Cross the Line Read online

“And a touch of curry powder,” Nana Mama said. “That and the way the onions and the chicken skin get so crispy? I’d pay for a meal like this.”

  “Nana?” Ali said. “Did you check the lottery?”

  Nana Mama had been playing numbers since I was a little kid. It was one of her few vices. Every week since I’d moved into her home all those years ago, she’d played a number.

  “Already looked,” I said. “No one won Powerball. It’ll be up over fifty million the next draw.”

  “No, Dad,” Ali said. “The charter-school lottery.”

  My grandmother said, “Ali wants to go to Washington Latin, and I want him to go. He’ll be challenged academically in a charter, just as Jannie has been.”

  “I should get in, right, Dad?” Ali said. “I scored ninety-six percent in math.”

  “In the ninety-sixth percentile in math,” Nana Mama corrected him.

  “And ninety-one percent, uh, tile, in reading,” Ali said.

  “That will get you at least one more number in the lottery.”

  “Two more,” Nana said. “He’ll have a good chance.”

  Ali grinned down the table at me. He was such an affable brainiac, interested in so many subjects it was sometimes hard to believe he was only seven. “I’m getting in if I have to go down the chimney,” he said.

  “Always better to go in the front door,” Bree said.

  She was up clearing dishes. I joined her, and we cleaned the kitchen to a high gloss that pleased Nana Mama enough for her to go out to watch NCIS, her latest favorite television show. Bree looked ready to join her, but I said, “Take a walk in the rain with me?”

  Bree smiled. “Sure.”

  The air was hot and saturated with the light rain that had begun falling. It felt good to walk in it, loosened up my legs a little after I’d eaten so much.

  “What did Michele Bui have to say?”

  “Nothing that pins the murders on Le, but she gave us enough promising leads to make it worthwhile,” Bree said. “She says he does have a Remington 1911 in a forty-five caliber. Several, evidently. And he had mentioned Tommy McGrath numerous times in the past few months, and always in anger. Le told Michele that Tommy was persecuting him. It’s amazing how they squeal when someone’s getting close.”

  “I know,” I said. “Listen, Michaels offered me chief of detectives.”

  Bree stopped and beamed at me. “Really? Oh my God, Alex. This is big.”

  “I know.”

  “You should do it. You deserve it, and I think you’d be great at it. Kind of like Tommy was, a mentor, an ally for every detective in Metro.”

  We started walking again. “I’ve thought of that. It’s appealing on that level.”

  “You’d also have more regular hours for the first time in longer than you’ve known me,” Bree said. “Jannie’s gonna be a sophomore. She won’t be home forever.”

  “I know,” I said. “And I’d get to see all of her races and attend science fairs with Ali. It’s really tempting.”

  Bree stopped again. There were raindrops on her cheeks that looked like tears. I brushed them away.

  “I hear a but coming,” she said.

  “There’s always a but coming.”

  “And yours is?”

  “Right here,” I said, patting my rump.

  “You’re avoiding the issue,” she said.

  “I am. Let’s go back.”

  “Not before you kiss me,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re kind of sexy in the rain.”

  “That so?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, and she got up on her tiptoes, put her arms around my neck, and kissed me long and deep.

  “Wow,” I said. “I’m going to have to walk in the rain more often.”

  She grinned and started strolling away coyly. “Can you imagine me in a steamy-hot rain forest, Chief Cross?”

  “Vividly,” I said, and we both laughed our way back to the house.

  I went upstairs to our bedroom and punched in the number for my recently found long-lost father. He answered on the second ring.

  “Haven’t heard from you in a bit, Alex,” my dad said.

  “You either, Dad. Retirement got you busy?”

  “Picking up more work than I can handle with the Palm Beach County prosecutors,” he said, sounding as if he couldn’t believe it.

  “Why does that surprise you?” I said. “They may have thrown you out of sheriff’s homicide, but they’re not going to waste talent.”

  “I’m still pinching myself I’m not in prison.”

  “You paid your dues. You became a good man, Jason Cross or Peter Drummond or whatever it is you’re calling yourself these days.”

  “Pete’s fine,” he said. “End of that. What’s up with you and the family?”

  I told him about the job offer.

  He listened and then said, “What turns you on, son?”

  “Being a detective,” I said. “It’s what I’m good at. Being an administrator—not so much.”

  “You can always delegate,” he said. “Stick to the stuff you’d enjoy about being COD and get rid of the rest of it. Negotiate it with your chief up front.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’ll sleep on it.”

  “Sounds to me like you’ve already made your decision.”

  Chapter

  18

  On the eve of battle, he always changed his identity to suit his role. That night he thought of himself as John Brown.

  Brown rode in the front passenger seat of a tan panel van that bore no markings. Perfect for a predator. Or a pack of them.

  “Seven minutes,” Brown said, rubbing at a sore knee.

  He heard grunts from behind him in the van and then the unmistakable ker-thunk of banana magazines seating and the chick-chink of automatic weapons feeding rounds into breeches.

