We both took a deep breath and climbed up into the Dumpster. It was hard to maneuver with the shifting bags underfoot, much less try to maintain the scene. As quickly as we could, we got a grasp of the victim and gently turned her over.
What I saw there knocked me right back on my ass. I leaned over the edge of the Dumpster and, for the first time in a long while, nearly lost the contents of my stomach.
Sampson was right there with me. “Alex, you okay? What’s going on?”
The taste of metal filled my mouth; I felt dizzy from the rush of adrenaline, from being blindsided so badly.
“She’s an agent, John. At the Bureau. Remember her? The DCAK case? It’s Anjali Patel.”
POOR ANJALI.
And goddamnit! How did this happen? How the hell could it?
There’s something inescapable about knowing the victim of a homicide, especially a killing as brutal as this. Unwelcome questions kept pushing to the surface: Did she see it coming? Did she suffer much? Was it over quickly for her?
I tried to remind myself that any precision knife work would have been postmortem, but that thought was cold comfort right now. Besides, the best I could do for Patel was to focus on my job and on this crime scene as objectively as possible under the messed-up circumstances.
Right away, I got on the phone to the ME’s office. I wanted to make sure Porter Henning was assigned to this one, and also to find out what the hell was taking them so long. They should have been here by now. Hell, I was.
Sampson took down the numbers we’d found on Anjali’s
back and got on his BlackBerry to see what he could find out about them in the short term.
By the time I’d spoken with Porter, who was caught in traffic on the Eisenhower Freeway, John was waving me back over to see something.
“I don’t know, Alex. This is pretty random.” He turned the screen around to show me the map he’d pulled up.
“It’s an address in Overland Park, Kansas. This thing’s just getting weirder and weirder. Maybe it’s some kind of math formula after all.”
“What about a reverse search on the address?” I asked.
“Working on it.” It was slow going, though, with his man paws and that tiny keyboard. This is why Sampson almost never texts anyone.
“Here we go, I got it. It’s a restaurant,” he said. “KC Masterpiece Barbecue and Grill?”
Sampson was shaking his head as if it couldn’t be right, but the name hit me like cold water. It must have shown on my face, too, because Sampson waved his hand in front of my eyes.
“Alex? Where’d you go?”
My own hands had tightened into fists. I wanted to hit something. Bad. “Of course,” I said. “This is exactly how the son of a bitch works.”
“How
who
works?” John said. “What are you —?”
But then he got it.
“Oh Jesus.”
It all made sense now, in the worst possible way. There was the
Alex Rifle
reference from the night before, and now this —
KC Masterpiece.
Kyle Craig’s masterpiece.
He’d done this before, leaving tokens behind at crime scenes, always aimed at getting him credit where credit was due. Both of these murders were references to my own open cases — the sniper-style hit on Tambour, and the numbers so brutally etched into Anjali Patel’s skin.
Obviously Kyle had killed them both. Or had someone do it for him.
Then, with a horrible kind of aftershock, I remembered something else: Bronson “Pop-Pop” James, my young client. He’d been shot trying to rob a store — a place called Cross Country Liquors. Of course. Why hadn’t I come back to that fact until now?
It all added up — another ton of bricks dropped onto my shoulders. Kyle was circling me and closing in as he did it, wreaking as much havoc as possible in the process. This wasn’t just blind savagery either. It was much more specific than that and, unless I was mistaken, much more personal.
It was all part of my punishment for catching him the first time.
IN ONE PHONE CALL, I re-upped with Rakeem Powell for additional twenty-four-hour security coverage at the house. I’d take out a loan if I had to; cost was not my concern right now. I couldn’t be sure what Kyle’s endgame was, but I wasn’t going to wait for him to come at me again.
I spent most of the day at the Hoover Building. With Anjali’s sudden death, it was like a wake over there, except in the SIOC, which was buzzing like an air traffic control tower.
The Bureau director himself, Ron Burns, made his designated operations room available to us, and the manhunt for Kyle Craig was back on full steam. This wasn’t personal for just me. Craig was already the biggest inside scandal in the Bureau’s hundred-year history. And now he’d killed another agent, maybe to get back at the FBI, too.
Every seat in the operation center’s double horseshoe of desks was filled. The five main screens at the head of the
room showed alternating pictures and old video of Kyle, plus national and world maps with electronic markers for his known victims and associations, and past movements.
We were on the line all day with Denver, New York, Chicago, Paris — everywhere Kyle had been known to live since his escape from ADX Florence. And every field office in the country was put on high alert.
Even so, with all this flurry of activity, we had to accept the fact that nobody had any idea where Kyle was.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Alex,” Burns said, pacing. We’d just hung up after a marathon conference call. “We’ve got nothing useful here, no physical proof that Kyle killed Tambour or Patel, or even that he’s been in Washington. And nothing on that Beretta you pulled out of evidence either, by the way.”
The Beretta he was referring to was the one Bronson James had used in the armed-robbery attempt. My original idea had been that Pop-Pop had gotten it from a gang member off the street, but Kyle Craig could have just as easily put that gun in his hand. I knew that Kyle favored Berettas, and he knew that I knew.
“
I’m
the proof,” I said. “He’s called me on the phone. He’s made threats. The man is obsessed with me, Ron. In his mind, I’m the only one who’s ever beaten him, and Kyle Craig is nothing if not highly competitive.”
“What about these disciples of his? Just for the sake of argument.” Burns was talking to me but also to a dozen other agents who took notes and banged away on laptops as he spoke. “The man’s got followers, some of them apparently ready to die on his command. It’s happened before. How do we know he didn’t commission one of them for these hits?”
