I, Alex Cross Read online

  I squeezed in to sit by her. “It’s Alex. I’m here now. It’s Alex, old woman.”

  I felt as if I were on the opposite side of a thick piece of glass from Nana. I could talk to her and touch her and see her, but I couldn’t actually reach her, and it was the most helpless sensation I’d ever known. I had this terrible sick feeling that I knew what was coming next.

  I’m usually good in a crisis—it’s what I do for a living—but I was barely holding it together. When Jannie came over to stand beside me, I didn’t bother to try and hide the tears coming down my cheeks.

  This wasn’t just happening to Nana. It was happening to all of us.

  And as we sat there watching Nana, a tear ran down her cheek.

  “Nana,” we all said at once. But she didn’t speak back to us or even try to open her eyes.

  There was just that single tear.

  Chapter 61

  WHEN I WASN’T sleeping that night, or getting out of the nurses’ way every few hours while they checked their patient, I was talking to Nana. At first, I stuck to the soft stuff—how much we loved her, how much we were pulling for her, and even just what was going on in the room.

  But eventually it sank in for me that all Nana ever wanted was the truth, whatever that happened to be. So I started to tell her about my day. Just like we had always talked, never thinking about the reality that our talks would have to end eventually.

  “I had to kill someone today,” I said.

  It seemed like there should have been more to say about that, once I’d said it out loud, but I just sat there quietly. I guess this was where Nana was supposed to come in.

  And then she kind of did—a memory, anyway, from an earlier time when we had a similar conversation.

  Did he have a family, Alex?

  Nana had asked me that before anything else. I was twenty-eight at the time. It was an armed robbery, at a little grocery store in Southeast. I wasn’t even on duty when it happened, just on my way home. The man’s name, I’ll never forget, was Eddie Clemmons. It was the first time anyone had ever shot at me, and the first time I’d ever fired in self-defense.

  And yes, I told Nana, he had a wife, though he didn’t live with her. And two children.

  I remember standing there in the front hall on Fifth Street with my coat still on. Nana had been carrying a basket of wash when I came in, and we ended up sitting down on the stairs, folding clothes and talking about the shooting. I thought it was strange at first, how she kept handing me things to fold. Then, after a while, I realized that at some point, my life would start to feel normal again.

  You’re going to be fine, she had said to me. Maybe not quite the same, but still, just fine. You’re a police officer.

  She was right, of course. Maybe that was why I needed so badly to have the same conversation again now. It was strange, but all I really wanted was for her to tell me it was going to be okay.

  I picked up her hand and kissed it and pressed it against my cheek—anything to connect with her, I guess.

  “Everything’s going to be all right, Nana,” I said.

  But I couldn’t tell if that was the truth or not, or exactly whom I might be lying to.

  Chapter 62

  I WOKE UP with a hand pressing on my shoulder and someone whispering close to my ear. “Time to go to work, sweetheart. Tia’s here.”

  My aunt Tia set her big canvas knitting bag down at my feet. I’d been awake and then asleep again half a dozen times through the night; it was strange being here, with no windows and no real sense of time, and Nana so sick.

  She looked about the same to me this a.m. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. A little of both, maybe. “I’m going to wait for morning rounds,” I told Tia.

  “No, sweetheart, you’re going to go.” She nudged my arm to get me out of the chair. “There’s not enough room in here, and Tia’s calves are killing her. So go on. Go to work. Then you can come back and tell Nana all about it, just like you always do.”

  The knitting came out automatically, with the big colorful wooden needles she always used, and I saw a thermos and a USA Today in the bag too. The way she settled right in made me remember she’d been through this before, with my uncle, then with her younger sister, Anna. My aunt was almost a professional at caring for the very sick and dying.

  “I was going to bring you some of that David Whyte you like,” Tia said. At first I thought she was talking to me. “But then I thought no, let’s keep you riled up, so I brought the newspaper instead. You know they’re outsourcing the statue for Dr. King’s memorial to China? China? Do you believe that, Regina?”

  Tia’s not a sentimental woman, but in her own way, she’s a saint. I also knew there was no chance she’d let Nana catch her crying, coma or no coma. I leaned down and kissed the top of Tia’s head. Then I kissed Nana too.

  “Bye, Tia, Nana. I’ll see you both later.”

  My aunt kept right on chattering, but I heard Nana answer me. Another echo or memory or whatever these were.

  Be good, she told me. And Alex, be careful.

  Actually, I wouldn’t be in any physical danger right away. Technically, I was on administrative leave after the previous day’s shooting. Superintendent Davies kept it down to two days, which I appreciated, but even that was time I couldn’t afford. I needed to talk with Tony Nicholson and Mara Kelly. Now. So I asked Sampson to set up some interviews under his name. Then I would just go along for the ride, be another set of ears and eyes.

  Chapter 63

  THE DETENTION CENTER down in Alexandria is a big old redbrick building at the dead end of Mill Road.

