“You sure?” I knew Bree had to be feeling guilty about to-night. I had been there before, many, many times, only maybe now I knew how my family felt.
“You’d better get going. You’ve probably got half the MPD up there, drooling all over your crime scene.”
A couple of uniformed officers stared our way as Bree leaned in and gave me a good-bye kiss. “What I said before?” she whispered. “I meant it.”
Then she wheeled around on the uniforms. “What the hell are you two doing? Get back to work. Wait! Scratch that. Somebody show me where to go. Where’s my crime scene?”
The transformation in Bree was a thing to behold. Even her posture changed as she strode toward the murder scene. She looked in charge, reminded me of myself, but she was still the sexiest woman I’d ever met.
Chapter 10
THAT NIGHT, a man and a woman in jogging outfits were hidden deep in the crowd gathered on Connecticut Avenue, across from the Riverwalk apartments. As police cars continued to arrive, they were there, admiring their handiwork.
The brilliant creation, Yousef Qasim, was no more. Poof—gone but not forgotten. The male had played Yousef brilliantly, and the audience had been held spellbound from the moment he stepped out on the terrace, his stage. Apparently, many of these onlookers were still in awe of the bravura performance, still talking about it in hushed whispers.
What a fitting encore this was. Hours and hours after the show, all these looky-loos remained outside the luxury apartment building. New admirers arrived every few minutes. The press was all over it—CNN, the other majors, newspapers, radio, video artists, bloggers.
The man nudged the woman with his elbow. “You see what I see?”
She craned her neck, looking left, then right. “Where? There’s so much to look at. Help me out, here.”
“Four o’clock. Now do you see? That’s Detective Bree Stone getting out of the car. And the other one—that’s Alex Cross. I’m certain it is. Cross has come, and it’s only our first show. We’re a hit!”
Chapter 11
FOR THE FIRST HALF HOUR, I tried to convince myself that I was content just sitting in the car, staying on the sidelines. The Mercedes, half station wagon, half SUV, was as comfortable as the easy chair in my living room. A copy of The History of Love by Nicole Krauss sat on my lap while I flipped through various stations on satellite radio, then listened to the local news. I had been savoring the Krauss, because it reminded me of how it was when I first fell in love with fiction. I had another good one at home, Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell, that I was equally enthralled with.
Plenty of time for reading now that I was out of the game. But was I out of the game?
Listening with one ear, I picked up on a few obvious inaccuracies in the news coverage, the worst being a report that the killer at the Riverwalk was some sort of terrorist. It was too early to jump to that kind of conclusion. Every news outlet in town was on this story, though, the nationals too, all scrambling for a unique angle. That usually led to mistakes, but the media didn’t seem to care as long as they could attribute a theory to some kind of “expert,” or even another news outlet.
Not that the killer would care about accuracy. It seemed obvious to me that what he wanted more than anything was simply attention.
I wondered if any Metro Police personnel had been assigned to follow the news coverage itself. If it were my case, that would be one of the first things I took care of. Emphasis on the if. Because this wasn’t my case. I didn’t have cases anymore. I didn’t miss them either, at least that’s what I told myself as I watched the action from my car.
There was something about being at the busy homicide scene that kicked in my instincts, though. I’d been formulating theories and running different scenarios in my head from the moment I got there—I couldn’t help myself.
The killer had obviously wanted an audience; he’d been consistently described as looking “Middle Eastern,” which added up to . . . what? Was it possible that this was a new kind of terrorism—the door-to-door variety? How did a bestselling crime writer fit in? There had to be some tie-in. Was the killer acting out a brutally sadistic scene he had imagined many times before? Was it something the author had written about? What kind of psychopath wanted to throw victims off twelve-story buildings?
Eventually, my curiosity moved me to my feet. I got out of the car and gazed toward the top floor. I couldn’t see Bree or anyone else up there.
Just a quick look around, I told myself. For old times’ sake. No harm in that.
Chapter 12
WHO WAS I TRYING TO KID, anyway? The Dragon Slayer was on the prowl again, and it felt natural, like I had never been away. Not even for the months I had been.
Most of the television-news cameras were set up around the MPD street-level command center. As I walked nearby, I recognized the captain of Violent Crimes, Thor Richter. Richter was standing behind a bouquet of microphones that had been stuck in the middle of all the chaos, and he was handling the interviews himself.
That probably meant Bree was still upstairs. Fine by her, I was sure. She didn’t like police politics, or Richter in particular, and neither did I. He was too much by-the-book, a ruthless prick and shameless ass-kisser. Plus, who the hell was named Thor? I was being unkind, I knew, but I just didn’t like the captain.
The lobby of the apartment building was relatively quiet, and I was recognized by a couple of uniforms who didn’t seem to know that I wasn’t on the Job anymore and hadn’t been for a while. As I rode the elevator to twelve, I didn’t really expect to get much farther than the primary perimeter. Somebody would be checking badges there.
Somebody was—an old friend, it turned out, Tony Dowell, who used to work in Southeast. I hadn’t seen Tony, or heard from him, in years.
“Look who it is. Alex Cross.”
