“It’s for goddamn real,” Sampson said as he ran at my side. “He’s here. No doubt about it now.”

I knew he would be. An urgent call had come to my desk less than ten minutes earlier. I had picked up the phone, distracted by another message, a fax from Kyle Craig of the FBI. I was scanning Kyle’s fax. He desperately needed help on his huge Mr. Smith case. He wanted me to meet an agent, Thomas Pierce. I couldn’t help Kyle this time. I was thinking of getting the hell out of the murder business, not taking on more cases, especially a serious bummer like Mr. Smith.

I recognized the voice on the phone. “It’s Gary Soneji, Dr. Cross. It really is me. I’m calling from Union Station. I’m just passing through D.C., and I hoped against hope that you’d like to see me again. Hurry, though. You’d better scoot if you don’t want to miss me.”

Then the phone went dead. Soneji had hung up. He loved to be in control.

Now, Sampson and I were sprinting along Massachusetts Avenue. We were moving a whole lot faster than the traffic. I had abandoned my car at the corner of Third Street.

We both wore protective vests over our sport shirts. We were “scooting,” as Soneji had advised me over the phone.

“What the hell is he doing in there?” Sampson said through tightly gritted teeth. “That son of a bitch has always been crazy.”

We were less than fifty yards from the terminal’s glass-and-wood front doors. People continued to stream outside.

“He used to shoot guns as a boy,” I told Sampson. “Used to kill pets in his neighborhood outside Princeton. He’d do sniper kills from the woods. Nobody ever solved it at the time. He told me about the sniping when I interviewed him at Lorton Prison. Called himself the pet assassin.”

“Sounds like he graduated to people,” Sampson muttered.

We raced up the long driveway, heading toward the front entrance of the ninety-year-old terminal. Sampson and I were moving, burning up shoe leather, and it seemed like an eternity since Soneji’s phone call.