Double Cross

Chapter 23

THE NEXT DAY’S Violent Crimes meeting had only one, very important agenda item, at least from my point of view. Bree asked me to sit in, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to be there. The meeting was heavily attended, standing-room only, and the place was buzzing with hot rumors.

Captain Thor Richter held up the start for the arrival of the deputy mayor, who was twenty minutes late and who spoke not a word the whole time he was there. The fact that Larry Dalton attended, however, sent a clear message on this one: Everyone’s watching the case. This was just what the maniac killer seemed to want, but it couldn’t be helped. No way could we disinvite the deputy mayor.

Bree started off by telling the group everything she and I had recently established. Our late-night stint with Jeffery Antrim had yielded a few more Abu Ghraib images but nothing else of real substance. Still, it was a good start, I thought. I assumed the killer had left it as a message for us. Or me?

“So then we opened our lens a little wider, for derivative elements elsewhere,” Bree said, and brought up a PowerPoint slide.

“Here’s a transcription of the speech the killer gives in the first half of the videotape. And this”-she changed slides-“is a speech from a 2003 video made by someone calling himself the Sheik of America.”

“Is it the same guy?” somebody in the back asked.

“No,” Bree said. “Actually, it isn’t. But he’s obviously borrowing from more than one source. Abu Ghraib. Now this. Statistically, the two speeches are about sixty percent similar.”

“Hang on a minute. Why do you insist it’s not the same guy?” Richter wanted to know. He had a snide way of making his questions sound like accusations.

I saw a brief flash of annoyance on Bree’s face, probably invisible to everyone else. “Because the Sheik was arrested last year. He’s cooling his heels in a New York prison,” she said. “Let’s move on, shall we?”

Another detective raised his hand like a schoolkid. “Do we have a bead on nationality one way or the other at this point?”

Bree nodded in my direction. That was my cue. “A lot of you know Dr. Alex Cross. I’m going to ask him to run down the basic points of our profile as it stands now. The killer knows about Dr. Cross. In case you haven’t heard, he was mentioned by name on the tape.”

“How could I resist an invitation like that?” I said, and got a few laughs.

Then we went right into the heavy stuff.