Cross My Heart ac-21 Read online

  “Dining room bug!” Sunday said.

  Acadia spun around, picked up the laptop, and turned up the volume.

  At first they heard nothing but static, and then Cross’s voice became audible: “Anything?”

  “I don’t know,” Bree said. “There are a few marks in the dust out in the addition that could be footprints. But nothing new.”

  “I’ll go up and sleep with him,” Cross replied. “But I think we should be changing the rules about him watching so many zombie shows.”

  “Agreed,” said Bree. “A rationing of zombie shows.”

  Footsteps. The lights began to go out. Sunday collapsed against the far wall of the van, laughed, and said, “That’s how a perfect criminal does things.”

  Acadia began to laugh, too, and crawled over to him hungrily.

  CHAPTER 59

  I felt someone shaking my shoulder, startled awake, and found my younger son’s earnest face about seven inches from my own.

  “I know there was a zombie, Dad,” he said in a forceful whisper. “When I went in to take a pee, he was there, and when I came out he was gone.”

  Sighing, I glanced at the clock: 7:30 a.m. Bree shifted in bed next to me, still fast asleep. Gesturing out the bedroom door with my finger, I slid out from under the sheets, grabbed my robe off the hook, and went out after Ali.

  As soon as I shut the door, Ali insisted in a whisper, “He was right where you were standing. It wasn’t a dream or a nightmare like you said.”

  I glanced down at the carpet where it met the staircase and saw bits of sawdust. We had all vowed to be careful to remove our shoes inside the house during the construction, but there was sawdust here and there all over the house. Some could easily have come in on someone’s pant legs, my pant legs.

  Downstairs I could hear the rumor of Nana Mama talking to Jannie, but I made out nothing distinct other than my daughter’s using the phrase “never home.” Noticing a bit more sawdust here, a bit more sawdust there, I went down the stairs.

  When I reached the lower landing, Ali was right behind me and said in a loud voice, “Dad, why don’t you believe me?”

  Irritated by lack of sleep, I glared at him and said, “Keep it down. Bree is trying to sleep. And why don’t I believe you? Because you say you saw him when you were half asleep, and when you came out later, more awake, he was gone. Doesn’t that sound wrong to you?”

  “No, that’s one of the reasons I know it was a zombie.”

  A headache began to throb. Confused by this seven-year-old logic, I said, “What was the other reason?”

  “I smelled him,” he said earnestly.

  Rubbing at my temple, too tired to be having this conversation, I said, “So you smelled something dead in the house? Don’t you think I would have smelled something like that? Or Bree?”

  He appeared puzzled, and I took that as a chance to give him a wink and head toward the dining room.

  “No, he didn’t smell like something dead,” Ali called after me. “But it wasn’t a smell we have here in the house. It was like—”

  “Quit while you’re ahead, son,” I said, and turned into the dining room to find Nana Mama pouring coffee from an old metal percolator and Jannie eating Raisin Bran with a sullen expression.

  “You look happy this morning,” I said to her as I sat at the table and my grandmother handed me the cup of coffee.

  “What do you care?” Jannie asked, not meeting my eyes.

  “Okay?” I said. “What’s up?”

  Jannie said nothing, just fumed.

  “She’s upset and she has a right to be,” Nana Mama announced.

  “Over?”

  “Jannie made the varsity track team at Benjamin Banneker yesterday, the youngest in the school to do it, the only freshman, and the coach thinks she has a great future in the sport. She tried to wait up to tell you, but it was after midnight and you hadn’t come home.”

  Once again I was reminded how much I was missing in the day-to-day life of my children, something I’d vowed to end too many times to count. Too many times I’d used the excuse of having to work, but this wasn’t one of them.

  “I was with a guy who had a heart attack,” I said. “I had to get him to a hospital. That’s why I wasn’t home until after midnight.”

  My daughter was unmoved. In fact, my answer seemed to make her even angrier. At last she turned to look at me with tears in her eyes and said, “Did you ever notice that there’s always someone who needs you more than we do, Dad?”

  My mouth hung open, and then I bowed my head. “You could have called or texted me—”

  Crying now, she got up and said, “I wanted to see your face, Dad. Can you understand that? Your face?”

  “Oh, God, Jannie, I—”

  She stormed away, pushed her brother aside where he was still standing in the door, and pounded up the stairs.

  “Dad!” Ali complained, rubbing his shoulder.

  I started to get up to follow Jannie but felt my grandmother’s hand on my elbow. “You leave her be a bit,” she said quietly. “Some of that’s just hormones.”

  That served to churn my emotions even more. I’d always thought of Jannie as my little girl, but here she was the youngest in the school to make varsity track and now she was surging with hormones?

  I put my head on my forearms, desperate to go back to sleep.

  “What’s hormones, Nana?” Ali said.

  A pause. “Ask your father.”

  My son replied, “He doesn’t want to talk to me because he doesn’t believe I smelled a zombie last night.”

  I raised my head, shot my grandmother an I-give-up look, and said, “I think I’ve given Jannie enough time.”

  Nana Mama looked ready to argue but then shrugged and looked at Ali. “Cereal or eggs, young man?”

