Not this man, she thought. Not this one. Please.

From the angle of his body, he’d been on his knees when he was shot. They’d forced him to his knees.

She tried to think, but no thoughts would come. Hendler couldn’t be dead. That was all, that was the extent of her mental processes. He…could…not…be…dead.

She needed him, after all.

Not this man, she thought again.

She held his head for a long time. She wasn’t sure how long. Faith blinked over and over, but felt no tears. There was nothing in her, not even grief. Not even anger. There was nothing to feel.

She finally lay his head down and touched his face with her fingertips. He was already starting to cool.

She gently backed away and just stared for a long moment. She’d seen death before, and had even taken a life herself, but this…there were no words, no thoughts, that could process it.

Faith tried to think analytically. She moved around the body and touched the office chair. It was still warm. She sat in it, swiveled to face the desk.

She leaned forward and was about to touch the computer keyboard’s space bar when she thought, You’re contaminating the crime scene.

She knew this had to be connected to everything else that had happened. Daryn McDermott, Kat Hall, Sanborn…her brother. There was no other explanation.

“Trying to organize my thoughts on some new evidence that just came in,” he’d said on the phone message.

His yellow legal pad sat just to the left of the computer. She recognized Hendler’s neat printing. She read the notes he’d written himself, and her stomach turned.

Daryn dead in SK Jeep??? SK gun, Cain to ballistics-SK obsessed with Daryn?

Sean Kelly.

The “new evidence” he’d mentioned-they must have found Sean’s Jeep and his gun, with some evidence to suggest that Daryn had actually been murdered there.

“Oh God,” Faith said.

She’d defended her brother to Hendler, saying she knew Sean wasn’t capable of murder.

Or was he?

Had he committed two murders? Had he been so obsessed with Daryn McDermott that he’d had to kill her, and then murdered Hendler when he began to have suspicions of Sean, with a growing amount of evidence against him?

No. He’s my brother.

She turned around and faced Hendler’s body. Her throat tightened.

It couldn’t be.

Why would Sean kill Hendler, then leave evidence right here, the evidence that implicated Sean in Daryn’s murder?

He’s my brother.

And he might be a murderer.

The phone rang.

Faith jumped. It was the phone on Hendler’s desk, right beside the computer. She looked at the caller ID and recognized the number at the FBI field office.

She listened to it ring four times, then stop as the call went to voice mail. The ringing seemed to jolt her into reality. Faith considered her options. She could call 911 and wait, be a good citizen. But how would Kimberly Diamond of Independence, Missouri, explain that she had a key to FBI Special Agent Scott Hendler’s condo? Plus, the odds were that at least someone who responded to the call might know her. Wouldn’t work-Faith Kelly had to be out of sight.

She could leave and place an anonymous call. But they would want to know how she knew there was a dead man in the condo. And she couldn’t answer questions.

Or she could leave him.

Faith folded her hands together, squeezing them until they hurt. To the extent that she had allowed him to be, Scott Hendler had been there for her whenever she’d needed him, no questions asked. He’d trusted her even when she gave him no reason to do so. He’d gone against his own better judgment at times in order to give her the benefit of the doubt.

She may have loved him, though Faith wasn’t sure she knew what that meant. She was certain that he had loved her, and it may have cost him his life.

She squeezed her hands tighter. She bowed her head until her lips touched one of her knuckles. She closed her eyes.

It wouldn’t be long before someone found him. One of his FBI colleagues, perhaps. Maybe his parents or his brother would call and be concerned when they couldn’t reach him. He’d grown up right here in Edmond, and his parents lived barely two miles away. He had dinner with them every week. Faith had met them-they were good people. They would be utterly devastated. In a very real way, they might never recover from their son’s murder.

Yes, he would be found.

And she would be gone. She would pick up her brother’s trail. Finding Sean was no longer an exercise in family dynamics.

She bent down and touched Scott’s cheek again. “I’m sorry, Sleepy Scott,” she said. She felt like she should cry, but she had no tears. She couldn’t feel anything at all, not yet. It frightened her to think of what it would be like when she finally did allow herself to feel.

“Not now,” she said. She stood up and went into the bathroom. She took a towel out of the linen cabinet and wiped down every surface she had touched.

She would do this investigation her way, and she couldn’t have the FBI or the Edmond Police Department or anyone else considering her a suspect while she was doing it. She felt a coldness begin to descend on her.

She pulled off the page of Scott’s legal pad that had his notes about Sean on it. She was only buying time-she suspected that others, particularly Rob Cain, had the same information. But she needed a head start. She already had a new identity and clean, untraceable money. That would help.

She took one long look back. “I’m sorry,” she said again, and left the condo.

She started the Suburban and let it idle for a moment. She pulled out the Kimberly Diamond cell phone and, in a burst of impulse, called the number on Rob Cain’s business card.

When Cain’s voice mail greeting came on, she said, “This is Faith. I’m going to fix this, once and for all. If you find out anything-about Daryn or about Scott-let me know. You’ll know what that means pretty soon. I-I don’t know what else to tell you, Rob. Scott trusted you, and I think I have to trust you. I hope you’ll return the favor. Call me at this number if you find out anything.”

She clicked the end button, put the phone away, and pulled out of the parking lot, back into afternoon traffic on Danforth Road. Everything seemed so normal, just an ordinary suburban street on an ordinary suburban afternoon.

Faith blinked again and again. The tears formed in her eyes, but not a single one fell.

EVEN BEFORE SENATOR EDWARD MCDERMOTT had finished speaking, the director of Department Thirty had been summoned to the attorney general’s office.

Yorkton ran Department Thirty from an unassuming gray stone building in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, one hundred miles from Washington. It was close enough to D.C. for easy access, far enough away to be removed from the regular business of government.

The AG was Yorkton’s only boss. There were no deputies or associates or assistants in between the two. Each attorney general since the Nixon Administration had functioned in this role, some wanting weekly reports from Department Thirty, some wanting as little contact with it as possible.

The current occupant of the office fell somewhere between the two, and while Yorkton couldn’t really say he liked the man-he was a political appointee, after all-he admitted the AG was intelligent, capable, and seemed to be honest. He generally let Yorkton do his job and kept his hands off Department Thirty’s internal operations.

The two men sat in the AG’s sumptuous office at the Justice Department with no aides, no secretaries, no in-house lawyers.

“Tell me,” the attorney general said. “Is it true?”