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shook his head. “No…not exactly. It’s just… familiar .”
    The agent thought about it for a second, then said, “Lemme ask you something, Stenowski. When you say you read a lot, you’re talking about, what? Sherlock Holmes? Forensic stuff? Mickey Spillane? What?”
    Stenowski shrugged. “Textbooks, mostly. Forensic science, criminology, behavioral profiling, stuff like that.”
    The agent glanced at the evidence flags, the blood-mottled sand, the huge black oval under Karen Finnerty’s torso. “That’s very interesting.”
    Stenowski looked at the younger man. “Why’s that?”
    Van Teigham pondered the victim’s pale, mildewed corpse, and the fact that it perfectly matched another random, motiveless killing in Minneapolis just a few weeks ago. “Because I was thinking the same goddamn thing—how familiar it looks.”

FIVE
    Grove was dozing fitfully in a cheap armchair in the corner of Tom Geisel’s hospital room when his cell phone began trilling incessantly in his pocket.
    Grove had been maintaining his lonely bedside vigil since 4 A.M . Not long ago he had told Lois to go get something to eat, and the subsequent silence had made Grove drowsy. He needed to rest his eyes. For hours he had been doing nothing but staring at his comatose boss, praying that the man would come back to the land of the living. Now the chirping cell phone seemed an affront to the older man’s dignity. “Should’ve turned this piece of shit off,” Grove grumbled under his breath as he rooted the cell phone out of his pocket.
    Across the room, a cold, gunmetal dawn rose behind the Venetian blinds, bathing the gurney bed in cameos of pale light. The section chief, nestled in his white linen sarcophagus, did not stir, did not move. Eyes closed, his strong, cleft chin shadowed with whiskers, Tom Geisel looked almost serene. Regal, even. Lois must have combed his hair, because it still had his trademark ruler-straight part, the iron-gray wings sweeping back over his large ears. His enormous, gnarled, liver-spotted hands lay in repose at his side. The soft beeping noises of the vital monitors drowned his shallow breathing.
    The section chief’s prognosis, according to the young, sober-faced resident who had been periodically charging in and out of the room, was still inconclusive. They were still studying MRIs, still analyzing CT scans. They suspected either a massive stroke or an aneurysm of some sort, but they were not ruling anything out, especially in light of the man’s symptoms. According to Lois, her husband had been dozing in front of the TV last night when he suddenly awakened from a terrible nightmare with blurred vision and chest pains. He had stumbled into the bathroom, and minutes later Lois found him on the floor, mumbling, disoriented, a part of his face slack and twitching.
    Grove looked at the caller ID display on his buzzing cell phone and saw it was a Bureau field office calling.
    An unexpected twinge of dread stabbed Grove in the chest: Bureau field offices never called him directly unless there was a time crunch on something . Was this the other shoe dropping? Was this the second act of this inexorable little tragedy he had stumbled into? Bad news comes in threes , his mother used to say. But right now, one was enough for Grove. At the moment, in fact, he wasn’t even sure he could handle a new case. Not with his lifeline—his anchor, his voice of reason—fading away in front of him.
    Tom Geisel had been Grove’s benevolent ring man from the very beginning: recruiting Grove fresh out of the military, and always present in Grove’s corner; carefully selecting Grove’s assignments, protecting the wonder boy. Grove and Geisel had caught dozens of elusive criminals together, and had also gotten to know each other on that bone-deep level shared by fellow trench warriors. They had attended weddings and