“Looks like this guy’s got a crush on you,” Huizenga said. My name was clickable, like the others, and she hovered her pointer over it. “You mind?”

“I can hardly wait,” I said.

What opened up then was a whole page dedicated to yours truly. It included my CV with the department, an old ID photo, a list of current and previous cases, and several other small images.

The first of those was a picture that had been taken from below, on Vernon Street, just as I’d gone to pull Elizabeth Reilly’s body out of the window where she’d been hanging. Her face was even fuzzed out, in some kind of twisted nod to journalistic propriety.

The other picture showed Kinkead’s restaurant from the outside. Beneath that was a screen capture of a tweet that had apparently been sent to go with it:

Three dead, and where’s DC’s favorite cop? Out to dinner. More like out to lunch! Priorities, anyone? #incompetentcops.

Finally, there was a long screed at the bottom, all about how I was the wrong one to be coordinating on these cases, and blowing it at every turn, apparently.

“Who the hell is this guy?” Valente asked.

The blog did have a contact page, but when Huizenga pulled it up, it gave us everything but a name. You could e-mail The Real Deal with questions, tips, or other thoughts about the job MPD was doing. There were invitations to follow The Real Deal on Twitter, or like it on Facebook, or “join the conversation” on something called NewsNet. For someone who had just gotten started, this so-called reporter was clearly going all in.

And I was starting to think I knew who he was. Or at least that we’d met.

“We need to get him out in the open,” I said to Perkins. “Let me run a subpoena on the blog’s ISP records, and see who’s attached to the account.”

I was remembering the bearded jag-off from the morning Cory Smithe’s body had been found. This was the guy with no press credentials who had refused to give me his name.

Perkins shoved back in his chair.

“Alex, I’ve got to ask you. Did you pull Elizabeth Reilly’s body before the ME reached that scene?”

“I did,” I told him. I wasn’t going to start tap dancing for the chief right now. It was all in the report, anyway.

“And, were you out to dinner that night, like it says?”

I could feel the heat coming up into my face. “I’m sorry, Chief, but what the hell does it matter?”

“In and of itself? It doesn’t. But if he’s telling the truth, he can say whatever he wants,” Perkins told me. “The last thing I need is a questionable subpoena on a guy like this, especially if he’s got any kind of audience.”

“If he doesn’t now, he will after that press conference,” Huizenga said, closing her laptop. “Stand by for the shit storm, everyone.”

“See what you can find out on your own,” Perkins said. “Pull whoever you need for this, but please, Alex—step lightly. We’re fighting a war of public perception right now. Approval of the department’s at an all-time low.”

Chief Perkins is no hysteric. He usually doesn’t give a hoot about public perception, especially not at the expense of an investigation. But the reality was, we were operating at expanded levels these days, and that hinged on a good relationship with the mayor, who had his own political angles to consider. The fact that he and his people had stayed away from the press conference meant they were already feeling skittish about this.

“I’m sorry, Alex,” Perkins said. “It is what it is.”

“Not a problem,” I told him. “I’ll find him anyway.”

That was the answer the chief needed right now, and hopefully the one that was going to keep me as far from under his thumb as possible.

I just hoped it was also true.

CHAPTER

36

PULL WHOEVER YOU WANT. THAT’S WHAT THE CHIEF HAD SAID. SO I STARTED close to home.

Even on my way down the stairs, I was on the phone with Bree, asking her to take a look at The Real Deal, and meanwhile, to keep digging on the Elizabeth Reilly case.

When I hit the third-floor hall, I called Sampson. He was in court that day, but I left a long message and asked him to swing by the house later on if he could. Both of them were already invested in Elizabeth’s murder. I didn’t see any reason not to make it official.

As soon as I was back at my desk, I pulled up The Real Deal’s contact page again and fired off a quick e-mail.

To whom it may concern: Please contact me at your earliest convenience. Thank you, Detective Alex Cross, MPD.

I was going to play it civil for the time being. I’d even play it nice if I had to, but only as a means to an end. This guy had been putting eyes on me and my family, and that’s a line you don’t cross.

Next up, I wound my way around the little warren of cubicles in our office to find Jarret Krause at his desk. Krause was one of Major Case Squad’s newbies, a Flatbush, Brooklyn, boy whose wife had taken a job working in their congressman’s DC office the previous fall. Already he’d made a name for himself, tracking down two very slippery violent offenders online—one serial rapist who connected with his victims on Facebook, and an eighteen-year-old thug from Shaw who had robbed and killed a seventy-year-old liquor store owner, then tried to sell a case of Cristal on Craigslist. Someday, these punks are going to wise up to their own virtual footprints. In the meantime, we’ve got guys like Krause to go around and scoop them up.

“’Sup, Alex?” he said, when I showed up over the wall of his ridiculously tidy cubicle. For that, I was giving him another six months.

“Have you heard of this blog, The Real Deal?” I asked.

“Yeah.” His fingers hit the keyboard in front of him and he brought it up. “This guy sucks,” he said. “And he’s seriously hating on you, too. How can I help?”

I was a little surprised at how much Krause already knew, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. Bad news travels about as fast as sound around that department.

“I need a name,” I said. “The blog’s hosted at DC Access, but Perkins doesn’t want to do an admin subpoena if we can avoid it. I was hoping—”

Already, Krause was scanning pages. “Yeah,” he said. “He’s hitting all the major platforms. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

“I’d appreciate it,” I said.

“You want me to stop there, or keep going?” he asked.

I wasn’t going to say no. “Define ‘keep going,’” I said.

“Well, for instance—this.” He came back to the latest blog entry, and pointed at the screen. “Twenty-six comments since seven this morning. These are the people you want to keep an eye on. Ninety-nine percent of the time, they’re going to be nobodies. But then once in a while, one of them will know something they shouldn’t, like a bullet caliber, or time of death, or whatever. That can be gold.”

“I’ll take it,” I said. “Anything you can do. But first—get me a name.”

“A name, to the face, to the asshole,” he said. “No prob. I’ll get back to you by the end of the day.”

CHAPTER

37

BY 9 P.M. I’D PUT IN A FULL WORKDAY, FOLLOWED BY A LATE DINNER WITH the family, homework with Ava, more homework with Jannie, and a chapter of Percy Jackson with Ali before bed.

I wasn’t going to say no to the six-pack of Cigar City Brown Ale that Sampson showed up with, just as Nana Mama and the girls were settling in for an episode of Once Upon A Time. John, Bree, and I took the beer up to my office in the attic and got back to work.

“Catch me up,” John said, twisting off a cap. “Where are we?”

Bree unwrapped the red figure-eight string from a big manila envelope and took out the case materials she’d picked up that afternoon. A tan clip folder and several black-and-white crime-scene photos spilled onto her lap.