“No, thank you,” Creem said. “What a lovely way to start the day.”

He smiled as she scooted out, letting her enjoy herself for now.

By the end of the week, she’d be looking for another job.

CHAPTER

21

CREEM’S APPOINTMENT WITH HIS CRIMINAL ATTORNEY WAS SCHEDULED FOR nine thirty that morning. He showed up at the L Street offices of Schuman and Pace just after ten.

“Elijah,” Bill Schuman said, coming around the desk to shake his hand. “Good to see you.” He paused to let Creem apologize for his tardiness, but Creem only nodded. He’d probably be charged for the time, anyway.

“Have a seat. Please,” the lawyer told him.

“Don’t mind if I do.”

He took the button-tufted tweed couch near the door instead of the leather swivel by Schuman’s desk. Schuman seemed a little puzzled, but didn’t say anything as he sat back down and started flipping through the file in front of him.

“Give it to me straight, doc. How long do I have to live?” Creem asked.

“You’re in a good mood,” Schuman said.

“Just got laid, if you want to know.”

His lawyer looked at him with an expression somewhere between offended and envious. It was the look of a guy who hardly ever got laid himself.

“Anyway,” Schuman went on, “things are moving along. We’ve got Lew Carroll coming down from New York for second chair, and I’ve already pinned down the two best jury consultants in the city for this trial.”

“Fine, fine,” Creem said. “Do we have a lot to go over?” Now that Joshie had thrown down the gauntlet with such determination, he had much more interesting things to think about.

“Well…yes,” Schuman said. “Of course we do. Elijah, you’ve got to focus here. If you want to get your money’s worth on this defense—”

“At eight hundred and twenty-five an hour, I don’t know if that’s possible,” Creem said.

Schuman raised his voice. “—then you’re going to have to show up. And I don’t just mean physically. Now, this pandering charge is a nonstarter, but I want to talk about the pornography charge. That’s where things start to get a lot stickier.”

Creem wanted to say “No pun intended,” but he kept his mouth shut.

“A worst-case scenario could be actual jail time,” Schuman told him. “Five years for possession, or as much as fifteen if the DA starts talking distribution. Are you hearing me on that?”

“When do you expect to go to trial?” Creem asked, his first serious question.

“June fourth,” Schuman said, “unless I can talk the DA into something more palatable.”

“Such as?”

“Well, a plea bargain, for one.”

“No,” Creem said.

“Elijah, at least listen to the range of options—”

“No.” Creem got up and paced over to the window. “I’m not taking a plea on this. I’ll wait for the trial. You just do your goddamn job.”

“I am doing my goddamn job!” Schuman said, showing his first bit of real spine. “I don’t understand. Why aren’t you—?”

He stopped short then, and dropped his head.

“Oh…cripes. Please don’t tell me….”

Now Schuman stood up and walked over to where Creem was watching the traffic down on L Street. When he spoke again, it was in a needless hush.

“Elijah, please tell me you’re not planning on doing something stupid, like fleeing the country. Just tell me that much, at least.”

Creem smiled again, looking down at Schuman. Maybe this tightly wound little man was smarter than he looked.

“Now why would I need to do that, Bill?” he said. “I’ve got the best lawyer in the city working for me.”

CHAPTER

22

AT THAT AFTERNOON’S MAJOR CASE SQUAD BRIEFING, SERGEANT HUIZENGA GOT the ball rolling by letting us know that word had come down from on high, approving all overtime requests until further notice.

That got a round of applause—it’s not unusual for cops to work off the clock when things get as tight as they were these days. But of course, on the clock was better.

“One guess,” I heard someone mutter behind me. “Al Ayla.”

Just a few months earlier, Washington had taken several hard hits by the Saudi-based terrorist organization, also known as The Family. Both the mayor and the chief of police had caught hell over that one, with accusations of mishandled resources and slow response time to the crisis as it played out.

The one good thing that had come out of it, apparently, was that we now had the kind of resources we could really do something with. Patrol units in and around Georgetown had been doubled during daylight hours, and in some cases tripled at night. A dedicated tip line had been established, and our neighborhood outreach people were on the street every day.

Some of that was about increasing the scope of the investigation, to be sure, but some of it was also about heading off the inevitable public flogging you get, no matter how hard you work.

Each of our three homicides now had a lead detective assigned, along with a full squad of investigators. I’d be running between all three, along with whichever personnel I could pull in from the districts, as needed. Huizenga was happy to have me working with Sampson on the search for Baby Reilly, since the Major Case Squad was out flat right now. As long as these three cases were all grouped under one umbrella, I was the guy holding the umbrella.

When Huizenga handed the floor over to me, I started by putting the three victims’ morgue photos on the screen at the front of the room for everyone to see. It wasn’t easy to look at, but my whole focus right now was about trying to draw some lines between these cases.

“These are now officially in chronological order, left to right,” I told everyone. “The autopsy puts Cory Smithe’s time of death at twenty-four hours after Elizabeth Reilly’s, and forty hours after Darcy Vickers’s.”

People started taking notes. A few just watched and listened, absorbing the details, which is more my own style.

“Beyond the issue of timing,” I said, “we’ve got a fair amount of common ground here, but mostly in pairs. Almost nothing I’ve found so far cuts across all three cases. Two of the victims were stabbed, for instance—although even there, Ms. Vickers’s wounds were fatal, whereas Mr. Smithe was mutilated postmortem. In both cases it was done with a narrow, but not identical blade.

“Two of these victims, obviously, were women,” I went on. “Two were found in Georgetown proper, although we don’t know for sure where Smithe was put into the river, so the primary crime scene there is still an unknown.”

The captain of our Homicide Branch, Frank Salazar, interrupted with a question—probably the question on everyone’s mind.

“Alex, I know we’re at the supposition phase, but what’s your bottom line right now? How many perpetrators do you suppose we’re looking at?”

I took a beat to think about it. The short answer was—I wish to hell I knew.

“Here’s the problem,” I said. “There’s no scenario right now that doesn’t defy logic, or at least, likelihood. We’ve never seen anything like this before, given the geography and the time frame. But I will say that it seems to me, a single killer is highly unlikely. The greater question in my mind is whether our perps are operating independently of each other, or not.”

That went over like a lead balloon. People were getting anxious for answers, both inside and outside the department. But without more information than we currently had, we were still flying blind on all three of these murders.

Meanwhile, the whole time I’d been talking, I could feel my phone vibrating—once, twice, a third time, in quick succession. As soon as Huizenga started fielding a few of the questions, I took out the phone and checked messages. They were all from Sampson—two voice mails and a text. That seemed like a good sign to me.