Anthony stared at me in a new way, as if he’d just figured something out. “What are you, a cop?”
“Just do what I asked you to do, okay?”
He laid the Colt on the coffee table. Once I had checked that it was empty, I locked the gun in my desk. Took a breath, let it out slowly.
“Now, do you want to talk about your dream?” I asked him. “Basra? What happened to you there?”
He nodded. Then he began to talk—and to pace the room again. But at least he wasn’t armed.
“It started out the same . . . the dream. We got hit, and I made it to a trench. Like I always do. But this time I wasn’t alone.”
“Are you talking about Matt?” I asked. We had gotten that far in the dream before.
“He was there with me, yeah. Just the two of us. We got separated from our unit.”
Matt was a buddy of his I’d heard about. They had worked on the same munitions truck, but I didn’t know too much more than that.
“He was ruined, man. Both his legs like hamburger, shredded to shit. I had to drag him by his arms. It was all I could do.” He stared at me for help.
“Anthony, are you talking about your dream or what really happened that night?”
Now his voice went down to a whisper. “That’s the thing, Doc. I think I’m talking about both. Matt was screaming like he was some kind of wild, hurt animal. And when I heard the screaming, in the dream, it was like I knew I’d heard it before.”
“Were you able to help him?” I asked.
“Not really, no. I couldn’t help, couldn’t do anything at all. A medic couldn’t have helped Matt, the condition he was in.”
“Okay. So what happened next?”
“Matt starts saying, ‘I’m not gonna make it. Not gonna make it.’ Over and over like that. And this whole time, there’s fire coming from every direction. I don’t know if it’s our guys or the ragheads. There’s nowhere the two of us can go—not with him on those shot-up legs and losing his insides like he was. And then he starts saying, ‘Kill me. Do it. Please.’ ”
I could see that Anthony was into it now, the dream, the horror of what had happened that night in the war. I let him keep going.
“He takes out his own gun. He can barely even hold it. He’s crying ’cause he can’t do it, and I’m crying ’cause I don’t want him to. And mortars are going off everywhere. The sky is lit up like the Fourth of July.”
Anthony shook his head, stopped talking. His eyes were welling up with tears. I thought I understood: there were no words he could use to describe this.
“Anthony?” I asked. “Did you help Matt kill himself?”
A tear rolled all the way down his cheek.
“I put my hand over Matthew’s, and I shut my eyes . . . then we fired. Together.” Anthony stared at me. “You believe me, don’t you, Dr. Cross?”
“I should, shouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and there was anger in his eyes. “You’re the doctor. You should know the difference between bad dreams and reality. You do, don’t you?”
Chapter 91
IN OUR VERY STRANGE and strangely powerful session together, Anthony Demao had asked me if I was a cop, and it struck me now that I hadn’t answered him. I wasn’t quite sure myself these days. I was still settling back in with Metro, and my situation was a special one. I knew one thing for sure: I hadn’t ever worked any harder on a case—one that seemed more complex and difficult every day.
Frustrating to all of us, but not that unusual under the circumstances, our hands were tied in the investigation of Brian Kitzmiller’s death. The Cyber Unit at the Bureau had promised a new contact soon and a full report on everything Kitz had been doing before he died, but in the meantime, it was basically “We’ll get back to you.”
Which is why Sampson and I showed up on Beth Kitzmiller’s doorstep in Silver Spring, Maryland, a day later. We didn’t want to bother the family, to intrude on their grief, but we didn’t have much choice.
“Thanks for letting us come over,” I said as Beth let the two of us into the foyer of the house.
Her face was drawn, and she looked deeply tired—but there was strength and resolve in her voice. “Brian died looking for this terrible, terrible man. You do whatever you need to do. Stay here as long as you have to. We need closure, Alex. I need it. So do my kids.”
Six-year-old Emily hovered at the top of the stairs, wide-eyed and silent, watching us. I gave her a wink and a quick smile, and finally she smiled back. Brave little girl, but just seeing her put a pain in my heart. I needed closure too.
