D’Auria quickly covered the basics, without getting too specific about methods, weapons, or the exact location where the bodies had been found. It was too early to make any of that publicly available. He did indicate both victims by name, though—Larissa Swenson and Ricky Samuels. That part was news to me. They’d been Jane and John Doe, the last I’d heard.
D’Auria also indicated that Mr. Samuels was a known sex worker, like Cory Smithe before him; but he didn’t make any mention of the physical similarity between Ms. Swenson and her equivalent “partner victim,” Darcy Vickers.
I would have made the same call. Gay hustlers are a specific group of people who might be able to use information like this to protect themselves. By the same token, there’s no effective way to warn and protect a city’s worth of attractive blond women. Protect them against doing what, exactly? It’s a fine line between what’s useful at this point, and what just stirs up panic. Sometimes you have to make your best guess and roll the dice.
As soon as D’Auria reached the end of his statement, the questions started flying. At first they were the usual logistical kind of inquiries. Were the bodies found near each other? Yes. How near? No comment. Did we have any evidence of a connection between the two victims? No comment. Would MPD be updating the press that afternoon? Yes, if there was anything to tell.
But then, after about five minutes, D’Auria called on Bev Sherman from the Post, and things took a turn.
“Commander, you mention two possible serial cases associated with these murders—”
“I didn’t say serial,” D’Auria cut in. “Let me be clear. We have what appear to be second homicides by the same perpetrators, in two previously unrelated cases.”
“Fair enough,” Bev went on. “My question is about a third incident. The Elizabeth Reilly murder?”
My ears pricked up at that one. Technically, all these cases were on my plate, but I’d just been down to Shellman Bluff. I’d met the Reillys. I’d held that baby girl.
“What about it?” D’Auria asked.
“A new blog by the name of The Real Deal has been quite critical of MPD lately, and the Elizabeth Reilly investigation in particular. Most specifically, The Real Deal has been focusing on Detective Cross, who I know is coordinating on all three of these cases. I was wondering if the detective himself would care to comment?”
All around the room, people started tapping away on phones and iPads, presumably looking up The Real Deal. I also felt a good number of eyes turning my way.
D’Auria held the floor, though. “Bev, I’m not going to respond to rumors on a blog I’ve never heard of,” he answered. “That’s something we’ll have to look into.”
“Let me be more specific,” Bev jumped in before he could move on. “Detective Cross, would you be willing to comment on some of the allegations—for instance, that you violated department policy by moving Ms. Reilly’s body before a proper examination? Or that you were out socializing on Saturday night while the investigation, arguably, should have been gearing up?”
I was stunned, and thrown off guard, and most of all, steaming goddamn mad. Where was this coming from? What was this blog I’d never heard about before? And who the hell had been watching me and my family go out to dinner?
I had about eighteen responses for Bev, none of them fit to print in her paper. Chief Perkins didn’t look too pleased, either. He was giving Joyce Catalone a signal to wrap this thing up.
“I can only repeat what Commander D’Auria already said,” I finally answered. “Until we get a look at the material in question—”
“So, you’re not familiar with The Real Deal?” someone else asked.
“Believe me, I will be in about ten minutes,” I said. It got a few chuckles around the room, and then Joyce was there at the podium.
“Ladies and gentlemen, that’s all we have time for this morning. The investigative team has other business to attend to, but we will be updating you throughout the day, if there’s anything to tell.”
It’s a thin charade, but absolutely preferable to letting the press conference spiral out of control. We’d come in trying to play offense, and already we were back on our heels.
Things weren’t looking so good for the department right now. And maybe even worse for me.
CHAPTER
35
FIVE MINUTES AFTER THE PRESS CONFERENCE LET OUT, OUR CORE TEAM WAS up in Chief Perkins’s office on the fifth floor.
“What the hell just happened down there?” Perkins wanted to know.
“We got coldcocked by some random blogger,” D’Auria said. “A million nobodies tapping away out there, and you never know which one’s going to blow up until you’re picking shrapnel out of your ass.”
Perkins didn’t keep a computer in his office, so Huizenga opened her laptop on the big round conference table. After a quick Google, she had The Real Deal up in front of her, and we all gathered around.
“Oh God,” she said. “One of these.”
The blog had a simple masthead—THE REAL DEAL, in a plain black font. Beneath that was a subheading, “Who’s Policing the Police?”
In the margin, there was a numbered list of twenty-three MPD officers, each one clickable to some other page. I recognized several names right away. They were all cops who had been arrested in the last year, for anything from petty theft to domestic abuse, and even one murder. There was also a small map of the city’s police districts, with different colored dots, presumably corresponding to various types of crimes.
The most recent blog entry was dated that morning. Its title was “America’s Most Dangerous City?” Beneath that, “Murder Season in DC.” And then, “Detective Cross: Asleep at the Wheel?”
“Looks like this guy’s got a crush on you,” Huizenga said. My name was clickable, like the others, and she hovered her pointer over it. “You mind?”
“I can hardly wait,” I said.
What opened up then was a whole page dedicated to yours truly. It included my CV with the department, an old ID photo, a list of current and previous cases, and several other small images.
The first of those was a picture that had been taken from below, on Vernon Street, just as I’d gone to pull Elizabeth Reilly’s body out of the window where she’d been hanging. Her face was even fuzzed out, in some kind of twisted nod to journalistic propriety.
The other picture showed Kinkead’s restaurant from the outside. Beneath that was a screen capture of a tweet that had apparently been sent to go with it:
Three dead, and where’s DC’s favorite cop? Out to dinner. More like out to lunch! Priorities, anyone? #incompetentcops.
