Marsh hadn’t been pleased to see Zack arrive at the scene a minute after his own unmarked car had skidded to a stop by the grassy park in front of the giant obelisk; and he’d been even less his agreeable self when Zack had tried to talk him into waiting for backup to arrive before they rushed the monument on their own. Although Zack was FBI and could—given enough time to make the proper phone calls—have attempted to take control of the situation, all they had so far were dead bodies, which meant Marsh, on homicide, was still officially in charge. Unless they were to find a couple of Renoirs on the other side of that entrance cut into the monument, Zack, on art crimes, had to continue to play backup quarterback.

Still, glancing up toward the peak of the massive, jutting granite tower, it wasn’t thoughts of Renoir that pulled at the corners of Zack’s mind; instead, his thoughts were immediately tipped toward one of the French Impressionist master’s contemporaries: Vincent van Gogh. Of course, he knew, logically, that a giant obelisk rising up into the sky should have had him thinking of a different Dutch artist—Govert Flinck, one of Rembrandt’s pupils, whose painting Landscape with Obelisk had been one of the objects stolen from the Gardner Museum that fateful night—but somehow Van Gogh seemed to him more appropriate. Not merely because Van Gogh had often described the cypress trees that had dominated many of his paintings as reminiscent of these emblems of Egyptian archaeology, but because the huge monument dominating the sky seemed so much like something out of a fevered dream, the sort that Van Gogh was famous for capturing.

The setting defied logic, which was fitting, because Zack could think of no logical reason why Hailey and Nick, apparently on the run from two separate crime scenes, had come to a crowded tourist spot on the Freedom Trail and then cornered themselves inside.

“One way in,” Marsh said, nodding toward the BPD officer, “one way out. Detective Karp, you head up the steps to the top. You see ’em along the way, you leave ’em be and radio down. If they’re still all the way up—”

Before he could finish the sentence, a sudden blaring alarm tore through the air. The noise was coming from inside the monument, a rising and falling electronic wail that reverberated off the granite and echoed out through the entrance in ear-shattering waves.

“What the hell?” Marsh hissed.

“Fire alarm,” Zack said.

And then he heard the footsteps—echoing beneath the wail, from somewhere high above. A controlled stampede of people making their way down the circular stairwell, he assumed.

“So that’s their plan,” Marsh grunted. “Must have spotted us. Now the fools think they can get past us in a crowd. Karp—plan stays the same. Go!”