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Avenue, hands stuffed in his pockets. He’s wearing a wool cap and keeps his head down, but there’s no mistaking who it is.
    Aw crap.
    What’s he doing here?

14
    B ursting out from the East Wing entrance and weaving through a crowd of visitors waiting to start their White House tour, I make a sharp left on East Exec and nearly collide with a middle-aged woman trying to take a cell phone photo of the White House. The President didn’t say a word as I left; they want to know why he’s here too.
    “ Sorry…! ” I call out, waving an apology as I swim upstream on East Exec.
    “ Watch yourself! ” a dad with two little kids barks as I cut past him and almost plow into someone else. But what catches me off guard is when that someone else grabs my wrist. And squeezes.
    I fight to pull away.
    He squeezes tighter, digging his thumb into my wrist. A jolt of electricity zigzags to my elbow. My arm goes numb. “ What’re you doing!? ” I hiss, finally turning to face him.
    His drooping gold eyes, the color of white wine, lock on me. His whole face sags, and his putty-like skin appears extra waxy in the sun. Still, even without his burns, I know that look since our childhoods in his treehouse. Not here. Be smart , Marshall insists with a burning glare.
    “ Look, check him out! ” someone whispers next to us.
    I turn just as two overweight teenage girls quickly look away. On our right, a n older woman tugs her husband’s arm, trying to steer his gaze toward us. This is Marshall’s life every day: pretending not to notice all the stares.
    He lowers his head and steers me through the throng, back toward the public part of Pennsylvania Avenue.
    I again try to pull free; he again squeezes the pressure point on my wrist.
    “What’re you doing here!?” I demand.
    He shakes his head, glancing up toward a nearby lamppost. A round security camera stares back down. I almost forgot. Marshall breaks into buildings for a living. Of course he knows where the cameras are.
    As he leads us through the crowd, he doesn’t duck and weave; he plows forward in a straight line. Some people see him, others just feel him coming. It’s why he’s so good at his job. The man with the boiled face is here. Whether it’s from fear or pity, everyone gets out of the way.
    “You know they saw you, right? They caught you on camera inside,” I tell him as we cross Pennsylvania Avenue and head across the street to Lafayette Square. He stops at a nearby bronze statue. It’s not the big statue at the center of the park—of Andrew Jackson looking glorious on horseback. It’s the smaller statue—of General Lafayette himself, his arm raised in mid-speech—that’s tucked in the corner of the park.
    “They shouldn’t care,” Marshall says, his voice grinding like crushed glass. His military posture is perfect as he scans the area, ever the wolf.
    “Of course they care. They know what you are!”
    “And what am I, Beecher?”
    I pause, choosing each word carefully. Until a few weeks ago, he’d been gone from my life. In one of my first cases with the Culper Ring, he came back, even helping me solve an old murder and stop a serial killer. “They’ve seen what you do. At the Lincoln Memorial…you may’ve been trying to protect the President, but you’re still the one who killed that shooter. Last I checked, they don’t like suspected murderers hanging outside the White House.”
    “I’m not the one they should be worried about,” Marshall says, looking down and kicking at a spot on the sidewalk. “Six o’clock. Directly behind me.”
    I glance over his shoulder. On the left: a homeless man tugging a rusted toy red wagon filled with old newspapers; on the right: a bald tourist with an old-fashioned camera around his neck.
    “The tourist,” Marshall says. “When A.J. took you out of the van and into the White House, the tourist was watching from across the street. Took photos of the whole thing.”
    “ What? I thought you were—?”