  “Sunny side up,” Ali replied as I headed toward the hall, then called after me, “Dad, will you walk me to school?”

  I checked my watch, realizing that if the killer and kidnapper kept to their ritualistic timetable, in less than thirty-six hours Cam Nguyen and those kids were going to die.

  “Can’t, son,” I yelled. “I have a meeting.”

  “Dad, please,” he insisted.

  “Tomorrow,” I called back down the stairs. “No ifs, ands, or buts.”

  Outside Jannie’s bedroom door, I raised my hand to knock but then heard Bree’s voice already inside.

  “It’s my fault,” she was saying. “I could tell you wanted to tell your dad something, but I didn’t pick up on what a big thing you’d done.”

  There was a long pause before Jannie said in a quiet tone, “I should have told you, but I wanted it to be a surprise. You know?”

  “I do,” Bree said.

  I knocked and opened the door, finding my wife hugging my daughter.

  “Group hug for the greatest freshman quarter-mile runner in Washington, DC?” I asked, throwing my hands wide in a comical gesture.

  Jannie smiled and nodded. I went over and wrapped my arms around her, saying, “We are very, very proud of you.”

  She snuggled her head into my chest and said, “Promise me you’ll both come to my first meet? It’s Friday afternoon. They’re putting me in the invitational.”

  “Good Friday,” Bree said. “Of course we’ll be there.”

  I added, “Wild horses couldn’t drag us away.”

  CHAPTER 60

  Harold Barnes came out of recovery at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring around three that Tuesday afternoon. He’d had a stent placed earlier in the day, and the nurse I’d been in touch with said he’d probably be alert enough to work with a police artist that evening.

  I kept looking at the clock in our office, knowing that every second that passed gave us less of a chance of finding Cam Nguyen, Joss Branson, and Evan Lancaster alive. Part of me wanted to go straight out to Holy Cross, pour cold water on the attorney’s face, and get him to work. But the more rational side of me wanted Barnes to have the clearest possi
ble mind when he started describing what the man in the Redskins hoodie had looked like the night of the Superior Spa slayings. If Barnes was at all foggy, a defense attorney could shred him in court.

  Bree called around six and in a stressed voice said, “What do we have now? Twenty-four hours?”

  “Give or take,” I said.

  “The Lancasters and the Bransons keep calling. I have nothing to tell them, nothing I can tell them. That’s the worst part. Knowing what I know about the timetable and having to keep it from them.”

  I felt for her, I really did. I said, “Stay positive. I’m going to head out to Silver Spring in about an hour, watch Barnes work with the artist. I’ll call you the second we have something.”

  At a quarter to seven, I was gathering up my things to head home when Captain Quintus came rushing down the hall with that expression on his face.

  Sampson saw it, too, waved his mitt of a hand and said, “No. No more.”

  “Four known dead at a high-class brothel in Georgetown,” Quintus said. “They were all shot at close range sometime late this afternoon. This could be your guy.”

  “No way,” Sampson said.

  I shook my head, too. “Our guy targets sleazy massage parlors once every two years.”

  “Weren’t you the one who said he could be evolving?”

  Sampson drove us to Georgetown. Along the way I texted Bree to let her know about the shootings, and that it was going to be another late night.

  She called as we parked south of the scene off Wisconsin near Book Hill Park. Dusk was falling. Blue lights were flashing. A perimeter had already been set up. Luckily, the word had not yet spread to the media. There were only a couple of freelance television guys. But a crowd was forming.

  Sampson got out, headed toward the crime scene while I took the call.

  “Is this connected?” Bree asked.

  “Quintus thinks so,” I replied.

  “Should I come over?”

  “I’ll let you know once I’ve taken a look.”

  “You sound beat.”

  “You know that candle that burns at both ends? I’m feeling like they’re almost one flame right about now.”

  “I know the feeling,” she said. “But I promised myself I’d take a look for Ava before heading home.”

  “Maybe that girl was right and Ava’s long gone for the Left Coast.”

  “Well, I’m going to give it a try, anyway.”

  “Another reason I love you,” I said, and hung up.

  I skirted the growing mob of looky-lous and reporters by walking up the west side of the street until I reached the tape.

  Showing the patrolwoman on duty my badge, I ducked under and started toward the apartment building. As I did, I happened to look back into the crowd, catching a glimpse of a man I almost recognized in a Georgetown sweatshirt. I slowed, trying to get a better look.

  “Alex?”

  I shot my attention to Sampson. The big man stood in the open doorway with that grim expression he gets when something has rocked his world.

  “Bad?” I asked, moving toward him.

  “Worse,” Sampson replied. “And you can forget that original body count.”

  CHAPTER 61

  Some crime scenes become etched in your mind, unerasable. I knew from the second I walked in that this was one of them. The smell hit you before the scene did, not citrus cleaner but Pine-Sol.

  You could see from the front door down a hall past two closed doors on your left and the gourmet kitchen on your right into a luxuriously appointed main room. Blood was visible, streaked and spattered across the butter-colored carpet and up the sides of the mouse-gray drapes, couches, and chairs.

