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moving ahead.
    It was not that Bulldog had anything personal against Markham. On the contrary, Bulldog actually admired the legendary “profiler,” the man who had brought down Jackson Briggs, aka “The Sarasota Strangler”—that son of a bitch who killed all those old ladies in Florida. And then, of course, there was that nasty little business in Raleigh, North Carolina. Yeah, no one would ever forget what happened there.
    Indeed, word on the street said that it was only a matter of time before Markham took over as chief for the Behavioral Analysis Unit-2 at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. However, Bill Burrell knew such a position was not one the forty-year-old Markham was gunning for. No, Markham was like him—happier with his boots on the ground, slugging it out in the trenches himself. And now that the Tommy Campbell disappearance had been deemed a homicide, if Burrell had to work with somebody from Quantico, he was glad that it was Sam Markham.
    Nonetheless, the fifty-year-old lifer could not help but feel cheated that the first and only break in the biggest case of his career had fallen into Markham’s lap, for no matter how much he admired Markham, Bill Burrell was instinctively territorial. Like a bulldog. And this was his junkyard.
    It was for this reason that the phone call from Special Agent Rachel Sullivan, Burrell’s NCAVC coordinator, went right up his ass. His technician had briefed him on their conversation as soon as Burrell arrived at the crime scene—a scene that had pulled him away from a visit with his sick mother in New Hampshire; a scene that demanded the hardnosed SAC show up at Watch Hill in person. And although Bulldog was pleased with the way his forensic team had secured the site, that Markham should have given orders to his men was simply unacceptable.
    Burrell stood at the bottom of the gravel driveway, frowning over a Marlboro. He dared to smoke only on a case—when he knew he would not be home for a while and his wife would not be able to smell it on him.
    But how the hell did he get them in here? Burrell asked himself, gazing out over the impeccably landscaped property.
    The mansion belonged to a wealthy investment CEO by the name of Dodd, who had been sleeping soundly with his wife when his caretaker discovered the statue in the southeastern corner of the topiary garden. A row of high hedges separated almost the entirety of Dodd’s estate from his neighbors on either side—except for the eastern stretch, which sloped down toward the beach. It was in this area that, upon their initial sweep of the crime scene, Burrell’s team discovered a set of fresh footprints running back and forth in the sand from the property next door. The neighbors on this side were summer folk—not “year rounders” like Dodd and his wife—and consequently the house remained unoccupied in the off-season. The man who made the footprints in the sand had known this. However, the man who made the footprints in the sand had also known to wear something— probably plastic bags —over his shoes; for in all the prints not a single tread could be found.
    “Yes,” Burrell whispered in a plume of smoke. “He had to have parked next door. But then that means he also had to carry Campbell and that boy around the back, across that narrow span of beach and up the grassy slope. Now that’s one strong, one determined son of a bitch.”
    Burrell heeled his cigarette into the gravel and crossed the large expanse of lawn to the entrance of the topiary garden. He looked at his watch: 12:58 P.M.
    Where the hell is Markham? he thought, scanning the sea of blue FBI jackets.
    The topiary garden was roughly a thirty-by-thirty-meter courtyard divided into quarters by a brick path with a marble fountain at its center. And save for the wall of twelve-foot high hedges that separated Dodd’s property from his neighbors, a series of arched “windows” and “doors” had been cut into the remaining