Target: Alex Cross Read online

It was four fifteen in the morning. He had half an hour at most.

  Lawlor shut the door quietly behind him. He stood a moment, listening intently. Hearing nothing to disturb him, he brushed off snow while waiting for his eyes to adjust. Then he put blue surgical booties over his boots and walked down a hallway to the kitchen.

  He pushed aside a chair, which made a squeaking noise on the tile floor. It didn’t matter. There was no one home. The owners spent their winters in Palm Beach.

  Lawlor went to a door on the other side of the kitchen, opened it, and stepped down onto a set of steep wooden stairs. Shutting the door left him in inky darkness. He closed his eyes and flipped on the light.

  After waiting again for his vision to adjust, Lawlor climbed down the stairs into a small, musty basement piled with boxes and old furniture. He ignored all of it and went to a workbench with tools hanging from a pegboard on the wall.

  He shrugged off the knapsack he carried, traded his leather gloves for latex ones, unzipped the bag, and retrieved four bubble-wrapped packages, which he laid on the bench.

  Lawlor cut off the bubble wrap and stowed the pieces in the pack before turning to admire the VooDoo Innovations Ultra Lite barreled action in 5.56x45mm NATO. A work of art, he thought.

  He fitted the barreled action to a five-ounce minimalist rifle stock by Ace Precision and then screwed a SureFire Genesis sound suppressor onto the threaded crown of the barrel. Picking up the Zeus 640 optical sight, Lawlor thought, A thing of beauty .

  He clipped the sight neatly into place. Overall, he was pleased with how the gun had turned out. He had ordered the components from U.S. internet wholesalers and had them shipped to the same nonexistent person at four separate UPS stores in and around the District of Columbia.

  Lawlor had arrived at Dulles International two evenings ago on a flight from Amsterdam using a fake British passport. He’d picked up the components at the UPS stores yesterday morning, relying on a fake Pennsylvania driver’s license he’d also bought online. He’d sighted in the gun yesterday afternoon in the woods of western Maryland. It was uncannily accurate.

  It’s the right tool, he told himself. The perfect one for this job.

  CHAPTER

  2

  LAWLOR PUT THE knapsack over his shoulder, took the gun up the basement stairs, and shut off the light before opening the door to the dark kitchen. He stepped out, pushed a button on the side of the sight, and raised the rifle.

  The Zeus 640 was a thermal unit, which meant it allowed the user to see the world as heat images. When Lawlor peered through the scope, the interior of the house looked like it had been cast in pale daylight. Except for the heat registers. They showed in much brighter white.

  The Zeus scope had been developed for hog hunters, and it had cost Lawlor more than eight thousand dollars. He thought it worth every penny, far superior to the kinds of rifle optics he’d been using just a few years ago.

  Lawlor kept the gun stock pressed snug to his shoulder, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and entered the master suite at the front of the house. He ignored the antique furnishings and crossed to the window.

  He lowered the rifle, opened the window sash, and looked outside. He saw the shadows of oak branches waving against the snowy background and the silhouette of a line of distinguished old townhomes across Thirty-Fifth Street.

  He raised the gun again, peered through the sight. The snow-covered street and brick sidewalks turned dull black.

  The heated town houses, however, were revealed in extraordinary detail, especially one to his right and down the street. A brick Georgian, it looked brilliant in the scope. The thermostat had to be turned up to seventy-five in there. Maybe eighty.

  Lawlor swung the gun toward the front door of the hot house and studied the area, figuring he’d have four seconds, maybe less, when it counted. The brief time frame didn’t faze him. He was good at his trade, used to dealing with short windows of opportunity.

  Lawlor fished in his inner coat pocket and drew out a microchip that he fitted into a slot in the scope in order to record his actions for posterity. Then he relaxed and waited.

  Ten minutes later, a light went on in the house to his far diagonal right, the hot one. He checked his watch. It was 4:30 a.m. Right on schedule. Disciplined.

  Fifteen minutes after that, a black Suburban rolled up the street. Also right on time.

