There were too many variables, too many players, to allow mistakes to be indulged. If anything, eliminating part of the team would send a very clear message to the rest of them—failure was not an option.

The idea of killing her was so enticing.

He wouldn’t be able to see to the task himself, though. At least, not right now. Too bad. She would be a fun toy to play with. A ballsy broad, willing to step into the mix, to kill and impersonate a federal agent.

He really shouldn’t eliminate her just yet. She could still be an asset. She was a well-educated forensics master. With a new disguise—a change of hair, posture, contacts—he could utilize her skills again. He hated to admit it, but the truth was he needed her. She helped him play his role.

His finger hovered above the mouse, trembling with excitement.

He weighed the risks. He’d planned several demises for her. It would have been so simple to just discard her, like so many others in his past. The easiest manner of disposal, of course, was to arrange for the car she was driving with her compatriots to swerve away from oncoming traffic, go through the guardrail, land in the icy water below. There would be no time to save her from the freezing water. She’d drown before the rescue crews got on the scene.

Hmm. The idea of her flailing in the cold water…

His finger twitched on the mouse, then he pushed it aside.

He reminded himself that he was no longer a child, that an impulse was just that, a scant fraction of a second of desire that gets compounded into want. Want, want, want. Wanting got little boys into trouble.

But she did need to be punished.

And he left nothing to chance.

Nothing.

His grandfather clock bonged softly, pulling him from his reverie. Half past. The lunch hour was over. He needed to get back to work. Needed to inhabit the identity he’d created.

He just had so many things to do. So many threads to pull. So many people involved now, hurtling them toward the final moments. It was too late to turn back—the game was in motion. He’d gotten bored with the cat and mouse. The challenge of it all just wasn’t enough anymore. He wanted to be impressed. He wanted to teach. But none of this was working for him. It was time to up the ante again.

As he pulled the lanyard over his head, he wondered if Taylor was frightened yet. Brave girl that she was, surely she was starting to feel the strain. He’d told that fuck Fitzgerald to relay his message, to make sure she knew that it was time to play. He was confident the point had gotten across. He’d been very persuasive.

He locked the town house behind him. The ride back to work would only take a few minutes. He wondered what was in store for him this afternoon.

He did love his job.

On his way back to the office, he stopped at the post office, sent the card he’d been holding for three months.

She would be so surprised.

Eleven

Nashville, Tennessee

Colleen Keck looked at the clock. It was nearly time to get Flynn from school.

This was the biggest story she’d seen in years. Her Felon E email had been dinging constantly with new messages: new tips, new confirmations. The fax machine was whirring to life again, people sending diagrams of crime scenes, lists of names. There was something more to these murders, she knew that already. Years of instinct, of assimilating the truth from the annals of crap she had to delve through, gave her a keen sense of story. Plot. Something was definitely up, something big.

This morning’s disaster in North Carolina was locked down. A major crime event, too. She wasn’t pleased about being shut out, especially since several television news outlets were hovering around, broadcasting minute-by-minute relays of nothing. The only good news was they’d been unable to crack into the scene either. She talked briefly with a reporter from the CBS affiliate who told her the same thing she’d heard on the radio, but nothing new. The names of the dead weren’t being released yet.

Frustrated, she called her 911 call-center contact in that area again and heard that next-of-kin notifications were the holdup. Apparently one of the victims’ wives was out of town with their kids—Disney World. They were having a hard time tracking her down.

Letting the families know who they’d lost before the world heard was hard in the age of the internet. Twitter was talking about it, but no new information was leaking. Some ghoul on Foursquare had driven to the crime scene and was standing outside the barricades, uploading photographs: “I’m Mayor of the Nags Head Dead!”

She abandoned the shots in distaste. It was snowing softly in Nags Head, the lights flashing sharp off the white ground. Pretty, but not at all helpful in efforting her story.

Colleen felt she had a grip on things again, at least for the time being. The Ativan had helped her refocus. She would come back to North Carolina in a bit.

The news hadn’t picked up on her copycat-killer story yet. She decided to go back to that, work all the angles she could find.

She took a sip of Diet Coke and set to work reviewing what she knew for sure, what she’d been able to mine from the various police departments. Last night, in San Francisco, California, there had been a double murder. The crime scene bore the signature of the Zodiac Killer. And late this morning, just a few minutes ago Nashville time, the San Francisco Chronicle had received a letter. A coded letter, signed with the distinctive cross inside a circle, the mark of the Zodiac.

He had returned, or someone was copycatting him. Not that there hadn’t been false alarms before… Either way, when she hit Publish on this afternoon’s blog, she was going to create a firestorm. She was going to beat the papers. The numbers on Felon E would go through the roof. Everyone loved a good Zodiac story. Everyone but the victims. She forced that thought away. Feelings like those would cripple her, like what happened this morning. She couldn’t worry about the victims or their families now, she needed to report the story.

Not that their loss was any less horrific than the loss in North Carolina, it was just…different.

She clicked the keyboard, the words spilling onto the screen. She’d double sourced this, and it was going to spread like absolute wildfire.

The headline was simple.

The Zodiac? He’s Back…

Colleen had no idea what she was about to unleash. She published the story, watched it filter through her systems, then begrudgingly laid her work aside. She turned off the computer to go fetch her son. Her mind was already on the work she’d do as soon as she got home.

The Boston case was up next, then New York. She could work on Boston while Flynn was in his room, focusing on his me time. It had taken her the best part of three hours to source the San Francisco story. Boston would hopefully go quicker since she’d already sent out the emails to her trusted sources. New York, too—her contact didn’t work the day shift, so she’d have to wait >until after five to speak with him anyway. And the dam would break on North Carolina soon.

Good. She had it all planned out.

Was it really possible? Three serial killers come back to life, all on the same night? Or was her mind treading into fantasy territory? And who was responsible for the carnage in North Carolina?