Текст книги "Alex Cross, Run"

Автор книги: James Patterson

Соавторы: James Patterson
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

CHAPTER

8

NO SUCH LUCK.

By the time Jannie and I had circled all the way around and back to our seats, the lottery was over. Most of the people were on their feet now, milling around and getting ready to leave.

Ava was still in her chair, scuffing her feet back and forth. She looked numb, as much as anything else.

Nana looked angry. Bree looked heartbroken.

“I’m sorry, Ava,” I said, sitting down next to her. “I wish it had come out differently.”

“Wha’ever,” she said. “I knew I wasn’t gettin’ in.”

It was frustrating to me, when the world behaved exactly as Ava expected it to. If I had to guess, I’d say she wanted in just as badly as Jannie, if for no other reason than to feel like she’d won something for once.

Jannie came over and sat on the other side of her. Several families around us were holding each other, and a lot of their kids were crying. Some of the parents, too. It had all gone by so fast.

“This sucks,” Jannie said. “Sorry, Ava.”

“No, you ain’t.” Ava turned on her with a sudden glare. When Jannie tried to take her hand, she snatched it away and stood up fast. “Come on,” she said. “It’s time to go. The lottery’s over.” Then she started walking out ahead of the rest of us without looking back. There was nothing to do in the moment but soldier on and follow her out.

Nana took my arm as we went. I could feel her shaking with anger.

“It’s insanity, is what it is,” she said. “Why in God’s name should children have to win a damn lottery to get a good education? And right here in the nation’s capital! What does that say about our country to the rest of the world, Alex? What?”

Even the “damn” was unusual for her, but I knew how she felt. The problem was so big, and so intractable, it was hard to even know who to be mad at anymore. The school chancellor? The teachers’ union? The mayor? God?

“I wish I had some answers for you, Nana. I really do,” I said.

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” she went on. “Miss Ava Williams will not be falling through any cracks, thank you very much. That girl is going to get the education she deserves if I have to give it to her myself.”

In other words, Nana Mama was going to get done whatever the chancellor, teachers’ union, mayor, and God hadn’t seen fit to accomplish.

And I had every faith that she would. One hundred percent.

CHAPTER

9

RON GUIDICE SAT IN THE BLEACHERS AT MARIAN ANDERSON HIGH SCHOOL, taking notes as the school lottery played out. The place was jam-packed. Not too many white folks, but enough that he didn’t stand out, anyway. Nobody would even notice that he didn’t have a fourteen-year-old of his own in tow.

Emma Lee played quietly the whole time at his feet, undressing and redressing Cee-Cee without a peep. She had the patience of a little saint, that was for sure.

Maybe she got that part from me, he thought.

Meanwhile, he sat and watched the Cross family as the lottery wound down. Interestingly enough, he found himself glad to hear Jannie’s name called out over the public address system. And then he was sorry when it became clear that Ava hadn’t made it in.

Poor Ava. That girl couldn’t catch a break, could she? Unless you counted getting in with the Cross family to begin with. They were “good people,” on paper. Guidice was even starting to like them a little more than he would have preferred. The grandmother and the kids, anyway. It happened all the time. He couldn’t help getting involved with his subjects.

Would they be devastated when Alex was dead and gone? Of course they would. That was the part that couldn’t be helped. The world was full of innocent victims.

He’d been one himself, once. Thanks to Alex.

But none of that mattered—not as long as he kept an eye on the bigger picture. Always the bigger picture.

That’s where Alex Cross was a dead man walking.

CHAPTER

10

I SKIPPED LUNCH WITH THE FAMILY AND GOT MYSELF STRAIGHT OVER TO THE new Consolidated Forensic Lab at Fourth and School Streets. It’s an amazing building—two hundred and eighty thousand square feet of facilities under one enormous roof. MPD finally had firearms, toxicology, DNA, fingerprint analysis, and the medical examiner’s office all in one place.

As soon as I got there, I threw on a surgical gown and mask and pushed in through the swinging door of the examination suite where Joan Bradbury was already halfway through Elizabeth Reilly’s autopsy.

“What have we got so far, Joan?” I asked.

“A lot,” she said. “Come on in.”

The body was open on the table, with a long Y cut down the middle of the torso, which had been flayed open by now. I’ve sat through more autopsies than I can remember, and my stomach’s way past any kind of trouble with this stuff. At the same time, I never let myself forget the reason I’m there. I owed Elizabeth that much, at least.

