Alex Cross, Run Read online

  “Slipped out right through the back of his property, it looks like,” she said. “Into the woods and God knows where from there.”

  The first thing I thought of was Jerry Doyle. He’d gone on and on about how Creem’s surveillance detail was insufficient—and he’d been right.

  I remembered how the place was bordered by Glover-Archbold Park. It’s a piece of land that runs from Cathedral Heights all the way down to the Potomac. We’d covered the front of Creem’s house, but there had been no way to completely cover the entire track of open ground at the back. It made for a perfect hole in our net. That much was clear—now.

  “We’ve got a BOLO out on him, but meanwhile, I want you over at Sheila Bishop’s apartment.”

  She gave me an address on Logan Circle. There was no question of yes or no. If I wanted to keep showing up for work, I needed to be there.

  Still, once I hung up with Huizenga, I continued on home. Screw protocol. I needed to check in with my family, too.

  Bree actually encouraged me to go, when I saw her. She and Nana were parked by the home phone, waiting for any word from Stephanie, while Bree worked her cell to be in touch with the districts, the hospital, and Howard House. The kids were with Aunt Tia, and could spend the night there if necessary.

  “Go,” she said. “You’re just a phone call away if anything comes up. I’ve got Sampson and Billie driving the neighborhood right now, keeping an eye out. You can spell them later.”

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “No,” Bree said. “But so what? Just go.”

  I looked at Nana, who had her hands clasped under her chin. I wasn’t sure if she was praying or just thinking, but she didn’t look good, either.

  I gave them both a kiss good-bye, and kept on moving, out the back door.

  CHAPTER

  92

  SHEILA BISHOP’S APARTMENT WAS HALF OF A TURRETED BRICK AND STONE town house on the north side of Logan Circle. Other than a handful of people watching their dogs run around John Logan’s statue, and the usual daytime traffic, it was quiet when I got there. No reporters, anyway. That was a relative blessing.

  Most of the investigative team was on-site, along with the Mobile Crime Unit from Forensics. They had techs in blue windbreakers on the front door, up and down the stairs, and all over the master bedroom, where Ms. Bishop’s body had been discovered by a housekeeper a few hours earlier.

  That’s also where I found Valente. He was kneeling by the body, and looking from Ms. Bishop to each of the doors and windows when I came in.

  She’d been shot once in the chest, and by all appearances had collapsed in front of the open double doors of her walk-in closet. I couldn’t say for sure, but it looked like Ms. Bishop was wearing the same clothes she’d had on when she left Dr. Creem’s house.

  A Barneys shopping bag was on the bed, with her evening gown and shoes inside. And according to Valente, the tub in the adjoining bathroom was just under half full.

  “Looks to me like she came in, left the bag on the bed, and started drawing a bath,” he said. “Then she comes back out here to get undressed, and bam. He’s waiting for her in the closet. No signs of forced entry, either. Creem could have easily had a key to this place.”

  Most of what Valente had worked out made sense to me—except for the part about Creem himself.

  “I watched him put her in a cab at three in the morning,” I said. “He didn’t go anywhere after that. At least not before five. There’s no way he could have beaten her over here.”

  “I guess the question then is time of death,” Valente said.

  “That’s one question,” I said.

  “Detectives?”

  Errico and I both turned around to see Manny Lapore, one of the forensic techs, standing in the door to the bathroom. He was holding up a clear acrylic lifter with the dark impression of a handprint on it. Even at a glance, the print was too big to have come from Ms. Bishop.

  “I got this off the bathroom tile over the tub,” Lapore said. “There’s a couple of matching partials on the hot and cold taps, too. Could be something.”

  My first thought was that the killer had gone in to turn off the tub, to avoid an attention-drawing flood in the bathroom. My second thought was that it seemed like a pretty sloppy mistake—unless he just didn’t care. Or wasn’t thinking straight.

