Cross the Line: (Alex Cross 24) Read online

  For the first year, she’d managed to keep JohnnyBoy5 at bay. But after that, his tone became irate, and then depressed.

  I don’t know what’s come over me, JohnnyBoy5 had written back in March. I’m terrified that I won’t see you again, Edita. I know it’s irrational, but there it is. I can’t shake this dark, dark feeling that I’m going to lose you somehow, that something bad is going to happen to you, that you’re never going to see the real me, and that you’ll never understand how much I truly care about you.

  Edita wrote back, This is no good, Johnny. Go away or I get a restraining order. A third-year told me how to do it.

  For three weeks after that, there was no contact between Ms. Kravic and JohnnyBoy5. Then he e-mailed her again.

  I know what you are, Edita, what you do out of class.

  No return e-mail. No follow-up for months. Three weeks before Edita was murdered, however, JohnnyBoy5 wrote her again.

  Who is he? The big meathead who threatened to break my face? Really? This is how things are between us? What if I just posted on Facebook about you and the life you don’t want anyone to know about? Will that do it?

  Two weeks passed.

  Sorry for the rants, JohnnyBoy5 wrote. God, I read back through some of it and that wasn’t me, Edita. The doctor put me on this asthma medicine called montelukast and I had a rare but bad side effect, which put me in a dark way. But I’ve returned to the living! Study group’s starting up again. Love to have you back, of course. No worries about anything else. Everyone’s got skeletons in the closet, am I right?

  Edita did not respond. Every day after that, leading up to the day before her death, JohnnyBoy5 wrote—chidingly, in worry, in despair, and in anger.

  In so many ways, meeting you was the ruin of my life, he’d written just two days before she died. Everything I built was reduced to rubble the moment I met you. Ruin deserves ruin, Edita. Ruin deserves ruin.

  Obsession has been a staple in the recipe book of murder since time immemorial. Sometimes obsession is a major ingredient. Other times, obsession is the oven that makes things too hot to handle.

  Some obsessives were taught to be that way through neglect or cruelty. Others developed hatred as the basis of their obsession. This was especially true of organized serial killers. They ritualized their killings, taking their rage out on surrogates for the people who’d spawned their hatred.

  But love can be the basis of obsession too, especially if one party or the other is spurned. You see that kind of gradual tick-tick-tick change in a person as he goes from being smitten to being crazy in love to—when he’s rejected—feeling sad, then worthless, then angry, then enraged, and then he grabs a gun because If I can’t have the object of my desire, no one will.

  Was that what had happened with JohnnyBoy5? Had he taken the romantic spiral toward homicide and killed Edita and Tommy McGrath, the big guy who’d threatened to break his face? Or was that someone else?

  Sampson walked in. “I got something you need to see.”

  “Me too,” I said, getting up. “She’s got a stalker.”

  “That fits,” he said. He turned and led me into her bedroom.

  Big four-poster bed. Matched linens. New dresser. Nice mirror. A walk-in closet with racks bulging with clothes and shelves holding dozens of beautiful shoes.

  There were built-in drawers at the far end of the closet.

  Sampson had pulled two of them open. The first was filled with fine lingerie. The second featured a wide selection of sex toys and lubricants.

  “So she had a kinky side,” I said. “So what?”

  He pushed shut the two drawers and opened the ones directly below. I took both in at a glance and said, “Oh, well, that changes things.”

  “Damn sure does,” Sampson said, looking into the right drawer, which was filled with hard-core S&M equipment.

  I was more interested in the drawer on the left, the deeper one, the one filled with stacks and stacks of banded fifty-dollar bills.

  CHAPTER

  9

  SAMPSON AND I left Edita Kravic’s apartment shortly after seven that evening. We’d found the sex equipment and the cash, which we estimated at forty thousand dollars, but little to explain how a second-year law student had come to have that kind of money stuck away in a clothes drawer.

  When you see that much dough and the sex gear, your investigative instincts tend to drift toward hooking or drugs or smuggling or organized crime. But we’d found no direct evidence of anything illegal, not even in the locked file cabinet, which we’d opened after we’d located the key.

