Detective Cross

Chapter 12

Bree slapped the bubble on the roof, hit the sirens, and said, “Hold on, Alex.”

I braced my feet on the passenger side. She glanced in her side view and stomped on the gas.

We squealed out of 5th Street, ran the red light at Pennsylvania, and headed toward the Mall with Chief Stone calling the shots over a handheld radio.

“He says it’s at the Korean War Memorial, but clear the MLK and Lincoln Memorials, too,” she said. “Close Ohio Drive and Independence Avenue Southwest. I want to know the second those five are clear. Am I clear?”

“Yes, Chief,” the dispatcher said.

“Call IT,” she said. “Find out if they got a trace on the call that just—”

Her cell phone started ringing. She glanced down, said, “Forget it, they’re calling me.”

Cradling the radio mike, she snatched up her cell, said, “Chief Stone. Did you get it?”

Bree listened and said, “How much damn time do they need?”

A pause, then, “You’d think in this day and age, it would be a hell of a lot less, but okay. If there’s a next time I’ll try to keep him talking.”

Hanging up and letting her phone plop in her lap, she let out a sigh of exasperation. “A minute ten at a minimum to hone in on an on-going cell signal. He spoke to me for twenty-one seconds.”

“They have no idea where he is?”

“Somewhere in DC but they can’t pinpoint the call. And even if they could, he has to be using a burner.”

“You’d think,” I said.

Six minutes later, Bree threw the car in park near the Ash Woods on Independence Avenue.

“You should stay here until you’ve got Mahoney at your side.”

“Agreed,” I said. “Be safe.”

She kissed me and said, “I’ll let the pros take care of the dangerous stuff.”

I watched her get out and walk toward the traffic barrier closing off the west end of the National Mall. She couldn’t be seen bringing me into a Metro investigation while I was on suspension.

Mahoney, however, could bring me in as a consultant. I left the car a few minutes later when he arrived with the FBI’s bomb squad and a dog team of three.

The wind was out of the southeast, so Mahoney sent the dogs between the Lincoln Memorial and Korean War Veterans Memorial, a dramatic, triangular space with nineteen steel statues of larger than life soldiers on patrol, some emerging from a loose grove of trees and others in the open, walking across strips of granite and low-growing juniper.

The FBI dog handlers spread out and released the bomb sniffers. Muzzles up, panting for scent, they cast into the wind toward the statues. Back and forth they ran, coursing through the trees and the steel patrol soldiers. I stood beside Bree, looking around to spot my favorite part of the memorial: three statues crouched around a campfire, set on a granite slab inscribed with THE FORGOTTEN WAR.

“C’mon,” Bree said in a low voice. “Find it.”

At the northeast end of the memorial, two of the dogs circled a low, dark wall that read FREEDOM IS NOT FREE. They returned to their handlers waiting on the walkway. The third shepherd took a longer loop downwind of the MLK Memorial before trotting back to his handler and the others.

“Rio and Ben are not picking up anything here,” a handler said on the radio. “And Kelsey wasn’t smelling anything at MLK. We can run the Lincoln if you want us to.”

“Yes,” Bree said. “Better safe than sorry.”

Mahoney said, “This the boy who cried wolf?”

“An effective tactic,” I said. “Gets us all worked up, calls us to action. He probably gets a kick out of—”

The bomb exploded behind us.