‘Surely we get forensics involved?’

Rachel and Rob were back in their room at the Loews Hotel. The official check-out time had been and gone, so they were gathering their belongings with efficiency if not outright haste.

Rob shook his head. ‘The county sheriff went round there, accompanied by the marshal, and they say they found nothing amiss. When they got up to Talia’s apartment it was empty; there’d been no robbery or criminal activity. Everything was quite in order. No crime: no need for a forensics team to be deployed.’

‘But it looked like the apartment sub-letter had left in a hurry, isn’t that what you said? So she could have left something behind this time.’

Rob placed himself between her and her suitcase. ‘Rachel, there’s nothing more we can do. We did the right thing intercepting Talia like that; that’s something we can be proud of. We could even have saved her life. Probably we did.’

Rachel turned away from him, screwing up a sweater and thrusting it roughly into her bag.

‘This is a huge country.’ Rob went on. ‘And our perpetrator is quite happy to criss-cross it at will. She knows how to stay one step ahead.’

Rachel stomped into the bathroom, grabbed toothbrush, toothpaste and face cream and hurled them into her bag.

‘So she probably knows to lay low for a while now,’ Rob went on. ‘In fact, she might even stop now…’

The underwear on the floor was scooped up briskly and scrunched into a pocket of space in her case.

‘… and we still have no knowledge of who she really is. You can’t identify someone who has no identity.’

‘She has many identities.’ Rachel grabbed her trainers from the side of the bed and pushed them down the sides of her bag.

‘It amounts to the same thing. We have to face it: we’ve done all we can. And CasaMia are on the case now.’

Rachel clenched her jaw and tossed her make-up bag on top of her case.

‘I tell you what – how about this? I’ve got a buddy at the Washington Post. I’ll get him to run a piece on the CasaMia murders, without mentioning me as a source. That’ll spook our killer; keep her away from the site.’

Rachel zipped her case and turned to face him. ‘You mean you’ll leak the story?’

‘Exactly. Although you could argue that it’s in the public interest.’

‘I suppose that would be a result of sorts. Even if it’s not how I envisaged this ending.’ Rachel took one last admiring look at the Golden Gate Bridge, then turned and asked, ‘Are you going to go back to DC?’

‘Yep. You coming?’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve still got a week of leave. I think I might go back to Los Angeles for a while. I’ll retrace Phoebe’s steps, see if there’s something I missed.’

‘Share a ride to the airport then, Miss Tenacity?’

---

They went through security together. When they reached the departure gates, the flight for Dulles was a left turn, and the one to LAX to the right.

‘I guess this is it then.’ Rob put down his case to sweep Rachel into his arms, just as he had when she arrived in Washington two days earlier. ‘Time to say goodbye.’

‘I never say goodbye.’

‘Not in your nature, right?’ Rob laughed, and patted her shoulder. ‘Thanks for being such an amazing teammate.’

She smiled, reaching up and kissing him swiftly on the cheek. ‘No, thank you. You’ve been an incredible sport about all this. I truly appreciate all you’ve done.’

Before he could say more, she turned on her heel and walked off to her gate without looking back. Sitting in the waiting area with twenty minutes to kill before her flight boarded, she pulled out her mobile and tried calling Brickall. Perhaps he would be mollified if she told him she might be heading back to London sooner than planned. The call rang a few times, then was cut.

‘Rachel!’

She swung round. A slightly breathless Rob stood there beside her.

‘If you think you’re going to get a goodbye out of me at the eleventh hour, forget it. I told you; I don’t do them.’

He was shaking his head vigorously. ‘No, that’s not it, I’ve just had a call. From my co-worker. A familial DNA match has come through on CODIS.’ Rob reached down and pulled her to her feet. ‘This is huge! We’ve got someone related to Miss XX.’