  We followed Lapore downstairs to see what, if anything, this print turned up. With the mobile automated fingerprint ID scanners we’re now using, a process that used to take hours—not to mention a trip to the lab—can happen anywhere, and in a matter of minutes. I didn’t even have time to check in with Bree before Lapore had found a match and was printing off the results.

  “Here’s your guy,” he said, handing me the report. “Does the name Joshua Bergman mean anything to you?”

  CHAPTER

  93

  I CAUGHT UP WITH BREE ON THE PHONE WHILE VALENTE AND I DROVE FROM Logan Circle over to M Street, where Josh Bergman lived. There was no new word about Ava. It was all eerily quiet on that front.

  Meanwhile, I had to focus on this if I could.

  It can take an hour or more to pull SWAT together, but that was time we didn’t have. Instead we dispatched a quick in-house team for the operation. Within thirty minutes, we had five tactically trained officers with one sergeant all ready to go in a parking lot on Water Street, a block from Bergman’s building.

  Bergman had a high-dollar loft on the top floor of a converted flour mill, from Georgetown’s nineteenth-century industrial days. Word from our spotter, stationed on the roof behind his, was that Bergman seemed to be home alone.

  After a fast briefing with Commander D’Auria, we piled into two plain white panel vans and pulled around the block. The drivers stopped in front, the van doors slid open, and we made a beeline for the entrance.

  Besides the half dozen tactical personnel, the entry team included me, Valente, and two more D-1 detectives from Major Case Squad, winding our way up the three flights of stairs to the top. We had officers stationed around the block, EMTs on standby, and D’Auria with a small crew in a mobile command center back down on Water Street.

  The breach team was armed with AR-15 rifles and SIG P226 sidearms. Tasers and pepper spray were standard issue as well.

  I had my Glock out, for the first time since I’d been reinstated. All of us wore Kevlar, too. We had more than enough manpower to take Bergman in, but he was very possibly armed and dangerous. Maybe also a little desperate. He might try to get off a few shots of his own.

  When we got to the third-floor landing, the sergeant at the head of the line wagged two fingers at a pair of officers, who came forward with the forty-five pound battering ram they’d carried up. Everyone was wired with headsets, but the protocol was for radio silence once we’d entered the building.

  Inside I could hear Bergman talking. It sounded like half of a phone conversation.

  “Where the hell are you? You said you’d be here an hour ago,” he said. He also sounded agitated, and seemed to be moving around. When he spoke again, his voice faded off toward the back of the apartment. “I don’t care,” he said. “Just . . . no, you listen to me. Just get here! Now!”

  That was it. I could feel the collective pulse of the group start to go up, as the sergeant gave a visual countdown on his fingers—three, two, one. The two cops at the front pulled back with the ram and swung it at Bergman’s steel front door. It sent a resounding boom up and down the stairwell. Any cover we had now was blown.

  “Units C and D, standby,” the sergeant radioed. “He may try to make a run for it.”

  It took two more fast swings before the door finally tore away from the frame and blew open. My vision tunneled straight ahead as the sergeant corkscrewed his arm, ushering the team inside, double time.

  “Go, go, go, go, go!”

  CHAPTER

  94

  VALENTE AND I DIDN’T WAIT FOR CLEARANCE. WE FOLLOWED RIGHT IN BEHIND the breach team. Normally, investigative
staff is meant to hold their position until we get an all clear, but neither of us were feeling that patient right now.

  The apartment door opened into a wide-open loft space that looked pristine to the point of sterility. Bergman didn’t seem to have any stuff at all. There was a set of white modular furniture on a huge gray rug, like an island in the middle of the room, with a single tall rubber tree that reached up to the exposed I-beams in the ceiling. A stainless-steel kitchen off to the side looked like it had never been used.

  There was no sign of Bergman anywhere in the front. The team quickly moved through, leapfrogging each other across the loft, and then down a long hallway toward the back of the building.

  “MPD! Joshua Bergman?” I shouted. “Stay right where you are! Don’t move!”

