“Alex, did you hear me?” Jayne was still talking, I realized. “There won’t be any more to know until tomorrow morning. Someone can call and check in around seven—”
“No,” I said. “I’m going to stay tonight.”
She put a hand on my shoulder. “That’s really not necessary,” she said.
“I understand.”
But it wasn’t about necessary anymore. It was about what I could and couldn’t control here. For the past ten minutes, I hadn’t just been thinking about losing Nana. I’d been wondering, What if I wasn’t here? What if she died and no one was with her when it happened?
I’d never forgive myself, I thought. So if it meant going back onto the night shift for a while, then that’s what I was going to do.
Whatever it took—I was going to be there for Nana.
Chapter 94
SENATOR MARSHALL YARROW was pulling a bag of golf clubs out of the back of his Navigator when he saw me and Sampson coming across the parking lot of the Washington Golf and Country Club. He looked like I’d just ruined his perfectly good Saturday morning. Imagine that. What a damn shame.
“What in hell’s name are you doing here?” he asked as we came up to his vehicle.
“Three appointments, three cancellations,” I told him. “Call me crazy, Senator, but I’d say you’re avoiding me. You were, anyway.”
“And who’s this?” He looked John over—more up than down, given Sampson’s height.
“This is my partner, Detective Sampson. You can just pretend he’s not here. He fits right in, doesn’t he? We both do. Maybe as caddies.”
Yarrow snorted at me and waved to someone waiting under the porte cochere in front of the club. “Mike, I’ll see you inside. Order me an espresso, would you?”
I realized after the fact that the other man had been Michael Hart, a senator from North Carolina, and a Democrat to Yarrow’s Republican.
“Would you rather talk in my car?” I asked him. “Or maybe in yours?”
“Do I look like I want to get in a car with you, Detective Cross?” I was surprised he remembered my name.
He stepped back out of sight then, between his own SUV and the other giant boat parked next to it, a brand-new Hummer H3T. With the likely hundred-thousand-dollar joining fee at this place, I guess no one was too worried about gas prices.
“I won’t keep you long, Senator,” I said, “but I thought you’d want to know, we’re a little short on leads here. The only next step I can see is to start releasing the recordings from Tony Nicholson’s club.”
Yarrow’s eyes flitted over to Sampson; I think he was wondering if both of us had seen him in action, or just me. His hands tightened over the head cover of the TaylorMade driver in his bag.
“So unless you’ve got some other meaningful direction we might go in—”
“Why would I?” he said, still cool.
“Just a gut feeling I had. Something about all those missed appointments.”
He took a deep breath and ran a hand over the weekend stubble around his chin. “Well, obviously I’ve got to run all this by my attorney.”
“That’s probably a good idea,” I said. “But just so you know, this is a working Saturday for us. We need to get one thing or another done today.”
I almost felt bad for Yarrow, he looked so uncomfortable. There were no good options left, and he knew it. When I’m lucky, that brings people right to the truth.
“Just for the sake of argument,” he said, “what could you offer me by way of immunity?”
“Nothing right now. That’s up to the DA.”
“Right, ’cause you people never wheel and deal, is that it?”
“Here’s what I can offer you,” I said. “You tell us what you know, and then when the Secret Service comes looking for you, and they will, it won’t be about obstruction of justice and conspiracy to cover up a string of murders.”
I could only imagine how much Yarrow was hating me right now. Without ever taking his eyes off mine, he said, “Tell me something, Detective Sampson. Would you say your partner here is a vindictive man?”
Sampson laid a big hand on the roof of Yarrow’s car. “Vindictive? Nah, that’s not Alex. I’d say more like realistic. Might be a good word for you to consider about now.”
At first, I thought Senator Yarrow was going to walk, or maybe even go postal with one of those TaylorMade irons of his. Instead, he reached into his pocket, and the doors on the Lincoln chirped open.
“Just get in the car.”
Chapter 95
YARROW’S CAR’S LEATHER interior reeked of coffee and cigarettes. I would have pegged him more as a cigar smoker.
“Let me get a few things out of the way,” I said first. “You were a paying client of that club, yes or no?”
“Next question.”
“You were aware that escorts connected to the club had died.”
“No. That’s not true,” he said. “I’d just started to suspect something was wrong before all this fuss happened.”
“And what did you plan to do with that information? Your suspicions.”
Yarrow turned suddenly and pointed a finger in my face. “Don’t interrogate me, Cross. I’m a goddamn US senator, not some worthless thug in Southeast DC.”
“Exactly my point, Mr. Yarrow. You’re a US senator and you’re supposed to have a conscience. Now, do you have something for us or not?”
He took a beat, long enough to pull a pack of Marlboro Reds out of the console. I noticed that the flame on his gold Senate lighter shook when he used it.
After a couple long consecutive drags, Yarrow started to talk again, facing the windshield.
“There’s a man you should check out. His name’s… Remy Williams. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s in this thing deep.”
“Who is he?” I asked.
“That’s a good question, actually. I believe that he used to be in the Secret Service.”
Those last two words went off in my mind like a Roman candle. “Secret Service? What division?” I asked him.
“Protective Services.”
