"Just tell me, Mr. Cooper."

"Oh. Uh, okay," he said. "The report said that while they found the remains of the driver of the car, there was no body in the truck. Kind of weird but not unheard of. I mean, maybe the driver fell asleep, woke up after the crash, and took off."

"So?"

"Well, there was this big fire that burned up the truck and car-and the body-so none of it could be identified. But when the camera came back on, they were still burning. I played around with the images in Photoshop and got these," he said, handing her two pictures.

One was of the truck's license plate and the other was a little more blurry but apparently was the car's license plate.

"Okay, the truck I'll give you, but how'd you get the car's license plate? The back end is hidden by the truck and facing the wrong way," Emily said, pointing to the original unretouched photo.

"You can thank the fire for that. Look here," he said, pointing at the window of the coffee shop the truck had smashed the car into. She could just barely see a reflection of the car's license plate, illuminated by the flames on the truck.

"Brilliant," she breathed. She had totally underestimated this kid. She got a sense that it happened to him a lot.

"It was fuzzy and backward, so it just took longer to render. Anyways, I checked them and the truck was stolen the day before."

"What?"

"That's not the best part. The car was licensed to a recent ex-con who was paroled early. I'm still looking into that," Dan said, digging through the papers again. "To this guy." Dan beamed with pride, but Emily didn't recognize the man in the picture.

"Who is he?"

"Are you kidding? It's David Jordan!"

Emily stared at him, her expression unchanged.

"No?"

"Sorry," Emily said, feeling let down again.

"Maybe it happened before you came to New York. The final murder victim, Bob Cummings, you know he was a news anchorman."

"That I know," Emily said.

"Well, Cummings used to be a cop. In fact, there was a huge racketeering case brought against him a few years back. It turned out he was clean, but the assistant DA had gone after him too hard, so he sued. Made a bundle of cash and was exonerated in the public's eye. He became a weird kind of martyr for blind justice. Besides the money, he got famous. Which made it easy for him to get a job in front of the cameras."

"I still don't see-"

"Cummings was exonerated, but his partner was guilty. Went to prison for it."

"And just got out," Emily said, feeling a chill.

"Now you're getting it. The guy killed in the car just before the traffic cameras came back on was David Jordan, Bob Cummings's ex-partner."

"Jesus," Emily said tracing her own finger along the map lines backward from the accident to The Cloisters. "Follow the yellow brick road."

"So what do you think?" Dan asked.

He's not the killer, Emily thought. At least, not the one who had killed leaving his symbol in his victim's dead flesh. There was no way to know if he had been driving the truck or not, but Emily's loyal mind reasoned that even if it was him behind the wheel, he hadn't killed but protected-protected his symbol, his reputation, and anyone else from being killed in his name.

"I think you're bloody brilliant!" Emily said, hugging him.

"DON'T LOOK AT me like that, Church," Emily said when she felt her hulking tomcat's green eyes burning into her. She was standing by the door paging through the pictures she'd taken on her digital camera. Dan had made the mistake of going to the bathroom and leaving his maps and photos lying out on the table. Was that her fault?

Before he'd left he'd told Emily what he wanted from her. A phone call, that was all. A simple phone call to his editors. Somehow he thought her endorsement would make them take him seriously. She knew a call from a struggling true crime author would make no difference whatsoever, but she didn't tell him that. She just wanted to get him out of her apartment. Of course, she had no intention of making the call. Her guilt was easily overridden by her excited conviction that The Monarch was innocent.

Churchill lay on the window ledge staring at her, his tail doing a slow, rhythmic snap every now and then that, to Emily, screamed disappointment.

"I didn't ask him to come here," Emily said, though if he hadn't she wouldn't have had the pressure in her chest relieved.

Despite what she'd told Wagner and her publisher, sometime in her final year at Oxford, during a conversation with her father, Emily had first learned about The Monarch. She'd almost immediately fallen in love with the faceless, debonair outlaw. It hadn't made any sense, but she couldn't help it.

