Working quickly, he took a hank of her long blond hair in his hand and sawed it off with the serrated edge of the knife. Then he cut another, and another, and another, until it was nearly gone, sheared down to where the scalp showed through in ragged patches. He kept just one handful of it for himself, tucked into a Ziploc bag, and left the rest lying in tufts around her body.
She died just as ugly as she had lived. And Dr. Creem was starting to feel better already.
When it was done, Creem closed the trunk and walked away, taking the nearest stairs down toward M Street. He didn’t speak until he was clear of the garage and outside on the sidewalk.
“Joshua?” he said. “Are you still there?”
Bergman took a few seconds to answer. “I’m . . . here,” he said. His breath was ragged, his voice barely above a whisper.
“Are you . . .” Creem grinned, though he was also a little disgusted. “Joshua, were you masturbating?”
“No,” his friend said, too quickly. Bergman had an ironic sense of modesty, all things considered. “Is it done?” he asked then.
“Signed, sealed, delivered,” Creem said. “And you know what that means.”
“Yes,” Bergman said.
“Your move, old pal. I can’t wait to see what you cook up.”
Part One
WIN, LOSE, OR DRAW
CHAPTER
1
IN THE PREDAWN DARKNESS OF APRIL 6, RON GUIDICE SAT BEHIND THE WHEEL of his car, keeping an eye on the house across the way.
Alex Cross’s place was nothing special, really. Just a white three-story clapboard on Fifth Street in Southeast DC. The shutters were ready for a coat of paint. There was a tidy little herb garden on the front stoop.
Cross lived here with his grandmother, his wife, and two of his three children, Janelle and Alex Jr., aka Ali. The oldest Cross child, Damon, was home for spring break, but he spent most of his time at boarding school these days. And there was a foster kid, too. Ava Williams. It wasn’t clear whether she was on track for adoption, or what. Guidice still had some digging to do. He liked to know as much as possible about his subjects.
There were a dozen Metro police officers on his list, and he’d been keeping tabs on all of them, mostly as a point of comparison. But Cross was special. Alex was the one that Guidice wanted to kill.
Just not yet.
Killing a man was easy. Any half-wit with a gun could put a bullet in someone’s head. But really knowing a man—learning his weak spots first, getting to know his vulnerabilities, and taking his life apart, piece by piece? That took some doing.
Meanwhile, whether Cross knew it or not, he had a big day ahead of him.
Guidice watched the front windows, waiting for a light to come on. It wasn’t strictly necessary to spend this much time on a subject, but he enjoyed it. He liked the quiet of the early morning hours, even if it meant just sitting and absorbing the seemingly inconsequential details—the missing chunk of concrete on the stairs, the eco-friendly bulb in the porch light. It was all part of the larger picture, and you never knew which tiny piece might take on some kind of significance in the end. He passed the time scribbling observations into a spiral notebook on his lap.
Then, just after five, a soft stirring came up from the backseat.
“Papa? Is it time to get up?”
“No, sweetheart,” he said. He kept his chin down and his eye on the house. “You can go back to sleep.”
Emma Lee was cuddled up in an army sleeping bag with her favorite Barbie, Cee-Cee. Her pillowcase had Disney’s Cinderella on it. She’d chosen it for the picture of the little helper mice, whom she adored, for whatever reason.
“Will you sing me something?” she asked. “ ‘Hush, Little Baby’?”
Guidice smiled. She always called songs by their first words.
“ ‘Hush little baby, don’t say a word,’ ” he sang quietly. “ ‘Papa’s going to buy you a mockingbird. . . .’ ”
The front hall light came on in Alex’s house. Through the frosted glass of the door, Guidice could see the tall, dark shape of the man, descending the stairs.
Guidice continued to take it all down while he sang. “ ‘If that mockingbird don’t sing, Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring. . . .’ ”
“A real one?” Emma Lee interrupted. It was the same question, every time. “A real diamond ring?”
