I, Alex Cross Read online

  By the time we got to Timothy O’Neill’s parents, the only thing I felt we’d accomplished for sure was stirring up bad feelings.

  The O’Neills lived in a brick-and-stone colonial in Spring Valley. It was modest for the neighborhood but still seven figures, I was pretty sure. Like a lot of people up here, the O’Neills were part of the Washington machinery. They struck me as a “good” Irish Catholic family, and I wondered how that jibed with the story of their missing son.

  “We love Timothy very much” was Mrs. O’Neill’s first response to my questioning. “I know what his file says, and I’m sure you’ll think we’re naive, but our love for Timmy is unconditional.”

  We were standing in their living room, next to a baby grand with family photos spread out over the top. Mrs. O’Neill held on to one of Timothy, a larger version of the same picture I had on my bulletin board at home. I hoped for their sake he had just moved away from Washington.

  “You said he was working as a bartender?” Sampson asked.

  “As far as we knew,” Mr. O’Neill said. “Tim was saving up for his own place.”

  “And where was that job?”

  Their eyes went to each other first. Mrs. O’Neill was already in tears. “That’s what’s so very hard,” she said. “We don’t even know. It was some kind of private club. Timothy had to sign a confidentiality agreement. He said he couldn’t tell us anything about it—for his own protection.”

  Mr. O’Neill picked up for his wife. “We thought he was being a little grandiose at the time, but… now I don’t know what to believe.”

  I think he did know what to believe, but it wasn’t my job to convince the O’Neills either way. These people were desperate to have their son back. I wasn’t going to begrudge them whatever it took to get through a difficult interview with two police detectives.

  Finally, I asked to see Timothy’s room.

  We followed the two of them back through the kitchen and attached laundry room to what I assumed had once been a maid’s quarters. There was a separate entrance from the back hall and a bedroom with its own bathroom—small but with lots of privacy.

  “We haven’t touched anything,” Mr. O’Neill said, and then he added almost affectionately, “You can see what a slob he was.”

  My first reaction was that messes are good for hiding things in. The room had as much strewn on the floor as anywhere else. Timothy had never really grown up, had he?

  There were clothes piled everywhere—on the bed, over the easy chair, on top of the desk. Some of it was just jeans and T-shirts, but there was a lot of expensive-looking stuff, too. The one thing he seemed to keep hung up was a collection of suits and jackets, and three leather coats. Two of them were Polo, one Hermès.

  That’s where I found the haystack needle. Sampson and I had been sifting for about fifteen minutes when I pulled a piece of paper out of one of the blazer pockets.

  It had a string of ten letters written on it—like the ones from Caroline’s date book. This one said AFIOZMBHCP.

  I held it up for Sampson to see. “Check this out, John.”

  Mrs. O’Neill stepped back into the room. She’d been waiting outside the door. “What is it? Please tell us.”

  “Could be a phone number, but I’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t suppose Timothy left his cell phone behind.”

  “No. He was attached to that thing twenty-four/seven. I mean, who isn’t these days?”

  She tried a weak smile, and I tried one back, but it was hard. All I could think about was how much more likely it had just gotten that she would never see Timothy again.

  Chapter 15

  JOHNNY TUCCI HAD stuck to a rigid system for survival since the trooper car stopped him on I-95. For starters, he never traveled in the same direction for two days in a row and never spent more than twenty-four hours in any one place. In fact, if the skinny girl working the register at the 7-Eleven in Cuttingsville hadn’t been such an easy, willing young thing, or if he could even remember the last time he’d gotten laid, he probably would have been long gone by now.

  Woulda, coulda, shoulda, he was thinking.

  He was in the middle of his second time around with the register girl when the flimsy door to room 5 at the Park-It Motel opened. Two men in gray suits strolled in like they had a key or something. How the hell had they gotten in the door? Whatever. They were in.