  It was where they held Zacarias Moussaoui until he was sentenced to the supermax facility in Florence, Colorado—which, by coincidence, was the last known residence of Kyle Craig, a serial killer and major piece of unfinished business for me to get to one of these days. It’s amazing how small and incestuous the world of major crime can start to feel once you’ve spent enough time immersed in it, as I had. Just thinking about Kyle Craig got me riled up inside.

  Nicholson and Ms. Kelly were being held on the first and second floors, respectively. We had put them in separate interview rooms and then had to shuttle between the two by elevator.

  At first, neither of them was willing to say anything except that they’d been the victims of kidnap and assault. I let that go on for a while, several hours, and even subtly let Mara Kelly know that her boyfriend was holding firm. I wanted to build up her trust in Nicholson before I tried to tear it down to nothing.

  Next time into the room, I laid a photocopied page on the table in front of her.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “See for yourself.”

  She leaned in, tucking in a loose strand of hair with a white-tipped fingernail. Even here in an interrogation room, Kelly had the kind of gentility that struck me as more practiced than real. She spoke of herself as an accountant, but she’d only finished a year of junior college.

  “Plane tickets?” she said. “I don’t understand. What are these for?”

  Sampson hunkered low over the table. He’s six nine and more than a little intimidating when he wants to be, which is most of the time when he’s on the job.

  “Montreal to Zurich, leaving last night. You read the ticket? You see the names?”

  He tapped a finger on the page. “Anthony and Charlotte Nicholson. Your boyfriend was getting ready to run on you, Mara. He and his wife.”

  She pushed the page away. “Yeah, I’ve got a computer and a color printer too.”

  I took out my cell phone and offered it. “There’s a number for Swiss Air right there. You want to call and confirm the reservation, Mrs. Nicholson?”

  When she didn’t answer, I decided to give her a few minutes alone to stew. Actually, she was right—we had faked the tickets. By the time we came back, she was ready. I could see she’d been crying, and also that she’d tried to wipe away any sign of tears.

  “What do you want to know?” s
he asked. Then her eyes narrowed. “What do I get for it?”

  Sampson made eye contact with her and held it. “We’ll do everything we can to help you.”

  I nodded. “This is how it works, Mara. Whoever helps us first, we help them.”

  I turned on the tape recorder and set it down. “Who were the men in the car? Let’s start there.”

  “I have no idea,” she said. “I never saw them before in my life.” I believed her.

  “What did they want? What did they say?”

  Here she paused. I had the sense she might be ready to bury Nicholson, but it wasn’t a corner she would turn all at once. “You know, I warned him something like this could happen.”

  “Something like what, Mara?” Sampson asked. “Be a little more specific.”

  “He’s been blackmailing clients of the club. It was supposed to be our ‘new-life money.’ That’s what Tony always called it. Some new life, right?” She gestured around the room. “This is it?”

  “What about names? Dead names, made-up ones, whatever you heard. What do you know about the people he was blackmailing?”

  Mara Kelly was warming to this, and as she did, her tone got more bitter and sarcastic. “I know that he always covered his bases. Both sides of the aisle. That way, if anyone talks, everyone loses. And if anything happened to Tony, I was supposed to blow the whole thing wide open.” She sat back and crossed her slender arms. “That was the idea, anyway. That was the threat he made to the dumbasses he was blackmailing for getting a little nookie.”

  “And everyone paid up?” Sampson asked her.

  Her eyes traveled around the room again like she couldn’t believe she was here, that it had all come to this.

  “Well, if that was true, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, now, would we?”

  Chapter 64

  IT DIDN’T TAKE long for Tony Nicholson to start talking a blue streak about the club and the blackmail scheme after that. I’d seen it so many times before, the way suspects will start competing with each other once they sense the ground is shifting. To hear him tell it, Mara Kelly had set up the entire back end: Asian underground banking, public key cryptography—everything they needed to stay out of reach for as long as they had.

  “Why do you think they came after her too?” he kept asking us. “Don’t be fooled by the pretty face. That bitch isn’t nearly as stupid as she appears.”

  I guess you could say those two were no longer an item. Now things might get interesting.

  Nicholson had been sitting on the same rickety folding chair for hours, with his injured leg stuck out to the side in an immobilizer. From the twisted look on his face, he was coming due for a pain pill.

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s a start, Tony. Now let’s talk about the real reason we’re here.”

  I took out a file and started laying photos on the table. “Timothy O’Neill, Katherine Tennancour, Renata Cruz, Caroline Cross.”

  There was a moment of genuine surprise on his face—but just a moment. Nicholson was cool under fire. “What about them?”

  “They all worked for you.”

  “It’s possible,” he said. “A lot of people work for me.”

  “It wasn’t a question.” I pointed at Caroline’s picture. “She was found mutilated beyond recognition. Did you catch that on camera too, Nicholson?”

  “I seriously don’t know what you’re talking about. I have no idea what you’re getting at. Try making sense when you bother to open your mouth.”

  “How did she die?”

  Something seemed to click suddenly, like a spark in Nicholson’s eyes. He looked down at the picture and then back up at me.

  “You said Caroline Cross? That’s your name, isn’t it?” When I didn’t answer, his mouth spread into a grin. “Excuse me, Detective, but I think maybe you’re in over your head.”