“Hey there, Tony. I thought they retired cops as old as you. Bree Stone around anywhere?”
Tony reached for his radio but then changed his mind. “Straight down the hall,” he said, and pointed. Then he handed me a pair of latex gloves. “You’ll need these.”
Chapter 13
I FELT A LITTLE SHIVER of anticipation, then kind of an unpleasant chill. Was it that easy to step back into the line of fire, or whatever this was? At the front door to apartment 12F, a small Asian man I recognized as an MPD techie was dusting for prints. That told me it would be relatively calm inside. Chemical elements aren’t introduced until the evidence-collection teams are finished.
I found Bree standing all by herself in the middle of the living room, looking pensive and far away.
A line of dark streaks, probably the victim’s blood, ran across the ivory carpet. A sliding glass door was open to the terrace, and a light breeze rustled the curtains.
Otherwise, the living room looked pretty much undisturbed. There were built-in bookshelves on every wall, and they were filled with hardbacks, mostly fiction, several of them by the victim herself, including foreign editions. Why a crime writer? I wondered. There had to be a reason, at least in the killer’s mind. Was that train of thought correct? Maybe, maybe not, but I was definitely analyzing the scene.
“How’s it going?” I finally spoke.
Bree’s eyebrows went up in a How did you get in here? kind of way, but she skipped the chitchat entirely. I had never seen her on the Job before, and she was a completely different person.
“Looks like he came in through the front door. No sign of forced entry anywhere. Maybe he posed as a serviceman of some kind. Unless she knew him. Her clothes, and her purse, are here.”
“Anything missing?” I asked the natural question.
Bree shook her head. “Nothing real obvious. Doesn’t look like she was robbed, Alex. She was wearing a diamond bracelet and earrings when she went over the railing. So maybe you can take it with you.”
I pointed at the streaks on the carpet. “What do you know about these?”
“The ME says the victim’s knees were bloody bef
ore the fall—and get this: she was wearing a dog leash when he tossed her off the balcony.”
“Somebody on the radio said it was a rope. I was thinking noose, but that didn’t totally make sense to me either. A dog leash? That’s interesting. Bizarre, but interesting.”
Bree pointed toward an archway and a formal dining room beyond, with lots of glass cabinets full of dinnerware. “Bloodstains start back there and then end here in the middle of the room. She was crawling, and she was under duress.”
“Like a dog. So he needed to humiliate her, and in public. What could she possibly have done to him? How could she deserve this?”
“Yeah, sure feels like it was personal. Maybe a boyfriend, or somebody who fantasized about her?” She breathed in and out slowly. “You know, this probably would have been your case if you were still on the force. High profile, high crazy factor.”
I didn’t tell her that the same thought had occurred to me about a half dozen times already. The weird cases usually funneled my way. So was Bree the new me? Suddenly I wondered if our meeting at the party had been as “accidental” as it had seemed at the time.
“Anyone else live here?” I asked.
“Her husband died two years ago. There’s a housekeeper, but she was off this afternoon.”
I rocked back on my heels. “Maybe the killer knew that.”
“I’ll bet he did.”
It was interesting, the way Bree and I fell into it. The really strange part was that it didn’t feel strange at all. I kept noticing different little things. A needlepoint pillow that said Mirror, mirror on the wall, I am my mother after all. A Hallmark greeting card propped up on the mantel. I looked at it, saw it was unsigned. Was that anything? Probably not. But maybe. You never know.
Bree and I walked out on the terrace together.
“So, he’s got every opportunity to kill her in private, but he marches her out here, throws her off the balcony instead,” Bree said, talking more to herself than to anyone else. “That is so messed up. I don’t know where to go with it.”
I looked out at the view—a couple of other luxury apartment buildings across the street; the National Zoo down a bit to the left; more trees than you would see in most big cities. Very pretty, actually—the twinkling lights at night, the patches of dark green dramatically lit.
Straight below us was the U-shaped driveway, a working fountain, and a wide sidewalk out front. Plus hundreds of spectators.
Then something hit me. Or, rather, something I suspected suddenly felt true enough to say out loud.
“He didn’t know her personally, Bree. I don’t think so. That’s not what this is about.”
Bree turned and looked at me. “Keep going.”
“He didn’t kill her personally, if that makes any sense. What I mean is that this was a public execution right from the start. It was all about having an audience. He wanted as many people as possible to watch him kill her. This was a performance. The killer came here to put on a show. At some point, he may have even stood down there and picked this terrace out for the murder.”
Chapter 14
AND THEN THERE WERE three of us.
My friend Sampson had walked into the living room, all six foot nine, 240 pounds of him. I knew Sampson was probably surprised to see me, but he played it deadpan, the usual for the Big Man.
“You looking to rent?” he asked. “Place is available, from what I hear. Probably go cheap after today.”
“Just passing through. Neighborhood’s a little too rich for my pocketbook.”
“Passing through doesn’t pay the same as consulting, sugar. You need a better business plan.”
“So what have you got, John?” Bree asked. She called him John; I’d been calling him Sampson since we were kids. Both ways worked fine, though.