“I did a tox screen on her blood last night, just to get a jump on things,” she told me. “We got a positive read for antidepressants, and, get this—Pitocin.”

“Pitocin? You test for that?”

“Not usually, but under the circumstances, I thought I might check. Glad I did, too. Pitocin doesn’t stay in the system too long, only around forty-eight hours. Which means Elizabeth Reilly induced her labor less than two days before she died.”

My mind started spinning around this new piece of information. So far there were no hospital records for Elizabeth Reilly in the area, and no record of any live births under that name, much less an induced labor.

Was it possible she’d done this on her own for some reason? She’d been a nursing student. She could have easily known how to get her hands on some Pitocin, and maybe even known how to administer it.

But why?

And meanwhile, was there a three-day-old baby out there somewhere? I needed to find out, ASAP.

“By the way,” Joan went on. “We didn’t find any rope fibers on her fingers or palms at all. Someone else put that noose around her neck. And if all that weren’t enough, the break in the second and third vertebrae was definitely postmortem. I’ve got a few hours to go here, but I can tell you right now, my report’s going to rule out suicide.”

Ultimately, cause of death is the ME’s to call. I hardly ever disagreed with Joan’s conclusions, and I didn’t have any reason to do it today, either. This was now officially a homicide investigation.

Maybe also a missing persons case.

I had my work cut out, that was for sure.

CHAPTER

11

THE FIRST THING I DID WHEN I LEFT THE MORGUE WAS FIND SAMPSON. HE WAS catching up on his reports at the Second District station house, and I pulled him outside for a talk.

I’ve known John all my life, and I trust him as much as anyone at MPD. He’s also been around long enough that he knows people all over the city. More specifically, he knew which people at which agencies were going to be willing to talk to him about a missing baby without eighteen and a half signatures on two dozen forms first. I understand why we’ve got a lot of the paperwork we do, but there’s a time and a place. This wasn’t it. If speed was my number one priority right now, discretion was a close second.

We stood out by my car in the station house parking lot, downing some sandwiches and going over the details.

“All indications are that this was a vaginal birth. No signs of episiotomy, or any hospital intervention at all,” I told him. “Given the Pitocin in Elizabeth’s system, and the fact that nobody we’ve talked to said anything about any pregnancy, it seems pretty clear she was trying to keep this a secret.”

“It’s not so hard to hide a pregnancy,” John said, flipping through the file I’d given him. “Especially if nobody’s looking.”

“Exactly. Her neighbors barely knew her, and she dropped out of school five months ago.”

“What about family?” he asked. “Next of kin?”

“Not much. She’s got two grandparents down in Georgia who raised her, and that’s about it. According to them, she fell off the radar a while ago. They haven’t heard from her since Christmas.”

“In other words, this baby could be—”

“Anywhere. Yeah.”

John chugged the last of his Diet Coke and obliterated the can in his huge hand. There’s a reason we call him Man Mountain. “I’m going to need something stronger here,” he said.

“Talk to Youth Division, see if any of this rings a bell,” I told him. “Harry Keith over there will keep his mouth shut, if you need some help. Go district by district if you have to. Check the NCMEC database as often as you can, and talk to their people over in Alexandria. Just don’t say anything about me or this case.”

This was the thing. Elizabeth Reilly’s pregnancy was the only card we were holding close anymore. If our killer had any connection to her baby, I didn’t want him to see us coming, and I was already publicly attached to this very public story. That’s where Sampson came in.

The other possibility was that there might not be a baby to find anymore. We didn’t know if Elizabeth’s pregnancy had been full term; if the baby was delivered stillborn; or God forbid, if it had been killed for some reason I didn’t understand yet.

Right now, all of that was a question mark. But for the baby’s sake, as well as the mother’s, we had to assume that there was still someone out there to save.

CHAPTER

12

FOR THREE DAYS WE GOT NOWHERE. THERE WAS NO SIGNIFICANT MOVEMENT on the Darcy Vickers or Elizabeth Reilly murders, and the phone call I kept hoping to get from Sampson never came. You could just feel these cases going cold.

Then on that Saturday morning, we had a new development. The worst kind. Another body popped up in Georgetown.

I was home when I got the call from Sergeant Huizenga. She wanted me to keep going in the direction I’d been going, and monitor this homicide alongside the other two. The trick would be to see this scene on its own merit first, without comparing it to anything. Sometimes if you go looking for connections, you start to see what you want to see instead of what’s really there.

