It worked until it didn’t. For almost seven years, Jackson’s brand and its subsidiaries grew and prospered. At age twenty-seven, however, and with Jackson in her late forties, Duchaine left the company and the relationship and started her own brand.

  “It was inevitable, but it still broke my heart,” Jackson said in the article. “Now we are friends and I know it was the right choice for Frances. She is not the kind of woman who likes to be contained by any sort of convention. That’s what I loved and still love about her.”

  Duchaine’s brand exploded because she aimed at the finer ready-to-wear market before going wide.

  On the notepad, Bree wrote, She followed Jackson’s business model. Worked even better for her than it did for Jackson. When Duchaine sold part of her company to a hedge fund, it made her a legit billionaire. Why would she do the things the women allege in the lawsuit? Why jeopardize the empire?

  Bree kept turning the pages in the press packet and saw pictures of Duchaine with one handsome man or beautiful woman after another. Now forty-eight, Duchaine had been romantically linked to a number of people of both sexes over the years.

  But she had never married, never even gotten engaged. Whenever Duchaine was asked about that, she laughed and said she was simply one of those people not meant to settle down for long.

  “I work hard, and I want to satisfy my whims when I like,” she said in an interview with the New York Times. “Go to my ski house in British Columbia when the powder’s deep or my island in Fiji when I long for solitude. Whatever. Whenever. A marriage, a family, kids—they’re not conducive to the lifestyle of a female knight that I cherish.”

  Bree thought about that last statement—the lifestyle of a female knight that I cherish—and realized Duchaine was revealing a deep inner truth about herself.

  She wrote, Frances is a queen any way you look at her. But she views herself as a female knight. Not a queen. Not a princess. A female knight.

  Tapping her pen on the legal pad, Bree reread her note and thought about that. She was about to push on when it all clicked in her mind.

  Bree scribbled, What does a female knight do? What all knights do. She goes out and slays dragons. When she’s back at the castle, she’s wooing fair maidens or handsome men. Think of all the fair maidens and handsome men in her business. They’re everywhere.

  But she never forms a deep relationship with any of them. In a sense, Duchaine conquers her partners, beds them, and moves on. At some level, partners could be objects to her. Like mannequins to use and discard at will.

  Bree again looked at the dismissed lawsuit before writing one last note to herself:

  From that perspective, it is plausible that she might have done the things alleged in the lawsuit. The victims would not be humans to Duchaine. Just pretty dolls to be used and set aside when they’re broken.

  Chapter

  10

  Thomas Tull stepped back from a wall in one of the two bedrooms of a luxury town house in Georgetown he’d rented for the duration of his research and writing. This bedroom had already been transformed into an office for the bestselling author and his longtime researcher, Lisa Moore.

  A sturdily built, fair-skinned woman with short black hair, Moore looked at the wall and said, “That’s a good visual representation, I think. Enough to get the imagination going.”

  “It’s a start,” Tull agreed.

  A few hours before, Tull and Moore had finished hanging custom-built pegboards and whiteboards that covered the entire wall, from the floor to the nine-foot-high ceiling. Since then, they’d been organizing the information from the three Family Man murders.

  The Hodges family, the first to die, was on the left. In the middle of the crime scene photos and notes, they’d arranged recent pictures of the victims so they would not lose track of who was most important in the story they would tell in Tull’s next book.

  Information about the Landau family, the second to die, was represented on the right side of the wall and arranged in a similar fashion. In the considerable free space between those two families, they’d put up that morning’s Washington Post articles about the Carpenter killings as well as the latest photographs of that family.

  “I’m amazed you got the pictures that fast,” Tull said.

  “The kids were on Instagram,” Moore said, sitting down at a new laptop computer. “The mom, dad, and grandmother were on Facebook. Password?”

  “FamilyMan. One word. Capital F, capital M.”

  His researcher typed the password.

  Tull stepped forward to study the photo of seventy-eight-year-old Pearl Naylor; in it, she was standing on a tennis court, the picture of health. Then he trained his eyes on Roger Carpenter’s photo. He was in a suit and tie outside a courtroom. In her picture, his wife, Sue, was wearing a heavy pack and beaming atop a mountain. “Prime of their lives,” Tull said into his phone’s recording app and tried to feel whatever emotions the victims conjured up in him as he looked at their faces. “Tragic, yes, but more. These were shining lights, snuffed out. The world is a lesser place without them.”

  This was all part of the writer’s method, part of the way he was able to bring characters alive on the pages of his books. Tull believed that if he understood the emotional center of a person and, in turn, the emotions that person stirred in other people, he would be able to depict him or her in a much more three-dimensional manner.

  He moved a few feet and steeled himself to look at the children’s pictures. The twin twelve-year-old girls, Alice and Mary Carpenter, were on skis out west somewhere with their goggles up and their arms thrown high over their heads.

  “The Carpenter girls, so privileged and yet so innocent,” he said into the recording app. “Their lives cut short. Buds before they could blossom. We need to hear from their teachers,” he told Moore. “Their friends too. And coaches if they had them.”

