Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

CHAPTER 103

“You woke me out of a perfectly good sleep to ride in a sardine can?” John Sampson groaned, trying to get his massive frame into Mahoney’s Subaru at around four in the morning. He wore a snorkel jacket, hood up, and peered at me blearily from inside the fur trim. He took the travel cup of coffee I offered him.

“Need help checking out a potential crime scene before I call in an evidence team,” I said, putting the Forester in gear. All-wheel drive and weighed down with Sampson’s and my combined four hundred and thirty pounds, the car moved like a mini tank into the tracks other cars had made going up and down Sampson’s street.

“Potential crime scene?” Sampson asked, annoyed.

“I don’t know exactly where the crime scene is, John,” I explained. “That’s why I need you. To help find it.”

He groaned, drank the coffee. “Why do I feel like I’m two hundred moves behind you, Alex?”

“Because in this case you are,” I said, and I filled him in, finishing with the information that members of Al Ayla had likely pulled nerve-gas components off a freight train stopped near the entrance to the tunnel system.

“I know where that is.” Sampson grunted. “Remember running out of there when we were kids?”

“Probably the only time I’ve ever beaten you in a race,” I said.

“Found a body in the right-of-way there six or seven years ago.”

I’d forgotten, but now I nodded and said, “Emily Rodriguez.”

“Poor little thing,” Sampson said. “What was she, seven? Son of a bitch tortured her something awful before he killed her.”

I flashed on Hala’s daughter, also seven, arching against the electric current, and said, “But what do you think? Freeway side of the tracks, or M Street?”

“Freeway,” Sampson said. “M Street, you’re gonna need boots. It’s a good walk to the tracks and they’ve got construction going there on that off-ramp they’ve been building forever.”

“But the freeway side is super-steep going down to the tracks,” I reminded him. “Fifty-five-gallon drum weighs a lot, and being up on the freeway is just too visible, even in a blizzard. I’m thinking they went in on the M Street side, big walk or not.”

“Hell, what do I know?” Sampson said. “I’m just along for the ride.”

The snowbanks along Eleventh Street were as high as I’d ever seen them, like in pictures of Anchorage or Nome. Sampson and I had to strain to spot the security fence where Eleventh Street crossed over the tunnel’s mouth.

I parked right in the middle of the street above the tunnel, threw on the hazard lights, told Sampson to move the car if someone came along. Before he could grumble about that, I got out, went to the snowbank, and crawled up it to the fence.

I got out my Maglite, shone it down through the chain links, and immediately saw footprints on both sides of the track where it entered the tunnel. Farther back on the bank facing M Street, the snow had been pounded down, leaving a path five or six feet wide.

I snatched up my cell phone, called Metro dispatch, and requested an evidence wagon and full team to join me at the corner of Eleventh and M Streets. Lucy, the dispatcher, a friend of mine, said it might be an hour before they could get the team there, what with all the snow.

“John Sampson and I will secure the scene and wait for them,” I said. “Thanks, Lucy.”

Snapping shut my mobile, I sat down on the snowbank and edged out, then started sliding. I hit the pavement, landed upright, and was walking back to the idling Subaru, cleaning the snow off the seat of my pants, when I heard a heavy engine backfire and then rumble to life southeast of me, toward M Street.