“Bobby Fisher and Eliza—what did you think about that? You knew he wanted her to go out with him?”

Fleurette shrugged. “Oh that. Fact is, Eliza couldn’t have cared less. Bobby didn’t really come into her line of focus, you know what I mean? She put up with him. What she really wanted to do was drop-kick him out of the building.”

“Do you think Eliza really disliked Bobby that much? Do you think he hated her because she kept turning him down?”

“Who knows? When he finally ran out of there on Friday, she looked at me, rolled her eyes, and said, ‘Well, maybe that’s the last time I’ll have to tell him to take a hike.’ ”

“So she never really took him all that seriously.”

“No,” Fleurette said. “The only person she took seriously was Justice Califano.”

“So what did Danny say to you before you told him you were going shoe shopping?”

“Nothing really, just something like ‘Women and shoes, that’s all you think about.’ Then he said he was going to see a foreign film with Annie that night, that he had something going—listen, Danny was always on the make. Usually whatever he said didn’t mean anything.”

“Except this time it did, didn’t it?” Ben said.

Before Ben and Callie left her by the Vietnam Wall, next to her uncle’s name, Ben remembered to ask Fleurette what color her toenail polish was last Friday. She looked startled, then laughed. “It’s called ‘I’m Not Really a Waitress Red.’ ”

Callie said to Ben as they drove away, “I wonder if her father makes the pilgrimage here every year like Fleurette does.”

“Somehow I don’t think so. After all, he wasn’t six years old when he first came here.”

“She’s scared, even though she denies it.”

“Yes, I think you’re right.”

CHAPTER 26

GEORGETOWN WASHINGTON, D.C.
FRIDAY EVENING

“SEAN ATE MORE spaghetti than you, Callie,” Savich said, eyeing her plate. “You need more Parmesan? Garlic bread? How about more of Sherlock’s Caesar salad? It’s the best. I taught her how to make it myself.”

“No, I’m fine, truly. It’s so nice to go off our pizza diet. It’s been a very long week.”

“Your mom is having her potluck tonight with her friends?”

Callie nodded to Sherlock, who was cutting into a beautiful apple pie.

Simon Russo, Lily’s art broker fiancé from New York, was sitting back in his chair, hands over his lean stomach. He was looking at Savich’s sister, and there was such sweetness in his look that Callie gulped. She had listened to them talk about No Wrinkles Remus, Lily’s political cartoon series that The Washington Posthad picked up, about Sarah Elliott’s paintings, one of which hung over the fireplace in the living room, but of course, the conversation always returned to Justice Califano and Danny O’Malley.

Savich served the warm apple pie with a big scoop of French vanilla ice cream on top. “Oh goodness,” Callie said. “This is wonderful. Just smell that. Were you a chef in a former life, Dillon?”

“He was probably a sculptor and a chef,” Sherlock said. “He’s still both in this lifetime. When we go back into the living room I’ll show you some of his work—”

Savich’s cell phone rang. He answered, jumped to his feet. “Eliza? What is it, what’s wrong?”

He listened, everyone else at the table focused on him.

Suddenly he yelled into the phone, “No! Eliza, fight him!”

He was already running for the front door. “He’s there, attacking her, right now! Lily, Simon, stay here with Sean. Ben, get your siren out, we’re going to McLean. That bastard is there! Hurry!” He clamped the phone back to his ear. “Eliza? Please, say something. Fight! You can do it, fight!”

Ben slammed the siren down on top of the Crown Vic in a second, already on his radio as he pulled out of the driveway, calling to control to report a murder in progress at Number 102, The Oaks condo complex in McLean.

In the Porsche, Sherlock was on her cell to Jimmy Maitland. “He’s got Eliza Vickers right now. Get the SWAT team out there, sir, a helicopter, the local police. We can’t let him get away. Oh God, Dillon heard him attacking her!”

Savich was still holding his own cell phone to his ear as the Porsche hit eighty miles an hour, heading for the highway to McLean. There were no voices now, no noise of any kind, just silence.

Eighteen minutes later, they barreled into the driveway, barely missing a squad car that was parked halfway on the drive, halfway on the front yard. There were a good dozen blue-and-whites all over the block, cops everywhere. The front door of Eliza Vickers’s condo was open, uniformed men and women streaming in and out.