THE NEXT DAY’S Violent Crimes meeting had only one, very important agenda item, at least from my point of view. Bree asked me to sit in, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to be there. The meeting was heavily attended, standing-room only, and the place was buzzing with hot rumors.

Captain Thor Richter held up the start for the arrival of the deputy mayor, who was twenty minutes late and who spoke not a word the whole time he was there. The fact that Larry Dalton attended, however, sent a clear message on this one: Everyone’s watching the case. This was just what the maniac killer seemed to want, but it couldn’t be helped. No way could we disinvite the deputy mayor.

Bree started off by telling the group everything she and I had recently established. Our late-night stint with Jeffery Antrim had yielded a few more Abu Ghraib images but nothing else of real substance. Still, it was a good start, I thought. I assumed the killer had left it as a message for us. Or me?

“So then we opened our lens a little wider, for derivative elements elsewhere,” Bree said, and brought up a PowerPoint slide.

“Here’s a transcription of the speech the killer gives in the first half of the videotape. And this”-she changed slides-“is a speech from a 2003 video made by someone calling himself the Sheik of America.”

“Is it the same guy?” somebody in the back asked.

“No,” Bree said. “Actually, it isn’t. But he’s obviously borrowing from more than one source. Abu Ghraib. Now this. Statistically, the two speeches are about sixty percent similar.”

“Hang on a minute. Why do you insist it’s not the same guy?” Richter wanted to know. He had a snide way of making his questions sound like accusations.

I saw a brief flash of annoyance on Bree’s face, probably invisible to everyone else. “Because the Sheik was arrested last year. He’s cooling his heels in a New York prison,” she said. “Let’s move on, shall we?”

Another detective raised his hand like a schoolkid. “Do we have a bead on nationality one way or the other at this point?”

Bree nodded in my direction. That was my cue. “A lot of you know Dr. Alex Cross. I’m going to ask him to run down the basic points of our profile as it stands now. The killer knows about Dr. Cross. In case you haven’t heard, he was mentioned by name on the tape.”

“How could I resist an invitation like that?” I said, and got a few laughs.

Then we went right into the heavy stuff.

AS I STOOD AT THE FRONT, I actually recognized about half the people in the room. I’m not sure how many of the rest of them knew me by reputation, but probably most of them did. I’d worked the high-profile cases in DC for years, and now here I was again. Doing pro bono work? Helping out Detective Bree Stone? What was this, actually?

“One thing’s pretty clear,” I began. “He’s going to want to kill again, whether or not he actually does it. His signature aspect is terrorist, but there are also serial tendencies here. There’s already a recognizable pattern that I see.”

“Can you clarify that, Alex?” someone asked. I looked over at Bree, but she raised her chin at me in a go-ahead signal.

“His opening bid, so to speak, was an individual homicide. It’s possible he’s warming up to something bigger, but I don’t think so. He just might stick to one victim at a time.”

“Why?”

“Good question, and I think I might even have the answer to that one. My guess is that he doesn’t want to be eclipsed by his own work. This is about him, not the victims. Despite what he says on the tape, he’s a narcissist at heart. He badly wants to be a star. Maybe that’s why he ‘invited’ me onto the case. He may have even left some greeting cards at the crime scene-a couple of unsigned Hallmark cards. We’re still checking into that one and what it might mean if he did. And we’re checking on the books Mrs. Olsen had written.”

“What about his motive?” Richter asked. “Are we still thinking this could be political?”

“Yes and no. Right now, our working theory is that he’s Iraqi-born, or descended, with some kind of law-enforcement or military background, or both. The FBI thinks he’s lived in the U.S. for at least a few years, if not his entire life. Above-average intelligence, highly disciplined, and yes, probably anti-American. But we also think the political agenda could be more a means of expression than an end in itself.”

“Expression of what?” Richter pressed, even though he had to know we didn’t have a lot of answers yet.

“A need to kill, maybe. He seems to like what he’s doing. But, more important, he likes being in the spotlight.”

Just like you do, Thor.

And maybe just like me.

SEVERAL PEOPLE SCRIBBLED or typed out notes in the deepening and troubling silence that followed. I didn’t want to dominate the meeting, so I handed it right back to Bree for the rest of the Q amp;A. Richter grilled her hard, but she never backed down from her domineering boss. Sampson was right about Bree-she was going places in the MPD, or she was going to get tossed by some jealous superior.

Afterward, we were gathering up our materials in the empty briefing room when she stopped and looked at me. “You’re pretty good at this,” she said. “Maybe even better than your hot-shit reputation.”

I shrugged her off with a smile, but deep down I enjoyed the compliment. “I’ve done a lot of these meetings. Besides, you carried it, and you know it.”

“Not the meeting, Alex. This. This work. You’re the best I’ve seen. By a lot. If you want to know the truth, I think we’re pretty good together. How scary is that?”

I stopped organizing the files in my hands and stared at her. “Then, Bree, why do I feel like we’re headed in the wrong direction on this thing?”

She looked stunned by what I’d said. “Excuse me?”

It had been bugging me since just before the meeting ended. Everything had been moving so fast. This was really the first opportunity to hold our stuff up to scrutiny. And now I felt as if we were missing something important. I was almost sure of it. I hated the timing, but I couldn’t help the feeling I had. My famous goddamn feelings! My gut was calling out to me to review all the bidding so far, everything that we thought we believed.

“Maybe this all makes sense because it’s what he wants us to think,” I said. “That’s just a hunch I have, but it bothers the hell out of me.”

I’d been burned like this before, not too long ago. We’d spent a lot of time on the Mary, Mary case in LA, running down an obvious but misleading persona instead of the actual killer. More people had died while we figured that out.

Bree started pulling papers from the briefcase she’d just packed. “Okay, fine. Let’s break it apart again. What do we need to know to nail this thing down the right way?”

The obvious answer to her question was that another murder would provide a hell of a lot more information for us.