  The cabinet had more of Edita Kravic’s personal files, one of which revealed that she was from Slovakia and had a green card. Another file showed an account with Bank of America with a balance of fifteen hundred dollars. She owed less than that on her Visa and American Express cards. I found her lease. I’d predicted the rent would be two or three grand a month; it was actually four thousand. But she wasn’t writing checks for the rent, or not any that I could see.

  “She paid cash for everything,” I said when we got back to the car.

  “Bought high-end stuff with it,” Sampson said. “Classic way to evade taxes.”

  “Still doesn’t explain where the money came from,” I said. “There were no files from the Phoenix Club, no record of payments.”

  “Maybe the club’s evading taxes too,” Sampson said, starting the squad car. “Where to?”

  “Swing by Terry Howard’s place before heading back to the office.”

  “Make the chief rest easier?”

  “Exactly.”

  We drove to a shabby, four-story apartment building off New York Avenue in Northeast.

  “This the right one?” I asked.

  “Google Maps don’t lie,” Sampson said.

  The seedy neighborhood sobered me, made me realize just how far and how hard Tommy McGrath’s onetime partner had fallen since his days with the Major Case Unit. Terry Howard had had a formidable reputation for playing the tough guy. He had never been above intimidating a source to get what he wanted. In fact, he’d been accused of it multiple times, and because of that, and because Tommy had ultimately turned on Howard, we were here.

  But the former detective who opened the door of his one-bedroom apartment didn’t look like a tough guy; he looked like a tired man pushing seventy rather than fifty-five. He wore a faded Washington Redskins ball cap, a plain black T-shirt, and jeans that sagged off him. The big frame I remembered was still there, but he’d gone soft and lost weight. His eyes were rheumy. He smelled of vodka.

  “Figured I’d see you two before too long,” Howard said.

  “Can we come in, Terry? Ask a few questions?”

  “Not tonight, I got lots of jack shit to take care of. Sorry.”

  I said, “You know we have to talk to you, and you know why. Now, we can continue standing here in your doorway where everyone on the floor will know your business, or we can come in, or we can take you down to the station. Any way you want to do this is fine by us.”

  Howard’s bleary eyes got hard and beady. “In here.”

  He stood aside. We walked into his sad little world. The apartment reeked of cigarette smoke. The muted television was tuned to a cable station rerunning classic baseball games. Beer cans and three empty bottles of Smirnoff vodka crowded the coffee table. The parakeet in the cage between the easy chair and the couch looked like a miniature plucked chicken. It had no feathers except for a crown of baby blue and orange.

  “That’s Sylvia Plath,” Howard said. “She’s got issues.”

  He laughed uproariously at that and then started coughing hard. He picked up a tissue, spit into it, and then said, “Aren’t you going to ask me where I was when Tommy got it?”

  “We figured we’d dance with you awhile before that,” Sampson said.

  Howard sobered, said, “No reason to. I was right here at the time the TV guys say he was killed.”

  “Anyone see you?”

 
; “Six of the fine ladies from my neighborhood Hooters were supposed to come over for breakfast and watch last night’s game with me on the DVR,” Howard said. “But, alas, they stood me up. Too bad. Good game. Senators demolished the Red Sox in interleague play. Harper went three for four.”

  “So you have no alibi,” I said.

  “Nope,” Howard said, going to the kitchen and pouring orange juice and vodka into a dirty highball glass. “But I know you can’t put me on upper Wisconsin because I wasn’t there. Hell, I can barely walk two blocks.”

  “You must have wanted to kill Tommy at one time,” Sampson said.

  “Man destroys your life, it crosses your mind,” Howard said, shuffling back and settling into a recliner. “But I did not pull the trigger on COD McGrath.”

  “You own a Remington 1911?” I asked.

  “I have always been a devotee of Smith and Wesson, so no.”

  “Mind if we look around?”

