The People vs. Alex Cross

Chapter 1

I looked in my bedroom mirror and tried to tie the perfect necktie knot.

It was such a simple thing, a ritual I performed every day before work, and yet I couldn’t get it right.

“Here, Alex, let me help,” Bree said, sliding in beside me.

I let the tie hang and said, “Nerves.”

“Understandable,” Bree said, coming around in front of me and adjusting the lengths of the tie.

I have a good six inches on my wife, and I gazed down in wonder at how easily she tied the knot.

“Men can’t do that,” I said. “We have to stand behind a guy to do it.”

“Just a difference in perspective,” Bree said, snugging the knot up against my Adam’s apple and tugging down the starched collar. She hesitated, then looked up at me with wide, fearful eyes and said, “You’re ready now.”

I felt queasy. “You think?”

“I believe in you,” Bree said, getting up on her tiptoes and tilting her head back. “We all believe in you.”

I kissed her then, and hugged her tight.

“Love you,” I said.

“Forever and ever,” Bree said.

When we separated, she had shiny eyes.

“Game face, now,” I said, touching her chin. “Remember what Marley and Naomi told us.”

She got out a Kleenex and dabbed at her tears while I put on my jacket.

“Better?” Bree asked.

“Perfect,” I said, and opened our bedroom door.

The three other bedrooms off the second-floor landing were open and dark. We went downstairs. My family was gathered in the kitchen. Nana Mama, my ninety-something-year-old grandmother. Damon, my oldest child, down from Johns Hopkins. Jannie, my high-school junior and running star. And Ali, my precocious nine-year-old. They were all dressed as if for a funeral.

Ali saw me and broke into tears. He ran over and hugged my legs.

“Hey, hey,” I said, stroking his head.

“It’s not fair.” Ali sobbed. “It’s not true, what they’re saying.”

“Course it’s not,” Nana Mama said. “We’ve just got to ignore them. Sticks and stones.”

“Words can hurt, Nana,” Jannie said. “I know what he’s feeling. You should see the stuff on social media.”

“Ignore it,” Bree said. “We’re standing by your father. Family first.”

She squeezed my hand.

“Let’s do it, then,” I said. “Heads high. Don’t engage.”

Nana Mama picked up her pocketbook, said, “I’d like to engage. I’d like to put a frying pan in my purse here and then clobber one of them with it.”

Ali stopped sniffling and started to laugh. “Want me to get you one, Nana?”

“Next time. And I’d only use it if I was provoked.”

“God help them if you are, Nana,” Damon said, and we all laughed.

Feeling a little better, I checked my watch. Quarter to eight.

“Here we go,” I said, and I went through the house to the front door.

I stopped there, listening to my family lining up behind me.

I took a deep breath, rolled my shoulders back like a Marine at attention, then twisted the knob, swung open the door, and stepped out onto my porch.

“It’s him!” a woman cried.

Klieg lights blazed to life as a roar of shouts erupted from the small mob of media vultures and haters packing the sidewalk in front of our house on Fifth Street in Southeast Washington, DC.

There were fifteen, twenty of them, some carrying cameras and mikes, others carrying signs condemning me, all hurling questions or curses my way. It was such a madhouse I couldn’t hear any of them clearly. Then one guy with a baritone voice bellowed loudly enough to be heard over the din:

“Are you guilty, Dr. Cross?” he shouted. “Did you shoot those people down in cold blood?”

Chapter 2

A black suburban with tinted windows rolled up in front of my house.

“Stay close,” I said, ignoring the shouted questions. I pointed to Damon. “Help Nana Mama, please.”

My oldest came to my grandmother’s side and we all moved as one tight unit down the stairs and onto the sidewalk.

A reporter shoved a microphone in my face, shouted, “Dr. Cross, how many times have you drawn your weapon in the course of duty?”

I had no idea, so I ignored him, but Nana Mama snapped, “How many times have you asked a stupid question in the pursuit of idiocy?”

After that, it took everything in me to tune it all out as we crossed the sidewalk to the Suburban. I saw the rest of my family inside the SUV, climbed up front, and shut the door.

Nana Mama let out a long breath.

“I hate them,” Jannie said as we pulled away.

“It’s like they’re feeding on Dad,” Ali said.

“Bloodsuckers,” the driver said.

All too soon we arrived in front of the District of Columbia Courthouse at 500 Indiana Avenue. The building is a two-wing, smooth limestone structure with a steel-and-glass atrium over the lobby and a large plaza flanked by raised gardens out front. There’d been twenty vultures at my house, but there were sixty jackals there for my rendezvous with cold justice.

Anita Marley, my attorney, was also there, waiting at the curb.