“Nobody seemed to notice our boy come in or out of the building. As we speak, they’re running all of today’s surveillance tapes. Such as it goes, this place is fairly tight, securitywise. Unless he can walk through walls, I’ll bet he’s going to show up somewhere on one of the tapes.”
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think this one minds having his picture taken,” I said.
Just then, a uniformed cop called from across the room. “Excuse me, Detective?”
All three of us turned.
“Uh, ma’am? Detective Stone? There’s a question for you. From CSI in the back room.”
The three of us followed the uniform down a narrow hallway into a den. It was lined with more books, and French litho-graphs in expensive-looking frames, plus several vacation photos. The apartment seemed to have quality furnishings everywhere—everything highly polished, oiled, or fluffed. A cardboard box full of liquor delivered from Cleveland Park was sitting by the door. Was the killer the delivery guy? Was that how he got in here?
A tapestry love seat was arranged in the corner, along with a television on a console. The cabinet doors were open to show a combination DVD player and VCR underneath.
I noticed another Hallmark greeting card on a shelf. I looked, and this card was also unsigned.
“Somebody should maybe bag these greeting cards, Bree. Unsigned. Could be nothing. But there was another one in the living room.”
A young woman in a crime-scene Windbreaker was waiting for us by the TV. “Over here, Detective.”
“What am I looking at?” Bree asked.
“Maybe nothing . . . but there’s a tape in the player. No other videos on display in the room. Do you want me to play it, eject it, or what?” Obviously the CSI techie didn’t know whether to wind her watch or shit.
“Latent prints all done in here?” Bree asked in a kindly manner.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Were the cabinet doors open or closed to begin with?” I asked.
“They were definitely found open, just like you see them now. You’re Dr. Cross, aren’t you?”
The young cop’s tone was a shade defensive, but Bree seemed not to notice. She flicked on the television and then the tape machine.
At first there was just static. Then came a flash of blue screen. Here we go, I thought.
Finally an image came up. Disturbing one too, right out of the box.
It was a medium shot of a dark-blue wall with a flag hanging on it. A plain wooden chair was the only other item in the picture.
“Anyone recognize that flag?” Bree asked. It had bars of red, white, and black, with three green stars across the middle.
“Iraq,” I said.
The word dropped like a heavy weight in the room.
Bree did the smart thing, then. She paused the tape. “Everyone out,” she said. “Now.”
A handful of other cops had gathered at the door to see what was up in the den. “Detective,” one of them said, “I’m D-2 on this case.”
“That’s right, Gabe, so you know how sensitive this tape might be. I want you to talk to everyone who was just in here. Make sure this stays tight.”
She shut the door to the den without waiting for a response from the D-2.
“Do you want me to go?” I asked her.
“No. I want you to stay. John too.”
Then Bree flipped the tape back on.
Chapter 15
A MAN WALKED OUT of the shadows and directly into the frame. The killer? Who else would it be? He’d left us this tape, hadn’t he? He wanted us to see it. He wore a plain oatmeal-colored robe and a black-and-white kaffiyeh, and appeared to be incredibly pissed off at the world. He carried an AK-47, which he draped across his lap as he sat to address the camera.
Now this was stranger than strange. It took my breath away, actually. The style of video was immediately familiar. We’d all seen tapes like this before, from Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas.
My gut tightened another notch. We were about to find out something about our killer, and I was willing to bet it wouldn’t be good news.
“It is time for the people of the United States to listen for a change,” the man said in heavily accente
d English. The skin on his cheeks, forehead, and prominent nose was heavily pockmarked. The skin color, mustache, and apparent height matched the eyewitness accounts from that afternoon at the Riverwalk.
This was our guy, wasn’t it? The one who’d thrown the author Tess Olsen twelve stories to her death? And before that, seen fit to humiliate her with a dog leash?
“Each one of you watching this film is guilty of murder. Each one of you is as guilty as your cowardly president. As guilty as your congress and your lying secretary of defense. Certainly as guilty as the pathetic American and British soldiers who defile my streets and kill my people, because you believe that you own the world.
“And now, you will pay with your lives. The blood of Americans will be spilled in America this time. Blood that I will spill myself. Make no mistake, there is much that one man can do. Just as none of you are innocent, now none of you are safe.”
The man got up and approached the camera, staring out at us as if he could see right into the den. Then he beamed with the most horrific smile. A second later, the screen went back to static.
“Christ,” Sampson said into the ensuing silence. “What the hell was that crazy piece of shit? Who was that maniac?”
Just as Bree was reaching for the “stop” button, another image came up on the screen.
“A double feature,” said Sampson. “Man believes in giving us our money’s worth, anyway.”
Chapter 16
AT FIRST, IT WAS A BLUR—someone standing in front of the camera. When he stepped back, we saw that it was the same man, only now dressed in plain green coveralls and a black baseball cap that said MO.
The scene was obviously Tess Olsen’s living room. Today. Mrs. Olsen was in the background on all fours, naked and visibly trembling. Her mouth was taped shut. And around her neck was the red dog leash.
He had filmed everything, playing to an audience the whole time he was here.