  At the very end of the hall there was an open door, with light streaming in through several iron-framed floor-to-ceiling windows. As soon as the first officer got there, I heard Bergman start to yell.

  “Get away from me! Stay back!”

  “Sir, put down the gun!” one of the officers shouted. “Keep your hands where we can see them and get down on the floor!”

  “Go to hell!”

  When I came into the room, Bergman was sitting up, cross-legged on a king-size platform bed. He had his back against the painted concrete block wall, with a white iPhone in one hand and a small Smith & Wesson revolver in the other. It could have easily been the same .32 he’d used to kill all those boys, as well as Sheila Bishop.

  “Bergman, put the gun down!” I told him. “You don’t want to do this.”

  “Oh yeah? I don’t?” He was clearly agitated, but also relatively focused. He looked me right in the eye when he said it.

  “Just try to calm down,” I told him. “Let’s go one thing at a time.”

  I lowered my own gun and took a step toward him, but only until he pressed the Smith & Wesson up to his chin.

  “You think I’m kidding around here?” he said.

  “Josh—don’t,” I said. “Please.”

  “Too late,” he said. He held the phone up to his ear and spoke a single word to whoever was there. “Good-bye,” he said.

  Then he pulled the trigger on that Smith & Wesson and blew himself away.

  Whatever horrible things Bergman might have done to other people, it was god-awful to see him go out like that. This was an act of pure, irrational desperation. Maybe even insanity.

  Not to mention a truly stomach-churning mess.

  Everyone started moving at once. There was no question of survival, but Bergman’s death had to be confirmed. The sergeant went straight to the body and felt for a pulse on the wrist, while Valente called it in.

  “One round fired, subject is down. Self-inflicted GSW,” he said. When the sergeant shook his head, Valente added, “No signs of life.”

  Bergman’s gun had dropped onto the bloodstained comforter, and his phone was on the floor. That’s what I focused on. I was pretty sure I knew who he’d been talking to, but I needed to confirm it if I could.

  I went straight to the phone, picked it up, and hit redial. On the first ring, it sent me right into voice mail.

  “Hello,” I heard in a familiar voice. “You’ve reached Dr. Elijah Creem. I can’t take your call right now, but please leave a message. Thank you, and have a pleasant day.”

  CHAPTER

  95

  THIS WASN’T THE END OF ANYTHING. WE WERE RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF IT ALL.

  Up until now, with only circumstantial evidence against Creem, it was all we could do to put a surveillance detail on him. Legally speaking, it’s one thing to watch someone at home, from the street. It’s another to go inside. The courts are jumpy about that kind of thing.

  So it was ironic to get the push we needed, not from Creem but from Bergman, our presumed River Killer. The fact that he’d called Creem’s cell and home numbers multiple times in the hours before he killed himself was enough to put us over the top. Within an hour of Bergman’s death, we had a warrant number for secreted evidence in Creem’s house and a one-sheet for Creem himself, circulating up and down the Eastern Seaboard. The special note on this one was that Creem might have been traveling in disguise. The one-sheet included his DMV photo alongside the clearest image we had of the old man mask he’d been using, but we weren’t cutting off any possibilities. He could have easily switched up his look by now—and probably had.

  My guess was that Creem had been planning this exit all along. It would explain the way he’d flaunted himself to the police so brazenly. Not to mention Sheila Bishop’s and Josh Bergman’s deaths. Was that all just one big, high-stakes smokescreen for him?

  If so, it had worked. We’d already lost between five and nine hours on Creem, depending on what time he’d slipped away from us.

  To search the house in Wesley Heights, Valente and I brought a team of three other detectives, plus four from mobile crime. It’s a slow, methodical process—aggravatingly so when your perp is already on the move. We spread out over the home’s three floors when we got there, to cover as much area as we could.

  I started on the lower level, where Creem had an office, an examination room, and a waiting area with its own separate entrance. There was also a TV room and a garage down there—plenty of places to look.

