I, Alex Cross Read online

Her small body was like nothing to hold in my arms. I laid her gently on the love seat and felt for a pulse at her neck. There was none.

  “Nana? Can you hear me? Nana?”

  My heart was flying now. The doctors at St. Anthony’s had told me the signs to look for—no movement, no breath, and she just lay there, horribly still.

  Nana was in cardiac arrest.

  Chapter 48

  IT WAS ANOTHER nightmare—the EMTs in the house, the blur of the ambulance ride, questions at the emergency room. Then the terrible waiting.

  I stayed with Nana all day and all night at St. Anthony’s. She’d survived the heart attack, which was about as much as anyone would say for now.

  They had her on a ventilator to help her breathe, with a tube taped over her mouth. There was a clip on her finger to measure her oxygen level, and an IV to keep the medications coming. More wires ran from Nana’s chest to a heart monitor by the bed, its pulsing lines like some kind of electronic vigil. I hated that screen and relied on it at the same time.

  Friends and relatives came and went all day and into the evening. Aunt Tia was there with some of my cousins, and then Sampson and Billie. Bree brought the kids, but they weren’t allowed in, which was just as well. They’d seen more than enough at home when the ambulance had come and taken Nana away again.

  And then there were the “necessary” conversations. Different staff members wanted to talk to me about the DNR order in her file, about options regarding hospice, about religious affiliation, all just in case. Just in case what—Nana never woke up?

  No one tried to chase me out after visiting hours, as if they could, but I appreciated the consideration. I sat with my forearms on the edge of the bed, sometimes to rest my head, other times to pray for Nana.

  Then, sometime in the middle of the night, she finally stirred. Her hand moved under the blanket, and it was like all those prayers of ours were answered in that one small motion.

  And then another tiny motion—and her eyes slowly opened.

  The nurses had said that I should stay calm and speak quietly if that happened. For the record, it was no easy feat.

  I reached up and put a hand on her cheek until she seemed to know I was there.

  “Nana, don’t try to say anything right now. Don’t try to argue either. There’s a tube in your throat to help you breathe.”

  Her eyes started moving around, taking it all in, staring at my face.

  “You collapsed at home. Remember?”

  She nodded, but just barely. I think she smiled too, which felt huge.

  “I’m going to ring for the nurse and see how soon we can get you off this machine,” I said. “Okay?” I reached for the call button, but when I looked back, her eyes had closed again. I had to check the monitor just to reassure myself she was only sleeping.

  All the yellow, blue, and green lines were doing their thing, just fine.

  “Okay, tomorrow morning, then,” I said, not because she could hear me but because I needed to say something.

  I only hoped there would be a tomorrow morning.

  Chapter 49

  NANA WAS WIDE awake and off the ventilator by noon the following day. Her heart was enlarged and she was too weak to leave intensive care, but there was good reason to believe she’d be coming home again. I celebrated by sneaking the kids into the room for the quickest, quietest Cross family party ever.

  The other hopeful news was on the work front. An FBI lawyer named Lynda Cole had established probable cause and gotten the Bureau back onto the property out in Virginia. By the time I reached Ned Mahoney on his cell, the FBI had a full Evidence Response Team on site.

  Bree spelled me at the hospital—Aunt Tia would spell Bree later—and I drove out to Virginia in the afternoon to have another look around Blacksmith Farms.

  Ned met me out front so he could walk me through with his creds. The primary area of interest was a small apartment out back. The access was an interior staircase from a three-bay parking garage underneath.

  Inside, the place looked like a suite at the Hay-Adams. The furniture was all soft linens and upholstery, mostly in lighter tones. There was a decorative dropped ceiling over the dining area, and a highly polished walnut-manteled fireplace.

  If you subtracted the techs in their tan cargos and blue ERT polo shirts, the place was pristine.

