“Alex?” Cynthia Wu called, breaking me out of my thoughts.
I turned. Francones’s chest had been sawed open. His heart lay in a pan. But the medical examiner was holding a piece of paper. “Preliminary tox screen is positive for cocaine. Lots of it.”
Then she pointed at the football great’s heart. “It’s enlarged, outsize even for him. And I found signs of a deviated septum from chronic use.”
“ ‘Say hello to my little friend,’” Sampson said, doing a pretty good imitation of Al Pacino in Scarface.
I nodded. “Cocaine smugglers and bloodbaths go hand in hand.”
My phone rang. Bree.
“Hey,” I said. “Don’t tell me there’s already a problem with the renovation.”
“I haven’t been home, so not that I know of,” she replied. “But I’m heading to Takoma and I think I’m going to be late.”
“What’s up?”
“Somebody posing as a city investigator walked into a day care and walked out with a baby who hasn’t been seen since.”
Chapter
15
“You gave our baby away to a fucking stranger!” a man yelled. “What did you expect me to do? Act happy? Sing ‘Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush’?”
Okay, Detective Bree Stone thought. She swallowed hard, climbed the steps of Child’s Play. Three satellite TV trucks were already parked down the street. A crowd had gathered at the police lines.
Cross’s wife went through the front door and entered chaos.
“We’re shutting you down!” screamed a sick-looking woman wearing a silk head scarf and stabbing her finger at Eliza and Marylyn Green. A young Metro patrol officer stood behind her.
“She said she was an investigator with Child Services,” Eliza moaned.
“She showed me a badge, an identification card, and a writ from Judge Banner in Family Court that commanded us to turn Joss over,” Marylyn Green said, crying. “She said you were like that guy in the show Breaking Bad.”
“You mean a meth maker?” the missing baby’s father said, first in disbelief and then anger. “That is complete bullshit!”
“I’m going to be sick,” Joss’s mother croaked.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Bree said firmly, taking charge. “I want everyone to take it down a notch. My name is Detective Bree Stone, and I’m here to help. Officer, please help the lady to a bathroom.”
The young patrolman nodded and helped the poor woman from the room.
Bree pointed at Branson. “I gather you’re the father?”
“I gather you’re not a rocket scientist,” he replied.
“Name?” Bree said, ignoring the jab.
“Theodore Branson,” he replied. “My wife’s Crystal.”
“I need a photograph of your daughter, Mr. Branson,” Bree said. “I’ll also need a description of what she was wearing. I need the footprints they took of your daughter at birth. I also need any identifying features, mole, birthmark, eye color, number of teeth, anything that says Joss.”
At that Branson straightened, stowed the anger, and said, “I have a picture right here on my phone. I took it this morning at breakfast. Crystal was feeling sick from chemo and I was feeding Joss. She just looked so cute, I…” He looked lost suddenly and began to cry. “My little Miss Muffin is gone.”
“We’ll get her back, Mr. Branson,” Bree said, softening her tone.
“How?” Branson asked, his voice thin and weak.
“I’m going to trigger an AMBER Alert to start. Get your daughter’s face in front of every law enforcement officer within five hundred miles of here.”
Chapter
16
Around that same time, Marcus Sunday slipped back into the apartment in Kalorama, finding the music off and Acadia Le Duc waiting for him, wearing a simple cotton dress with an Indian pattern, no shoes, and fresh daisies in her hair. The dress was faded and threadbare and left little to the imagination, certainly not the fact that she wore nothing much beneath.
“Ready for your present, sugar?” she asked with a coy grin.
“It’s all I could think about the entire day,” he replied.
“Me, too,” she said, and started toward the hallway and the storage room.
As the writer followed, he was once again thinking that when it came to Acadia Le Duc, anything was possible.
She was a photographer by training, a good one. They’d met by chance two years before at a bar on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. There’d been this mutual, explosive, reckless attraction between them, the kind Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway had in that old movie Bonnie and Clyde. At least that was the way Sunday saw it.
Acadia was definitely crazy and bold enough to play Bonnie Parker, he thought, stopping in the storage room doorway to watch as she touched the computer genius’s shoulder just so.
Preston Elliot startled, ripped off the headphones, and whirled around, smiling. He was roughly Sunday’s size. He even sort of looked like Sunday at a quick glance.
“Huh-huh-hi, Acadia,” Preston said, stuttering painfully.
Acadia stroked the stutterer’s upper arm with the fingernails of one hand, played with her curly blond hair with the other. Preston looked mesmerized until she said, “This is my friend I told you about, sugar. He wants to see your invention at work.”
The stutterer spotted Sunday, sobered, nodded awkwardly, and acted like he wanted to speak, but didn’t. He turned to a laptop, gave it a command. The screens on the wall displayed what looked at first glance like a collage of images.
At center was a photograph Acadia had recently taken of Alex Cross’s house from across Fifth Street. Dotted lines traveled from various windows in the house out to pictures of Dr. Alex, his wife, his grandmother, his daughter, and his younger son. Set off to one side was a framed picture of Damon, Alex Cross’s older son, seventeen and a student at a prep school in western Massachusetts.
