Kyle checked his watch as he closed the front door behind him. It was only twelve thirty, and the sun didn’t come up for hours. There was still plenty of time for what he had to get done.

Chapter 66

FIRST THINGS FIRST, he unlocked the basement door and let himself down the narrow stairs to the cinder-block-walled workshop underneath the house. It wasn’t exactly his father’s old walnut-paneled den, with the twelve-foot fireplace and rolling ladders, but it did the trick and would work just as well. A big bulkhead door at the back had allowed him to bring down a new chest freezer the other day, and he went to it now.

Agent Patel was sleeping peacefully inside. She still looked basically like herself, but she’d grown quite stiff, which seemed fitting. The girl had been pretty much the same way when she was alive.

“Ready for a change of scenery, my dear?”

He lifted her out and laid her on a sheet of four-millimeter painter’s plastic to loosen up while he went about his other business. It reminded him of his not so dear but very much departed mother, Miriam — the way she used to leave a frozen tray of pork chops or a flank steak on the counter in the morning so it would be ready to cook up for dinner that night. He couldn’t say the old girl never taught him anything useful.

Next, he tackled the walls. Dozens of new photos were taped up alongside the old, the result of several mind-numbing days of additional surveillance on Cross’s movements. Not the most stimulating part of the process so far, but it had certainly paid off.

Here were Alex Cross and John Sampson, working the scene of that wonderfully twisted new case in Franklin Square.

And there was Alex with his son Ali, and the mother, Christine, who seemed to have brought quite a bit of Sturm und Drang of her own to the table.

It all came down now — every picture, every map, every clipping he’d collected since coming to Washington. None of it was necessary anymore. He’d committed it all to memory. And besides — now was the time to get the details out of his head and really start to fly!

Once upon a time, Kyle knew, he would have wanted — no, needed — to have this thing mapped out down to the finest details. But that wasn’t true anymore. Now his options just hung there in the air, like so many pieces of fruit waiting to be picked.