Criss Cross

Chapter 99

He was in his mid-forties, athletically built, with pale skin and facial bruises. He wore an olive workman’s shirt flecked with sawdust. A white hard hat rested on the desk near his right elbow. There was a carpenter’s tool belt beside it.

His neck was thick. His pale head was completely bald, his lashes were fine and blond, and his steady eyes were ice blue. I had never seen the man before in my life, but I knew who he was just the same.

“M,” I said. “Where’s my son?”

M took me in with those eyes, which spoke of violent desire and something profoundly evil. “He’s buried deep. The bugs are probably already on him.”

My worst fear hit me like a blow to the solar plexus. My knees jellied. Ali? Gone? “No,” I mumbled. “Why?”

M said nothing, just tilted his head slowly left and then right, studying me. It was as if he were mentally recording every twitch and ripple of grief passing through my body. The longer he gazed at me, the more his eyes brightened. The barest smile came to his lips.

I understood. The man was enjoying himself. He was a sadist, and in my experience, sadists liked to play with their prey. It was part of the power trip.

Feeling stronger for that understanding, I straightened up, said, “You’re lying.”

“Am I?”

“Yes.”

He shrugged. “When I left Ali, he was doomed. It really doesn’t matter when he goes for good, not him or your grandmother or your wife or your daughter out there at Ned’s beach house in Delaware. In my mind, Cross, you and yours are already bittersweet memories.”

He’s equivocating, I thought, feeling another surge of hope. Ali had been alive when M left him. I just had to keep him talking to find out where and how long ago. “What’s your real name?”

“It’s whatever I’m calling myself at any given moment. I have found that a name really doesn’t matter in the long run.”

I glanced beyond him at the thin curtains billowing as the wind and rain came in the open window. He must have come out of the Morses’ house and across the scaffolding.

M reached back and shut the window. The thin curtains settled.

“You’re here to kill me?” I said.

“Hate to say it again, but you are a big disappointment. Time to move on to new and bigger challenges.”

“Who are you really? Why are you doing this? I think the doomed man has a right to know before he dies.”

He smiled outright. “Who am I really? Why am I doing this? I am a multitude of names and purposes, Cross. But all the world really needs to know is that I bested the greatest detective on the planet, the Sherlock Holmes of his time, at his own game and on his own turf. And too many times to count.”

My mind raced back years and years, and I remembered a Washington Post Magazine profile of me and the writer saying something ridiculous like that.

“You read that damn article years ago?” I said.

“And in my spare time, I’ve been playing you ever since. Plotting, executing, outfoxing. All while you bumbled and choked at every turn. World’s greatest detective.” He snorted. “I don’t think so.”

Despite the put-down, I realized M, or whatever his name was, had just told me quite a bit about himself, intrinsic things. He’d shown me the cracks in the facade and perhaps given me tools to widen those cracks.

“You won,” I said. “It’s true. You beat me. Whatever your name is, whatever your reason, I suppose you are now the greatest criminal on earth.”

He made a low humming noise in his throat but said nothing, just watched me.

“It follows, doesn’t it?” I said. “You defeat the best detective, you’re number one.”

After a moment’s pause, he said, “I suppose it does follow, yes.”

“They’ll be talking about you for years.”

M hummed again.

“Right there with the immortals,” I said. “John Wilkes Booth. Ted Bundy. Lee Harvey Oswald. John Wayne Gacy. Kyle Craig.”

M made a clucking sound, said, “I am more than all of them combined.”

“You’re not too far off. They’ll write books about your life. Maybe make a movie. But that will be long after you’re dead.”

M said nothing, and he never took his eyes off me.

I said, “Do you know they have a place where they bury people like you?”

“You don’t understand, Cross. There’s no one like me.”

“But there are. Sadists. Serial killers. Assassins. Predators so vicious, whose crimes are so heinous, that their own relatives refuse to retrieve their bodies for proper burial. Cemeteries refuse the bodies too, something about not wanting them to defile a sacred place. So you and all your buddies are taken to this remote corner of Marine Base Quantico and buried under nameless headstones. I thought you’d want to know where you’re going to end up eventually.”

As I spoke, I watched his eyes shift from impassive to soulless.

“Many other men have made the mistake of trying to get inside my head,” M said, raising the pistol. “They had no idea what I was capable of, and neither do you.”

Starting in the pit of my stomach, terror swept through me.

I held up both palms, said, “Please, don’t shoot, M—”

“Shut up,” he said, losing all affect, turning asocial, amoral, and moving his gun to aim at my face. “Alex Cross, welcome to the dead.”