The young woman looked at the cuff and then back up at Harvath. “What is it?”

He peeled off two more hundreds and held all four bills out for her. “You and Agnes stay off the street until Detective Cordero and I catch this guy. Deal?”

The wheels were turning in the young woman’s head. She was undoubtedly doing some sort of calculation and it wasn’t about how many holy candles she and her pal could purchase with that kind of money. Finally, she replied, “Deal.”

After tucking the money away, Brittany removed the cuff and placed it into the handkerchief Harvath had retrieved from his jacket.

He then let her rejoin her friend, while Cordero phoned her department to make sure they had the young woman’s complete arrest record in the system.

Satisfied, Cordero asked the ladies for a few more details, including contact information, and then gave each of them her business card along with her cell phone number on the back. With that, the patrol officers were asked to drive the women back to South Boston.

“You’re definitely not a cop,” the detective said to Harvath, as they watched the cruiser pull away from the curb and head toward Southie.

“Why’s that?”

“Because outside of a drug buy, no one hands over that kind of cash for something the law empowers them to take.”

Harvath shrugged. “Just because something is legal, doesn’t always mean it’s the right thing to do. Trying to keep those kids off the street for a couple of days was the right thing to do.”

Cordero shook her head. “They’re junkies. They’re going to burn through your four hundred dollars in the blink of an eye. But hey, if it buys you a good night’s sleep.”

Having seen what he had of this killer, Harvath doubted he was going to be able to sleep well anytime soon. Even if the money kept Brittany and Agnes off the street for only one night, it would be worth it.

Though he didn’t yet have physical proof that the woman pulled from the Charles River had been killed by the same person as Claire Marcourt and Herman Penning, his gut told him that he was right on the money. It also told him something else. The killer was losing control.

CHAPTER 32

FORT BELVOIR

VIRGINIA

Bob McGee had spent the better part of his career engaging in risky operations, but the minute Lydia Ryan explained her plan, he told her it was off-the-charts stupid. It was one thing to screw up and have Phil Durkin triangulate on them that way; it was something entirely different to openly invite him to come kill them, and that’s what he had felt Ryan was doing.

Just as the porch light came on, and just in case she hadn’t internalized it the last one hundred times he had said it, he stated, “This is going to go down as the mother of all bad ideas.”

“You’re overestimating your prowess in this category,” she replied as someone inside unlocked the door.

“Like hell I am” was the last remark McGee made before the door opened. He had decided to stand behind Ryan not so much because he didn’t want to appear imposing, but because if the person on the other side was armed and the rounds began flying, Ryan would suffer the fate she so rightly deserved for this idea and function as his bullet sponge while he took off running. He turned out to be wrong, but not about the being armed part.

Colonel Brenda Durkin had opened the door with her Beretta M9 pistol just out of view. One of the last people she ever expected to see on her doorstep, much less in the middle of the night in a bathrobe, was Lydia Ryan. “What in God’s name are you doing here?”

“We’re in trouble. Can we come in?”

The woman looked at the man standing behind Ryan as if deciding what to do, and then stood back and opened the door the rest of the way. “Of course you can.”

They sat in the kitchen, where the closest thing to coffee Durkin had to offer her guests was Diet Coke. Both Ryan and McGee accepted. Grabbing three bottles out of the fridge, she brought them over to the table and sat down.

“When I told you if there was anything I could ever do for you,” said Durkin, “I didn’t actually think you’d show up at the house. I figured maybe you’d call or send an email.”

“I know,” Ryan replied, opening her Coke. “I would never have come like this if it wasn’t serious.”

“Wait a second,” McGee interrupted. “You two actually know each other?”

Durkin looked at Ryan before responding. “I needed to make sense of my marriage, or what was left of it at the time. The only way I could do that was to meet Lydia and have her tell me, face-to-face, that nothing had happened between her and Phil. She was kind enough to do so.”

“But you still left him.”

“Our marriage had been over for a long time. Would it have been easier to end it if Phil had been having an affair? Probably. That’s why I had wanted to meet Lydia. As soon as I saw her, I was convinced they’d been having an affair. I mean, look at her.”

“Yeah,” Ryan replied, extending a clump of her ruffled hair and tugging on the lapel of her dirty robe. “Look at me.”

Durkin smiled. “Then we sat down and started talking. I wanted to believe she was sleeping with Phil because then I could blame him for everything, walk away, and never have to acknowledge my role in the fact that our marriage collapsed.”

“I threw a wrench in that plan, though, didn’t I?”

“You did. In fact, you caused me to take a deep, hard look not only at my marriage, but myself. Getting divorced was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, but it was the right thing. Phil Durkin is a colossal asshole. Had Dante known that son of a bitch he would have invented a whole other circle of hell for him.”

“So what you’re saying,” McGee replied with a grin, “is that you’ve moved on. It’s all behind you at this point.”

Brenda Durkin laughed. “I guess that’s the Scottish in me. We can hold a grudge like nobody’s business.”

“If it’s any consolation, I agree with you. Not about the grudge, but about your ex being a colossal asshole. I told Lydia she should have dumped him in a shallow grave. In fact, I even offered to dig it.”

“I came close to digging one for him many times myself, but in the end, he dug his own. That’s the way it should be.”

McGee and Ryan nodded. Brenda Durkin was right.

“So why don’t you tell me why you’re here,” the Colonel said, and with that, Ryan filled her in on their story.

They talked until just before dawn. It was agreed that if they were going to hole up in her house, Brenda Durkin needed to act as if nothing had changed. That meant not missing her morning group run and not calling in sick to her position at the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command. The one thing she decided to do differently was to park her car in the driveway so that McGee’s 4Runner could be kept out of sight in her garage.

Ryan tried to grab a couple of hours of sleep, but it came in fits and starts. When she finally gave up and came downstairs to the kitchen, she found McGee had had about as much luck as she had. He was sitting at the table with a Diet Coke, a café-au-lait mug full of Lucky Charms, and the television tuned to some Animal Planet program.

“Just once, I’d like to see the little guy at the back of the herd kick the lion’s teeth in,” he said as Ryan got a Diet Coke for herself and sat down next to him.

“Any word about what happened last night?”

McGee picked up the remote and clicked back over to one of the local news channels. “Not really. There was a brief mention of a car fire, but that was it. My guess is that local law enforcement kept the press from getting too close and didn’t give them much in the way of details.”

“Which means they probably don’t have much themselves.”