I rubbed my eyes before I lifted my coffee and took a large gulp. My blood caffeine level had hit record highs in the past couple of sleepless days, but it couldn’t be helped. After last night’s end-of-day task force meeting, I’d spent much of the night Googling everything I could on Ash Wednesday.

Ash Wednesday was one of the most solemn days in the Catholic liturgical year. It was a day for contemplating one’s transgressions.

But whose transgressions was the killer trying to point out with the slayings? The dead kids’? Society’s? His own?

I caught my ash-streaked, mournful reflection in the plate glass.

Well, I was certainly stewing in my own lapses this morning, I thought, looking away. For not already putting an end to this horrible case.

As Chrissy played peekaboo with a neighboring toddler in a stroller, I checked my cell phone for the millionth time to see if I had missed any messages. I winced when only my Yankees-logo wallpaper appeared again. Emily had put an incredible rush on the print, but there was still no word.

I spun my phone on the chessboard tabletop as I looked out the window down Broadway. I could feel the moments slipping away from me, and there was nothing I could do.

Where and how? I thought. Where and how?

MY CASE-DISTRACTED MIND still hadn’t come a hundred percent back online as I stepped with Chrissy into my apartment ten minutes later. Otherwise, I would have checked my caller ID before I snapped open my phone.

“What’s the story?” I yelled into it.

“What story?” my grandfather Seamus said. “Actually, who cares? Did you tell her yet?”

“Tell who what?”

“Mary Catherine, ya eedjit! See, I knew you’d forget. And with MC in such a riled knot of late. Does the song ‘Happy Birthday’ ring a bell, Detective?”

“Holy sh-… ugar,” I said. “No. I forgot.”

Eedjit was right! I thought. I’d blown this one big-time. I could at least have brought her back a muffin or something. What would Mary Catherine throw out of mine next? I wondered. I needed to address the situation, and pronto. I heard the tea kettle start to boil in the kitchen. Maybe I still had a shot.

“I’m all over it, Father,” I said, hanging up.

Mary was taking a mug down from the cabinet just inside the kitchen door.

“Mary. There you are,” I said, surprising her with a hug.

“Happy birthday!” I said as merrily as I could and went to plant a kiss on her cheek.

But as it turned out, I was the one who got the surprise present.

Mary Catherine turned her head, and our lips locked. At first, I pulled back as if I’d been Tasered, but then, before I knew it, my hand found the back of her neck and we were, well, making out would be the exact expression.

Mary’s unheeded mug slid off the counter and shattered.

I guess you could call it pretty hot-and-heavy making out.

“Mary Catherine!” Chrissy called a second later just outside the kitchen door.

Mary almost broke my nose as she ripped herself away from me. Her face was at least twenty shades redder than her strawberry-blond hair. My face felt like it was on fire. I couldn’t seem to close my mouth.

“Goddamn you, Mike,” she said before she fled out the doorway. Was she crying? Why was she crying? I was having trouble enough breathing. I heard the hall bathroom door slam a second later.

I was still standing there, brain-locked and blinking, when Chrissy came in. “Where’s MC?” she said.

“I’m not sure. I broke a mug, Chrissy. Could you get me the dustpan?”

I WAS DOWN on my hands and knees, dazed and sweeping up, when my cell rattled.

“Hey, Mike,” Agent Parker said. “Get down here. I have news. I’m right outside your building.”

“Thank God,” I said, dumping the last of the shards into the garbage. “I mean, on my way!”

I quickly hollered, “I’m off to work, ’bye, Mary,” as I passed the still-closed bathroom door.

Was that the right thing to do? I wasn’t sure. I’d never made out with my kids’ nanny before.

I wiped the lip gloss off my chin in the elevator mirror on the way down to the street. Still tasting it, I pondered what the heck had just happened and how I felt about it.

Like I needed something else on my plate at this juncture.

“Goddamn you, Mike.”

I CLIMBED INTO Emily’s double-parked Crown Vic. She was wearing a new white silk blouse and sleek beige skirt suit. With the case dragging on, she must have done some shopping, I realized.

Was it me, or was the blouse showing some pretty nice cleavage? I wiped my eyes. What the hell was happening to me?

“Feeling okay there, Mike?”

“Never better,” I said, smiling. “What’s up?”

Emily handed me a folder.

“We finally got the toxicology report back on the ashes found on the first victim, Jacob Dunning. Are you familiar with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy?”

“Had one six months ago,” I said, nodding. “Doctor said I’m as clean as a whistle.”

“Listen closely, wiseass,” Emily said, ignoring my acerbic wit. “Basically, individual elements reflect X-ray light in different patterns. They ran the ashes through the machine, and it turns out most of it is regular cigarette tobacco. The twist is that they found traces of some very interesting substances as well that came from the killer’s sweat.”

“Like what kind of substances?” I said.

Emily lifted a clipboard.

“Several amphetamines and a drug called… Iressa. It’s a chemotherapy drug for lung cancer.”

I rubbed my face as I nodded.

“Hey, good work,” I said. “I’ll get Schultz to contact Sloan-Kettering and the other cancer centers and check out their patients. It’s starting to make a little more sense now in terms of motive. If this guy is terminal, maybe he made out some psycho bucket list. Maybe this is his way of going out with a bang.”

“Funny you should say bang,” Emily said, pointing to a name on the fax sheet. “Because the drugs aren’t the worst of it. There was evidence of something called pentaerythritol. It’s found in plastic explosives, Mike.”

KIDNAPPING, CHILD MURDERS, and now plastic explosives? This nightmare case kept getting worse and worse. I unsuccessfully tried to wake myself out of it as Emily answered her encrypted cell phone.

“Hold on, Tom,” she said into it. “Let me put you on speaker.”

“We got the print back, Em,” FBI lab chief Tom Warriner said a moment later. “You’re not going to believe this. It’s a hit, but one that’s coded to COINTELPRO.”

“Cointelpro?” I said.

“The FBI’s counterintelligence program,” Emily said.

“The section attached to this was run out of the New York office,” Warriner continued. “The Domestic Terrorism Squad from the sixties. The code name attached is Shadowbox.”

“In Intelligence Squads, when the identity of a person is classified, they designate code names,” Emily explained with a roll of her eyes. “Like the CIA, the FBI spook division loves codes and passwords. James Bond, eat your heart out.”

She aimed her voice at her phone.

“So, what do you think, Tom? Our guy, this Shadowbox, was probably a confidential informant on a domestic terrorist group?”

Terrorism? I was still trying to absorb the plastic explosives angle.

“Most likely,” the FBI lab chief said.

“So, how do we get a name to match the code name?” I asked.

“I’ve tried twice to crack the old databases, but some COINTELPRO records seem to be missing,” Warriner said.

Emily snorted.

“I’ll bet. Into the ol’ memory hole you go. What the hell are we going to do? How do we get around that?”

“I’ve been asking around, and the best lead I can tell you is that you guys should go see John Browning,” Warriner said. “He’s the former agent who ran the group out of the New York office from ’sixty-eight to ’seventy-four. I tried to call him, but there’s no answer at his house up in Yonkers. I worked with Browning on a few things when I was a rookie tech. Sarcastic pain in the ass, but a mind like a steel trap. If he can’t tell you who Shadowbox is, no one can.”