Triple Cross Read online

  “Fired?” she said, shocked into a whisper. “Bill, you can’t—”

  “I just did,” he said coldly. “Get your things and clear out. I need new blood in here before everything around me dies.”

  Triple Cross

  Chapter

  1

  A wall of rhododendron bushes prevented anyone in the neighborhood from seeing the interior of the compound: a rambling white Cape with dark green shutters and a four-bay carriage house set on three landscaped acres.

  Though it was dark now, the killer the media had recently dubbed “the Family Man” knew everything beyond the rhododendrons was picture-perfect. The lawns were lush and cut so precisely, they looked like green jigsaw-puzzle pieces set amid flower gardens ablaze with spring glory and color.

  The sprinkler system goes on at four, Family Man thought, glancing at the phone. Two a.m. More than enough time.

  With latex-gloved hands, the killer started the book-size Ozonics ozone machine attached to a belt, tugged up the hood of the black hazmat suit, and donned a respirator mask and night-vision goggles. Family Man padded across one piece of jigsaw lawn to a walkway and the junction box of the alarm system.

  It was disabled in six minutes.

  Around the back, by the pool, the killer went to a bulkhead. It opened on well-oiled hinges.

  The Schlage dead bolt on the basement door was no match for the technician’s skills. It turned in under a minute.

  After two careful steps, then three, Family Man halted inside and listened a moment before peering around the basement. The floor was bare. The wall cubbies and shelves, however, were filled with artifacts of a suburban family, stacked and organized like a Martha Stewart dream.

  The killer started up the stairs, knowing that on the other side of the door lay a short hall and the kitchen. And a dog, an aging Labrador retriever named Mike.

  At the door, Family Man reached through a Velcro slit in the hazmat suit, took out a baggie containing a cheese-and-anchovy ball, opened the door, tossed in the bait, and closed the door with a loud click.

  The killer stood there, taking slow breaths with long pauses and listening to the sound of dog nails clicking on hardwood floors. The ozone machine purred, destroying all human odor.

  Mike snuffled at the door, clicked over, and slurped down the treat.

  Fifteen minutes later, Family Man eased open the door and stepped into the main house, hearing the loud ticking of the grandfather clock in the front hall and the snoring of the dog lying just a few feet away. Swinging the night-vision goggles around, the killer took in the particulars of the kitchen.

  Huge stainless-steel Coldspot fridge and freezer. Six-burner Aga stove. Double sink on the prep island. Copper pots hanging from the ceiling. Italian espresso machine.

  These details counted, didn’t they? Of course they did. They were the essence of it all.

  Satisfied that things were going according to plan, Family Man shrugged off a small pack, retrieved a pistol, and began the evening’s real work.

  Chapter

  2

  The pistol, a Glock, was chambered in .40 caliber and fitted with a sound suppressor. Family Man liked the balance it gave the weapon.

  The master suite, which lay beyond the kitchen and the great room, was so neat it looked like a crew of maids had just finished cleaning. The leather furniture was showroom new. The rows of books on the shelves appeared unread.

  It could be a stage set, the killer thought, easing open another door to reveal an anteroom and a huge walk-in closet.

  To the right of the anteroom lay the bathroom. Beyond a pocket door to the left, Family Man knew, Roger and Sue Carpenter were deep asleep, aided by the hissing of a white-noise app.

  The couple didn’t hear the pocket door sliding back or the Family Man slipping across the carpet to the right side of a four-poster bed. Mr. Carpenter, an attorney with boyish good looks, lay on his back with his forearm across his eyes, which made things easier.

  Once, long ago, the killer had heard a Navy SEAL commander describe the perfect up-close execution with the word canoe. It meant shooting someone high in the head so that the bullet left the shape of a canoe bottom as it passed through the top of the skull.

  Family Man canoed Carpenter through the forehead. His wife stirred at the thud of the silenced shot.