Digital lines went out from each portrait, linked to images of schools, police stations, churches, grocery stores, and various friends. There were also lines connecting each member of Cross’s family to calendar and clock icons.
“He uses mind-mapping software and an Xbox 360 with Kinect to make it work,” Acadia explained. “It’s interactive, Marcus. Just stand in front of the camera and point to what you want.”
Intrigued now, Sunday stepped in front of the screens and the Kinect camera. He pointed at the photograph of Cross. The screen instantly jumped to a virtual diary of the detective’s recent life, everything from photographs of Bree Stone, to his kids, to his white Chevy sedan and his best friend, John Sampson, and Sampson’s wife, Billie.
Sunday pointed at the calendar, and the screens showed a chronological account of everything he had seen Cross do in the prior month. He gestured at the photograph of the house, and the screen reverted to the original collage. Interested to see just how far they had taken the data, he gestured at the photograph of Damon, Cross’s older son.
The screen mutated yet again, showing a collage dominated by a color map of the campus at the prep school Damon attended, but there was little detail about the young man’s day-to-day life there.
Sunday decided he would have to beef up that portion of his research. Then he turned to Acadia and Preston. “It’s brilliant.”
“Mo-mo-more,” Preston stuttered.
“The best part, in fact,” Acadia said. “Put the helmet on, sugar.”
Sunday hesitated but then saw that a cable linked the helmet to the server. He put the helmet on, lowered the visor, and gasped. He was now looking at a 3-D image of Cross’s house.
It hovered there in front of him like a hologram.
“Touch the front door,” Acadia said through speakers in the helmet. “Your hands guide you.”
Chapter
17
Sunday reached toward the door. It swung open and he moved inside a digital model of Cross’s house, not quite architectural rendering, not quite photograph. He was in the front hallway
. He moved his right hand and was quickly peering into the front room. He moved his left hand and a closet opened.
“The entire place like this?” he said.
“Top to bottom,” Acadia said. “You can see the house as it is now, and as it will be during and after the construction.”
Fascinated now, the writer climbed the virtual staircase and found Alex Cross’s bedroom. He looked at the bed, thought of Bree Stone in those jeans she’d been wearing. Despite that pleasurable image, he did not linger.
There was one place in particular he very much wanted to see. He navigated out of the bedroom and climbed a second, narrower staircase to the attic and Cross’s home office, which was depicted with near-photorealism.
The writer was ecstatic. This was where Dr. Alex did some of his best work, at least according to a fawning profile of him that had run a few years back in the Post’s Sunday magazine. The piece had included the photograph of the attic that Preston had somehow melded into the cyber-rendering.
Sunday panned about, seeing the desk, the chair, the filing cabinets, even the snapshots of the victims of unsolved murders and various news clips regarding those cases thumbtacked to the wall. He spotted two and almost gasped.
Could it be? Cross was still obsessed with the Perfect Criminal cases?
Sunday pointed at one clip. To his delight, it was enlarged, and he scanned a story from the Austin American-Statesman about the Monahan murders, pausing on a picture of Alice, the young mother and wife. In Sunday’s mind he saw her as he always did: naked in the bathroom, screaming before the razor cut her throat.
But rather than dwell on that, he pointed at the second clip, a story from the Omaha World-Herald describing the brutal slayings of the Daley family. He lingered on the wife and mother, Bea. She was older than Alice Monahan by nearly twenty years. In his mind he saw her naked, too, and begging for mercy before the razor slashed her—
“Love it, sugar?” Acadia asked over the headset, breaking his attention.
“I do.”
There was no doubt about that. Through his clever invention, young Preston Elliot had made Sunday invisible, free to roam Cross’s house at will, free to become familiar with every inch of the place so that someday soon he could creep into it in the dark for real.
That would be exciting. Wouldn’t every cell in his body buzz?
Yes. Oh, yes, it would. But there was more than that. Looking around the cyberversion of the office, Sunday felt as if he’d already violated Dr. Alex’s privacy, slipped inside the detective’s sanctuary, and made himself right at home.
What could be better? What could make things better?
Nothing!
Feeling untouchable now, Sunday tore off the helmet and smiled at Preston. “Acadia said you were a genius, my friend. She’s right.”
Preston glanced at Acadia, blushed, and squirmed in his seat.
“No one knows you’ve done this work for us, correct?” Sunday asked.
“Ju-ju-just me,” Preston said. “Like A-A-Acadia asked.”
Sunday looked at her. “And you know how to enter future data?”
“Preston’s a very good teacher,” Acadia said, rubbing the young man’s shoulders sensually.
“Pay him,” Sunday said, heading toward the door.
“My great pleasure,” Acadia said.
As he walked through the apartment to the front door, Sunday felt the building thrill of anticipation pulse through him again. He opened the door, shut it again, and slipped off his shoes and thin belt. He stood there inside the door, listening.
Acadia laughed seductively and said, “Come to my room, sugar? See what a good old Louisiana girl can do between the sheets?”
