I, Alex Cross Read online

  “The car’s been towed to our lot up at division headquarters on Route One,” Fellows told us. “Otherwise, everything’s here. The remains are downstairs in the morgue. All the obvious evidentiary material is in the lab on this level.”

  There was that terrible word again. Remains.

  “What did you bag?” Bree asked him.

  “Troopers found some women’s clothing and a small black purse wrapped in a mover’s blanket in the trunk. Here. I pulled this to show you.”

  He handed me a Rhode Island driver’s license in a plastic sleeve. The only thing I recognized at first was Caroline’s name. The girl in the photo looked quite beautiful to me, like a dancer, with her hair pulled back from her face and a high forehead. And the big eyes—I remembered those, too.

  Eyes as big as the sky. That’s what my older brother Blake had always said. I could see him now, rocking her on the old porch glider on Fifth Street and laughing every time she blinked up at him. He was in love with that baby girl. We all were. Sweet Caroline.

  Now both of them were gone. My brother to drugs. And Caroline? What had happened to her?

  I handed the driver’s license back to Detective Fellows and asked him to point us toward the investigating ME’s office. If I was going to get through this at all, I had to keep moving.

  The medical examiner, Dr. Amy Carbondale, met us downstairs. When we shook hands, hers was still a little cool from the latex gloves she’d been wearing. She seemed awfully young for this kind of work, maybe early thirties, and a little unsure of what to do with me, what to say.

  “Dr. Cross, I’ve followed your work. I’m very, very sorry for your loss,” she said in a near whisper that carried sympathy and respect.

  “If you could just give me the facts of the case, I’d appreciate it,” I told her.

  She adjusted her glasses, silver wire rims, working up to it. “Based on the samples I took, there was apparently a ninety-six percent morselization of the body. A few digits did survive, and we were able to get a print match to the name on the license that was found.”

  “Excuse me—morselization?” I’d never heard the word before in my life.

  To her credit, Dr. Carbondale looked me right in the eye. “There’s every reason to believe a grinder of some sort was used—likely a wood chipper.”

  Her words took my breath away. I felt them in my chest. A wood chipper? Then I was thinking: Why keep her clothes and driver’s license? As proof of Caroline’s identity? A souvenir for the killer?

  Dr. Carbondale was still talking. “I’ll do a full tox screen, run a DNA profile, and of course we’ll sieve for bullet fragments or other metals, but actual cause of death is going to be hard to prove here, if not impossible.”

  “Where is she?” I asked, just trying to focus. Where were Caroline’s remains?

  “Dr. Cross, are you sure right now is the time—”

  “He’s sure,” Bree said. She knew what I needed, and she gestured toward the lab. “Let’s get on with it. Please, Doctor. We’re all professionals here.”

  We followed Dr. Carbondale through two sets of swinging doors into an examination room that resembled a bunker. It had a gray concrete floor and a high tiled ceiling, mounted with cameras and umbrella lights. There were the usual sinks and stainless steel everywhere, and a single white body bag on one of the narrow silver tables.

  Right away, I could see something was very strange. Wrong. Both.

  The body bag bulged in the middle and lay flat against the table at the ends. I was dreading this in a way I couldn’t have imagined beforehand.

  The remains.

  Dr. Carbondale stood across from us and pulled back the zipper. “The heat sealing is ours,” she said. “I closed it back up after my initial exam earlier.”

  Inside the body bag there was a second bag. This one looked like some kind of industrial plastic. It was a frosted white translucent material, just clear enough to show the color of meat and blood and bone inside.

  I felt like my mind shut down for a few seconds, which was as long as I could deny what I was seeing. It was a dead person in that bag but not a body.

  Caroline but not Caroline.

  Chapter 4

  THE DRIVE BACK to Washington was like a bad dream that might never end. When Bree and I finally got home, the house was starkly quiet and still. I thought about waking Nana, but the fact that she didn’t get up on her own told me she was out cold and needed the rest. All of this bad news could wait until later in the morning.

  My birthday cake sat untouched in the refrigerator, and someone had left the American Airlines folio on the counter. I glanced at it long enough to see two tickets for Saint John, an island in the Caribbean I’d always wanted to visit. It didn’t matter; all of that was on hold now. Everything was. I felt as though I was moving in slow motion; certain details had an eerie clarity.

  “You have got to go to bed.” Bree took me by the hand and led me out of the kitchen. “If for no other reason than so you can think clearly about this tomorrow.”

  “You mean today,” I said.

  “I mean tomorrow. After you rest.”

  I noticed she hadn’t said sleep. We dragged ourselves upstairs, took off our clothes, and fell into bed. Bree held my hand and wouldn’t let go.

  An hour or so later, I was still staring at the ceiling, hung up on the question that had been dogging me ever since we left Richmond: Why?

  Why had this happened? Why to Caroline?

  Why a goddamn wood chipper? Why remains instead of a body?

  As a detective, I should have been thinking about the physical evidence and where it could lead me, but I didn’t exactly feel like a detective, lying there in the dark. I felt like an uncle, and a brother.

