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“Did he just wink at us?”
    He didn’t leave the terrace, though. Or the picture frame. I could see by the angle of his head that he wasn’t looking straight down to where she fell. He was looking out at his audience, at the people down on the street. He was taking chances that he didn’t need to take.
    In the scheme of things, that was good for us. Maybe that’s how we’d find him, catch this bastard. Because he was reckless—and liked to preen in front of an audience.
    Then I analyzed my own thought: We,
not
they,
were going to get this sonofabitch
.
    And then, the killer spoke to the camera, and this was the eeriest part of all. “You can try to capture me,” he said, “but you will fail . . . Dr. Cross.”
    Sampson, Bree, and I turned to one another. John and I were speechless, and all Bree could manage was “Holy shit, Alex.”
    Ready or not, I was back in the game.

Chapter 17

    WELL, I
WASN’T
READY. Not yet, anyway. Four days after the Riverwalk murder, I was thinking about my patients. I was already conflicted, though. I was trying
not
to focus on Tess Olsen’s murder, and who the maniac killer might be, and
how
he could possibly know me, and what the hell he wanted from me.
    I couldn’t help starting my day by checking the latest news on washingtonpost.com. Nothing further had happened during the night, thank God. No more murders, so at least he wasn’t on a spree.
    The morning’s sessions would keep me on my toes, anyway. It was my biggest day of the week, the one I looked forward to but also dreaded in some ways. There was always the hope that I might do somebody some good, have a breakthrough. Or, possibly, I could fall right on my ass.
    It started at seven with a recently widowed DC firefighter who was in conflict between a sense of duty to his job and kids, and a growing sense of meaninglessness about life that produced daily thoughts of suicide.
    At eight I saw a Desert Storm vet who was still wrestling with demons he’d brought home from the war. He was a referral from my own therapist, Adele Finally, and I was hopeful that I could help him eventually. Still, this was the crisis stage of his treatment, so it was too early to tell if we were really communicating.
    Next came a woman whose postpartum depression had left her with a lot of ambivalence toward her six-month-old daughter. We discussed her little girl and even talked about my feelings—just for a minute—about Damon possibly heading off to prep school. Same as in police work, I was usually unorthodox in the sessions. I was there to talk to people, and I talked freely, for the most part.
    I had a half-hour break, during which I checked in with Bree, then glanced at the news on washingtonpost.com again. Still nothing new, no further attacks, no explanations for the death of Tess Olsen.
    The morning’s final patient was a Georgetown law student whose mysophobia had become so intense, she’d begun incinerating her own underwear every night.
    Quite a morning. Satisfying in a strange way. And relatively safe—at least for me.

Chapter 18

    BREE CALLED THE OFFICE while I was eating an unbuttered hard roll before my one o’clock. “We did some close-up work on the tapes,” she said. “Tell me what you think of this, Alex. There’s a scar on the killer’s forehead. Shape of a half-moon. It’s fairly pronounced.”
    I thought for a moment before answering. “Could mean head trauma at some time. This is a shot in the dark, but he could have damaged frontal lobes. People with frontal-lobe damage can display bad tempers and impulsiveness.”
    “Thanks, Doc,” Bree said. “Nice having you on the team.”
    I was on the team? Since when? Had I agreed to that? I didn’t think so.
    After lunch, and the very nice homicide-case chat with Bree, I had my last client of the day, also my favorite, a woman in her midthirties named Sandy Quinlan.
    Sandy was a recent transplant to DC from small-town life in northern Michigan, not far from