  They left Interstate 695 and crossed the bridge over the Anacostia River, heading toward the part of DC few tourists ever ventured. Drugs. Apathy. Poverty. They were all here. They all festered here, and because they were an infection, they had to be cut out, the area doused with antibiotics.

  They left the bridge, headed south on I-295 and then east again on Suitland Parkway. They exited two miles later and went south of Buena Vista.

  “Be smart and disciplined,” Brown said, pulling a sheer black mask down over his face. “Nothing gets taken, and nothing gets left behind. Agreed?”

  Grunts of approval came from the blackness of the van behind him. Brown leaned over and took the wheel while the driver put on his mask.

  A female voice in the back said, “Work the plan.”

  “Smart choices, smart fire,” a male said.

  “Surgical precision,” another male said.

  Brown pressed the microphone taped to his neck. “Status, Cass?”

  His headphones crackled with a woman’s voice

  “Good to go,” Cass said. She was in the van trailing them.

  Brown said, “Fifty seconds out.”

  More rounds were seated in chambers. A few soldiers coughed or blew their noses. The tension in the van was remarkably low, given the task ahead. Then again, the men and women following Brown were highly trained. This was neither a new drill nor an unfamiliar assignment.

  They pulled onto a spur road that hooked around back to the west, where it met the Lincoln Memorial Cemetery. The van stopped where three streetlights had gone dark thanks to Crosman pellet guns two of his men used the night before. Brown’s driver killed the headlights. The rear of the van opened, and four men dressed head to toe in black spilled out.

  Brown got out after them. Before clicking shut the passenger-side door, he said, “Oh three thirty.”

  The driver nodded and drove away. The second van disgorged its passengers as well, and soon eight men and two women were climbing up and over the wall and into the cemetery. They turned on night-vision goggles. They wove through the green shadows and tombstones on a route that had been scoute
d repeatedly in the past three weeks. The intelligence was solid. So was this entry and exit route.

  Now it was just a matter of executing the plan.

  With his sore knee, Brown struggled to keep up, but he soon joined the others strung out along the tree line as they looked across a junky parking lot toward a dark and abandoned machine-tool factory. He listened, heard the purr of gas-fired electric generators, several of them, which was all the evidence you really needed to know that there was more to that relic of a factory than met the eye.

  “See them, right there?” Cass whispered. “Two by the door, one on either end? Just like I told you.”

  Cass was a big woman in her early thirties with short blond hair, and she was extraordinarily strong from years spent training in CrossFit. She was also one of the most competent and loyal people Brown had ever met. He’d had her scout the machine shop, knowing she’d do the job right.

  He turned up the magnification on his night-vision, peered across the lot, and spotted the first two guards. They were lying on mattresses on either side of a double door. A third smoked a cigarette at the far corner. The fourth sat on his haunches at the opposite end of the building.

  “Formation is the same,” Brown murmured into his microphone. “Cass and Hobbes, take the center. Price and Fender, the flanks.”

  They padded softly toward their prey. The two guards sleeping at the doors didn’t have a chance to stir or make a peep before Cass and Hobbes snapped their necks. And the two watching the corners of the factory had no warning as Price and Fender came up behind them, flipped loops of piano wire over their heads, and crushed their throats.

  Chapter

  19

  In the misty August dawn, six patrol cars with lights flashing formed a broad perimeter around an abandoned machine-tool factory in Anacostia. Despite the early hour, small groups of people were standing outside on stoops and sidewalks, peering at the old brick building as if it were some cursed place.

  Bree, Sampson, and I had responded because we were closest, and we found the two patrolmen who’d made the discovery shaken.

  They laid out the situation, which began with an anonymous call to 911 and ended with what they’d found in the old factory.

  “We saw enough to fall back and call in the cavalry,” one said.

  “You did right,” I said. “Show us.”

  The officers led us around the rear of the building. We could hear generators rumbling inside when we turned the corner and saw the first strangled man sprawled ten feet away on gravel and weeds.

  The piano wire that had killed him was embedded in his flesh. Early twenties, Hispanic, better than six feet tall and well over two hundred hard pounds, he wore a black wifebeater, baggy denim, expensive Nike basketball shoes, and lots of gold bling.

  “Took somebody awful strong to do this,” Bree said.

  “You know it,” Sampson said.

  I dug through the victim’s front pockets and came up with cash and a vial of pinkish powder.

  “Tastes like meth,” I said after dipping a gloved finger into it.

  There was something odd about the angle of the dead man’s hips, so I pushed the body forward. Nothing on the ground. But when I lifted the tail of his shirt, there was a 9mm Ruger in a concealed-carry holster at the small of his back.

  “He never got the chance to go for his gun,” I said.

  “So somebody awful strong and awful sneaky quiet,” Bree said.

  There were three other dead men outside the factory. The two by the doors were African American and had suffered broken necks. The one at the far corner was Caucasian and had also been strangled with piano wire. All of them were buff. All of them were armed. Not one of them carried an ID.

  “So how did it work?” Sampson asked. “One killer?”

  “He’d have to be a ninja or something,” I said. “I’m thinking four.”

  “At the same time?” Bree said.

  I looked around, saw no lightbulbs in any of the exterior light fixtures.

