SOMETHING TERRIBLE was going to happen today. Cindy's latest e-mail assured us of that. And her strange pen pal hadn't been wrong yet, hadn't misled her or lied.

It was a sickening, helpless feeling to watch the dawn creep into the sky and know: in spite of all the resources of the U.S. government, all the fancy vigilance and warnings and cops we could put out on the street, all my years of solv-ing homicides... August Spies were going to strike today. We couldn't do a thing to stop the killers.

That dawn found me in the city's Emergency Command Center, one of those "undisclosed locations" hidden in a nondescript cinder-block building in a remote section of the naval yard out in Hunter's Point. It was a large room filled with monitors and high-tech communications equipment. Everyone there was on edge. What were August Spies going to pull now?

Joe Molinari was there. The mayor, Tracchio, the heads of the fire department and Emergency Medical Task Force, all of us crammed around the "war table."

Claire was there, too. The latest warning had everyone freaked out that this new attack could be a widespread one involving ricin. Molinari had a toxins expert on alert.

During the night we had decided to release Hardaway's name and description to the press. So far we hadn't been able to locate him, and the situation had only gotten exponen-tially worse. Murder had given way to public s............