“At the White House?”
Yarrow smoked almost continuously while the knuckles on his free hand went white gripping the wheel. “Yeah,” he said with an exhale. “At the White House.”
Sampson was staring over the headrest at me, and I’m sure we were wondering the same thing. Was this the White House connection we’d already heard about? Or the kind of coincidence that gums up investigations all the time?
Senator Yarrow went on without any more prodding from me. “Last I heard, Remy was living in some godawful shack, way out in Louisa County, like one of those survivalists with the bottled water and the shotguns and all. Into the Wild kind of lifestyle.”
“What’s your association with him?” Sampson asked.
“He was the one who told me about the club in the first place.”
“That doesn’t really answer the question,” I said. “Look, Senator, I’m not recording any of this. Not yet anyway.”
Yarrow opened the window and tapped the last of his cigarette onto the pavement, then put the butt in his ashtray. I could sense him starting to circle the wagons again.
“He’s my ex-wife’s brother, okay? I haven’t seen the bastard in over a year, and it doesn’t matter. The whole point is, you take a drive out there, you might just have something more to do with your Saturday than harassing public servants.”
Chapter 96
IT WAS JUST over two hours’ drive to the western edge of Louisa County, which was also about an hour south of Nicholson’s club. Those two locations triangulated easily with the spot on I-95 where Johnny Tucci from Philly had been pulled over carrying my niece’s remains in the trunk. Maybe we were actually getting somewhere with all this.
Yarrow’s vague sense of the cabin sent us down a handful of wrong turns before we eventually found the right gravel road off Route 33. Several miles back through the woods, it came to a makeshift dead end,
with a row of rocks blocking the way. They’d obviously been moved there by hand, and it didn’t take us long to clear them.
Beyond that were two dirt tracks retreating into the brush, and another half hour of slow going before we saw anything man-made. Remy Williams’s nearest neighbor seemed to be Lake Anna State Park to the east.
The driveway, such as it was, came up on the back of a rudimentary single-story building surrounded closely by fir trees. It looked unfinished from here, with a galvanized standing-seam roof but just warped and silvered plywood over Tyvek on the walls.
“Very nice,” Sampson muttered, or maybe growled. “Unabomber east, anyone?”
It was bigger than Ted Kaczynski’s famous shack, which I’d been to once before, but the general feeling was about the same: madman in residence.
Around front, the two small windows under a covered porch looked dark. There was a dirt yard big enough for several cars, but no sign of any vehicle. The place seemed completely deserted, and part of me hoped it was.
It wasn’t until I’d driven around nearly full circle that I saw the wood chipper at the side of the house.
“Sampson?”
“I see it.”
It was an old industrial unit, with two tires and a rusted trailer hitch balanced on a cinder block. Most of the paint was long gone, just a few impressionistic flecks of John Deere green and yellow on the frame. Next to it, a blue tarp was folded on the ground, weighted down with a two-gallon gas can.
I kept the car running as we got out, and I pulled my Glock.
“Anyone home?” I called halfheartedly.
There was no answer. All I heard was the wind, a few birds chattering in the trees, and my idling car.
Sampson and I took the porch from opposite sides to check the windows first, then the door.
When I looked in, it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. Then I saw a man, sitting in a chair against the far wall. It was too dark for details; I couldn’t even tell if he was alive or dead. Not for certain. Not yet.
“Fuck,” Sampson muttered,
Exactly right. My thoughts exactly.
Chapter 97
THE SHACK’S FRONT door had no lock, just a hammered-iron latch, and as soon as I swung it open, the smell hit us.
It was that combination of sweet and putrid that’s so distinct and so hard to take. Like fruit and meat rotting for days in the same barrel.
The place was mostly empty, with just a few pieces of furniture—a metal cot, a woodstove, a long farm table.
The only chair in the place was occupied, and Remy Williams had apparently died in it.
He looked graphic-novel-style slack jawed where part of his face had been blown off. A Remington shotgun was still half-clutched in his left hand, barrel pointed down at the soft pine floor.
The other hand hung loose at his side, and it looked like there was some kind of writing on his forearm. Writing? Was that it?
“What the hell?” Sampson covered his mouth and nose with his arm and bent down for a closer look. “Oh no, he didn’t.”
When I put my Maglite on it, I saw that the arm had been carved, not written on.
A six-inch hunting knife was on the ground at Williams’s feet, streaked the same reddish brown as his skin. The letters were still easy enough to read:
SORRY
Chapter 98
A LOT HAPPENED really fast after we found Williams. Within a few hours, we had new versions of all the old players on the scene—Virginia State Police out of Richmond and the FBI team from Charlottesville. There was no one I knew here, which was maybe a good thing and maybe not. I’d find out which pretty soon.
The Bureau’s Evidence Response Team included serious-looking folks from serology, trace analysis, firearms, photography, and fingerprinting. They set up a tent and spread long sheets of butcher paper over plywood-and-sawhorse tables.
The ground around the wood chipper was sectioned into eight-inch squares, and they started right in, meticulously sifting one square at a time, separating potential evidence from dirt and debris.