Tall and athletically built, with auburn hair, freckled skin, and sharp emerald eyes, Marley had once played volleyball for and studied acting at the University of Texas; she later graduated near the top of her law-school class at Rice. She was classy, brassy, and hilarious, as well as certifiably badass in the courtroom, which was why we’d hired her.

Marley opened my door.

“I do the talking from here on out, Alex,” she said in a commanding drawl just as the roar of accusation and ridicule hit me, far worse than what I’d been subjected to at home.

I’d seen this kind of thing in the past, a big-time trial mob with local and national reporters preparing to feed raw meat to the twenty-four-hour cable-news monster. I’d just never been the raw meat before.

“Talk to us, Cross!” they shouted. “Are you the problem? Are you and your cowboy ways what the police have become in America? Above the law?”

I couldn’t take it and responded, “No one is above the law.”

“Don’t say anything,” Marley hissed, and she took me by the elbow and moved me across the plaza toward the front doors of the courthouse.

The swarm went with us, still buzzing, still stinging.

From the crowd beyond the reporters, a man shouted in a terrified voice, “Don’t shoot me, Cross! Don’t shoot!”

Others started to chant with him in that same tone. “Don’t shoot me, Cross! Don’t shoot!”

Despite my best efforts, I could not help turning my head to look at them. Some carried placards that featured a red X over my face with a caption below it, one reading END POLICE VIOLENCE and another GUILTY AS CHARGED!

In front of the bulletproof courthouse doors, Marley stopped to turn me toward the lights, microphones, and cameras. I threw my shoulders back and lifted my chin.

My attorney held up her hand and said in a loud, firm voice, “Dr. Cross is an innocent man and an innocent police officer. We are very happy that at long last he’ll have the opportunity to clear his good name.”

Chapter 3

The police officers manning the security checkpoint watched me as I entered the courthouse, the media still boiling behind me.

Sergeant Doug Kenny, chief of court security and an old friend, said, “We’re with you, Alex. Good shoot, from what I hear. Damn good shoot.”

The other three all nodded and smiled at me as I went through the metal detectors. Outside, the horde descended on my family as they fought their way toward the court entrance.

Nana Mama, Damon, and Jannie made it inside first, looking shaken. Ali and Bree entered a few moments later. As the door swung shut, Ali faced the reporters peering in. Then he raised his middle finger in a universally understood gesture.

“Ali!” Nana Mama cried, grabbing him by the collar. “That is unacceptable behavior!”

But with the security team chuckling at him and me smiling, Ali didn’t show a bit of remorse.

“Tough kid,” Anita said, steering me to the elevators.

“Smart kid,” said the young African American woman who’d just appeared beside me. “Always has been.”

I put my arm around her shoulders, hugged her, and kissed her head.

“Thank you for being here, Naomi,” I said.

“You’ve always had my back, Uncle Alex,” she said.

Naomi Cross, my late brother Aaron’s daughter, is a respected criminal defense attorney in her own right, and she’d jumped at the chance to help me and work with the renowned Anita Marley on my case.

“What are my odds, Anita?” I said as the elevator doors shut.

“I don’t play that game,” she said crisply, adjusting the cuffs of her white blouse. “We’ll inform the jury of the facts and then let them decide.”

“But you’ve seen the prosecution’s evidence.”

“And I have a rough idea of their theory. I think our story’s more compelling, and I intend to tell it well.”

I believed her. In just the past six years, Marley had won eight high-profile murder cases. After I was charged with double homicide, I reached out to her, expecting to get a refusal or a “too busy.” Instead, she flew from Dallas to DC the next day, and she’d been standing by me in legal proceedings ever since.

I liked Anita. There was no BS about her. She had a lightning-fast mind, and she was not above using her charm, good looks, or acting skills to help a client. I’d seen her use all of them on the judge who oversaw pretrial motions, motions that, with a few disturbing exceptions, she’d won handily.

But mine was as complex a trial case as she’d ever seen, she said, with threads that extended deep into my past.

About fifteen years ago, a psychopath named Gary Soneji went on a kidnapping and murder spree. I’d put him in prison, but he escaped several years later and turned to bomb-building.

Soneji had detonated several, killing multiple people before we cornered him in a vast abandoned tunnel system below Manhattan. He’d almost killed me, but I was able to shoot him first. He staggered away and was swallowed by the darkness before the bomb he wore exploded.

Flash-forward ten years. My partner at the DC Metro Police, John Sampson, and I were helping out in a church kitchen. A dead ringer for Soneji broke in and shot the cook and a nun, and then he shot Sampson in the head.

Miraculously, all three survived, but the Soneji look-alike wasn’t found.