I took Pennsylvania, and then M Street, all the way to the Key Bridge and parked just below it. Several cruisers were already on-site, and they’d strung an outer perimeter of yellow tape across Water Street, on the south side of the Potomac Boat Club.

A maintenance worker had found the boy’s body that morning, lodged under one of their docks. By now someone had pulled him onto the shore and left him there, on a little spit of dirt and grass just beyond the white-clapboard-and-green-shingled building.

The first sight of him was a shock, even for me. The apparent cause of death was a gunshot to the face, with an ugly, wide-open entry wound that told me he’d been hit at close range. It was hard to know what kind of powder burns or stippling had washed away in the water, but there were still a few dark marks around the remains of his cheekbone. A couple of smashed teeth were exposed where the flesh had been blown away, and it gave him a kind of sideways grimace, almost as if he were still in pain.

That wasn’t all. His jeans were stained dark all around the hips and crotch, presumably from stabbing. There were at least half a dozen ragged perforations in the denim of his pants, clearly centered around the genital area. It was a horrible proposition to think about what had happened to this poor kid. I could only hope for his sake that he’d been shot dead first, and mutilated after. Not much consolation there.

The most depressing part was how young he was. He didn’t look any older than eighteen, and his waterlogged letterman’s jacket was from St. Catherine’s, a private high school in Northwest DC. How he had gotten here, like this, was anyone’s guess.

My one clear hit was that this had been done in anger—possibly at the victim himself, but also maybe out of the killer’s own sense of self-loathing. Mutilation can be a signifier of that, as often as not. Either way, our perpetrator obviously had some kind of demons to exorcise. You don’t need a gun and a blade if your motivation is strictly murder.

In fact, it felt a little to me like this killer was getting out all of his ideas at once—stabbing, shooting, drowning. But why? What need did that satisfy?

After I’d taken in all the details I could, I slipped on some gloves and checked the boy’s pockets. They were all empty, but I did find a name, Smithe, stenciled on the back of his jacket. I called it in right away.

It didn’t take long to get word back, either. A few minutes later, a call from our Command Information Center told me that an eighteen-year-old senior at St. Catherine’s, Cory Smithe, had been reported missing by his parents two days earlier. Six one, blond hair, and a small birthmark on his right wrist. Check, check, and check.

“Have you got an address?” I asked the dispatcher.

“Already sent it to your phone,” she told me.

Because we both knew what I had to do next.

CHAPTER

13

WHEN I HEADED BACK TO MY CAR ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE BOATHOUSE, I saw that the locust storm had descended—the kind with cameras, microphones, and broadcast towers.

Instead of the usual half-dozen reporters we might have seen by now, there were dozens of them, just waiting for the story. Trucks were lined up on Water Street, and without a designated press space everyone was right there on the tape line.

This was three bodies in less than a week, centered around one of DC’s least violent neighborhoods. By comparison, the previous three murders anywhere west of Rock Creek had been spread out over a fourteen-month period. People were definitely sitting up and taking notice.

“Detective Cross, over here!”

“Who’s the victim, Alex?”

“Are you considering this a serial investigation at this point?”

It’s a little like being a rock star, without any of the fringe benefits. I gave them the bare minimum, which was all I could afford to do right now.

“Sergeant Huizenga will be out to brief you after the family has been notified,” I told whoever was closest. “We won’t be releasing any details in the meantime.”

“Detective Cross, will you be overseeing all three of these cases?” Shawna Stewart from Channel Five asked me.

“I don’t know yet,” I told her.

“How are the Darcy Vickers and Elizabeth Reilly investigations coming along?”

“They’re coming,” I said, just as I reached my car.

“Hey, Alex, is it true you pulled Elizabeth Reilly’s dead body out of that window before a proper examination?” someone else yelled out. “Doesn’t that compromise the investigation?”

That one stopped me cold. Maybe I should have kept moving, but instead I turned around to see who had asked the question.

This guy struck me as a one-man operation from the first glance. I’d seen his type before—camera around his neck, a handheld recorder pointed my way, and a notebook sticking out of the pocket of his cargo shorts. He also had a full beard, and no press credentials that I could see. Everyone else around him had laminated badges from the city, clipped to their lapels or hanging on lanyards around their necks.

“I don’t recognize you,” I said. “Who are you with?”

“I’m just trying to get the facts, detective.”

“That’s not what I asked,” I said. “I asked who you’re with.”

He raised his voice then, enough to make sure the microphones all around us were picking him up. “Am I a suspect, detective? Are you saying you want to detain me?”