  In a way, we’d lost Caroline once before. After Blake died, her mother didn’t want anything more to do with the family. She’d moved away without so much as a parting word. Phone numbers were changed. Birthday presents were returned. At the time, it seemed like the saddest possible thing, but since then, I’d learned—over and over—what a staggering capacity the world has for misery and self-inflicted wounds.

  Somewhere around four thirty, I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and sat up. My heart and mind were not to be eased.

  Bree’s voice stopped me. “Where are you going? It’s still night.”

  “I don’t know, Bree,” I said. “Maybe the office. Try and get something done. You should go back to sleep.”

  “I haven’t been asleep.” She sat up behind me and put her arms around my shoulders. “You’re not alone on this. Whatever’s happening to you is happening to me.”

  I let my head hang and just listened to her soothing voice. She was right—we were in this together. It had been like that ever since we’d met, and that was a good thing.

  “I’m going to do anything it takes for you and for this whole family to get through this,” she said. “And tomorrow, you and I are going to go out there and we’re going to start to find out who did this terrible thing. You hear me?”

  For the first time since Davies’s phone call, I felt a warm spot in my chest—nothing like happiness or even relief, but gratitude, anyway. Something to be glad for. I’d lived most of my life without Bree, and now I couldn’t imagine how.

  “How did I find you?” I asked her. “How did I get so lucky?”

  “It’s not luck.” She held on to me even tighter. “It’s love, Alex.”

  Chapter 5

  IT SEEMED BOTH appropriate and ironic to Gabriel Reese that this odd, almost unprecedented middle-of-the-night meeting take place in a building originally built for the State, Navy, and War Departments. Reese lived by a deep sense of the historic in everything he did. Washington, you could say, was in his blood, in his family’s blood for three generations.

  The vice president himself had called Reese, sounding more than a little tense, and Walter Tillman had run two Fortune 100 companies, so he knew a thing or two about pressure. He hadn’t give
n details, just told Reese to be at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, now. Technically, this was the VP’s ceremonial office, the same one where veeps from Johnson through Cheney had welcomed leaders from every quadrant of the globe.

  More apt and to the point, it was away from the West Wing and whatever eyes and ears this secret meeting was clearly designed to avoid.

  The doors to the inner office were closed when Reese got there. Dan Cormorant, head of the White House’s Secret Service detail, was stationed outside with two other agents farther down the hall in either direction.

  Reese let himself in. Cormorant followed and closed the heavy wood doors behind them.

  “Sir?” said Reese.

  Vice President Tillman stood with his back to them at the far end of the room. A row of windows reflected the glow of half-lit globes on an elaborate gasolier overhead, a reproduction. Several glass-encased ship models gave a more specific reference to the building’s history. This office had been General Pershing’s during World War I.

  Tillman turned and spoke. “We’ve got a situation, Gabe. Come and sit down. This is not good. Hard to imagine how it could be much worse.”

  Chapter 6

  AGENT CORMORANT WALKED forward and took a standing position next to the vice president. It was an odd move, and Reese’s gut tightened another notch. He was chief of staff—there was very little that the Secret Service should know about ahead of him. But they clearly did in this case. What in the name of God had happened? To whom had it happened?

  The vice president nodded for Cormorant to go ahead and speak.

  “Thank you, sir. Gabe, keeping what I’m about to tell you to yourself probably constitutes a felony. You need to know that before I—”

  “Just spit it out, Dan.”

  Gabe Reese liked Cormorant well enough, just not the way he pushed the bounds of his position. Tillman had brought both of them along, all the way up from the old days of Philadelphia politics, so there was some leeway to be expected here. It was just that Cormorant always seemed to make a little more of it than Reese thought he should. Then again, Cormorant probably thought Reese lived with a stick up his ass.

  “Have you ever heard the name Zeus mentioned in any work-related context?” the agent asked. “Zeus, as in the Greek god.”

  Reese thought for a moment. Secret Service had revolving code names for all protectees, but that certainly wasn’t a familiar one, and, of course, it would have to be a higher-up. He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Should I have?”

  Cormorant didn’t answer the question, merely continued. “Over the past six months, there have been a series of missing-persons cases all over the mid-Atlantic region. Mostly women, but a few men too, and all of them in a certain profession, if you follow me, which I’m sure you do. So far, nothing’s connected them.”

  “Until now,” Reese inferred aloud. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Our intel division has three separate communications intercepts linking this tag, Zeus, to three separate cases. Last night, it came up again, but on a known homicide this time.” He paused for emphasis. “All of this is classified, of course.”

  Reese felt his patience slipping fast. “What does this have to do with the vice president? Or the president—since you’ve called me in? I’m not even sure we should be having this conversation.”

  Tillman spoke up then, cutting through the bullshit as usual. “This Zeus, whoever it is, has some kind of connection to the White House, Gabe.”

  “What?” Suddenly Reese was up and out of his chair. “What kind of connection? What are you saying—exactly? What the hell is going on here?”

  “We don’t know,” Cormorant said. “That’s the first part of the fucking problem. The second is shielding the administration from whatever this is going to be.”

