“Don’t tell me. Blond. Three carefully placed stab wounds. Bad haircut.”

“Unfortunately, yeah,” Jacobs said.

“And you’re saying they were found at the exact same time?”

“That’s the freaky little kicker to the whole thing. The two vics were handcuffed together in the water. Whatever that means.”

I took a deep breath. It meant that our two Georgetown killers were back in business together. More than ever, from the sound of it.

I heard Huizenga’s chair push back, and some jangling keys. “Does Valente already know?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“Call him. I’ll notify the chief. And tell whoever’s on the scene not to touch a damn thing.”

When Jacobs came out, she glared at me but kept moving. Ten minutes later, all off-duty Major Case Squad personnel had been called in, and the office was empty. Except for me, of course. I was left back to answer the phones and twiddle my thumbs, like some kind of lackey in a cage. Again.

I really wasn’t sure how much more of this I could stand.

CHAPTER

80

AS SOON AS I HAD THE OFFICE TO MYSELF, I PUT IN A CALL TO BREE.

I knew she was working a gang shooting over at the Garfield Terrace projects in Northwest. She’d left the house early that morning when the call came in. Hopefully, she’d be wrapping up soon and could go take a look at the scene on Roosevelt Island—or at least, get a little closer to it than my radioactive ass was ever going to get.

“I’ve still got about an hour to go here,” she told me. “But I can drive by after that, if it helps.”

“Anything helps,” I said. I was determined to track this case, one way or another. “See if you can find Errico Valente. He’ll keep you in the loop, if anyone will.”

Working the same homicide—much less several of them—was something Bree and I had set out to avoid when we got married. It only made family life that much harder, in terms of being around for the kids and keeping things running smoothly at home. But somewhere along the way, between the Ava situation, and Ron Guidice, and now my own troubles at work, the rules of the game had shifted.

And for better or worse, we make a pretty good team. I like working with her.

After that, I spent the next few hours alone on the desk, taking calls and mulling over everything I knew about these cases.

Whatever our killers were getting out of their double homicides, it was clearly working for them. Two handcuffed victims in the river was a step up from a body dump in Rock Creek Park. It was staged. They were getting into it now.

And staged seemed like the right word. It was as if they were putting on some kind of show with all of this. For us? For each other? For the world?

Who knew? It was all just questions in a vacuum, while I hung there on the desk, answering call after call.

Finally, around midafternoon, I heard back from Bree.

“I just got here,” she said. “And I’m already back at the perimeter. D’Auria tagged me out before I could even get a look at the bodies.”

“Did you tell him you’ve got a prior connection to the case?”

“He wasn’t having it,” she said. “They’ve got this place tied down tight.”

“What about Valente?” I asked.

“He’s down by the water. I’m going to hang out a little and see if he comes up for air, but I’ve got to be at the ME’s office before five, and then…” Bree’s voice trailed off. “Oh, for crap’s sake,” she said then. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“What is it?” I asked. I hated getting all of this secondhand.

“It’s Ron Guidice. He’s over on the line with the other reporters. Son of a bitch just took my picture,” she said.

My face started burning, just thinking about it. Of course he was there. He was everywhere these days.

“Don’t give him the satisfaction of a response,” I said. “That’s exactly what he wants.”

“I’d like to wrap that camera strap around his throat.”

“Believe me, I know how you feel,” I said. “But don’t do it, Bree. Ignore him.”

I heard her take a deep breath. I did the same.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “I’ll let him live. But listen, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you if I get anything off of Valente. Love you.”

“You too,” I said, and then she was gone.

Usually, I can read Bree pretty well. Not this time. After we hung up, I sat there wondering if she’d told me what I needed to hear, or if she really was going to give Guidice some distance. She hated the guy just as much as I did.

For all I knew, she’d already punched his lights out before I’d even taken my next call.

CHAPTER

81

JOHN SAMPSON WAS IN HIS CAR WHEN HE GOT BREE’S TEXT.

Eyes on Guidice. Go now if u can.

They’d been waiting for this opportunity. Instead of continuing down Mass Ave. to the police training he was supposed to hit that day, he took a hard right on K Street and headed off to Virginia instead.

Accurint records showed Ron Guidice’s name on a house rental in Reston for the last three years. The place belonged to a developer out of Atlanta, with a management company based in DC, but none of those people had anything interesting to say about their tenant. Guidice had decent credit, paid his rent on time, and looked normal on paper.

The house itself was surprisingly suburban, for lack of a better word. It was a simple little Cape, painted an ugly light blue, in the middle of a tightly packed neighborhood, Sampson saw as he drove in. It wasn’t nearly the hole in the ground you might expect a bottom-feeder like Guidice to crawl out of.

At the front door, he rang the bell just in case. When no one answered, Sampson stepped off the low porch and did a quick half lap around to the back. There was no car in the driveway, no garage, either. Just a nonexistent scrub of fenced-in backyard.

If there was any concern at all, it was the lack of deadbolts on Guidice’s doors. There weren’t even shades or curtains on the windows. Going by first impressions, it didn’t seem like the guy had anything to hide. But there was one way to find out.

Sampson slipped the license out of his wallet and easily carded his way past the cheap lock on the back door.

From there, it didn’t take long to case out the first floor. Empty seemed to be the operative word. There wasn’t much of anything in the fridge, and just a single recliner next to a folding TV table in the living room. A stack of newspapers by the front door went back about three weeks—Post, New York Times, and Al-Sabah, for whatever that was worth.

He continued upstairs and found a simple layout of three small bedrooms. One was completely empty. One had a futon on the floor, with a few piles of folded clothes against the wall.

The third bedroom seemed to be Guidice’s makeshift office. There was a card table piled with Pendaflex files, and a cheap Lexmark printer on the floor. The files didn’t seem to have much rhyme or reason. There were clippings about everything from police brutality to financial planning, car engine repair, and even the White House vegetable garden.

The whole place was kind of depressing, actually. It was pretty easy to imagine Guidice living out his pathetic nights here, working up his conspiracy theories, and writing his shitty little blog.

Still, Sampson had been hoping for something he could run with. He took another twenty minutes or so, checking the closets, the floorboards, and the air vents, just in case. But there was nothing.

Back outside, he was halfway to his car when he spotted one of the neighbors. He was an older man in golf pastels, wheeling his garbage out to the curb. It seemed worth a shot, anyway. Sampson stopped to take an empty interoffice envelope off his backseat, and headed over.