“Because the hits were directed at me,” I said slowly. “This is the part Kyle would want to do himself.”
“Even so” — Burns stopped pacing and sat down — “we’re getting off point here. Whether Craig made these kills or he didn’t, our hand is pretty much the same. We keep scouring the crime scenes. We make sure that our radar’s up and that our people are as ready as they can be the next time he strikes.”
“That’s not good enough. Goddamnit!” I said, and swiped my notes off the desk, taking with them a few other people’s papers, too. Right away, I regretted it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Sorry.”
Burns bent to where I was picking up the papers and put out a hand. He pulled me to my feet. “Take a breather. Go get some dinner. There’s nothing else to do right now.”
Like it or not, he was right. I was exhausted and a little embarrassed, and I definitely needed to go home for a while. Once I’d gathered up my stuff, I headed out.
Waiting at the elevator, I felt my phone vibrate for the umpteenth time that day. It had been a steady stream of calls from MPD, Sampson, Bree, Nana —
But this time, when I looked at the ID, it just said, “A. Friend.”
“Alex Cross,” I answered, and I was already heading back to the operations center.
“Hello, Alex,” Kyle Craig said. “Really in the thick of things now, aren’t we?”
“THIS PHONE I’M CALLING ON is encrypted, so don’t bother trying anything,” Kyle went on. “Now, if I’ve timed this correctly, you’re right in the belly of the beast. Is that right? And don’t put me on speaker — or I’m hanging up.”
I came into the conference room, gesticulating like crazy to let them know something was going on. Agents started scrambling, although there wasn’t much they could do. I had no doubt Kyle was telling the truth about the encrypted phone.
Someone handed me a pad and pen, and Burns sat down with his ear close to the cell, until an assistant ran over with a laptop. He took the director’s place and started transcribing as much as he could hear.
“You killed Anjali Patel and Nelson Tambour, didn’t you, Kyle?”
“I’m afraid I did.”
“And what about Bronson James?” I said. “Did you do that, too?”
“Remarkable little boy, wasn’t he? Just vegetable soup, last I checked.”
My big mistake the previous time with Kyle had been to lose my shit during the manhunt. I was determined not to let that happen again, but my heart was pounding with as much hate as I’ve ever felt for anyone in my life.
“Do you see the swath of destruction
you’re
creating here?” he went on. “How much better off these people would be if you simply didn’t exist?”
“What I see is a man with an obsession against me,” I told him.
“Not true,” he said. “I think you’re fascinating, especially for a Negro. If you weren’t, you’d be dead by now, and Tambour, Patel, and little Bronson James would all be wondering what to have for breakfast tomorrow. It’s quite a compliment, really. Not many people are worthy of my time.”
His voice sounded almost… playful? He appeared to be in an especially good mood. Killing seemed to do that for him. Kyle also loved to talk about himself.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“
Interesting.
You don’t usually ask permission. Go right ahead, Alex.”
“I’m curious about the way you killed Tambour and Patel. It’s not like you to imitate anyone —”
“No,” he said right away. “It’s usually the other way around, isn’t it?”
“But that’s exactly what you did here. Twice.”
“So what’s your question, Alex?”
“Have you been in touch with them?” I asked. “The original killers. Are they
yours,
Kyle?”
He thought for a second, maybe trying to slow this down a little. Or maybe concocting a lie?
“I haven’t, and they aren’t,” he said then. “This Patriot character is a bit pedestrian for me. But that other one, with the numbers? Much more interesting. I’ll admit, I wouldn’t mind a little tête-à-tête with that chap.”
“So you don’t know who either of them are,” I said.
There was another long pause. Then he laughed, as heartily as I’d ever heard from Kyle.
“Alex Cross,
are you asking me for advice?
”
“You used to be a good agent,” I said. “Remember? You used to advise me.”
“Of course. They were the second-worst years of my life. The first being my time in that so-called Supermax out in Florence — which I have you to thank for.” He stopped, and I heard another long, slow breath. “Which also brings us full circle, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does,” I said. “Your whole life seems to revolve around paying me back for that.”
“Something along those lines.”
“So why all the running around, playing games, Kyle? What are you waiting for?”
“The right inspiration, I suppose,” he said without a trace of irony. “That’s the beauty of creation and imagination. Remaining open to what comes. The more seasoned the artist, the more capable he is of responding in the moment.”
“So you’re an artist now?”
“I suppose that I always have been,” he told me. “I’m just getting better at it, that’s all. It would be foolish to quit while I’m in my prime. But I will tell you one thing, my friend.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“When the end comes — trust me — we’ll both know it.”
LEAVING DC in the old white Suburban that morning, Denny had seen in the side mirror vapor trails coming out of the exhaust, but he didn’t think too much about it. With a rig as old as this one, he couldn’t bother himself over every mechanical hiccup.
Now, three and a half hours from home, the hiccup had turned into something more like a death rattle. There was a familiar dry clank coming from the engine.
As they pulled over to the side of Route 70, Mitch looked up from the
Penthouse
he’d nabbed off the rack at their last pit stop. “What’s going on, Denny? That doesn’t sound right.”
“Can’t you hear the head gasket going?” Denny said. It was amazing how observant Mitch could be with a rifle in his hand, considering how dim he was about most of the rest of his life.
A quick check under the hood told Denny what he already
knew, but he waited until they were limping back up the highway to say anything more about it to Mitch.
“Now, don’t freak out or anything, buddy, but the old magic bus ain’t going to make it back to DC. I think we’re going to have to ditch it.”