The location was at the edge of Rock Creek Park, with the Whitehurst Freeway running overhead. We put officers with MP5s on the overpass, and a barrier of armored SWAT vans hugging the corner to block as many sight lines as possible.

Our nerve center was a coffee shop on K, where the SWAT unit commander, Tom Ogilvy, could stay in radio contact with his team. Sampson and I listened in on headsets.

EMS was on standby, with patrol units barring the street a block away in each direction. All personnel were outfitted with Kevlar and helmets.

And maybe it was all for nothing. Was Kyle actually watching? Was he armed? Ready with something up his sleeve? Or maybe none of the above. I think that’s exactly what he wanted me to wrestle with now.

In any case, it didn’t take long for the entry team to find something. Less than five minutes after they’d snaked into the park from Twenty-ninth, their lead man radioed over.

“We’ve got a body here,” he said. “White male, middle-aged. Looks like it could be a homeless guy.”

“Proceed with caution,” Ogilvy radioed back. We’d already briefed everyone about the possibilities here. “I want a full visual check around that body before anyone touches it. B Team, I need you on high alert.”

Three more minutes of silence ticked by until the “all clear” came back — such as it was. When I reached for the coffee shop door, Sampson grabbed my arm.

“Let me do this one, Alex. If Kyle’s here, it could be you he’s waiting for.”

“No way,” I told him. “Besides, if Kyle ever comes for me, it’s going to be face-to-face, not from a distance.”

“Oh, because you know everything there is to know about that maniac?” he said.

“I know that much,” I said, and headed outside.

Even before we got close to the body in the park, I recognized Stanislaw Wajda’s filthy barn coat. He’d been left on his side, shoved under a clump of bushes, just like his own victims before him.

There was no carving this time. The only visible injury was a single puncture wound to the throat, similar to the one we’d seen on Anjali Patel.

The skin on his neck was a solid stain of dried blood, and it continued down under his shirt. That meant he’d most likely been sitting up when he was stabbed. Probably when he died, too.

We’d already run prints on the shopping cart and sledgehammer from Farragut Square. There was no doubt anymore that Wajda was our Numbers Killer. Still, whatever he’d done when he was alive, I felt a wave of pity for him now.

“What’s this?” Sampson pointed at something in Wajda’s hand. I pulled on some gloves and knelt down to take whatever it was from between the clenched fingers.