“Alex, we’ve got a phone conference next week, and I don’t want you coming in cold. Call me at home over the weekend if you have to. I’d also like you to speak with Detective Galletta in L.A. She knows something you need to hear. If you don’t have her phone numbers, Tony can get them for you.”

The implication was clear already. Ron Burns wasn’t asking me to stay on this case. He was telling me. God, I was tired of this—the murders, the horrific cases, one after another. According to estimates at the Bureau, there were more than three hundred pattern killers currently operating in the United States. Hell, was I supposed to catch all of them?

I clicked Pause on the machine to take a second and decide how I felt about what was going on here. My thoughts went straight back to Mary Smith. I had let her into my head again. She’d caught my interest, my curiosity, probably my ego. A female serial killer—could it be? Killing other women? Mothers?

But why? Would a woman do that? I didn’t think so. I just couldn’t imagine it happening, which didn’t mean that it hadn’t.

I also wondered if there had been another e-mail to Arnold Griner. What part did Griner, or the L.A. Times, play in all this? Did Mary Smith already have the next victim in her sights? What was her motivation?

That was the line of thought that finally got to me. Some unsuspecting woman, a mother, was going to lose her life in L.A. soon. A husband, and probably children, would be left behind. It hit too close to home for me, and I think Burns knew that when he called. Of course he did.

Several years before, my own wife, Maria, had been gunned down in a drive-by shooting. Maria had died in my arms. No one was ever convicted, or even arrested. My biggest case, and I’d failed on it. It was all so unspeakably senseless. And now this terrible case in L.A. I didn’t need my PhD in psych to know that Mary Smith was pushing all my buttons, both personally and professionally.

Maybe I would just check in, I thought. Besides, Burns was right—I didn’t want to show up behind the ball on Monday morning.

Damn it, Alex, you’re weakening.

When I picked up the phone, though, I was surprised to hear Damon’s voice already on the line.

“Yeah, I missed you, too. I was thinking about you. I swear I was, all the time.”

Then an adolescent girl’s laughter. “Did you bring me anything from California, Day? Mouse ears? Somethin’, somethin’?”

I forced myself to hang up, quietly.