  The wind was blowing stiffly down Thirty-Fifth from north to south. He would have to account for slight bullet drift.

  The Suburban pulled over by the curb across from the hot house. Lawlor flipped the safety off and settled in, aiming at the front door and the steps down to the sidewalk.

  The passenger, a large male wearing dark winter clothes, got out of the Suburban, ran across the street and sidewalk, climbed the steps, and rang the bell. The door opened, revealing a woman in a long overcoat.

  Lawlor couldn’t make out her features or determine her age through the thermal scope, and he didn’t want to. He had seen several recent pictures of her, but through the Zeus 640, she was a pale white creature in a cold dark world, and he rather liked it that way.

  Keeps things impersonal, like a video game, he thought, moving the crosshairs as the woman raised her hood and stepped out into the storm. He aimed at the right edge of the hood to account for drift. She followed the big guy, hurrying down the stairs, across the sidewalk, and into the street, eager to be out of the snow and get to her early yoga class.

  Too bad, he thought as he pulled the trigger. I heard yoga’s good for you.

  The rifle made a soft thudding noise. The woman’s head jerked and she crumpled on the street behind her bodyguard. Lawlor’s instinct was to flee, but he stayed on task, moved the crosshairs to her chest, and shot her again.

  He pushed down the sash and never looked back. After finding his spent brass, he rapidly disassembled the gun and placed three of the components back in the knapsack. He kept the thermal scope and used it so he could move fast back through the house.

  After Lawlor slipped out the rear gate, he turned off the scope and pocketed it. Hearing the wailing of sirens already, he ducked his head and set off into the storm.

  Too bad, he thought again. Husband. Five children. Six grandkids. A real shame.

  CHAPTER

  3

  BREE AND I arrived in Georgetown shortly after dawn that first day of February. It was snowing at a steady pace with five inches on the ground already.

  DC Metro patrol cars had blocked both ends of the street on Thirty-Fifth. We showed our IDs to the officer.

  He said, “There’s U.S. Capitol Police, FBI, and Secret Service already up there.”

  “I’d imagine so,” Bree said, and we went through the barrier and up the street, noticing many anxious residents looking out their windows.

  FBI criminologists were setting up a tent around the victim and the crime scene. Yellow tape had been strung from both sides of the town house, across the street, and around the Suburban, where a big man in a black parka was engaged in a shouting match with a smaller man in an overcoat and ski cap.

  “This is our case,” the big man said. “She died on my goddamned watch.”

  “U.S. Capitol Police will be part of the investigation,” the smaller man barked. “But you will not, Lieutenant Lee. You are compromised, and you will be treated as such.”

  “Compromised?” the big guy said, and for a second I thought he was going to deck the smaller man.

  Then FBI special agent Ned Mahoney appeared from behind the tent.

  “That’s enough,” Mahoney said. “Agent Reamer, please do not assume in any way that you are in charge of this investigation. The FBI has complete jurisdiction.”

  “Says who?” Agent Reamer said.

  “President Hobbs,” Mahoney said. “Evidently, your new boss doesn’t have much faith in the Secret Service these days. He talked with the director, and the director talked to me. And here we are.”

  Agent Reamer looked furious but ma
naged to keep his voice somewhat under control as he said, “The Secret Service will not be cut out of this.”

  “The Secret Service will not be cut out, but it will do what it is told to do,” Mahoney said, and then he saw us. “Alex, Chief Stone. I want you both part of this.”

  Quick introductions were made. U.S. Secret Service special agent Lance Reamer had worked Treasury investigations for the past ten years. The big guy was U.S. Capitol Police lieutenant Sheldon Lee. Lieutenant Lee had served on the victim’s security team for six years.

  With the snow and the wind, Lee hadn’t heard the shots or the sound of sixty-nine-year-old U.S. senator Elizabeth “Betsy” Walker falling to the ground behind him.

  “I ran ahead and opened the rear door of the Suburban like I always do,” Lee said. “I looked back and there she was. Lying in the snow, bleeding to death.”