“We were hoping to take a look in his office,” I told Beth. “I know he did a lot of work at home.” And if anyone had crossed paths with our killer online, it would have been Kitz, I thought, though I didn’t say that part out loud.
“Of course. Let me show you the Lair.”
Beth led us through a pair of sliding pocket doors at the rear of the homey Colonial that Kitz would never see again. His office looked out onto a backyard with a swing set and a sunflower garden. Life goes on. For some of us, anyway. Not for Kitz, though.
Beth lingered in the doorway. “I don’t know if you’ll find anything worthwhile or not, but please, look anywhere you like. Nothing in our house is off-limits.”
“Is this the only computer he used at home?” Sampson asked from where he sat at a large, cluttered desk. I noted that the system was surprisingly low-tech, just a Dell CPU and monitor.
“He had a laptop from the Bureau,” Beth said. “I don’t think it’s here, though. I haven’t come across it anywhere.”
I looked over at Sampson. We hadn’t found a laptop in Kitz’s office or his car. “How about passwords? Any idea?” I asked Beth.
She blew out a mouthful of air. This was difficult, but Beth Kitzmiller was making it a lot easier for us. “Try Gummi Worm, with an i. He used that one sometimes.”
The three of us exchanged a kind of shy, painful smile.
“It was his nickname for Emily,” she offered. “And occasionally for me.”
Sampson tapped in Gummi Worm.
Chapter 92
IT WAS KITZ’S PASSWORD—at least, on the computer at home—and while Sampson feverishly worked the keyboard, I started in on the desk drawers.
I turned up a thick stack of pending case files, most of them serial-related, and all filled with Xeroxes of original material. I had to wonder if these were “unauthorized” copies he’d brought home from work. Kitz had been a “fan” of this kind of stuff, right? If he was a little obsessed, it was part of what made him good at his job. Of course, in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help thinking, Kitz was FBI, and Kyle Craig had been too. Unfortunately, that particular line of thinking also made me a suspect.
The first case I looked at was one I’d heard about before. Someone was breaking into suburban Maryland homes at night and strangling women in their beds. No theft, no vandalism—just the vicious murders themselves. So far, there had been three in a span of five months, one every seven weeks.
The next file was coded “Mapmaker,” and outlined a series of shootings, always with the same gun. The victims were apparently random, the only consistency being their location. The shootings, four so far, had taken place on street corners along a straight line running through Northwest DC.
Then I discovered a file Kitz had put together on Kyle Craig. It even included information on how I had taken Kyle down. Plus, Kitz had been going through all of Kyle’s old case notes, including the ongoing investigations at the time he was arrested.
When I found the DCAK file, it was mostly old information on the Washington-area murders: copies of crime reports, map sections, lab results, interviews—hundreds of them, all tied to the known homicides. Not much that was new or helpful. And nothing directly linking DCAK to Craig.
“How’s it going over there?” I asked Sampson. “Any luck so far? Good or bad?”
“There’s a lot to look at,” he said. “He’s got Techno
rati, Blogdex, PubSub . . . tracking software, Alex. With the right setup, he could ping anyone who commented on a blog or surfed a site.”
“So how do we find out what Kitz knew? Where did he keep it?”
Sampson thrummed his fingers on the desk. “I could check his Internet history, see if there were sites he went to a lot. Guess I’ll start there.”
A few minutes later, Sampson suddenly sat back in Kitz’s desk chair. He whistled through his teeth. “I’ll be damned. Come over here, Alex.”
I peered over his shoulder.
“Look familiar?” Sampson asked. “It should.”
He’d pulled up a long list of sites, many of them with names I recognized from my own surf-sleuthing. But that’s not what had my attention now. In addition to the named sites, the list included dozens of numbers. As I looked closer, I saw that it was actually the same number, repeated over and over, subdivided in different ways with periods and slashes.
