Double Cross

Chapter 83

MY STOMACH HAD NEVER been tied in so many knots, not that I could remember, anyway. DCAK was bad enough, but now I was sure Kyle Craig had been added to the mix, and I couldn’t figure out why, or where this freight train could be headed. Nowhere I wanted to go.

The drive over to Nineteenth and Independence was a paparazzi nightmare of the sort that had probably killed Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed in a dark, scary tunnel in Paris. We cut diagonally through the city toward Southeast, sirens wailing and an unbelievable entourage following us the whole way. Hell, we were like the pied pipers of DC, with trailing rats that wanted nothing more than to take our picture and run it in the National Enquirer. If they were gambling we wouldn’t stop to issue traffic violations right now, they had that right.

Six MPD units were already at the scene when we got there, and they had closed off the main intersections to foot and vehicle traffic.

But what exactly was this scene? What had happened here?

No obvious clues. The neighborhood was a mix of residential and industrial. Two lines of newly refurbished row houses extended along both Nineteenth and Independence from the northwest corner. I remembered that I’d actually read about this project in the paper, all primary colors and funky angles. Just the extra touch of visual drama our killer would go for. The bastard was making a movie, wasn’t he? Shooting it all in his head.

The new St. Coletta School was across the street in one direction, and the Armory Building in the other. It was a huge area to cover-a giant haystack, with somebody’s body for a needle. Or, God willing, a living victim this time. Was that a possibility? Maybe DCAK wanted a change of pace.

More squad cars arrived, over a dozen of them, and then I stopped counting. I wondered when Kitz and his people would get here. We needed the FBI techies on this, all the help we could possibly get.

First thing, we made the residential buildings our priority, working in teams of two and knocking on every door up and down the street. Everything else had to wait, including any attempt at crowd control. The scene was already too crazy-camera crews matched us step for step, shooting from every angle.

We hadn’t been searching long when one of the uniformed officers called out, “Detectives. Something over here. Detectives!”

Bree and I ran to see what was up. The house in question was bright yellow, with large single-pane windows facing out onto Nineteenth Street. The front door was ajar and had been heavily gouged around the doorknob and faceplate. It looked like somebody had recently broken in.

“Good enough for me,” Bree said. “Sufficient evidence of a break-in. Let’s go.”