  “It’s the bedroom that’s the puzzle,” Ned said. I followed him in through a set of curtained French doors. “No carpet, no knickknacks, no bedding, nothing,” he said, stating the obvious. Other than a bare bed, dresser, and two nightstands, it looked like someone had recently moved out.

  “Prints and fibers came up with nothing. So we went to luminol.”

  That explained the portable UV lamps set up in the room. Mahoney turned off the ceiling light and closed the door. “Go ahead, guys.”

  Once they powered up, the whole room seemed to go radioactive. The walls, the floor, the furniture, all fluoresced bright blue. It was one of those occasions when my life actually did feel like an episode of CSI.

  “Someone cleaned in here professionally,” Mahoney said. “And I don’t mean Merry Maids of Washington.”

  One of the limitations with luminol is that although it can bring out traces of blood, it also responds to some of the things people use to get rid of blood, like household bleach. That’s what we were looking at. It was as if the room had been painted with Clorox.

  This looked like a crime scene for sure. And maybe a murder scene.

  Chapter 50

  THE NEXT THING that happened, nobody saw coming. It was maybe half an hour later, and I was still on the case at Blacksmith Farms.

  A rumble of conversation came from the apartment’s living room, and Ned and I went out to see what was going on. Several techies were gathered around a bearded guy on a short ladder near the door. He had the plastic cover of a smoke detector in one hand, with the exposed unit on the ceiling above him. That’s what everybody was staring at.

  The tech reached up with a pencil and pointed at an innocuous plastic nub tucked into the circuitry. “I’m pretty sure it’s a camera. Fairly sophisticated.”

  Talk about grinding the gears.

  Immediately, Ned ordered a second sweep of both buildings. Everyone turned off their cell phones, and all the televisions and computers we could find were disconnected. That would keep them from interfering with the radio-frequency detectors.

  Once the search got going, it was fast work. Ninety minutes later, most of the on-site personnel were gathered in the main house foyer for a briefing. I saw a few familiar faces, including the assistant director in charge, Luke Hamel, and also Elaine Kwan from the Behavior Analysis Unit, my old office.

  I was surprised the case hadn’t been graded major yet, just based on the firepower in the room.

  The special agent in charge of ERT was Shoanna Spears. She was tall and big boned, with a heavy Boston accent and a tiny ivy tattoo that just peeked over the top of her white oxford collar. She stood on the grand staircase to address the group.

  “Basically, there’s nowhere in the house that isn’t covered. We found cameras in every room, including the bathrooms and the apartments out back.”

  “How do we find out what all those cameras have been filming?” Hamel asked the question percolating in everyone’s brains.

  “Hard to say. These are wireless units; they can transmit to any base station within a thousand feet, maybe more than that. We did find a hard drive on the third floor with the right software, but no archived files. That means either that all the surveillance was done live or, more likely, that somebody took the files off site.”

  “In which case we’d be looking for what?” Mahoney spoke up from the back of the room. “Disks? A laptop? E-mails?”

  Agent Spears nodded. “Keep going,” she said. “There’s nothing terribly sophisticated about those files. They can pretty much be stored anywhere.”

  You could feel the energy in the room dip. We were all ready for so
me good news. And then we got it.

  “For what it’s worth,” Spears went on, “there seems to be only one set of prints on the hardware upstairs. We’re running them through IAFIS now.”

  Chapter 51

  “I DON’T UNDERSTAND any of this, Tony. Why can’t you at least tell me where we’re going? Is that too much to ask?”

  The truth—and Nicholson had only come to realize it that afternoon—was that he didn’t have the stomach for cold-blooded murder. Not by his own hand, anyway. He’d always believed that if he had to, he could easily put a pillow over Charlotte’s face or slip something lethal into her morning coffee, but that wasn’t going to happen, was it? And now it was too late to have her hit by someone else, which would have been a snap.

  He threw a few last things into his duffel, while Charlotte harped at him from the far side of the bed. The Louis Vuitton bag he’d set out for her was still empty, and his patience was running out. He badly wanted to punch her in the face. But what good would that do?