It turned out there was a cult dedicated to Soneji that thrived on the dark web. The investigation into that cult led me, in a roundabout way, to an abandoned factory in Southeast DC, where three armed people wearing Soneji masks confronted me. I shot three, killing two.

But when police responded to my call for backup, they found no weapons on any of the victims, and I was charged with two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.

The elevator doors opened on the third floor of the courthouse. We headed straight to courtroom 9B, cut in front of the line of people trying to get seats, and, ignoring the furious whispers behind us, went in.

The public gallery was almost full. The media occupied four rows on the far left of the gallery. The front row behind the prosecution desk, which was reserved for victims and victims’ families, was empty. So was the row reserved for my family, on the right.

“Stay standing,” Marley murmured after we’d passed through the bar and reached the defense table. “I want everyone watching you. Show your confidence and your pride at being a cop.”

“I’m trying,” I whispered back.

“Here comes the prosecution,” Naomi said.

“Don’t look at them,” Marley said. “They’re mine.”

I didn’t look their way, but in my peripheral vision I picked up the two assistant U.S. attorneys stowing their briefcases under the prosecution table. Nathan Wills, the lead prosecutor, looked like he’d never met a doughnut he didn’t eat. In his mid-thirties, pasty-faced, and ninety pounds overweight, Wills had a tendency to sweat. A lot.

But Anita and Naomi had cautioned me not to underestimate the man. He’d graduated first in his class from Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley and clerked at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals before joining the Justice Department.

His assistant, Athena Carlisle, had a no less formidable background. A descendant of sharecroppers, Carlisle came from abject poverty in Mississippi and was the first person in her family to graduate from high school. She’d won a full scholarship to Morehouse College, graduated at the top of her class, and then attended law school at Georgetown, where she’d edited the Law Review.

According to profiles of the prosecutors that had appeared the week before in the Washington Post, both Wills and Carlisle were ambitious in the extreme and eager to prosecute the federal government’s case against me.

Why the U.S. government? Why the high-powered U.S. Attorney’s Office? That’s how it’s worked in Washington, DC, since the 1970s. If you’re charged with a homicide in the nation’s capital, the nation is going to see you punished.

I heard shuffling and voices behind me, turned, and saw my family taking their seats. Bree smiled at me bravely, mouthed, I love you.

I started to say it back to her but then stopped when I saw a sullen teenage boy in khakis and a blue dress shirt with too-short sleeves enter the courtroom. His name was Dylan Winslow. His father was Gary Soneji. His mother had been one of the shooting victims. Dylan came up to the bar, not ten feet away from where I stood, pushed back his oily dark hair, and glared at me.

“Frickin’ hell’s in session for you, Cross,” Winslow said, his smile smug and malicious. “Honestly, I can’t wait to see you go down in flames.”

Ali jumped up and said, “Like your dad did?”

I thought Winslow was going to go ballistic and attack my younger son. Damon did too, and he stood up behind Ali.

Instead of taking a swing at Ali, the teen smiled even more malevolently.

“That’s right, kid,” he said coldly. “Exactly like my dad did.”

“All rise!” the bailiff cried. “Superior Court of the District of Columbia is in session. Judge Priscilla Larch presiding.”

A woman in her mid-fifties, with thick glasses and dyed-black hair pulled back in a severe hairdo, Judge Larch stood four foot ten. She was so short she looked almost comical climbing up behind the bench.

But I was not laughing. Larch had a richly deserved reputation for being a hanging judge.

After striking her gavel twice, Judge Larch peered out through those glasses and in a smoker’s voice growled, “The People versus Alex Cross. This court will come to order.”

Chapter 4

Six weeks earlier...

John Sampson tried to remain calm, tried to tell himself that he would be okay with whatever decision awaited him on the other side of wooden double doors on the fifth floor of the Daly Building in downtown DC.

But Sampson couldn’t remain calm. He smelled his own sweat and was almost consumed by anxiety.

His stomach did a flip-flop when the secretary at last nodded to him around five p.m. and said, “He’ll see you now, Mr. Sampson.”

“Thank you,” Sampson said. He got to his feet and, like the therapists had taught him, widened his stance to counter the occasional bouts of vertigo he’d suffered since the gunshot wound to his head.

Sampson walked to the door, trying to exude confidence. He opened it, stepped in, and spotted Bryan Michaels sitting behind his desk, signing documents. Silver-haired and in amazing physical condition for a man in his mid-fifties, DC’s chief of police looked up, smiled perfunctorily, and waved Sampson to a seat.

“If it’s okay, sir, I’d rather stand,” Sampson said.

