A single print had been found on an otherwise freshly cleaned area of glass where the shots had been taken. And, as it turned out, it was a match for two other prints found on-site — one on a stair rail between the building’s eighth and ninth floors, and another on the crash bar of a ground-level steel door that had almost certainly been the shooter’s exit point.

That was all the good news, or at least the interesting news. The bad part was that our print didn’t match any of the tens of millions of samples in the IAFIS database. Our presumed killer had no criminal record to help point the way to his arrest.

So I widened my net. Recently I’d been to Africa and back, chasing down a mass murderer who called himself the Tiger. As part of the fallout from that case, I’d struck up a pretty good rapport with a guy named Carl Freelander. He was Army CID, embedded with the FBI in Lagos, Nigeria, as part of a Joint Terrorism Task Force. I was hoping Carl could help me cut a few corners with the investigation.

It was late afternoon in Lagos when I caught Carl on his cell.

“Carl, it’s Alex Cross calling from Washington. How about if I ask you my favor first, and we do the chitchat later?”

“Sounds good, Alex, minus the chitchat, if you don’t mind. What can I do for you?” This was one of the reasons I liked Carl; he worked the way I did.

“I’ve got a print on a homicide, two kill shots from two hundred sixty-two yards. The guy obviously had some training, not to mention good equipment, and I’m wondering if maybe there’s a military connection.”

“Let me guess, Alex. You want a red phone into the civil database.”

“Something like that,” I said.

“Yeah, okay. I can run it by CJIS,” he said. “Shouldn’t take too long.”

CJIS stands for Criminal Justice Information Services, a part of the FBI that’s based in Clarksburg, West Virginia. This was one of those loopy situations — calling halfway around the world to access something so close to home, but it wouldn’t be the first time.

Less than two hours later, Carl was back with some discouraging news.

“Your boy’s not U.S. military, Alex. Not FBI or Secret Service either. And I hope you don’t mind, but I ran it through ABIS at Defense while I was at it. He’s never been detained by U.S. forces, and he’s not a foreign national who’s ever had access to one of our bases. I don’t know if that helps or not.”

“It gets rid of some of the obvious possibilities anyway. Thanks, Carl. Next time you’re in DC —”

“Drinks and all that, sure thing. I look forward to it. Take care, Alex.”