He picked up his mobile phone and dialed.

Charles Schuyler answered immediately. "Okay. What have you got?"

"Lynch and the Michaels woman just left."

"So she's working the case with him?"

"It sure sounded like it. I could hear every word they said in Agent Stedler's condo. And I've got some bad news for you ... She knows about the carpet."

He expected Schuyler to cut loose with a string of expletives; instead there was just silence. Lethal, terrifying silence.

"Are you still there?"

"You gave me your word." Schuyler voice was quiet, each word measured.

Laird would have preferred to hear the expletives. He had worked as Schuyler's security head for many years and knew that in this mood, Schuyler was at his most vicious. "And the carpet cleaner gave me his word. He's the best in the business."

"How in the h.e.l.l did they find out?"

"She ... smelled it."

"What?"

"I recorded the whole thing. I'll let you listen for yourself. Kendra Michaels is ... weird. She's almost creepy."

"I'm glad you're so impressed by her. What in the h.e.l.l are we going to do about this? Time's running out."

"It doesn't have to be a problem. I could have her and Lynch taken care of tonight."

Silence.

"Not yet, Laird." Schuyler's voice was thoughtful. "But have your people standing by. We'll definitely keep that option on the table."

CHAPTER.

3.

FBI Headquarters

San Diego Branch Office

KENDRA CLIPPED THE VISITOR'S badge to her jacket lapel and glanced around the lobby area. Deja vu. The same guards, the same black-tiled floors, the same awful fake plants. G.o.d, she hated this place.

Lynch examined the badge clip before putting it on. "You're right. Sharp little teeth on this thing."

She turned toward Lynch. "I know there are some things you're not telling me. I haven't cared enough to press the point, but I will not even consider helping you until you tell me everything there is to know."

He nodded. "Would you believe me if I said I didn't want to influence your perceptions just yet?"

"There's not much chance of that. I trust my own judgment far too much to be so easily swayed."

The corners of his lips indented in a half smile. "I'm starting to realize that."

She heard the elevator chime and a familiar set of footsteps approaching from the other side of the guard desk. "We'll talk later ... if I'm interested."

"Fair enough."

Agent Bill Santini appeared, a sandy-haired man of medium height. His middle-age paunch had grown since the last time she had seen him, Kendra noticed. "Kendra, Lynch ... Good morning." His monotone was meant to be without expression. It was not-he was definitely p.i.s.sed off.

"Good to see you, Bill," Kendra said. "So you got picked to take us up. Does Griffin still put you in charge of the afternoon Starbucks run?"

He scowled and turned around. "Follow me."

Kendra smiled. Santini might have been helpful when she'd pumped him for information about Lynch but the truce was clearly over. And Santini was so easily annoyed by her that she just couldn't resist scoring off him.

"Can you at least try not antagonizing them?" Lynch murmured.

"Can't help it. Just comes naturally."

Santini escorted them to the fifth floor, where Kendra noticed that she and Lynch were attracting a lot of attention-some of it hostile, some merely curious-as they walked past the offices and cubicles. He stopped at the small conference room and motioned for them to step inside. He followed and closed the door behind them.

The head of the San Diego office, Special Agent in Charge Michael Griffin, stood and walked toward them. He was a fiftyish man with silver hair, and as far as Kendra had ever been able to tell, no sense of humor. "I was surprised when Lynch told me you would be joining him, Kendra. I'm not sure there's much you can do for us here."

"I'm not sure either, Griffin. Let's find out."

Griffin motioned toward the only other person in the room, a young blond woman with shoulder-length hair. "Kendra, this is Special Agent Sienna Deever. She's been working this case with us for the past few weeks."

Sienna stepped forward and eagerly shook her hand. "A pleasure, Dr. Michaels. I've been reading up on the other investigations you helped along. I'm impressed."

Kendra smiled. Sienna possessed an enthusiasm that characterized many agents just out of the academy. She hadn't been beaten down. Yet. "Don't be too impressed with me, Sienna. It could make you very unpopular around here."

Sienna's face froze as she decided how to react.

Griffin brushed past her and motioned toward a series of whiteboards running down the length of the room. "Let's get started. We have a case file, of course, but this is probably a better way to get a quick grasp of what we're dealing with. These are our victims. Three women and two men. Age range from thirty-five to forty-seven."

Kendra looked at the whiteboards, which featured a driver's license photo of each victim, crime-scene shots, and vital stats. She paid particular attention to the crime-scene photos. "Serial killers don't usually mix genders like this. Were they each attacked in similar surroundings? At home?"

"Three were, two weren't."

Sienna pointed at the photographs. "Tricia Garza, Monica Sellers, and Nick Wagner were killed at home. Stephanie Marsh and Steve Conroy were killed in public places, a parking garage and a city park."