  Johnny jumped about three feet off the bed and pulled the sheet up to cover himself. So did the girl. Liz? Lisl?

  “Johnny Tucci? The Johnny Tucci?”

  One intruder—the speaker—was a white guy, the other Hispanic. Maybe Brazilian? Johnny had no clue who they were, but he sure knew why they’d come to the motel. All the same, he gave it his best. “You got the wrong room, man. Never heard of John whatever-you-said. Now, please get out!”

  The Hispanic guy fired before Johnny even saw he had a gun in his hand. He flinched hard and almost had a heart attack on the spot. When he looked, the girl, Liz/Lisl, was sitting cockeyed against the headboard with a hole in her forehead and blood seeping down to the tip of her nose, then onto her breasts.

  “Jesus Christ!” Johnny fell off the bed more than got off, and then crab-walked himself back into a corner. He’d never actually been shot at before.

  “Let’s try this again. Johnny Tucci?” said the white dude. “The Johnny Tucci?”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay!” He kept his hands up, one of them at the side of his face so he wouldn’t have to see the girl lying there dead and leaking blood. “How’d you find me? What do you want? Why’d you hurt her?”

  The two guys looked at each other and laughed at his expense.

  These guys obviously weren’t Family. They were too “white” for that, even the dark one. “What the hell are you? CIA or something?”

  “Worse for you, John. We’re former DEA. Less paperwork, if you know what I mean.”

  Johnny was pretty sure he did. They weren’t going to write up what had happened to poor Liz or Lisl. What—like she’d tried to pull a gun on them from her pussy?

  The white guy crossed the floor in a couple of fast steps and kicked him a swift one in the groin. “That doesn’t mean we like wasting our time running after pathetic garbage like you, though. Let’s go. Get your pants on.”

  “I… can’t. Where are we going?” Johnny was doubled over, with his hands on his crotch, only wishing he could hurl. It felt like his stomach had turned inside out. “Just… shoot me and get it over with.”

  “Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Join your little girlfriend in the everlasting. Afraid it’s not going to be that easy, my friend.”

  The two guys leaned over and started wrapping him in the motel bedsheet. They pulled the corners up all around, tied them tight. Johnny couldn’t even take his hands off his meat to do anything. Then they dragged him out the door like he was a bag of dirty laundry.

  That’s when he would have started screaming, if he’d had the air for it, because Johnny Tucci had just figured out where they were going, and what was going to happen next.

  Chapter 16

  WHEN CAROLINE’S MOTHER pulled the black Chevy Suburban into the parking area at Rock Creek Cemetery, it was the first time I’d seen her in over twenty years. We’d spoken on the phone about funeral arrangements, but now that it was here, I didn’t know what to expect or really what to say to her.

  I opened the car door myself. “Michelle, hi.”

  She looked the same to me, still pretty, with the same long wild hair, shot through with gray now, half-tamed in a braid twisting down her back.

  It was her eyes that were different. They’d always been so alive. I could see she’d been crying, but they were dry now. Dry, red around the rims, and so very tired.

  “I forgot how much you looked like him,” she said.

  She meant Blake; he and I had always been unmistakably brothers, at least physically, especially in the face. Blake was buried here at Rock Creek too.

  I held out my arm and
was a little surprised that she took it. We started walking toward St. Paul’s, with the rest of the family not far behind.

  “Michelle, I want you to know that I’m handling Caroline’s case myself. If there’s anything you need from me—”

  “There’s not, Alex.”

  It came out quickly, a simple statement of fact. When she spoke again, her voice started to shake. “I’m going to lay my baby to rest…” She stopped to take a steadying breath. “And then I’m going to go back home to Providence. That’s as much as I can handle right now.”

  “You don’t have to go through this alone. You can come stay at the house. Nana and I would like that. I know it’s been a long time—”

  “A long time since you turned your back on your brother.”

  So there it was. Twenty years of misunderstanding coming out, just like that.

