Sampson was going to be fine, according to his doctors. He needed stitches and fluids, but I had no doubt he’d be driving the staff crazy by checkout time tomorrow. Eventually, we retreated to a waiting area so that Billie and Djakata could have some alone time with the Big Man. Billie didn’t seem too happy with him, though, or with me.
The kids were full of questions, and Bree and I answered as many as we could. Though—as always—we didn’t have all the answers ourselves. Not yet, and maybe not ever. Especially where Kyle Craig was concerned.
“So, who were those people really? DCAK?” Jannie wanted to know. I’ve always loved her curiosity, but I wasn’t sure what to make of this budding interest in things forensic. The last thing we needed was another Dragon Slayer in our house on Fifth Street.
“We should know more soon,” I told her. Both Anthony and Sandy—her body, anyway—had been fingerprinted. I thought they’d probably show up somewhere, in somebody’s files, maybe even in Kyle Craig’s old notes from his FBI days.
I finally sent the family home, and Bree and I went to look in on our captive. We watched “Anthony” through a window while a post-op medical team got him stabilized for transfer. He was handcuffed to a hospital bed and lay there the whole time, staring at the ceiling. I’d seen this stillness in him earlier that day. It was impossible to read. Was it defeat? Calculation? Boredom? The answers would help us know whether he was headed for a penitentiary or a psych ward.
“The names are Aaron and Sarah Dennison.”
I turned to see Ramon Davies standing behind us. “IAFIS turned Aaron up. He’s wanted in two states that we know of so far. California and Nevada. Aaron was a suspect in two murder cases, one in each state. His sister Sarah’s record was clean. They did some acting in Vegas, Tahoe, Sacramento—mostly regional theater.”
“Where were they right before DC? Do we know that?” I asked the superintendent.
“In and out of LA. Why?”
I shook my head and looked back through the window at him—Aaron, not Anthony. “Just curious if any of it was the truth, the things he told me. LA would be where he followed the case with Michael Bell. The Mary, Mary case. He must have been in touch with Kyle Craig from there too.”
“What about the Webcast?” Bree asked. “We have any idea how many people saw it?”
Davies looked from her face to mine. “Let’s just say if you ever wanted to sell your story, now would be a good time.” We laughed but only because there was nothing we could do about the reach and popularity of the Webcast.
“He basically got what he wanted, didn’t he?” Bree said. “He got famous, anyway. She’ll be famous now too. As disciples of Kyle Craig, at the least.”
I turned away from the window, suddenly done looking at him, and done with this case. “Hope it was worth it, Anthony.”
I heard a shout that was muffled by the observation window. I looked back.
“Dead man walking!” Aaron yelled. “That’s what you are, Cross.”
Epilogue
LAST DAYS
I DIDN’T HEAR ANYTHING from Kyle Craig, which didn’t completely surprise me. He’d made terrible threats, but if he had wanted me dead, he would have done it. He had his chance in the alleyway. So the next few days passed quickly for me, but probably slowly for Damon. My boy was leaving home.
By the time we were packing the car to send him off to his first semester at Cushing Academy, he was showing his emotions on a fairly regular basis. Cool just didn’t cut it for him anymore.
He and I spent the final couple of days driving up to Massachusetts together. We stopped to see our cousin Jimmy at the Red Hat in Irvington, and had a fine meal and listened to some jazz, then continued on our way. I noticed that I was showing my emotions on a regular basis now too. I figured that was a good thing, growth maybe. I was troubled by my life, though. I wondered if I had a soul anymore. All these killings, understanding the killers . . .
“So you know when Family Weekend is?” Damon asked me as we got close to Sturbridge, Massachusetts.
“Don’t worry, it’s already on my calendar. I’ll be there with bells on.”
“Well, if you have a case or whatever, I understand.”
“Damon.” I waited for him to look at me. “I’ll be there. No matter what.”
“Dad.” He gave me a grown-up stare and a little frown he’d inherited from Nana Mama. “It’s okay. I know you’ll come if you can.” It wasn’t quite like looking at myself across the front seat, but there was no closer copy in the world.
“You’re going to have a great year, Day. In school and on the basketball court. I’m really proud of you. One hundred percent.”
“Thanks. I think you’re going to have a great year too. Keep an eye on Bree. She’s good for you. Everybody thinks so. Your decision, though. Of course.”
Just then, my cell phone rang. What now? I had a crazy thought—to throw the damn thing right out the car window.
And that’s what I did.
And Damon clapped, and we laughed as if it were the funniest thing I’d ever done. Maybe it was too.
We arrived at the school in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, and it was so gorgeous, such an eyeful, that I wished I could spend the next four years there myself, relive my youth, or something like that.
A message was waiting for me at the admin building. It was from Superintendent Davies. Alex, I have bad news. There have been some murders in Georgetown.
But that’s another story for another time.
The chase is on—is Alex Cross the hunter or the hunted?
For an excerpt from the next Alex Cross novel,
turn the page.
GEORGETOWN, WASHINGTON, DC
The surname of the family was Cox, the father a very successful trial lawyer, but the target was the mother, Ellie Randall Cox. The timing was right now, tonight, just minutes away. The payday was excellent, couldn’t be better.