Kendra studied the crime-scene photographs. "It looks like Garza, Sellers, and Wagner lived in detached single-family homes. Correct?"

Sienna nodded. "The other two lived in apartments."

"Less private, easier to be seen coming and going," Kendra said. "Probably why these two were attacked elsewhere."

Griffin dropped down in one of the diamond-backed chairs. "That's how we see it. These people were targeted."

Kendra tried to detach herself emotionally from the horrific images on the board, but she couldn't. She never could. Others in the room could look at the splayed bodies and awful grimaces as mere puzzle pieces, but she would never have that facility.

Thank goodness.

But she was positive they would sleep better than she would that night.

She turned from the photos. "Different murder venues. Again, not typical for a serial killer. So what's the connection? There has to be one, or else you guys wouldn't be involved."

Griffin looked at Lynch. "You haven't told her?"

"I'm letting you take it, in case she has follow-up questions."

Griffin exchanged quick glances with the other two agents. "We haven't gone public with this yet. We're actually not even sure what it means."

They were clearly uncomfortable discussing it with her, Kendra realized. "Why all this buildup, guys?"

"What we're about to tell you can't leave this room."

She half smiled. "My, my, you sound like someone in a grade-B movie. It's not as if I'm going to run out and sell the story to Rolling Stone. You seriously overestimate my interest in this case, Griffin."

She'd done it again. Kendra could see them stiffen and draw away from her.

Sienna quickly stepped forward, as if to get between Kendra and her superiors. "Dr. Michaels, perhaps I should tell you that I was brought into this investigation because I'm a toxicology expert."

"Poisons?"

"Yes. I've published quite a few papers on the subject. I was actually an Army physician before I joined the Bureau."

"Now it's my turn to be impressed. But the bodies in these pictures don't look as if they were poisoned."

"They were, believe it or not. Every one of them."

Kendra glanced back at the photos of corpses lying in pools of their own blood.

"It obviously isn't what killed them," Sienna said. "But that's our common thread. They each had the same contaminant in their systems. It was discovered almost by accident in the first victim's autopsy."

"What contaminant?"

Sienna shook her head. "We don't know."

Kendra's brows rose. "That's your expert opinion?"

"I'm afraid so. We have half a dozen labs working on it, but so far we can't identify the substance."

"I'm not sure I understand. You say that this contaminant isn't something that killed them..."

"It might have, if they had lived longer. We do know that this contaminant, whatever it is, appears to be a base-altering mutagen. It invades the system and actually alters the DNA."

"That's not so rare, is it? There are insecticides that do that."

"This is no insecticide."

"Just how does it alter the DNA?"

"Hard to say without knowing exactly what we're dealing with." Sienna peeled back several pages of a flip chart on an easel until she came to a large molecular drawing. "Here's what it looks like, at least on a molecular level. We just don't know where it came from or what its purpose is."

Kendra stared at the drawing. "You're telling me this contaminant is something no one has ever seen before, except in the bodies of these five murder victims?"

"That's the way it looks."

"Interesting." Kendra scanned the vital stats written beneath the photos of each victim. "Did they ever cross paths with each other?"

"Not as far as we can tell. They lived and worked in different parts of the city, and there's no evidence of any kind of environmental exposure that could have affected just these people."

Kendra studied the victims' photos a moment longer. "You're doing a good job keeping this under wraps from the media," she said slowly. "I'm finding that unusual. Why don't you go public with this?"

"The killer doesn't know we know about this," Griffin said. "It's the one strategic advantage we have."

"'Strategic advantage'? Shouldn't people be warned that there's a killer on the loose?"

Santini broke in, "What possible purpose could that serve? If there were a geographic pattern to the killings, we could warn people. But the killer has struck at different times and in different places. Anybody's at risk."

"Anybody, apparently, with this chemical in their systems," Kendra said. "How did you first discover this? You said it was almost an accident. Was it the medical examiner's autopsy?"

"No," Griffin said. "It's clear the examiner was obviously a moron."

Sienna shook her head. "In all fairness, n.o.body performing a standard autopsy on a stabbing victim would have discovered this. It's a miracle we latched on to it at all. The first victim had donated her body to UC San Diego Medical Center, where they happen to be in the midst of a major air-pollution study and the environment's effect on people of various ages. They ran a battery of tests on her organs and body tissues. That's how they discovered it, and it was unusual enough that they reported their findings back to the police department. The second body was still in the morgue, so we decided to check it out. The substance was identical, and so were the levels. The same has held true for the other victims."

Kendra nodded. "And you're positive the substance wasn't injected into the victims at the time of their murder?"