"Thank you for the tip," I said dryly.

"Be sure to wear thick clothing."

"Huh?" His eyes, blacked out by sunglasses, scanned mirrors as other cars crept past.

"Paint bullets hurt."

"I don't plan on getting hit."

"I don't know anyone who plans on it."

"When did you get in?" he asked me.

"Last night."

Marino slid a pack of cigarettes from his visor.

"You been told much?"

"I've looked at a few things. Apparently the detectives from North Carolina are bringing in most of the case records this morning."

"It's Gault. It's gotta be."

"Certainly there are parallels," I said cautiously. Knocking out a Marlboro, he clamped it between his lips.

"I'm going to nail that goddam son of a bitch if I have to go to hell to find him."

"If you find out he's in hell, I wish you'd just leave him there," I said.

"Are you free for lunch?"

"As long as you're buying."

"I always buy." I stated a fact.

"And you always should." He slipped the car into drive.

"You're a goddam doctor."

I trotted and walked to the track, cut across it and let myself into the back of the gym. Inside the locker room three young, fit women in various stages of nudity glanced at me as I walked in.

"Good morning, ma'am," they said in unison, instantly identifying themselves.

Drug Enforcement Administration agents were notorious around the Academy for their annoyingly chivalrous greetings. I self-consciously began taking off wet clothes, having never grown accustomed to the rather male militaristic attitude here, where women did not think twice about chatting or showing off their bruises with nothing on but the lights. Clutching a towel tightly, I hurried to the showers. I had just turned on the water when a pair of familiar green eyes peeked around the plastic curtain, startling me. The soap shot out of my hands and skidded across the tile floor, stopping near my niece's muddy Nikes.

"Lucy, can we chat after I get out?" I yanked the curtain shut.

"Geez, Len just about killed me this morning," she said happily as she booted the soap back into the stall.

"It was great. Next time we run the Yellow Brick Road I'll ask him if you can come."

"No, thank you." I massaged shampoo into my hair.

"I have no desire for torn ligaments and broken bones."

"Well, you really should run it once. Aunt Kay. It's a rite of passage up here."

"Not for me it isn't."

Lucy was silent for a moment, then uncertain when she said, "I need to ask you something."

Rinsing my hair and pushing it out of my eyes, I gathered the curtain and looked out. My niece was standing back from the stall, filthy and sweaty from head to toe, blood smudging her gray FBI T-shirt. At twenty-one, she was about to graduate from the University of Virginia, her face honed into a beautiful sharpness, her short auburn hair brightened by the sun. I remembered when her hair was long and red, when she wore braces and was fat.

"They want me to come back after graduation," she said.

"Mr. Wesley's written a proposal and there's a good chance the Feds will approve."

"What's your question?" Ambivalence kicked in hard again.

"I just wondered what you thought about it."

"You know there's a hiring freeze."

Lucy looked closely at me, trying to read information I did not want her to have.

"I couldn't be a new agent straight out of college anyway," she said.

"The point is to get me into ERF

now, maybe through a grant. As for what I'll do after that"-she shrugged" who knows? "

ERF was the Bureau's recently built Engineering Research Facility, an austere complex on the same grounds as the Academy. The workings within were classified, and it chagrined me a little that I was the chief medical examiner of Virginia, the consulting forensic pathologist for the Bureau's Investigative Support Unit, and had never been cleared to enter hallways my young niece passed through every day.

Lucy took off her running shoes and shorts, and pulled her shirt and sports bra over her head.

"We'll continue this conversation later," I said as I stepped out of the shower and she stepped in.

"Ouch!" she complained as spray hit her injuries.

"Use lots of soap and water. How did you do that to your hand?"

"I slipped coming down a bank and the rope got me."

"We really should put some alcohol on that."

"No way."

"What time will you leave ERF?"

"I don't know. Depends."

"I'll see you before I head back to Richmond," I promised as I returned to the lockers and began drying my hair. Scarcely a minute later, Lucy, not given to modesty either, trotted past me wearing nothing but the Breitling watch I'd given her for her birthday.

"Shit!" she said under her breath as she began yanking on her clothes.

"You wouldn't believe everything I've got to do today. Repartition the hard disk, reload the whole thing because I keep running out of space, allocate more, change a bunch of files. I just hope we don't have any more hardware problems." She complained on unconvincingly. Lucy loved every minute of what she did every day.

"I saw Marino when I was out running. He's up for the week," I said.

"Ask him if he wants to do some shooting." She tossed her running shoes inside her locker and shut the door with an enthusiastic clang.

"I have a feeling he'll be doing plenty of that." My words followed her out as half a dozen more DEA agents walked in, dressed in black.

"Good morning, ma'am." Laces whipped against leather as they took off their boots.

By the time I was dressed and had dropped my gym bag back in my room, it was quarter past nine and I was late.

Leaving through two sets of security doors, I hurried down three flights of stairs, boarded the elevator in the gun-cleaning room, and descended sixty feet into the Academy's lower level, where I routinely waded through hell.

Inside the conference room, nine police investigators, FBI profilers, and a VI CAP analyst sat at a long oak table. I pulled out a chair next to Marino as comments caromed around the room.

"This guy knows a hell of a lot about forensic evidence."

"And anybody who's served time does."

"What's important is he's extremely comfortable with this type of behavior."

"That suggests to me he's never served time."

I added my file to other case material going around the room and whispered to one of the profilers that I wanted a photocopy of Emily Steiner's diary.

"Yeah, well, I disagree," Marino said.

"The fact someone's done time don't mean he fears he's going to do time again."

"Most people would fear it-you know, the proverbial cat on the hot stove."

"Gault ain't most people. He likes hot stoves." I was passed a stack of laser prints of the Steiners' ranch-style house. In back, a first-floor window had been pried open, and through it the assailant had entered a small laundry room of white linoleum and blue-checked walls.

"If we consider the neighborhood, the family, the victim herself, then Gault's getting bolder."

I followed a carpeted hallway into the master bedroom, where the decor was pastel prints of tiny bouquets of violets and loose flying balloons. I counted six pillows on the canopied bed and several more on a closet shelf.

"We're talking about a real small window of vulnerability here." The bedroom with its little girl decor belonged to Emily's mother, Denesa. According to her police statement, she had awakened at gunpoint around two a. m.

"He may be taunting us."

"It wouldn't be the first time."

Mrs. Steiner described her attacker as of medium height and build.

Because he was wearing gloves, a mask, long pants, and a jacket, she was uncertain about race. He gagged and bound her with blaze orange duct tape and put her in the closet. Then he went down the hall to Emily's room, where he snatched her from her bed and disappeared with her in the dark early morning.