  “Darling.” The word nearly caught in his throat. “Just trust me here. We have a plane to catch. I’ll explain everything once we’re away. Now, pick out a few things and let’s go. Let’s go, sweetheart.” Before I get really angry and murder you with my bare hands.

  “It’s about those men from the other night, isn’t it? I knew something wasn’t right with them. Do you owe somebody money—is that it?”

  “Goddamnit, Charlotte, are you listening at all? It’s not safe here, dimmy. For either of us. The best we could hope for would be jail at this point. That’s the best, do you understand? It only gets worse from there.”

  Depending on who gets to us first was the rest of his thought.

  “We? What do you mean, we? I haven’t done anything to anyone.”

  Nicholson rushed around the bed and threw an armful of clothes from her closet into the bag, hangers and all.

  Then the red leather jewelry box he’d bought her in Florence, forever ago—a lifetime ago, when he’d been young, in love, and most definitely dumb as a bag of bricks with a hard-on.

  “We’re leaving. Now.”

  She trailed after him, more afraid of being alone than anything else, which he was counting on. That got them as far as the front hall before Charlotte melted down completely. He heard something between a moan and a scream, and turned to see her half-crouched on the polished slate floor. Black lines of makeup ran down her cheeks with the tears; she always wore too much of the stuff, like some kind of tart, and he should know.

  “I’m so scared, Tony. I’m shaking all over. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see anything besides your own needs? Why are you being like this?”

  Nicholson opened his mouth to say something bland and conciliatory, but what came out instead was “You really are too stupid for words, do you know that?”

  He dropped her bag and took her up roughly by the arm, didn’t care if he yanked it from its socket. Charlotte pulled back, kicking and screaming, literally, as he started to drag her across the floor. All he had to do was get her to the car, and then she could pop an aneurysm for all he fucking cared about the dumb, stubborn cow his wife had become.

  But then the first slam came at the front door.

  Something—not someone—had just smashed into it from the outside, hard enough to leave a long, forked crack down the middle. Nicholson looked out a window just quickly enough to realize what it was—a battering ram. And he knew then that it was probably too late to save even himself.

  The second vicious and powerful swing came right away. It popped the lock set and dead bolt like children’s toys, and the door exploded open.

  Chapter 52

  “RUN.”

  That was the only advice Tony Nicholson had for his wife before he dropped her arm and sprinted toward the back door himself. All priorities were now relative. Survival was not, and it definitely could go to the fittest.

  He got as far as the kitchen, where he came face-to-face with a short, solid-looking Hispanic man coming the other way. Now, who the hell was this?

  There was a blur of motion, then an excruciating crack at the side of his knee. Nicholson vaguely registered the pipe wrench in the man’s hand as he went down hard and stayed down.

  At first there was only pain, a big red ball of it exploding up and down his leg.

  Then came the handcuffs. They bit into his wrists before he knew they were there.

  Handcuffs?

  Next, the Hispanic intruder dragged him by the collar all the way back into the living room, where he dropped him midpoint on the rug.

  Charlotte was sitting in one of the Barcelona chairs with a strip of silver tape plastered over her mouth.

  A second man—were there really only two of them?—stood over her, watching Nicholson with faint interest, almost boredom, like he did this kind of thing every day.

  They weren’t FBI or police; that much seemed clear. And they were nothing like the two goons from last week. Their clothes were dark, and they wore black balaclavas pulled up off their faces and latex gloves on their hands.

  Not exactly cops, but close. Former cops? Special Forces?

  The one who had attacked him was smash nosed, with dark eyes that seemed to be looking down at an unworthy specimen more than anything.

  “The disk?” was all that he said.

  “Disk?” Nicholson gutted out the word between clenched teeth. “What the hell are you talking about? Who are you two?”

  “Two—I like that number.”

