Double Cross Read online

  I peeled off my Windbreaker and tried to wipe myself with it, then stuck the coat in the bag Fescoe brought me. I needed to keep moving and to get out of this room, at least for now.

  I headed toward the stairs and found Bree just coming down.

  “Alex? Jesus, what happened to you?” she asked.

  I knew if I started to explain, I wouldn’t be able to finish. “We’ll talk about it later, okay?” I said. “What’s going on upstairs?”

  She looked at me strangely but didn’t push it. “More of the same. Bad stuff. Third floor, Alex. Two more kids. I think they were trying to hide from the killers, but it didn’t work.”

  A photo flash ghosted the stairwell as we climbed. Everything seemed hallucinogenic and unreal to me. I was outside the scene, watching myself stumble through it. Ellie had been murdered. I tried again but couldn’t process the thought.

  “No blood on the stairs, or in the hall,” I noticed, trying to focus on evidence, trying to do the job. It was freezing cold, with a hatch door open overhead. November third, and the forecast was for single-digit temperatures overnight. Even the weather had gone a little crazy.

  “Alex?”

  Bree was waiting up ahead, standing at the doorway to a room on the third floor. She didn’t move as I approached. “You sure you’re okay to be here?” she asked, speaking low so the others wouldn’t hear.

  I nodded and peered into the room.

  Behind Bree, the two little girls’ bodies were crisscrossed on an oval rag rug. A white canopy bed was broken into pieces, collapsed in on itself as if someone had jumped too hard on it.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I need to see what happened here. I need to begin to understand what it all means. Like who the hell was jumping on that bed?”

  BUT I DIDN’T even begin to understand the horrible murders of five family members. Not that night, anyway. I was as baffled as everybody else about the possible motivation of the killers.

  What made the mystery even deeper was something that happened about an hour after I got to the crime scene. Two officers from the CIA showed up. They looked around, then left. What was the CIA doing there?

  It was a little after three thirty in the morning when Bree and I finally got back home to Fifth Street. In the stillness of my house, I could hear Ali’s little-boy snores wafting down from upstairs. Reassuring and comforting sounds, to be sure.

  Nana Mama had left the hood light on over the stove, and she’d Saran Wrapped a plate of the last four hermit cookies from dessert. We took them upstairs, along with glasses and a half-full bottle of wine.

  Two hours later I was still awake and still messed up in the head. Bree finally sat up and turned on the light. She found me sitting on the edge of the bed. I could feel the warmth of her body against my back, her breath on my neck.

  “You sleep at all?” she asked.

  That wasn’t really what she wanted to know.

  “I knew the mother, Bree. We went to Georgetown together. This couldn’t have happened to her. Shouldn’t have, anyway.”

  She breathed in sharply at my revelation. “I’m so sorry, Alex. Why didn’t you say so?”

  I shrugged, then sighed. “I’m not even sure if I can talk about it now,” I said.

  She hugged me. “It’s okay. No need to talk. Unless you want to, Alex. I’m here.”

  “We were best friends, Bree. We were a couple for a year. I know it was a long time ago, but . . .” I trailed off. But what? But—it hadn’t just been kid stuff, either. “I loved her for a while, Bree. I’m blown away right now.”

  “You want to get off the case?”

  “No.” I’d already asked myself the same question, and the answer had come just as quickly.

  “I can get Sampson or somebody else from Violent Crimes to cover. We’ll keep you up to the second—”

  “Bree, I can’t let go of this one.”

  “This one?” She ran a hand softly up and down my arm. “As compared to . . . what, Alex?”

  I took a deep breath. I knew where Bree was going with this. “It’s not about Maria, if that’s what you mean.” My wife, Maria, had been gunned down when our kids were small. I’d managed to close the case only recently. There had been years of torture and guilt before that. But Maria had been my wife, the love of my life at the time. Ellie was something else. I wasn’t confusing the two. I didn’t think so anyway.

  “Okay,” she said, stroking my back, soothing me. “Tell me what I can do.”

  I folded us both under the covers. “Just lie here with me,” I said. “That’s all I need for now.”

  “You got it.”