A few moments later Sunday heard a door open, and soft music begin to play. He flashed on the image of himself at eighteen with the shovel in his hands, slipping up behind that figure, starting to swing.
Feeling insanely alive now, beyond all laws, all rules, beyond any sense of moral order, the writer crept down the hall toward the bedroom. He was embracing freedom, true freedom, and it left him panting.
Sunday stood in the hallway, listening to Preston grunting and Acadia urging him on. It was over in less than a minute. Probably a sophomore.
Five minutes later, Acadia said, “Something more exotic, more erotic, sugar?”
“P-p-please,” Preston said.
“Get off the bed and onto your knees, then, chéri,” Acadia ordered. “I want you to orally worship me this time before we join.”
Preston gave a pleasurable sigh. Sunday moved to the open door. The stutterer was indeed on his knees, his back to the writer. Acadia was stunningly naked, gently writhing her sex in front of the computer genius’s face.
Preston’s attention never wavered from her. But Acadia’s did when Sunday looped the belt around the programmer’s neck and began to throttle him.
The entire time the stutterer struggled toward death, she stared into Sunday’s eyes with a reckless desire that matched his own.
Chapter
18
I hung up the phone in my office around six thirty that Friday evening, exasperated that we were having trouble getting copies of the feed from the closed-circuit television cameras mounted at intersections in the blocks around the Superior Spa.
The guys over in the IT department said some kind of programming glitch or bug or something had corrupted the files. They weren’t gone, but they weren’t opening, either. The IT guys were feeling the strain of the high murder rate and the Francones case as much as we were. It might take several days before a tech could debug the relevant files.
Earlier, I had tracked down Francones’s agent and business manager, or figured out who they were, anyway. But the two of them were currently in a private jet en route from Los Angeles to DC to help arrange memorial services for the Hall of Famer. Their secretaries said they’d be free to meet with us in the morning.
Trenton Wiggs, the named owner of the massage parlor, was not in any of the metro-area phone books I looked at. I ran the name through Google, found ten different men of that name in various locales around the country, but nothing that pegged any of them as a sleaze merchant. Then again, who advertised that kind of thing?
In the meantime, Francones’s murder had become the hottest news story of the moment. Nearly every cable and network news show had led with the case, almost all of the coverage slanted at the Mad Man’s bloody demise in a massage parlor in what they were calling the Murder Capital of the World.
“I’m going home, see how the renovation is going,” I told Sampson. He was feeling the stress as much as anybody. “You should go home to Billie. We were up late and up early.”
“Reading my mind,” he said, yawned. “Beer?”
“Nah, not tonight,” I said, and left.
Twenty minutes later, I drove past my house, seeing that the Dumpster in the front yard was almost full of construction debris. I almost parked, but then drove on by, heading over to Anacostia, one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city and the reigning champion when it came to murders per capita.
Ava Williams had lived on the streets in Anacostia before Nana had rescued her. I went to some of the places she’d told us about: a convenience store in Congress Heights, the ER at St. Elizabeths Hospital, the woods east of Mississippi Avenue, Fort Stanton Park. I showed her picture to groups of young people hanging in all those places, and to every homeless person I could find. Not one of them recognized her.
Frustrated, I finally drove to the abandoned factory building where we’d discovered the burned body. There was a police seal on the place, but it had been broken already. I got a flashlight and went inside, climbed down the near stairs to the basement room where the burning had been done, found where the cement floor was charred with death.
I stared at it for a long time and then flashed my light around. The basement had been gone over by a forensics team and was still fairly clean. Then I felt a sudden breeze, coming from back toward the
second set of stairs, as if some window or door had been opened.
I went back out there, trying to find where the draft was coming from. I shined the light into a room beyond those stairs.
He came at me wild-eyed and insane, swinging a Louisville Slugger that caught me flush in the stomach, knocked all the wind out of me, and drove me to my knees.
Part Two
Killing Time
Chapter
19
Around midnight I was icing my stomach in the dining room while Bree heated up leftover chicken stew on the portable electric double burner I’d bought to get us through the remodel. Heavy plastic sheeting closed off the kitchen area, which looked like a bomb had gone off inside.
“The guy was long gone by the time I could stand up,” I said.
“You get a good look at him?” Bree asked, spooning stew into bowls.
“Some dirty, crazy homeless guy with wild, frizzy hair,” I replied. “Probably lives in that room. I found a mattress, ratty blankets, fresh McDonald’s wrappers, and three bags of clothes, including something you’re not going to want to see.”
Bree set the bowl of steaming chicken stew in front of me. “What?”
I reached down, groaned at the ache in my stomach, and got the plastic grocery bag sitting beside me. I pulled out a large Ziploc evidence bag that contained a teal-blue sweater with distinctive little brass buttons.
“That’s Ava’s!” Bree cried, her hands going to her mouth.
“Her Christmas present from Nana Mama.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Have it analyzed, give the loony who hit me a couple of days to settle back into his nest, and then go back in there after him.”