344.19.204.411
34.41.920.441/1
34.419.20.44/11
344.192.04.411
The list continued beyond the figures on the screen, but what we had was our mystery number—the one from the side of the mailbag at the Smithsonian.
“It’s an IP address, Alex. A Web site. At least, Kitz seemed to think so.”
“Why didn’t he tell us about it?” I asked. “What’s going on here, Sampson?”
“Maybe he hadn’t found the right combination. Maybe he hadn’t gotten around to checking it yet. Or the site could be inactive.”
“One way to find out,” I said. “Let’s start at the top and work our way down the list.”
Chapter 93
BREE STONE STOOD ALL ALONE on the roof of the Nineteenth Street house, staring at the spot where the sun had baked Brian Kitzmiller’s blood to a cracked black stain. All the wrong questions were running through her head: Did you suffer much, Kitz? Were you blindsided? Did you even have a fighting chance? Any chance at all? Did you know who did this?
They were inevitable questions, human ones, but also unhelpful to this investigation. She needed to focus on the killer’s methods and then trace any evidence he might have left here.
Tonight, Bio-Tec was coming in to clean the “yellow house.” The homeowners would be back in town tomorrow. This was the last walk-through, her final chance to find some shred of evidence that everyday life would soon erase.
Every indication was that the killer had come up through the roof hatch and had exited by the scaffold in the back, two houses over. Kitz’s postmortem had shown abrasions under the arms and fibers on his shirt where he’d been hauled up with a strong nylon rope, or a cord of some kind. Nonfatal levels of chloral hydrate were in his bloodstream, indicating he’d been unconscious, which was the only good news so far.
No blood was found inside the house, at least none that mattered. Kitz’s throat had been cut right here on the roof, not long before the police arrived. The killer probably could have timed it any way he wanted.
The bastard chose the close call, didn’t he? He planned everything about this, including that Kitz should die soon after we arrived.
Bree pressed her knuckles into the back of her neck. The pulsing headache she’d woken up with was turning into an all-day event. And the dark shirt she was wearing was a really bad call. It was already soaked through with sweat.
She walked toward the scaffold, past a litter of cigarette butts and half-crushed tall boys that hadn’t been there before, which meant that somebody had been. “Psychotourists,” Alex liked to call them, pathetic creeps drawn by a serial-crime scene. And hell, this was probably the most sensational case in the last ten years, unfortunately for everyone involved.
Bree looked straight down from the roof. The parking area below was mostly empty at this time of day. That’s where Kitz’s white Camry had been found in one of the resident spaces.
The killer either left on foot or had another vehicle waiting for him.
That is . . . if he left the scene at all.
Had he?
Or had he stayed awhile to watch and collect memories?
Did he always hang around afterward?
The actual murder had taken place in private, an interesting departure for DCAK. The audience was bigger but also more abstract—out there in TV land somewhere. Bree wondered if he’d wanted—needed—to check out the “live” crowd gathered on Nineteenth Street. She’d be willing to bet her shield that’s exactly what the bastard had done.
And what about the woman who’d been his accomplice in Baltimore? Had she been here too? Was she part of everything from the start? What was the deal with the two of them? Lovers? Former inmates at some asylum? And what connected them to Kyle Craig?
Bree sat on the edge of the roof, then finally let herself down the scaffold, carefully, because she was feeling a little shaky right now—too much stress, not enough sleep, not enough Alex either. Seconds later, she was on the ground.
From there, she forced herself to follow the killer’s most likely path, up the alley to A Street and back around to Nineteenth.
It was quiet now, especially compared to two days ago. A single MPD cruiser was parked in front of the house. Howie Pearsall, the officer she’d brought with her, was leaning against the passenger side. Howie was a good man, a friend of hers, just not the most ambitious guy in the world.
Bringing him was a safety precaution but not one that Bree took seriously. She was more likely to protect Howie than the other way around. He stood up straight and brushed something off his shirt when he saw her coming.
“At ease, soldier. Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Sorry I took so long, Howie.”