  Moore said, “I’m always five steps ahead of you, Thomas. I’m sending a list of names, numbers, and relationships your way.”

  “Do me a favor and prioritize them first,” he said, looking at the images of nine-year-old Nick Carpenter in a Little League uniform and his brother, five-year-old Alan, who was sitting in a wheelchair at an amusement park somewhere and grinning like he was having the time of his life.

  Tull felt a surge of emotion—grief over the senseless loss melded with pity—and had to fight the ball of pain filling his throat.

  “Alan. That poor kid is one of the heavyweights of this story,” he murmured into the recorder. “Born into terrible circumstances beyond his control and then dying the same way. But in the years between, there was love. Deep love for and from Alan.”

  Tull paused and shook his head before speaking again. “Need scientific background on cerebral palsy. Talk to Alan’s therapists. His friends. His doctors.”

  He stopped, rubbed his eyes, and sat at his desk.

  “Do you like them?” Moore asked. “As subjects?”

  “I do,” Tull said. “I’m sad, of course, but these were good people caught up in events beyond their understanding. I need to explore that theme, I think. Readers will relate to that. They love it when the victims have good souls.”

  “No doubt,” Moore said. “What about law enforcement?”

  “I’ll take the local crime-beat reporters out to lunch, begin building our sources for the nitty-gritty to come.”

  “Alex Cross?”

  “Dr. Cross is near the bottom of the list for the moment,” he said. “Along with the other two detectives quoted in today’s articles, Mahoney at the FBI and Sampson with Metro Homicide.”

  “Why so low?”

  “Because we’re conducting our own extensive investigation first and in parallel.”

  “You believe they’ve already made mistakes?”

  “I do. A couple of big ones.”

  Chapter

  11

  The Family Man sensed the time was ripe to increase the pressure and make the critical next move in the promotion of general hysteria.

  Up to this point, the killer had focused primarily on white suburban families. Now that had to change.

  The Elliott family of Alexandria, Virginia, would do nicely, thank you. A family selected to change the popular buzz about the killings, broaden and deepen it, spread the fear far and wide.

  With the floor plan of their Craftsman bungalow memorized, the night-vision goggles ready, and happy that there was no canine to contend with, the Family Man eased down an alley behind the house, finished putting on the hazmat gear, and vaulted the rear gate.

  The killer landed and trained a laser pointer on the wide-angle security camera high above the rear door, effectively blinding it to the backyard.

  There was no camera above the concrete steps that led to the basement door, a steel-clad affair with double dead bolts. With the help of a pair of stainless-steel picks and a small electromagnet, the Family Man had the bolts turned and the door open in under ten minutes.

  The bungalow design presented an interesting challenge. The members of the Carpenter family had slept on different levels of their house, but the Elliotts were all clustered upstairs in three bedrooms around a common area and a bath.

  The house was nearly sixty years old. A creak in a floorboard or a stair riser could alert one of them and make life and death messier than it had to be.

  The Family Man got out the pistol with the sound suppressor, climbed the steep stairs out of the musty basement, and slipped into the kitchen. The night-vision goggles revealed a living room on the right and a dining room and stairs to the second floor on the left.

  The killer took several breaths with closed eyes, rehearsing, before moving to the staircase and, with near robotic precision, settling each foot on the side of the risers, not in the middle, where they might squeak or squeal in protest.

  The Family Man made no detectable sound the entire climb but paused at the last step anyway to listen for movement. Hearing nothing, the killer stepped up onto the landing and then slid along the wall, head up, intent on the master bedroom’s door, which was ajar.

  The Family Man’s soft-soled boot accidentally kicked a wineglass on the wood floor. It hit a second wineglass, which tipped over an empty bottle, which hit the wood and rolled. It might have given another intruder a heart attack.

  But, adapting, the killer just pushed up the goggles and aimed the pistol at the bedroom door.

  “Tristan?” a woman said groggily on the other side. A light went on.

  Then a light went on in the bathroom; the door opened and Tristan Elliott, a massive Black man who’d played lineman at Georgia Tech, stepped out. He saw the Family Man aiming the gun at him. Elliott raised his huge hands, sudden terror in his eyes, and whispered, “No, please. I know who you are. I know what you’re here to do. Don’t do it!”

  “That’s not possible,” the killer said and shot him, then pushed open the master bedroom’s door to find Elliott’s wife on the edge of her bed, just about to scream.

  Chapter

  12

  Bree and I were up and out of our house to run at six on Thursday morning.

  We usually put in five miles every other day. It was not only a chance to exercise; it was also a chance to connect and talk about the work to come.

  “I’m having a tough time with my new assignment,” Bree said as we ran downhill on the south side of Capitol Hill and onto the sidewalk along Independence Avenue, headed toward the National Mall.

  The spring morning was beautiful. Flowering trees and shrubs were in full bloom everywhere you looked on the Capitol grounds.

  “This is the assignment you can’t talk about?” I said, trying to ignore the way my knees protested the steep descent.

  “That’s the one,” she said. “But I think I can do it without naming names.”

  “Handy skill to have.”

