“Tape?” he said, genuinely confused and looking at me.
Before I could answer, Abigail screeched, “You were leaving that sleazy massage parlor on Connecticut Avenue where Mad Man Francones was murdered! They have it on tape. They’re showing it everywhere! Betsy Martin saw it on the television in the bar at the club and showed me! At the club!”
She broke down weeping and sagged. Sampson caught her and walked her to a wingback chair.
Harold Barnes’s skin had lost all its color. His hand sought his mouth and he staggered out of the room, choking, “My God, what have I done?”
That seemed to revive Abigail Barnes, because she interrupted her crying to start screaming after him again, “You’ve ruined us, that’s what you’ve done! I’ll be the laughingstock of…of everything!”
“Mr. Barnes?” I called, hustling after him.
But by the time I reached the hall, he’d dodged into a powder room, shut the door, and started gagging. I stood there listening to his wife crying back in the living room, and him retching, and frankly felt bad that my instincts had been correct and my idea had worked.
Right after I’d spoken with Sampson I’d called Captain Quintus and convinced him to release the footage of the man in the business suit leaving the area of the Superior Spa.
“Gonna be a shitty wake-up call for some poor bastard and his wife,” Quintus had told me after agreeing to the plan.
Leaning against the hallway wall, suffering the sounds of a fracturing marriage I’d helped break, I had to agree.
Chapter
55
Harold Barnes was a successful and influential patent lawyer with an impeccable pedigree. Dartmouth. Georgetown Law. Editor of the law review. Clerked at the US District Court. Became a partner in a prestigious firm. Husband of twenty-seven years. Father of three girls.
“Thank God they’re all off at school,” Abigail moaned as I turned the corner back into the living room and found her slumped in the chair.
I raised an eyebrow at Sampson. “See if you can find her some coffee.”
Behind me I could hear the door of the powder room opening. Barnes’s wife looked toward the hall, said, “No, I want to hear everything about his filthy life.”
“I’ll let you two deal with that in private,” I said firmly. “Right now we’re hoping he can help us solve a mass murder and maybe save three lives.”
Mrs. Barnes looked appalled and then incredulous, as if I’d somehow challenged the idea that the planets revolved around her and not the sun.
“Let’s take a walk, Mrs. B,” Sampson said, and held out his hand.
She balked and then, reluctant and wobbly, got to her feet. Barnes must have heard me talking, because he’d stalled back there in the hallway. Sampson supported the crushed socialite as they left the room by another door.
As it shut behind them, I heard her sniffle, “I never thought my life would become a cliché. Was I naïve, Detective?”
Her husband came back into the room, looking like a husk of what he’d been not ten minutes before. Broken glass crunched beneath his wingtips, but he seemed not to notice.
“My name’s Alex Cross,” I began.
“I know who you are, Dr. Cross,” Barnes said weakly before sinking into the chair his wife had just occupied. “I read the papers.”
“I’m sorry about all this, but we had no other way of finding you,” I said.
Barnes made a flick of his fingers, replied, “I debated coming forward days ago. But I kept thinking maybe it wasn’t necessary.”
He fell silent and then gazed at me intently. “I want you to know that I wasn’t like Francones. Sex is not an addiction for me. Nor an obsession.”
“Okay.”
The attorney moved uncomfortably. “The truth is that my wife is more interested in her status than in sex. Or at least since she turned fifty and—”
“No offense, Mr. Barnes,” I said. “I’m not particularly interested in the motivations that led you to the Superior Spa.”
He knitted his brows, said, “Oh.”
“Just to confirm: You did actually go into the spa?”
Barnes blinked, thought like a lawyer, and said, “So you don’t actually have me on tape entering or leaving?”
“Does it matter?”
“It would in court.”
“If you were on trial here, and you’re not. But if you don’t talk and it turns out we can gather evidence that places you in that massage parlor before the murders, I can and will arrest you on obstruction charges, Counselor.”
Barnes rolled his lips back from his teeth, thinking, but then sighed and said, “Okay. I was there.”
Once the attorney started talking, he did not hold back. He described parking well up Connecticut Avenue and then walking to the Superior Spa, corroborating the timeline we’d established from the closed-circuit tapes. He said he spent time with An Lu, the young Korean woman in the robe we’d found dead in the lobby. As Barnes was leaving, he saw Mad Man Francones going down the hallway with Cam Nguyen to the squalid little room where he lost his life.
“I was surprised, you know?” Barnes said. “Guy like that.”
I wanted to say, “Guy like you,” but didn’t.
“He see you? Francones?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“And then?”
“I got out of there, out the front door.”
“See anyone?”
Barnes paused. “You mean inside or outside?”
“Outside on the sidewalk.”
The patent attorney was about to shake his head but then cocked it left as if he was confronting a memory. “A guy in a red hoodie.”
“Where? Standing there? Coming from what direction?”
He thought about that and replied, “Coming from the north.”
I felt my pulse quicken. It matched what we’d deduced from the tapes.
