Double Cross

Chapter 67

WHAT SHOW AM I MISSING? I wondered. I jumped up from the table, my pulse already racing.

“Who left this?” I asked the people in line. “Did anybody see who put this note down here?”

The woman whose book I’d just signed pointed back into the crowd. “She went thatta way, Sheriff!”

“What did she look like?” I asked. “You sure it was a woman?”

“Um… straight dark hair. Black shirt. Jeans. I think? Like everybody else here. Looked female.”

“And glasses!” someone else said. “She had a blue back-pack!”

“Alex”-Bree came back in my ear-“what’s going on over there? Did something just happen? What the hell happened?”

“Bree, we’re looking for a woman. Definitely a female. Black shirt, jeans, glasses, a blue backpack. I need you and Sampson to cover the exits. Let Baltimore PD know what’s going on. She left me a note from DCAK.”

“We’re on it!”

A ripple of excitement spread inside the crowd as I began to push my way through a tightening knot of people. Not everyone wanted to let me pass, either. Several of them closed in on me, trying to find out what was happening, where I was going, asking me questions I didn’t have time to answer at the moment.

I waved them off as best I could. “This isn’t a game now! Anyone see a woman in a black shirt and glasses go this way?”

A kid smelling of marijuana giggled out a response. “Man, that’s half the people here.”

The crowd shifted again, and I thought that I saw her-at the far end of the lobby. I moved the kid and a few others out of my way. “Let me through here!”

“Bree!” I was running now. “I can see her. She’s tall. White. Carrying the blue backpack.”

“And female?”

“I think so. Could be a disguise.”

When I reached the next corner, the suspect was already more than halfway down a long corridor, running toward the exit at the far end.

“Police! Stop! Stop right there!” I shouted at her, and I had my gun out too.

Whoever she was, she didn’t even look around as she slammed through the door. It swung back hard, then burst into an opaque web of broken glass.

“East parking lot!” I told Bree and Sampson. “She’s outside! She’s running! It’s a woman!”