The People vs. Alex Cross

Chapter 42

Four weeks later...

Striking her gavel twice, Judge Priscilla Larch peered out through thick-lensed glasses and in a gravelly voice said, “The People versus Alex Cross. This court will come to order. Sergeant Holm, you may seat the jury.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” the bailiff said, and he went out.

“I’m praying we chose right,” my niece Naomi said.

Anita Marley nodded stiffly and looked to her opening arguments, not bothering to watch the five men and seven women who held my fate in their hands now filing into the courtroom and taking their places in the jury box. I understood why. Anita was still upset with me about jury selection.

During voir dire — the questioning of potential jurors by the prosecution and defense prior to jury selection — we’d disagreed over two picks: juror five and juror eleven. Five was a man in his seventies who had something wrong with his spine. His upper back was twisted and hunched. He walked slowly with a cane and had to turn his shoulders and rib cage to look up at you.

Juror five had also been sharp in his answers, especially when it came to describing his general skepticism about nearly everything in life. An electrical engineer before retiring, he said he took his time making decisions, tried to get to the truth before he acted, and was firm in his convictions.

Anita had wanted to dismiss juror five because he had a friend whose son had been shot by the Baltimore police. But he also said that he had “nothing against cops. They have a tough job. I can apply the law fairly, given that.”

I overruled Anita’s objection to juror five, telling her we wanted people skeptical enough to hear the facts and honest enough to deal with them fairly.

Juror eleven was a big, stylish, and beautiful woman in a gray Chanel suit. A brassy redhead, she had a beaming smile, an infectious laugh, and an accent as smooth as West Texas honey. She worked for a big PR firm in DC and was friends with several U.S. Capitol Police officers. Anita wanted her off the jury because a police officer had hit her brother with a baton during a riot at a music festival in Austin.

But juror eleven had also said that her brother “deserved to be hit because he was drunk, crazy, and took a swing at two cops.” I reminded Anita of that and overruled her.

The others we agreed on. On the whole, my jury seemed a cross-section of the capital. In addition to jurors five and eleven, there was a thin, hyper woman who worked as a U.S. Senate aide and was furious she hadn’t been excused from serving, a beefy guy who wrote a tax newsletter, a lobbyist for agribusiness, and a young mother from Adams Morgan who seemed delighted to serve, apparently seeing it as an extended break from her kids. There was also a male nurse who worked at GW Medical Center, a retired teacher, and a bartender at the Four Seasons Hotel. Two grandmothers and an ex — merchant mariner completed the dozen people who would decide whether I would go on with my life or take a very long detour into a federal penitentiary.

When they were seated, Judge Larch said, “The floor is yours, Mr. Wills.”

Chapter 43

“Thank you, Judge,” the assistant U.S. attorney said, and he got up. Wills tucked his shirt in over his big old belly, smiled sheepishly, ambled midway to the bench, and stopped.

The federal prosecutor took a breath, played the silence a moment, and then said, “Some police officers in America believe the judicial system is in ruins. They get so frustrated, they begin to see themselves as judge and jury, and then executioner. They do. I am with the U.S. Justice Department, and I’m telling you that in every major police force in this country, there is one or a pair or even a handful of cops who believe they are above the law.”

Wills paused and then directed his attention at me. “The defendant, Alex Cross, is a prime example of a police officer who thinks he is above the law, a cop who believes that he alone can identify evil and that he alone has the ability to stop it, even if it means his killing someone in the process.”

The prosecutor nodded to Athena Carlisle, his co-counsel, and she hit a button on her computer, bringing up two pictures, a man and a woman, on a screen opposite the jury.

Wells said, “Virginia Winslow was a mom, a welder, and a survivor of terrible abuse during her years married to Gary Soneji—”

“Virginia’s a martyr!” someone in the courtroom yelled.

I pivoted in my chair to see a bearded man with wild eyes standing in the aisle and pumping his fist. He shouted, “So’s Lenny Diggs!”

Judge Larch banged her gavel. “Bailiff, have this man removed from my court. I said I would not tolerate any outbursts and I meant it.”

“Both were persecuted!” the man shouted. “Both were killed by the chief persecutor, Alex Cross!”

Two U.S. marshals grabbed the guy, who offered no resistance and said nothing more as he was taken out. I guess he figured he’d made his point.

“The jury will ignore the outburst,” Judge Larch said. “Mr. Wills, make it snappy. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

“Yes, Judge,” the prosecutor said, and he walked to the jury box. “Ladies and gentlemen, it is critical for you to know one thing about Virginia Winslow. She was sick and tired of being targeted by law enforcement simply because she’d unknowingly been married to a vicious criminal.

“Virginia changed her last name after divorcing Gary Soneji. The cops still came for her. She moved. They found her. She tried to hide her teenage son, Dylan, from his father’s legacy. But in this case, the defendant, Cross, acted to cruelly change that, seeking out and telling the boy in lurid detail what his father had done and making the young man feel as if he were also to blame.”

Wills turned to look at me. “Alex Cross made him feel that way because Alex Cross did indeed hold Gary Soneji’s son, his ex-wife, and everyone else who had ever been associated with the deceased killer partially responsible for the man’s crimes. Alex Cross was obsessed with Gary Soneji. He hated all things Soneji with such a passion that he decided he had to go above the law. He decided these Soneji people had to die, be wiped off the face of the earth. He’d kill every one of them.”

Wills paused and looked around. I heard Ali whisper, “He’s lying, isn’t he, Damon? That man is standing there and lying ’bout Dad. How come no one’s saying a thing?”

“Shh,” Damon said. “We’ll get our chance.”

The assistant U.S. attorney went on. “The evidence will show that Detective Cross used intimidation tactics to get an admirer of the late Gary Soneji to take him to meet the leader of a group of people interested in the dead killer. Alex Cross defied well-established police protocol. He went alone, without backup. He marched into what turned out to be a trap, a trap that featured people wearing masks and clothes that made them look like Gary Soneji, all part of a performance designed to evoke a reaction from Detective Cross.

“They got more of a reaction than they expected,” Wills said somberly. “Alex Cross shot three of them down in cold blood. Virginia Winslow died first. Cross shot and killed a cameraman, Leonard Diggs, next. Then he tried to kill Claude Watkins. Watkins lived, but he’s paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. Now, you will hear the defense assert that all three victims were armed and threatening the detective when he shot them. That is a false statement, and the evidence will prove it.”

The prosecutor put both his hands on the jury-box rail and looked at each of the jurors in turn.

“Dr. Cross and other rogue cops across the country have gone above the law and gotten away with murder over and over again. Isn’t it time that we, as a nation, as a people, say, ‘Stop. That’s enough. No more killings by cop’?”

Wills paused for dramatic effect, and then with anger laced through his voice he said, “I’m asking you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to look at the evidence. And I’m asking you to say, ‘No more.’ I am asking you to say, ‘That’s enough, Alex Cross. You might be a great detective. You might have solved many cases. But you will not kill with callous disregard for our judicial system ever again. You will be judged on the facts in a court of law. And you will be found guilty and you will be punished for your cold-blooded actions.’”

Chapter 44

When Wills sat down, Judge Larch rapped her gavel, called for a ten-minute recess, and hurried off the bench.

I glanced at the jury and saw jurors five and eleven looking at me as if I were some lower order of species.

“That went well,” Anita Marley said.

“If that went well, I’d like to see your version of getting crucified,” I said.

“Take a breath, Uncle Alex,” Naomi said. “It’s not that bad.”

“Pretty damning.”

“No, Naomi’s right,” Anita said. “Did you notice there weren’t a whole lot of bombproof facts mentioned? They’ve got a few, but not enough. If they had enough, they’d have said so. That’s why prosecutors try to tie in some national trend to their cases. All spin aside, it means they haven’t got enough to try the case on the merits.”

Before I could reply, I heard, “Alex?”

I looked over and saw Bree at the bar. She waved her cell phone at me. “I’ve got to go.”

I walked over and hugged her. “Thanks for being here.”

“I want to be here every minute,” she said, and she kissed my cheek.

“I know. But go to work. I’ve got good people fighting for me.”

Bree wiped at a tear when we broke apart, nodded, and left with a little wiggle of her fingers at Nana Mama, Damon, and Ali. I winked at my sons and my grandmother. Ali winked back. Damon smiled weakly. Nana nodded without conviction and worried the small string of rosary beads she’d brought along.

“All rise,” the bailiff called.

Judge Larch strode back into the court.

I was too far away to smell it, but I knew she’d have the odor of Marlboro cigarettes about her. Larch was forever trying to quit and never succeeding, which contributed to her general surliness on the bench. At least, that’s what her clerk had told me once.

“Ms. Marley, you may proceed,” Judge Larch said, and she popped a mint in her mouth.

My defense attorney looked at me and smiled. Then she put her hand on my shoulder. She stood up and kept her hand there, gazing at the jury, sweeping her eyes over each one of them.

“Not this man,” Anita said, and she paused for several moments.

“This man is not the creature that Mr. Wills just described. This good man is Alex Cross, and let me tell you a few hard facts about Dr. Cross, facts that cannot be denied or molded like mud into something other than the truth.”

She left my side. “Alex Cross won a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University, where he graduated with high honors. He took a PhD there in criminal psychology as well. He worked seven years as a member of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, the people who hunt serial killers by profiling them. Cumulatively, he has been a homicide detective with the Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department for more than fifteen years.

“During all that time with the FBI and DC Metro, Dr. Cross has been repeatedly cited for, among other things, bravery in defense of fellow police officers, arresting bombers, rescuing kidnap victims, capturing mass murderers, and defeating a terrorist plot to blow up Union Station. Did I mention that the last citation was signed by the president of the United States? It was.”

Chapter 45

Juror five was craning his neck and shoulders to look at me, and juror eleven seemed impressed enough to jot something down on her notepad.

“Sadly, that is why the U.S. Attorney’s Office is pressing this case,” Anita Marley said, returning to my side. “You see, with the rash of police shootings across the country, the Justice Department needs a prominent individual to prosecute as a way of demonstrating to the outraged masses that the government is actually doing something about police violence.”

She put her hand back on my shoulder and said, “But, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I ask you not to be swayed by the government’s tactics because the facts of this case are on this good man’s side, and they demonstrate far, far beyond a reasonable doubt that he is innocent. Let me lay them out for you.”

Anita took the jurors through a straightforward summary of the events that led me to shoot three followers of Gary Soneji in self-defense, starting with telling them about the Soneji, a violent cult that had risen up around the myth of the late kidnapper and bomber.

“The cult targeted the investigators who had hunted Gary Soneji,” Anita said. “They targeted Detective John Sampson, and they targeted Alex Cross. They made death threats to Dr. Cross and to his family.”

Then she explained how the FBI Cyber Division identified a woman named Kimiko Binx as the secretive builder of a website dedicated to the cult. Records showed that Binx had a partner in the website named Claude Watkins. When he was sixteen, Watkins was tried as an adult and convicted of carving the skin off a little girl’s fingers.

“Ms. Binx told Dr. Cross she could take him to see Watkins, who had served his time and was now a successful artist,” Anita said. “Ms. Binx led Dr. Cross to an abandoned factory where Watkins and a group of his followers were waiting, all dressed up as Soneji, using Hollywood-quality masks.”

She nodded to Naomi, who hit a button on her laptop. An old mug shot of Gary Soneji popped up on the courtroom screen along with a crime scene photograph of one of the masks.

“Three of the cult members wearing masks like this one were armed,” Anita said. “They carried nickel-plated pistols that they used to threaten Detective Cross, an officer in the course of his duties. Dr. Cross gave them fair warning, and then he defended himself.

“When he left the crime scene to meet police and ambulances he’d called to the factory, someone took the three pistols. The defense believes a member of the cult did this in order to frame Dr. Cross, to portray him as yet another policeman gone over the edge.”

Anita paused, and then showed outrage. “The U.S. Attorney’s Office should be ashamed for buying into what is obviously a fabricated story. The Justice Department and the attorney general should be ashamed as well. They don’t care about Alex Cross’s exemplary record with the FBI. They don’t care about the great good he’s done repeatedly in the course of his career. They just want a high-profile scapegoat, and Dr. Cross fits the bill.”

She crossed back to me, put her hand on my shoulder, and said in an even, forceful tone, “But, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I say to you: Not Alex Cross. Not this good man. This good man will not be made a scapegoat. This good man’s reputation as one of the country’s finest detectives will not be dragged through the mud. Dr. Cross’s remarkable career will not be ruined, and he will never see the inside of a prison cell, because this good man is completely innocent of these charges.”

Chapter 46

Priscilla Larch called for a lunch recess at the end of Anita Marley’s opening argument, and judging from the body language of jurors five and eleven as they left for the jury room, it seemed that my lawyer’s remarks had evened the score.

Nana Mama thought Anita’s speech was strong as well. But my grandmother was tired after the stressful morning and said she was going home for a nap.

I encouraged the kids to go with her. Both boys refused. Jannie decided to accompany Nana, do some studying, then go to practice.

Damon and Ali went out for lunch. Anita, Naomi, and I ate takeout Chinese in a conference room down the hall from the courtroom as we went over the testimony of several witnesses who might be particularly hostile to my case.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Wills had a reputation for not holding back at trial. He liked to attack with his strongest evidence right off the bat to make a deep impression on the jury. We were preparing for a rough afternoon.