Chief Michaels’s smile disappeared, and he set his pen down as Sampson approached and stood at ease. The chief leaned back in his chair and studied the big man for several long, disquieting moments, glancing more than once at the scar on the left side of the detective’s forehead.

“You shot well in qualifying, I see,” the chief said at last.

“Not a stellar performance, but I passed, sir.”

“You did,” Michaels said. “And you almost matched your personal best in the physical tests.”

“I’ve worked very hard to be here, Chief.”

Sampson caught Michaels glancing again at the scar on his forehead.

“You have worked hard, John,” Michaels said in a tone that instantly troubled Sampson, made him feel lost and, well, about to be discarded.

The chief went on. “But I also have to use my best judgment in deciding whether or not to return an officer to the field after the kind of trauma you sustained. And I have to ask myself if you will be a liability to other officers in times of crisis.”

Sampson had wondered the same thing, but he said nothing, just gazed at the chief without expression. A beat went by, then two.

Chief Michaels broke into a smile, stood, and offered his hand. “Welcome back, Detective Sampson. You’ve been greatly missed.”

Sampson grinned, grabbed the chief’s hand, and pumped it wildly. “Thank you, Chief. You won’t regret this.”

“I know I won’t,” Michaels said. “You’re an inspiration to many of your fellow officers. I want you to know that.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“You’ll be needing a new partner,” the chief said, his face falling a bit.

There was an awkward moment before Sampson said, “I’m ready for that.”

Chief Michaels studied him a moment and then said, “I hate that there’s a gorilla in the room.”

“Yes, sir. But I believe the gorilla will win out eventually.”

Michaels softened. “I hope so. How is he?”

“Hung out his shingle to pass time until the trial,” Sampson said.

“Give Alex my best. I mean that.”

There was a sharp knock at the door, and in stepped an angular and highly agitated redheaded woman with a detective’s badge on a chain around her neck.

“Fox?” Michaels said, irritated. “I hadn’t asked you in here yet.”

Fox glanced at Sampson, then back at the chief. “I apologize, sir, but Detective Sampson and I, we just pulled a bad one. Kidnapping and shooting at Washington Latin.”

“Latin?” Sampson said. “Ali Cross goes to that school.”

Chapter 5

Ali was badly shaken but physically okay when Sampson found him on the steps of the Washington Latin Public Charter School, his backpack between his knees, wiping away his tears. A patrolman said Ali had seen the entire brutal incident. So had five other students involved in an after-school debate program.

“You okay, buddy?” Sampson said, folding his huge frame down beside Ali and putting an arm around the boy’s shoulders. It was mid-October, chilly with night falling, and he was shaking.

“My dad’s coming,” Ali said in a flat tone. “So is Bree.”

“Tell me what happened.”

Before he could, Detective Ainsley Fox said, “Detective Sampson? Could I have a word?”

She was standing at the bottom of the steps, frowning at him.

“Hang tight,” Sampson said. He patted Ali on the back, got up, and climbed down the steps to her.

In a low, scolding voice, Fox said, “You may have forgotten during your leave that we have rules against physical contact with minors.”

Sampson squinted at her. “The kid’s like my own, Fox.”

“But he’s not your own, and the rules are the rules. Shot in the head or not, you’ve got to play by them or suffer the same kind of consequences your old partner now faces.”

Sampson gritted his teeth, said, “Fox, there are five other kids to interview by the rules. They’re right over there.”

Fox hesitated, put off, but then lifted her chin and strode toward the cluster of other upset children. Sampson returned to Ali in time to see Alex Cross and Bree Stone running past the crime scene tape. Alex grabbed up Ali and hugged him fiercely. Ali hugged his dad back just as intensely and started to cry.

When they’d both calmed down, Sampson again asked Ali to describe what he’d seen.

Ali said it was dark out when he exited the charter school behind a group of his friends on the debate team. He was the youngest and shortest by far, so his view was blocked when the screaming started. Then they all started running in different directions. Ali didn’t follow them. He stood his ground and got out his cell phone.

“You called 911?” Bree asked.

“No, I videoed them.”

“You videoed them?” Sampson said, impressed.

“I wasn’t going to fight them,” Ali said, pulling out his phone and starting the video.

The footage was shaky at first, but then steadied, showing three men in dark coveralls and masks dragging a screaming blond teenage girl across the terrace in front of the charter school toward Second Street.

“That’s Gretchen Lindel, Dad,” Ali said. “She’s, like, a junior.”

On the screen, the kidnappers almost had Gretchen Lindel to the sidewalk. A woman came barreling into view from the left. She was spitting mad and went straight at the masked men.

“Ms. Petracek,” Ali said softly. “Our debate coach.”