  “Hell yeah, I mind,” the disgraced detective said. “You got a warrant, Cross, have at her. Otherwise, and with all due respect, we’re done here. Me and Sylvia P. got another game to watch.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  SAMPSON AND I didn’t argue with Howard. The former detective didn’t strike me as being physically or mentally capable of shooting McGrath. He seemed to have given up and was at some bitter peace with that.

  So we left and returned to the office, where I found Bree and Muller waiting with Rico Lincoln and Martin O’Donnell, the other detectives Chief Michaels had assigned to the murder of Tom McGrath. Bree and Muller described their meeting with Vivian McGrath and we brought them up to speed on what we’d found at McGrath’s, Edita Kravic’s, and Terry Howard’s.

  When we finished, I looked at Detective Lincoln, a tall, skinny marathoner who’d been smiling and acting impatient during our reports.

  “You got something you’d like to share, Rico?”

  “I do,” Lincoln said. “I mean, we both do.”

  “You first,” O’Donnell said.

  Lincoln got on his computer and linked it to a large screen on the wall. The screen jumped to a traffic-camera perspective of upper Wisconsin Avenue. Cars in both northbound lanes came at the camera head-on so we could see each vehicle and its passengers best at a distance. With the rain, it was hard to get a good look through the windshields, especially the ones in the right lane.

  Lincoln sped the video up, watching the data in the lower corner, and then paused at the time stamp reading 7:20 a.m.

  “Tommy McGrath and Edita Kravic are gunned down at seven twenty,” he said, and he hit Play. “Coming at you in the northbound right lane, dark-primer four-door sedan, stripped, almost looks like it’s about to be repainted.”

  “That Treasury agent called it,” Sampson said.

  “Watch now,” Lincoln said.

  The car was passing, rain spattering its windshield, and you couldn’t see a thing. Lincoln froze the screen when the front of the car was almost out of view. He pointed to the left side of the windshield. Up on the dashboard, there was a red Washington Redskins ball cap.

  “We saw Howard wearing a red Redskins cap just like that not an hour ago,” Sampson said.

  It was true. Same hat.

  Lincoln said, “Something else.”

  The detective advanced the frames so the windshield of the car and then the tinted driver-side window disappeared. When he stopped the film again, we had a side-angle view through the open rear window.

  We could see the silhouette of a person with a wild mop of hair sitting in the middle of the backseat.

  “Okay?” I said.

  Lincoln advanced the film two frames. Here, the shadows were different. Three-quarters of the face was revealed.

  I stared for a second and then said, “Raggedy Ann?”

  “That was our reaction,” Detective O’Donnell said. “At first we thought we had the wrong car and the cap on the wind-shield was just chance.”

  Lincoln said, “But the more we thought about it, the more we became convinced that there wasn’t a third person in the backseat. A scarecrow was sitting there. See the shadows here and here? That’s the shoulders of a dark coat. See the lapels?”

  “I get it,” I said. “Why’s Raggedy Ann wearing a coat?”

  “Exactly,” Lincoln said.

  Rubbing my chin, I said, “I agree that’s our shooter’s car. Have pictures of it at the best angles sent to every officer on the force.”

  “On it,” Lincoln said, and he started typing.

  Bree fought off a yawn. I fought off a yawn too and then nodded at O’Donnell, who said, “I started going through Chief McGrath’s work files. Right away, I found a threatening e-mail.”

  He typed on his computer, and the screen changed from the close-up of the Raggedy Ann doll to a July 3 e-mail to McGrath from TL.

  You push too hard, we gonna push right back. Only it’s gonna be lethal this time, Chief McG.

  “TL?” Sampson said. “That Thao Le?”

  “Has to be,” Bree said, sitting forward.

  Muller said, “I thought Le got convicted in Prince George’s last year.”

  “Got off on appeal four months ago,” O’Donnell said, showing us an investigative file he’d found in McGrath’s desk. “Tommy had evidently been running a solo investigation into Le’s activities since his release.”

  “What did he find?” Bree asked.