  His voice choked. “My God, I had to go wake poor old Larry, her husband, to tell him. He’s in there calling his children and … who the hell would do this? And why? That woman was a great person, treated everyone just right.”

  That was true. The senator from California could be tough when she was fighting for a cause, and she had a first-rate mind, but she was one of those genial and compassionate women who had never met a stranger. Walker was also the second-most-senior member of the GOP in the Senate and a highly respected politician.

  “Can we see the scene?” I asked as the snow slowed to flurries.

  Agent Reamer said, “Why exactly are you here, Dr. Cross?”

  “Because I asked him to be here,” Mahoney growled. “Dr. Cross used to be with the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, and he has more than two decades of exceptional service as an investigator. He’s under contract to advise us on cases like these because the FBI thinks highly of him.”

  Bree nodded. “So does DC Metro.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  REAMER LOOKED LIKE he’d tasted something disagreeable and threw his hands up in disgust.

  Mahoney called by radio and was told we could look at the crime scene from the flaps of the tent. We went as a pack of five past Lieutenant Lee’s Suburban and around the other side of the shelter.

  Inside, a team of Quantico’s finest were working in baggy white jumpsuits pulled over their winter gear. Senator Walker lay twisted on her side in the snow. Her hood was half off her head, revealing a bullet hole beneath her right cheekbone.

  “What do you know, Sally?”

  Sally Burton, the chief FBI criminologist on the scene, stood up from beside the victim. “The snow’s making it tougher than tough, Ned, but so far, it looks like she was hit twice. The head shot killed her instantly. Shooter put a second round into her chest after she fell.”

  “Like someone filled with hate would,” Lieutenant Lee said. “A fanatic.”

  “Or a professional,” Agent Reamer said.

  “Or both,” I said. “Who had reason to hate her?”

  “Good question,” Mahoney said, and he looked back to Burton. “Got an angle for the shots yet?”

  The criminologist made a sour expression. “The snow and no witness to her falling make the first shot tough to call, but by the chest wound, I’m saying it’s roughly this angle,” she said, gesturing high into the corner of the tent.

  Mahoney thanked her, then turned to Lieutenant Lee. “You have good rapport with the senator’s husband?”

  “Excellent rapport, sir. Larry’s a sweet old guy, a real friend. Smart as they come too. He used to be a trial judge in San Francisco.”

  “Go inside and talk to him frankly. Find out who didn’t like or had a grudge against his wife for whatever reason. Names. Phone numbers if he’s got them.”

  “Wait,” Agent Reamer said. “Lieutenant Lee is compromised.”

  “He knows the family,” Mahoney said. “Better than any of us. That helps.”

  “But—”

  Mahoney hardened. “Do you honestly think Lieutenant Lee could be involved?”

  “Well, no, but it’s … it’s gotta be against protocol,” Reamer sputtered.

  “I don’t give a damn about protocol,” Mahoney said. “He’s in.”

  The lieutenant nodded. “I can also get you a log of threatening calls and letters. Even Betsy got them from time to time.”

  “Were they turned over to the FBI?” Mahoney asked.

  “A few. They’re in your files.”

  When Lee left, the Secret Service agent said, “Okay, then what am I doing?”

  “Take several of your men, go to Senator Walker’s offices, seal them, and then sit on them and her staff until we get there,” Mahoney said. “Dr. Cross, Chief Stone, and I are going to figure out where the hell those shots came from.”

  It didn’t take us long.

  We knocked on the doors to the two town houses across and down the street that seemed likely candidates and found the residents home and upset. One, a prominent patent attorney, said her next-door neighbors Jimmy and Renee Fairfax were at their winter home in Palm Beach and had been for more than two months.

  We called Mr. Fairfax’s Florida residence to get permission to enter his house but got no answer. But when we found snowed-over tracks coming out of the rear terrace and discovered the rear door unlocked and the alarm system bypassed, Mahoney felt he had more than enough just cause to enter.