When the masked man had mentioned her "error in judgment," he'd been talking about how she'd taken her school grants and loans and had used them to chase every rumor of The Monarch across Europe instead of finishing her degree. Her goal in life had become to find the object of her affection. Just as, apparently, it had become the masked man's goal. Now that he could use the killings as a way to- The frightening thoughts from the bus stop rose up in her mind again. What if these killings weren't just a convenient tool the masked man could use? What if he was responsible for them? He had power and pull. He also seemed to have a flair for the dramatic. And since almost every murder scene screamed, Ta-da!, that didn't bode well for him just being an opportunist.

"There's something bigger going on here than some kid's dream of being Clark Kent, Church," Emily said, flopping down on her couch.

Churchill rolled off the ledge and thudded to the floor. Emily wondered how he could do that. He just pushed himself into the unknown and somehow always rolled enough to land on his feet. He padded over and hopped up on the sofa, nuzzling his way onto Emily's lap.

"What does this guy want, Church?" Emily asked as she scratched behind his ears. He purred an I don't know.

Emily had her suspicions-some of them horrifying-but with thousands of dollars roasting in her oven, it was almost impossible for her to take the righteous stance.

"Maybe he is just a fan? Maybe he just wants more of the book?" Emily tried to lie to herself. Churchill twitched like he was trying to shake something off. "Yeah, I'm not even buying that one."

Emily thought for a while longer and finally realized she didn't have enough information-about either the murders or the masked man-to make a decision either way. Her eyes fell on the oven across the room as she thought.

She pushed Churchill aside and took the case out of the oven, placing it on the table. Emily put the file on the table and took the cash out, making a mental note to find a place for it before going to sleep.

If she was lucky, there'd be something here she could trace back to the owner. A serial number, a make and model-something. With the contents out, it just seemed like a run-of-the-mill metal briefcase. The outside was silver aluminum with two latches, each with a keyhole. The inside was lined with black felt and the lid had a couple pockets for files and such. Emily looked in the pockets but couldn't see anything. Just to be sure, she reached in and ran her fingers along the bottoms of the pockets. The first one was nothing but more felt. But in the corner of the second pocket, the one that used the lid as its backing, her finger caught on something.

Emily rooted through a kitchen drawer until she found a flashlight, hoping the batteries weren't dead. The light was dim, but still alive. Before it died, she shone it into the briefcase's pocket. There, in the bottom corner, sticking out through a tiny tear in the felt, was a loop of wire.

Something electronic was hidden in the briefcase.

She dropped the flashlight and backed away.

How could I be so stupid?

This wasn't her first time around the block and it certainly wasn't the first time a source had tried something like this. She tried to run the night through her mind-where they'd been in the room and what they'd said. It had been such an emotional roller coaster that she just couldn't remember it all.

Emily decided against ripping the case apart to get a better look at whatever was secreted inside. The less whoever put it there knew, the better. She was pretty sure she hadn't said anything she didn't want the masked man to know in its vicinity, and it had spent most of the night in the oven. But if the device was sensitive enough, it might have picked up her conversations with Dan at the kitchen table. Assuming it was a listening device and not a bomb. Stranger things had happened; which was why the case went back in the oven.

With paranoia firmly set in, Emily went out into the hall taking only her own cell phone. She made a quick call and returned to her apartment, being careful not to slam the door. If it was a listening device, she didn't want them knowing she'd left. If it was a bomb, loud noises were generally a bad idea, though the more she thought about it, the more she doubted the bomb idea. Still, once her writer brain got rolling it was hard to stop it.

Emily changed her clothes and got into bed with Wagner's file. She propped herself up on some pillows and flipped the file open. For over an hour she read through pages and pages of commendations, reprimands, promotions, and demotions. Wagner's career read like a bouncing ball. Reading between the lines, Emily discerned that he was a man who did what he thought was right, regardless of protocol or the chain of command. Not quite a maverick, but definitely not someone who worried about politics. Normally, he'd be the type of man Emily respected. At the moment-sizing up her opponent-it worried her.

11.