  By the time the killer got around the bed to a WASPish-looking blonde in her thirties, she was half awake, her eyes open but puzzled.

  “Roger?” she asked sleepily.

  “Shhh,” Family Man said and shot her from two feet away.

  She died instantly, but blood splashed off the headboard and spattered the upper chest and arms of the killer’s hazmat suit. A few drops hit the night-vision goggles.

  Family Man plucked a tissue from the box beside the dead housewife and dabbed at the goggles until the view was clear again. The tissue fell on the bloody pillow next to Mrs. Carpenter.

  The killer slid the pocket door back into place, walked through the great room and kitchen, stepped over the snoring Mike, and found the door to the mother-in-law apartment.

  Pearl Naylor, Mrs. Carpenter’s mother, was a light sleeper and spry for seventy-eight. She rolled in bed and almost got her bony finger on the light switch, which would have sent blinding light through the goggles and might have changed the course of the night.

  But before the old woman could flip the switch, Family Man shot her through the upper left side of her skull. She sagged off the bed, her legs caught in the sheets and blankets.

  A few moments later, the killer exited Mrs. Naylor’s apartment and paused a moment before climbing the stairs.

  Despite the Family Man’s training and experience, children were always the hardest.

  Chapter

  3

  My name is Alex Cross. I am an investigative consultant for the Washington, DC, Metro Police, where I was a homicide detective for many years, and for the FBI, where I was once a member of the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit, the team that hunts serial killers and other bringers of doom and mayhem.

  I felt like I was tracking one of those dark beings when I got out of my car in a swank neighborhood in Chevy Chase, Maryland, not far from the nation’s capital. Blue lights flashed on two state police cruisers blocking the road.

  John Sampson pulled in behind me in an unmarked squad car. A first-rate detective in Metro PD homicide, Sampson was also my oldest friend.

  “I thought this was over,” he said.

  “Dreams dashed,” I replied.

  An FBI forensics van arrived before we even got to the yellow tape and the cruisers. A hundred yards ahead, two more cruisers were parked, lights flashing, cutting off traffic from that direction. Beyond them, the first satellite-news van was pulling in.

  “And the games begin again,” Sampson said.

  “This is the sickest game I’ve ever heard of,” I said angrily, showing my identification to the troopers.

  Once we were beyond the police barrier, Sampson said, “We know numbers?”

  I shook my head. “The maid saw the grandmother and backed out.”

  A short man in his mid-forties with sandy hair and wearing a blue FBI windbreaker came down the driveway toward us.

  “You been inside?” Sampson asked.

  “Waiting for you,” said Ned Mahoney, FBI special agent in charge. “You’re the only ones who’ve been to all the earlier crime scenes, and I wanted your eyes on the place first. See if Family Man has finally made a mistake.”

  “Hope springs eternal,” I said. We walked up the driveway and saw a white Porsche Cayenne in one bay of the carriage house and a red Corvette in another.

  “Big money?” Sampson said.

  “The whole neighborhood is big money,” Mahoney said.

  “What’s the maid’s story?” I asked.

  Mahoney said she’d arrived at six a.m., her normal time, and came in through the kitchen door to find the family dog whining. After feeding the dog, she went into the mother-in-law’s apartment, also her routine.

  “The maid saw grandma and got so upset, she had chest pain and couldn’t breathe after she called 911,” Ned said. “She’s in the ER with a uniformed officer now.”

  We put on hazmat suits, blue booties, latex gloves, surgical masks, and hairnets so as not to contaminate the house with our own DNA.

  The assassin the media had dubbed “the Family Man” had attacked twice before in the DC area, and twice before, we and a great team of forensic investigators had scoured the crime scenes top to bottom and did not come up with a single strand of DNA that did not belong to the victims or their immediate families or friends.

  There had been no unidentified fingerprints either. And no footprints. No alarms triggered. No signs of tinkering at the locks. And the killer had left no witnesses and no suspicious footage of any kind on the security cameras in the surrounding areas.