  Blake’s addiction had done a lot of the talking for him near the end. He’d cut me out when I got aggressive about rehab, but that was obviously not what he told Michelle, who was using heroin at the time too, even while she was pregnant with Caroline.

  “It was actually the other way around,” I said to her as gently as I could.

  For the first time, her voice rose. “I can’t, Alex! I can’t go back to that house, so don’t ask me to.”

  “Of course you can.”

  We both turned around. It was Nana who’d spoken. Bree, Jannie, and Ali were there too, coming up on either side of Nana, her honor guard, her protectors.

  Then she walked right up to Michelle and put her arms around her.

  “We lost sight of you and Caroline a long time ago, and now we’ve lost her for good. But you are still a part of our family. You always will be.”

  Nana stepped back and put a hand on Jannie’s shoulder. “Janelle, Ali, this is your aunt Michelle.”

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” Jannie said.

  Nana went on. “Whatever happened before today, or whatever happens tomorrow, doesn’t mean a thing right now.” Her voice was filling with emotion, and I could hear shades of the southern Baptist heritage coming through. “We’re here to remember Caroline with all the love we have in our hearts. When those good-byes are over, then we’ll worry about what comes next.”

  Michelle seemed conflicted. She looked around at each of us, not speaking a word.

  “So all right, then,” Nana said. She patted her chest a few times. “Lord, all this grief has given me an awful feeling. Michelle, take my arm, would you?”

  I knew Nana’s heart was breaking too. Caroline was her granddaughter, though she never really got to know her, and gone forever now. Meanwhile, there was someone else here who needed her help. Maybe that’s where I get it, I thought. Sometimes the best, or only, way to take care of the dead is to take care of the living.

  Chapter 17

  MICHELLE DID GO back to her home in Rhode Island that night. I put her on a plane to Providence myself, but I made sure she had my numbers and told her that I hoped we’d hear from her—when she was ready.

  The next morning, I was right back at it, the investigation of her daughter’s awful murder, and possibly the murders of others.

  The first thing I tackled at the office was the phone numbers we’d found at Caroline’s apartment and in Timothy O’Neill’s bedroom.

  My backup plan was to hit up the Bureau for help, but I had a feeling about these numbers. If there was a key to unlocking them, it was probably something that Caroline or Timothy O’Neill could use on a regular basis. I was betting I could do this myself.

  I started by writing out all the lettered strings I had on a piece of paper, just to get them rolling around in my head.

  A simple A-to-Z, one-through-twenty-six substitution didn’t seem right, since anything above J, or ten, wouldn’t apply to a phone keypad.

  But what if it came off the keypad itself?

  I opened my cell on the desk and wrote down what I saw.

  ABC—2

  DEF—3

  GHI—4 (I = 1?)

  JKL—5

  MNO—6 (O = 0?)

  PQRS—7

  TUV—8

  WXYZ—9

  The one and the zero keys didn’t have any letters of their own, of course, but the I and O seemed like intuitive substitutions.

  That still left G and H for number four, and M and N for number six.

  When I used that logic to translate the first string, BGEOGZAPMO, it gave me 2430492760. Then I took the first three digits and Googled them as an area code. But 243 came up invalid.

  It felt too soon to abandon the idea, so I kept going with it. I translated the rest of my list into numbers and lined them all up in a column on the page to see if anything jumped out at me.

  It sure did. Nearly half the numbers started with a two.

  It didn’t take long from there to see that all of those numbers had a zero in the fourth position and another two in the seventh.

  202 is Washington’s area code.

  I went back to the first number and underlined.

  2430492760

  Things were starting to come together. When I looked at the same positions in the non-202 numbers, all but three gave me either 703 or 301, which are for areas of Virginia and Maryland close to DC.

  The final three codes turned out to be from Florida, South Carolina, and Illinois—out-of-town customers, presumably.