  There was water in the hallway, probably melted snow, and smaller droplets crossing the floor to a door to the basement. There was no sign beyond that, certainly not of the footprints I’d expected to find, given that the shooter came in out of the weather.

  We looked out the front window and decided the shooter had to have been higher, upstairs. We found a clear line of sight in the master bedroom, some hundred yards down the street from the evidence tent in front of Senator Walker’s house.

  “He was right here,” I said, looking around. “Probably shot from his knees, using the windowsill as a rest.”

  “No brass,” Bree said. “The place is clean.”

  Mahoney nodded. “Either a fanatic or a professional.”

  “Or both,” I said.

  CHAPTER

  5

  I HAD TO leave at quarter to nine to make an appointment with a new patient, an attorney at the Justice Department. In addition to my law enforcement work, I have a PhD in clinical psychology and practice on a part-time basis out of an office in the basement of our house on Fifth Street in Southeast DC.

  In the northern United States or out west, six inches of snow is no big deal. But in the nation’s capital, it usually creates a state of emergency and near gridlock. I somehow managed to catch a cab, but I had to get out at the bottom of Capitol Hill and walk the rest of the way home.

  The storm was clearing but a raw wind bit at my ears as I hustled along and thought about the late Senator Walker. Given her committee assignments—chairman of Energy and Natural Resources, and prominent seats on Appropriations and Agriculture—I was leaning away from the idea that a fanatic professional was behind the assassination.

  As a matter of fact, I was tilting away from the idea of a fanatic at all. The entire thing felt surgical, or at least highly organized. Though I wasn’t completely dismissing the idea of a terrorist, I was thinking a pro was responsible.

  But why? Why a professional assassin? What had Senator Walker done to get gunned down in cold blood in front of her house? Who had she crossed or destroyed?

  Was the fact that she was shot outside her home meant as a statement, like a Mafia killing? Or was it merely a zone of opportunity?

  I decided it was the latter. Before I left the crime scene, Lieutenant Lee had told me that the senator attended a yoga class Monday through Thursday. Every morning. It helped her clear her mind, he said.

  It also helped her killer, I thought. The shooter knew about the pattern through personal observation or because he had been told about it.

  Mr. and Mrs. Fairfax had been down in Palm Beach for two months. Mahoney believed it was possibl
e the killer had been inside the house scouting Senator Walker multiple times and for extended periods. He had called for a second forensics team to comb the bedroom for DNA and microfibers, but I doubted they’d find much.

  Making repeated trips inside the Fairfaxes’ residence felt unprofessional to me. If I were a gun for hire, I’d want to spend as little time as possible in the kill zone. Whenever a human brushes up against something, he or she leaves tiny bits of skin and hairs that people like Sally Burton can gather and analyze. A trained assassin would know that.

  No, I thought as I turned down Fifth Street and saw people out shoveling their sidewalks. The killer went in there based on someone else’s intelligence, so maybe once or twice, no more than—

  “Dad!”

  I started, looked up, and saw a snowman in front of our house. Ali was beside it, excited and waving. I grinned. My youngest child had a real passion for life. Whatever he was into at the moment, he was fully there and usually having a heck of a good time.

  “Nice one,” I said.

  “I built it just since breakfast!”

  “No school?”

  “Snow day,” he said, beaming. “I get to play.”

  “Well, your dad gets to work. Have fun and don’t get wet. You’ll catch a cold.”

  “You sound like Nana.”

  “Maybe there’s hope for me,” I said. I rubbed the top of his wool cap and went around the side of the house in fresh untracked snow up to my ankles to steps that led down to the basement door.

  I used a key to open it and pushed the door in. Snow fell inside on the mat. So did a folded piece of paper.

  I picked it up, unfolded it.

  I turned it over. Nothing.

  Behind me, in a trembling voice, a woman said, “Dr. Cross?”

  I pivoted to find a very attractive woman in her thirties looking down at me through the open door. Wearing a knit cap and mittens and hugging herself in her baby-blue down coat, she had fresh tears on her cheeks. Her posture was hunched, which I read as more despondent than distressed.