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BREE WALKED THROUGH THE door of Frost and Lear’s offices in Bethesda once again. She smiled winningly at the young receptionist, a freckle-faced redhead who wore thick eyeglasses and a harried expression.

“Bree Stone with the Bluestone Group,” she said pleasantly, handing the young woman a card. “Is Jeffrey Frost available?”

“I’m afraid Mr. Frost is on-site at one of our developments in the area.”

“Which one?” Bree asked. “The empty lots by the Anacostia River or the condemned building in Northeast?”

“Uh, Northeast, I think.”

“Great, I’ll find him there,” she said, and left with a wave.

Alex called shortly after Bree started driving. He told her not to worry but that he and John had been in a wild incident at one of the private airfields at Dulles. Bree was shocked to hear about the explosions and Hawk’s drugged state.

“But you’re not hurt?” she said.

“Miraculously, no. How are you?”

“I’m fine,” she said, then filled him in on her talk with Elena Martin and told him her current destination, the condemned building in Northeast DC by the vacant lot where the first burn victim had been found.

“Bree, I have to tell you something about my brother Charlie,” Alex said. He told her that Aldous Campbell said his brother had been living in that building, and Alex was afraid that Charlie was the earlier burn victim.

“What do you hope to do by going to that building?” he asked her.

“Shake Frost up a little?”

“Let me know what rattles,” Alex said. “And be careful. If Rosalynn’s right about Frost and Lear being involved in organized crime, you don’t know what you might be facing.”

“Heard and understood.”

“Okay, gotta go make my report to Chief Kane.”

“I don’t miss those days at all,” Bree said and hung up.

It took her twenty minutes to drive to the condemned apartment building that F and L owned, the one where Campbell said he’d last seen Charlie Cross. The building had a chain-link fence around it and a weed-choked vacant lot behind it.

Though the gate bore a No Trespassing sign, the padlock was open, and the chain dangled. She went through to the entrance to the building.

When she opened the door, she was almost overwhelmed by the smell of rodent urine. Bree hesitated. She hated mice and rats. She really did not want to go inside.

But then she heard muted voices echoing in the halls and forced herself to enter. She stopped, listened, and heard the voices again. They were coming from somewhere above her.

Bree found a groaning, squeaky staircase and climbed it to the second floor, feeling more uneasy about the strength of the structure the higher she got. The voices were coming from a room down the hall, and there seemed to be three, two male and one female.

She walked toward the voices, and the garbled sounds became clearer.

“This is the decision, then,” a voice she recognized as Jeffrey Frost’s said. “We either start over with a new design or we take the entire place down to the studs and rehab it the way we envisioned.”

“Just asking,” a woman with a slight Eastern European accent said, “but which one requires more cash? Starting over or rehabbing with the existing steel structure?”

“In all likelihood, rehab,” Frost replied. “Lots of subs. Lots of details.”

“Wiggle room on costs versus real costs?”

“Bigger wiggle with rehab. Like I said, lots of subs.”

A male with a nasal voice and a thicker Eastern European accent said, “When can you—”

Bree stepped through the doorway, smiling brightly. “Hi there, everyone!”