We had no idea how rough it would be.

The prosecution started the after-lunch proceedings by calling DC Metro detective Harry Chan, the first investigator to arrive at the factory after the shootings. Two patrolmen had driven into the lot five minutes before Chan, but I’d kept them outside pending arrival of detectives and criminologists.

“He wanted to keep the scene as uncontaminated as possible,” Chan said.

“Can you describe the defendant when you first encountered him that day?” Wills asked.

“He was excited, talking fast,” the detective said. “He was sweating and pacing. He complained of being dizzy and having a headache.”

“What happened then?”

“The ambulances and Chief Stone arrived,” he said. “She wanted him — Dr. Cross, her husband — kept away from the scene, and she took him home without giving me much time to interview him. I entered the factory with the EMTs and my partner, Detective Lorraine Magee. When we got to victim one, Virginia Winslow, she was dead of a gunshot wound. Victim two, Leonard Diggs, was barely clinging to life. Victim three, Claude Watkins, was more alert but badly wounded. Diggs died en route to hospital.”

The prosecutor paused as if to think about that and then said, “Did you see a nickel-plated pistol in the hands of or around any of the three victims?”

“We did not.”

“And did crime scene techs find pistols hidden in the factory?”

“No,” Chan said.

“Any footprints near the victims?”

“Lots of them,” he said. “Watkins and some of his followers had been living there for some time.”

“Nothing conclusive?”

“Not in my book.”

“Any gunpowder residue on the hands of any of the victims?”

“No.”

“Your witness,” the prosecutor said to Anita Marley.

Anita smiled and stood. “Tell me, Detective Chan, have you ever been in a gunfight with three assailants?”

“No.”

“But, given your years of experience, would it be reasonable to say that having survived such an ordeal, Dr. Cross would be excited, sweating, talking fast, pacing out of nervous energy, and even dizzy or suffering a headache from the gunshots?”

Chan said, “I suppose it’s as reasonable as saying Dr. Cross had just shot three people for his own ends and was acting that way because he was trying to figure out if he’d done it well enough to fool me.”

Anita looked annoyed. “Objection, Judge. Will the Court instruct the witness to answer my question?”

“Asked and answered, Counselor,” Larch said. “Motion denied.”

“Defense reserves the right to recall Detective Chan at a later time,” my attorney said, and she sat down.

“The United States calls Norman Nixon to the stand,” Wills said.

“Jesus, they’re not fooling around,” Naomi muttered under her breath.

Chapter 47

Norman Nixon was a hearty-looking man in his fifties, neatly groomed with scrubbed skin, slick iron-gray hair, and a competent, earnest expression. He wore a khaki suit and a blue-striped tie, and he carried a file folder to the witness stand.

After Nixon was sworn in, Wills quickly established the witness’s bona fides as an expert on police shootings. Nixon had been a decorated cop in Chicago before joining the FBI, where he had worked as an investigator in the civil rights division. He was involved in the U.S. government’s investigation into police killings. After his retirement from the Bureau, Nixon continued to study the forces that contributed to citizens’ death by cop.

“Sometimes the officer’s a racist,” Nixon said. “Sometimes the officer’s just burned out from the day-to-day pressure of the job and is feeling inordinately threatened. And sometimes, more often than you’d think, the police officer shoots because he believes he’s above the law.”

Wills looked at the jury. “In your opinion, Mr. Nixon, does Alex Cross fit the profile of a police officer who believes he’s above the law?”

“Objection — argumentative,” Anita said.

“Overruled,” Judge Larch said. “Answer the question, Mr. Nixon.”

“He does fit the profile,” Nixon said. “In fact, he’s a prime example of the phenomenon.”

“A prime example,” Wills said. “What does that mean?”

“It means I’ve studied him at length,” Nixon said, looking earnestly in my direction. “It means I’ve researched every shooting Dr. Cross has ever been involved in.”

“Wait,” the prosecutor said. “Dr. Cross has been involved in shootings other than the three in question today?”

Anita sprang to her feet. “Objection! Relevance?”

Wills said, “We’re trying to give the jury the context in which these three shootings took place.”

“Overruled,” Larch said.

“Judge!”

“Overruled!”

Wills said, “Was Alex Cross involved in other shootings before the three in question?”

“Yes,” Nixon said.

“How many times does the average police officer in America discharge his weapon in the course of a career?”

“Zero,” Nixon said. “The vast majority of police officers never fire their weapon in the line of duty.”

“Zero,” Wills said. “And how many times has Dr. Cross discharged a weapon in the course of his careers at the FBI and DC Metro Police?”

The witness shifted in his chair, said, “I don’t have all the records. Some are sealed. But just from the public documents I’ve looked at, Alex Cross has fired his weapon at least thirty-one times.”

I blinked and felt my stomach go sour. There was a louder reaction in the audience, which caused Judge Larch to pound her gavel. “Order.”

By their expressions, jurors five and eleven had turned against me again. And no wonder. I was as shocked as they were to hear the number.

Thirty-one times. Is that true? And have I shot more than that? He said at least, didn’t he?

Wills said, “Can you break down the shots for us in a meaningful way?”

Nixon nodded. “The records I’ve seen indicate that Dr. Cross missed fourteen times and wounded someone eight times.”

“And the other nine times Dr. Cross pulled his trigger in the line of duty?”

“His shots were perfect,” Nixon said. “All of his victims died.”

Chapter 48

By the end of the first day of the trial, I felt like that side of beef Rocky Balboa used as a punching bag.

For three solid hours, Wills and Nixon had kept up a relentless barrage of facts about the nine deadly shooting incidents that they said collectively cast me as a cop who believed he was above the law.

“They’ve almost got me believing it,” I said after court was adjourned for the evening. We’d gone to a conference room to reassess before heading home.

Anita said, “You must absolutely not believe it.”

Naomi nodded. “She’s right. Your belief in your innocence has to shine through your body language. The jury will pick up on the slightest doubt you feel.”

My lead attorney put her hand on my forearm. “This is classic Nathan Wills, from what I understand, and we still have more than a few cards up our sleeves. Go home, Alex. Be with your family. Don’t watch the news. We’ll see you in the morning.”

I nodded. “Sampson’s picking me up in the garage.”

“Perfect,” Naomi said. “And have you thought about that interview request from Gayle King?”

“I don’t see an upside.”

My niece said, “The upside is you get to tell your story to a national audience and counter all the horrible things people have been saying about you.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, and left.

Sampson was waiting for me in the garage in his Jeep Grand Cherokee.

“How’d it go?” he asked after I’d shut the door.

“Slightly better than the Spanish Inquisition.”

“Shit. And here I was, hoping the iron maiden and the rack were making a comeback in our legal system.”

I glanced at him, saw him grinning, and laughed. “Yeah, I get it. I suppose it could have been worse. I just don’t know how.”

We left the courthouse garage, skirted around the media mob waiting for me to exit the building, and headed home.

“Anything I can do?” Sampson said.

“Not unless you can speed up lab work faster than Bree can.”

He looked over at me, puzzled.

“Some saliva tests Anita wanted done. They might help.”

“With what?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“I understand,” he said, but his tone said he didn’t, and there was a strained silence between us the rest of the ride.

Sampson pulled over well down the street from the small crowd of journalists camped outside my house. “You best take the alley home.”

“It’d be easier,” I said. “Thanks for being a standup guy, John.”

He paused, and then nodded and said, “I have a great role model.”

He drove away. Knowing Sampson still had my back, I felt okay as I walked down the alley that ran behind my block. Even better, the air smelled like garlic and basil when I went through the back gate and stole through the side door.

Ali and Jannie were on the couch in the great room, watching the NBC evening news with Lester Holt, when I came in.

“Dad!” Ali said, running over and hugging me.

Jannie’s eyes avoided mine. She was barefoot but still in her warm-ups, watching the screen. Holt wrapped up a piece on the latest budget impasse in Congress and then turned grim and said, “Thirty-one times.”

Behind him, a dark silhouette of a man appeared. He held a pistol. Beneath the image, a caption read POLICE GONE BAD?

Holt said, “The trial of noted detective Alex Cross opened today in Washington, DC, amid what prosecutors are saying is a long-needed discussion in America about police gone bad and gone violent, above the law.”

The screen jumped to footage of me and Anita entering the courthouse that morning, with Holt talking in a voice-over. “After opening statements, the prosecution brought in star witness Norman Nixon and almost immediately there were fireworks and harsh accusations, including the stunning news that Detective Cross has fired his weapon at least thirty-one times in the course of duty when the average police officer never fires his gun at all. Before the two killings he’s on trial for, Cross’s shots have proven fatal nine times.”

The screen jumped to a frizzy-haired woman identified as a sociology professor sitting in front of a wall of books. “Thirty-one times?” she said. “He kills nine before these two? I’m sorry, but this is a cop who shoots first and asks questions later.”

Chapter 49

“Turn it off,” I said.

Jannie didn’t move.

“Jannie,” Ali said, going over and grabbing the remote.

“Don’t,” she said. “I want to know how bad it really is.”

Ali hit the power button and the screen went dark. Jannie glared at him and then at me before jumping up and leaving the room.

“What’s with her?” Ali said.

I gazed after Jannie as she stormed through the kitchen. My grandmother popped up from behind the counter.

“I’ll ask later,” I said, and then I went into the kitchen, where Nana Mama was finishing dinner preparations.

She patted me on the back. “Hang in there. The truth will out, son. It always does.”

“I know,” I said, but there was little conviction in it.

Nana Mama motioned me into her arms. It was still a miracle to me how such a tiny old woman could radiate so much positive energy.

“Don’t let them get you down,” she said, rubbing my back. “When they hear your side of what happened, old Lester Dolt and Chuck Fraud will be singing a different song.”

I laughed and looked down at her. “Lester Dolt and Chuck Fraud?”

“That’s what I call him and the political reporter guy.”

“But Lester Holt is not a dolt.”

“And Chuck Todd’s not a fraud,” Nana Mama said. “But calling them that when all the news is depressing gives me a reason to smile.”

I gazed into my grandmother’s eyes and saw both confidence and fear.

“You are one complicated old lady,” I said, touching her cheek.

“I should hope so,” she said, pulling away. “Dinner in fifteen minutes?”

“What’s cooking?”

“Chicken roasted in Nana’s special herb rub. Go on, wash up. Bree texted she’ll be home any minute.”

I was about to head up the stairs when Bree came through the front door. There was strain everywhere about her, and she dropped her gaze and hesitated before coming into my arms.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” Bree said. “It must have been awful.”

“Sobering,” I said. “Thirty-one times. I had no idea.”

Bree lifted her head to look me in the eyes with cold curiosity. “And the nine dead and the eight wounded?”

“I remember each and every one of them,” I said. “You can’t forget things like that. Ever. Even when they were righteous shoots.”

She studied me, her eyes welling with tears, then hugged me tight.

“Jesus,” she said hoarsely. “They want to tear you apart.”

“They better pull hard,” I said, and I kissed her head.

Chapter 50

Gretchen Lindel lay curled up on her filthy mattress, scratching her head, staring at the plywood walls that imprisoned her, and wondering if her torture would ever end.

Coated in grime, her nightgown in tatters, Gretchen reeked, and her feet were cut and swollen. Her hair was tangled with burrs, leaves, and twigs. She couldn’t pick them out, no matter how hard she tried, and she hadn’t tried in days, at least since the last time they’d come for her.

How long had that been? Five days ago? Six?

She couldn’t tell, and in the end it didn’t matter.

I’m here until I’m not, Gretchen thought. It’s like I’m not even me already.

How bad can the last step be?

The big man in black, the one wearing the tinted paintball visor and carrying the knife, had come for her four times since her kidnapping. Each time it had been dusk when he’d untied her blindfold and she’d found herself in the woods.

There were two or three others there, all dressed similarly, all laughing at her when the big one said, “Run, now. Give yourself a chance, and give the boys a show.”

Gretchen played competitive volleyball, and she ran hard the first time, took off, not caring about the stones and sticks that jabbed her bare feet. She’d gotten ahead of them and thought she’d lost them.

Before it turned dark.

Then they were all suddenly around her, yelling in the woods, taunting and calling, “Where are you, blondie? Where are you, uptown girl?”

They had to have been wearing night-vision goggles or something like that, because they’d caught her every time, and every time they’d taken her right to the point where she believed with every cell that they were going to kill her, slit her throat and watch her bleed out, all on-camera, all to their delight.

The first three times they’d hunted her, Gretchen had survived by focusing on her friends and her parents and on how desperately she wanted to see them all again, especially her dad. She shared a special relationship with him, a real friendship as well as respect and love.

It would kill him, she’d thought when she’d wanted to give up and ask them to end it. It would kill him, and I can’t do that to him. To either of them.

The fourth time they’d hunted Gretchen, the last time they’d hunted her, had been different. They’d barely let her run before catching her. They’d dragged her to a building in the woods. The big one had torn off her panties while the others held her down. They’d—

She’d gone to a far-off place in her mind then, where there was no hurt, no feelings at all, as if she’d already found death. That feeling of passing, of being already gone from her body, had stayed with her even after they were done, even after they’d thrown her back in her plywood box, even after days without eating.

