That was all he could think of. With a nod he handed off to Lukas. She stepped in front of the agents. Looked over them, silent, until she had everyone's attention. "Now, listen up. Like Agent Jefferson said, the unsub's dead but the shooter sure as hell isn't. We don't know if he's in Gravesend and we don't know if he's living in the safe house. But I want everybody here to assume he's ten feet behind you and has a clear path to target. He's got no problem lighting up law enforcement personnel. So as you go through the neighborhood I want everyone to be looking for ambush positions. I want weapon hands free, I want jackets and coats unbuttoned, I want holster thongs unsnapped."

She paused for a moment. She had their complete attention, this thin woman with silver-blond hair.

"At eight o'clock-yep, that's right, just over two hours-our perp is going to find someplace that's filled with people and he's going to empty his weapon at them again. Now I do not want to work that crime scene and have to look into the eyes of someone who's just lost a parent or a child. I do not want to have to tell them I'm sorry but we couldn't find this beast before he killed again. That is not going to happen. I'm not going to let it. And you're not."

Parker found himself drawn into her words, delivered in a firm, even voice. He thought about the Band of Brothers speech from Shakespeare's Henry V, which had been Robby's introduction to theater. The boy had memorized the speech the day after they returned from Kennedy Center.

"All right," Lukas said. "Any questions?"

"Anything more on his armament?"

"He's been armed with a full-auto Uzi loaded with long clips and a suppressor. We have no further information."

"How green-lighted are we?" one agent asked.

"To light up the shooter?" Lukas replied. "Totally green-lighted. Anything else?" No one raised a hand. "Okay. We're on emergency frequency. I don't want any chatter. Don't report in that you haven't found anything. I don't care about that. You see the suspect, call for backup, clear your background and engage. Now go find me that safe house."

Parker himself felt oddly moved by these words. It had been years since he'd fired a weapon but he suddenly wanted a piece of the Digger himself.

Lukas directed teams of agents and officers to those parts of Gravesend she wanted them to canvas. Parker was impressed; she had a remarkable sense of the geography of this neighborhood. Some people, he reflected, are just natural-born cops.

Half of the agents started off on foot; the others climbed into their cars and sped away. Leaving Cage, Lukas and Parker standing on the curb. Cage made a call. He spoke for a moment. Hung up.

"Tobe's got an MCP. They're on their way. He's analyzing the tape from the theater. Oh, and that psychologist from Georgetown's on his way over here too."

Most of the streetlights were out-some shattered from bullets, it looked like. Pale green illumination lit the street from the fluorescent lights of the few stores that were open. Two agents were canvassing across the street. Cage looked around and saw two young men rubbing their hands over an oil drum in which a fire burned. Cage said, "I'll talk to them." He walked into the vacant lot. It seemed that they wanted to leave but figured that would look more suspicious. Their eyes locked onto the fire as he approached and they fell silent.

Lukas nodded toward a pizza parlor half a block away. "I'll take that," she said to Parker. "You want to wait here for Tobe and the shrink?"

"Sure."

Lukas started up the street, leaving Parker alone.

The temperature was continuing to fall. There was now a sharp edge to the air: that frostiness that he enjoyed so much in the autumn-evoking memories of driving the children to school while juggling mugs of hot chocolate, shopping for Thanksgiving dinner, picking pumpkins in Loudon County. But tonight he was aware only of the painful sting in his nostrils and on his ears and fingertips; the sensation was like a razor slash. He stuffed his hands in his pockets.

Maybe because most of the agents had left, the locals were returning to the streets. Two blocks away, a nondescript man in a dark coat stepped out of a bar and walked slowly up the street then stepped into the darkened alcove of a check-cashing outlet-to pee, Parker guessed.

A tall woman, or transvestite, obviously a hooker, walked out of the alley where she'd been waiting for the crowd to disburse.

Three young black men pushed out of an arcade and cracked open a bottle of Colt 45 malt liquor, laughing hard as they disappeared down an alley.

Parker turned away and happened to glance across the street.

He saw a thrift store. It was closed and at first he didn't pay much attention to the place. But then he noticed boxed sets of cheap stationery on shelves near the cash register. Could this be where the unsub had bought the paper and envelope for the note?

He stepped to the window of the store and gazed through the greasy glass, cupping his hands against the glare of the one nearby streetlight that still worked and trying to see the packages of paper. His hands shook in the chill. Beside him a rat nosed through a pile of trash. Parker Kincaid thought, This is crazy. I have no business being here.

But, still, he lifted his sleeve and, using the fleece cuff of his bomber jacket, wiped the grimy glass in front of him as carefully as a diligent window cleaner so that he'd have a better view of the merchandise inside.

"Maybe I seen him. Yeah, maybe."

Margaret Lukas felt her heart pump faster. She pushed the picture of the unsub closer and the counterman at the Gravesend pizza place-a chubby Latino in tomato-sauce-stained whites-continued to study it carefully.

"Take your time," she said. Please, she thought. Let's have a break here…

"Maybe. I no so sure. What it is, we get tons 'n' tons of people in here. You know?"

"Its very important," she said.

She'd remembered that the coroner had found steak in the belly of the unsub. There was no steak on the menu here. Still, it was the only twenty-four-hour restaurant on the street near the Metro stop and she figured that the unsub might have stopped in at some point in the past few weeks. Maybe he'd even planned the extortion scheme here-he might've sat under this sickly light at one of the chipped tables to draft the note as he looked around at the sad people eating greasy food and thought, arrogantly, how much smarter he was than they. How much richer he was about to be.

She laughed to herself. Maybe he'd been as smart and arrogant as she was. As much as Kincaid.

Three of them, all alike.

Three hawks on a roof. One's dead; that leaves two on the roof. You and me, Parker.

The clerk's brown eyes lifted, gazed into her blue ones. They dropped bashfully to the paper again. It seemed to be a personal defeat when he finally shook his head. "No, I no think so. Sorry. Hey, you want a slice? The double cheese, it's fresh. I just made it."

She shook her head. "Anybody else working here?"

"No, just me tonight. I got the holiday. You did too, looks like." He struggled for something to say. "You work many holidays?"

"Some," she said. "Thanks."

Lukas walked to the front door. She paused, looked outside.

The agents from the field office were canvassing across the street. Cage was talking to more gangstas in the vacant lot and Kincaid was ogling some thrift store as if the crown jewels were in the window.

The other agents were dispersed where she'd sent them. But had she been right? she wondered. Who knew? You can read all the books on investigative techniques ever written but the bottom line is improvisation. It was just like solving one of Kincaid's puzzles. You had to look beyond the formulas and rules.