  “Your job is covering the president and vice president, not the entire administration,” Reese shot back, his voice rising.

  Cormorant stood firm, both arms folded across his chest. “My job is to investigate and prevent any potential threat—”

  “Both of you, please shut it!” Tillman’s voice rose to a shout. “We’re all together on this or the meeting is terminated right now. You got that? Both of you?”

  They answered in unison. “Yes, sir.”

  “Dan, I already know what you think. Gabe, I want your honest opinion. I’m not at all sure we should keep this quiet. It could very easily come back to bite us, and we’re not talking about censure or a slap on the wrist here. Not with this Congress. Not with the press either. And surely not if this actually involves murder.”

  Murder? Dear God, Reese thought.

  He ran a hand through his hair, which had been silver since his midtwenties. “Sir, I’m not sure that an off-the-cuff answer to a question like this is in your best interests, or the president’s. Is this a rumor? Are there hard facts to substantiate it? What facts? Does the president know yet?”

  “The problem is that we know very little at this juncture. Goddamnit, Gabe, what does your gut tell you? I know you have an opinion. And no, the president doesn’t know. We know.”

  Tillman was big on gut, and he was right; Reese did already have an opinion.

  “Going public is a bell that can’t be unrung. We should find out what we can, within a very limited time frame. Say two or three days. Or until you specify otherwise, sir,” he added for Agent Cormorant’s benefit. “And we’ll need an exit strategy. Something to distance ourselves when and if any story comes out before we want it to.”

  “I agree, sir,” Cormorant put in. “We’re way too much in the dark right now, and that is unacceptable.”

  Tillman took a deep breath that Reese read as both resignation and assent. “I want you two working together on this. No phone calls, though, and for God’s sake, no e-mails. Dan, can you assure me that absolutely none of this goes through the Crisis Center?”

  “I can, sir. I’ll have to speak to a few of my men. But it can be contained. For a while.”

  “Gabe, you mentioned exit strategies?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Think dimensionally here, all possible scenarios. Anticipate everything. And I mean everything.”

  “I will, sir. My mind is going at about a million miles an hour right now.”

  “Good man. Any other questions?”

  Reese had already started scanning his memory for historical or legal precedent, more out of habit than anything. There were no questions of loyalty here. His only reservation was situational. Good God Almighty—if there was a serial killer connected to the White House? Any kind of killer?

  “Sir, if there’s word out on this, what’s to keep anyone else—God forbid a reporter—from picking up on it?”

  Cormorant looked offended, but he let the vice president answer.

  “It’s the Secret Service, Gabe. We’re not talking about an open-source intelligence here.” Cormorant stood down and Reese tensed.

  “But that’s not the kind of insurance I’m going to depend on either. I want this done fast, gentlemen. Fast and clean and thorough. We need some real facts. And clarity. We need to find out who the hell Zeus is and what he’s done, and then we have to deal with it like it never happened.”

  Chapter 7

  THE PUNCHES KEPT coming, hard ones. Despite the Rhode Island driver’s license, Caroline had been living in Washington for the last six months, but she’d never tried to make contact with me. She had an English-style basement apartment on C near Seward Square—less than a mile from our house on Fifth Street. I’d jogged by her building dozens of times.

  “She had nice taste,” Bree said, looking around the small but stylish living room.

  The furniture and decor had an Asian influence, lots of dark wood, bamboo, and healthy-looking plants. A lacquered table by the front door held three river stones, one of them carved with the word Serenity.

  I didn’t know if that felt more like a taunt or a reminder. Caroline’s apartment was nowhere that
I wanted to be right now. I wasn’t ready for it.

  “Let’s split up,” I told Bree. “We’ll cover the apartment faster that way.”

  I started with the bedroom, forcing myself to keep going. Who were you, Caroline? What happened to you? How could you die the way you did?

  One of the first things that caught my attention was a small brown leather date book on a desk near her bed. When I grabbed it, a couple of business cards fluttered out and onto the floor.

  I picked them up and saw they were both for Capitol Hill lobbyists—though I didn’t recognize the names, just the firms.

  Half of Caroline’s date book pages were blank; the others had strings of letters written on them, starting at the beginning of the year and going about two months ahead. Each string was ten letters, I noticed right off. The most recent, from almost two weeks before Caroline had died, was SODBBLZHII. With ten letters.

  The first thing I thought of was phone numbers, presumably coded or scrambled for privacy.

  And if I asked myself why at that point, it was only because I was putting off an inevitable conclusion. By the time I’d gone through the big rosewood dresser in her walk-in closet, there was little doubt left about how my niece had been affording this beautiful apartment and everything in it.

  The top drawers were filled with every kind of lingerie I could imagine, and I have a good imagination. There was the more expected lacy and satin stuff, but also leather, with and without studs, latex, rubber—all of it neatly folded and arranged. Probably the way her mother had taught her to organize her clothing as a kid.

  The bottom drawers held a collection of restraints, insertive objects, toys, and contraptions, some of which I could only guess about and shake my head over.

  Separately, everything I’d found was no more than circumstantial. All together, it got me very depressed, very quickly.