Someone threw the door’s dead bolts.

Gretchen cringed and tried to keep staring at the plywood wall.

“You don’t eat, you don’t deserve to play the game,” the strange electronic voice said. “You don’t eat, drink, keep your strength up, you don’t deserve to live.”

“I don’t want to live like this.”

“We kind of thought that.”

She looked at the big guy in black wearing the GoPro camera and the paintball visor and saw something that cut through her feelings of nothingness, made her retreat.

He wasn’t carrying that knife he’d brought the first four times they’d played the game.

This time he carried a coil of rope tied at one end into a hangman’s noose.

Chapter 51

Judge Larch gaveled the court to order at precisely eight a.m. She took care of several administrative issues before reminding Norman Nixon he was still under oath when he returned to the witness stand.

“Ms. Marley,” Larch said. “Your cross-examination, please.”

Anita patted me on the thigh, got up, and said, “Mr. Nixon, of the nine fatal shooting incidents you looked at involving my client, how many were judged wrongful police conduct?”

He shifted uncomfortably. “None. It’s a—”

“So you’re saying that in each of these cases, Alex Cross was investigated and found to have taken prudent action in accord with police and FBI protocol?”

“I don’t know about prudent when you end up with a dead suspect.”

“Objection,” Anita said.

“Sustained,” Judge Larch said. “But rephrase, Ms. Marley.”

Anita seemed taken aback for a moment. Then she said, “Was Dr. Cross found to be in compliance with police and FBI protocols in each of those nine shootings?”

Nixon acted like he had something stuck in his teeth but eventually said, “He was.”

“All nine?”

“All nine.”

“And in the cases of wounding?”

“Yes, but—”

“A simple yes will do, Mr. Nixon. Since you have had a chance to look at Dr. Cross’s record in such detail, would it be fair to say that the criminals involved were dangerous people? Violent people?”

“Doesn’t mean they had to die by a police bullet,” Nixon said.

“It’s a yes-or-no question.”

“Yes, they were dangerous.”

“Killers?”

“Often.”

“Bombers?”

“Their crimes are not the issue here.”

“They most certainly are the issue,” Anita said. “Dr. Cross has a reputation for going after the worst criminals, taking on the biggest cases, isn’t that so?”

“He’s well regarded as an investigator.”

“Did Dr. Cross put himself in personal danger to solve the cases you looked at?”

“Every cop in America is in danger every day.”

“Point taken,” Anita said. “But in light of the kinds of cases Dr. Cross worked for the FBI and DC Metro, wasn’t he bound to come into contact with more violent suspects than the average cop?”

Nixon paused and then said, “Probably a higher incidence of contact with that sort of criminal, but I can’t tell you what that is statistically.”

“A higher incidence of contact will do,” Anita said, and she smiled at the jury as she went back to the defense table. She put on reading glasses and scanned her notes for a moment.

When she was done, she pivoted and looked at the witness. “Just to summarize, Mr. Nixon, in each of the nine fatal cases you looked at, Dr. Cross, because of his job, came into close contact with a hardened criminal, correct?”

He thought about that and then said, “Correct.”

“And violence ensued,” she said.

“Violence ensued and someone died by Cross’s hand.”

Anita removed her glasses and cocked her head at him. “In those nine fatal incidents, Mr. Nixon, how many times did Alex Cross shoot first?”

He cleared his throat. “It’s more telling to look at escalation, Ms. Marley.”

“How many times did Dr. Cross shoot first?”

Nixon looked ready to argue but then said, “Zero.”

“Zero?” she said, looking at the jury. “And how many times did Alex Cross shoot first in any of the wounding incidents?”

“Zero.”

“Zero,” Anita said, looking right at jurors five and eleven. “Not once in Dr. Cross’s career has he fired his weapon in anything but self-defense. He deals with the worst of the worst. He tries to avoid conflict, but these people are violent, and he has the right to defend himself, isn’t that right, Mr. Nixon?”

“No,” Nixon said. “That’s not right. Cross seeks conflict. He charges in.”

“Sounds to me like a brave cop doing his job.”

“Objection,” Wills said.

“Sustained,” Judge Larch said. “The jury will ignore that.”

But of course they couldn’t. I could see in jurors five and eleven that Anita’s line of questioning had been effective and revealing. To those two, at least, maybe I wasn’t the out-of-control cop the prosecution described earlier.

“I have nothing further for this witness, Your Honor,” Anita said.

Wills stood and said, “The prosecution calls Kimiko Binx.”

Chapter 52

Kimiko Binx raised her right arm and took the oath. A fit Asian American woman in her late twenties, Binx wore a chic gray pantsuit. Since I’d seen her last, she had grown out her hair and gotten it cut in a geometric style.

She perched in the witness chair and slowly swept her gaze around the courtroom, looking at everyone, it seemed, but me.

“You may proceed, Mr. Wills,” Judge Larch said, and she coughed.

The assistant U.S. attorney adjusted his pants, grinned sheepishly at the jury again, and then said, “Ms. Binx, what is it you do exactly?”

“Web design and coding,” she said.

“Good at it?”

“Very.”

“Well,” Wills said, and he smiled at the jury once more. “Do you remember the afternoon and early evening of March the twenty-ninth?”

“Like it was yesterday.”

The prosecutor led Binx through her version of events. She reported that she’d found me waiting for her outside her apartment door when she came in from a run, that I’d tracked her through a website dedicated to Gary Soneji that she’d designed, and that I asked her to take me to see her partner in the website, Claude Watkins.

“What’s your big interest in Gary Soneji?” Wills asked.

Binx shrugged. “It was a phase, like that woman who wrote the book where she visits all the graves of assassinated presidents? Kind of ghoulish, but interesting at the moment, you know?”

“So you’re not obsessed with Gary Soneji?”

“Not anymore. Seeing friends of mine killed for their intellectual interests soured me on it.”

“Objection!” Anita said.

“Sustained,” Judge Larch said. “The jury will ignore the last statement.”

Wills bowed his head, crossed to the jury box. “So you led Dr. Cross to an abandoned factory to see Mr. Watkins, isn’t that correct?”

Binx nodded and said that Claude Watkins and some of his friends had been using the old factory as an art studio and living space.

“Did you coerce Dr. Cross in any way to go find Watkins?”

She leaned forward to the mike. “I didn’t have to. He wanted to go.”

“But you wanted him there as well, correct?”

“Well, Claude did, that’s right.”

“Why’s that?”

“Claude’s an artist — visual and performance. He thought it would be interesting and telling to see what Cross would do if he were confronted with one Soneji after another.”

Under further questioning, Binx continued her tale in mostly accurate fashion until she had us moving deeper into the factory and reaching a large rectangular room. At that point, she began to lie through her teeth.

Wills said, “When you went inside, was Claude Watkins at the far end of that long room wearing the Soneji disguise?”

“Yes,” Binx said.

“Was Mr. Watkins armed?”

“No.”

“No nickel-plated revolver in his hand?”

“No. Claude had his hands open, and he turned his palms to show Cross.”

Chapter 53

I leaned over to Naomi, whispered, “That is categorically false.”

My niece patted me on the arm. “Don’t worry. We’ll get our chance.”

Wills said, “What happened next?”

“Cross aimed his gun at Claude and told him to drop the gun and get down on the floor.”

“Did he?”

“He didn’t have a gun, but Cross didn’t seem to care. I knew he was going to shoot Claude, so I hit Cross’s gun hand. Claude took off and tried to hide.”

“What was Dr. Cross’s state before you hit him?”

“He was acting weird, creepy.”

“In what way?”

“Sweating, looking like he was loving the fact he was aiming down on Claude, you know, like he dug it.”

Wills crossed to a blown-up diagram of the factory floor and pointed at the far left end of the rectangle. “Watkins was here before he ran?”

“Yes, in front of that alcove.”

“What happened then?”

For the first time, Binx looked over at me. “Cross went crazy.”

“Objection!” Anita cried.

“Overruled,” Judge Larch said. “Continue.”

Binx testified that Virginia Winslow stepped out of the shadows of an alcove in the middle of the far long side of the factory room and that I then shot Soneji’s widow without provocation.

“Was Mrs. Winslow armed?” Wills asked.

“No way,” Binx said. “She hated guns.”

“Tell us why she was part of this performance in the first place.”

“Virginia told me that she couldn’t get away from Soneji’s legacy, so she’d decided to try to make art out of it, a bitter commentary, you know?”

“And Dr. Cross shot her?”

“Right in the chest. I couldn’t believe it. I started screaming, but he didn’t care. He just kept shooting, Claude, and then Lenny Diggs.”

“All of them unarmed?”

“Yes. And after he shot Lenny, he was swinging his pistol around and yelling for more.”

“What exactly was Dr. Cross yelling?”

“Like ‘Who’s next? C’mon, you bastards! I’ll kill every single Soneji before I’m done.’”

Wills looked at the jury. “‘I’ll kill every single Soneji before I’m done.’”

Juror five was shaking his head. Juror eleven was shaking hers.

Wills rubbed his hands together as if he were washing them and said, “Thank you, Ms. Binx, that must have been difficult. Your witness, Ms. Marley.”

Chapter 54

Anita had been scribbling notes on her legal pad. She looked up and said, “Your Honor, the defense asks the Court’s leave to delay our cross-examination of Ms. Binx pending an ongoing line of inquiry we are following.”

“An ongoing line of inquiry?” Wills asked.

“Right,” Anita said.

Judge Larch didn’t like that. “How much of a delay are you asking for?”

“I would think tomorrow afternoon would work, Your Honor.”

Larch got a sour look on her face, but then seemed to think of something that brightened her mood. She said, “Ms. Binx, you are excused for the day. Ten minutes’ recess before Mr. Wills calls his next witness.”

The judge banged her gavel, got up fast, and hurried for the door, no doubt dreaming of that first puff.

Larch came back in a much better mood exactly ten minutes later. She returned to the bench, popped a mint, and said, “Mr. Wills?”

“The prosecution calls Claude Watkins to the stand.”

I heard a creak as the double doors to the courtroom swung open. I turned to see a man in a wheelchair being pushed by Gary Soneji’s son, Dylan. Claude Watkins was in his late forties with salt-and-pepper hair, a stubble beard, and a buff upper body. A blanket hid his withered legs.

Dylan left him at the bar, and Claude Watkins rolled the chair over in front of the witness stand.

The prosecutor looked at Judge Larch and said, “I’d like to treat the witness as hostile. He has been highly uncooperative.”

Larch glanced at the man in the wheelchair, who looked fuming mad.

“You going to answer questions under oath?” she asked.

“Depends on what’s asked,” Watkins said, not looking at her.

She ordered the bailiff to administer the oath, which he did without enthusiasm.

“How are you, Mr. Watkins?” Wills asked.

Watkins sneered at him. “About as good as you can be when you’re confined to a wheelchair and have to use a catheter to take a piss.”

“How did you wind up in that chair?”

Watkins’s face bunched up in loathing before he pointed at me and said, “He put me in it. Cross. Shot me for no good reason.”

“Objection,” Anita said.

“Overruled,” Judge Larch said. She popped another mint into her mouth.

Wills said, “Can you take us through the events of March twenty-ninth?”

Watkins grudgingly said he’d gotten interested in Soneji and then me by accident. But the more he read about me, the more he was convinced I was “borderline out of control” when it came to the mass murderer.

He testified that he decided to entice me into a situation that could result in an “interesting and revealing piece of performance art.” He would lure me to an abandoned factory where he’d confront me with one Soneji after another.

“So you could see his reaction?” Wills asked.

“Oh, hell no. I wanted everyone in the world to see Cross’s reaction.”

Beside me, Anita cocked her head to one side.

Wills squinted as if he’d heard something new from the witness and said, “How were you going to do that?”

“By filming it, of course,” Watkins said.

“What?” Wills said.

“What?” Naomi whispered.

Anita said, “What the hell is—”

“You had to have found them,” Watkins said. “I mean, you had to have searched the factory and found the smartphones with the add-on lenses, right?”

Anita and the prosecutor’s assistant both shot to their feet.

Anita said, “Judge, there has been no mention of any such cameras or phones in discovery.”

“Because we found no cameras or phones,” Wills said.

Watkins looked like he wanted to spit in disgust. “I put them there myself. What is this? A cover-up? I was wondering why you weren’t badgering me about them from the get-go. I’m telling you, we got the whole thing from three different angles!”

Chapter 55

The courtroom erupted. Judge Larch banged her gavel, demanding order. She told the jury to ignore Mr. Watkins’s testimony for the time being and ordered both prosecution and defense into chambers along with the U.S. marshals who worked in her courtroom.

“Judge, the government asks that it be given time to find the phones Mr. Watkins claims are in that factory,” Wills said when they were all in chambers.

“Judge, there is no way to know if these phones, if there are any, have been put there after the fact as a ploy by Mr. Watkins,” Anita said. “Whatever is on them should be excluded.”

“That factory has been sealed for months,” Wills said.

“But not guarded.”

