The Maze

"I lied to Brady. I'm a glory hound-even if it's just a crumb, I'm happy. I love praise. Who doesn't?"

"But that's not even part of why you went."

"All right, Sherlock. I wanted to be in at the kill. I wanted to see this guy. If I hadn't seen him, then it would never be finished in my mind. Too, this was your first day. It was important for you to see how I work, how I deal with local cops. Okay, it was a bit of a show. I think I deserved it. You're new. You haven't seen any disappointments yet, you haven't lived through the endless frustration, the wrong turns our unit has suffered since the first murders in Des Moines. You didn't hear all the crap we got about the profile being wrong. All you saw was the victory dance. This has been only the third real score I've gotten since the FBI started the unit up.

"But I can't ever forget that there was Des Moines and St. Louis and twelve people died because we didn't figure things out quickly enough. Of course Chicago was the key, since that was his focus. As soon as I realized that the neighbors knew one another and watched out for one another, and there hadn't been any strangers at the Lansky house, then I knew our guy lived there. He had to. There wasn't any other answer."

Savich added in a tired voice, "You did just fine, Sherlock."

For the first time in years, she felt something positive, something that made her feel really good wash through her. "Thanks," she said, and stretched out in her seat. "What if I hadn't known the answer when you asked me to explain it?"

"Oh, it was easy to see that you did know. You were about to burst out of your skin. You looked about ready to fly. Yeah, you really did fine."

"Will you tell me about your first big score sometime? Maybe even the second one?"

She thought he must be asleep. Then he said in a slow, slurred voice, "Her name was Joyce Hendricks. She was seventeen and I was fifteen. I'd never seen real live breasts before. She was something. All the guys thought I was the stud of the high school, for at least three days."

She laughed. "Where is Joyce now? "She's a big-time tax accountant in New York We exchange Christmas cards," he mumbled, just before he drifted off to sleep.

7

LACEY MOVED A WEEK LATER into a quite lovely two-bedroom town house in Georgetown on the corner of Cranford Street and Madison. She had four glasses, two cups, a bed, one set of white sheets, three towels, all different, a microwave, and half a dozen hangers. It was all she'd brought with her from California. She'd given the rest of her stuff to a homeless shelter in San Francisco. When she'd told Savich she didn't have much in storage, she hadn't been exaggerating.

No matter.

The first thing she did was change the locks and install dead bolts and chains. Then she hung up her two dresses, two pairs of jeans, and two pairs of slacks on her hangers. She was whistling, thinking about MacDougal and how she'd miss him. He was on the fifth floor, working in the National Security Division. He was big-time into counterterrorism. It had been his goal, he'd told her, since a close friend of his had been blown out of the sky on the doomed Pan Am Flight 103 that exploded over Lockerbie in the late eighties. He'd just gotten his first big assignment. He would go to Saudi Arabia because of a terrorist bombing that had killed at least fifteen American soldiers the previous week.

"I'm outta here, Sherlock," he'd said, grabbed her, and given her a big hug. "They're giving me a chance. Just like Savich gave you. Hey, you really did well with that guy in Chicago."

"The Toaster."

"Yeah. What a moniker. Trust the media to trivialize murder by making it funny. Anything big since then?"

"No, but it's been less than a week. Savich made me take three days off to find an apartment. Listen, no impulsive stuff out of you, okay? You take care of yourself, Mac. Don't go off on a tear just because you're FBI now and think you're invincible."

"This is just training for me, Sherlock. Nothing more. Hey, you're good little-sister material."

"We're the same age."

"Nah, with those skinny little arms of yours, you're a little sister."

He was anxious to be gone. He was bouncing his foot and shifting from one leg to the other. She gave him one more hug. "Send me a postcard with lots of sand on it."

He gave her a salute and was off, whistling, just as she was now, his footsteps fast and solid down the short drive in front of her town house. He turned suddenly and called back, "I hear that Savich is big into country-and-western music. I hear he loves to sing the stuff, that he knows all the words to every song ever written. It can't hurt to brownnose."