He went into the building, to the elevators, pushed the Down button. Down. Way down. People got on the car with him. A couple of them looked at him sideways, then looked away. He vaguely recognized faces but couldn’t recall names. He didn’t know them well—or they him, he suspected, though his short-term memory still had some holes in it.

They knew of him, he suspected. He had signed on with the Bureau in 1971 after a stellar career in homicide in the Chicago PD. He had come to Quantico and the Behavioral Sciences Unit the fall of 1975, just as the unit was beginning to blaze some exciting trails. Being a part of that time had made him and his colleagues legends. He was forty-eight and a legend. Not bad.

Or maybe these people knew about him, as in “The guy that got shot in the head and lived.” The academy was a small, incestuous community, and like in all small, incestuous communities, gossip ran thick and fast.

The elevator stopped and most of the passengers got off, headed for the cafeteria or PX. The smell of coffee, eggs, and bacon grease hit him like a brick, then the doors closed and the car began to drop another twenty feet to what the agents lovingly referred to as the National Cellar for the Analysis of Violent Crime.

The warren of offices and conference rooms had been a bomb shelter during the height of the Cold War, a hideout for J. Edgar and his cronies in the event of nuclear attack. The Bureau had seen fit to send the Behavioral Sciences/Investigative Support Unit down to the win dowless, sometimes musty-smelling, subbasement a year before.

Closed off in their own giant tomb with their cases—the worst of the worst murders and sexual assaults the country had to offer—the agents joked (in the gallows humor that kept them for what passed as sane) that they lived and worked ten times deeper than the dead.

Leone stepped off the elevator.

“Vince!”

He glanced up at his colleague, wearily amused by the expression on his face. “Bob. I’m not a ghost.”

“Geez, no. Not at all. I’m just surprised to see you, that’s all. What are you doing here?”

“Last I knew, I worked here,” Vince said, turning in the opposite direction.

He went into the men’s room, went into a stall, and puked, a wave of heat sweeping over him. The meds or maybe nerves, he admitted to himself. He’d been gone six months.

A couple of stalls down, someone else vomited.

They came out of the stalls and went to the sinks together.

“Vince!”

“Got a bad one, Ken?” Leone asked. He ran the faucet, scooped water into his hand, and rinsed his mouth.

Ken’s face was gray and drawn, his eyes haunted. “Three little kids, sexually assaulted, their faces blown off with a shotgun.