  Mahoney adjusted his mask and said, “Let’s go catch the perfect killer.”

  “There’s no such thing,” I said.

  “I don’t know, Alex,” Sampson said. “He hasn’t thrown a ball off the plate yet.”

  Chapter

  4

  I had grown to hate entering the Family Man’s crime scenes.

  In my line of work, it was normal to come upon a murdered adult. It was all too common to encounter multiple victims. And while it was always shocking and disheartening to face slain children, it wasn’t unusual.

  But it was almost unheard of to find three and sometimes four generations of a single family murdered, one after another, in the same house over the course of the same night. So far, the killer had given no reason, left no note, offered no insight whatsoever into his mind.

  It enraged me and everyone else assigned to the case. Indeed, as we went into the house, I could see grim anger in the faces of every agent, detective, and forensics expert on hand.

  Who shoots old people and children like that? With no emotion? And why? Goddamn it, why?

  I had never seen anything like this case. The killings were all cold, technical, no signs of passion or obsession.

  The seven newest victims—Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter, Granny Pearl, twelve-year-old twins Alice and Mary, nine-year-old Nick, and five-year-old Alan—had all been executed the same way the others had: shot at close range through the upper part of the skull.

  Seeing the victims angered me even more, especially the kids, particularly the boys. Nick was a year younger than my son Ali, and Nick’s younger brother, Alan, had cerebral palsy. Mahoney and Sampson were equally shocked.

  “What kind of sick, unfeeling bastard executes a special-needs kid?” Ned said.

  “Or the grandmother of a special-needs kid?” Sampson said.

  Those questions spun in my mind as I tried to suppress my anger and see the crime scene on its own and in relation to the others.

  “A careful, sick, unfeeling bastard,” I replied. “I think he did it bottom to top—mom and dad first, grandma second, the four kids last.”

  “Makes sense,” Mahoney said. “Biggest threats first.”

  I nodded. “And he polices his brass as he goes.”

  Sampson said, “The more I think about the lack of DNA evidence in the other cases and probably here, the more I figure he’s got to be dressed like us.”

  “You mean in PPE?” I said.

  “It’s the only explanation I can come up with,” he said. “I mean, we’re seeing no signs of recent cleaning up here.”

  Mahoney said, “The maid says Mrs. Carpenter was a neat freak, so we might not know if he cleaned anything.”

  “PPE, I’m telling you,” Sampson said. “Gloves plus gown plus hairnet plus mask plus eye protection equals no DNA.”

  “I think we should operate on that assumption until proven otherwise,” I said. “And I need to get out of this gear for a bit. I’m getting claustrophobic.”

  “Let’s take a break,” Mahoney said. “Get forensics in here.”

  We left by the back door and stood by the pool stripping off our protective equipment, feeling renewed outrage at these deaths and a little defeated by the lack of evidence around them.

  “However he’s dressed, he’s a pro,” I said. “Gotta be.”

  “Hundred percent trained assassin,” Mahoney said, nodding.

  “I agree,” Sampson said. “If he were an ordinary sicko, he might have done it in a different way each time and then hung around to play a little. This guy is on a mission, in and out. Absolutely ruthless. I mean, again, who shoots a special-needs kid?”

  “Someone who’s getting his own needs met,” Ned said as he waved to a crew of FBI techs waiting to enter the house.

  I said, “Sure, but what needs? What does he get out of this? He’s certainly not doing it for jollies.”

  Sampson shrugged. “Money? Power? Revenge?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But there were no connections whatsoever between the Hodges family and the Landau family, and I doubt the Carpenter family will break that pattern. What links them? How does he choose his victims? What’s his motivation? We’re no closer to knowing that than we were a year ago when these killings started.”

  “Then we need to work harder,” Sampson said, looking down the driveway at a growing crowd of neighbors across the street. “Go back to basics. Pound some shoe leather until something gives.”