  The room held four bodies. A sharply dressed man in his early twenties had been shot in the right eye at close range. He lay sprawled closest to the entry. The others were women, all beautiful, all in their late twenties, early thirties, all in lingerie and negligees. Two of them had died on the couch, shot through their heads and chests. The third was belly-down near a hallway. She’d been shot through the back of her neck. Amber splotches of Pine-Sol showed in and around the bodies. And there were 9mm casings scattered, too, ten of them by my count.

  “There’s three more victims down the hall in the bedrooms,” Sampson said. “Two men, one woman.”

  Before going back there, I spoke with a shaken Officer Andrea Sprouls, who’d been first on the scene. Sprouls said she’d responded to a noise complaint — loud music and people yelling — from the elderly woman who lived in the condo upstairs. When she arrived, the angry tenant buzzed her in. Sprouls had heard the throbbing hip-hop music immediately.

  Officer Sprouls had pounded on the door of the apartment, had gotten no answer, and had tried the handle. The door had been unlocked.

  “I called it in based on what I could see from the entryway,” said Sprouls. “Which was more than enough. I … I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “It’s hard every time,” I said sympathetically. “Touch anything?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Besides the doorknob, I used my handkerchief to unplug the stereo and upstairs, to check the bedrooms. Then I backed out and waited.”

  “You talk to the old woman?” Sampson asked.

  The officer nodded. “Mrs. Fields. She didn’t think anybody lived here full-time because they were always so quiet. Which made the loud music strange.”

  “Good job,” I said. “Officer, could you wait for the crime unit and show them everything you touched, including the outer door? They’ll need your boots, too.”

  She nodded, looked relieved, and left. I followed Sampson down the hall toward the bedrooms. There were three bedrooms, all well appointed. The first one was empty. The second held two victims, a man and a woman, both naked. He lay on his side with a single wound to the side of his head, and she appeared to have tried to scramble forward, only to die from a bullet to the back of the skull. Their blood soaked the silk sheets, and the wooden floor was sticky with drying Pine-Sol.

  The third bedroom held a single male corpse, crumpled on his side below a wide-open window. This victim’s feet were bare, as was his chest. He wore pants, but the zipper was down and the belt unbuckled. The killer had shot him three times, twice in the back, once through the throat.

  A man’s shirt, tie, and jacket hung from a stand, shoes and socks below. A black lace negligee was draped over a rocking chair in the near right corner. A shred of black lace about the size of a thumbnail hung from the bottom of the raised window.

  “Tell me what happened, Alex,” Sampson said.

  I paused, reflecting on what I’d observed so far, then said, “He enters through the front door, so he’s expected, which means he contacted someone, a booker, maybe the dead guy in the main room, or one of the women out there.”

  My partner nodded.

  “So he comes armed, but not in a way that triggers alarm in whoever lets him in,” I continued. “A lineup of the available women, in this case three, is called. They file into the outer room. The killer stands near the stereo. He twists up the volume. The guy maybe tells him to turn it down. The killer shoots him at close range, then the two women nearest to him. He has to be quick and shoot across the room to get the third woman before she reaches the hallway.”

  Sampson thought about that. “Why turn up the stereo?” he asked. “He probably had a suppressor.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe he wanted to drown out any screams. In any case, given how the couple in the other room died, we can assume that all they heard was loud music until the killer came in. He shoots that john first, then the girl.”

  Sampson gestured at the body in front of us. “And this?”

  I chewed my lip a second, letting scenarios play out. “He hears something, or maybe the lady with him hears something, a scream. Whatever. They’re trying to get out through the window. Though she snags and tears her nightgown, she makes it. He doesn’t.”

  “I could see that,” Sampson said. “But wh
at if he comes in, shoots the guy trying to get out the window, and takes her like Cam Nguyen?”

  “One or the other,” I said. “We’ll know more once Forensics gets in here.”

  “I’ll start figuring out who’s who.”

  “I’ll be along,” I said, and then stepped over the victim, stuck my head out the open window, and used my flashlight to look around.

  There was a small backyard that featured a brick terrace, raised flower beds, brick walls about five feet high, and a few pieces of wrought-iron furniture. A low set of stairs climbed to French doors far to my right, probably behind those closed drapes in the main room.

  The overgrown beds, the moldering leaves, dead branches on the brick, and an old Styrofoam coffee cup told me that those French doors and this terrace had rarely been used of late. I was about to draw my head back in when my flashlight beam caught something I’d missed on the first pass.

  Below and to my left there was a cement stairwell littered with broken beer bottles. I leaned out farther, angled the flashlight, and saw liquid in the curve of some of the shards.

  That didn’t make sense. Except for the matted leaves, there didn’t appear to be anything wet in the backyard, and it hadn’t rained in days. I wriggled out just a little farther and saw a steel door at the bottom of the stairs. A basement?

  Wanting to get a closer look at those broken bottles and that liquid, I retreated, stepped back across the victim, and went out to the main room, where crime scene techs were beginning to photograph and otherwise document the scene. Sampson was in the kitchen, going through purses and wallets.

  Rather than interrupt him, I went over to the drapes, drew them back, found the handles to the French doors. They were locked with a Master Lock that required a key, and I had no key.