  “That Le was back in the game. Associating with known criminals and members of his old gang. Drugs. Women. Loan-sharking. Extortion.”

  “Why wouldn’t Tommy have told someone?” Sampson asked.

  “Nailing Le was personal with Tommy,” O’Donnell said. “He even wrote about it. He thought Le was the one who’d planted the evidence in Terry Howard’s case, and even though Terry hated him, Tommy was out to prove it.”

  “So maybe Tommy got close enough to spook Le into making good on his threat,” Bree said.

  “Where’s Le now?” I asked.

  “No clue yet,” O’Donnell said. “But the last two times Le was picked up on weapons charges, he was carrying a forty-five-caliber Remington 1911.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  I WAS UP before dawn, startled awake by a dream where a pistol-packing Raggedy Ann drove a motorcycle down Rock Creek Parkway, which was littered with fifty-dollar bills. The cash almost covered the corpses of Edita Kravic and Tommy McGrath.

  I eased from bed, letting Bree sleep. We’d gotten home after midnight, wolfed down leftovers from the fridge, and gone straight to sleep.

  After a shower, I went downstairs to find my ninety-one-year-old grandmother making breakfast.

  “You’re up kind of early, Nana Mama,” I said, kissing her on the cheek.

  “Big day ahead for you,” she said. “I wanted to make sure it starts right.”

  “We appreciate it,” I said. I poured myself some coffee and got the papers from the front porch.

  The murder of Tommy McGrath and Edita Kravic led the front page of both the Washington Post and the Washington Times. Chief Michaels was quoted as saying DC Metro had lost one of its best men and that the department would be relentless in its pursuit of the killers. He announced the formation of an elite task force to investigate the murders, and he named me as team leader.

  “Pop?”

  I glanced up from the papers to see my oldest child, Damon, standing there, looking excited.

  I smiled, asked, “You ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  “Sit down there and Nana will give you one last proper breakfast.”

  Damon’s six foot five and towers over my grandmother. He scooped her up and gave her a kiss, which caused her to shriek with laughter.

  “What was that for, young man?” she demanded, looking ruffled when he set her down.

  “Just because,” Damon said. “Can I get three eggs this morning?”

  She sniffed. “I suppose I can manage it.”

 
“Two for me,” said my fifteen-year-old daughter, Jannie, who was still in her pajamas and rubbing her eyes when she came in. “I’ll make my own shake.”

  Ali, almost eight and my youngest, ran in after her and said, “I want French toast.”

  “No sugar-bombing in my kitchen,” Nana Mama said. “Eggs. Protein. Good for your brain.”

  “So’s French toast.”

  I looked at him, said, “You’ll never win that one.”

  Ali acted like the weight of the world was on him. “Can I get two sunny-side up with regular toast?”

  “That you can have,” my grandmother said.

  Bree joined soon after. It was a nice treat, all of us sharing breakfast together on a weekday. All too soon, though, we were out in front of the house helping Damon load the last of his things into our car.

  “That’s it?” I said, shaking my head. “Really not that much.”

  “That surprises you?” Damon asked.

  “I guess it does,” I said. “Back when I left for school, I had twice the amount of stuff, or maybe my stuff was just bigger. That’s it—there’s no huge stereo system anymore. Everything’s gotten smaller.”

  “That’s a news flash, Alex,” my grandmother said impatiently, and she rapped her cane on the sidewalk. “Now, Damon, you come over here and give your Nana Mama some love before you go, but do not pick me up again. You’ll break my back.”

  Damon smirked before bending over and kissing Nana Mama good-bye.

  “I’m so proud of you,” she said, her eyes getting glassy. “You are a gentleman and a scholar.”

  Coming from my grandmother, a retired English teacher and former high school vice principal, that was high praise.

  Damon beamed, said, “That’s because you taught me how to study.”

  “You learned it and ran with it,” she said. “Give yourself some credit.”

  He kissed her on the cheek again and then turned to Jannie. “You keep killing it, you hear?”

  “That’s the plan,” she said, and hugged him. “You’ll come to the invitational, right?”