ON THE WAY back to DC, I got Bob Shaw, the captain of MPD’s Homicide Unit, on the phone and started lining up an immediate mobile surveillance team on Rodney Glass. This detail needed to be as covert as possible. That meant pulling cars out of the pool that weren’t Crown Vics or Impalas — makes that screamed “undercover cop” to the informed eye.

I also gave Shaw a list of names from Narcotics and a few of the warrant squads — guys I knew had the look and skills to go unnoticed on the street. What I didn’t want was anyone who had been anywhere near the Branaff campus since this investigation had started.

That included myself. Glass knew me. I was going to have to stay on the fringes of this surveillance for the time being.

By four o’clock that afternoon, I was back in the city, and we had three cars positioned strategically around the school neighborhood, just as Glass was leaving for the day.

All of my team were carrying GPS locators so I could use a single laptop to track them from a distance in my own car. We had radio communication set up on an alternate, nonrecorded channel, which was as private as we were going to get on short notice. I parked several blocks away and listened in.

“This is Tango. He’s out the south gate. Green Subaru Forester, turning north on Wisconsin.”

“Go ahead, Tango. This is X Ray. I’ll cut around and get you somewhere after Thirty-seventh Street.”

“No problem. Bravo, hang back if you can.”

“Copy that.”

We had just enough units to run a floating box, with one car following for a while, then dropping off while another came in to take its place. I gave them some time to get ahead of me, then pulled around and brought up the rear from about half a mile back.

“Who’s got eyes on him?” I asked, once I was headed up Wisconsin the way they’d gone. “What’s he doing?”

“This is Bravo. He’s just driving. Listening to music, it looks like, tapping his hands on the wheel. Guy doesn’t seem like he’s got a care in the world.”

“Yeah, well, I think maybe he does.”

Glass stayed on Wisconsin for a couple of miles. It seemed like he might be headed into Maryland, but then I got word he was stopping in the Friendship Heights shopping mall. He parked in the lot outside Bloomingdale’s and walked over to the Mazza Gallerie mall.

I sent two guys inside after him and kept one circling the block, then parked myself just past the lot, where I could see Glass’s empty car.

For the next forty-five minutes, it was the usual kind of boring minutiae you get on ninety-nine percent of surveillance details. I sat and listened while Glass went to McDonald’s. Got a burger. Sat at one of the tables, reading a paperback copy of Sebastian Junger’s War, which I’d read myself. He didn’t seem to be in any kind of hurry. Nothing special about the day.