FCI Yazoo City Yazoo, Mississippi 2:00 A.M. Local Time LEW FELT MORE than heard the driver's door slam. He'd actually fallen asleep after lying in the plain wooden coffin with the taped-up Colero as a pillow. By the time he'd shaken the sleep grog from his brain, he felt the truck pull out and head down the short drive to the prison gate. His training in Iraq, thanks to all the kidnappings of Americans, had included how to determine direction and orientation of a vehicle with a bag on his head. He was pretty sure this wasn't what the instructors had had in mind for his training, but he was grateful for it, nonetheless.

Colero mumbled something under his tape gag.

"Here we go," Lew said quietly, holding the gun at the ready. He'd given up on his fingerprint idea when it just got too hard to hold the darn thing with only two fingers.

Less than a minute later, the van's brakes squeaked to a stop. The door slammed after the driver got out and Lew heard muffled voices for a while. This was the hard part. The waiting. The next sound they heard would either be the driver's door slamming after he got back in, or the dreaded click of the van's back door as a guard opened it to check inside. It could go either way. Lew figured if Quinn was on the level he would have called ahead to the guard. But with the near riot still fresh in the guard's mind, he might decide to check inside the van anyway.

All Lew could hear was the pounding of his own heartbeat in his ears. It reminded him of a time before he'd met Jonathan, before his life had taken a downward spin. His unit was clearing a village in Kuwait when mortar fire hit them. Almost his entire squad was killed except for him and this kid named Olsen, though Olsen had lost most of his left shoulder in the attack. When the shelling stopped, Iraqi troops had come in on foot to check for survivors. Lew pulled Olsen into a ditch and then pulled several dead bodies on top of them. The kid couldn't stop moaning from the pain, so Lew had choked him out to save his life. That's when the boots came out the back door, less than three feet from where they were laying.

Lew had thought he was going to lose his mind from the anxiety. Especially when, to make sure, one of the bastards had strafed the pile of dead bodies with his AK47. Two of the slugs went straight through Olsen's head, and one of them pierced Lew's leg. Even so, he'd kept perfectly still and quiet. The enemy wandered around the village for two more hours before they left. It was another hour before Lew could get up the courage to climb out of his hole. He put a tourniquet on his leg and walked almost four miles back to base, every one of his buddies' dog tags in his bloody pocket.

And here he was again, hiding with a supposedly dead body in a cheap pine box built for one. After what seemed like an eternity the driver's door opened and closed again. A few jostling minutes later, Lew knew he'd just escaped from prison. But he wasn't free just yet. He surmised that somewhere between here and the coroner, the van would stop. Either because the driver was in on it or because the men who wanted Miguel Colero's dead body had forced him to stop.

Lew couldn't see Colero's face in the dark, but every now and then he heard a muffled grunt and knew the drug lord was trying to talk under his gag. Lew thought about it and realized that if they were ambushed before he could figure out what to do, having Colero free, talking, and on his side might buy him some time, if not save his life. And if Colero went all stir-crazy, Lew'd just rap him in the mouth with the gun and put the tape back on. A win-win scenario, Lew style.

"You got some big cojones, I'll give you that, Katchbrow," Colero said when his mouth was untaped. As Lew continued cutting him free, he could tell from the volume Colero was using that he was going to behave. "What's the deal?"

"The warden sold you out," Lew said.

"Cabron," Colero hissed.

"Well, there's more," Lew said, trying to keep his bearings by feeling the turns of the van while he talked. So far, they seemed to be on course.

"Like what?"

"Like he hired me to kill you."

"Didn't think someone like you would have a problem with that. Maybe I read you wrong," Colero said.

"You didn't," Lew said, taking neither pride nor guilt in who he was. "But the big issue now is where are we going?"

"S. Good question."

"Either your enemies are going to meet us and carve you up-and I'm guessing anyone who happens to be with you-or we are headed for the coroner, and when they crack this puppy open we're going to have some fast talking to do."

"You can bet we ain't goin' to the coroner," Colero said. "They must have moved the date up," he said more to himself.

"They?"

"S, there was a reason I needed to be dead and out today."

"I figured as much," Lew said. Just then he felt a turn and an acceleration that wasn't on his mental schedule.

"What is it?"

