"We'll be as brief as we possibly can," he said. "But this rapist is still out there."

"Don't you dare lay a guilt trip on her. Don't you dare."

We followed Ms. Goodes inside through a marble-tiled foyer. A sweeping staircase to our right echoed the curve of the chandelier dangling overhead. When I heard the chatter of children's voices off to the left, they seemed somewhat incongruous with the formality of the house. I began to wonder where these people kept their messes.

Ms. Goodes sighed, then showed us into a side parlor where Lisa Brandt sat alone. She was tiny but pretty, even now, under these unfortunate circumstances. I had the sense that she was dressed for normality, in jeans and a striped oxford shirt, but it was her bent-over posture – and her eyes – that told more of the story. She obviously didn't know if the pain she was feeling now would ever go away.

Sampson and I introduced ourselves and were invited to sit down. Lisa even forced a polite smile before looking away again.

"Those are beautiful," I said, pointing at a vase of fresh-cut rhododendron on the coffee table between us. It was easy enough to say because it was true, and I honestly didn't know where else to start.

"Oh." She looked at them absently. "Nancy is amazing with all that. She's a real country girl now, a mom. She always wanted to be a mother."

Sampson began gently. "Lisa, I want you to know how sorry we are that this happened to you. I know you've spoken with a lot of people already. We'll try not to repeat the background detail too much. Okay so far?"

Lisa kept her eyes fixed on the corner of the room. "Yes. Thank you."

"Now, we understand you received the necessary prophylaxis but preferred not to provide any physical evidence in your exam at the hospital. Also, that you're choosing for the time being not to give any description of the man who committed the crime against you. Is that correct?"

"Not now, and not ever," she said. Her head shook slightly back and forth, like a tiny no repeated over and over.

"You're not under any obligation to talk," I assured her. "And we're not here to get any information that you don't want to give."

"With all that in mind," Sampson went on, "we have some assumptions that we're working with. First, that your attacker was not someone you knew. And second, that he threatened you in some way, to keep you from identifying him or talking about him. Lisa, are you comfortable telling us whether or not that's accurate?"

She went very still. I tried to gauge her face and body language but saw nothing. She didn't respond to Sampson's question, so I tried a different angle.

"Is there anything you've thought about since you spoke with the detectives earlier? Anything you'd like to add?"

"Even a small detail might aid in the investigation," Sampson said, "and catch this rapist."

"I don't want any investigation of what happened to me," she blurted. "Isn't that my choice?"

"I'm afraid it's not," Sampson said in the softest voice I'd ever heard out of him.

"Why not?" It came out of Lisa more as a desperate plea than a question.

I tried to choose my words carefully. "We're fairly certain that what happened to you wasn't an isolated incident, Lisa. There have been other women -"

At that, she came undone. A choking sob escaped her, letting loose everything behind it. Then Lisa Brandt doubled over onto her lap, sobbing with her hands clutched tightly over her mouth.

"I'm sorry," she said in a moan. "I can't do this. I can't. I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

Ms. Goodes rushed back into the room then. She must have been listening just outside the door. She knelt in front of Lisa and put her arms around her friend, whispering reassurances.

"I'm sorry," Lisa Brandt got out again.

"Nothing to be sorry for, sweetheart. Nothing at all. Just let it out, that's it," said Nancy Goodes.

Sampson put a card on the coffee table. "We'll show ourselves out," he said.

Ms. Goodes answered without turning away from her sobbing friend.

"Just go. Please don't come back here. Leave Lisa alone. Go."

Chapter 55

THE BUTCHER WAS ON A JOB – a hit, a six-figure one. Among other things, he was trying to keep his mind off of John Maggione and the pain he wanted to cause him. He was observing an older well-dressed man with a young girl draped on his arm. A "bird," as they had called them here in London at one time.

He was probably sixty; she could be twenty-five at most. Curious couple. Eye-catching, which could be a problem for him.

The Butcher watched them as they stood in front of the tony Claridges Hotel waiting for the man's private car to pull up. It did so, just as it had the previous evening and then again around ten o'clock that morning.

No serious mistakes so far by the couple. Nothing for him to pounce on.

The driver of the private car was a bodyguard, and he was carrying. He was also decent enough at what he did.

There was only one problem for the bodyguard – the girl obviously didn't want him around. She'd tried, unsuccessfully, to have the older man ditch the driver the night before, when they had attended some kind of formal affair at the Saatchi Gallery.

Well, he would just have to see what developed today. The Butcher pulled out a few cars behind the gleaming black Mercedes CL65. The Merc was fast, more than six hundred horsepower, but a hell of a lot of good that would do them on the crowded streets of London.

He was a little paranoid about working again, and with pretty good reason, but he'd gotten the job through a solid contact in the Boston area. He trusted the guy, at least as far as he could throw him. And he needed the six-figure payday.

A possible break finally came on Long Acre near the Covent Garden underground station. The girl jumped out of the car at a stoplight, started to walk off – and the older man got out as well.

Michael Sullivan pulled over to the curb immediately, and he simply abandoned his car. The rental could never be traced back to him anyway. The move was a classic in that most people wouldn't even think of doing it, but he couldn't have cared less about just leaving the car in the middle of London. The car was of no consequence.

He figured the driver-bodyguard wouldn't do the same with the two-hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes, and that he had several minutes before the guy caught up with them again.

The streets around the Covent Garden Piazza were densely packed with pedestrians, and he could see the couple, their heads bobbing, laughing, probably about their "escape" from the bodyguard. He followed them down James Street. They continued to laugh and talk, with not a care in the world.

Big, big mistake.

He could see a glass-roof-covered market up ahead. And a crowd gathered around street performers dressed as white marble statues that only moved when someone threw them a coin.

Then, suddenly, he was on top of the couple, and it felt right, so he fired the silenced Beretta – two heart shots.

The girl went down like a throw rug had been pulled out from under her two feet.

He had no idea who she was, who had wanted her dead or why, and he didn't care one way or the other.

"Heart attack! Someone had a heart attack!" he called out as he let the gun drop from his fingertips, turned, and disappeared into the thickening crowd. He headed up Neal Street past a couple of pubs with Victorian exteriors and found his abandoned car right where he left it. What a nice surprise.

It was safer to stay in London overnight, but then he was on a morning flight back to Washington.

Easy money – like always, or at least how it had been for him before the cock-up in Venice, which he still had to deal with in a major way.