“So he went by you?”
“More like we went by each other.”
“You see him go into the Superior Spa?”
Barnes shook his head vigorously. “I never looked back.”
“You see his face?”
He hesitated, but then nodded. “He had his hood up, but there was a streetlight there. I guess I saw him pretty good.”
I wanted to pump my fist in the air but said, “You’d be willing to work with an artist?”
He nodded again.
“And you think you remember what he looked like?”
Barnes gazed into his lap, said quietly: “I don’t suppose you could forget the face of the man who missed killing you by a couple of minutes.”
The attorney had no sooner said those words than he got a pained expression on his face that was replaced almost immediately by one of terror. His arm came up, traveling toward the breast pocket of his suit coat, and he looked at me and choked, “I’m…”
Barnes keeled forward onto the floor, gasping.
“John!” I bellowed as I threw myself down on my knees next to him. “Call 911! He’s having a heart attack!”
Chapter
56
Cross returned home around midnight. Sitting in the van down the street, Sunday and Acadia watched the detective go inside and turn off the porch light. Most of the other lights in the house were already off.
“You sure this is the night, sugar?” Acadia asked with slight worry.
“Thanks to your brilliant three-D model, yes,” Sunday replied. “Besides, we need better, more up-to-date information if this is going to go like clockwork.”
“You know I’m moving on if you’re caught in there,” she said.
He smiled at her, stroked her cheek with his finger, and said, “I wouldn’t expect anything less from a girl who fed her own daddy to gators.”
Acadia bit gently at his knuckle, said, “How long are you going to wait?”
The last light in Cross’s house had just died.
“Couple of hours,” Sunday said. “Let them all get good
and deep.”
“I’m going to nap until you’re ready,” she said, then crawled into the back of the van and a sleeping bag on a pad they’d brought along.
To pass the time, the writer reached forward, turned the radio on, and tuned to WTOP, the twenty-four-hour news station in the nation’s capital. The news was all about the latest nonsense in the Middle East, the upcoming primary season, and the opening day of baseball season the following week.
But then, at 1:45 a.m., the announcer said, “In local news, the Washington Post is reporting in an article posted on its website that police now believe that the kidnapping of infants Joss Branson and Evan Lancaster may be linked to the unsolved killing of Mad Man Francones and several others at a local massage parlor earlier this month.”
Sunday wanted to put his fist through the windshield when the announcer introduced Detective Bree Stone, who said, “We believe that this has happened before, variations of it, anyway, in Albuquerque and in Tampa. We are looking for a couple, one white male, one white female, who may be posing as the parents of the babies. They may have a Vietnamese girl about twenty with them. If you see people matching this description, please call our tip line immediately.”
The story ended.
Furious that Cross and his wife had one-upped him, Sunday punched off the radio, climbed into the back, and shook Acadia awake. “It’s time.”
She groaned, nodded, and sat up against the van’s inner wall. She got a laptop, opened it, and called up Skype. She dialed a number. Sunday heard the ring in the Bluetooth device in his ear, answered, and said, “Test.”
Acadia gave him the thumbs-up, and he slipped from the van without further ado. Wearing black clothes and snug 5mm neoprene booties found in a dive shop over on S Street, he padded toward Cross’s house. It was windy out, and the air smelled like a storm was coming.
Sunday had once again gone through the virtual version of the detective’s home earlier in the day. As he moved into the narrow space between the real thing and the house next door, he felt supremely positive about his chances.
You stand apart from the moral universe, he told himself as he slowed and donned a black balaclava. The laws of God and man do not bind you, Thierry Mulch. You, my friend, are the perfect criminal.
Buzzing on that idea, he slipped around the back of the main house and moved to the addition. The studs of the new room were up. So were the trusses and roof boards. Visqueen sheeting had been wrapped and stapled all around the perimeter.
Sunday got a utility knife from one of his cargo pockets. With the wind blustering all around him, he slit open the plastic where it met the house. When he had a flap about three feet long, he let it go, saw the piece flapping in the wind. He got duct tape out of the backpack. He tore a piece roughly the same length as the cut and pressed it gently against the outer flap.
Then Sunday crawled through the slit onto plywood floors covered in sawdust that whirled into the breeze. He almost choked on the dust before he could draw the duct tape tight to the side of the house. Getting to his feet, he brushed off the sawdust, moved toward the space that used to be the kitchen.
It was pitch-dark, and despite his familiarity with the general layout, Sunday was finally forced to get out a small night-vision monocle he’d bought from the Cabela’s catalog. He flipped it on and pressed the electronic spyglass to his right eye.
Cross’s inner sanctum now appeared in a soft green glow, making it more like the virtual version of the home, which suited Sunday. In seconds he found the plastic sheeting that separated the construction space from the rest of the house. As quietly as he could, the writer separated the Velcro fastener and stepped into Cross’s dining room.