On-screen, one of the men let Gretchen Lindel go, pivoted, and, with zero pause, shot Ms. Petracek in the face at point-blank range. Sampson pulled back at the coldness of it.

The courageous teacher of English and public speaking at Washington Latin died in a heartbeat. Her body fell hard. The gunman turned to Gretchen, who was being forcibly held between two parked cars.

Ali said, “Here’s the worst of it.”

Siren wailing, blue lights flashing, a Metro DC patrol car came screeching up in front of the kidnappers. The men yanked open the cruiser’s doors, threw Gretchen in the back, and jumped in themselves, and then the patrol car, tires squealing and siren still wailing, sped out of sight.

Chapter 6

Shortly after she took me in following the death of my mother down south, Nana Mama caught me sad and lazing around on her front porch, doing just about nothing.

I was ten. Nana asked me what I was doing, and I told her the truth.

“Breathing,” I said.

“Not hard enough,” Nana Mama said. “I know you don’t like it here, Alex, but give it time. You will. Between now and then, I want you busy. You up to nothing but breathing? You come see me. I’ll give you something to do.”

“What if I don’t feel like doing anything?”

My grandmother, eyebrows raised and hands on hips, said, “In my house, you don’t get that option. And you know what? When you’re all grown up and gone from here, you won’t get that option either, ’less you marry some rich girl or win the lottery.”

Ironically, almost four decades later, my grandmother, in her nineties, did win the lottery — the Powerball, in fact. She took the single-payout option, paid a whopping tax bill, and immediately formed a foundation to promote literacy, aid the poor, and provide hot-breakfast programs at local churches.

She also made sure my kids could have whatever education they aspired to. Even then, Nana Mama had enough money left over that the entire Cross family could have sat on the front porch doing just about nothing until we were all pushing up daisies.

But that wouldn’t fly with my grandmother. She was all about having a purpose in life that bettered and benefited others. After months on suspension pending my murder trial, and even though I’d been helping Anita and Naomi with my defense, Nana Mama felt I needed to do more than figure out ways to keep myself out of jail. She was right. I’d caught myself “just breathing” too often for my own comfort.

I’d decided that if I couldn’t be a cop for the time being, I had to have a reason to get out of bed, a way to be useful to someone besides myself. So I returned to my first profession, psychological counseling.

I fixed up an office in the basement that had its own separate entrance, put up my framed master’s and doctorate diplomas from Johns Hopkins, and hung out my shingle after nearly two decades in law enforcement.

I called every social services agency in the metro area, offering my skills and asking for referrals. Luckily I’d gotten a handful, and then a few more, and my practice slowly built.

Two days after Ali witnessed a kidnapping and a murder at Washington Latin, I was down in my office and heard a soft knock at the outer door.

I glanced at my scheduling book: Paul Fiore. First visit. Right on time.

I went to the door and opened it, saying, “Welcome, Mr. Fio—”

The stocky man who stood before me was five ten, maybe two hundred pounds, with curly dark hair, brown eyes, olive skin, and a baby face. I couldn’t have guessed his age. But by his clothes, I certainly knew his calling.

“I’m sorry, Father Fiore,” I said. “Please, come in.”

Chapter 7

The catholic priest looked chagrined as he came into my office. “I should have told you on the phone, Dr. Cross. I just didn’t know what you’d think.”

“I’d think I’d be glad to meet you,” I said, shutting the door behind him. “And how can I help?”

Father Fiore smiled, but it was strained.

“Please, Father,” I said, gesturing toward an overstuffed chair in my office.

“This is odd,” the priest said, sitting down and looking around.

“How so?”

“I’m usually the one hearing confessions.”

I smiled and took my chair. “If you don’t mind my asking, doesn’t the church provide counselors?”

“It does.” Father Fiore sighed. “But I’m afraid this is a delicate subject, Dr. Cross, one they frankly might not understand even in the enlightened age of His Eminence Pope Francis.”

“Fair enough,” I said, picking up a yellow legal pad. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

Fiore told me he got the calling to the priesthood when he was fourteen. He was ordained at twenty-two and worked in some of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. He made such an impression there that the church transferred him to Washington, DC, where he split his time between the parish of St. Anthony of Padua and the cardinal’s office, working to fund programs for the poor.

“My grandmother’s foundation makes grants to similar programs,” I said.

Fiore’s smile was genuine. “How do you think I got your name?”

I had to laugh. Leave it to Nana Mama to get me a priest for a client.

“She’s quite a lady, your grandmother,” Fiore said. “Won’t take no for an answer, and yet extraordinarily generous in spirit.”

“That describes her to a tee. But let’s get back to why you’re here.”