  “I’m with you,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Mahoney said, “I’m staying put. Let me know what the locals say.”

  We walked down the driveway and across the street to the police tape, behind which about twenty people were gathered. The media was being kept off to the left.

  Sampson and I knew several of the reporters, and they began shouting at us. But we ignored them, split up, and tried to talk to the neighbors, who were upset and firing more questions at us than we were at them.

  When we informed them that the entire Carpenter family was gone, several of the women broke down sobbing. Carrie Baldwin, who lived up the street and claimed she and Sue Carpenter had been BFFs, almost fainted in her husband’s arms when we confirmed that Alan had also been murdered in cold blood.

  “Our son’s going to be devastated,” Carrie said when she’d calmed down enough to talk. “Stuart has special needs too. They…they were the best of pals.”

  “Any reason someone would target the family for murder like this?” I asked.

  “Sue was a saint,” Carrie said, genuinely bewildered. “When my Stuart was born, she was the first one who reached out. She was always like that, looking out for others. People loved that family, all of them.”

  Baldwin’s husband, Max, tilted his head and said, “Well, for the most part.”

  I looked at him. He was dressed for a tennis outing. “How’s that?”

  “Roger was a high-dollar divorce attorney,” Max said. “Super-nice dude here at home, but he had a reputation for tearing husbands’ throats out in family court.”

  “Max!” his wife said. “Don’t speak ill of the dead!”

  “Hey, it’s true, Carrie,” Max said. “Two guys in my office? Their ex-wives hired Roger. They said dealing with him was like being examined by an angry proctologist.”

  “What?” his wife said.

  “Think about it a little, Carrie,” Max said. He turned to me. “You want a list of suspects? Start looking at all the poor bastards Carpenter took to the cleaners.”

  Chapter

  5

  The weather could not have been more perfect for a mid-April evening: temperature in the mid-seventies, low humidity. My wife, Bree Stone, and I decided to sit out on the front porch until dinner.

  Bree used to be the chief of detectives for Metro PD and now worked for a private security company. Along with Sampson and Mahoney, Bree was who I went to when I was trying to figure out a case or when I wanted a different perspective on things.

  After I’d described the investigation’s initial findings, Bree said, “It’s a little extreme to kill an entire family because of a lousy divorce settlement, don’t you think?”

  “More than extreme,” I said. “And my gut says that’s not the motive for these killings. There’s no link that I know of to a bad divorce or divorce attorney in the Hodges or the Landau cases. Hodges was a petroleum lobbyist. Landau was a pilot for Delta.”

  “What about the wives?” Bree asked.

  “Mrs. Carpenter was evidently devoted to her children and did volunteer work, a pillar of the community. Mrs. Hodges taught school in Falls Church. Mrs. Landau was a CPA in DC. If there’s a common link, I’m not seeing it.”

  From behind the blooming vines that shielded one end of the porch, a voice called out, “Maybe it’s their kids, Dad.”

  Bree moaned her displeasure.

  “Ali?” I said, crossing my arms.

  My youngest came around where we could see him. Smiling, his dirty hands chopping the air, he said, “Think about it! They probably went to the same summer camp or had swimming lessons together, or maybe they were in the same Sunday school. I’m telling you, it’s the kids.”

  Bree, who did not approve of Ali’s obsessive interest in our cases, said, “How long have you been eavesdropping, young man?”

  Ali’s face fell. “I wasn’t eavesdropping.”

  “What would you call it?” I asked.

  “Weeding Nana Mama’s herb garden like she asked me to?”

  I looked at Bree, who sighed.

  I said, “You know the cases we work on are confidential.”

  Ali nodded. “I’m not telling anyone anything.”

  “That’s not really the point, pal,” I said. “I’d be in a heap of trouble if it got out at the Bureau or inside Metro that I shared information about an ongoing case with a ten-year-old, even one as sharp as you.”