  I got up very fast. If the table hadn’t been bolted to the floor, I might have pinned Nicholson to the far wall with it.

  But Sampson got to him first. He shot around the table and pulled the chair right out from under him. Nicholson flopped onto the floor like a caught fish.

  He started to scream. “My leg! My goddamn leg! You bastards! I’ll sue you both!”

  Sampson didn’t seem to hear. “You know Virginia’s a death penalty state, right?”

  “What is this, Abu fucking Ghraib? Get the hell away from me!” Nicholson gritted his teeth and pounded the floor. “I didn’t kill anyone!”

  “But you know who did,” I shouted back.

  “If I had anything to trade, don’t you think I’d use it? Help me up, you stupid assholes! Help me up, here. Hey! Hey!”

  We walked out instead. And while we were at it, we took the chairs with us.

  Chapter 65

  FOUR HOURS LATER, in the name of “coming clean” and telling us what he knew, and most of all, getting the best deal he possibly could, Nicholson offered up access to a safe-deposit box in DC. He said it contained evidence that could help us. I had doubts, but decided to take my progress with him incrementally.

  It took some scrambling, but by the next morning Sampson and I were outside the Exeter Bank on Connecticut with fully executed paperwork, a key from Nicholson’s desk, and two empty briefcases in case there really was evidence to retrieve.

  This place was no ordinary savings and loan, starting with the fact that we had to be buzzed in from the street. The lobby had a do-not-touch kind of feel to it—not a pamphlet or a deposit slip in sight.

  From the reception desk, we were directed up to a row of glass-walled offices on the mezzanine. A woman inside one of them put down her phone and turned to look at us as we started up the stairs.

  Sampson smiled and waved at her. “Feels like a damn James Bond movie,” he said through his teeth. “Come in, Dr. Cross. We’ve been expecting you.”

  The branch manager, Christine Currie, was indeed expecting us. Her brief smile and handshake were about as warm as yesterday’s oatmeal.

  “This is all a bit irregular for us,” she said. Her accent was stuffy and British, and more upper-crust than Nicholson’s. “I do hope it can be done quietly? Can it be, Detectives?”

  “Of course,” I told her. I think we both wanted the same thing—for Sampson and me to be back on the street as soon as possible.

  Once Ms. Currie had satisfied herself with our paperwork and compared Nicholson’s signature in half a dozen places, she led us out to an elevator at the back of the mezzanine. We got on and started down, a very rapid descent.

  “You guys do free checking?” Sampson asked. I just stared straight ahead, didn’t say a word. Stuffy environments sometimes set John off. Stuffy people too. But most of all, bad people, criminals, and anybody who aids and abets.

  We came out into a small anteroom. There was an armed guard by the only other door, and a suit-and-tie employee at an oversize desk. Ms. Currie logged us in herself, then took us straight through to the safe-deposit room.

  Nicholson’s box, number 1665, was one of the larger ones at the back.

  After we’d both keyed the flap door, Ms. Currie pulled out a long rectangular drawer, then carried it to one of the viewing rooms off an adjacent hallway.

  “I’ll just be outside, whenever you’re ready,” she said in a way that sounded a lot like Don’t take too long with this.

  We didn’t. Inside the box, we found three dozen disks, each one in its own plastic sleeve and dated by hand in black marker. There were also two leather binders filled with handwritten pages of notes, lists, addresses, and ledgers.

  A few minutes later, we left with all of it in our briefcases.

  “God bless Tony Nicholson,” I said to the unflappable Ms. Currie.

  Chapter 66

  FOR THE REST of the afternoon, Sampson and I holed up in my office with a pair of laptops. We stayed busy watching and cataloging the extracurricular sex lives of the rich and mostly famous. It was surprisingly repetitive stuff, especially given everything that Tony Nichol
son was set up to provide at the club.

  The roster of power players, on the other hand, was one big holy shit after another. At least half the faces were recognizable, the kind of people you’d see at a presidential inauguration. In the front row.

  The clients weren’t just men either. Women were outnumbered about twenty to one, but they were there, including a former US ambassador to the United Nations.

  I had to keep reminding myself that every one of these people was—at least technically—a murder suspect.

  We set up a log, using the date stamps embedded on each recording. For every clip, we wrote down the name of the clients we recognized and flagged the ones we didn’t. I also made a note of where each “scene” took place at the club.

  My primary interest was the apartment over the carriage barn, which I’d come to think of as a kind of ground zero for this whole nasty murder puzzle.

  And that’s where we started to pick up some legitimate momentum. Right around the time I thought my eyes were going to burn out of my head, I started to notice an interesting pattern in the tapes.

  “John, let me see what you’ve got so far. I want to check something.”

  All of our notes were handwritten at this point, so I laid the pages out side by side and started scanning.

  “Here… here… here…”

  Every time I saw someone had used the apartment, I circled the date in red pen, ticking off entries as I went. Then I went back over everything I’d circled.

  “See this? They were using the studio in the back pretty regularly for a while, and then, about six months ago, it just stops cold. No more parties back there.”