Cain nodded. Hendler pulled out of the parking lot. Cain watched him the whole way.

As Hendler turned onto Shields, another car pulled from a side street and dropped into traffic one car length behind him.

FAITH’S LAST ACT AS HERSELF-AT LEAST FOR A while-was to return the Focus to the rental agency at Will Rogers World Airport. Then she walked around the corner to a different rental counter and, as Kimberly Diamond, signed out a Chevy Suburban.

Since I’m a new person, I’ll rent something that Faith Kelly would never get, she thought as she got into the huge Suburban and drove out of the airport.

And now what?

Yorkton had told her-three times, no less-to go to ground. In order words, stay out of sight. It had been a few hours since Senator McDermott had pronounced his public indictment of Faith and Department Thirty. By now, she suspected the media would have found her house. Her home phone was unlisted, but they had their ways-property tax records, that sort of thing. They would be camped out on her quiet street in The Village. They would be talking to her neighbors. Unlike “Katherine Hall,” Faith didn’t hang around with her neighbors. They were mostly families with kids, or retired people. She was the only single person on the block. They would tell the reporters about Faith Kelly being polite but standoffish, keeping to herself most of the time, but making sure her lawn was mowed and her house maintained.

The obvious answer was to go to a hotel and simply stay there and do nothing. Let Yorkton go into damage control mode. Forget about all that had happened.

She remembered Daryn-He’ll kill me, you know-and she remembered Sean, the last time she’d seen him, sprawled drunk on her couch after she’d dropped Daryn off at “Kat’s” apartment.

Sober up, she’d told him. We need to talk.

Then Daryn was dead and Sean was gone.

How could she forget? She might be using documents that identified her as Kimberly Diamond, but her life and her memory and her mistakes all belonged to Faith Kelly. It was a strange twist on the whole idea of Department Thirty. She’d worked with people to assume new identities, had counseled them on leaving their old lives behind.

And now here she was, in the same position her cases had been.

But it’s temporary, she told herself. Yorkton will work this out.

Or so she hoped.

Her own cell phone had rung incessantly, and she’d finally turned it off after a while. Driving north on Meridian Avenue from the airport, she finally turned it on again to check the messages. There were calls from her friends Alex Bridge and Nina Reeves, from Chief Deputy Raines, from her old college friend Jennifer Ghezzi in St. Louis, from her father, and from Scott Hendler.

“Faith, what’s this all about?” her father said on the message. “You call me and tell me what this means.” Click.

Hendler’s message was from a little more than an hour ago. She listened to it twice. He was being her friend, her lover, and an investigator, all at once.

“Oh, Scott,” she said.

She knew she would have to check into a hotel as Kimberly Diamond, sit and do nothing. But that could wait, at least for a while.

I need to hear that you’re okay, he’d said.

And Faith realized, with increasing clarity, that she needed him as well. Needed him to just be there, to be normal and sane and even-tempered, even needed his silly word games.

She headed toward Edmond.

Half an hour later, she turned off Danforth Road onto a side street and parked in front of the condominium fourplex where Hendler lived. It was less than a mile from the Edmond safe house. Hendler’s Toyota was the only vehicle in the lot. He’d told her that the other three units were all occupied by either young single professionals or couples with no kids, who all worked during the day. There were times when he was working a big case that he would escape here in the afternoon to organize data, write reports, and such. It was much quieter than his desk at the FBI field office. Faith smiled. They’d spent a couple of afternoons here engaged in other, less formal activities as well.

All of the condos were split-level, and Hendler’s faced away from the street. Faith walked through a wide breezeway, turned the corner, and rang his doorbell.

She waited a long moment, then knocked.

The condo had two bedrooms, and Hendler had set up the second one as his computer room. It was farthest from the door, and sometimes when he was working back there he wouldn’t hear the knock or the bell the first time, especially if he was wrapped up in whatever he was doing.

Faith waited another minute, then pounded the door with her fist. Even when he was wrapped up in work, it wasn’t like him to not answer the door for this long.

“I’m going to work at home for the rest of the day, trying to organize my thoughts on some new evidence that just came in. I need to talk to you about this.”

Faith walked very quickly back to the Suburban, where she’d left it in the parking lot beside Hendler’s Toyota. She pulled Kimberly Diamond’s new Glock out of the glove compartment and, holding it close to her body, jogged through the breezeway and back to the condo.

She and Hendler had given each other keys to their respective homes a few months ago, when they began spending more and more nights together. She found her key ring and put the key in the lock.

Turning it, the key met no resistance. There was no click.

It was already unlocked.

“Oh, shit,” she whispered. Hendler never left his doors unlocked for any reason.

She pushed the door open and stepped into the room, the gun coming up in her hand.

Nothing in the corners.

Everything looked perfectly normal, the same as it had looked the last time she saw it, the morning after Daryn McDermott died. She and Hendler had left hastily after Rob Cain’s call, and she hadn’t been back here since.

The living room was done in deep blues and browns, the furniture tasteful but not expensive. Hendler wasn’t a neat freak like her brother, but he was certainly a better housekeeper than Faith was. Things were well organized, put away. There was no dust. There were several pictures of windmills and train depots, Hendler’s two artistic passions. He’d developed into a fairly talented photographer and had taken several of the photos himself in various places he’d traveled.

Faith took a deep breath and closed the door behind her. “Scott?”

She heard nothing.

“Scott, it’s me! Hello!”

The kitchen was empty. The bathroom and Hendler’s bedroom-the room they’d made love in so many times-empty. The bed was neatly made.

She found him in the computer room.

His desk chair had been spun around and was facing the wrong direction, away from the desk. The computer monitor was still on, a screen saver of three-dimensional pipes scrawling across it.

Hendler was a couple of steps in front of the chair, toppled toward the far wall. He’d fallen straight to the side, as if he had been kneeling and simply fell over. Blood had pooled under his head, and there were a few splatters on the floor and the wall.

Her gun slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. She moved forward tentatively, like a child taking its first halting steps.

Then something broke inside her and she rushed to him. He was on his side, his feet pointing toward her.

“Scott!” she shouted. “Scott, no! Dammit, no, no, no!”

The first thing she touched was his arm; then she ran her hand up to his shoulder. There was drying blood on his neck. She saw the wound, one fairly small entry at his temple.

Execution style, was how they described such things in movies.

More blood and tissue. Red, white, gray. She picked his head up. No exit wound on the other side. A small-caliber gun, most likely, the round still lodged in Scott Hendler’s brain. Some of his blood had gotten on her hand, a little more on her shirt.