He was baiting me. I’ve seen it a million times. If they can’t get the story they want, they’ll try to create one—especially the hacks and the wannabes.

“No, I’m not detaining you,” I said. “It was just a simple question.”

“Why? Am I required by law to identify myself?” he said.

Now he was just being a dick. The civilian in me wanted to shove that recorder right down his throat.

“No,” I said again. “You’re not required to identify yourself.”

“In that case—no comment,” he said, fighting back a smile. It got a laugh from a few in the crowd, but not from me. The best thing I could do right now was get in my car and leave.

I had somewhere more important to be, anyway. And it couldn’t wait.

CHAPTER

14

BY THE TIME I PULLED UP IN FRONT OF CORY SMITHE’S HOME, I FELT LIKE I HAD a fifty-pound bag of gravel sitting on my chest. Family notifications are the hardest part of my job, hands down.

The Smithes lived in one of the thousands of early twentieth-century row houses that line the streets of Northwest DC. This one was on Shepherd Street in Petworth, with a tiny, terraced stamp of green lawn halfway up the stairs to the front door. In the middle of the grass was a statue of the Virgin Mary, surrounded by a bed of spring tulips. Maybe the Lady would give these people some comfort when they needed it most.

I’d already notified the Fourth District missing persons unit. They had Victims Services on the way over, but this part was all on me. I climbed the stairs and rang the bell.

Cory’s father answered the door almost right away. He looked a lot older than I would have expected, and had a cane hooked over his wrist.

“Can I help you?” he asked, a little warily.

“Mr. Smithe? I’m Alex Cross from the police department,” I told him. “I’m here to speak with you about Cory. May I come in?”

There are a few things you want to avoid in this kind of situation. One of them is mentioning up front that you’re from Homicide. Notifications need to unfold at the right pace—not too fast, but not too slowly, either.

“Come in,” he told me, and opened the screen door. “My wife’s in the back.”

He hobbled on ahead of me, and I followed him through to a screen porch off the kitchen. Mrs. Smithe was there, in slippers and a flowered housecoat. She clutched the neck of it closed and stood up as I came in. The cordless phone on her lap fell onto the floor, but neither of them seemed to notice.

“What is it?” she said. I could tell by her face that she’d already been contemplating the worst. I quickly reintroduced myself, and then got right to it.

“I wish there was an easy way to say this,” I told them.

“Oh Lord. No…”

“I’m so sorry, but Cory’s been killed. He was found this morning.”

It was like her voice cracked the air. There weren’t any words now, just a gut-wrenching expression of grief. Loss. Devastation. She sank down onto her knees and leaned against her husband, who was still holding the cane, trying not to go down himself, I think. He bent his head toward his wife’s with his eyes squeezed shut, the cane shaking between the two of them.

“Where?” Mr. Smithe choked out. “Where was he?”

“In the Potomac,” I said. “At the Georgetown waterfront.” There’s no sense holding back information at this point. It was better for them to get it from me than some other version on the news later.

“Killed?” he said. “As in—”

“Somebody did this to him, yes,” I said. “Again, I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

I think a lot of people assume that’s lip service when cops say it, but the truth was, I could have cried right there with them. The loss of a child is a tragedy, whoever’s it is. You learn to keep it inside.

I waited until I felt like they could hear more from me, and then moved on.

“I know how hard this is,” I said, “but if you could give me a little information about Cory, it could be a big help.”

Mr. Smithe nodded, still on his feet. His wife was back in her chair, quietly weeping.

“What do you need to know?” he asked.

“The kinds of things Cory liked to do, where he hung out, the friends he spent the most time with. That sort of thing,” I said.

His mother looked up then. “Was he in some sort of trouble?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I told them honestly.

“He was a good boy,” Mr. Smithe said. “I know every parent must say that…or maybe they don’t. But Cory walked hand in hand with God. He prayed with us every night. In fact, he’s supposed to start at Catholic University in the fall. A theology major.”

Later I’d learn that Mr. Smithe was a deacon at the family’s church, and his wife had been a nun for twenty years. This had to feel to them like the cruelest possible blow from God.

I pressed them for as much as I could, and took down the names of Cory’s closest circle. There was a girlfriend, Jess Pasternak, they said. She lived only a few blocks away. That was as good a next stop as any.

Then I gave the Smithes my card with my cell number written on the back, and left them to grieve in private. The best thing I could do for them now was keep moving.

As usual, time was not on my side.