Emma Lee played quietly the whole time at his feet, undressing and redressing Cee-Cee without a peep. She had the patience of a little saint, that was for sure.

Maybe she got that part from me, he thought.

Meanwhile, he sat and watched the Cross family as the lottery wound down. Interestingly enough, he found himself glad to hear Jannie’s name called out over the public address system. And then he was sorry when it became clear that Ava hadn’t made it in.

Poor Ava. That girl couldn’t catch a break, could she? Unless you counted getting in with the Cross family to begin with. They were “good people,” on paper. Guidice was even starting to like them a little more than he would have preferred. The grandmother and the kids, anyway. It happened all the time. He couldn’t help getting involved with his subjects.

Would they be devastated when Alex was dead and gone? Of course they would. That was the part that couldn’t be helped. The world was full of innocent victims.

He’d been one himself, once. Thanks to Alex.

But none of that mattered—not as long as he kept an eye on the bigger picture. Always the bigger picture.

That’s where Alex Cross was a dead man walking.

CHAPTER

10

I SKIPPED LUNCH WITH THE FAMILY AND GOT MYSELF STRAIGHT OVER TO THE new Consolidated Forensic Lab at Fourth and School Streets. It’s an amazing building—two hundred and eighty thousand square feet of facilities under one enormous roof. MPD finally had firearms, toxicology, DNA, fingerprint analysis, and the medical examiner’s office all in one place.

As soon as I got there, I threw on a surgical gown and mask and pushed in through the swinging door of the examination suite where Joan Bradbury was already halfway through Elizabeth Reilly’s autopsy.

“What have we got so far, Joan?” I asked.

“A lot,” she said. “Come on in.”

The body was open on the table, with a long Y cut down the middle of the torso, which had been flayed open by now. I’ve sat through more autopsies than I can remember, and my stomach’s way past any kind of trouble with this stuff. At the same time, I never let myself forget the reason I’m there. I owed Elizabeth that much, at least.

“I did a tox screen on her blood last night, just to get a jump on things,” she told me. “We got a positive read for antidepressants, and, get this—Pitocin.”

“Pitocin? You test for that?”

“Not usually, but under the circumstances, I thought I might check. Glad I did, too. Pitocin doesn’t stay in the system too long, only around forty-eight hours. Which means Elizabeth Reilly induced her labor less than two days before she died.”

My mind started spinning around this new piece of information. So far there were no hospital records for Elizabeth Reilly in the area, and no record of any live births under that name, much less an induced labor.

Was it possible she’d done this on her own for some reason? She’d been a nursing student. She could have easily known how to get her hands on some Pitocin, and maybe even known how to administer it.

But why?

And meanwhile, was there a three-day-old baby out there somewhere? I needed to find out, ASAP.

“By the way,” Joan went on. “We didn’t find any rope fibers on her fingers or palms at all. Someone else put that noose around her neck. And if all that weren’t enough, the break in the second and third vertebrae was definitely postmortem. I’ve got a few hours to go here, but I can tell you right now, my report’s going to rule out suicide.”

Ultimately, cause of death is the ME’s to call. I hardly ever disagreed with Joan’s conclusions, and I didn’t have any reason to do it today, either. This was now officially a homicide investigation.

Maybe also a missing persons case.

I had my work cut out, that was for sure.

CHAPTER

11

THE FIRST THING I DID WHEN I LEFT THE MORGUE WAS FIND SAMPSON. HE WAS catching up on his reports at the Second District station house, and I pulled him outside for a talk.

I’ve known John all my life, and I trust him as much as anyone at MPD. He’s also been around long enough that he knows people all over the city. More specifically, he knew which people at which agencies were going to be willing to talk to him about a missing baby without eighteen and a half signatures on two dozen forms first. I understand why we’ve got a lot of the paperwork we do, but there’s a time and a place. This wasn’t it. If speed was my number one priority right now, discretion was a close second.

We stood out by my car in the station house parking lot, downing some sandwiches and going over the details.

“All indications are that this was a vaginal birth. No signs of episiotomy, or any hospital intervention at all,” I told him. “Given the Pitocin in Elizabeth’s system, and the fact that nobody we’ve talked to said anything about any pregnancy, it seems pretty clear she was trying to keep this a secret.”

“It’s not so hard to hide a pregnancy,” John said, flipping through the file I’d given him. “Especially if nobody’s looking.”

“Exactly. Her neighbors barely knew her, and she dropped out of school five months ago.”

“What about family?” he asked. “Next of kin?”

“Not much. She’s got two grandparents down in Georgia who raised her, and that’s about it. According to them, she fell off the radar a while ago. They haven’t heard from her since Christmas.”

“In other words, this baby could be—”

“Anywhere. Yeah.”

John chugged the last of his Diet Coke and obliterated the can in his huge hand. There’s a reason we call him Man Mountain. “I’m going to need something stronger here,” he said.

“Talk to Youth Division, see if any of this rings a bell,” I told him. “Harry Keith over there will keep his mouth shut, if you need some help. Go district by district if you have to. Check the NCMEC database as often as you can, and talk to their people over in Alexandria. Just don’t say anything about me or this case.”

This was the thing. Elizabeth Reilly’s pregnancy was the only card we were holding close anymore. If our killer had any connection to her baby, I didn’t want him to see us coming, and I was already publicly attached to this very public story. That’s where Sampson came in.

The other possibility was that there might not be a baby to find anymore. We didn’t know if Elizabeth’s pregnancy had been full term; if the baby was delivered stillborn; or God forbid, if it had been killed for some reason I didn’t understand yet.

Right now, all of that was a question mark. But for the baby’s sake, as well as the mother’s, we had to assume that there was still someone out there to save.

CHAPTER

12

FOR THREE DAYS WE GOT NOWHERE. THERE WAS NO SIGNIFICANT MOVEMENT on the Darcy Vickers or Elizabeth Reilly murders, and the phone call I kept hoping to get from Sampson never came. You could just feel these cases going cold.

Then on that Saturday morning, we had a new development. The worst kind. Another body popped up in Georgetown.

I was home when I got the call from Sergeant Huizenga. She wanted me to keep going in the direction I’d been going, and monitor this homicide alongside the other two. The trick would be to see this scene on its own merit first, without comparing it to anything. Sometimes if you go looking for connections, you start to see what you want to see instead of what’s really there.

I took Pennsylvania, and then M Street, all the way to the Key Bridge and parked just below it. Several cruisers were already on-site, and they’d strung an outer perimeter of yellow tape across Water Street, on the south side of the Potomac Boat Club.