Guidice reached over and stroked his daughter’s rosy cheek with one finger. Her little half-lidded eyes made him smile.

“Look at her,” he said. “She looks just like me.”

“Still. This is the baby’s mother we’re talking about,” Lydia insisted.

“She was just some slut, Mom. A one-night stand.”

His mother half turned her head and held up a hand. “Too much information, thank you. I’m just saying, it’s not right what she did.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Think about it, Mom. This is someone who leaves a baby in a car with a note and walks away. Do you really want that kind of person in Grace’s life?”

Lydia held the baby a little closer. “Well, no, but—”

“That’s why we moved. I didn’t want her finding us. And frankly, I don’t want to find her, either. I say Grace deserves better than that.”

“I suppose,” Lydia answered tentatively—either because she agreed with him, or because her tenth-grade education hadn’t armed her for any kind of substantive debate in life.

“Don’t suppose, Mom. Think about it,” he told her. “Do you really want someone like that raising your granddaughter?”

“No,” she answered, more resolutely this time.

“No,” he said. “You don’t. And neither do I.”

He let it all sink in for a moment, and then softened his tone as he went on. Time for a little carrot.

“Believe me,” he said. “You’re a way better mother than she’d ever be. No contest, Mom.”

Lydia Guidice was always easily flattered. She smiled as she blushed, and then finally stepped out of the way.

“Go on,” she said. “Emma Lee’s waiting.”

Guidice kissed his mother on the cheek before he headed up the hall.

There were other solutions, of course. Lydia could be eliminated just as easily as anyone else, physically speaking. It would even be a relief to put the ultimate gag order on that incessant nagging.

But it was basically a cost-benefit situation at this point. Lydia played a vital role in the family. Like it or not, he needed her right now. It would be shortsighted to take her out just to shut her up.

No, Guidice thought. He couldn’t do that. Couldn’t even think about it.

Not unless it became absolutely necessary.

CHAPTER

53

I TRIED TO STAY FOCUSED AT THE NEXT MORNING’S BRIEFING, BUT IT WAS HARD to keep my mind in the room.

I was starting to wonder if I’d overextended myself. It’s a question that comes up a lot. I had three cases on the books—plus Ava. She was the fourth case. Later in the day, we had a meeting at Child and Family Services. In the meantime, I had more than enough to keep me busy.

Too much, in fact, but how do you say no to something when the stakes are people’s lives? We had nine dead so far, one missing, and, with three unknown suspects at large, the looming promise of more to come.

There’s a good amount of disagreement about clusters, as they’re called in serial homicide. Some people say they’re nothing more than coincidence, and that we’re bound to see concurrent activity from time to time. The United States is the world capital of serial murder, with somewhere between twenty-five and fifty active killers at any given time.

The most famous cluster I knew of had been in South LA, from the early eighties through 2007. LAPD had tracked down five separate cases then, including the Grim Sleeper and the Southside Slayer. By the time all five of those files were closed, a total of fifty-five people had died, all within a fifty-square-mile area.

There had also been some recent coverage about the three killers operating simultaneously in Nassau and Suffolk Counties, on Long Island. The last I’d heard, two suspects were in custody, with one still at large, and the body count was up to thirty.

Now, Washington had the makings of its own cluster. I spent virtually all my time turning over these three cases in my head—thinking about methods, victim profiles, possible motives, and most of all, wondering where one of these guys might strike next.

Killer number one was the man I thought of as “Russell,” the supposed boyfriend of Elizabeth Reilly. He was the most unpredictable in a way, with four and a half years between his pregnant victims, and a probable kidnapping on his resume, too.

Number two was the one they’d dubbed the River Killer in the press. Three gay hustlers had been found dead so far, but my fear was that we just hadn’t found them all yet. Under normal conditions, it can take weeks for a submerged, decomposing body to build up enough gas to become buoyant and rise to the surface.

Killer number three was the least established, but he already had two different monikers. Some were calling him the Georgetown Ripper. Others were using the Barbie Killer, for the blond hair and perfect bodies on his two known victims. MPD had left those comparisons out of their official statements, but the media had picked up on it anyway.

That was the case that had me most on edge right now. Considering the apparent relationship between the River Killer and this guy, I couldn’t help feeling as though our Barbie Killer had some catching up to do. In the plainest possible terms, it felt to me like we were overdue for another dead blonde.

Three days later, it turned out I was half right.

This time, it was two dead blondes.

CHAPTER

54

THE BODIES WERE FOUND BY A HOUSEKEEPER WHEN SHE ARRIVED FOR WORK that Monday morning. Time of death was later determined to be somewhere around ten o’clock on Saturday night, which meant that these women were dead in their house for a full thirty-six hours. More bad news for the investigation. I headed over as soon as I got the call.

The place was a pink brick townhome on Cambridge Place, a well-to-do but tightly packed block of Georgetown. Still, there had been no reports of any screams, or disturbances of any kind.

“We’ve got no signs of forced entry,” Errico Valente told me at the front door. “The alarm system was disabled, too. Seems like he might have been admitted to the house.”

“Are there neighborhood cameras?”

“Yeah. It’s a private security firm,” he said. “We’re tracking down the logs right now.”

The bulk of DC’s municipal crime cameras are normally reserved for our most violent neighborhoods. The irony was that these two homicides had now put Second District, which is Georgetown, on par with anywhere else in the city, body for body.

From the home’s center hall, I followed Valente up to the apparent crime scene, a master suite on the second of three floors. The victims in this case were a mother and daughter, Cecily and Keira Whitley, ages forty-three and nineteen. Mrs. Whitley was divorced, but her ex-husband still lived in DC, where they’d raised two daughters. Keira’s twin sister was enrolled at UC Santa Barbara out in California.

Now the Whitley family had been cut in half.

Coming into the bedroom, I saw the mother first. She was laid out on the pale pink sheets of an unmade king-size bed. The covers had been pulled off and left in a heap on the floor.

Her daughter was on an overstuffed chaise longue in the corner, facing her mother. Marks in the carpet told me the chaise had been moved to that position recently.

Both victims were tall, attractive women, with the telltale signs of what had once been long blond hair. In fact, they looked quite a bit alike. Two more Barbies for the Barbie Killer. If there was any doubt on that front, the signature knife work clinched it. Both had incurred stab wounds to the left chest, abdomen, and right thigh, near the femoral artery. Dried blood formed a dark corona around each of their bodies on the mattress and chaise, respectively.

“Evil son of a bitch,” Valente said. “Just killing for killing’s sake.”