  Again, I went back to the first string. If positions one, four, and seven were an area code, didn’t it make sense to look at positions two, five, and eight for the exchange? I started scribbling again.

  2430492760 = 202

  2430492760 = 447

  2430492760 = 3960

  202-447-3960

  Next question—was 447 an actual DC exchange? I grabbed the phone book and found out that it was.

  This was starting to feel like the first good day of my investigation. A very good day.

  Once I’d deciphered everything I had so far, I called a good friend at the phone company, Esperanza Cruz. I knew that the reverse directories we used at work were only good for listed numbers. It took Esperanza maybe fifteen seconds to find the first listing.

  “Okay, now you’ve got me curious,” she said. “This one is for Ryan Willoughby, unlisted. What’s he done? Other than being a walking, talking stiff.”

  I was surprised but not shocked. Ryan Willoughby was the six o’clock anchor for a network TV affiliate here in the Washington area.

  “Esperanza, if you and I were actually having this conversation, I could tell you, but given as how we never spoke today—”

  “Yeah, yeah, story of my life, Alex. What’s the next number?”

  In a few minutes, I had a list of fifteen names. Six of them were familiar to me, including a sitting congressman, a professional football player, and the CEO of a high-profile energy-consulting firm in town. This thing was starting to bubble over, and not in a good way. When I thought about how these men knew Caroline, it made me sick, physically ill.

  My next call was to Bree. She recognized two more of the names. One was a partner at Brainard & Truss, a political PR firm on the Hill; and it turned out that Randy Varrick, who was the mayor’s press secretary, was a woman.

  “Things are about to get real nasty around here,” Bree said. “These are high-resource people, and I’m afraid they’re going to push back hard.”

  “Let them push,” I said. “We’ll be ready for them. In fact, I’m going to make my first call right now. In person.”

  Chapter 18

  HIGH-RESOURCE PEOPLE, and apparently a lot of them were involved. What was this about, and how had it led to the death of Caroline Cross? Where else would it lead?

  It took me less than fifteen minutes to get from the Daly Building on Indiana up to Channel Nine’s offices on Wisconsin. By the time I got there, I hadn’t cooled down one bit. My badge got me past the guard in the lobby, then up to a receptionist on the third floor. A big number 9 hung on the wall behind her, along with poster-si
zed head shots of their news team.

  I showed my badge and pointed at the wall. “I’m looking for him.”

  She pushed a button without taking her eyes off me. “Judy? I’ve got a police officer out here for Ryan?”

  She covered the receiver and spoke to me. “What is this regarding?”

  “Tell him I’ll be happy to share that information with anyone who wants to listen if he and I aren’t face-to-face in the next two minutes.”

  About ninety seconds later, I was ushered past reception, past the news studio entrance, and into a hall of windowed offices someplace in the back. Ryan Willoughby was waiting for me, looking like his tie was a little too tight. I’d seen him dozens of times delivering the news, but now all that polished blond congeniality of his was nowhere in sight.

  “What the hell is this about?” he asked me, after he closed the door. “You come barging in here like Eliot Ness, or Rudolph Giuliani back in his prosecutor days.”

  I held up a picture of Caroline. “It’s about her,” I said in the quietest voice I could manage.

  It took him a second, but I saw a flash of recognition on his face, then a fast recovery. He was brighter than he seemed.

  “Pretty girl. Who is she?”

  “Are you saying you’ve never seen her before?”

  He laughed defensively, and a little more of the anchorspeak came into his voice. “Do I need a lawyer here?”

  “We found your phone number in her apartment. She was murdered.”

  “I’m sorry about that, the girl’s murder. A lot of people have my number. Or they can get it.”

  “A lot of call girls?” I asked.

  “Listen, I don’t know what you want with me, but this is obviously some kind of mistake.”

  Whatever he was publicly, this guy was nothing but a scumbag to me now. It was clear he didn’t care about Caroline and what had happened to her.