  And soon, wrapped in Bree’s arms, I went off to sleep—for a whole two hours.

  “I SPY, WITH my little eye, a pink newspaper,” said Bree.

  “Over there!” Ali was quick to spot it. “I see it! It is pink. What kind of crazy newspaper is that?”

  To my family’s surprise and delight, I hadn’t left for work at some obscene hour the morning after I found Ellie and her family dead in their home. Today, I wanted to walk the kids to school. Actually, I wanted to do it most every day, but sometimes I couldn’t, and sometimes I didn’t. But today I needed lots of fresh air in my life. And smiles. And Ali’s giggles.

  Jannie was in her last year at Sojourner Truth, all ready for high school, while Ali was just starting out in the school world. It seemed very circle-of-life to me that morning, with Ellie’s family gone in a blink, and my own kids coming up strong.

  I put on my best cheerful dad face and tried to set aside the gruesome images of last night. “Who’s next?”

  “I’ve got one,” Jannie said. She turned a canary-eating grin on Bree and me. “I spy, with my little eye, a POSSLQ.”

  “What’s a possel-cue?” Ali wanted to know. He was already looking around, moving his head like a bobblehead doll’s, trying to spot it, whatever it was.

  Jannie practically sang out the answer. “P, O, S, S, L, Q. Person of the opposite sex, sharing living quarters.” She whispered the word sex in our direction, presumably to safeguard her little brother’s innocence. No matter, I could feel myself blushing slightly.

  Bree tagged Jannie’s shoulder. “Where exactly did you pick that one up?”

  “Cherise J. She says her mom says you two are, you know, living in sin.”

  I exchanged a look with Bree over the top of Jannie’s head. I guessed this was bound to come up in some way or another sooner or later. Bree and I had been together for more than a year now, and she spent a good amount of time at the house on Fifth Street. Part of the reason was that the kids loved having her around. Part was that I did.

  “I think maybe you and Cherise J. need to find something else to talk about,” I told her. “You think?”

  “Oh, it’s okay, Daddy. I told Cherise her mom needs to get over herself. I mean, even Nana Mama’s down with it, and her picture’s in the dictionary under ‘old-fashioned,’ right?”

  “You wouldn’t have any idea what’s in a dictionary,” I said.

  But Bree and I had stopped trying to be politically correct with Jannie, and we just let ourselves laugh. Jannie had that “crossroads” thing going on these days; she was right at the intersection of girl and woman.

  “What’s so funny?” Ali asked. “Somebody tell me. What is it?”

  I scooped him up off the sidewalk and onto my shoulders for the last half block of our walk to school. “I’ll tell you in about five years.”

  “I know anyway,” he said. “You and Bree love each other. Everybody knows. No big deal. It’s a good thing.”

  “Yes it is,” I said and kissed his cheek.

  We dropped him at the school’s east entrance, where the rest of his class of minicuties were lining up outside. Jannie called to him through the fence. “See you later, alligator! Love you.”

  “In a while, crocodile! Love you back.”

  With their older brother, Damon, off at prep school in Massachusetts, these two had grown cl
oser than ever lately. On weekend nights, Ali often slept on an air mattress at the foot of his sister’s bed, in what he called his “nest.”

  We left Jannie at the opposite side of the school building, where all the older kids were streaming in. She gave us both hugs good-bye, and I held on a little longer than usual. “I love you, sweetie. There’s nothing more special to me than you and your brothers.”

  Jannie couldn’t help but look around to make sure no one had heard. “Me too, Daddy,” she said. Then, almost in the same breath, “Cherise! Wait up!”

  As soon as Jannie was gone, Bree took my arm in hers. “So what was that?” she said. “ ‘Everybody knows you and Bree love each other’? ”

  I shrugged and smiled. “What do I know? That’s the big rumor going around, anyway.”

  I gave her a kiss.

  And because that worked out so well, I gave her another.

  Read an extended excerpt and learn more about Cross Country.

  Alex Cross gets a presidential request:

  “Please find my kids!”

  For an excerpt from the new Alex Cross novel,

  turn the page.

