Atjust after midnight, they saw their man. Bruno Steele was walking across the vacant lot behind the target house.
"I've got a visual," came the radio.
"I see him," Jessica said.
Steele hesitated near the door, looking both ways up and down the street. Jessica and Nicci slid slowly down in the seat, just in case another car rolled up the street and silhouetted them in the headlights.
Jessica picked up her two-way radio, keyed it, whispered: "Are we good?"
"Yeah," Palladino said. "We are good."
"Uniforms ready?"
"Ready."
We've got him, Jessica thought.
We've fucking got him.
Jessica and Nicci drew their weapons, slipped quietly out of the car. As they neared their subject, Jessica made eye contact with Nicci. It was a moment for which all police officers live. The excitement of an arrest, tempered by the fear of the unknown. If Bruno Steele was the Actor, he had brutally killed two women that they knew of, both in cold blood. If he was their unsub, he was capable of anything.
They closed the distance in shadow. Fifty feet. Thirty feet. Twenty. Jessica was just about to draw down on the subject when she stopped.
Something was wrong.
In that moment, reality came crashing down around her. It was one of those times-unsettling enough in life in general, potentially fatal on the job-when you realize that what you thought you had in front of you, what you assumed to be one thing, was not only something else, but something wholly other.
The man in the doorway was not Bruno Steele.
The man was Kevin Byrne.