"Put down your weapon, or I'll shoot!" Thorwald said firmly.

  "I really don't believe you will," Greer said. "I know you've never shot anything except targets at Quantico, Linda. You've never killed anybody in your life, especially in cold blood. I don't think you've got it in you."

  "But I do."

  Lacey Brennan, gun in hand, rose from where she'd apparently been crouching, two rows behind Greer and a little to his right. With people popping up from all over, this whole thing resembled a farce – or it would, if somebody wasn't about to die.

  At the sound of Lacey's voice, Greer couldn't stop himself from looking toward her for an instant. And it was in that moment that Lacey fired and blew the top of his head off.

  That's the thing about head shots. More often than not, the motor synapses stop working instantly. Greer fell against a car, then slid to the ground without firing a shot. He died with a look of surprise on his face.

  I was pretty surprised myself.

I called 911, identified myself, and told them to send some black-and-whites and an ambulance. I asked the dispatcher to be sure to tell the responding officers that the shooter was already in custody.

  Lacey heard me. She managed a smile of sorts. "Is that what I am, Stan? In custody?"

  "I just said that so the uniforms wouldn't arrive thinking there was an armed suspect lurking around. That makes them nervous, and nervous cops sometimes shoot first and ask questions later."

  "Yeah, I think I heard that, someplace," she said.

  "Better give me your gun, though."

  "Sure. Here." She handed me the compact Walther she'd just used to shoot Greer.

  "Nice piece," I said.

  "It's mine, not the department's. I had to turn in my duty weapon when I went on leave. But I used to carry that for backup."

  "I don't mean this the way it sounds," I said, "but what are you doing here?"

  She jerked a thumb toward Thorwald, who was leaning against a nearby car, arms folded. "You said to keep an eye on her, so I did."

  Thorwald gave me a tired smile. "Were you actually having me followed, Sergeant?"

  "Yeah, sorry about that," I said. "Until about three minutes ago, I thought you were one of the bad guys."

  I found out later that the goblin words for "bitch" and "faggot" – neither of which is a nice thing to call somebody – sound very similar. Ivan the ogre had mistranslated, so whenever Wilson had referred to "our Bureau colleague", I'd assumed he meant Thorwald

  "The Bureau thought the same thing about Greer, and has for a while now," she said. "That's why they assigned me as his partner – to keep an eye on him, and wait for him to slip up – which he finally did, a few minutes ago."

  I could hear sirens now.

  "I think Greer was suspicious of me, too, after a while," Thorwald said. "I wanted to let you know that he shouldn't be trusted with sensitive information, but if I had a private conversation with you, or asked you out to lunch alone, he'd know something was up."

  "Why didn't you just call me?" I said.

  "I don't trust the phones," she said. "The Church is believed to have some people at NSA, the National Security Agency. They can pull any conversation they want out of the air and listen to it."

  "Well," I said, "being paranoid doesn't mean that they're not really out to get you."

  "For sure," she said. "That's why I invited you to my room that morning. It was the only plausible excuse to be alone with you that Greer would accept."

  The sirens were closer. The police cars and ambulance would be here any minute now.

  "Wait a second," I said. "That's why you invited me to your room – to warn me about Greer? Not for the 'hard fucking' you were talking about?"

  "Well," Thorwald said with a toss of her head, "the two weren't mutually exclusive, I suppose."

  "Is that what you really had in mind – both a warning about Greer and sex?"

  The smile she gave me would have made Mona Lisa envious. "I guess we'll never know, will we?"

You know how sometimes you're asleep, and you dream that you've just woken up? That happens to me, sometimes.

  I opened my eyes and slowly came awake – or thought I did. The room around me was unfamiliar, and the pale light coming in through the window had that translucent quality you sometimes find in dreams. Awake or asleep, I felt good – I knew that. In fact, I couldn't stop my face from growing a smile so wide I could've been running for public office.

  From my left, a woman's voice said, "That's the kind of grin I associate with the Cheshire Cat – the morning after he got his rocks off, well and truly."

  Lacey Brennan propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at me, her blonde hair disarrayed in what my partner Karl, who is known to be crude, would call a "freshly fucked look".

  "Where am I?" I asked.

  "My place. It's your first visit – who knows, maybe it won't be your last."

  "If this is a dream, I've had something like it before," I said. "But it never seemed this real."

  "Really?" Lacey gave me a wicked grin, all traces of the monster gone from her blue eyes. "You used to dream about fucking me, Stan?"

  I nodded. "Oh, yeah. Often. But I never had the nerve to try it in real life."

  "Until last night, you mean."

  "Is that what I did last night? Put the moves on you – and it worked?"

  "Don't you remember? You must've had more champagne than I thought. Although, come to think of it, I had quite a bit myself."

  "Maybe that's what accounts for my success. We were drinking champagne, huh? Must've been celebrating something."

  "'Course we were," Lacey said. "This nasty bastard of a case is finally over, and we all came out of it more or less intact. So we celebrated – the three of us. With champagne and… other things."