Blowout

he might not have cared, just blew us off.”
    “That’s possible,” Jimmy Maitland said. “Anyone who uses Günter Grass as an alias is about as egotistical as any killer I’ve ever seen.”
    Savich heard Sherlock’s cell phone play the beginning bars of Bolero, and looked up.
    He watched her face as she listened, then said, her voice urgent, “We’ll be there as soon as we can. Don’t force his hand. Don’t hurt him.” He was stepping toward her as she jumped to her feet. “Dillon, we’ve got to go, now. It’s Samantha’s boy, they’ve found him, and there’s trouble.”
    Jimmy Maitland didn’t hesitate. “Samantha’s son? Tell me later. Go, but you call me when you get back, okay?”
    Savich nodded, even as he was running for the conference room door. “Ben, Callie, you’re with us.”
    As they raced from the elevator toward their cars in the garage, Sherlock said, “I had the Boston field office put out an alert on the name Austin Douglas Barrister. If it turned up, I was to be called immediately. That was Chief Howard Gerber of the Petersboro, Maryland Police Department. He said they have a hostage situation, a man inside a house with his wife and two children. The Hostage Rescue Team was trying to talk him out when the guy yelled out that his name wasn’t Martin Thornton, it was Austin Douglas Barrister. Chief Gerber realized he’d just read that name, looked it up, and called me. I told him we’d be there as soon as we could.”
    “Don’t lose us,” Savich shouted to Ben and gunned the Porsche out of the garage.
    Savich headed the Porsche north on the Beltway. Sherlock said to him as well as to Ben on her cell phone, “The siren is great, Ben. We want to get there as fast as possible. Until we got this break, we couldn’t locate Austin Barrister. It was like he disappeared off the face of the earth. Neither the Boston field office nor MAX could track him down.
    “Okay, now, it looks like Petersboro is about ten miles due west of Alston, Maryland, off 270. We’re about forty-five minutes away, particularly with you, Ben, sitting on the siren. We’ll probably get there with a four-car escort.”
    Ben said, “I’m with you. Tell Savich we’re right behind him, at least I’m trying. That Porsche is something.” Ben laughed as he shut down his cell.
    Savich said to his wife, “You didn’t tell me you’d put a tag in the system.”
    “Yep, I didn’t really think it would result in anything, but who knew?”
    Savich shook his head, amazed as always with her ingenuity, signaled, and passed a Beemer at one hundred miles per hour. “So he’s been using the name Martin Thornton since he ran away from Boston.”
    “Yes. The Hostage Rescue Team was probably calling his name over and over, you know how they do—Martin, do you hear us, Martin?—and he must have cracked and shouted out his real name.”
    “Thank God for that.”
    “Thank God for a police chief who remembered the alert and acted quickly on it.”
    Inside the Crown Vic, Callie watched the traffic whiz by them, cars pulling over quickly as they neared, looking almost as if they were standing still. When they reached a clear stretch, all she could see of the Porsche was a flash of red.
    “More pedal to the metal,” Ben said, and soon the Porsche came back into sight.
    “This is the strangest day of my life.”
    “You really think this is a strange day?”
    “Don’t arch that supercilious eyebrow at me, Ben Raven. First I’m allowed in a meeting on the sacred fifth floor of the FBI building, and the next thing I know, we’re chasing Savich’s Porsche to Maryland to find this guy who’s the son of a woman who was murdered thirty years ago.”
    “That’s why I went into law enforcement,” Ben said, “the excitement. It’s nonstop.”
    “Yeah, right, so you say. The cops I’ve talked to usually whine about how boring it is—on the phone and the computer all day.”
    They rounded a bend and the Porsche accelerated forward out of a curve. “My oh my,” Ben said. “Be still my heart. That car can go, just look at it.”
    Callie laughed at him. “So get yourself one—to go with your truck.”
    “Would you prefer I picked you up in a Porsche or a truck?”
    “Now we’re going on a date? You’re asking me my car preference?”
    He shrugged. “It might be fun in the truck. You and my dog could hang out the window, tongues lolling in the wind. Well, at least it could be fun in the summer. Now,