Cross Kill

Chapter 30

Kimiko Binx was still crying and refusing to talk to me or to the patrol officers who arrived first on the scene, or to the detectives who came soon after.

Not even Bree could get Binx to make any kind of statement, other than to say sullenly, “Cross didn’t have to shoot. He didn’t have to kill them all.”

The fact was, I had not killed them all. Two of the Sonejis were alive, and there were EMTs working feverishly on them.

“Three Sonejis?” Bree said. “Makes it easy for them to cover ground.”

I nodded, seeing how one of them could have shot Sampson, while another staked out Soneji’s grave, and the third could have driven by Bree and me outside GW Medical Center.

“You okay, Alex?” Bree asked.

“No,” I said, feeling incredibly tired all of a sudden. “Not really.”

“Tell me what happened,” Bree said.

I did to the best of my abilities, finishing with “But all you really need to know is they set up an ambush, lured me, and I walked right into it.”

Bree thought about that, and then said, “There’ll be an investigation, but from what you said, it’s cut-and-dry. Self-defense, and justified.”

I didn’t say anything because somehow it didn’t seem quite right to me. Justified, yes, but cut-and-dry? They’d tried to kill Sampson, and me, twice. But some of the threads of what had happened just didn’t—

“By the way,” Bree said, interrupting my thoughts. “The labs came back on the exhumation.”

I looked at her, revealing nothing. “And?”

“It was him in the coffin,” she said. “Soneji. They compared DNA to samples taken when he was in federal custody the first time. He’s dead, Alex. He’s been dead more than ten years.”

One of the EMTs called out to us before I could express my relief. We went to the Soneji in the far alcove, then the one who’d been crawling away, leaving blood like a snail’s track. They’d shot him up with morphine and he was out of it. They’d also cut off his shirt and found the raised latex edge of a mask that could have been crafted by one of Hollywood’s finest.

After photographing the mask, we sliced and peeled it off, revealing the ashen face of Claude Watkins, painter, performance artist, and wounded idolizer of Gary Soneji.

The second Soneji was up on a gurney and headed for an ambulance when we caught up to him.

We tore open his shirt, found the latex edge of an identical mask, photographed it, and then had the EMTs slice it off him. The man behind the mask was in his late twenties and unfamiliar to us. But as they wheeled him out, I had no doubt that, whoever he was, he’d been worshipping Gary Soneji for a long, long time.

We waited for the medical examiner to arrive and take custody of the dead Soneji before we cut off the third mask.

“It’s a woman,” Bree said, her hands going to her mouth.

“Not just any woman,” I said, stunned and confused. “That’s Virginia Winslow.”

“Who?”

“Gary Soneji’s widow.”

“Wait. What?” Bree said, staring at the dead woman closely. “I thought you said she hated Soneji.”

“That’s what she told me.”

Bree shook her head. “What in God’s name possessed her to impersonate her dead husband and then try to kill you? Did she shoot John? Or did Watkins? Or that other guy?”

“One of them did,” I said. “I’ll put money one of the pistols matches.”

“But why?” she said, still confused.

“Binx and Watkins and, evidently, Virginia Winslow made Soneji into a cult, with me being the enemy of the cult,” I said, and thought about Winslow’s son, Dylan, and the picture of me on his dartboard.

Where was the kid in all of this? Seeing Binx being led out, I thought that if we leaned on her hard enough, she’d eventually want to cut a deal and tell all.

“You look like hell, you know,” Bree said, breaking my thoughts again.

“Appreciate the compliment.”

“I’m serious. Let’s go, let the crime-scene guys do their work.”

“No formal statement?”

“You’ve made enough of a statement to satisfy me for the time being.”

“Chief of detectives and wife,” I said. “That’s a conflict of interest any way you look at it.”

“I don’t care, Alex,” Bree said. “I’m taking you home. You can make a formal statement after you’ve had a good night’s sleep.”

I almost agreed, but then said, “Okay, I’ll leave. But can we stop by Sampson’s room before we go home? He deserves to know.”

“Of course,” she said, softening. “Of course we can.”

I stayed quiet during the ride away from the ambush and shooting scene. Bree seemed to understand I needed space, and didn’t ask any more questions on the way to GW Medical Center.

But my mind kept jumping to different aspects of the case. Where had Watkins and Soneji’s widow met? Through Kimiko Binx? And who was the other wounded guy? How had he come to be part of a conspiracy to kill me and Sampson?

Riding the elevator to the ICU, I promised myself I’d answer the questions, clean up the case, even though it was all but over.

As the door opened, I felt something sharp on my right arm and jerked back to look at it.

“Sorry,” Bree said. “You had a little piece of Scotch tape there.”

She showed me the tape, no more than a half inch long, before rolling it between her thumb and index finger and flicking it into a trash can.

I twisted my forearm, to see a little reddish patch, and wondered where I’d picked that up. Probably off Nana Mama’s counter earlier in the morning, left over from one of Ali’s latest school projects.

It didn’t matter because when we reached the ICU, the nurse gave us good news. Sampson was gone, transferred to the rehab floor.

When we finally tracked him down, he was paying his first visit to the physical therapist’s room. We went in and found Billie with her palms pressed to her beaming cheeks, and her eyes welling over with tears.

I had to fight back tears, too.

Sampson was not only out of bed, he was out of a wheelchair, up on his feet, with his back to us, using a set of parallel gymnastics bars for balance. His massive arm and neck muscles were straining so hard they were trembling, and sweat gushed off him as he moved one foot and then the other, a drag more than a step with his right leg. But it was incredible.

“Can you believe it?” Billie cried, jumped to her feet, and hugged Bree.

I wiped at my tears, kissed Billie, and broke into a huge grin before clapping and coming around in front of Sampson.

Big John had a hundred-watt smile going.

He saw me, stopped, and said, “’Ow bout that?”

“Amazing,” I said, fighting back more emotion. “Just amazing, brother.”

He smiled broader, and then cocked his head at me, as if he felt something.

“Wha?” Sampson said.

“I got him,” I said. “The one who shot you.”

Sampson sobered, and paused to take that in. The therapist offered him the wheelchair, but he shook his head slowly, still staring at me intently, as if seeing all sorts of things in my face.

“F-get him f-now, Alex,” John said finally, with barely a slur and his face twisting into a triumphant smile. “Can’t yah see I got dance less. .sons ta do?”

I stood there in shock for a moment. Bree and Billie started laughing. So did Sampson and the therapist.

I did, too, then, from deep in my gut, a belly laughter that soon mixed with deep and profound gratitude, and a great deal of awe.

Our prayers had been answered. A true miracle had occurred.

My partner and best friend had been shot in the head, but Big John Sampson was not defeated and definitely on his way back.