He scanned it, seeing the table and the portable double burner and fridge. A few more moments’ study and Sunday had his spots picked out. He climbed up onto the table, got out a listening bug, activated it, and fixed it to the chain above the modest chandelier. Then he set a tiny motion-activated fiber-optic bug, transmitter, and nine-volt lithium battery in a spider plant in the corner, fish-eye lens aimed toward the table.
“Strong signals from both,” Acadia said in his ear.
Sunday made a light clucking noise with his tongue to tell her he’d heard and headed to the front room, where he placed an audio bug behind the sofa and a second optical bug in the bristles of the fireplace broom, aimed up at the couch and chairs. Then he went to the staircase and climbed as slowly and methodically as he’d practiced, keeping his weight well to the edges of the risers so they would not squeak.
Reaching the landing right beside Cross’s bedroom, Sunday grinned insanely at his audacity. If he wanted, he could open the door and shoot them both, or shoot Cross and take Bree. Anything he wanted. Everything was possible in an existential world.
Be patient, he thought. This will be so much better if you let it all play out.
Chapter
57
Sunday climbed up the second staircase to the attic and Cross’s fortress of solitude. When he reached the detective’s private office his heart was pounding. Was this what Raskolnikov felt as he planned the pawnbroker’s death?
Of course he did, the writer thought giddily. This sensation is classic, timeless, and shared by everyone on the face of the earth. Humans love causing destruction, especially of another human, especially those who have climbed highest. We just like to see them fall. It was just the way things worked.
He crossed to the gable window and drew down the shade. Then he pocketed the night-vision scope, turned on the desk lamp, and gazed around the room with great pleasure, thinking, How does that old song go?
Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby?
For several minutes, he hummed the tune, letting his happy attention dance over the shelves and the walls, the photographs, the mementos, the framed accolades and diplomas, and comparing it all to the photograph Acadia’s young computer genius had used in the virtual house.
Incredibly close, he thought. A book moved here. A picture there. But all in all it’s the same. Cross doesn’t like change, especially not in his sanctuary.
A weakness, he decided, one that he should exploit somehow.
Sunday set that idea aside for the moment and set about bugging the office, putting a keystroke repeater between the cable connected to the desktop computer and the wall socket that fed the Internet. Anything that Cross typed would be recorded and a transcript would immediately be sent to an anonymous website that Acadia had set up.
On the credenza behind the desk, Sunday taped an audio bug to the underside of the leg of a picture frame that held a photograph of Dr. Alex and his bride on their wedding day.
What about the last optical bug? Sunday looked around and spotted the perfect place. On the top shelf of a bookshelf opposite the desk, he fitted the tiny camera, transmitter, and nine-volt lithium battery between and behind two books on homicide investigation.
When he was satisfied the bug would not be seen unless Cross took down one of the books—an unlikely move—he went to sit in the detective’s chair, smiled at the camera, and murmured, “Test.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you look great in black?” Acadia said. “The mask especially is an improvement.”
He shot her the finger, checked his watch. It was 2:27 a.m.
Sunday was about to call it good and leave when he noticed tacked to the wall behind the desk the article about the mass murders that formed the basis of his book, The Perfect Criminal. Unable to help himself, he thumbed through the pages, looking for the places where the journalist had quoted him.
To his surprise, he saw that they’d been underlined. Cross had written something in the margin. Sunday had to turn the pages to see it.
“Grandstander in general, but this seems smart,” it read. “What else does he know?”
Grandstander? I know more than you, Cross. So much more than you.
Biting his lower lip, he considered the article another moment and then forced his attention to roam
and come to rest on a penholder made from a tin can wrapped in red construction paper and decorated with little green Christmas trees, a present from one of Cross’s children, no doubt.
The penholder stood on the desk next to the phone. It had been right there in the picture the Post ran of Cross’s office three years before. It had probably never moved. Sunday picked it up and put it at the far end of the credenza.
The move was small. It was subtle. But if Sunday was right, it would serve to rattle Cross at some level. At least, that was what he hoped.
“I’m leaving,” Sunday muttered to Acadia.
He got up from the chair, careful to position it exactly where he’d found it, retrieved the monocle, and flipped off the desk light. In green night vision he crossed to the door and eased it open without a sound. Creeping down the staircase, he reached the second-floor landing and slipped toward the lower stairs and Cross’s bedroom.
Sunday was right there, about to take that first step down the next flight, when he heard a latch lift. A door opened behind and to his left.
The writer froze and slowly looked over his shoulder, seeing little Ali Cross rubbing one eye.
Chapter
58
It was only a second, maybe two, but time seemed to stand still while the obvious option seized Sunday’s mind: Kill him! Now!
In two steps he could have the boy, break his neck, and—
Ali dropped his hand and staggered toward the bathroom door as if he’d never seen Sunday. He pushed the door open and went inside. A motion-detector night-light went on.
Sunday danced down three stairs and froze, hearing the sound of the boy peeing. Eight more stairs, and he reached the front hall and froze again. The toilet flushed.
Small feet moved. A door opened.
There was a pause and then the boy cried out, “Zombie! There’s a zombie in the house!”