The priest’s face fell a bit as he continued his story. He explained that earlier in the year, he’d attended a fund-raiser with the cardinal at a hotel in Georgetown. He’d found a young woman named Penny Maxwell alone and weeping in a back hallway. He stopped to console her.

Mrs. Maxwell was a widow. It was the second anniversary of her husband’s death in Afghanistan, and try as she might, she couldn’t keep her emotions bottled up.

“She was suffering, grieving,” Fiore said. “So I did what a priest does. I listened and talked and prayed with her.”

After the party, he walked with her along the Georgetown Canal and spent three hours listening to her describe the challenges of her life as the widow of a gifted army surgeon and the mother of two wonderful boys.

Fiore was amazed and inspired by how courageous Penny was, by how determined she was to raise her sons right, and by how much she wanted to honor her late husband’s memory in their lives. To his surprise, Fiore learned Penny went to St. Anthony’s for services from time to time.

“Penny started bringing the boys to Mass, and I got to know them,” he said. “We did things together, hikes, a trip to the beach, and it was like I experienced a dimension of life that I’d thought I understood, but didn’t.”

“And what dimension was that?” I asked.

“Love,” Fiore said, sitting forward, hanging his head, and rubbing his hands. “I didn’t just fall for her, Dr. Cross. Penny became my best friend, and I became hers. And those boys are just... every time I leave them, Dr. Cross, I feel as if my heart has a new hole in it.”

“Does Penny know how you feel?” I asked.

He nodded. “We both feel this way.”

“Have you slept together?”

“No,” he said firmly. “We both believe in the sanctity of marriage.”

“But the church does not believe in married priests,” I said.

He nodded miserably, said, “So what do I do, Dr. Cross? Leave the only calling I’ve ever had or leave the only woman I’ve ever loved?”

Chapter 8

An ashen-faced and distraught woman walked to a bank of microphones.

“Please,” Eliza Lindel said in a tremulous voice. “I beg you, from a mother’s broken heart, if you know anything about my daughter’s kidnapping, come forward, call the police or the FBI, and give me hope. Gretchen is a sweet, innocent young woman. Please help us find her before it’s too late.”

The feed cut away to a local station’s news desk and an anchor who began prattling on about the kidnapping.

In her office downtown, Bree hit the mute button on her remote. She didn’t want to hear the talking heads sum up the case. She knew the situation cold.

The critical first forty-eight hours of the investigation had elapsed with little progress. Part of that was due to the fact that the FBI had stepped in to take over the case because it was a kidnapping and Gretchen had likely been taken across state lines. Bree and DC Metro had been largely cut out at that point, especially after the FBI reviewed the tape of the snatching and saw the police car. As far as she knew, there’d been no ransom note, no attempts by the kidnappers to contact anyone.

“Chief?” Sampson said, knocking at her door. “We’ve got something.”

Before Bree could reply, Detective Fox barged in front of Sampson and said, “I think we should be reporting this to the FBI. They’re the higher authority now.”

Bree’s expression hardened. Ainsley Fox had never met a regulation or rule she didn’t worship as gospel.

“Detective Fox,” Bree said. “Last time I looked, your badge said DCMP, and you report to me. Anything you have, I want to hear.”

“For Christ’s sake, Fox,” Sampson said when the detective hesitated. “I’ll tell her if you won’t.”

Sampson took a seat, opened a file, and began by noting that all DC Metro patrol cars carried GPS trackers that transmitted their locations to databanks. A check of those banks showed no Metro cruisers in the vicinity of Washington Latin at the time of the kidnapping and murder.

“But Ali Cross’s video clearly shows a patrol car with all the right markings and decals of a Metro rig,” Sampson said. “Someone detailed that car to perfection, even configured the sirens and blues exactly the way we do.”

“Where does that take us?” Bree asked. “To body shops? Places that rent stunt vehicles to the movies?”

Sampson glanced at his new partner and said in a grudging tone, “At some point, maybe, but Detective Fox has turned up a more promising lead.”

Fox almost smiled. She pushed back her lank hair, got out her laptop, typed something, then spun the screen around. Bree saw a picture of a blond woman, late twenties or early thirties, earth-mama sort, no makeup but very attractive in a wholesome way. She was vaguely familiar.

“Cathy Dupris,” Fox said. “She disappeared from her home in small-town southern Pennsylvania ten weeks ago.”

Bree remembered, then said, “The neighbors claimed an ambulance came, and men dressed in EMT uniforms rushed into her house and took her out on a stretcher. But there was no record of a 911 call or a private ambulance request.”

“And no ransom note,” Fox said, nodding.

“What’s the connection?” Bree asked.

Fox called up another photograph of another pretty blonde, Delilah Franks, a bank teller in Richmond, Virginia, who’d vanished six months before.