"Looks like you're right. We just turned away from downtown. And picked up speed."

For once, Colero was quiet.

THEY HEARD THE driver plead for his life, a gunshot answering him. Then someone pulled open the cube van's roll-up door. Lew tried to peer out through a crack but it was the wrong angle. From the voices he'd heard before they shot the driver, he thought there were three of them. No doubt, one of them was the competition come to claim his crown from Colero. And his pound of flesh.

Somebody shouted in Spanish just before Lew heard a bolt pulled back. The bolt on an automatic weapon.

The repeating of the automatic weapon was deafening in the small space. The smell of gunpowder and ozone made it hard to breathe.

Splinters and smoke filled the air as the shooter yelled like an animal, filling the pine box with holes. When he finally stopped, he kicked the lid off the low-grade coffin. It took some time before the air finally cleared. When it did, Lew imagined the shooter's smile disappeared.

"Impossible!" The shooter sputtered. Lew pictured the three men leaning forward and seeing that the only thing in the pine box was coroner supplies now perforated worse than peg board. Supplies that had been in two storage cupboards at the back of the van's cargo area just two minutes earlier.

Lew and Colero, each in a separate cupboard, kicked the doors open simultaneously. They came thrusting into the cargo area before the assassins knew what was happening. Lew fired his pistol once, hitting the gunman in the middle of his face. His head snapped back and flesh and cartilage exploded up into the air, backlit by the moonlight outside the truck. Lew kept pulling the trigger, but nothing fired. He quickly realized that Quinn had fucked him too.

One of the remaining men turned and ran around the corner. Lew knew that had to be the boss, who apparently wasn't so brave when the chips were falling. The other man reached for the gun hanging in the holster under his arm, but Lew was on him before he could unclip the leather. He hit him at a full run, the two men sailing through the air out the back of the truck and slamming down on the side of the road, Lew using the attacker's midsection as a landing pad for his knees and all two hundred and twenty pounds of his bulk.

Colero, still wearing most of the duct tape Lew had sliced so he could move his arms, jumped out the back screaming and went after the other man, who had run up the side of the truck toward a black Escalade parked across the road. Lew didn't care about him right now. Despite shooting bile and snot into the air on their landing, the man under Lew-who was no jockey himself-was still going for his gun. Lew grabbed the holster and fought with the man. Then he realized he still had the pistol in his other hand.

"Ah, fuck it," Lew said. The gun might have been empty, but it was still a useful weapon. He raised his fist and slammed the barrel down straight into the attacker's eye socket. The one-eyed man screamed and let go of the gun in his holster. "Big mistake."

Lew snatched the gun out of the holster, stood up, and put two shots into the screaming henchman. The screaming stopped.

He turned in time to see Colero coming back around the end of the truck. Behind him, he could see a man lying in the road, lit up by the van's headlights. From the way the body was lying he could tell its back was broken. His head also seemed to be facing the wrong way.

"Guess I wasn't wrong about you after all, amigo," Colero said with a smile.

"How the hell did you . . ." Lew looked at the small-statured man and realized there was far more to him than a couple of colorful names. Then he saw that Colero was holding a gun similar to Lew's, each pointed at the other man.

Maybe I didn't think this all the way through.

Time stretched out. Steam rose in the cool night air from their sweaty faces, the corpses littering the street, and the still running engines of the two vehicles. They were on some back road in southern Mississippi. Lew knew if you died there, the only ones that would find you would be the gators and the survivalists.

"What now, compadre?" Colero asked, his gun leveled.

"The way I see it there's only one question," Lew said, eyeing Colero. He figured if the drug king had wanted him dead he would have been in the ditch by now. And it never hurt to have friends in low places.

"And that is?"

Lew dropped his weapon to his side. "I don't suppose you'd let me take the Escalade?"

Colero smiled and dropped his gun as well.

"I like you, Katchbrow. You don't say too much. You can obviously take care of yourself too."

"Seems to me all I've been doing lately is taking care of you," Lew said before he closed the van's back door. He picked up the first man he'd shot under the arms. Colero did the same with the other man. Together they dragged them off the side of the road into the brush.