The chipper itself would be disassembled in a lab in Richmond, but blood-enhancement agents had already shown trace amounts of serum. A visual inspection also turned up some likely bone fragments in the mechanism’s blades.
Everything was duly photographed, documented, and either set out to dry or put into manila envelopes for transport.
The faster job turned out to be a search of the woods. A lieutenant colonel with the state police called in two K-9 units, and within the first hours, they’d sniffed out a freshly turned patch of earth half a mile east of the cabin.
Some careful digging brought up two plastic bags of “remains” from about five feet down. Everyone on the site was carrying around a hangdog face. No one is ever ready for this kind of murder scene.
The new remains looked exactly like Caroline’s had, and the consensus was that they hadn’t been in the ground for more than three days. Right away, I thought of Tony Nicholson and Mara Kelly, who were still officially MIA.
“It adds up, on paper anyway,” I said to Sampson. “Get them out of jail, and you can make them disappear once and for all. We were supposed to think they fled the country.”
“Hell of a way to cover your tracks,” Sampson said. “But I have to admit, effective.”
We were sitting on the edge of the porch around one a.m., watching an agent tag what was left of the newly deceased as evidence, before they went into body bags. John couldn’t take his eyes off it, but I’d seen enough. It depressed me to know that my own niece’s case was becoming the single grisliest piece of work I’d ever investigated.
But that fact kept me moving too. For the fourth time in as many hours, I dialed Dan Cormorant’s phone number.
This time the Secret Service agent actually picked up.
“Where the hell are you guys?” I asked him. “Are you even tracking this?”
“You’re obviously not watching TV right now,” he said. “It looks like they’ve got everyone but ESPN out there in those woods.”
“Cormorant, listen to me. Remy Williams wasn’t Zeus, any more than Tony Nicholson or Johnny Tucci was. Williams may be a stone-cold killer, but he’s not the one we’re looking for.”
“I agree with you,” Cormorant said, “and you know why? ’Cause we’ve got Zeus pinned down. Right now. You want to be part of the sideshow, you stay where you are. But if you want to be here when we finish this thing once and for all, I’d suggest you get your ass back to the city. Pronto, Detective Cross. This case is about to close. You should be there.”
Chapter 99
SAD TO SAY, I was operating on nothing but adrenaline and caffeine by the time we got to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across from the West Wing. It was nearly four a.m. at this point, but the Joint Operations Center was buzzing like midday.
The mood in the briefing room was tense to say the least. They had CNN on one of a dozen flat screens arrayed on the wall, with an overhead shot of Remy Williams’s cabin and the subhead Secret Service Agent Found Dead.
At the front of the room, a fiftyish agent in shirtsleeves was shouting on the phone, loudly enough to be heard over everyone else.
“I don’t give a shit who you need to speak to; he’s not a member of the Secret Service. Now change the damn graphic!”
I had already spotted several people I knew, including Emma Cornish, who was MPD’s liaison to the Service’s High Intensity Violent Crimes Task Force; and Barry Farmer, one of two Secret Service agents assigned to Metro’s Homicide Unit. It was as if the two departments had suddenly been knitted together, right there in the middle of the night.
For show, maybe?
I wasn’t ready to say yet.
We all gathered around a long oval table for the first briefing. The man with the big voice in front turned out to be Silo Ridge, deputy special agent in charge. He was the whip on this one, and he stood up with Agent Cormorant.
“I’m sending ar
ound a fact sheet,” Ridge said, handing half a stack in each direction. “The subject’s name is Constantine Bowie, aka Connie Bowie, aka Zeus. Most of you know this already, but Bowie was an agent with the Service from 1988 to 2002.”
Nobody flinched but me—and maybe Sampson. It was like a whole new map of this thing had just been unfolded in front of us.
I put up my hand. “Alex Cross, MPD. I’m just catching up here, but what’s the known relationship, if any, with Remy Williams? Other than the fact that they’re both supposed to be former agents.”
“Detective Cross, glad to have you here,” Ridge said, and a few more heads turned my way. “The focus of this operation is former agent Bowie. Everything else is on a need-to-know basis for the time being.”
“I’m only asking because—”
“We appreciate MPD’s participation, as always. This is all obviously a little sensitive, but we’re not going to start unpacking it here. Moving on.”
I gave Ridge the benefit of the doubt, for the moment at least. It wasn’t a bridge I had to cross yet. Or burn.
An image of Bowie’s 2002 credentials came up on one of the screens. He looked like a million other agents to me—Waspy, square jaw, brown hair combed back. Everything but the dark shades.
“Bowie’s been implicated in the murder of at least three women,” Ridge went on, “all of them known employees of the so-called gentlemen’s club in Culpeper County. Those women are Caroline Cross, Katherine Tennancour, Renata Cruz…” Surveillance photos that I’d seen before went by in a slide show. “And this is Sally Anne Perry.”
A video started up, and right away I recognized the recording I’d handed over to Cormorant just the other day. Like Ridge had said, the Secret Service appreciated MPD’s participation.
“There’s nothing pleasant about having to watch this,” Ridge said, “but you should know who we’re going after. The man about to come into the bedroom is Constantine Bowie. And he is about to commit murder.”