Criss Cross

Chapter 20

“Good thing I came along when I did,” Craig said, sounding matter-of-fact rather than smug, “or that young lady would have been dead. Or one of you.”

Our astonishment was complete as we lowered our pistols.

“Jesus, Kyle,” Sampson said. “Where did you come from?”

“Back there,” he said, walking toward the body. “I’ve been watching this guy. But I had no idea what he was going to do even after he disappeared through that hedge.”

“Wait,” I said. “You’ve been following him?”

“Last night and all day today,” Craig said.

“You know who he is?” Sampson said.

“Definitely,” Craig said, holstering his weapon, getting out a flashlight, and shining it on the dead man’s face. He removed the mask and said, “Pal of yours, Sampson.”

We gaped at Bernard Mountebank, the shop owner who’d given us the runaround when we asked about the tie.

“What?” Sampson said, dumbfounded.

“Right?” Craig said, sounding pleased with himself.

Hearing sirens in the distance, no doubt summoned by Craig’s shots, I said, “How did you get onto him?”

“I knew he was bad from the get-go, kind of smelled it, especially after he sent us all to see that old man at the cupcake shop. So I dug into him a little. He’s not Bernard Mountebank, and he’s not from England. Meet Gerald St. Michel, suspected serial sex offender from the British Virgin Islands.”

He told us St. Michel had entered the United States after obtaining a green card by marrying a woman from Northern Virginia. St. Michel hadn’t said anything to her about his criminal past, nor did he mention that in his application for permanent-resident status or in his dealings with his business partner Nathan Daniels.

But Craig had found documents through an FBI database that showed St. Michel had changed his name to Mountebank a year before leaving the Virgin Islands. Craig had contacts on the islands who put him in touch with a police detective there.

“He hadn’t heard that St. Michel had gotten resident status,” Craig said. “No one had ever contacted the BVI about him. If someone had, the detective would have said that St. Michel was a suspect in several sexual assaults down there, often of female tourists.”

The detective believed St. Michel had abducted five different young women over the course of seven years. In each case, he’d kept the woman as a sexual slave for three days, then drugged her and let her go.

“He always wore a mask,” Craig said, gesturing at the one he’d set by the dead man’s head. “And he was careful to clean the women up. But the detective said there was no doubt in his mind that St. Michel was his man.”

“You think he’s the one who killed Kissy Raider?” Sampson asked.

“He’s looking awful good for it to me,” Craig said.

I took a flashlight from my pocket and shone it inside the van, where there was a kit waiting: strips of duct tape for his victim’s mouth and ankles, hanging above a pair of handcuffs linked through a bracket welded into the van’s wall.

“He had it worked out. Looks just like what happened to Kissy,” Sampson said.

“But it’s not,” I said. “Kissy was restrained by nylon webbing and eyebolts.”

“Close enough,” Craig said.

“Maybe,” I said, opening the passenger door of the van.

The dome light had been turned off, but I beamed my flashlight under the seats, across the dash console, and into the glove compartment.

Then, as the first Fairfax County Sheriff patrol cars pulled into the parking lot, I went through St. Michel’s pockets. I found nothing.

“Is it the same guy?” Sampson said after I’d taken a step or two back from the scene.

“I don’t know,” I said. “If it is, where’s the bleach solution? More important, where’s the tie he was going to strangle her with?”