“That’s what we’re thinking, too.”

Baldwin knocked once, hard, then tried the knob. Locked. He drew his weapon, lifted his leg and kicked, hard. Luckily, the dead bolt wasn’t thrown. The door swung open with a crash, the wood splintering from the frame. They filtered into the house carefully. Baldwin’s heart was pounding so hard he could barely hear the others calling out from the lower floors.

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

“Garage is clear.”

Baldwin was in Aden’s bedroom now. Nothing was missing, nothing out of place. The closet held only clothes. He shouted, “Clear,” then went back downstairs.

“We got nothing,” Geroux said. “It’s like he disappeared into thin air.”

Baldwin could hear Goldman in the kitchen giving one of his detectives a major dressing-down. Arlen had obviously slipped out during the power outage. Though there were no open windows and the back door was locked, the front door’s bolt hadn’t been thrown. It was within the realm of possibility that Arlen had simply waited for the perfect moment and slipped out the door unnoticed.

The detective kept insisting that there was no way that could have happened; he and his partner were on the house all night, the only person who’d been in or out was the FBI chick, yesterday, during the storm. Goldman wasn’t hearing any of it.

Baldwin shut his eyes for a minute, both to tune the shouting out and to will his adrenal gland back into submission. He took a deep breath, then another. A thought hit him. Oh, my God. Why hadn’t he considered that before?

‘The basement. We need to look in the basement again.” Goldman cut off his diatribe. “Why? We’ve been through it.”

“Because there’s a tunnel,” Baldwin replied.

The basement was quiet as the grave. Baldwin went first, inching slowly down the stairs. If he was right, and he was suddenly sure he was, Arlen could be most anywhere. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before. He felt the breeze before he saw the opening, smelled the damp, musty air. Old air.

He had a small Maglite in his pocket. He turned it on, splayed the light over the far wall. There. The light spilled into a hole in the wall, a dark entrance to somewhere. The shelving unit was pulled back, the dry wall along with it. In the light, it would have looked like seams in the mud, just what you’d expect from an unfinished basement Baldwin tamped down his anger at the Fairfax crime-scene tech and his own team for missing it. My God, they might have been able to save Kaylie if they had seen this.

He had just turned to signal to Geroux when the shooting started.

He whipped back in a flash, saw Sparrow go down. He trained his weapon on that trajectory, saw Butler fall out of the corner of his eye. He started shooting, moving quickly to the mouth of the tunnel. He butted up against the edge, Geroux took the opposite side. Goldman and his detective had taken cover.

Baldwin started to signal Geroux, but he whipped around into the mouth of the tunnel just as a fresh load of bullets winged through the cool air. Still firing, Geroux took one right in the neck and went down in a heap.

Baldwin squeezed the trigger again and again. The returning shots stopped. There was a gurgling noise coming from about fifteen feet away. He’d hit the shooter. His training took over, he acted to neutralize the threat. Another shot fired, and the gurgling stopped with a strangled sigh.

Quiet. Was that footsteps? No, probably his imagination-his ears were ringing from the shots. Using the flashlight, he scanned the far reaches of the tunnel. Arlen was down, his back to him. He must have been running away when Baldwin or Geroux’s shots hit him. Baldwin kicked the gun out of his hand and knelt to feel for a pulse. He was gone.

There was shouting and screaming now, calls to ambulances, the Fairfax County guys making themselves useful. He felt numb, couldn’t feel his hand. It took both hands to reholster his weapon. He struggled to get his breathing under control. He finally held his breath to stop the ragged jags of air forcing their way into his lungs, and his heart slowed a bit.

That’s when he heard the crying, quiet and faint.

He stumbled past Arlen’s body in the dark, used the small beam of the flashlight to guide him, deeper and deeper. He turned a corner and saw Gretchen on the floor, in a nightgown. Her legs were broken, but she was very much alive.

He gathered the girl in his arms, felt her forehead press into his neck. She was sobbing. He realized he didn’t know whose tears were landing on the front of his shirt-hers, or his.

Fifty-Three

Nashville

10:00 p.m.

Ariadne had made it her business to know where the various covens met When she was part of the ruling council, it was her right, and her duty. As wonderful as Wicca was, there were always abusers, those who sought power over their coven members. There was a very specific code of ethics that governed coven work-taking money was forbidden, as was insisting on a physical culmination of the Great Act to be accepted into the coven. In ceremonies, the Great Act was symbolic-athame plunging into chalice, chalice opening to athame-instead of actual sex. Priests and priestesses couldn’t insist that members worship sky clad-there were any number of rules in place to assure freedom, free will and comfort were always present during ceremonies.

But the ways of man included the sin of power-seeking. Ariadne was the higher authority to whom those abused by the power in their coven appealed. She had a solid working knowledge of where most of the covens in the area practiced, and an even greater antenna for spiritual portals, spots in the wilderness that were especially close to the Goddess.

She’d recognized the place from her dreams as holy ground, both secular and Wicca, a tract of land that had seen the good and the bad, and as such had been imbued with powerful spirits. It was in a private graveyard, on the western edge of Davidson County, down a cow path that led to a clearing off a small two-lane road called McCrory Lane.

Her home was downtown, off Sixteenth Avenue South, just up the street from the area of town known as Music Row. She’d done all the backbreaking restoration herself- tearing out a 1960s avocado-green kitchen, a flimsily paneled den-instead filling the house with white marble and period wainscoting. The walls were painted in rich Easter-egg pastels, edged in white crown molding; the six-paneled doors had crystal doorknobs. The parlor had an original frieze of a chariot race in ancient Rome that she’d restored. She trailed her hand along the chair rail in the hallway as she left, glad that her people didn’t see pride as a sin.

The trip to the graveyard took twenty minutes. Through the Village, past the holiday carnage in Green Hills to Old Hickory. To her right, the open expanse of the Steeplechase fields glowed black in the night. She turned left on Highway 100, the shadowy road winding through the surrounding landscape, rolling hills and protected forests and horse farms, breaking open into civilization at Ens worth High School. She drove through the intersection of Highway 100 and Old Harding, dismayed to see stores of modern convenience squatting on newly shriven land, then the road grew dark again.