“We don’t even know if the phones exist, Ms. Marley,” Judge Larch said. She looked at one of her marshals. “Collins, you and Avery, please go talk to Mr. Watkins. Find out where he says he hid these phones, call a forensics team, and go look. If you find them, establish a perfect chain of custody and bring them here.”

“Judge, that’s the rightful role of the government,” Wills said.

“We’re seeking swift truth and justice here, Mr. Wills,” Larch said. “If the cameras are there and they do show what happened that day, we’ll all see it together. At the same time. Here. In my chambers.”

The marshals left. The judge ordered that the jury be sequestered and given lunch. We ate down the hall, all of us wondering how the cameras could have been missed, and me worrying about the confidence with which Watkins had revealed them. What would they show?

An hour later, word came that three smartphones with extender lenses had been discovered where Watkins said they’d be: in recesses cut into the factory’s support beams, hidden with thin pieces of sheet metal.

An hour after that, Larch’s marshal entered her chambers with three evidence bags, each holding an iPhone 6s. They were dusty and their batteries were dead. Between the group of us, we had enough cords to recharge the devices.

One by one, they blinked on. Claude Watkins was asked to provide the security codes for the phones, which he did. They all used his birthday.

U.S. Marshal Avery, a thin woman with an intense bearing, wore gloves to enter the codes. Then she attached the first phone to a laptop computer, and the laptop to a screen on the wall of Judge Larch’s chambers.

Fifteen minutes later, as the last of the three videos played, there was dead silence in Judge Larch’s chambers. I felt steam-rolled and had no doubt I was heading to a federal pen for a long, long time.

“Compelling, Judge,” Wills said, triumphantly. “The government wishes to introduce these into evidence immediately.”

Anita said, “Your Honor, you cannot allow these videos to be introduced until we’ve had time to analyze them.”

“I’d say the videos speak for themselves,” Wills said. “The important parts, anyway. To ignore them would be a travesty of justice, Your Honor.”

“Allowing them into evidence without giving us the chance to examine them would be a gross miscarriage of justice, Your Honor,” Naomi said.

Judge Larch sat back in her chair, closed her eyes, and puffed on an electronic cigarette.

“Your Honor?” Wills said.

“I’m thinking,” Larch said. “You’ve heard of that, right, Counselor?”

The prosecutor was taken aback but said, “Of course, Your Honor. I’ve been known to think myself every once in a while.”

The judge opened one eye and fixed it on Wills. “I’ll allow the videos to be introduced.”

“What?” Anita cried. “Judge—”

“Ms. Marley,” Larch said curtly. “The prosecution wants the videos introduced. If you can impeach their value and credibility, you’ll be free to do so at the appropriate time.”

“With all due respect, Your Honor,” Anita began, “these will bias the—”

“For a few days, perhaps,” Larch said, putting her e-cig on her desk. “If they’re fake, you’ll know soon enough, won’t you? And maybe you’ll make Mr. Wills look like a fool for being so impetuous.”

“Your Honor?” the prosecutor said, looking as if he’d sniffed something unpleasant.

“I’ve given you lots of rope, Mr. Wills,” she said. “Try not to hang yourself with it.”

Wills blinked and said, “Yes, Your Honor.”

Chapter 56

Nana Mama saw the devastated look on my face when we returned to the courtroom. She came to the rail.

“You okay, son?”

“It’s bad, Nana.”

“The truth will out. Just stay fixed on that.”

I nodded but felt like the weight of the world was on me when Judge Larch gaveled the court back into session and announced to the jury that she was admitting the videos. She also cautioned them that the government had decided not to analyze the videos before they were shown to the jury.

“In that light, keep an open and skeptical mind,” she said. “The defense will have its say about these videos, I’m sure.”

As Marshal Avery called up the videos on a screen facing the jury, Nathan Wills was so pleased he jigged a little as he crossed to the witness box. Claude Watkins was again sitting there in his wheelchair.

“Mr. Watkins,” Wills said. “Have you seen this footage?”

“No.”

“They’re all black-and-white, three or four minutes long. We’ll watch them simultaneously. You’ll see the scene from three angles at once.”

The deputy marshal hit a key on her computer. The screen, divided into three frozen feeds, lit up.

On the left, there was an elevated, look-down perspective on the dimly lit rear of the factory where the shooting had occurred. It was a long and largely empty assembly-line space with dark storage alcoves off it on all four sides.

From the perspective, I figured the smartphone had been placed atop an alcove in the middle of the long south wall of the room. On the opposite wall, a mural was lit by soft spotlights.

The middle of the screen showed the feed from a smartphone camera that had been hidden almost directly across the room, above the opposite northern alcove, and aimed back at the floor area, though you could see the bottoms of the three spotlights.

On the far right of the screen, we were afforded a view from above the west alcoves. That angle showed the full length of the factory floor and the spotlight beams bisecting it right to left.

The deputy hit Play and all three feeds started. The people in the courtroom saw me enter the space at the east end of the factory floor, carrying my service weapon and leading Binx along by her handcuffs. Exactly the way I remembered it.

At the west end of the room, Claude Watkins stepped out. He was dressed as Gary Soneji, and in a cracking, hoarse voice he said, “Dr. Cross. I thought you’d never catch up.”

“Freeze them,” Wills said. “Show feed three only.”

A moment later, the screen was filled with Watkins in disguise standing there, palms turned out.

“No gun,” Wills said. “Absolutely no gun.”

It was the second time I’d seen the image and the second time I got furious thinking that, if I wasn’t guilty, I was being railroaded by pros.

“That’s fake,” I whispered to Naomi. “I don’t know how they did it, but that is wrong.”

Before my niece could answer, the screen unfroze. The three videos showed me raising my service pistol, aiming at Soneji, and moving toward him, shouting, “Drop your weapon now or I’ll shoot!”

Watkins’s right hand moved, but there was nothing there, and nothing like the clatter of a gun dropping that I remembered.

“Facedown on the floor!” I shouted. “Hands behind your back!”

Soneji started to follow my orders but then Binx came up from behind and hit my gun hand with both her fists. The blow knocked me off balance, and my gun discharged before a fourth spotlight went on, blinding me.

Then the lights died. I threw myself to the factory floor. I stayed there several moments, peering around, before I lurched to my feet. Gun up, I ran hard to the nearest alcove on the north wall.

I shouted, “I’ve got backup, Gary. They’re surrounding the place!”

Leaving the alcove, I moved west along the north wall of the factory to the next anteroom, the one directly beneath the mural. The camera on the opposite roof caught me from behind and gave the viewer a decent look inside the north alcove, where large rolls of canvas were stacked on tables made of plywood and sawhorses.

From deep in that alcove, Virginia Winslow, disguised as her late husband, stumbled out of the darkness. Stooped and far forward on the balls of her feet, she took two sharp, halting steps before straightening up. The camera zoomed in on us. Her right hand started to rise.

“Stop,” Wills said.

The screen froze on Gary Soneji’s widow with her palms almost turned up.

“No gun,” Wills said.

The videos started again.

Mrs. Winslow opened her mouth and raised her hand. I shot her. She fell and Binx screamed.

It went on like that for several more minutes, with Wills stopping the videos to show Watkins dressed as Soneji and me shooting him, then taking cover behind two old oil drums. The prosecutor froze the video one last time to show Leonard Diggs unarmed and up on the roof above the north alcove just before I shot him. Before the videos mercifully ended, you could hear Binx sobbing.

I blew out some air and looked over at the jury. Juror five had recoiled in his chair and was studying me like I was a war criminal. Juror eleven covered her mouth with a well-manicured hand and shook her head in horror.

Chapter 57

The next afternoon, I could see outright suspicion on the normally guarded face of Gayle King, co-anchor of the CBS morning news.

As a sound tech hitched me up to a microphone in our house, King came over and said, “Five minutes, Dr. Cross?”

“I look forward to it, Ms. King.”

“Call me Gayle. And we’re agreed? No ground rules?”

“Ask away,” I said. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“Your grandmother?” King said. “She’s something.”

“She is that.”

She smiled, but I saw some pity in it. She walked away.

Bree came over and handed me water. “You’re sure about this?”

“Anita and Naomi seem to think it will humanize me. And there’s nothing else we can do until Anita’s experts have a go at those videos.”

At the close of court proceedings, Judge Larch had granted Anita’s motion to adjourn through the following Monday morning to do just that.

“Your FBI friends?” Bree asked, adjusting my tie.

“Mum,” I said. “Not surprising. I would think the U.S. Attorney’s Office got Rawlins analyzing the videos for the prosecution.”

“Well, that would be good, right? He’ll find the flaws.”

Before I could answer, King said, “Dr. Cross?”

“Good luck,” Bree said and kissed me on the cheek.

The journalist gestured to a chair across from her. I mirrored her posture, sitting on the first third of the chair, back straight, chin up, and facing her with my hands relaxed, open, and resting on my thighs. Two small spotlights lit us. King put on reading glasses.

“You’re on,” one of the camera operators said.

The morning news anchor got right to it and pulled no punches, noting that the introduction of the video in court the day before had to have been a devastating blow.

“Understandably, we weren’t happy about it, Gayle,” I said. “But we’re confident the video’s been doctored and we intend to prove it.”

“How many times have you drawn and fired your service pistol in the course of your career, Dr. Cross?”

“Norman Nixon says at least thirty-four times, counting this case,” I said.

“And killed eleven now in the line of duty?”

“In all those cases, I acted in accord with proper police protocol. Until the shootings I’m on trial for, I had never pulled the trigger first. But I was at close quarters in that situation. When I saw the guns, I gave them one chance to drop them and then fired to save my own life.”

“You still maintain the three victims were armed?”

“I do.”

King said, “The prosecution paints you as an ‘out-of-control’ cop.”

I controlled my temper, said, “Every time an officer fires his weapon in the course of duty, there’s a diligent investigation. I’ve gone through the process more than most officers, but in every instance I have been cleared.”

“What do you say to those who characterize those earlier cleared cases as having been whitewashed?”

Chapter 58

I looked directly in the camera with the red light glowing and said, “Read the investigative documents yourself, Gayle. I’ll give them to you, and you can post them on the CBS website where anyone can read them. I’m confident that you’ll agree with the shooting boards’ assessments.”

“I like that,” King said, and she paused. “Are you above the law, Dr. Cross?”

I had to fight not to let my hands curl into fists and said, “No, Gayle, I am not above the law, and I’m frankly insulted at the characterization. I have spent my life in service to the law as a homicide cop and an FBI agent. I have more than twenty meritorious citations for my actions with both agencies and not one reprimand for excessive violence or any other disciplinary action. Not one.”

King’s eyes locked on mine. She said, “Did Gary Soneji deserve to die ten years ago?”

I thought about that and said, “Personal opinion?”

“Is there any other kind?”

“Then my opinion is yes.”

King’s eyes went wide. “Yes?”

“Soneji bombed people with impunity. He kidnapped and tortured others. He used a baby as a human shield while trying to bomb Times Square. I chased him into the New York subway system when he was wearing an explosives vest. He tried to kill me. I did everything I could to make sure the vest did not go off, including killing him. So, yes, if I’ve ever met someone who deserved to die, it was Gary Soneji.”

“Are you obsessed with him?”

“No more than you’ll be obsessed with me when you move on to your next story. Look, being a detective is my job, not a crusade or a vendetta. I do my best. I move on.”

“‘I do my best. I move on.’ I like that,” she said, and she smiled and took off her glasses. “Virginia Winslow and Leonard Diggs. Did they deserve to die?”

“No,” I said. “But they made decisions that led me to make decisions as a police officer that ended their lives. I still don’t have a crystal-clear rationale for their actions other than their wanting to frame me.”

“In the video, none of your victims are seen carrying guns.”

“In person, they were all holding nickel-plated revolvers,” I said.

She chewed on one arm of her reading glasses. “And you, what, believe that Claude Watkins’s followers somehow erased the images of them?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“If you watch that video, you look like the coldest of killers, Dr. Cross.”

“Or the biggest of patsies.”

King put her glasses back on, referred to her notes. “With all the shootings across the country involving white cops killing black kids, isn’t it ironic that there was no real federal involvement in this issue until the U.S. Justice Department put a black cop on trial?”

I felt my expression harden as I said, “I’ve never really wanted to play that card, but it sure makes you think, doesn’t it?”

It went on for another twenty minutes before King finished. When the cameras were off, I stood and let the tech remove the microphone while King spoke with her producer.

She came over afterward, shook my hand a second time, and said, “I apologize for some of the tougher questions. Like you said, it’s the job.”

“I don’t mind tough questions as long as they’re unbiased.”

“How’d I do?”

“I thought you were fair. How’d I do?”

King held my gaze before saying, “You’re either a pathological liar and a killer or you’re being framed by real smart folks.”

“That how you’re going to spin it?”

“No spin, Dr. Cross,” King said. “We’ll lay out both sides as we go and let the viewers decide.”

Chapter 59

Bree, Anita, and Naomi were convinced I’d done myself a great deal of good with the interview. And Nana Mama was still buzzing with the excitement of meeting Oprah’s best friend forever, which I thought was kind of sweet and funny.

But as the hours ticked by I grew more anxious. What if Anita’s analysts weren’t good enough? What if we couldn’t prove the video had been doctored?

