Double Cross

Chapter 51

I SAW THE LIGHT on my phone flashing, but I didn’t answer calls during therapy sessions. So I let it go for the moment, and then I worried about it.

“Who was that I saw on my way in here?” Anthony Demao was asking. I had to juggle my clients’ schedules around some to accommodate my new lifestyle. “Another cuckoo clock like me?”

I smiled at Anthony’s usual irreverence. “Neither of you is cuckoo. Well, maybe a little.”

“Well, she may be crazy, a little crazy, but she sure is good-looking. She gave me a smile. I think it was a smile. She’s shy, right? I can tell.”

He was talking about Sandy Quinlan, my schoolteacher patient. Sandy was attractive, a good lady, maybe a little cuckoo, but who wasn’t these days?

I changed the subject. Anthony certainly wasn’t here to talk about my other patients. “Last time, you started to tell me about your army unit’s push toward Basra,” I said. “Can we talk about that today?”

“Sure.” He shrugged. “That’s what I’m here for, right? You fix cuckoo clocks.”

After Anthony Demao left, I checked my voice mail. Bree. I caught up with her on her cell.

“Good timing,” she said. “I’m in the car with Sampson. We’ll come get you. Guess what? It looks like you were right again. Must get boring.”

“What was I right about?”

“Copycat. On the G.W. Parkway with those kids. That’s what DCAK says, anyway. Says he did FedExField but not the two murders on the overpass.”

“Well, he would probably know.”

I met Bree and Sampson on Seventh Street and climbed into the back of her Highlander. “Where are we going?” I asked as she pulled out in a hurry.

Bree explained as she drove, but I had to interrupt her halfway through. “Hold on, Bree. He used your name? He knows about you too? What are we doing with that?”

“Nothing, for now,” she said. “I’m feeling pretty special, though. How ’bout you? You feeling honored?”

Sampson shrugged at me in a way that said he’d already had the same conversation with her and obviously with the same result. Bree showed no fears, at least I’d never seen any.

“By the way,” Bree said, “he claims he models himself after people. Any ideas on that?”

“Kyle Craig,” I said. It just came out. “Let me think about it some.”

Kitzmiller had provided Bree with the name Braden Thompson, a systems analyst with a firm called Captech Engineering. We double-parked outside Captech’s dull, modern-looking building, then took the elevator up to the fourth floor.

“Braden Thompson?” Bree asked the receptionist, and held up her MPD badge and card.

The woman picked up her phone, her eyes still on Bree’s creds. “I’ll see if he’s available.”

“No, no. He’s available, trust me. Just point the way. We’ll find him. We’re detectives.”

We walked calmly and quietly through the bustling office but didn’t make any less of a scene for it. Secretaries’ heads turned, office doors opened, and workers checked us out as if we were here with the take-out food.

A white plastic plaque etched with Thompson’s name marked a windowed office on the north side of the building. Bree opened the door without knocking.

“Can I help you?” Braden Thompson was about what you’d expect for somebody working here: paunchy, fortysomething white guy in a short-sleeved shirt and tie, possibly a clip-on.

“Mr. Thompson, we’d like to talk with you,” Bree said. “We’re Metro Police.”

He looked past her at me and Sampson. “All three of you?”

“That’s right.” Bree was inscrutable. And the truth was, none of us wanted to miss this interview. “You’re an important guy.”