  “At the same time and in the dark,” I said. Then, gesturing toward the steel doors, I asked, “If they were guards, what were they guarding?”

  Sampson went to the near door, turned the knob, and pushed. The door creaked open. We got out Maglites and, pistols drawn, entered the abandoned factory. I led, my beam flickering down the cement-floored hall to swinging double doors, which I pushed through.

  Big machine tools had once occupied the large open space. You could see the outlines of them on the floors beneath a film of grit and dust; you could smell the oil of them in the air. There was also a faint smell of engine exhaust.

  Pigeons flew through broken windows two stories above us. The sun was starting to light up the area, but I kept the flashlight on, peering around, seeing that about halfway across the factory, the vault met the walls of a second story. In the space below that upper floor, there were two large gas-fired electrical generators idling, the source of that exhaust smell.

  “No one move,” Bree said.

  I turned and found her studying the factory floor. She scuffed at the grime with the toe of her shoe and then turned her light back the way we’d come.

  “We’re leaving footprints here,” she said. “But not back in the hallway. It’s been swept. Maybe mopped.”

  I got what she was saying and trained my flashlight on the floor by the double doors. The floor there was clean as well. On either side of the doors, there was a cleaned path about twenty inches wide that ran the length of the room tight to the wall; each ended at a steel industrial staircase.

  We didn’t need the flashlights to see that the stairs climbed to two catwalks and that the catwalks led to doors, one at either end of the second story. We walked along the left path, our flashlight beams finding mounds of junk, old pipes, conduits, and metal fittings, all coated in filth.

  But the steel staircases looked freshly swept. The catwalk too.

  One door was ajar, and I could see light shining beyond.

  “Alex?” Sampson said. He’d stopped on the catwalk behind me and was shining his light down at the factory floor and onto a fifth dead man sprawled on his belly there.

  “He’s been shot in the head,” Bree said, focusing her beam on the nasty exit wound at the back of his skull. “I’m calling in a second forensics team.”

  “Smart,” I said, shifting my attention to the open doorway. I moved closer and pushed the door inward, revealing a short passage that was blocked from floor to ceiling and wall to wall with black, heavy-gauge plastic sheeting.

  There was an industrial-strength vertical zipper in the sheeting and two small square windows through which light was blazing. I stepped up, looked through one of the windows, and felt my stomach fall twenty stories.

  “Alex?” Bree said from behind me. “What is that?”

  “An air lock,” I said, twisting away from the window.

  She must have caught the shock on my face, said, “What?”

  “Call in two more forensics teams,” I replied, hearing the tremor in my voice. “Better yet, call the FBI, Ned Mahoney. Tell him we need a team of the best from Quantico. And have them bring chemists and hazmat suits.”

  Chapter

  20

  By the time my old friend and partner Ned Mahoney and two FBI chemists arrived, there were news satellite trucks setting up and news helicopters circling overhead.

  I was on the phone with Chief Michaels, having just given him an overview of what we’d seen inside.

  “Jesus,” he said. “The FBI will take this over, won’t they?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Which brings me to your question from last night.”

  “Okay?”

  “I’m honored, but my place is in the field, and right now it’s inside this factory.”

  “Goddamn it, Cross, I need someone managing my detectives.”

  “Chief, they’re bringing me my hazmat suit. I’ll call when we’re out and know the full extent of things.”

&nb
sp; I hung up before he could challenge me. I went to the FBI van, where Mahoney, his chemists, and Sampson were climbing into protective suits.

  “How many did you see?” Mahoney asked.

  “At least five more bodies,” I said.

  “Wait until the cable shows get hold of this,” Sampson said.

  “They already have,” said Bree, coming up behind us and eyeing the hazmat suits. “Someone needs to talk to them.”

  “Once we know what to tell them,” I said. “You coming?”

  She made a sour face and shook her head. “I’d get claustrophobic in one of those things. And we don’t even know what’s in there yet.”

  “Which is why we have to go look,” I said, and I kissed her.

  I donned the hooded visor. The temperature outside was pushing ninety, and inside the suit, it had to be well over one hundred degrees as we started back into the factory. Sampson let the chemists go through the air lock first. I heard one of them inhale sharply.

  “Be careful in here,” he said. “No sudden moves.”

  “Believe me, there won’t be,” I said, and I ducked through the flaps of the air lock into a room set up as a sophisticated laboratory.

  The FBI chemists were already studying the mind-boggling array of equipment and the various chemical processes that had been under way at the time of the massacre. Sampson and I went to the five dead people in the room, two women and three men, sprawled by various workbenches.

  They wore hospital scrubs, lab goggles, booties, and surgical hats and masks. Every one of them was shot either through the head or square in the chest.

  I scanned the floor all around, said, “I haven’t seen a cartridge casing yet.”

  “No,” Sampson said. “They policed their brass, swept their way out.”

  “Professional gunmen,” I said.

  Mahoney and the chemists came over.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  Pitts, one of the chemists, said, “It’s no Walter White setup, but this has the makings of a serious drug lab. Meth and ecstasy.”