Around nine that evening, I was feeling claustrophobic. Ali found me pacing around in the kitchen.

“Dad?” he asked. “Can I see those videos everyone’s talking about?”

“Why would you want to see things like that?”

He shrugged. “Your attorney Ms. Marley thinks something’s wrong with them. I wanted to see if I could see it.”

I thought about that for several moments and then said, “I don’t think I’d be the best father if I let a nine-year-old see a recording of people dying needlessly.”

“Oh,” my son said, sounding taken aback. “I just wanted to help.”

“I know you did, bud,” I said, and I hugged him.

Ali left me looking disappointed, which made me feel even more claustrophobic. I went upstairs and got changed into sweatpants, an old FBI hoodie, and running shoes. I found Bree in the front room watching The Voice and said I was going out for a jog.

“You want company?”

“Not this time,” I said. “I need to get some things straight or I won’t sleep.”

Bree gave me an even gaze. “Just for the record, Alex, I think it sucks you’re going through this. It guts me.”

“It does suck,” I said. “But like Nana Mama said, the truth will out.”

“I don’t want you spending a day in prison before that happens.”

“Me neither,” I said.

“Don’t forget Jannie’s racing in the morning.”

“I won’t be longer than I have to be,” I said, then kissed her and went out the door. I ran down the block well out of sight before slowing and hailing a cab.

I got in the back and gave the driver an address. Twenty minutes later I was climbing out into a crowded parking lot in a light industrial area off I-95 not far from Dumfries, Virginia. I’d probably driven by the steel building there several thousand times while I was based at Quantico and never noticed it.

Then again, ten years before there had been no big glittering sign on the side facing the road that said GODDESS!

Throbbing electronic music pulsed from the building. For a moment I thought the two shaved-head bouncers weren’t going to let me in because of what I was wearing, but the manager happened by and said, “The FBI is always welcome. More and more of you brave ones every day.”

I paid the twenty-five-dollar cover fee and went inside the club, an homage to 1970s disco, with black walls, lots of mirrors, and flashing balls spinning and flickering above the dance floor, which was packed with gyrating gay men in all manner of dress, from tuxes to leather bondage outfits.

As I moved around, I turned down two offers to dance myself before spotting the man I’d come to see. Krazy Kat Rawlins was right in the middle of the mob of sweating dancers, shaking his booty, tossing his red Mohawk around, and waving his tattooed arms overhead as if he were at a revival for some of that old-time religion.

When the song changed, Rawlins came off the dance floor sweating, gasping, grinning, and flirting with several pals before he spotted me. Suddenly, the FBI’s top digital analyst wasn’t so exhilarated anymore.

“Unless you drive on my side of the highway, what are you doing here?”

“You haven’t been returning my calls.”

Rawlins patted his Mohawk, gauging its stiffness, before saying, “I don’t believe you deserve to talk to me or to Batra anymore.”

“Excuse me?”

He squared off, crossing his arms. “I’ve looked at the videos, Dr. Cross. Metadata’s all there and I don’t see any evidence that the sections that show the victims’ hands have been altered in any way.”

The words took a moment to sink in, and then I felt detached from my body. I looked around the dance club as if it were part of some weird dream.

“I saw guns, pistols,” I said.

“The data doesn’t lie,” Rawlins said.

“No, that’s not right. I’m telling you, Krazy Kat, that—”

“I can’t help you.”

I put my hands to my head. “I feel like I’m in some alternate universe, like I’m losing my mind.”

He knit his brow. “Then you should go talk to someone, like a therapist, someone who can help you understand what you’ve done.”

“But I didn’t—”

“The videos say you did,” Rawlins said. “The videos say Winslow and Diggs were unarmed. You killed them in cold blood, not self-defense.”

“I saw guns!”

“Then your brain invented the guns so you could deal with what you’d done. You’d gotten off before. You’d do it again.”

The FBI tech guru walked away and disappeared into the mass of writhing bodies on the dance floor with me staring dumbly after him.

Chapter 60

I have never been a quitter in my entire life, never tried to do anything but face my responsibilities and duties head-on. But sitting in another cab twenty minutes after Rawlins vanished back onto the dance floor at the club, I felt like telling the driver to take me to National Airport or Union Station instead of home.

I wanted to flee, get a new identity, and hide out on a South Sea island, do anything except go home to tell Bree, Nana Mama, and the kids what Rawlins had said. There’d been no guns. I’d been deluded at best, downright evil at worst. In either case, I was going to federal prison, probably for life.

I shut my eyes, trying to remember the entire incident, clearly seeing the gun in Watkins’s hand, and in Virginia Winslow’s, and Leonard Diggs’s. It made me sick to my stomach when I thought of the videos, clearly showing no guns before I shot.

How in God’s name was that possible?

I thought back again, trying to remember every instant, and recalled that I’d felt odd, light-headed when Kimiko Binx and I arrived at the factory. Inside the factory, I’d felt... giddy? Why would I have been giddy? There were people with guns trying to kill me and I’d been... elated?

Maybe Rawlins was right. Maybe I did need to see a shrink, or at least someone who might understand what I was going through, someone like...

“Driver,” I said. “Change of plans. Take me downtown.”

He dropped me on a corner not far from the courthouse. I walked north several blocks to a familiar street with lights blazing in some of the town houses and big dumpsters out in front of the ones that were dark.

There were a few lights on in one of the duplexes, which did and didn’t surprise me. Bernie Aaliyah had been fixing up the place.

As I climbed the stairs to the porch and the front door, my mind fled back to the last time I’d been here. I remembered being outside Tess Aaliyah’s bedroom door, hearing the gunshot, and jumping back in shock and despair. And poor Bernie Aaliyah pounding on the door, begging the silence for an answer, some hope.

I shook off the memory, hesitated, and then knocked. A few moments later, the dead bolts were thrown and the door opened.

“Dr. Cross?”

“I wonder if I could talk to you.”

“I’m doing good since we last spoke,” Tess said, and she smiled. “We have another meeting set, don’t we?”

“This time it’s not about you,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, and frowned. “Well, then, of course, please come in.”

Chapter 61

I followed her inside, remarking to myself how good she looked after only a month off the various interacting drugs that had helped put her behind a locked door with her backup pistol talking about rats, and her father and I outside thinking suicide.

It turned out that the construction projects up and down the street had disturbed the neighborhood’s urban rat population and caused a migration. Tess had seen rats twice in her closet upstairs earlier that day. After her fight with her dad, and in a semidelusional state due to the drugs, she decided she’d clean out the closet, put crackers and birdseed in a pile, and then sit back and wait for a shot. It was why she’d insisted on talking quietly. She’d been hunting.

After Tess shot the rat, the ringing in her ears was so loud that for several long, agonizing moments, she didn’t hear her father pounding on the door. Then she’d opened the door and looked at us with bloodshot, drug-puzzled eyes, as if she couldn’t imagine what we were so upset about.

It had taken several hours to convince Tess to enter a psychiatric facility in Virginia so she could be properly evaluated. But she eventually agreed and spent a week there getting clean and undergoing tests. She’d gone into the psych ward taking a multi-pill cocktail and left on a single drug for depression. The doctors said that in her effort to forget, she was lucky she hadn’t done permanent brain damage.

“You want a beer?” Tess said. “Dad left some.”

“Water if you’ve got it,” I said.

“Coming up,” she said and got me some chilled from the fridge.

I sat in Bernie Aaliyah’s favorite chair. Tess gave me my water, curled her feet under her on the couch, and said, “Thank you again for helping me, Alex. You were the only one who saw I was a danger to myself.”

“I’m glad you agreed to get help,” I said. “Which is why I came to see you.”

“Okay?”

“Have you been following my trial?”

She shook her head. “My therapist advised me to go on a no-media diet for a few months.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” I said, but then I brought her up to speed on the latest trial developments, including the video and Rawlins’s contention that it had not been doctored.

“But you saw those pistols?”

“Every time I close my eyes, I see them,” I said.

“Any chance you imagined them?”

I started to tell her absolutely not but then said, “Part of me doesn’t know anymore, Tess, and it’s got me scared that I did something heinous and that my mind has somehow erased it and put something else in its place to justify my actions. Does that make sense? Has that ever happened to you?”

Pain flickered on her cheeks before she shook her head. “I remember every detail, the first shots, me returning fire, and then hearing the Phelps’s nanny wailing beyond that apartment door. I can’t forget a second of it.”

“That’s how the other part of me feels.”

“Then those pistols were there and removed from the videos. You just have to prove it.”

My cell phone dinged, alerting me to a text. I pulled it out, saw it was from Bree: Where are you, Alex? I’m worried.

I texted back, Talking to an old friend. On my way.

I looked at Tess and said, “I have to go. Thanks for talking.”

“One good deed deserves another.”

We both stood and headed toward the door. I opened it and looked back at her before leaving.

“I forgot to ask. How are you keeping busy?”

Tess smiled wistfully and said, “Running twice a day, reading, and trying to learn how to forgive myself without a bunch of drugs in my brain.”

Chapter 62

At ten the following morning, I was in the stands inside the Johns Hopkins University field house with Damon, a sophomore now. We were watching Jannie take her last warm-ups. She’d been quiet on the ride up for the meet, so quiet that I had finally asked her what was going on.

Jannie didn’t want to talk at first, but she eventually admitted that she was upset because someone had uploaded the shooting videos to YouTube. Social media was incensed. Terrible comments had been directed at her and at the boys.

That only made the day worse. When I’d told Bree the night before that Rawlins said the videos had not been doctored, I’d seen something in her eyes that I swore I’d never see there. Doubt. Not open suspicion, not a lack of faith, but doubt about the facts of the shootings as I’d described them.

“How are you doing, Dad?” Damon asked.

“Let’s focus on Jannie,” I said. “I’m sick of thinking about everything else.”

“How’s our girl looking?” Ted McDonald asked, breaking into my thoughts.

I was surprised to see him. “Thought you couldn’t make it, Coach.”

“My plans changed last night.”

“Does Jannie know?” Damon asked.

“She will after the race.”

“You mean after you see if she executes your race plan,” I said.

“That too,” McDonald said. “The field’s pretty much the same as last time, including Claire Mason, so we can kind of hit reset today.”

“Same tactics you recommended before?”

“A few tweaks based on her recent practice times,” he said, and he dug in his pocket for a stopwatch.

Jannie had pulled the inside third lane. Claire Mason, the Maryland state champion and future Stanford athlete, was two wide in the fifth slot.

Whatever frustration and hurt Jannie might have been feeling on the ride to Baltimore appeared to be bottled and corked when the race starter called the young women to their marks. Our girl went to the blocks bouncing, shaking her arms, and rolling her head, all the while staring into the middle distance.

McDonald lowered his binoculars, said, “She’s good.”

I thought so too. She looked like the old Jannie out there, especially when she smiled after the starter said, “Set.”

At the pistol crack, my daughter came out of the blocks well, more smooth power than explosive. Her stride lengthened, her legs found a relaxed cadence, and her arms were driving fluidly by the end of the first straight. She ran the curve cleanly and confidently, no sign of foot pain.

Exiting onto the backstretch, Jannie was exactly where she’d been in the previous race, in fourth, just off the shoulder of the girl in third, with Claire Mason leading by two body widths. But there was no move for the front. Jannie stayed right in her groove through the second curve and back up the near straightaway.

“Nice,” her coach said, clicking his stopwatch as she flashed by. “I like that number a whole lot.”

Claire Mason tried to run away with it coming out of the third turn, but the three athletes chasing her, including Jannie, reeled the state champion in down the backstretch. They were running in a tight bunch entering the final, far turn.

“Well done,” McDonald said, watching through his binoculars. “Now gallop for home, girlie-girl.”

Jannie seemed to hear her coach’s words in her head because he’d no sooner said them than she found another gear. She passed the girl in third and was right off the shoulder of the athlete in second coming out of the last curve.

I couldn’t help it; I started yelling, “C’mon, Jannie!”

Damon shouted, “Show them who’s boss, sis!”

My daughter did something then that I hadn’t seen since the foot injury. Her gait became more like bounding, and she blew by the girl in second place and bore down on Claire Mason with thirty yards to go. Mason gave a backward glance, saw Jannie coming, and ran in fear. But even sheer terror wouldn’t have helped the state champ’s cause that day.

With fifteen yards remaining, Jannie caught Mason. She was a full body width ahead at the wire.

Chapter 63

Jannie slowed, laughed, and threw her arms up to the sky. Damon cheered. I whooped and hollered and felt better than I had in days. Poor Claire Mason looked shell-shocked; she was a senior heading to a top track program, and she’d been bested by a junior just back from a long time off for a foot injury.

McDonald clapped when Jannie came up a few moments later.

“That is exactly how you do it,” he said, giving her a high five. “The win’s nice. So is beating Mason. But I’m prouder of you for being a disciplined and smart athlete.”

Beaming, Jannie said, “It worked staying just off them. I felt like I had a lot in the tank when it counted.”

“Sometimes I do know what I’m talking about,” McDonald said, and he winked at her. “Enjoy the moment. I’ll talk to you Monday.”

“Leaving already?” Damon asked.

“Noon flight to Dallas,” he said, and he looked to Jannie. “Ice bath ASAP.”

