By the time she dared to sit up and turn her Camry around, the Porsche was gone. Pessimistic about her chances of reconnecting, she guessed that Griswold must have headed toward the interstate. Doing eighty, she weaved through traffic back across the Rappahannock. At the last possible instant, she caught sight of the Porsche—a bullet streaking onto I-95, headed south away from D.C. and toward Richmond. It took a while to catch up, but she strongly sensed she had done it without being spotted. By the time they reached the outskirts of the capital of the Confederacy she had written down the license number.

The car, the clothes, even his swagger—it was as if Treat Griswold had driven into the rickety garage in Fredericksburg and emerged a different man. Now that man was easing off the interstate into the low-rent district of Richmond. Comfortable with the pattern of his driving and his lack of attention to the road behind him, Alison pulled over nearly a block away from where the Porsche had stopped. They were on a street of aging gabled houses that had probably been very special during the Civil War but were now all in need of scraping, paint, and carpentry—all, that is, but one.

Griswold turned right into the driveway of that house—an immaculately restored Victorian, painted gray with maroon trim and white mul-lions on what had to be at least two dozen windows. It was at once massive and elegant, perhaps half-again larger than the other homes on Beechtree Road. The rooflines of its two street-side spires were gracefully curved, and the lower two of three stories featured broad, circular porches. The curtains on most of the windows were drawn, although, like the street in Fredericksburg, Beechtree seemed like one where the residents kept to their own business.

By the time Alison risked cruising slowly past the drive, Griswold was gone and the 911 was locked in the garage.

Out of nothing, something.

An asthma inhaler had led her a hundred miles from the White House to . . . to what? A brothel of some sort? Her instincts said no, but her instincts had led her astray more than once over the years.

She noted down the address of the house next to the license plate number of the Porsche. There was no way to check on the owner of either without giving away information Alison needed to keep to herself. She would just have to wait until she got back to D.C. The day might come when she would need to blow the whistle on Treat Griswold for something illegal, but when and if she did, her case would be a hell of a lot better documented than the one at the hospital in Los Angeles had been and she would be a hell of a lot more prepared for the counterattack that was sure to follow.