“How’d it go in there?” he wanted to know.
“Howie, it didn’t. Hold on, I’ll be right back.” She went up the front walk and tore the police notice off the door. So much for the crime scene.
“Excuse me. Detective?” The guy behind her on the lawn seemed to have come out of nowhere. What the hell was his deal?
“I’m Neil Stephens with the AP. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”
Chapter 94
NEIL STEPHENS, OR RATHER DCAK, wanted to shoot Bree Stone full of holes right there in front of the house. Pull the .357 out of his vest. Bam. Dumb cop dead on the front walk. Get the uniform sloppily moping around by the squad car too.
But no. This wasn’t even a rehearsal, much less a performance. Maybe it was groundwork for later on, though. And a little bit of fun too. Detective Stone was, after all, a stone-cold fox. And she was Alex Cross’s girlfriend, wasn’t she? That made this very cool. Gave it stature and importance in his mind.
Stone kept moving toward the cruiser. “No comment,” she said, not even making eye contact with him.
So she was a bitch on wheels as well as a mediocre detective! Figured. Cops weren’t much of a challenge. Maybe collectively they were.
He pulled the Leica around on its strap. “Just a quick photo, then?”
Like he cared about the picture. What he wanted was for Stone to see him—to have seen the character he was playing today, Neil Stephens.
Detective Bree Stone was his audience right now. But she didn’t even look. She held up a palm and got into the car—Talk to the hand puppet. “Let’s go,” she said to the cop at the wheel, and they pulled away from the curb. End of interview.
Neil Stephens called out to her, “Having a bad day, Detective Stone?”
It was meant to be in character, the parting shot of a pushy journalist. He wasn’t even sure she’d heard it—until the police cruiser suddenly braked. Then the car backed up several feet to where he was standing.
Bree Stone climbed out and gave him a quick once-over. Now he had her attention. But was that a good thing?
“What did you say your name was?” she asked. “I didn’t catch the name.”
“Stephens. Out of Chicago. Associated Press.” The worst thing he could do right now was flinch. So he stepped closer instead
. That’s what Neil would do—get the story. “I left you a voice mail this morning.” He hadn’t. “Actually, I was hoping to do a piece on your team while I was here in Washington.”
He was handling this pretty well, but his position still wasn’t good. The logic wasn’t quite right, didn’t feel solid to him.
Stone must have thought so too. “Could I see some ID?” she asked next.
So what did he do now? He stepped closer again and handed the identification to her. He could see the other cop out of the corner of his eye—both hands still on the wheel. Stone’s gun was holstered on her right hip, next to her badge. He had her—no doubt about it in his mind. He could take her out right here, right now. He knew that he should too.
She looked at him again, her face more relaxed than before. “Yeah, okay. We could do a quickie back at the office. I’ll introduce you to whoever’s around. How’s that sound?”
She was almost convincing. Almost fooled me, Detective. But her tone told DCAK everything he needed to know, including that he had to act now or he was toast.
His fist flew up and struck Bree Stone in the temple. Christ, she had a hard head for a woman. He grabbed her Glock and shot the other cop right through the open window. DCAK fired into the crumpled form again to make sure. Then he turned back to Stone.
She was still down, obviously hurt but not unconscious. One hand was pressed against her forehead, blood dripping between the fingers. She tried to reach for him. He hooked her with his foot and flipped her on her back.
“Don’t move!” he screamed in her face.
He put the gun inches from her eyes. “Look at me, Bree. Remember my fucking face. And every time you do, you’ll know what a total screwup you are. You and your main mount, Alex Cross. Hey, you just met DCAK.”
Chapter 95
I RUSHED TO BE WITH BREE at St. Anthony’s emergency room, which was where my wife, Maria, had been pronounced dead, and I couldn’t get that terrible, morbid thought out of my head. Bree was getting stitches when I got there. Word was they practically had to drag her into the ER. Unfortunately, an officer named Howie Pearsall was dead. Another cop down.