Jannie groaned. “I hate ice baths.”

“But she’ll do it,” I said.

After we’d left Damon to his studies, Jannie was bubbling with excitement as she got into the car and for half the way home. Then she checked her cell phone and got quiet again.

“They giving you a hard time?”

For several moments Jannie did not reply, but then she said, “They’re idiots, Dad. They don’t know you like I know you, so I think it’s time I do some serious de-friending and maybe take a week or two vacation from all social media, even Snapchat and Instagram.”

“Two weeks? I read somewhere that it’s virtually impossible for teenage girls to get off their smartphones.”

“Alert Mark Zuckerberg. I’m going to be the first.”

I laughed. “Good for you.”

“I’m sorry for the way I’ve been acting. I guess I could only see what the trial was doing to my life.”

“And I’m sorry you’ve had to suffer for my actions. It’s not fair to you or to your brothers.”

We drove on in silence for a while. “Dad?”

I looked over and saw tears dripping down her cheeks. “What’s the matter, sweetie?”

“I love you, Dad, and I believe in you, but I’m also really scared for you.”

A big ball of emotion surged in my throat. “I love you too, Jannie, and don’t be scared for me. We’re going to be all right.”

But the closer we got to DC and home, the less I believed it.

Chapter 64

Ali Cross heard Jannie come through the front door, and the excitement in her voice and then in Nana Mama’s, but it wasn’t enough to get him up from the desk in his father’s attic office or make him take his eyes off the computer screen showing a YouTube video of his father shooting three people.

Ali had heard about the videos on Facebook and had watched them nearly twenty times by then. The first playing had been the most difficult. He’d jerked back and shut them off when his dad pulled the trigger, killing Virginia Winslow. It reminded him so much of seeing his debate teacher shot during the kidnapping of Gretchen Lindel that he almost got sick.

Deciding not to finish the tape, he almost shut down the browser. But then he remembered Ms. Marley, his dad’s attorney, quoted in the Washington Post the day before, saying that there was something wrong with the videos, that they had been altered somehow. And he saw the comments people had posted on YouTube, most of them saying that Alex Cross was guilty as hell and deserved to spend life in prison or worse.

Ali had fought off the urge to cry reading the posts and forced himself to play the videos to the end, and then again and again, freezing the screen whenever one of the victims’ hands was visible.

No gun. No gun. No gun.

But his dad said they’d all had guns, so he’d watched the videos over and over and over again. It wasn’t until the fifteenth or sixteenth time that Ali noticed that the lighting seemed to change in the moments before each of the victims appeared, going dimmer but not dark enough that you couldn’t see them and then brightening so you could see their empty hands just before the shot.

Ali had looked at those parts of the videos in detail at least three times and could not figure out what the change in lighting meant. He reached for the computer mouse and was about to play the videos yet again when he heard someone climbing the stairs.

Heart pounding, Ali clicked off the browser, revealing a Microsoft Word file that he pretended to be scanning when his dad came in.

“Nana Mama says you’ve been up here all morning,” he said.

“I have a paper due on Monday,” Ali said, still not looking up.

“Really? What’s your topic?”

“Magic,” he said, lifting his head. “Like Harry Houdini magic.”

“The best there ever was,” his dad said. “How’s it going?”

The truth was Ali had finished writing the paper two days before, but he said, “Pretty good. I should be done on time if I work hard.”

“Good for you,” his dad said, looking around at the stacks of boxes that crowded the little office. “I’ve got to do something about this. I can’t move in here half the time.”

“Bree said it’s evidence stuff and not to touch it.”

“Too much evidence stuff,” his dad said, distracted. “Don’t stay up here all day. Go ride your bike at some point, or maybe we can go shoot a few hoops.”

“That’d be good,” Ali said, and he smiled. “Why was Jannie so happy?”

“She won her race, beat the strongest girl in Maryland.”

“Wow,” Ali said. “And no foot pain?”

“None,” his dad said and turned to leave.

“Dad?” Ali called after him. “Do you think real magic exists? That there are people who can make things appear and disappear for real?”

“No,” he said. “It’s all deception, sleight of hand, smoke, light, and mirrors.”

Ali nodded. “I think so too.”

“You want lunch?”

“I’ll come down in a bit,” Ali promised. He watched his dad duck his head going out the door and listened to him drop to the second floor, then the first.

Ali felt a moment of guilt before launching the Internet browser again. He didn’t like lying to his father or directly disobeying him, but someone had to figure out what was wrong with the videos.

He hit Play again and decided not to fast-forward, to watch them all from the beginning. He focused on the middle camera, the north one, looking back across the width of the factory floor with the bottoms of the three spotlights on the roof of the southern alcoves visible. Ali froze the screen and zoomed in.

He’d hoped to see some shadow there behind the spotlights, the suggestion of a silhouette, but he saw none. He hit Play again and noticed a tiny blue pinpoint light flash. And then it was gone.

It took Ali three attempts to freeze the middle video feed on that tiny blue light. He zoomed in on it but couldn’t tell what the light was attached to. Frustrated, he hit Play again. He focused on the third feed, the one showing the length of the factory room, with the spotlights aimed toward the mural.

He zoomed in on the spotlights, but saw no one behind them.

Who was running the lights? And where was that blue pinpoint? Try as he might, he couldn’t spot it.

“Ali!” Nana Mama yelled up the stairs. “I’ve got your bacon, lettuce, and tomato down here waiting.”

“Coming, Nana,” he cried. He cleared the browser’s history to cover his tracks, then shut down the web page.

Ali got up and headed toward the stairs, only vaguely aware of the stacks of evidence boxes he passed. Indeed, he was thinking so intently about that pinpoint blue light that he barely noticed that the box on the filing cabinet closest to the door was labeled AUTOPSIES.

Chapter 65

We were finishing up lunch when I heard a knock at our side door.

“Who’s that now?” Nana Mama grumbled. “A damn reporter again?”

“If it is, I’m calling a real cop,” I said, grinning and tousling Ali’s hair because he seemed lost in thought.

I put my dishes on the counter, crossed to the side door, and opened it. A distressed Alden Lindel stood there.

“Mr. Lindel?” I said, stepping out and closing the door.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Cross,” the father of the kidnapped girl from Ali’s school said. “I know you’ve got your own issues, but I didn’t know where else to turn.”

I took a deep breath and then gestured to the basement door.

In my office, Lindel reached into his jacket pocket and came out with another flash drive in a baggie. “This time they hanged Gretchen.”

He dropped into the chair, hid his face in his hands, and sobbed. “God damn it, they hung my daughter, or made it look that way, and they’re selling tickets to the show on the Internet.”

I flashed on Jannie and felt sick to my stomach. I walked over, put my hand on Lindel’s shoulder, and said, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through.”

He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes. “My wife and I barely talk. I can’t work. My boss has threatened to fire me. Some days Gretchen’s all I think about. And then, just for a while, she slips my mind. I get a little rest, and then something like this shows up in the mailbox. What do they want, Dr. Cross? Why are they doing this?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But you need to take the drive straight to the FBI. I’ve been cut out of the loop because of my trial.”

He continued to look at me, his face wretched. “You can’t help me?”

“I want to,” I said, sitting down across from him and leaning forward, my elbows on my knees, hands clasped. “Mr. Lindel, I want to help find your daughter and the other missing women in the worst way. I really do. But the ugly truth is, given my situation, I’m afraid I’d be more of a hindrance than a help to you. I hope you understand, sir. I’m not much good to you at the moment.”

He didn’t understand, not really. He got up, looking abandoned.

“You were our last chance,” Lindel said, defeated. “But I wish you luck in your trial.”

Feeling helpless, I shook his hand. “Don’t give up. They’re keeping Gretchen alive, which means there is hope you’ll see her again. But the FBI can’t find her if you’re not turning over things like this flash drive.”

He nodded. “I’ll take it straight to their office.”

When Lindel left, I went back into my office and collapsed on the couch. I felt bad, but what choice did I have? I couldn’t have gotten Rawlins or Batra to expedite an analysis of the flash. They thought I was a killer.

My cell phone rang. It was Anita Marley.

“Alex,” she said. “I’ve got bad news. Judge Larch is in the hospital. Possible stroke.”

“What?” I said, shocked. “When?”

“She was taken to GW last night,” Marley said. “They got drugs into her fast, so they’re hopeful, and they’re running more tests.”

I shook my head, seeing little Judge Larch striding up onto the bench in a way that made her seem ten feet tall, larger than life. A stroke?

I said, “What if she can’t go on?”

Anita sighed. “It will be a mistrial.”

I shut my eyes. “And months before any kind of verdict.”

“Let’s wait to hear the diagnosis.”

“I’ve got some bad news too,” I said. “The videos weren’t monkeyed with. At least, according to the metadata.”

There was a pause. “And how do you know that?”

“A well-placed source in the FBI told me last night.”

When Anita spoke again, she was irritated. “And you didn’t think it smart to alert me or Naomi? We’ve lost twelve, maybe fifteen hours of—”

“The news was pretty devastating. I guess I wasn’t thinking straight.”

She sighed and said, “Well, I’m trying. My people are still working on those videos despite what the FBI tells you. And I do have a bit of good news. The saliva tests are done. I’ve put in a call to an old chemist friend in San Francisco just to make sure I’m interpreting the results correctly, but let’s just say they’re interesting.”

“Can they clear me?”

“Given our inability to impeach the videos, no, it’s not enough. But if I’m right, with luck, we’ll be able to muddy the prosecution’s waters a bit, show there were mitigating circumstances.”

I started kneading my forehead and said, “Mitigating circumstances? Sounds to me as if I should be getting my affairs in order.”

There was a long pause before Anita said, “Always better to be prepared.”

Chapter 66

The following twenty-four hours were some of the lowest of my life. When Bree came home, I took her for a walk and told her what Anita had said. We held each other for the longest time.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Bree said.

“Makes me wonder what I did to deserve this.”

“No self-pity. What do we do?”

“No self-pity, and we move to protect you, Nana, and the kids,” I said. “I can’t have you all being punished for something you didn’t do.”

The next morning, after church, we went down to my basement office, shut the door, and made a list of things that would have to be done if I was convicted. Transfer my personal bank account to Bree. Find a trustee to step in to oversee my grandmother’s philanthropic foundation. Transfer sole medical authority for Jannie and Ali to Bree. Transfer authority on the kids’ college funds to her. Ask Nana Mama if she still wanted me as the executor of her living will. Make Bree my executor should I die in prison.

“I feel like we’re getting ready for a funeral,” Bree said.

There was a knock on my office door.

“Dad?” Jannie said.

“We’re busy, sweetheart,” I said.

“There’s someone here to see you.”

I closed my eyes. When did people stop believing in Sundays?

“Tell them to come back tomorrow.”

Nana Mama said, “I think you’ll want to come out.”

Throwing up my hands in surrender, I went over, opened the door, and found Sampson and my father, Peter Drummond, a big, robust black man in his late sixties, standing there in the hall. Drummond had a face almost devoid of expression due to nerve damage associated with a large burn scar that began beneath his right eye and spread down much of his cheek to his jaw.

“Dad?” I said.

“I came to provide some moral support,” Drummond said and he gave me a hug and a clap on the back. “John picked me up at National.”

“It was supposed to be a surprise,” Nana Mama said.

“It is a surprise,” I said. “It’s... good. Is Alicia here too?”

“Indisposed, but sends her prayers,” Drummond said.

“Let’s go upstairs,” Nana Mama said. “I’ll make a big breakfast.”

Afterward, my dad, Bree, Sampson, and I took a walk. My father asked a lot of questions. Drummond knew as much about murder as we did and more about enduring tough times than we could imagine. He’d worked sheriff’s homicide in Palm Beach County, Florida, for thirty-two years. Before that he’d served in the first Gulf War, where he was caught in an oil-well explosion that burned his face.

After we’d walked several miles and I’d brought him up to speed on everything, he said, “I know your case looks bleak, son, but you can’t lose hope. I’m living proof of that. I lost hope of ever seeing you or Nana or your children, and then there you were down in my neck of the woods, looking for Reverend Maya. Miracles happen every day.”

“From your lips to God’s ears,” Sampson said, and he checked the time. “I’ve got to go. Promised Billie I’d watch the Redskins game with her.”

“Any progress with the blondes?” I asked. “Anything from that latest video of Gretchen Lindel? The one showing her hanged?”

Sampson glanced at Bree and then shook his head. “I haven’t heard about that one. But on my end, it feels like I’m banging my head against a brick wall.”

“And the new partner?”

“She’s the brick wall.”

“John,” Bree said, but she couldn’t hide a smile. “It’s not that bad.”

“If you say so, Chief,” he said. Then he gave us a salute and walked away.

Chapter 67

At four thirty the next afternoon, a Monday, there was a knock at the basement door. Closing my laptop, I got up, happy for the new client and grateful to have something beyond my own fate to think about.

I opened the door to find a tall and very attractive woman in her early thirties. Her hair was long, luxurious, and black, her skin mocha and flawless, and her exotic chocolate eyes were wide and turned up at the outer corners. She wore a tight black skirt, stiletto heels, a chic white blouse, and a simple strand of pearls beneath a black leather jacket. Lots of other jewelry. No wedding ring.

