh. Quincy waited with a far more prescient sense of something significant about to break.

“We have the tox report back on the victim. Two drugs were found in her system. A small dose of ketamine, and a significantly larger dose-no doubt lethal dose-of the benzodiazepine, Ativan. In other words…”

“Special Agent McCormack listed them both last night,” Quincy murmured.

“Yeah,” Kaplan said slowly. “McCormack knew the drugs. Now how about that?”

Quantico, Virginia

11:48 A . M .

Temperature: 95 degrees

MAC DROVE UNTIL THEY’D LEFT THE CONCRETE COLUMNS of Richmond behind them. He headed west on Interstate 64, where a towering line of dark green mountains stood out in vivid contrast to the bright blue sky and drew them steadily forward.

They stopped at Texaco for gas. Then they stopped at a Wal-Mart to cover the essentials: bug spray, first-aid kit, hiking socks, energy bars, chocolate bars, extra water bottles, and a whole case of water. Mac already had a compass, Swiss army knife, and waterproof matches in his backpack. They grabbed an extra set for Kimberly to carry, just in case.

When they returned to his rented Toyota, Mac discovered a message on his cell phone from Ray Lee Chee. The botanist, Kathy Levine, would meet them at Big Meadows Lodge in the Shenandoah National Park at one-thirty. Without a word, they started driving again.

Cities came and went. Major housing developments bloomed alongside the road, then slowly withered away. They headed deeper west, where the land opened up like an emerald sea and took Mac’s breath away.

“God’s country,” his father would say. There wasn’t much of this kind of land left.

As Kimberly navigated, they turned off the interstate for the rolling lanes of U.S. 15, leading to U.S. 33. They swept by vast fields, each dotted by a single redbrick ranch house with a fresh-painted white porch. They passed dairy farms, horse stables, vineyards, and agricultural spreads.

Outside the car, everything took on a green hue, a rolling patchwork of square fields seamed by groves of dark green trees. They passed horses and cows. They came upon tiny towns defined by run-down delis, old gas stations, and pristine Baptist churches. Then, in the blink of an eye, the towns disappeared and they headed deeper into the growing shade cast by a towering mountain range. Slowly but surely, they started to climb.

Kimberly had been quiet since their meeting with the geologist. Her visor was down, casting a shadow across the top half of her face and making it difficult to read her expression.

Mac was worried about her. She’d shown up bright and early this morning with the gaunt cheeks and feverish eyes of a woman who’d had little sleep. She wore linen trousers, topped with a white dress shirt and matching linen jacket. The outfit looked sharp and professional, but he suspected she’d chosen the long pants to hide her knife, and the jacket to cover the discreet bulge of the Glock strapped to her waist. In other words, she was a woman going to war.

He suspected she went to war a lot. He suspected that since the deaths of her mother and sister, life for her had essentially been one long battle. The thought pained him in a way he hadn’t expected.

“It’s beautiful,” he said at last.

She finally shifted in her seat, giving him a brief glance before stretching out her legs. “Yes.”

“You like the mountains? Or are you a city gal?”

She shook her head. “City gal. Technically speaking, I grew up in Alexandria, close to these mountains. But Alexandria functions more as a suburb of D.C. than Richmond. And let’s just say my mother’s interests ran more to the Smithsonian Institution than the Shenandoah Mountains. Then I went off to school in New York. You?”

“I love mountains. Hell, I love rivers, fields, orchards, streams, woods, you name it. I was lucky growing up. My grandparents-my mother’s parents-own a hundred-acre peach orchard. As their kids married, they gifted each one with three acres of land to build a home; that way all the siblings could live close by. Basically, my sister and I grew up in booneyville, surrounded by a dozen cousins, and a ton of open space. Each day my mom would kick us out of the house, tell us not to die, and come home in time for dinner. So we did.”

“You must have liked your cousins.”

“Nah, we annoyed the snot out of each other. But that was half the fun. We made up games, we got into trouble. We basically ran around like heathens. And then at night,” he slanted her a look, “we played board games.”

“Your whole family? Every night?” Her voice was skeptical.

“Yep. We’d rotate around each aunt and uncle’s house and off we’d go. My mom started it. She hates TV, thinks it rots the brain. The Boob Tube, she calls it. When I turned twelve, she threw ours out. I’m not sure my father’s ever recovered from the loss, but after that we had to do something to pass the time.”