“Our ME’s already gone, but I assumed you’d want one of your folks to take a look,” Bob said. “It all sounds like the same character you’ve been dealing with down there in the city. Pretty awful stuff.”

That was one way of putting it.

All indications were that the murder itself had taken place up here on the trail. A dark patch of dried blood in the dirt had been found about halfway down the hill, and there were some pretty clear drag marks between that spot and the canal.

They had the body laid out on the grass when we got there, giving me a sickening sense of déjà vu. There was the one gunshot wound to the face, and then multiple stab wounds around the hips and genitals.

Also, there was a water factor. Cory Smithe had been found in the Potomac, Ricky Samuels in Rock Creek, and now this.

The only real difference I could see, besides location, was in the knife work. Each victim seemed to have been stabbed quite a few more times than the one before him. This boy’s jeans were bloodstained all the way down to his neon green shoes.

Jacobs knelt next to the body. I could tell she was doing what I did sometimes—forcing herself to get close and absorb as much as she could, subconsciously or otherwise.

“What’s this guy so pissed off about?” she said. “What’s he trying to work out here, do you suppose?”

She seemed to be homing in on some of the same anger I’d been seeing in all these cases. That word kept coming up.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it can be a vicious cycle. The harder he tries to scratch that itch, the more he’s going to find out it can’t be done, and the more desperate he’s going to get.”

“Or enthusiastic,” she said, fingering one of the perforations in the kid’s pants with a gloved finger. “Or both.”

The gunshot was a means to an end, I felt pretty sure. It was the knife work where his emotions took over. In every other respect, he seemed to be extremely well disciplined about the whole thing. These weren’t spontaneous murders. Each one of them required some forethought and planning.

And that brought up the other big question here.

The last time around, in Rock Creek, our victim hadn’t been alone. There were two bodies that night, most likely from two different killers.

The Montgomery County CSI unit had already made a first pass up and down the canal, and they were still dragging the woods, but it seemed clear to me by now that this was another solo job.

But why? What had changed? Or changed back?

I had no idea, but even as I stood there taking it all in, some part of me was already bracing for what came next. Whatever game these people were playing, it wasn’t over yet.

And the score was three to two.

CHAPTER

46

IT WAS JUST BEFORE DARK WHEN I FINALLY WRAPPED UP AT THE CRIME SCENE. I’d been there longer than I meant to be, but then again, I always am. I walked back up through the woods to the parking lot and toward my car.

When I got there, someone was waiting for me. It was dusk, and I couldn’t see who it was at first, but then I recognized the beard. Even the hoodie and cargo shorts were the same as the last time.

“Ron Guidice?” I said.

Sure enough, he turned around. I’d been right all along. It was him.

“I’ve been trying to reach you,” I said. “We need to talk.”

“Oh, now you want to talk?” he said, immediately aggressive. “Last time I got the brush off.”

I took a deep breath. Part of me wanted to cuff him and throw him in the back of the car. But that wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I pressed on instead.

“Listen, I’m not going to pretend that I understand exactly what you went through six years ago. But what you’re doing now? It’s not helping anyone.”

“I guess that’s a matter of opinion,” he said.

“I want you to know that I’m sorry for your loss,” I told him. “I really am, but—”

“But what, Alex? I should just shut up and go away? I already tried that, but it didn’t help. You and your department are just as incompetent as you were six years ago.”

I looked him in the eye, trying to gauge how put together this guy was—or wasn’t. Were there emerging paranoia issues here? Was Guidice one hundred percent? I wasn’t convinced.

“It’s not just my life you’re making difficult,” I said. “You’re potentially putting future victims’ lives at risk here. Do you understand that?”

“That’s funny,” he said. “Because I write what I do to protect the people you’re putting at risk.”

“You’ve got the wrong idea,” I said.

“Do I?” he said. “What about Rebecca Reilly, detective? Can you tell me where she is? Because as far as I know, she disappeared on your watch.”

He was just baiting me now. That much was obvious. I wasn’t going to be able to placate this guy, and I wasn’t sure it was worth trying anymore.

But I did have one other thing to say.

“All right, fine,” I told him. “You want to blog your bullshit, that’s your right. But I’ll tell you something else. If I find you tailing me when I’m with my family again, we’re going to have a very different kind of problem. Do you understand?”

He stepped a little closer. Guidice was a big dude, and obviously not intimidated by much. But neither am I.

“Are you threatening me, Detective Cross?” he asked. “Is that what’s going on here?”

I hadn’t even noticed the recorder in his hand until now. He’d been palming it, just out of sight. Before I thought too much about it, I snatched it out of his hand and threw it as far as I could into the woods. Probably a mistake. Another one for my resume.

“You think that’s going to stop me?” he said. He laughed without smiling before he went on. “This is your other problem. You’ve started to believe your own publicity. Alex Cross, the Dragonslayer. Alex Cross, the Sherlock Holmes of MPD. Alex Cross, the second goddamn coming of Christ! You’re a paper tiger, Alex. A phony! And people need to know about it.”

I was already walking away.

“This isn’t over,” he called after me. “Not even close!”

“That’s one place where we agree, Guidice,” I said as I got into my car. “It definitely isn’t.”

It was time to hit this guy from another angle.

CHAPTER

47

IT’S NOT LIKE I WAS COMPLETELY UNSYMPATHETIC TO GUIDICE. I LOST MY OWN first wife to senseless violence. It was the worst day of my life, and in a strange way it connected the two of us.

But that didn’t mean I was going to let him keep going unchecked. If he wouldn’t talk to me, in a real way, then I had to do whatever else I could to stop him.

I spent the evening pulling everything we had on Guidice, and digging for anything else I could find. Commander D’Auria let me piggyback onto his LexisNexis access, and that turned up what was basically a bibliography of Guidice’s past work. It gave me a whole new lens on him.

What I already knew was that he’d been with the US Army for several years before receiving an honorable discharge in 2005. That was where he’d cut his teeth, journalistically speaking.

Most of his work in the army had been with administrative and communications units, first at Fort Bragg, then in Newark, New Jersey, with one six-month deployment to Baghdad for the Army Times. Overseas, he’d written a series of PR pieces highlighting US humanitarian efforts and infrastructure projects in Iraq. All of that was a matter of public record.

Then there was everything that came after his discharge. I don’t know what happened to Guidice in the army, but by the time he started writing freelance—and well before Theresa Filmore died—it was like he’d turned a one eighty. His focus at that point was almost entirely on the overreach of the US government, both at home and abroad.