  As it turned out, there were a few things Creem hadn’t even tried to hide. Within the first few minutes, I found a makeup kit in his top desk drawer. There were tinting pigments, a dozen different small brushes, a bottle of spirit gum, and several items I didn’t recognize. Maybe he’d even worked on his latest mask right there at the desk, while I’d been sitting outside on the curb, watching his house the night before.

  The other thing I did while I searched was to keep dialing Creem’s number. I didn’t really expect him to pick up, but I figured it was worth trying. He was the type who might like to take a parting shot at the cops, given the opportunity.

  For the first hour, I got the same response, over and over—straight to voice mail. He’d probably shut the phone down to keep it from pinging off of cell towers and leaving a trail behind him.

  But that doesn’t mean I was wrong about Creem. He must have tracked my incoming calls somehow, because the next time my phone rang, it was him, calling me back.

  On his terms, of course.

  CHAPTER

  96

  I DIDN’T RECOGNIZE THE NUMBER ON THE ID AS I PICKED UP.

  “Detective Cross,” I answered.

  “It’s me,” Creem said. “The man of the hour.”

  I banged my knee on his desk as I jumped up. Valente was just coming into the room, and I snapped my fingers to grab his attention.

  “Dr. Creem,” I said pointedly. “I’m a little surprised to hear from you.”

  Right away, Valente took out his own phone and started making a call, presumably to try to run a trace.

  “I wanted to ask about Josh,” Creem told me.

  “What about him?” I asked.

  “Is he dead?”

  Valente motioned at me to take my time and go slow with him.

  “I’m not going to discuss that with you over the phone,” I said. “Tell me where you are. I’ll meet you anywhere you like. No other cops.”

  Creem paused, maybe even just to smile to himself. He was enjoying this, no doubt.

  “Don’t bother with this phone, by the way,” he said. “I bought it an hour ago and I’m throwing it away after this call.”

  He was probably using a convenience store burner, or something like it. From a cop’s perspective, those are the worst. They can be impossible to track down.

  I figured the best way to keep Creem talking would be to feed that oversize ego of his. It was the only language he seemed to speak.

  “You know, there’s a massive manhunt going on right now,” I said. “You’ve given us quite the slip.”

  “Any luck so far?” he asked.

  “If there were—”

  “Of course. We wouldn’t be having thi
s conversation,” Creem said.

  I also knew better than to condescend to him. One thing about Creem—he wasn’t stupid. If I lost him now, something told me that would be it.

  “I’d love to know how you pulled this off,” I said. “It’s been a fascinating case. You, Bergman, all of it. I assume you were in it together from the start.”

  This time Creem sighed, almost nostalgically. “All the way back to college, in fact. We got a bit of a taste for it then, just like old Jack Sprat and his wife.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He liked the boys, I liked the girls. And between the two of us, we licked the platter clean.”

  His calm, collected pride in the whole thing gave me the creeps. Wherever he was headed, I didn’t think for a second he’d be able to stop himself from killing again.

  “So what now?” I said. “You disappear, never to be heard from?”

  “That’s the idea,” he said.

  “Are you leaving the country?” I asked, but Creem demurred.

  “I called because I wanted to know about Josh,” he told me. “If you don’t have anything to say about that, I’m hanging up.”

  When I looked at Valente, he just shook his head and raked his fingers through his hair. It wasn’t going well.

  “What do you want to know?” I asked.

  “Is he dead or not?”

  “Yes,” I told him. It would all be in the news soon enough anyway.

  “Where did he do it?” Creem asked.

  “In his loft, on M Street,” I said, stalling.

  “No. I mean, it sounded to me like he shot himself. Was it in the mouth?”

  “Under the chin,” I said.

  “Lord. Must have been a terrible mess.”

  “It was,” I said. “Is that hard for you? He was your friend, after all.”

  Creem paused again. I listened hard for any kind of telltale background noise, but there was nothing.