Phyllis responded quickly, saying, "No doubt there could be. But shouldn't we focus on the one that's not at all innocent, Charles?"

"I… I can't believe this," Wardell stammered. "Jason Barnes is a fine and loyal agent. He has no motive, and… and I… I won't sit here… and… and let you people… let you lynch him… and…"

His convoluted syntax aside, I actually admired Mr. Warden's effort to cover Barnes's ass. In a ruminative moment it struck me that were it my gilded ass up in the air, I shared no tribal loyalties with anyone in this room, and nobody was going to rush to my defense. I glanced at Phyllis, but she appeared to be preoccupied staring down Mr. Wardell. I looked at Jennie, and she nodded and smiled. She was really nice. I smiled back.

I really needed to make a few friends. If we didn't start making progress, pronto, this thing would turn ugly, and I was the lowest-ranking person on this team. As a rule of thumb in Washington, it's always lonelier at the bottom than the top.

Anyway, before it turned really pissy Director Townsend asserted himself and informed Mr. Wardell, "Nobody's lynching Jason Barnes." Everybody nodded-there were no hasty lynchers in this room.

After a moment Townsend emphasized, "Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. Everything I've heard is circumstantial." Again, everybody nodded and a modicum of equanimity was restored. He then looked around and asked, without even a hint of irony, "Can anybody tell me what we know about this Jason Barnes?"

Jennie-on-the-spot was apparently prepared for this pointed question and she swiftly and efficiently recounted the observations we had picked up at Jason's home, his personal quirks and habits, and so forth. Wisely, she did not reveal or even imply that Jason was an exact match for the type of compulsive, organized killer we were looking for, mollifying Mr. Wardell, for the moment. She reached down to her briefcase and said, "I made copies of his Secret Service personnel file. Why don't I distribute them?"

She walked around the table, dropping folders, and everybody began leafing through the professional life and times of Jason Barnes. Mr. Wardell was nobody's idiot and refused to retreat into a consent of silence, mumbling things like "steamroll" and "rush to judgment," and whatever.

Like prison records, apparently, the longer you serve, the thicker the book. With only two years in His Majesty's Service, the info on Barnes was sparse, factual, and not all that illustrative, or even enlightening-Caucasian, male, age, academic degrees, height, weight, and so on. Also included inside the folder were the annual ratings from his boss, Mr. Kinney, which I took a moment to examine. They were, as he had indicated, universally exceptional.

Interestingly, because of his Marine service and "remarkable potential," Jason had bypassed the traditional initial stint of investigative duties and been assigned straight to protection details. He had twice won the highly coveted Agent of the Month award. Also there were commendatory letters from various administration personages complimenting the agent's extraordinary work and diligence on a trip to California and another to some African country

On paper, this guy was so conscientious, professional, and shit-hot He didn't even need a bulletproof vest.

I took a moment to study his photo. Jason Barnes was fairly good-looking, actually-high cheekbones, smooth complexion, thin lips, and eyes that were deepset and light blue, or possibly gray. His hair was brown and short, with every strand in place, and I wondered if he had AstroTurf in his DNA. Even his eyebrows looked plucked and neatly combed.

On the surface, this was a guy who could get his share of the ladies into the sack. But attractive bone structure aside, something about him didn't sit right. He was too well-groomed, and as a result, a little strange-looking. In a well-lit room, women with less than five beers in them would look carefully at Jason Barnes and take a pass.

Sounding surprised and distressed, it was Mrs. Hooper who broke the studious silence. She held Barnes's photo aloft. "I know this guy From Belknap's house." She unhappily added, "I've spoken to him a few times."

I mentioned, "And I hope he remembers them as warm and pleasant conversations"

She stared at me like I was weird.

But seriously, I-actually, we all-needed to open our minds a bit. With only suggestive evidence, with no scintilla of anything substantive, we had slipped the noose around this poor schnook's neck. The more circumstantial the case, the more somebody needs to tamp the breaks and sniff for the bullshit. I'm good at dubious.

In truth, Jason Barnes had led an honorable, in fact an exemplary life-military college, three years as a Jarhead, Secret Service-all in all, a life dedicated to the trinity of God, country, and family Also, crime originates in the mind, and what was missing here was the why-as in, why would this gilded paragon of red-blooded American goodness become a homicidal maniac?

Or was there another side to Jason Barnes, a shred or shard burrowed so deeply that his supervisors, peers, and a shrink entirely missed it? Was he a split personality, half Mr. Goodbar and half Simon LaGreedy? As a member of the Secret Service, Jason had surely been apprised of the bounty on his boss's head-all that cash, for whoever had big enough brass balls to collect it. Possibly. However, nothing in his life pattern suggested money was the flame that lit his wick.

Of course, people change. Daily proximity to all that power and money can wear on the soul, the mind, and the spirit. The poor schlep gets up in the morning, drives his crapped-out Mazda to the manor house, and then squats in a cramped and dreary subterranean cell, through the cameras observing the Lord and Mistress upstairs entertaining the glitterati, gleaming Mercedeses stacked out front, people in tuxes and evening gowns guzzling the bubbly, trading political fixes, and plunking $50K checks into the coffers of the Grand Old Party.

Or had Jason Barnes experienced some spastic metamorphosis? Some galvanizing revelation that sent him caterwauling into a homicidal rage?

I mentally ran his life backward. His father was a judge, and had in all likelihood filled his son's head and heart with lofty notions about equality and justice. He was raised in Richmond, a bastion of southern culture, largely bypassed by the carpetbaggers, which was both a good and a bad thing. Having once spent a few weeks in Richmond on a case, I recalled it as one of those cities with a quaint, almost small-town feel and insular, tight-knit neighborhoods. Being a prominent judge's child could not have been easy for little Jason Barnes. Army bases have that same close-knit aura, and as a colonel's kid, I remembered the way other kids and their parents looked at me when I did bad things. Boy, did I remember.

Also, we knew for a fact that Jason was a pious man whose adulthood had been cloistered in monasteries to high ideals and patriotic virtues. We had uncovered his monkish lifestyle, and witnessed his quirky appetite for neatness and order, so the obvious question now seemed to be: How deep and how wide did that go?

In the enlightened words of somebody, it's not the cynics who ignite revolutions, it's the disillusioned idealists. Perhaps Jason Barnes took a long and disquieting peek behind the curtain of the counterfeit reality, at the pulleys and levers behind the spin machine, at the money that greased the machinery, at the full hypocrisy of democracy, so to speak, and maybe… well, maybe Jason decided that somebody needed to clean up this mess. Maybe.

Both motives sounded reasonable: greed, the oldest engine of dirty deeds; and rage, the nectar of history's most appalling crimes. Yet neither rationalized the sheer extravaganza of killing. A pious man on a moral crusade doesn't massacre innocents, and a greedy man has his own reasons to be circumspect in his actions. The contradictory extremes made no sense, unless we were missing some connecting line between the victims. And if Jason's motive was money, why leave that leading note at Belknap's home? And why put Fineberg and Benedict in the morgue?