Bree said, “Don’t they think the boyfriend’s responsible?”

“She was having an affair behind his back,” Fox said. “But maybe that’s just a coincidence. Maybe Delilah was taken for some other reason.”

“You think you know that reason?” Bree said.

“Show her the pair first,” Sampson said.

Fox typed a third time and showed Bree a split screen featuring school portraits of two teenage girls, both blond, both very cute.

“That’s seventeen-year-old Ginny Krauss on the left,” Fox said. “Alison Dane, sixteen, is on the right. Both girls disappeared nearly seven months ago from rural Hillsgrove, Pennsylvania.”

Bree frowned. “I haven’t heard anything about this.”

“Because the families and police up there have kept it mostly quiet,” Fox said. “The parents of both girls are devout Christians. They and the sheriff’s investigators believe the girls ran away because of their parents’ extreme views about the evils of lesbianism.”

“The girls are gay?” Bree said.

“And in love, evidently,” Fox said, and she typed again.

She pulled up a photograph of a blue Toyota Camry in a muddy clearing in the woods. The rear and front windows were blown out, and the driver’s door was ajar, revealing shattered glass on the seats.

“The day after the girls failed to come home, sheriff’s investigators found Alison’s car at a popular party and make-out spot in a clearing way out in the state forest,” Fox said, typing some more. “Now here’s the change in pattern.”

Bree sat forward when she saw a handsome little boy.

“Timmy ‘Deuce’ Walker,” Fox said. “Twelve years old. The same day the girls go missing, Deuce vanishes from his neighborhood, which is less than a mile from where the car was found. A month later, a hiker discovers Deuce’s remains in the woods roughly six miles from where the girls’ car was.”

“You think they’re all related?”

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Fox said, typing.

The screen jumped to a web page that displayed the photos of the missing women against a backdrop of chalk outlines of bodies on a pavement. Across the top of the page there was a platinum wig that looked like Marilyn Monroe’s hairdo the night she sang “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy.

Below the wig, letters that looked like melting red wax spelled out the site’s name: www.Killingblondechicks4fun.org.co.

Chapter 9

I studied father Fiore and saw the priest’s anguish. I took a deep breath, let it out, and said, in sincere sympathy, “That is a doozy of a dilemma, Father.”

“It’s torn me apart,” Fiore said, tears welling. “I want what I can’t have.”

I didn’t know what to say; not at first, anyway.

But then I asked, “Do you think God lays out a path for all of us?”

“I do,” he said without hesitation.

“So you think you were meant to meet Penny and her sons?”

“I believe that’s true. But why? As a test of my faith?”

“I don’t think anyone could ever question your faith, Father. And I don’t think this is a lesser-of-two-evils situation. More like the greater of two goods.”

“I don’t follow,” Fiore said.

I set my notepad aside. “If you stay a priest, you’ll sacrifice personal happiness to continue to help the poor and the members of your congregation. But if you leave, you could find similar, rewarding work, marry Penny, and raise her sons with as much love as possible, which is a noble thing too.”

He thought about that. A sharp knock came at my outer door.

“I should go,” Fiore said, looking at the time.

“They can wait.”

“No,” the priest said, standing. “You’ve given me much to pray about, Dr. Cross. I appreciate it. I really do.”

I shook his hand. “You’ll let me know what you decide, Father?”

“I will,” he said. “And say hello to your grandmother for me.”

I followed him into the hallway and to the door. When I opened it, John Sampson was standing there. The two men nodded to each other, then Father Fiore climbed the stairs and left, and John came in.

“You here for counseling?” I asked Sampson, shutting the door behind him.

“Got that covered,” he said, going into the office and taking my chair. “I’m here off the record — way off the record. Not supposed to be talking to you about cases at all, per order of your wife and Chief Michaels. But my new, uh, temporary partner is driving me up the wall, and I needed your perspective.”

“Honored to give it,” I said, glancing at the scar on Sampson’s forehead, remembering how he’d looked in the moments after he was shot by a follower of the late Gary Soneji. It was a miracle I was even talking to him.

John brought me up to speed on the crimes that appeared related to the disappearance of Gretchen Lindel. Then he logged on to my Wi-Fi and said, “My partner, Ainsley Fox, was in a chat room where people were discussing the kidnappings and murders, and she found this hyperlink.”

He showed me the screen and a link that read XRAYBLOND.BIZ.

He clicked it, and it took him to a site called Killingblondechicks4fun.org.co. I studied it several moments before asking, “Is this for real? I read that fake sites often use a double thing like that, dot org and then dot co.”

“Hold that thought,” Sampson said.