The six-foot-six, two-hundred-fifty-pound killer known as “the Tiger” had given out guns to his team—also a gram of cocaine to share, and the only instruction they would need tonight: The mother is mine. Kill the rest.
His secondary mission was to scare the American meddlers. He knew how they felt about home invasions, and their precious families, and murders in cold blood. They had so many rules for how life ought to be conducted. The secret to beating them was to break all their silly, sacred rules.
He settled down to watch the house from the street. Wood blinds in the first-floor windows drew horizontal lines across the family members as they moved around inside, unaware of the murderous forces gathered outside.
The boys waited restlessly at the Tiger’s side, and he waited for instinct to tell him it was time to move on the house.
“Now,” he said, “we go!”
Then, with only the slightest bend and whack of the knees, he began to run, breaking out of the camouflaging shadow of an evergreen, his strides almost too fast to count.
A single, powerful leap and he was up on the stoop of the house. Next came three splintering blows to the front door. It seemed to explode open, and they were inside, the kill team, all five of them.
The boys, none older than seventeen, streamed in around him, firing Berettas into the living room ceiling, waving crude hunting knives, shouting orders that were hard to understand because their English was not at the level of the Tiger’s.
The children of the house screamed like little piglets; their lawyer father leapt up and tried to shield them with his flabby, overfed body.
“You are pitiful!” the Tiger shouted at him. “You can’t even protect your family in your own house.”
Soon enough, three family members were corralled against the living room mantel, which was covered with birthday cards addressed to “Momma” and “My Darling Ellie” and “Sweetness and Light.”
The leader nudged the youngest of his boys forward, the one who had chosen the name Nike and who had a contagious sense of humor. “Just do it,” the Tig
er said.
The boy was eleven years old and fearless as a crocodile in a muddy river. He raised a pistol much larger than his own hand and fired it into the shivering father’s forehead.
The other boys howled their approval, shooting off rounds in all directions, overturning antique furniture, breaking mirrors and windows. The Cox children were weeping and holding one another.
One particularly scary, blank-faced boy in a Houston Rockets jersey emptied his magazine into the wide-screen television, then reloaded. “Rock da house!” he shouted.
THE MOTHER, “DARLING ELLIE,” “Sweetness and Light,” finally came running and screaming down the stairs for her Akata babies.
“Leave them out of this!” she yelled at the tall and very muscular leader. “I know who you are!”
“Of course you do, Mother,” said the Tiger as he smiled at the tall, matronly woman. He had no desire to harm her really. This was just a job to him. A high-paying one, important to somebody here in Washington.
The two children scrambled to get to their mother, and it became an absurd game of cat and mouse. His boys shot holes in the sofa as the wheezing American young ones squeezed behind it.
When they emerged on the other side, the Tiger was there to pluck the squealing son off the floor with one hand. The young girl in the Rugrats pajamas was a little more clever and ran up the stairs, showing little pink heels at every step.
“Go, baby!” her mother yelled. “Get out a window! Run! Keep running!”
“Won’t happen,” said the Tiger. “No one gets away from here tonight, Mother.”
“Don’t do this!” she begged. “Let them go! They’re just children!”
“You know who I am,” he said to her. “So you know how this will end. You knew all along. Look at what you brought on yourself and on your family. You did this to them.”
THE HARDEST MYSTERIES to solve are the ones you come to near the end, because there isn’t enough evidence, not enough to unravel, unless somehow you can go all the way back to the beginning—rewind and replay everything.
I was riding in the lap of comfort and civility, my year-old Mercedes. I was thinking about how odd it was to be going to a murder scene now. And then I was there, leaving my vehicle, and feeling conflicted about going over to the dark side again.
Was I getting too soft for this? I wondered for an instant, then let it go. I wasn’t soft. If anything, I was still too hard, too unyielding, too uncompromising.
Then I was thinking that there was something par-ticularly terrifying about random, senseless murder, and that’s what this appeared to be, that’s what everyone thought anyway. It’s what I was told when the call came to the house.
“It’s rough in there, Dr. Cross. Five vics. It’s an entire family.”
“Yeah, I know it is. That’s what they said.”
One of the first responders, a young officer I know named Michael Fescoe, met me on the sidewalk at the murder scene in Georgetown, not far from the university where I’d gone as an undergrad and which I remembered fondly for all sorts of reasons, but mostly because Georgetown had taken a chance on me.
The patrolman was visibly shaken. No surprise there. Metro didn’t call me in special at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night for run-of-the-mill homicides.
“What have we got so far?” I said to Fescoe and flashed my badge at a patrolman seemingly guarding an oak tree. Then I ducked under the bright yellow tape in front of the house. Beautiful house, a three-story Colonial on Cambridge Place, a well-heeled single block just south of Montrose Park.
Neighbors and looky-loos crowded the sidewalk—but they stayed at a safe distance in their pajamas and robes, keeping up their white-collar reserve.
