I first met up with Blake Neeson last summer during a missing person’s investigation. Later, I discovered that he was a former undercover cop from L.A. who’d found his way into the criminal underground and become a kingpin in the dishearteningly lucrative world of smuggling both drugs and human beings into New York City.

Blake was now operating under a new name—Fayed Raabi’ah Bashir—but he would always be Blake Neeson in my book, and taking on the persona of an infamous terrorist wasn’t going to intimidate me or dissuade me. Blake wasn’t interested in fueling a movement, he was simply interested in benefiting from it.

His brother was a serial killer who’d murdered at least five people before being fatally wounded by a friend of mine and fellow FBI agent while she was attempting to apprehend him last summer.

“We’ll work with you,” I said to Mannie. “Give us Blake.”

“Take me in.” He eyed the blood that I’d wiped onto my pants. “Then we’ll see what happens next.”

Greer closed the door, and we stepped out of earshot of Mannie.

“What do you make of this?” he said.

“I’m not sure, but wherever Mannie is, Blake is probably somewhere close by. I say we have officers go door to door down in the neighborhood and maybe even set up a roadblock.”

He shook his head. “I doubt that’ll fly. Not with all the dignitaries at the funeral. The condos, maybe, but we can’t check all of those cars as they’re leaving.”

“This is Blake Neeson we’re talking about.”

“Yeah.” He considered that. “I’ll call DeYoung, see what he thinks.” Greer unpocketed his cell. “That woman you were chasing—do you think she’s working with them?”

“Hard to say. Listen, I’ll be right back. I need to go collect some evidence.”

“What evidence is that?”

“Her jacket.”

9

Bardstown, Kentucky

Christie Ellis knelt before the fourth Station of the Cross and brushed a strand of her blonde hair aside when it tipped across her face as she was repositioning her knees to avoid some rocks on the ground.

For a moment, she wondered what her Baptist friends from church would think if they saw her here at this monastery, on her knees in front of a statue. But she wasn’t praying to a piece of metal or stone. She was praying to the one this statue represented. Besides, who cares what others might think. This was between her and God. The two of them had some things to sort out.

The rural Kentucky landscape surrounded the monastery—patches of farms and quiet woodlands interspersed with panfish ponds. The moist scent of leaf cover from the ground filled the monastery’s walled-in courtyard around her.

Christie’s parents were dead. She was an only child raising an only child.