Criss Cross

Chapter 48

Three days after the run-in with Dwight Rivers, as I entered George Washington University Hospital, I thought about the Meat Man and the tornado. Even all these years later, I was still awestruck at the way it had passed within two hundred yards of me and Randall Peaks, tearing apart outbuildings but leaving the slaughterhouse untouched.

I spotted John Sampson coming down the hall toward me and waited for him.

“Mahoney tell you anything?” I said.

“Just to be here. Sixth floor.”

Since the night we found the head in Rivers’s bunker, we’d been kept completely in the dark about the case. All we knew was what we heard from the media reports, which were sketchy because Mahoney’s team was keeping a tight lid on the details.

The night before, I’d been watching a piece on the local news that featured the Shenandoah County sheriff and a Virginia State Police captain, both of whom were angry about being excluded from the Rivers investigation, when I got a text from Ned telling me to be at the hospital at nine the next morning.

Mahoney was waiting outside a hospital room for us. “His attorney’s in there.”

“Seeing things clearer?”

“Clear enough that you’re here, but do me a favor?”

“Anything.”

“Next time you get a self-destructing message from M, simultaneously squeeze the sleep button and the home button on your phone. It will take a screenshot and put it in your photos folder.”

“Really?”

“That’s what Rawlins says to do.”

Before I could tell Mahoney that I was grateful for his show of confidence, Sheila Cowles, Dwight Rivers’s attorney, came out of his room. A tall, skinny woman in her forties, Cowles adjusted her blazer and said, “I advised him not to speak to you until he’s feeling better. But he wants to talk to you so he can give you his version of events sooner rather than later.”

“What we wanted to hear,” Mahoney said, and the three of us followed her inside.

Rivers was in a hospital bed with the back raised slightly. Monitors chirped around him. An IV ran into his left arm. His right ankle and lower leg had been broken badly in the crash and that leg was in a cast. His face was swollen, but not enough to obscure the deep blue, intelligent eyes that scanned us as we entered.

Mahoney and Sampson held up their badges. Ned identified me as an FBI consultant.

Rivers studied me, then said, “You the one who saved my life?”

He’d bitten his tongue in the crash, so it was a little hard to understand him, but I nodded.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

Mahoney turned on the video app on his phone, set it in a little stand on a cabinet facing the patient, and said, “Your attorney says you want to talk.”

“Want to help. Any way I can.”

That surprised me. What was Rivers’s game? The right play would be silence, wouldn’t it?

Mahoney said, “Mr. Rivers, before you say anything, you should know you have the right to remain silent.”

“I know. But I did not kill anyone.”

Sampson said, “Sir, we found the decapitated head of an unidentified male in the third subbasement of your bunker, and another head — an unidentified Hispanic male in his forties — fell out of your Porsche after you crashed the car.”

“I heard that. I didn’t know it was there.”

Rivers claimed he’d spent much of that day in his basement office in the house, working on his computer and engaging in a series of phone and FaceTime meetings with executives at companies in which he invested. He said he was on the phone when the dark panel van appeared in the rain and stopped at his garage.

Rivers said he got so many deliveries that he kept a sign on the inner garage door that told drivers to leave packages there if they were addressed to him but put the packages in the front hall of his bunker if they were marked Prep.

“So you just leave that bunker open?” Mahoney asked, incredulous.

“During the day. Wouldn’t get any work done if I didn’t. Never been a problem before. I live in rural America, you know? People leave their houses unlocked here.”

Sampson said, “What was the delivery?”

“I don’t know exactly. I buy a lot of things online. And there’s a bunch of locals who work for me.”

“Building your anthill,” Mahoney said.

He stiffened. “Free country. Man’s got a right to spend his money any way he wants.”

I wanted to press Rivers on that, try to get him to talk about the paranoia that seemed inherent in spending a fortune to build a doomsday fortress in western Virginia, but before I could, Ned said, “You have security cameras on the driveway.”

“Two motion-sensor cameras at the drive entrance, one near the garage. They feed to a server in my house office. All the others feed to hard drives in the anthill.”

“Do we have your permission to look at them?” Mahoney said.

I squinted. Permission? Two heads had been found. The FBI must have already looked at those feeds. They must have already torn Rivers’s bunker apart.

Rivers said, “You are free to look at any and all of my security recordings.”

“Can you tell me what you think we’ll see when we look at the hours in question?”