Criss Cross

Chapter 70

Bree moved toward the morgue door as she said, “It was a good thought. But I’ve got places to be.”

“Not yet,” I said, then I looked at Dr. Abbott. “The FBI stores some of their caseload here, doesn’t it?”

“They do, here and in Alexandria.”

“Are there by any chance three other heads here? One female, Asian? And two males, one Caucasian, one Hispanic?”

“Yes, they’re here,” she said. “But technically, we should have written permission for you to examine them.”

“I was there when all three of those heads were discovered, working as a special consultant to the FBI.”

Special Agent Tillis and Bree nodded in support.

Sampson said, “It’s true.”

“They’re in a separate area. I’ll have to go get them.”

Dr. Abbott was back quicker than I’d expected, pushing a metal cart holding the three heads: the Asian female head put in our car during the Diane Jenkins kidnapping investigation, the male Caucasian head put in the locker in the subbasement of Dwight Rivers’s anthill, and the Hispanic male head that rolled out of Rivers’s Porsche before it blew up.

Abbott opened all three evidence bags, and we stared from the heads on the cart to pictures on Tillis’s laptop.

“My God,” Tillis said, putting her hand to her mouth. “Marty was framed.”

“He was indeed,” I said, walking to the heads, and gesturing to each one in turn. “Carlos Octavio, Ji Su Rhee, and Gor Bedrossian.”

Dr. Abbott frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“Sex traffickers whose corpses were found beheaded on a yacht last year. An FBI agent named Martin Forbes is being held for their murders. But now it is clear these heads were all moved around and planted by the real killer while Forbes was behind bars.”

“Unless Marty had an accomplice,” Sampson said.

“Who?”

“M? Pseudo-Craig? How do we know Forbes is not—”

“He’s not,” Agent Tillis said sharply. “This kind of savagery? Taking people’s heads? That is not Marty Forbes. He may be guilty of a lot of things, but this is not anywhere in his makeup.”

“I agree,” I said. “Forbes should get out of that cell.”

Tillis smiled. “That would be a start.”

“There was a finger with an engagement ring and a wedding band found with the Asian woman’s head, Dr. Abbott,” I said. “Did it belong to Diane Jenkins?”

Dr. Abbott pulled up a file on the computer. “The rings were Mrs. Jenkins’s, but no, the DNA of the finger didn’t match hers. We still don’t know whose finger it was.”

Bree’s phone buzzed. She turned away and answered.

“So who are those others?” Sampson asked. “The six heads?”

I said, “I’m betting DNA from three of them will match the three unidentified bodies found with the bodies of these three aboard that slave ship. The others? I don’t know. But there have to be open cases of headless bodies out there.”

Bree turned around, upset. “That was BATF. The bomb that killed Officer Petit was radio-controlled.”

It took a moment for me to digest that and consider the implications. “He was watching us,” I said. “M.”

“I know,” Bree said, puffing her lips. “Which means he could have targeted all of us when we went through that abandoned building. But he didn’t. And he didn’t when I went back through the structure alone. And he didn’t wait for you to be in there, Alex. M chose to detonate the bomb when Nancy Petit was in that building. Why?”

Before any of us could reply, four different telephones started chirping, buzzing, and ringing, all of it echoing through the morgue.