“You bet,” he said. “Someday, when you’re older.”
He looked back over his shoulder into the soft, sleepy eyes of his daughter and wondered if it was even possible to love someone more than he did her. Probably not.
“Now go back to sleep, Baby Bear. When you wake up again, we’ll be home.”
CHAPTER
2
I GOT THE FIRST CALL AT HEADQUARTERS AROUND TWO O’CLOCK THAT afternoon.
A woman had been found dead in the trunk of her car, in a Georgetown parking garage. Pretty unusual for Georgetown, so my hackles were up more than usual. I took the elevator straight down to the Daly Building garage and headed out with an extra-large coffee in hand. It was going to be a long-ass day.
That said, I really do like my job. I like giving a voice to the people who can’t speak for themselves anymore—the ones whose voices have been stolen from them. And in my line of work, that usually means through some kind of violence.
The responding officer’s report was that a garage attendant at American Allied Parking on M Street had found what looked like a pool of dried blood underneath a BMW belonging to one Darcy Vickers. When the cops arrived, they’d forced open the trunk and confirmed what they already suspected. Ms. Vickers had no pulse, and had been dead for some time. Now they were waiting for someone from Homicide to arrive and take it from there.
That’s where I came in. Or at least, so I thought.
It was a beautiful spring day. The best time of year in DC. The National Cherry Blossom Festival was on, and we hadn’t yet gotten hit with the first wave of summer humidity—or summer tourists. I had my windows down and Quincy Jones’s Soul Bossa Nostra up loud enough that I almost didn’t hear my phone when the second call came in.
Caller ID told me it was Marti Huizenga, my sergeant at the Major Case Squad. I juggled the volume down on the stereo and caught the call just before it went to voice mail.
“Dr. C.,” she said. “Where are you?”
“Pennsylvania and Twenty-First,” I told her. “Why?”
“Good. Take a right on New Hampshire. Another body just popped up, and it sounds god-awful, to tell you the truth.”
“So you thought of me.”
“Natch. I need someone over there right away. It’s a bad scene, Alex—a dead girl, hanging out of a sixth-floor window. Possible suicide, but I don’t know.”
“You want me on this instead of Georgetown?”
“I want you on both,” Huizenga said. “At least for now. I need one set of eyes on both scenes, as fresh as possible. And then I want you to tell me this is all just a coincidence, okay? I’m asking politely here.”
Huizenga’s sense of humor was as dark as mine could be sometimes. I liked working with her. And we both knew that the difference between two unrelated dead bodies and two related ones was the difference between not getting much sleep for the next forty-eight hours, and getting none at all.
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
“Vernon Street, between Eighteenth and Nineteenth,” she said. “I’ll tell Second District to get started without you at the garage in Georgetown, but try to be there as soon as you can.”
That’s kind of like telling the clouds when to rain. I had no idea how long I’d be at this new scene. You never do until you’re there.
And this one turned out to be a nightmare.
CHAPTER
3
VERNON STREET IS JUST A SINGLE TREE-LINED BLOCK OFF THE WEST END of U Street. It’s a quiet residential area, but I could see a crowd of people pooled on the sidewalk as soon as I turned the corner from Eighteenth. Most of them
were looking up and pointing at a mansard-roofed brick building on the south side of the street.
As soon as I got out of my car, I saw the girl. It was like a check in the ribs. She hung suspended by her neck on a length of rope, about three feet below one of the dormered sixth-floor windows. Her face was visibly discolored, and her hands seemed to be tied behind her back.
Jesus. Oh Jesus.
There were two cruisers and an ambulance parked out front, but the only personnel I saw was a single cop on the door of the apartment building. The rest of the sidewalk was filled up with looky-loos, snapping away on their phones and cameras. It pissed me off as much as it amazed me.
“Get this street roped off, right now!” I told the cop on my way into the building. “I don’t want to see anyone on that sidewalk by the time I’m up there looking down, you got it?”