He showed me several pages on the website dedicated to kidnappings and killings. The writing was atrocious and, according to John, had many of the facts wrong. But each page did contain links to legitimate news articles about the cases, as well as clips from local TV broadcasts.

“Why does the original link not match the name of the website?” I asked.

Sampson smiled. “You noticed. There’s more. When you Google either site, or use any other search engine, you get nothing. No results.”

I thought about that. “So it’s part of, what, the dark web?”

The dark web was a secret part of the Internet accessible only via encrypted software.

“Hold that thought too,” Sampson said, clicking on Reenactments. The screen jumped to a page of MPEG thumbnails.

He clicked on one titled “Delilah Goes Down.” A picture of Delilah Franks, the Richmond bank teller, came up, a photo I’d seen on the web page dedicated to her disappearance.

The image dissolved into a poorly lit, shakily shot video of a blonde being chased through the woods; it was taken from a camera mounted on her pursuer’s chest or head. You could hear footsteps that matched the jerking motion of the camera, which quickly got close enough to the woman to show the back of her filthy, tattered dress and reveal that she was barefoot and bleeding.

She seemed to sense how close her pursuer was; she looked over her shoulder and screamed hysterically before jumping down the side of a steep embankment. She slipped, tumbled, and sprawled in the mud at the bottom.

“Don’t,” she wept, pushing herself up on all fours in the muck, shaking her head back and forth. “Please, not that. Haven’t I been through enough?”

The camera focused down on her, and a computer-altered voice said, “It’s never enough, Delilah. Once is never enough.”

Chapter 10

A knife blade appeared in the camera frame, obsidian black and curved tightly back toward an ornate knuckle guard and the fingers of the cameraman’s gloved right hand. The wicked-looking blade began a slow, sinewy dance in the air. The chest-mounted camera jiggled as it moved even closer to the shaking woman.

The woman looked up, saw the knife, shrieked in terror, and tried to scramble away. The camera swung crazily after her and blurred the action for several moments.

When it stilled, a gloved left hand had the hysterical woman by her blond hair, and the right hand held the knife so the curve of the blade’s cutting edge was poised just above the crown of her head.

“Do blondes have more fun, Delilah?” the computer-altered voice said.

Before she could respond, the screen froze on the image of the two hands, the knife, and the back of her blond head. Superimposed over the image, an icon of a lock appeared.

“Dark web,” Sampson said. “Encrypted. Completely out of our league.”

“Are all the videos like this?” I asked. “Blocked at the moment of crisis?”

“Yup,” Sampson said.

“Think he killed her?”

“That’s the point. You’ve got someone with a high-def GoPro camera mounted on a chest harness, wearing gloves, and carrying that knife. He turns loose the screaming woman, chases her down, and takes her right to the point of complete terror before the screen locks. You’re left hanging, wanting to see the ending.”

“And how do you do that?”

“I don’t know. There’s no promo offer anywhere on the site that I can see, but Fox found references to the site and comments about it on an open bulletin board for hackers and coders. They’re extensive, and disturbing.”

Sampson called up the hackers’ website, and it was quickly apparent there was a significant cheering section for Killingblondechicks4fun.

I want in to that site, read one comment from Lone Star Blondes Must Die. I can contribute. Help. Break some skulls, even.

Death to all blondes, read a post by Brunette Lover. Platinum damages the brain.

Scalp every one of them bitches, read another by 1889B1.

There were, according to Sampson, more than two hundred posts on the hackers’ board in that vein from ninety unique posters, all callous, merciless, and hateful. Why? Because of a woman’s hair color? What the hell was that all about?

I said, “Any idea who built it? Owns it?”

“None,” Sampson said. “But don’t you know a cyberwizard at the FBI?”

“I know a cyberwitch at the FBI,” I said. “I can call her if you—”

I heard the door at the top of the basement stairs open.

“Alex?” Bree called. “Are you down there?”

Sampson shut his laptop. I got up fast and called out, “Still with a client, hon. I’ll be up soon.”

“Oh God, I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you’d be done by now.”

The door shut and clicked. I didn’t like deceiving Bree, but I didn’t want to get John in trouble on his third day back on the job, and it felt so good to be on a case with him again.

“I’m sliding out of here,” Sampson whispered, getting up.

“It’s dark out, and I’ll turn off the outside light over the stairwell.”

“It’ll be like I was never here,” he said. He stopped at the door to gaze at me. “That felt good in there — you know, natural, me and you.”

I smiled. “It did feel good. It does.”

“You’re gonna beat this, Alex. We’ll get back to the routine again.”

“Natural you and natural me,” I said, and we bumped fists. Then I opened the door and the best friend I’ve ever had slipped off into the night.