  The man looked at his stainless-steel watch. “You have about two minutes.”

  “Two minutes or what?” Nicholson asked, but then he saw the answer to his question.

  The taller one took out a clear plastic bag and pulled it down over Charlotte’s head. She struggled, but he had no trouble wrapping bands of the silver tape around her neck, sealing her head inside the plastic.

  Nicholson could see Charlotte’s expression change as she realized exactly what was happening. He even felt a pinch of pity, maybe even lost love, something emotional and, well, human. For the first time in years, he felt a connection to Charlotte.

  “You’re insane! You can’t do this!” he yelled at the man holding down his wife.

  “You’re the one doing this, Mr. Nicholson. You’re in complete control of the situation, not us. This is all on you. For God’s sake, make us stop.”

  “But I don’t even understand what you want. Tell me what it is!”

  He lunged for Charlotte, but the injured knee took him right back down, wedged embarrassingly between the couch and the coffee table.

  “Please, tell me what you want! I don’t understand!” Nicholson begged at the top of his lungs as convincingly as possible. It was the performance of a lifetime, and it had to be.

  By the time he got himself onto the couch, Charlotte had gone still.

  Her familiar blue eyes were wide open. Her head lolled against her shoulder like some marionette waiting to be picked up. It was grotesque, with the plastic bag still on, and easy to respond to.

  “You bastards! You fucking bastards, you killed her! Now do you believe me? Is that what it takes?”

  The two men were as cool as ever. They exchanged a glance. A couple of shrugs.

  “We should go,” the white guy said. The other nodded, and for a second Nicholson thought he’d pulled it off, that maybe “we” meant only the two of them. It didn’t. One of them picked up Charlotte and the other dragged Nicholson.

  As he was forced to hobble on his good leg toward the door—and God knew where after that—Nicholson had the strangest thought. He wished he had been nicer to Charlotte.

  Chapter 53

  NED MAHONEY AND I were in my car, headed east on I-66 toward Alexandria, when the call came in that we were too late. Virginia State Police were reporting that they’d found Nicholson’s house empty. There were signs of a break-in and a struggle, two packed suitcases left behind, both of the Nicholsons’ cars still in the garage.
/>   An APB was in effect, but without a specific vehicle to look for, it didn’t carry much hope of an apprehension.

  The plan was still to convene at the Nicholson house. ADIC Hamel was calling in another Evidence Response Team right away. And Mahoney phoned someone at the Hoover Building to do some fast digging on Nicholson.

  He also had one of the Bureau-issue Toughbooks in the car, which let him double up on research. He started feeding me information rapid-fire, the way Ned always does when he’s keyed up.

  “Well, our boy’s never been arrested, naturalized, federally employed, in the military—no big surprises. He doesn’t have any known aliases either. And he doesn’t cross-reference in any Bureau file, under Tony or Anthony Nicholson.”

  “I don’t think he’s our killer,” I said.

  Mahoney stopped what he was doing and gave me his attention. “Because?”

  “There’re too many loose ends here,” I explained. “Nicholson’s obviously one of them, but that’s all he is, Ned. It’s like that old story about the five blind men and all the elephant parts.”

  “Which makes Nicholson what—the asshole?”

  I had to laugh. Mahoney is never without a quick response, and he’s at his best when the pressure’s on.

  “I think someone came after the same thing we’re looking for, only they got to him first. Which just means they have more puzzle pieces to work with than we do.”

  “Or”—Mahoney held up a finger—“he staged his own disappearance. It wouldn’t be hard—drop a few suitcases, bust up some furniture, and he’s halfway over the Atlantic with his little snuff film collection while we’re still dusting the house for prints.”

  We batted possibilities around some more, until another call came in. Whatever it was got Mahoney excited—again. He punched an address into his laptop.

  A few seconds later, we were following the GPS onto the Beltway toward Alexandria—but not to Nicholson’s house.