  IT BEGAN WITH PRESIDENT COYLE’S CHILDREN, ETHAN AND ZOE, BOTH high-profile personalities since they had arrived in Washington, and probably even before that.

  Twelve-year-old Ethan Coyle thought he had gotten used to living under the microscope and in the public eye. So Ethan hardly noticed anymore the news cameramen perpetually camped outside the Branaff School gates, and he didn’t worry the way he used to if some kid he didn’t know tried to snap his picture in the hall, or the gymnasium, or even the boys’ bathroom.

  Sometimes, Ethan even pretended he was invisible. It was kind of babyish, kind of b.s., but who cared. It helped. One of the more personable Secret Service guys had actually suggested it. He told Ethan that Chelsea Clinton used to do the same thing. Who knew if that was true?

  But when Ethan saw Ryan Townsend headed his way that morning, he only wished he could disappear.

  Ryan Townsend always had it in for him, and that wasn’t just Ethan’s paranoia talking. He had the purplish and yellowing bruises to prove it—the kind that a good hard punch or muscle squeeze can leave behind.

  “Wuzzup, Coyle the Boil?” Townsend said, charging up on him in the hall with that look on his face. “The Boil havin’ a bad day already?”

  Ethan knew better than to answer his tormenter and torturer. He cut a hard left toward the lockers instead—but that was his first mistake. Now there was nowhere to go, and he felt a sharp, nauseating jab to the side of his leg. He’d been kicked! Townsend barely even slowed down as he passed. He called these little incidents “drive-bys.”

  The thing Ethan didn’t do was yell out, or stumble in pain. That was the deal he’d made with himself: don’t let anyone see what you’re feeling inside.

  Instead, he dropped his books and knelt down to pick them back up again. It was a total wuss move, but at least he could take the weight off his leg for a second without letting the whole world know he was Ryan Townsend’s punching and kicking dummy.

  Except this time, someone else did see—and it wasn’t the Secret Service.

  Ethan was stuffing graph paper back into his math folder when he heard a familiar voice.

  “Hey, Ryan? Wuzzup with you?”

  He looked up just in time to see his fourteen-year-old sister, Zoe, stepping right into Townsend’s path.

  “I saw that,” she said. “You thought I wouldn’t?”

  Townsend cocked his head of blond curls to the side. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Why don’t you just mind your own—”

  Out of nowhere, a heavy yellow textbook came up fast in both of Zoe’s hands.

  She swung hard, and clocked Townsend with it, right across the middle of his face. The bully’s nose spurted red and he stumbled backward. It was great!

  That was as far as things progressed before Secret Service got to them. Agent Findlay held Zoe back, and Agent Musgrove wedged himself between Ethan and Townsend. A crowd of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders had already stopped to watch, like this was some new reality TV show—The President’s Kids.

  “You total losers!” Townsend shouted at Ethan and Zoe, even as blood dripped down over his Branaff tie and white button-down shirt. “What a couple of chumps. You need your loyal SS bodyguards to protect you!”

  “Oh yeah? Tell that to my algebra book,” Zoe yelled back. “And stay away from my brother! You’re bigger and older than him, you jerk. You shithead!”

  For his part, Ethan was still hovering by the lockers, half of his stuff scattered on the floor. And for a second or two there, he found himself pretending he was part of the crowd—just some kid nobody had ever heard of, standing there, watching all of this craziness happen to someone else.

  Yeah, Ethan thought. Maybe in my next lifetime.

  AGENT FINDLAY QUICKLY AND EFFICIENTLY HUSTLED ETHAN AND ZOE away from the gawkers, and worse, the kids with their iPhones raised: Hello, YouTube! In a matter of seconds, he’d disappeared with them into the otherwise empty grand lecture hall off the main foyer.

  The Branaff School had once been the Branaff Estate, until ownership had transferred to a Quaker educational trust. It was said among the kids that the grounds were haunted, not by good people who had died here, but by the disgruntled Branaff descendants who’d been evicted to make room for the private school.

  Ethan didn’t buy into any of that crap, but he’d always found the main lecture hall to be supercreepy—with its old-time oil portraits looking down disapprovingly on everybody who happened to pass through.