“Ms. Cassidy?”

Annie Cassidy smiled weakly, adjusted the cuff of her jacket, and said, “It’s so good of you to see me on such short notice, Dr. Cross.”

“Any friend of Father Fiore is always welcome,” I said. “Please come in.”

I stood aside, and she looked at me uncertainly before coming down the stairs. As she passed, she glanced up shyly before continuing on into my office, leaving the faintest smell of her perfume.

After I closed the door, I found her on my couch, fiddling with her iPhone.

“Just making sure no bells,” Cassidy said.

“I appreciate it,” I said, taking a seat across from her.

She set the phone facedown on the table beside her and then took a big breath and blew it out. “I’m sorry. I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“Just so you know: There are no judgments here. Ever. And nothing you say will ever leave this room.”

“Okay. Don’t I have to fill out forms or whatever?”

“You’ll do it electronically. I’ll give you the information after we decide if we can work together.”

Cassidy thought about that, said, “Fair enough.”

“So,” I said, picking up a notepad and a pen. “How can I help?”

She hesitated, squinted, said, “Are you a sleepwalker, Dr. Cross?”

“Is that what you’re having trouble with? If so, I can refer you to an excellent sleep specialist.”

Cassidy made a show of crossing her legs. “I’m not a sleepwalker myself, but I’m wondering if you are so I can understand you before I try to explain.”

It seemed like an odd and convoluted reason for the request, but I said, “I don’t think I have sleepwalked since I was a child.”

“Or since you were married,” she said, her head tilted in deference.

“I’m afraid I’m not following.”

“Of course not,” Cassidy said, and she smiled. “Sleepwalker.”

As I readjusted my position in my chair, I was thinking that I might have someone mentally unstable on my hands.

She straightened her legs and then crossed them the other way. “To be plain: I’m an addict, Dr. Cross, and I need your help.”

“Opioids?” I said with a sigh. “If so, there are better—”

“No, not opioids.”

“What then?”

“How does that old Robert Palmer song go?” Cassidy asked, smiled, and then sang quietly, “‘Might as well face it, you’re addicted to love.’”

Her happiness vanished. “That’s the long and short of what’s wrong with me, Dr. Cross. I’m a straight-up, strung-out, love junkie if ever there was one.”

Chapter 68

I’d heard and encountered pathological love stories before, especially when unrequited desire and obsession were motives for murder. But in the hour that followed, Annie Cassidy gave me a crash course in the little-studied, rarely discussed world of love junkies and so-called sleepwalkers like me.

Cassidy told me she was like most of the love junkies she knew in that, as a little girl, she’d bought hook, line, and tiara into the myth of the fairy-tale princess. Cassidy’s mother dressed her up as a princess when she was young. She entered Cassidy in beauty pageants. And every night before bed, she read her daughter fairy tales where Prince Charming always appeared to scoop the princess out of her poor Cinderella life and ride her into the happily ever after on the back of his valiant white steed.

As I listened, I realized this story was a variation of the princess story the computer geek at Catholic University had told me as a way of explaining the minds of blond women, but I kept my mouth shut and kept an open mind.

“All my life, I dreamed of happily ever after,” Cassidy said wistfully as she sat back on the couch. “When Kevin appeared in my life, senior year at NYU, I was sure he was my Prince Charming. I’d never felt like that with anyone before. Breathless. Sick when we were apart. And when we were together, I could hold his hand, feel his love coursing through me, and tell him every dark secret in my heart. Is that what falling in love was like for you, Dr. Cross?”

I thought of Bree and me in our early days, how smitten I’d been by her, breathless and tongue-tied after our first kiss, and how euphoric we were to be together after we’d been apart.

“Yes,” I said. “We couldn’t get enough of each other.”

“Roughly two years of that, right? Like there’s no one else in the world who matters?”

I smiled. “Yes.”

“That’s because when you fall in love, there’s a chemical cocktail mixing in your brain. First it’s norepinephrine, and then the serotonins kick in, give you wild energy. It’s like bathing your brain in cocaine.”

“I think that’s right,” I said.

“You would do almost anything for that feeling once you have it. You might do crazy things that no sane person would do. Like abdicate a throne. Or walk away from your family, your life, just to be with your new love.”

Cassidy said she and Kevin fell into that kind of passionate love. They married after college and were still living the romance two years later.

Their third year together, however, Kevin began working longer hours, and when he was home, he was too tired to do much beyond sit in front of the television with his computer in his lap. He gained weight. He lost interest in her.

She grew more frustrated, in part because, while the chemicals of falling in love carry with them the rush of amphetamines, the chemicals of long-term love are more like a gentle opioid calming the brain, sedating it, in a sense.

“In retrospect, there was that, for sure,” Cassidy said. “I felt groggy all the time, like a sleepwalker. Even through the haze, I could see that I’d screwed up. I realized I hadn’t married the Prince Charming in my fairy tale. I’d married the frog.”

That crushed Cassidy. She felt like she’d settled for less than the perfect love and the beautiful life she’d been promised. Shortly afterward, she met Chet, a man who came to work at her real estate firm. Chet was handsome and funny. They flirted. He listened to her. The chemicals of new love trickled in her brain.

“I came awake, alive again,” Cassidy said. “But I did the right thing.”

She said that many women raised in the traditions of the princess myth will ask for a separation from the frog, hinting that they might be willing to recommit at a later date. They string the frog out for years, punishing him with hopes of reconciliation dashed, unwarranted restraining orders, and false charges of abuse and neglect.

“It’s all done out of spite,” she said. “They feel cheated. The fairy tale is not true, so they take their rage out on the husband while getting some love chemicals on the side.

“But I absolutely did not do that. I did not play torture-the-frog just because Kevin was not Prince C. He could have easily turned out to be an ogre, am I right? The point is that as soon as I had a commitment from Chet, I told Kevin to his face that I had to be free to love and that I wanted a divorce.”

Cassidy moved in with Chet until the chemical attraction wore off, about two years later. Chet’s place in her heart was soon occupied by Steven. Twenty-six months later, she met Carlos, a deep sleepwalker, who was ten years into his marriage.

“I woke Carlos up,” Cassidy said, and she chuckled. “In a big way.”

I glanced at the clock. “Our hour’s almost up, but I have a quick question.”

Cassidy said, “Okay.”

“What do you want out of our sessions? If we go on, I mean.”

She sighed, studied the ceiling, and said, “I’ve been eighteen months with Carlos. He’s a stand-up guy. He divorced his wife for me, and I really do love him. Not only that, I genuinely like him. He’s my best friend ever. But I know what’s coming in six months, a year at the outside, and I... I guess I want to learn how to be a sleepwalker and stay with someone forever.”

I smiled. “That’s a good goal.”

“Something we can talk about next time?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Cassidy took her iPhone off the table and got up. “Thank you, Dr. Cross.”

“You’re more than welcome. I’ll need an e-mail address to send my forms.”

“Oh,” she said, her brow knitting. “I had a computer virus over the weekend and I’m between e-mails at the moment. I’m opening a new account on Gmail tonight. Can I ping you with it?”

“That works.”

“Thank you for understanding all this.”

“It’s what I do.”

“And you do it well,” she said. She smiled uncertainly and left.

I stood there a few moments, wondering if Bree and I were sleepwalkers, then deciding that if we were, I was more than happy in my semiconscious state of marital bliss.

Remembering I had to take some leaves I’d raked and bagged out front for pickup, I went outside. The light was fading. Drizzle fell. I got the leaf bags, carried them around the house, and put them on the sidewalk.

I happened to look down the block and saw Cassidy getting into a black Nissan Pathfinder. Wondering if her Carlos might be driving, I walked a few yards that way and was in deep shadow near a retaining wall when the Pathfinder came closer, headlights off.

I could see the silhouette of Cassidy sitting sideways, facing the driver, who was just a dark shape until the Pathfinder crossed beneath a street lamp. For a second his face was clearly visible through the windshield.

Recognition stopped me cold. I was confused.

What was Annie Cassidy doing with Alden Lindel?

Chapter 69

Gretchen Lindel’s father used to tell her that the brain could be the strongest part of the body, or the most fragile.

“It’s your choice, Gretch,” he’d said not long before she’d been taken captive in the twisted world of sickos.

Lying on her filthy mattress in her plywood cell, holding her left leg so it wouldn’t be irritated any further by the manacle around her ankle, the seventeen-year-old was doing everything she could to keep her mind strong.

I am going to get out of here, Gretchen kept telling herself. I just have to survive long enough to get the chance. I’m going to be like Dad. Nothing they’ve done hurts me in any way. It makes me stronger. This only makes me stronger.

But it had been several days since they’d come for her. Hour upon hour of silence created all sorts of dark voices in her mind.

Doubt crept up on Gretchen and whispered that she’d die there in the box. Fear wormed its way into her stomach and said they’d take her again before that happened. Self-pity wrapped her head and heart, told her she was defeated.

But time and time again, whenever Gretchen realized the voices of despair were taking control of her thoughts, she’d think of her father and everything he’d endured, and she’d take heart.

I will survive. They can’t hurt me. This will only make me—

The dead bolts turned. She closed her eyes, not knowing if this was a meal or another of their twisted games. If it was a game, she was done crying. She was done being scared. They seemed to feed on her fright, and as the door swung open she vowed to give them none.

The big one in black came in carrying a semiautomatic AR rifle. Her father had one just like it.

“It’s time, Gretchen,” he said from behind the paintball mask. “We’re all but done here. Cleanup time now.”

Gretchen said nothing, just stared through him as if he didn’t matter anymore, as if nothing mattered anymore.

Be like Dad, she thought as he went to work on her ankle manacle.

For God’s sake, be like Dad.

Chapter 70

Had that been Gretchen Lindel’s father driving the Pathfinder?

I kept trying to convince myself I was wrong, but each time I closed my eyes, I saw Alden Lindel clearly. But why? And how?

When Annie Cassidy called to set up the appointment, she’d said that Father Fiore had referred her, hadn’t she? Well, now that I thought about it, she hadn’t actually used his name. She’d said she’d gotten my number from “a mutual friend, a priest with challenging problems.”

And Lindel? He’d contacted me directly. No reference that I remembered.

What were the odds of two people who knew each other coming to my office and never mentioning it to me?

I thought about Gretchen Lindel’s mother, Eliza, and how distraught she’d been in the days after her daughter’s kidnapping. Was Annie Cassidy the reason she and her husband separated? Had she used fake names for her lovers? Was Alden Lindel actually Carlos?

I went inside, told my grandmother I was going out, and got the car keys.

By the time I drove into a residential neighborhood west of the Cabin John Parkway, it was pitch-dark and the rain had stopped. I found the address I was looking for and parked the car across the street from a brick-faced Colonial with a big flower bed gone dormant, a crushed-gravel driveway, and a bronze Volvo station wagon. Lights gleamed in the narrow windows that flanked the front door.

I climbed out, smelled wet leaves, and started toward the house, wondering about the reception I’d get, a lone man at night unannounced. My cell phone buzzed. I ignored it, climbed the stoop, and rang the bell.

A dog started barking. A small Jack Russell terrier was soon bouncing and barking an alarm on the other side of the lower right window.

“Tinker!” a woman said. “Get back, girl!”

The dog kept barking and then yelped in protest when the woman grabbed her and held her in her arms. She peered blearily out the window at me. Despite the exhaustion and despair that seemed to hang off her like rags, I recognized her.

“Mrs. Lindel?” I said. “Eliza?”

The terrier in her arms showed her teeth.

She said, “If you’re a reporter, please go away, you’re not helping the situation. No one’s helping the situation here.”

“I’m not a reporter,” I said. “My name is Alex Cross. I’m a... my son Ali goes to school at Latin with Gretchen.”

Eliza studied me a long moment before opening the door. The dog growled like a little demon.

“Hush, now,” Eliza said, and the dog stilled but kept a close eye on me.

The missing girl’s mother was in her mid-thirties but looked older in baggy sweatpants, Birkenstock sandals, and a George Mason University tee. Her hair was in disarray and graying at the roots. Her eyes were bloodshot, rheumy.

“Alex Cross,” she said. “You’re that cop on trial for murder.”

“Innocent as charged.”

“I read you’ve killed eleven people.”

“In the course of duty I have, that’s true.”

“I also read you’ve found kidnapped girls before.”

“That’s also true. Including my niece, who today is part of my defense team. Life can go on after an abduction, Mrs. Lindel.”

“That why you’re here?”

“In part. Can I come in?”

She hesitated, then stuck her face in her dog’s face. “You be good now, Tinker, hear?”

Tinker licked her cheek. Eliza set the dog down. The Jack Russell eyed me when Eliza stood aside and I entered. I smelled gin and cigarettes as I walked past her into a center hall lined with hooks where pictures had once hung.

“Is there somewhere we can sit and talk?” I asked.

“The kitchen. Straight ahead.”

She followed me down the hallway through an open doorway into a dingy white kitchen where dirty dishes were piled high in the sink, newspapers and unopened mail covered the table, and prescription bottles took up two entire shelves of a bookcase. I caught a whiff of something antiseptic and thought I heard muffled voices.

