ONCE UPON a long time ago, Nana Mama had been the one who had taught me to play the piano.

In those days, the old upright sat like a constant invitation to make music in our family room. One afternoon after school, she heard me trying to play a little boogie-woogie. I was eleven years old at the time. I remember it well, as if it were yesterday. Nana swept in like a soft breeze and sat next to me on the piano bench, just the way I do now with Jannie and Damon.

“I think you’re a little ahead of yourself with that cool jazz stuff, Alex. Let me show you something beautiful. Let me show you where you might start your music career.”

She made me practice my Czerny finger exercises every day until I was ready to play and appreciate Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Haydn-all from Nana Mama. She taught me to play from age eleven until I was eighteen, when I left for school at Georgetown and then Johns Hopkins. By that time, I was ready to play that cool jazz stuff, and to know what I was playing, and even know why I liked what I liked.

When I came home from Delaware, very late, I found Nana on the porch and she was playing the piano. I hadn’t heard her play like that in many years.

She didn’t hear me come in, so I stood in the door way and watched her for several minutes. She was playing Mozart and she still had a feeling for the music that she loved. She’d once told me how sad it was that no one knew where Mozart was buried.

When she finished, I whispered, “Bravo. Bravo. That’s just beautiful.”

Nana turned to me. “Silly old woman,” she said and wiped away a tear I hadn’t been able to see from where I was standing.

“Not silly at all,” I said. I sat down and held her in my arms on the piano bench. “Old yes, really old and cranky, but never silly.”

“I was just thinking,” she said, “about that third movement in Mozart’s Concerto No. 21, and then I had a memory of how I used to be able to play it, a long, long time ago.” She sighed. “So I had myself a nice cry. Felt real good, too.”

“Sorry to intrude,” I said as I continued to hold her close.

“I love you, Alex,” my grandmother whispered. “Can you still play ‘Clair de Lune’? Play Debussy for me.”

And so with Nana Mama close beside me, I played.

THE GROAN-and-grunt work continued the following morning.

First thing, Kyle faxed me several stories about his agent, Thomas Pierce. The stories came from cities where Mr. Smith had committed murders: Atlanta, St. Louis, Seattle, San Francisco, London, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Rome. Pierce had helped to capture a murderer in Fort Lauderdale in the spring, unrelated to Smith.

Other headlines:

FOR THOMAS PIERCE, THE CRIME SCENE IS IN THE MIND

MURDER EXPERT HERE IN ST. LOUIS

THOMAS PIERCE-GETTING INTO KILLERS’ HEADS

NOT ALL PATTERN KILLERS ARE BRILLIANT-BUT AGENT

THOMAS PIERCE IS

MURDERS OF THE MIND, THE MOST CHILLING

MURDERS OF ALL.

If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought Kyle was trying to make me jealous of Pierce. I wasn’t jealous. I didn’t have the time for it right now.

A little before noon, I drove out to Lorton Prison, one of my least favorite places in the charted universe.

Everything moves slowly inside a high-security federal prison. It is like being held underwater, like being drowned by unseen human hands. It happens over days, over years, sometimes over decades.

At an administrative max facility, prisoners are kept in their cells twenty-two to twenty-three hours a day. The boredom is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t served time. It is not imaginable. Gary Soneji told me that, created the drowning metaphor when I interviewed him years back at Lorton.

He also thanked me for giving him the experience of being in prison, and he said that one day he would reciprocate if he possibly could. More and more, I had the sense that my time had come, and I had to guess what the excruciating payback might be.

It was not imaginable.

I could almost feel myself drowning as I paced inside a small administrative room near the warden’s office on the fifth floor at Lorton.

I was waiting for a double murderer named Jamal Autry. Autry claimed to have important information about Soneji. He was known inside Lorton as the Real Deal. He was a predator, a three-hundred-pound pimp who had murdered two teenage prostitutes in Baltimore.

The Real Deal was brought to me in restraints. He was escorted into the small, tidy office by two armed guards with billy clubs.

“You Alex Cross? Gah-damn. Now ain’t that somethin’,” Jamal Autry said with a middle-South twang.

He smiled crookedly when he spoke. The lower half of his face sagged like the mouth and jaw of a bottom feeder. He had strange, uneven piggy eyes that were hard to look at. He continued to smile as if he were about to be paroled today, or had just won the inmates’ lottery.

I told the two guards that I wanted to talk to Autry alone. Even though he was in restraints, they departed reluctantly. I wasn’t afraid of this big load, though. I wasn’t a helpless teenage girl he could beat up on.

“Sorry, I missed the joke,” I finally said to Autry. “Don’t quite know why it is that you’re smiling.”

“Awhh, don’t worry ’bout it, man. You get the joke okay. Eventually,” he said with his slow drawl. “You’ll get the joke, Dr. Cross. See, it’s on you.”

I shrugged. “You asked to see me, Autry. You want something out of this and so do I. I’m not here for your jokes or your private amusement. You want to go back to your cell, just turn the hell around.”

Jamal Autry continued to smile, but he sat down on one of two chairs left for us. “We boff want somethin’,” he said. He began to make serious eye contact with me. He had the don’t-mess-with-me look now. His smile evaporated.

“Tell me what you’ve got to trade. We’ll see where it goes,” I said. “Best I can do for you.”

“Soneji said you a hard-ass. Smart for a cop. We’ll see what we see,” he drawled.

I ignored the bullshit that flowed so easily from his overlarge mouth. I couldn’t help thinking about the two sixteen-year-old girls he’d murdered. I imagined him smiling at them, too. Giving them the look. “The two of you talked sometimes? Soneji was a friend of yours?” I asked him.

Autry shook his head. The look stayed fixed. His piggy eyes never left mine. “Naw, man. Only talked when he needed somethin’. Soneji rather sit in his cell, stare out into far space, like Mars or someplace. Soneji got no friends in here. Not me, not anybody else.”

Autry leaned forward in his chair. He had something to tell me. Obviously, he thought it was worth a lot. He lowered his voice as if there were someone in the room besides the two of us.

Someone like Gary Soneji, I couldn’t help thinking.