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assumed he was all alone except for the poor victim trapped inside the car he had T-boned, but it was obvious from the position of the departing sedan that it had been parked right behind his truck. How long the sedan had been there and what its driver had seen Bud had no idea, but he was a witness to a major automobile accident. Bud knew the driver of the other car should not be leaving and yet there he went, driving into the darkness, swallowed up by the rain.
    He shook his head, spraying water in all directions, trying to comprehend what could possibly have compelled the anonymous witness to stop at an accident scene and drive away without attempting any sort of help.
    Then he forgot all about the odd occurrence as his attention was drawn in the direction of Merrimack proper, where he could see a string of emergency vehicles speeding toward the accident site. Within seconds they arrived, their strobes jaggedly slicing the 3:00 a.m. darkness in brilliant flashes of red, white, and blue.

Chapter 5
    Lady Bird Johnson Memorial Park was unseasonably warm for mid-May as bright sunlight flooded the Washington, D.C. area on the heels of the departure of the massive overnight storm, which had featured torrential rains moving slowly up the eastern sea-board, snarling last evening's rush hour traffic in cities all the way from Washington to Philly to New York to Boston. Now, though, the rainfall was just a memory, and people crowded into the park, eager to enjoy the unseasonably early taste of summer.
    Young mothers pushed strollers along walking paths, stopping and chatting and cooing over each other's babies. Joggers of all ages pounded the paths, weaving around old folks leaning on canes and walking sticks as they shared the same routes. College students tossed Frisbees back and forth, running and leaping and shouting.
    Tucked into the southeast corner of the park, backed snugly against a row of neatly trimmed ficus bushes, was a wrought-iron bench. On this bench sat Nelson W. Michaels, a balding middle-aged man in a rumpled blue suit, maroon rep tie loosened to enable him to unfasten the top button of his robin's egg blue dress shirt.
    A briefcase rested on the ground next to his nervously tapping left foot. The man was a good thirty pounds overweight, carrying extra baggage which made him appear at least a decade older than his forty-eight years. He was sweating heavily, although not as a result of the unseasonably warm temperatures.
    Nelson hoped he looked just like any other anonymous government bureaucrat passing the time on his lunch hour by ogling the throngs of sexy young women in the park. He pretended to read the newspaper, which he had opened randomly to the sports section. The Washington Nationals, widely considered the worst team in baseball, had just won their seventh consecutive game, leading fans to begin hoping maybe the team was actually better than they had been led to believe.
    Nelson raised his face to the sun and tried to slow his racing heartbeat through sheer force of will. He was just one of hundreds of guys in the park, plain and invisible. There was no reason to work himself into a stroke over an illicit lunch hour rendezvous in the park for Christ's sake; what he was doing had been going on in D.C. since the days of Washington and Jefferson.
    Without warning, a man dropped onto the other side of the worn bench, legs splayed, sweat glistening on his olive skin. He seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, making the already jumpy Nelson yelp out loud.
    The man looked younger than Nelson by a decade and had a full head of thick, wavy black hair that he wore slicked back from his high forehead. The man wore stonewashed jeans and an Ox-ford shirt with the top two buttons unfastened and the long sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He carried a brown leather briefcase, which was almost an exact replica of Nelson's. He leaned forward and placed the briefcase on the ground to his right.
    The new arrival sat