I knew he had his hands full, but I couldn’t help feeling revved up by the whole thing. This girl was someone’s daughter. She had a family. They didn’t need her picture on some goddamn Facebook page for the world to see.
I left the cop to it and took the stairwell instead of the elevator. It seemed like a more likely exit, if this was in fact a murder we were talking about. And you only get one chance to see a crime scene for the first time.
When I came out into the sixth-floor hall, another cop and two EMTs were waiting outside an open apartment door. The building had three units on this level, all facing the street. Our dead girl was apparently in the center one.
“Door was locked when we got here,” the police officer told me. “That splintering on the frame is us. We were inside just long enough to get a flatline on the girl, but it wasn’t easy. I can’t guarantee we didn’t move anything in there.”
The apartment was a small alcove studio. There was a closet kitchen to one side, an open bathroom door on the other, and a futon couch that looked like it doubled for a bed. As far as I could tell, there were no signs of a struggle. In fact, the only thing that looked out of place was the old-fashioned coat tree, braced sideways against the open window, with a loop of rope hanging down from the center.
I forced myself to enter the room slowly, checking for drag marks, or anything that might have been left behind. When I got to the window and looked down, I could see the top of the girl’s head, just out of reach. Her heel had broken through the window of the apartment below, and the cord around her wrists seemed to be more of the same rope that had been used in the hanging.
That didn’t rule out suicide, either. A lot of people will bind themselves just before they do the deed, to keep from trying to struggle free in the heat of the moment.
Down below, another cruiser had arrived and the street was clear. But now I had another problem. When I looked straight across, I could see at least a dozen people in the windows of the facing apartment building, looking my way—more phones, more cameras. I wanted to give them all the finger, but I held back.
Still, I wasn’t going to let this go on for one second longer than I had to.
“Give me a hand over here!” I shouted toward the hall.
Technically, the body at any crime scene belongs to the medical examiner, not the cops. But I wasn’t thinking about technicalities right now. I was thinking about this girl and her family.
I already had my own phone out, and I fired off a bunch of shots. I got the coat tree, the window frame, the rope, and the girl, from above. I needed to preserve as much detail as I could before I did what I was about to do.
“Sir?” a cop said behind me.
“Help me pull her in,” I said.
“Um . . . don’t you want to wait for the ME?”
“No,” I said, pointing at the audience we had across the street. “Not anymore. Now give me a hand, or get me someone who will!”
CHAPTER
4
WE LAID THE GIRL OUT AS CAREFULLY AS WE COULD ON THE FLOOR OF THE apartment, and left the rope around her neck. As long as she was out of the public eye, that’s all I needed. The rest I could leave to the investigation.
Her name was Elizabeth Reilly. According to the driver’s license I found in a purse by the front door, she was just two weeks shy of turning twenty-one. The apartment had all the signs of someone who lived alone, from the Lean Cuisines in the freezer to the single towel and washrag hanging neatly in the bathroom.
Obviously there was more to the story here, but I wasn’t seeing it yet.
When the ME did arrive I was glad to see it was Joan Bradbury. Joan’s an easygoing, sixty-something Texan. As far as I knew, she never came to work in anything but top-stitched cowboy boots, even after twenty years in DC. She’s opinionated, but also easy to work with, and didn’t give me any big lectures when she saw what I’d done with the body. Joan has four daughters of her own; I think she instinctively got it.
While she started her initial exam, I got our team of investigators out knocking on doors, especially across the street. This hanging had gone down in broad daylight. Someone had to have seen something.
I also got some more info from Sergeant Huizenga on our victim. Elizabeth Reilly had been a nursing student at Radians College on Vermont Avenue until the previous December, when she’d dropped out. There was no word yet on recent employment, but other than one unpaid parking ticket her record was squeaky clean.
By the time I got back to Joan, they were ready to wrap and bag the body for transport to the morgue.
