Read The Maze for Free Online

picked them up and ushered them to an unmarked light blue Ford Crown Victoria.

    "Captain Brady didn't think you'd want to be escorted to the station in a squad car. This one belongs to the captain."

    After a forty-five-minute ride weaving in and out of thick traffic, everyone in the radius of five miles honking his horn, he let them off at the Jefferson Park station house, the precinct for what was clearly a nice, middle-class neighborhood. The station house was a boxy, single-story building on West Gale, at the intersection of two major streets, Milwaukee and Hig-gins. It had a basement, Officer Ponce told them, and that was because it had been built in 1936 and was one of those WPA projects. When there'd been a twister seven years before, everyone had piled into the basement, prisoners and all. One nutcase had tried to escape. There had been little updating since the seventies. There was a small box out front holding a few wilted flowers and a naked flagpole.

    Inside, it was as familiar as any station house Savich had ever been in-a beige linoleum floor that had been redone probably in the last ten years, but who knew? It still looked forty years old. He smelled urine wearing an overcoat of floral room spray. There were a dozen or so people shuffling around or sitting on the long bench against the wall, since it was eight o'clock at night. At least half of them were teenage boys. He wondered what they'd done. Drugs, probably.

    Savich asked the sergeant on duty where he could find Captain Brady. They were escorted by an officer, turned wary after he'd seen their FBI badges, to a squad room with several offices in the back with glass windows. The room was divided off into modular units, a new addition that nobody liked, the officer told them. There wasn't much noise this time of night, just an occasional ring of the phone. There were about a dozen people in the squad room, all plainclothes.

    Captain Brady was a black man of about forty-five with a thick southern drawl. Even though there wasn't a single white hair on his head, he looked older than his years, very tired, lines scored deeply around his mouth. When he saw them, his mouth split into a big smile. He came out from behind his cluttered desk, his hand out.

    "Agent Savich?"

    "Yes, Captain." The two men shook hands.

    "And this is Agent Lacey Sherlock."

    Captain Brady shook her hand, gave her a lopsided grin and said, "You're a long way from London, aren't you?"

    She grinned back at him. "Yes, sir. I forgot my hat, but my pipe's in my purse." She hadn't realized that Savich even knew her first name.

    Savich was studying the computer on the captain's desk.

    Captain Brady waved them into two chairs that sat opposite a sofa. The chairs were surprisingly comfortable. Captain Brady took the sofa. He sat forward, his hands clasped between his knees. "Bud Hollis in St. Louis said you had followed this case since the guy killed the first family in Des Moines and the DMPD had asked the FBI to do a profile. He said I should get you here, and that's why I e-mailed you. He, ah, appreciated your ideas even though they didn't get him anywhere. But you already know that. The guy's a mystery. Nothing seems to nail him. It's like he's a ghost."

    Captain Brady coughed into his hand, a hacking low cough. "Sorry, I guess I'm getting run-down. My wife chewed me out good this morning." He shrugged. "But what can we do? We've been putting in long hours since the guy killed the family three and a half days ago. He did it right at six o'clock, right at dinnertime, right at the same time he killed the other two families. Sorry, but you already know that. You got all the police reports I sent you yesterday?''

    "Oh yes," Savich said. "I was hoping you'd contact me."

    The captain nodded. "Bud Hollis also said you had a brain and weren't a glory hound and did your investigating with a computer. I don't understand that, but I'm willing to give it a try.

    "I still wasn't sure bringing