  “You know, the president’s going to have to hear about this, Zoe. The fight, your language back there,” Agent Findlay said. “Not to mention Headmaster Skillings—”

  “No doubt, so just do your job,” Zoe answered with a shrug and a frown. She put a hand on top of her brother’s head. “You okay, Eth?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, pushing her off. “Physically, anyway.” His dignity was another question, but that was too complicated for him to think about right now.

  “In that case, let’s keep this parade moving,” Findlay told them. “You guys have assembly in five.”

  “Got it,” said Zoe with a dismissive wave. “Like we were going to forget assembly, right?”

  The morning’s guest speaker was Isabelle Morris, a senior fellow with the DC International Policy Institute and also an alum of the Branaff School. Unlike most of the kids he knew, Ethan was actually looking forward to Ms. Morris’s talk about her experiences in the Middle East. Someday he hoped to work at the UN himself. Why not? He had pretty good connections, right?

  “Can you give us a teeny-tiny second?” Zoe asked. “I want to talk to my brother—alone.”

  “I said I’m fine. It’s cool,” Ethan insisted, but his sister cut him off with a glare.

  “He tells me things he won’t say to you,” Zoe went on, answering Findlay’s skeptical look. “And private conversations aren’t exactly easy to come by around here, if you know what I mean. No offense meant.”

  “None taken.” Findlay looked down at his watch. “Okay,” he said. “Two minutes is all I can give you.”

  “Two minutes, it is. We’ll be right out, I promise,” Zoe said, and closed the heavy wooden door behind him as he left.

  Without a word to Ethan, she cut between the rows of old desk seats and headed to the back of the room. She hopped up on the heating register under the windows.

  Then Zoe reached inside her blue and gray uniform jacket and took out a small black lacquered case. Ethan recognized it right away. His sister had bought it in Beijing this past summer, on a trip to China with their parents.

  “I’m all about a ciggie right now,” Zoe whispered. Then she grinned wickedly. “Come with?”

  Ethan looked back at the door. “I actually don’t want to miss this assembly,” he said, but Zoe just rolled her eyes.

  “Oh, please. Blah,
blah, blah, Middle East, blah, blah. You can watch it on CNN any hour of the week,” she said. “But how often do you get a chance to ditch Secret Service? Come on!”

  It was a totally no-win situation for him and Ethan knew it. He was either going to look like a wimp—again—or he was going to miss the assembly speech he’d been looking forward to all week.

  “You shouldn’t smoke,” he said lamely.

  “Yeah, well you shouldn’t weenie out so much,” Zoe answered. “Then maybe assholes like Ryan Townsend wouldn’t be all over you all the time.”

  “That’s just because Dad’s the president,” Ethan said. “That’s all, right?”

  “No. It’s because you’re a geek,” Zoe said. “You don’t see Spunk-Punk messing with me, do you?” She opened the window, effortlessly pulled herself through, and dropped to the ground outside. Zoe thought she was another Angelina Jolie. “If you’re not coming, at least give me a minute to get away. Okay, Grandma?”

  The next second, Zoe was gone.

  Ethan looked over his shoulder one more time. Then he did the only thing he could to maintain his last shreds of dignity. He followed his sister out the lecture hall window—and into trouble he couldn’t even begin to imagine.

  No one could.

  AS SOON AS THE DOOR TO THE LECTURE HALL SLAMMED SHUT BEHIND Agent Clay Findlay, he checked the knob—still unlocked. Then he checked the sweep hand on his stainless-steel Breitling. “I’m giving them another forty-five seconds,” he said into the mike at his cuff. “After that, we’ve got T. Rex going to assembly and Twilight headed to the principal’s office.”

  Word from the president and First Lady had been to allow Ethan and Zoe as normal a school experience as possible, including their own conflicts—within reason. That was easier said than done, of course. Zoe Coyle didn’t always operate within reason. In fact, she usually didn’t. Zoe wasn’t a bad kid. But she was a kid. Willful. And smart, and devoted to her younger brother.

  “l’m probably going to get reamed for this,” Findlay radioed quietly. “Tell you what, though. That Ryan Townsend kid’s a little prick. Not that you heard it here.”