“I’m going to need a full autopsy,” she told me, “but I’m thinking this girl was dead before she went out the window. Maybe strangled with the same rope.”
She reached down and pointed at some dark, purplish marks on Elizabeth Reilly’s lower neck.
“You see these contusions? These are all consistent with manual strangulation. But up here, higher, where the rope caught her? Just faint bruising. If there was any blood flow when she was actually hanged, those marks would be darker.”
I rocked back on my heels and ran a hand over the bottom of my face.
“This is what I was afraid of,” I said.
“There’s more, Alex.”
Normally Joan was pretty matter-of-fact, even at the roughest scenes, but there was a tightness in her voice I’d never heard before. This one was getting to her.
“The abdomen’s still flaccid, and she’s got obvious striations around her midsection and breasts,” she told me. “As far as I can make out, our girl here had a baby recently. And, Lord help me, I mean recently.”
CHAPTER
5
IT WAS LATE EVENING BY THE TIME I FINALLY GOT OVER TO THE AMERICAN Allied Parking garage in Georgetown. The site was well preserved, but Darcy Vickers’s body had already been removed. I’d have to fill in some blanks with the crime-scene photography later and glean what I could for now.
Ms. Vickers’s silver BMW 550i was parked on the third level. That’s where she’d been found. One of the Second District detectives, Will Freemont, walked me through it. He seemed like he wondered what I was doing so late to the party, but that was the least of my worries right now. My thoughts were still consumed by the Elizabeth Reilly case.
“So, they found her in here,” Freemont said, pointing into the open trunk. “Stab wounds were here, here, and here.” He pointed with two fingers to his own chest, abdomen, and upper leg. “This lady didn’t die too well, but you can bet she died quick, for whatever that’s worth. And just for shits and giggles, I guess, he cut off her hair, too.”
Left behind were a yoga mat, a briefcase, a few shopping bags, and a garment bag, all covered in a combination of dried blood and a mess of loose blond hair, some of it matted with the blood.
There was also a good-size dark stain—more blood—pooled on the cement under the car.
“He would have needed it to be quick,” I said. “It’s a pretty risky site for a murder.”
“He?” Freemont said.
“I’m guessing,” I said. It was all about first impressions at this point. “What do we know about Darcy
Vickers?”
The detective flipped open a small notebook, the same kind I carried, and looked down at it.
“Forty-two years old. Divorced, no kids. Works for Kimball-Ellis on K Street, mostly retainer work for a couple of the big tobacco companies. Supposedly she had a real cutthroat reputation, from what I’ve got so far.”
In other words, Darcy Vickers had plenty of enemies. Most lobbyists do. But not every lobbyist ends up stabbed to death in the trunk of a car. Who, exactly, would want to do this? And why?
And for that matter, could this possibly have anything to do with Elizabeth Reilly’s hanging?
Nothing obvious had been taken. Darcy Vickers’s wallet, cash, phone, and jewelry were all still there, as far as anyone knew. That led me to believe that the killing itself was the motive, either to satisfy some impulse for violence or to get rid of this woman in particular—or maybe both.
In those respects, the two cases seemed the same. But the m.o. was completely different.
Assuming Elizabeth Reilly hadn’t committed suicide, her killer wanted the body put on display for everyone to see. He would have had to go to some trouble for that. Whereas with Darcy Vickers, it was all about the act itself—the stabbing, and then for whatever reasons, the cutting of the hair.
My gut was telling me these were two different cases, but we still had a lot of background work to do. Maybe these two women shared some connection, somewhere.
“Any witnesses?” I asked Freemont.
“Not exactly,” he said. “But security cameras picked up something interesting.”
He unfolded several sheets from his pocket, and showed me a series of black-and-white screen captures.
“This is nine oh four last night. We’ve got Ms. Vickers, coming in the east entrance from the alley over there. Then, right behind her, we’ve got this guy.”