  “Took years to develop.”

  Bree told me she and Bluestone were working for an anonymous client who’d dug up dirt on a major player in the fashion industry.

  “What kind of dirt?” I asked.

  “I can’t say,” Bree said. “But it’s rough.”

  “Why would a major hitter in fashion be involved with something rough?”

  “Exactly my reaction,” she said, puffing as we reached the bottom of Capitol Hill and started down the Mall toward the Washington Monument. “But there’s enough on paper to suggest it may be real. There was a lawsuit filed in North Carolina, but it was dismissed and sealed before depositions took place.”

  I wiped the sweat off my brow and I thought about that for a few moments. “Why North Carolina?”

  “The hitter evidently has relationships with multiple textile and clothing manufacturers there. The two women and one man claim they were coerced with promises that the hitter and friends would help them get a foothold in the modeling or fashion industry. But they said it was a lie, a pretext for the roughness.”

  “Reasons for dismissal and seal?”

  “That’s unclear and part of why the anonymous client has asked us to investigate. I’ll put in calls this morning to the attorney who sued and see what she remembers about the case.”

  “At least you’ll have a better idea of what to believe,” I said. “What else?”

  “I’m going up to New York this evening,” Bree said as we took a right on Fourth Street and looped toward the north side of Capitol Hill. “I figure five days to do what I need to do, which means I’ll probably miss Jannie’s big race.”

  “I’ll film it,” I said. “Or I can FaceTime you and you can see the whole thing.”

  She grinned. “I like that idea better. Ready?”

  “Never,” I said, seeing the sidewalk starting to climb ahead of us.

  We’ve been doing this route for years, and Capitol Hill still beats me up. My calves were screaming, and I had a stitch in my side when we crested the hill and slowed to a walk at First Street.

  “God, that’s steep.” I groaned.

  “Never gets easier,” Bree said, panting.

  We walked to Second Street and had just started to jog home slowly when my cell rang. Ned Mahoney. We slowed to a walk again.

  “We’re out for a run and almost home, Ned,” I said. “Can I call you back in ten?”

  “Afraid not, Alex,” Mahoney said. “Family Man struck last night in Alexandria. I need you there, pronto.”

  My stomach soured as it had before I’d entered the Carpenters’ home. I hated going into the Family Man’s crime scenes—I feared the multiple victims would be too much for me to process, which meant they’d soon haunt my daydreams and my nightmares.

  But I said, “I’ll be there in forty.”

  “Make it thirty. I’m calling Sampson,” Ned said and hung up.

  “Another one?” Bree asked in concern as I lowered the phone from my ear.

  “In Alexandria,” I said, and we broke into a run toward home.

  Chapter

  13

  The following morning around ten, I was at the desk I use when I’m working at Metro PD, forcing myself to study the crime scene photographs from the Elliott family home. Sampson sat at the desk opposite me, writing up the case for the murder book that would help us in our part of the overall investigation.

  I was able to look at the pictures of forty-three-year-old Tristan Elliott and his thirty-nine-year-old wife, Madonna, with relative dispassion. But those of the children made me want to close my eyes and banish them from my memory.

  It was clear from my first moments inside the Elliott house that the crime scene was different. Not only were the Elliotts the first family of color to die by the Family Man’s hand, but these murders had not gone as smoothly as the others.

  In the first three cases, the Family Man had managed to sneak in and execute his victims as they slept. But not at the Elliotts’, where we’d found lights on and bodies strewn about the second floor. After Ned, John, and I thoroughly inspected the scene, we came to believe that Tristan Elliott had been in the main bathroom and had surprised the Family Man, who shot him from across the landing, probably right next to the staircase.

  Madonna must have heard something because she had turned on the lights in the master bedroom and seemed to have been getting out of bed when she was shot. She’d thrown up her right hand; the bullet that killed her had gone through her palm before hitting her high in the forehead.

  We believed the Elliott kids, fourteen-year-old Marisa and eleven-year-old Zach, who slept in adjoining rooms, must have heard their father fall or their mother scream, because they were both out of bed.

  Marisa had opened her door and been shot at near point-blank range. We found her lying on her back staring upward with unseeing eyes.

  Her younger brother seemed to have tried to hide. We found him dead in his closet, curled up. That was the one that really got me, the one that had festered in my brain as I slept the night before, the one driving me to action now.

  “Remember Paladin?” I said to Sampson.

  “The needle-in-a-haystack people?”

  “The same. They pulled it off for us in the Alejandro and Maestro killings. Let’s see what they can do with this case.”

  “Worth a try. But you’ll probably have to do the formal request through Mahoney and the FBI director’s office.”

  “I’ll alert Paladin that a request is coming,” I said; I found the main phone number in my list of contacts and called.

  A receptionist answered. I identified myself and asked to speak with Steven Vance, the CEO of Paladin Inc. Vance had been our point person the year before.

  “I’m sorry,” the receptionist said. “Mr. Vance is in Italy on vacation and won’t be back until early next week.”

  “What about Mr. Malcomb? This is a big murder investigation.”

  “I’ll see if he’s available.”