“Family of five, all of them dead,” Fescoe repeated himself. “The name’s Cox. Father, Reeve. Mother, Eleanor. Son, James. All on the first floor. Daughters, Nicole and Clara, on the third. There’s blood everywhere. Looks like they were shot first. Then cut up pretty bad and piled into groupings.”
Piled. I sure didn’t like the sound of that. Not inside this lovely home. Not anywhere.
“Senior officers on site? Who caught it?” I asked.
“Detective Stone is upstairs. She’s the one asked me to page you. ME’s still on the way. Probably a couple of them. Christ, what a night.”
“You’ve got that right.”
Bree Stone was a bright star with the Violent Crimes branch, and one of the few detectives I went out of my way to partner with, pun intended, since she and I were a couple and had been for more than a year now.
“Let Detective Stone know that I’m here,” I said. “I’m going to start downstairs and work my way up to where she is.”
“Will do, sir. I’m on it.”
Fescoe stuck with me up the porch steps and past an ALS tech working on the demolished front door and threshold.
“Forced entry, of course,” Fescoe went on. He blushed, probably because he’d stated the obvious. “Plus, there’s a hatch open to the roof on the third floor. Looks like they might have left that way.”
“They?”
“I’d say so—based on the amount of damage, whatever the hell happened in there. Never seen anything like it, sir. Listen, if there’s anything else you need—”
“I’ll let you know. Thank you. It’s better if I do this alone. I concentrate better.”
My reputation seems to attract hungry cops on big cases, which can have its advantages. Right now, though, I wanted to take in this scene for myself. Given the grim, steely-eyed look on the face of every tech I’d seen coming from the back of the house, I knew this was going to get harder in a hurry.
Turns out I didn’t know the half of it. The murder of this family was much worse than I’d thought.
Much, much worse.
THEY WANTED TO scare somebody, I was thinking as I entered a brightly lit, warmly decorated alcove. But who? Not these dead people. Not this poor family that had been slaughtered for God only knew what reason.
The first floor told a grim and foreboding story that delineated the murder. Nearly every piece of furniture in the living and dining rooms had been either turned over or destroyed—or both. There were gaping holes punched in the walls, along with dozens of smaller ones. An antique glass chandelier lay scattered in splinters and shards all over a brightly colored Oriental rug.
The crime scene made no sense and, worse, had no direct precedent in my experience as a homicide detective.
A bullet-riddled Chesterfield couch and settee had been pushed up against the wall to make room in front of the fireplace. This was where the first three bodies were piled.
While it’s safe to say that I’ve seen some horrendous shit in the line of duty, this scene, the monstrosity of it, stopped me instantly.
As promised, the stacked victims were the father, mother, and son on top, all lying faceup. There were blood streaks and stains on the nearby walls, furniture, and ceiling, and a pool had formed around the bodies. These poor people had been attacked with sharp cutting instruments of some sort, and there had been amputations.
“Jesus, Jesus,” I muttered under my breath. It was a prayer, or a curse on the killers, or more likely both.
One of the printing techs answered under his breath, “Amen.”
Neither of us was looking at the other, though. This was the kind of homicide scene you just gutted your way through, trying to get out of the house with a minute piece of your sanity intact.
The blood patterns around the room suggested the family members had been attacked separately, then dragged together in the middle.
Something had fueled whatever savage rage brought these killers to this and I agreed with Fescoe that there had been several killers. But what exactly had happened? What was the cause of the massacre? Drugs? Ritual? Psychosis?
Group psychosis?
I stashed the random thoughts to consider at another time. Methods first, motive later.
I slowly circled the bodies and parts, picking m
y way around the pools of blood, stepping on dry parquet where I could. There didn’t seem to be any cohesion to the cutting, or the killing for that matter.
The son’s throat was slit; the father had a bullet wound to the forehead; and the mother’s head was turned away at an unnatural angle, as if her neck had been broken.
I went full circle to see the mother’s face. The angle was such that she seemed to be looking right up at me, almost hopeful, as if I could still save her.
I leaned in for a closer look at her and all of a sudden felt dizzy. My legs went weak. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
Oh no! Oh my God, no!
I stepped back blindly, my foot hit a slick spot, and I fell. As I went down, I reached to break my fall. My gloved hand smeared deep red across the floor.
Ellie Randall’s blood. Not Cox—Randall!
I knew her—at least I once had.
Long, long ago, Ellie had been my girlfriend when we’d been students at Georgetown. She had probably been my first love.
And now Ellie had been murdered, along with her family.
ONE OF THE printing techs moved to help me, but I got myself up quickly. I wondered if maybe I was in shock about Ellie. “No harm. I’m fine. What’s the name here again?” I asked the tech.
“Cox, sir. Reeve, Eleanor, and James are the victims in the living room.”
Eleanor Cox. That was right; I remembered now. I stared down at Ellie, my heart racing out of control, tears starting at the corners of my eyes. She had been Ellie Randall when I met her, a smart, attractive history major looking for antiapartheid signatures from Georgetown University students. Definitely not someone whose story would end like this.
“Need anything?” Fescoe was back and he was hovering.
“Just . . . get me a garbage bag or something,” I told him. “Please. Thank you.”