“The message I got while we were talking to Sansom was from Garrett. Three people were found dead about twenty minutes ago, their bodies dumped on the beach just south of here. A woman, and two men. An SBI agent is on scene and says they’re theirs.”

“I don’t understand.”

Baldwin gestured over his shoulder. “The people in there, the ones we’ve been talking to all morning? They’re plants. The real Renee Sansom, Wally Yaeger and Eliot Polakis are dead.”

Six

Nashville, Tennessee

Colleen Keck was deep into her background on the Zodiac when her computer started going wild. She looked up, saw the words Nags Head. North Carolina? She flipped her online scanner over to the appropriate channel. Her mind was instantly processing this information as if it were linked to the earlier messages she’d received—what serial killer had struck in North Carolina? Was this part of the pattern from the murders last night? Was she simply reaching? She was a crime blogger after all, prone to seeing killers in every corner of her world. An overreactor, Tommy would say.

She was instantly grateful for the new protocols in many police departments that had allowed their personnel to shift away from 10 codes and into plain speak; while she was familiar with a wide array of codes from the major metropolitan areas, the smaller jurisdictions didn’t follow the same patterns. Plain speak allowed everyone to understand. The scanner crackled.

“Officers down, officers down. We need backup, my location.”

What the hell was his location? she wondered, writing the words down in her personal journalism shorthand. The disembodied voice went on, describing the scene.

“Update, there are seven officers involved in two separate shootings. We have a total of seven down. We need extra personnel, my location. Send out a BOLO on a black Lincoln Town Car, North Carolina plate, state owned, numbers to come. Suspects are armed and dangerous, repeat, armed and dangerous. Last seen heading west on Highway 64. Put roadblocks in place all the way out to 95. Switch to channel eighteen, code three, code three. Switching channels now.” The scanner went dead. They’d switched to a private channel to avoid people like her. It wouldn’t have mattered if the voice had continued, she wasn’t hearing anything but the roaring in her own ears.

Oh, my God.

Colleen’s breath came short, and she gagged a little, unable to resist a brief glimpse into her own hell after hearing the words officers down. Seven cops hurt in the line of duty. Seven families torn apart. Seven.

The memories assailed her anew, and she barely made it to the bathroom in time. She vomited in the sink, tears mingling with sudden beads of sweat that popped up on her forehead.

Oh, Tommy. Why did you have to leave me? Why did you have to be so freaking brave?

After a few minutes, her cries died down, and she gathered herself. She rinsed her mouth out with cool water, splashed some on her face, which managed to smear her already desiccated day-old mascara even further. She swiped furiously at the dark smears with a bit of toilet paper. Weakness was not allowed. Weakness was her enemy, the taloned beast that lived in her chest and couldn’t wait to sharpen its fangs on her heart. She’d considered succumbing many times, but Flynn—her darling, sweet boy, the spitting image of Tommy—Flynn kept her strong. Strong enough to fight back the beast and its basilisk stare into her soul.

Empty. She was terribly empty. The less she had to give, the less she could get hurt.

The phone rang.

She had a moment’s irrational fear—it was a call from the police, something’s happened to Flynn—but she pushed the thought away firmly. This time of day, it was some sort of telemarketer. She allowed the answering machine to pick up, heard the long beeps of a facsimile machine.

Sniffing hard, Colleen went to the refrigerator. She poured a little orange juice in a glass, then opened the cabinet above the stove, the one locked against her child’s roving hands. The small vial of Ativan was nestled in between some old painkillers and a never-used package of birth control pills, standing ready for when she and Tommy were able to resume post-baby connubial relations. Choking back another sob, she extracted the benzodiazepines, shot two into her mouth before she could change her mind, and swallowed. Thus indulged, she brushed her hair back from her face and tried to focus.

Something major had happened in North Carolina. Combined with the reports coming in from California, Massachusetts and New York, she felt it her duty to explore the cases further. They were connected, she was sure of that. Something told her that they hadn’t seen the end, either.

Seven

The Outer Banks, North Carolina

Taylor felt the cold seeping into her stomach. No wonder Fitz had been so reluctant to talk to her. He must have sensed something wasn’t right about Sansom and her goons.

Oh, God. Was Fitz safe? Surely this was an anomaly, not some sort of reengagement. Would the Pretender let Fitz go only to take him back into his custody? She took a deep breath. No. The helicopter that took him away bore the Duke Medical Center insignia. There was no way.

She was through taking chances.

“We have to get that helicopter diverted to Nashville, just to be safe.”

Baldwin looked at her for a long moment. “I agree.”

He made a call. Taylor could hear the voice of Charlaine Shultz, one of Baldwin’s lead profilers, on the other end. She promised to take care of it immediately, and Baldwin put the phone into his pocket.

They could hear sirens wailing now, and the SBI chopper soared past overhead in a swirl of dusty snow. The cavalry had arrived.

Baldwin touched her arm. “Come on, let’s do a sweep. This place is going to be crawling in a few minutes and we’ll need to give a SITREP.”

As always, Baldwin was thinking ahead. Taylor wasn’t in any mood to stop, hand over their knowledge to another officer, calmly give a situation report. No, she wanted to go after that damn car. But she joined him back in the police station. The scene inside was worse than Taylor remembered. Nadis and his receptionist were sprawled in their own blood, and they found another Nags Head officer and their SBI driver garroted in a closed-off room. Taylor barely recognized the silent smoker who’d picked them up from the airport. The scent of death was close in her nose.

Standing over the bodies, looking at the thin necklace of bruised and bloodied flesh on the officers’ throats, Taylor felt ice sweep through her veins. The sight thrust her back in time, to more deaths on her hands. Garroting was the signature of another killer, one long since dead. She swallowed hard.

“Fake Polakis and Yeager were taking down the others while Fake Sansom talked to us,” Taylor said.

“Looks that way. See, there are drag marks,” Baldwin said, pointing to a series of black scuffs on the white linoleum that led to the small break room where the bodies of the men had been stashed.

“They must have taken them down one by one, then lugged them in here, out of the way. How did they pull this off?”