“The police forensic guys checked body temperature and stiffness of the corpse and put the T.O.D. between five-thirty and seven-thirty this morning, but the pathologist should be able to narrow that down even more.”

“What did Snyder say?”

“She’s freaked and so am I. It was her call on my advice to get the search warrant for the lab first and use that as probable cause to get a warrant to search Miller’s apartment and question him. That may have cost us a couple of hours. Now she’s feeling the heat from above.”

Vaill never questioned Snyder’s decision to move cautiously on Miller. She never acted impulsively, which is why there were jokes about her sleeping with the FBI’s procedures manual under her pillow. Snyder’s commitment to protocol was probably the reason she’d risen in the ranks while Vaill was still in the field.

Now, in spite of himself, Vaill began considering a rushing stream of other explanations for this latest disaster—especially the possibility that Burke wasn’t the only one in the agency who was working for the Society of One Hundred Neighbors.

The first mention of Humphrey Miller and his connection to Ahmed Kazimi had come from Lou Welcome at two-thirty that morning, and had almost immediately been relayed to Beth by McCall. Who she talked to after that was anyone’s guess. Now Miller was gone and a woman was dead in his apartment, with the stench of Alexander Burke’s close-range M.O. hanging heavy in the air. Even after exhaustive backtracking, to this day, nobody knew how the killer had infiltrated the organization. Did he have help from the inside? If so, someone else in the agency was on One Hundred Neighbors’ payroll.

“Chuck,” Vaill asked, “did you put Humphrey Miller’s name into the I.D.W. after you phoned it in to Beth?”

I.D.W. stood for Investigation Data Warehouse, and it was where all leads associated with active cases got logged in by the investigating agents. Vaill knew that he was being intentionally cagey with his partner. Their pairing was fairly new. How much did he really know about the man? What if McCall had worked his way onto the investigation team the same way Burke had infiltrated Kazimi’s security detail?

Vaill’s mind was spinning.

This was the second major security breach. Who in the hell could he trust?

“Right after I called Snyder I keyed the new leads into the I.D.W. from my phone,” McCall replied.

More possible sources of leaks. The I.D.W hadn’t been in place long, and already had a reputation as a sieve.