It was too quiet.

It didn’t smell right.

No coffee dregs. No breakfast dishes in the sink. The air was stale and old, and very, very cold.

Cautious now, she pulled her Glock, kicked off her heels. Moved quietly through the bottom floor. There was a catch-all desk in the corner of the living room. Someone had stirred through the household detritus—mail and flyers and grocery lists and magazines were scattered across the desk and onto the floor.

Looking for something. All the hair on her neck stood on end.

Up the stairs, creeping, quiet as a mouse, her breath the only sound.

The two men were together, face-to-face, on the floor of the master bedroom. One was bound, hands tied roughly behind his back. The other was loose, long limbs splayed out, as if he’d reached for his friend in the last moments.

There was no blood, but each had a small froth of foam around their mouths. They’d been fed poison of some kind.

She didn’t need to check their pulses—they were clearly cyanotic and clearly dead—but she did, anyway, out of habit more than anything else.

Dead. Sprinkled with gray.

She stood, went to the front window, looked out onto the street. Dialed Riley.

“Problem. Z squared, Amanda’s place.” It was their own code, a personal shorthand her team developed to bypass any eavesdroppers on the lines who might be familiar with standard military speak. She heard the sharp intake of breath.

“Let me scramble this.” A moment later. “All right. We’re safe. I’ll send help.”

Help was a cleaning crew.

“I think that’s premature. This has nothing to do with us. Let’s allow it to play out.”

“You sure?”

She nodded, looking at the young men. Too young. In the wrong place at the wrong time. They’d been treated roughly. There was bruising around their throats and...what was that, wedged under the unbound boy?

She stepped quickly, lightly, used the Glock to slide the piece of paper out. Handwritten, spiky script, practically scribbled. Hurriedly written. Wrong, all wrong.

I’m sorry, I had no choice. It’s better this way.

Another note. She’d been right, damn it. Cattafi probably hadn’t killed her sister. And whoever had was looking for something, and tying up the loose ends as they went.

“Are you there?”

“Yes. There’s a note. Same basic scenario as Mandy.”

“Murder-suicide?” Silence. White space. Then he asked quietly, “What are the odds?”

“That’s what I’m wondering. Perhaps the police were hasty in their assessment of the scene in Georgetown. These two have been dead at least a day.”

And the blood began running hard, pumping slick and wet through her veins, adrenaline pushing with it. If Mandy hadn’t been killed by Cattafi, who had killed her?

And why?

The email came back to her.

Did you get it in?

The email was the key. Whoever sent it was behind this, she was sure of it.

And Amanda had it, whatever that may be.

Or did.

Chapter 18

State Department

Washington, D.C.

FLETCHER WAS BEHIND the wheel, the wipers squeaking away the downpour, and Sam was thinking about the news they’d received. A bigger picture was beginning to form.

“I think we’re onto something with all this regeneration talk. Cattafi might have been harvesting cells to use in his experiments. That explains him removing ejaculate and blood from the cadavers. Not terribly ethical, but not unheard of. Especially if he was trying to prove a theory—regenerating a cadaver’s cells makes for a convincing presentation.”

“What?” Fletcher asked, cutting off a bike messenger without braking.

“Whoa. You nearly hit that kid.”

“Yeah, well, he shouldn’t have been driving through a red light. Would serve him right.”

“You haven’t heard a thing I just said. What put you in such a foul mood all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s the idea of messing with the dead. I don’t get it.”

He glanced over at Sam. She raised an eyebrow.

“You do know who you’re talking to, right? What I do?”

Fletcher went quiet. The rain pattered harder. His wipers were due for a change; the one on her side left a wide streak in the middle, making her center line of vision blurry. The tension built in the car.

“What is it, Fletch? Spit it out.”

“I mean, what you do, it’s for the greater good. No one likes an autopsy.”

“I beg to differ, but I hear what you’re saying. Go on.”

“I don’t know, the idea of a room full of cadavers, kids cutting them up to learn how they work, and Cattafi, partially undressed near one, messing with the body...ugh.”

“There are some people who find the dead highly erotic.”

“Okay, stop trying to gross me out.”

She laughed. “And some find great peace with the dead. Me, for instance.”

“Peace? Really?”

She nodded. “They don’t exactly talk back, you know. Not out loud, anyway.”

“Hmm. I’ve never asked you why, Sam. Why did you choose pathology over being a regular doctor? You’d have made a great surgeon.” He touched the scar on his neck. She’d given it to him, a month earlier, in the woods near Great Falls, when he’d been shot by a suspect, and nearly bled out. “If you hadn’t been there...”

“But I was.”

“Exactly my point. You could be saving lives, not dissecting them.”

She looked out the window. They were passing through the area of town aptly named Foggy Bottom, one of the oldest in the city. She saw a red door—the home of one of her favorite old haunts, the Red Lion, and the entrance across the way to the Metro. People streamed past in droves, umbrellas up, a dance of the sugarplum fairies in reds and greens and blues and blacks. “My mother said the same thing to me when I was sixteen and told her I wanted to be a pathologist.”

“You knew that early?”

“I’d always known I wanted to go to med school, and I didn’t have any problems with dissection. I was in advanced biology, we did a tour of the morgue, witnessed an autopsy. It was fascinating.”

“But you were only sixteen. Surely you had other interests. Boys, shoes...”

She glanced at him. “Do I strike you as the shoes type?”

He pointed at her feet. “How much did those cost?”

She raised her leg, looked at the supple calfskin Frye boot. Not obscenely expensive, but pricey enough. “Touché.”

He laughed. “So what is it, really?”

She gathered her thoughts, tried to find the right words. It was an odd compulsion, and she appreciated why people had a hard time understanding. “You’ve been in enough autopsies. Have you ever noticed, Fletch, that we’re all the same inside? For the most part, identical little machines that whir day in and day out until something, or someone, bids them to stop?”

“I’ve never really thought about it.”

“Now’s your chance. We are all alike inside. Everything is meant to work together. The placement, the mechanism, the engine, is sheer and utter perfection. So, if we’re all alike inside, then there’s something that makes us individuals. More than our body type, or our face, because once even that’s stripped away, it’s clear the skin is just a machine casing.

“Whether it’s an id, or a soul or a spirit, there’s an ineffable something inside that makes us unique, makes each person who they are. How do we make decisions? Why do some of us go bad, become criminals, murderers? Why are some of us shy, and some outgoing? Loving, hateful? Philanthropists, misers. Why are some brilliant, some average, some subpar?” She flipped her hair off her shoulders. “Maybe I’m looking for the last bits of...it, whatever it is, that makes us who we are. Maybe it’s that I’m curious about what makes the machine stop. Either way, everyone deserves an answer to why their lives ended. It’s my job to find those answers.”