“How are you holding up?” I said.

Eliza pushed back a strand of hair. “How does it look like I’m holding up?”

“I can’t help asking — the pictures in the hall?”

She stared at me. Her lower lip quivered. “I couldn’t take looking at Gretchen anymore. She was ripping me up every time I walked through there.”

“The stress must feel unbearable.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Your husband?”

She stiffened. “Alden? Alden’s Alden. A trouper. Never gives up hope. Never says die.”

“I’m a clinical psychologist by training. I don’t know if he’s told you, but he’s been seeing me for therapy.”

She crossed her arms and studied me skeptically. “No, he didn’t say anything.”

“Two sessions.”

“Really? You’d think he would have told me. Why don’t we go ask him why he didn’t?”

My pulse quickened. “He’s here? I just saw him heading toward Capitol Hill. He looked like he was out for a night on the town. With another woman.”

“Another woman?” She laughed sarcastically. “I bet he smelled of cheap perfume, didn’t he?”

“I didn’t get close enough.”

“Well, you can now,” she said, gesturing at a door at the far end of the kitchen. “Alden’s right through there, watching Game of Thrones. Let’s go talk to him. Get things out in the open.”

“Let’s do that,” I said. I crossed the kitchen and went through the door.

Chapter 71

A wave of antiseptic smells hit me as I stepped down into a space set up as a hospital room.

To my right, shelves bulged with medical equipment, supplies, and clean linens. To my immediate left there was a tall green oxygen tank with a hose that ran over to a hospital bed with its back raised.

Beyond the tank, an array of electronic monitors cheeped and beeped over the sounds coming from a speaker system linked to the big screen mounted on the opposite wall. According to a tag in the lower right corner of the screen, season 3, episode 4, of Game of Thrones was showing.

I took a few more steps into the room and saw a man in the bed. He reminded me of the physicist Stephen Hawking, gaunt, bent, and curled up by disease. Breathing oxygen through a nasal cannula, he lay on his right side, wore glasses, and watched the screen intently, seeming to have no idea we were there.

“That’s not the Alden Lindel who came to see me,” I said.

“I didn’t think so,” Eliza said.

“I don’t know why I didn’t check.”

“Why would you? We’re private about Al’s challenges because that’s the way he wants it. How could you have known he has end-stage ALS?”

“I suppose,” I said, and I felt baffled until I realized that the man who’d posed as Alden Lindel brought me the flash drives that showed the mock executions of Gretchen Lindel.

No one had sent those drives to him. He was part of Killingblondechicks4fun. And so was the love junkie.

Tinker darted by us and jumped up on the bed, wagging her tail.

“E-liza,” an electronic voice said.

She smiled at me before going to his side. “Right here, Al.”

“N-ext?”

“You’re not even through that one yet, and the next is in the queue,” she said with a glance at me. “He loves this show.”

“S-mart dwarf,” he said. “B-oobs.”

“Yes, Tyrion and lots of boobs,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’d like you to meet someone, Al. He’s trying to find Gretchen for us.”

I came over to her husband’s bedside. Laboring for breath, the real father of the missing blond girl rolled his eyes up to me.

“I’m Alex Cross, sir,” I said.

He had a digital tablet next to him on the mattress. He rolled his eyes down and blinked eleven or twelve times, maybe more.

“I know you,” the tablet said a few seconds later.

“Wow,” I said. “How does that work?”

Eliza said, “The tablet’s built with three camera lenses that triangulate to pick up where he’s looking on the screen, which shows a keyboard layout. He looks at a letter on the keyboard and blinks. When he blinks twice, he’s done with the word. Blinks three times and the voice comes on.”

“That’s amazing.”

“I think so.”

The tablet voice said, “B-lows, you ask me.”

Lindel was peering at me again, and I nodded in sympathy.

He looked at the tablet. A few seconds later, the voice said, “Where’s my Gretch?”

Thinking about the fake Alden Lindel and Annie Cassidy coming to my office, I said, “She could be closer than we think. Within driving distance.”

The missing girl’s father looked down at the tablet. His synthesized voice said, “Can’t even cry for her.”

Eliza’s hand shot to her lips. “It’s true. His tear ducts are shutting down. We have to put drops in every two hours.”

Her husband rolled his attention to the tablet for the longest time yet before the voice said, “My time is near, Cross. My last wish is to see my Gretch again. One last time.”

He peered up at me. Even though his body and face were virtually frozen, I could see the desperate hope in his eyes.

“I’ll do my best, Al,” I said. “Just hang on.”

I gave Eliza Lindel my cell phone number, said good-bye to her and her husband, and left the house feeling humbled.

The day before, with the weight of the evidence in my murder trial so stacked against me, I’d been thinking that life was treating me pretty damn unfairly. But here the real Alden Lindel’s life was being squeezed from him by a disease that was killing him one paralyzed muscle at a time. And there was his courageous wife, caring for him and worried sick about their missing daughter.

All in all, I had nothing to bitch about.

I got in the car thanking God and the universe for the blessings in my life: my wife, my family, my home, my health, my friends, my—

My cell phone rang. It was Anita Marley.

“Judge Larch had a transient ischemic attack,” she said. “No stroke.”

“Hey, that’s good news.”

“It is,” she said. “I like Judge Larch. A lot. Her clerk’s saying we’re back in session the day after tomorrow.”

“Even better.”

“You still sticking with your story about the guns?”

“Yes. I’m telling you I saw them.”

“My analysts agree with the FBI. There’s no evidence of doctoring. But we’ll try to raise some reasonable doubt based on the fact that the phones were supposedly in the factory for months.”

I wasn’t convinced it would do any good. Later, as I was turning onto Fifth, my phone rang again.

Sampson said, “Are you busy tomorrow?”

“No trial until Wednesday.”

“Tell Bree I’m taking you fishing in Pennsylvania to get your mind off things. I’ll pick you up at five.”

Chapter 72

In the chill gray light of an autumn dawn, I watched fog swirling around the trunks and through the branches of leafless oak trees. Clusters of acorns still clung to some, but many more littered the forest floor. It was quiet but for the distant sound of a creek and the irregular patter of oak mast falling.

“Alex?” Sampson said behind me. “I got it to work finally.”

I turned to find him looking at an iPad on the hood of his Grand Cherokee. Still clutching my second big cup of fast-food coffee, I walked over and looked at the iPad, which had a satellite connection.

Sampson had the Google Earth app launched. It gave us a bird’s-eye view of a rural area forty miles northwest of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where several creeks met and formed a trout stream roughly three miles from where we were standing. The stream ran by a fifty-acre property adjoining an un-paved country road. A long two-track driveway wound from the road past meadows to a line of mature pines that shielded a large hollow between two ridges.

A modest ranch house sat in a clearing in the bottom of the hollow. There was a barn larger than the house and five other sheds and smaller structures. A substantial garden flanked the back of the barn. Beside the garden stood a big satellite dish.

I tapped on the dish. “That what they’re keying on?”

Sampson nodded. “Big bandwidth coming and going. Lots of electricity being used on the property. And many of the recent uploads to Killingblondechicks have evidently come through that satellite dish. We’ve got the IP address.”

“Seems strange,” I said. “When Krazy Kat Rawlins looked at that website, he couldn’t tell where most of the videos of blondes were coming from because they used onion routers. And our guys were able to track them?”

“Maybe the guys making them got lazy,” Sampson said. “It happens.”

“The woods around here do look like the woods in the videos of Gretchen Lindel and Delilah Franks,” I said. “The blondes running in the trees?”

“I remember,” Sampson said. “And the lesbian girls disappeared less than sixty miles east of here. They could all be in that house or in any of those outbuildings.”

“Wish you’d gotten the search warrant.”

“Not enough evidence yet, the judge said. Which is why you’re here and Fox isn’t. Like I said, we’re going fishing.”

We got back in the car. It felt good to be riding shotgun with Sampson again. My world seemed even better than it had leaving the Lindels the evening before.

I switched the iPad app to Google Maps and used it to navigate the labyrinth of dirt roads around the property. Somewhere on it, there was a computer belonging to a twenty-seven-year-old named Carter Flint. In the satellite image, there were six or seven vehicles in Flint’s yard.

But driving past that line of pines into the hollow, we spotted only two: a faded red Ford Ranger pickup and an old Toyota Corolla that looked in need of springs, both with their noses toward an embankment below the ranch house.

Sampson parked sideways behind them, blocking anyone trying for a quick exit. We got out. The fog was lifting from the ridges above the hollow. A dog barked in the distance beyond the pole barn. Closer, I heard the blatting of a sheep and the squeal of a pig or two.

We went up a crumbling brick walkway and knocked on the front door. No answer. No sounds inside. Sampson knocked again, and I thought I caught a flutter of movement in a window to my right. But again there was no answer.

“Let’s take a look around,” I said. “Maybe he’s in the barn.”

As we crossed the yard and got closer to the barn, the animal sounds got louder, more frantic, the dog barking, the sheep blatting, and the pig squealing. I knocked at a side door, then tried the knob. It turned. I pushed the door open. Bells hanging on the inner knob jangled.

The pig started squealing in an even higher pitch. The sheep blatted in terror. So did the dog; it sounded desperate, crying and yelping.

We stepped inside and took in the cavernous space in one long, sweeping, and horrified glance.

“Jesus Christ,” Sampson said. “This isn’t right.”

Chapter 73

The pig was forty pounds or so. It was in a low wire pen and was missing a two-inch-wide strip of skin along the length of its spine; it was clearly in terrible pain.

A lamb was in a pen beside the pig. Three of its legs were broken and it was struggling piteously.

The dog, a beagle, had been beaten with a blunt object. It tried over and over to get to its feet, but it kept falling and yelping for help.

Three GoPro cameras on tripods were aimed at the cages. Beyond the pens, a long workbench stretched the length of the side wall. On it were dozens of pieces of grotesque taxidermy, animals stuffed in their tortured state.

Behind the bench, the rear sliding door of the pole barn was open to the big garden. Thirty, maybe forty more creatures — small dogs and cats, wild things like skunks and opossums, even an owl — were stuffed in positions that preserved their agony and set in the garden in neat little rows. A few were dressed in doll clothes, which only made the situation more disturbing.

“We need to call in the locals,” Sampson said.

Before I could reply, a man wearing headphones appeared in the open doorway to the garden. Bone thin and dressed in painter’s pants and a green wife-beater, he had skin as pale as a fish belly, pinkish eyes, and wispy hair the color of snow.

Two steps into the barn, as he was smiling at the wounded animals in their pens, he spotted us over by the door. He ripped off his headphones.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

“Police,” Sampson said, holding up his badge. “You Carter Flint?”

Shock locked Flint in his tracks for a second as he looked from John’s badge to the suffering animals. Then he whirled and flew out the barn door.

I tore after him. I had no jurisdiction. I wasn’t even a cop, technically, but after what I’d seen, I wasn’t letting the sadist who’d done it get away.

Neither was Sampson; he was off my left shoulder, exiting the barn into the garden. Flint was surprisingly fast and nimble. He was already beyond the garden’s borders and racing behind two other outbuildings toward the north tree line at the base of a ridge a hundred and fifty yards away.

“If he makes those woods, we’ll lose him,” Sampson growled.

I gritted my teeth and danced through the stuffed animals until I hit the grass, then I told myself to be like Jannie — relax and run. For thirty yards I was convinced I’d catch him, but Flint was younger and, judging from the way he was gaining ground, much fitter than me.

But not fitter than Sampson, who blew by me.

When Flint was forty yards from the woods, he hit tall, tangled grass. It slowed him. But it didn’t slow John, whose long legs had him leaping after the sadist. Flint looked back in desperation and then lunged for the woods.

Sampson ran up a hummock in the weeds and dived after him.

Chapter 74

Sampson’s shoulder and his two hundred and twenty pounds drove into the back of Flint’s legs, flattening him in the deep wet grass. I ran up, gasping, as John straddled the sadist and kept his shoulders pinned.

“My knee.” Flint moaned. “Something snapped. And I got broken ribs.”

Sampson dug out zip cuffs and wrenched Flint’s arms up behind him, which provoked another round of howling.

“My ribs!”

“Screw your ribs,” Sampson said. “And screw your knee. You’re lucky I don’t kick out your front teeth.”

I helped Sampson up and then pulled Flint to his feet. His left leg buckled, and he began to whimper.

“I can’t help it, man. I got a mental sickness. I tried to stop. I did, but—”

“Save it for a judge,” Sampson said.

“Where are the blond women?” I said. “Which building?”

He didn’t react at first. Then he looked confused. “What blond women?”

“The ones you made those movies of,” Sampson said. “Fake executions. Uploaded them to the Killingblondechicks site.”

“No,” he said. “I watched some free videos on that site, but that’s not me.”

“All the recent uploads have been coming from your IP,” Sampson said.

Flint shook his head. “I’ve never submitted to that site. Never. I do animals for animal sites. Not humans. I’d never do humans.”

“Try telling that to a jury after they’ve seen your barn,” I said.

“I’m telling the truth,” he said. “Maybe I deserve punishment for what I’ve done, who I am. But if those blonde videos came through my IP, man, someone frickin’ hacked and hijacked my computer! I’m being framed!”