Marsh must have called every unit on the waterfront—if not every cop in uniform available through the entire city—as soon as Zack had informed him of the intelligence he’d gathered from his phishing operation. Unfortunately, it had taken Zack a fair amount of time to decipher the fragmented conversations he’d been able to overhear, between Hailey and Nick and the third party, a history professor he still hadn’t definitively identified. What he had gleaned—that they were looking for a book with a red cover, somehow tied to Paul Revere and the stolen finial from the Gardner theft—hadn’t been enough to lead him to the fugitives; it had taken some keen triangulation work, using pings from cell towers that Hailey’s phone had passed by—correlated with some quick research into the whereabouts of collections of Revere’s artifacts throughout the greater Boston area—to give him enough information to make a best guess as to where she and Nick had been heading.

Even so, until the reports of gunshots had begun to come over the wire just under an hour ago, Zack hadn’t been certain he’d been on the right track. But when those calls came in—Zack had known they were facing a fourth crime scene connected to the murder from the night before; and Marsh, still fuming from the Bunker Hill Monument, had marshaled a small army to greet whatever they might find.

Which, it turned out, had been very little. Shattered display cases and ruined artwork, bullet casings that had come from an unmarked, unlicensed weapon, and blood on a carpet that hadn’t yet been identified by its DNA. Any security video that might have existed had been professionally erased, and since it was a museum, any fingerprints, fibers, hairs, et cetera found at the scene would be hay in the haystack—let alone anything resembling a needle.

And still, the squad cars kept coming. Through the windshield, Zack could see Marsh, now storming back and forth in front of the entrance to the museum, surrounded by uniforms with very little to do but stay out of the puggish man’s way. Zack almost felt sorry for him; he knew how frustrating it could be to always be one step behind a perp, how awful it could feel when a case seemed to be getting away, the hit your ego took, especially when it all went down in such a public fashion. But Marsh was a disagreeable human being—and such a remorseless, brute of a cop—that Zack had a hard time gathering together any true empathy for the man.