Finally, there was a long screed at the bottom, all about how I was the wrong one to be coordinating on these cases, and blowing it at every turn, apparently.
“Who the hell is this guy?” Valente asked.
The blog did have a contact page, but when Huizenga pulled it up, it gave us everything but a name. You could e-mail The Real Deal with questions, tips, or other thoughts about the job MPD was doing. There were invitations to follow The Real Deal on Twitter, or like it on Facebook, or “join the conversation” on something called NewsNet. For someone who had just gotten started, this so-called reporter was clearly going all in.
And I was starting to think I knew who he was. Or at least that we’d met.
“We need to get him out in the open,” I said to Perkins. “Let me run a subpoena on the blog’s ISP records, and see who’s attached to the account.”
I was remembering the bearded jag-off from the morning Cory Smithe’s body had been found. This was the guy with no press credentials who had refused to give me his name.
Perkins shoved back in his chair.
“Alex, I’ve got to ask you. Did you pull Elizabeth Reilly’s body before the ME reached that scene?”
“I did,” I told him. I wasn’t going to start tap dancing for the chief right now. It was all in the report, anyway.
“And, were you out to dinner that ni
ght, like it says?”
I could feel the heat coming up into my face. “I’m sorry, Chief, but what the hell does it matter?”
“In and of itself? It doesn’t. But if he’s telling the truth, he can say whatever he wants,” Perkins told me. “The last thing I need is a questionable subpoena on a guy like this, especially if he’s got any kind of audience.”
“If he doesn’t now, he will after that press conference,” Huizenga said, closing her laptop. “Stand by for the shit storm, everyone.”
“See what you can find out on your own,” Perkins said. “Pull whoever you need for this, but please, Alex—step lightly. We’re fighting a war of public perception right now. Approval of the department’s at an all-time low.”
Chief Perkins is no hysteric. He usually doesn’t give a hoot about public perception, especially not at the expense of an investigation. But the reality was, we were operating at expanded levels these days, and that hinged on a good relationship with the mayor, who had his own political angles to consider. The fact that he and his people had stayed away from the press conference meant they were already feeling skittish about this.
“I’m sorry, Alex,” Perkins said. “It is what it is.”
“Not a problem,” I told him. “I’ll find him anyway.”
That was the answer the chief needed right now, and hopefully the one that was going to keep me as far from under his thumb as possible.
I just hoped it was also true.
CHAPTER
36
PULL WHOEVER YOU WANT. THAT’S WHAT THE CHIEF HAD SAID. SO I STARTED close to home.
Even on my way down the stairs, I was on the phone with Bree, asking her to take a look at The Real Deal, and meanwhile, to keep digging on the Elizabeth Reilly case.
When I hit the third-floor hall, I called Sampson. He was in court that day, but I left a long message and asked him to swing by the house later on if he could. Both of them were already invested in Elizabeth’s murder. I didn’t see any reason not to make it official.
As soon as I was back at my desk, I pulled up The Real Deal’s contact page again and fired off a quick e-mail.
To whom it may concern: Please contact me at your earliest convenience. Thank you, Detective Alex Cross, MPD.
I was going to play it civil for the time being. I’d even play it nice if I had to, but only as a means to an end. This guy had been putting eyes on me and my family, and that’s a line you don’t cross.
Next up, I wound my way around the little warren of cubicles in our office to find Jarret Krause at his desk. Krause was one of Major Case Squad’s newbies, a Flatbush, Brooklyn, boy whose wife had taken a job working in their congressman’s DC office the previous fall. Already he’d made a name for himself, tracking down two very slippery violent offenders online—one serial rapist who connected with his victims on Facebook, and an eighteen-year-old thug from Shaw who had robbed and killed a seventy-year-old liquor store owner, then tried to sell a case of Cristal on Craigslist. Someday, these punks are going to wise up to their own virtual footprints. In the meantime, we’ve got guys like Krause to go around and scoop them up.
“’Sup, Alex?” he said, when I showed up over the wall of his ridiculously tidy cubicle. For that, I was giving him another six months.
“Have you heard of this blog, The Real Deal?” I asked.
“Yeah.” His fingers hit the keyboard in front of him and he brought it up. “This guy sucks,” he said. “And he’s seriously hating on you, too. How can I help?”
I was a little surprised at how much Krause already knew, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. Bad news travels about as fast as sound around that department.
“I need a name,” I said. “The blog’s hosted at DC Access, but Perkins doesn’t want to do an admin subpoena if we can avoid it. I was hoping—”
Already, Krause was scanning pages. “Yeah,” he said. “He’s hitting all the major platforms. Shouldn’t be too hard.”
“I’d appreciate it,” I said.
“You want me to stop there, or keep going?” he asked.
I wasn’t going to say no. “Define ‘keep going,’ ” I said.
“Well, for instance—this.” He came back to the latest blog entry, and pointed at the screen. “Twenty-six comments since seven this morning. These are the people you want to keep an eye on. Ninety-nine percent of the time, they’re going to be nobodies. But then once in a while, one of them will know something they shouldn’t, like a bullet caliber, or time of death, or whatever. That can be gold.”
“I’ll take it,” I said. “Anything you can do. But first—get me a name.”
“A name, to the face, to the asshole,” he said. “No prob. I’ll get back to you by the end of the day.”
CHAPTER
37
BY 9 P.M. I’D PUT IN A FULL WORKDAY, FOLLOWED BY A LATE DINNER WITH the family, homework with Ava, more homework with Jannie, and a chapter of Percy Jackson with Ali before bed.
I wasn’t going to say no to the six-pack of Cigar City Brown Ale that Sampson showed up with, just as Nana Mama and the girls were settling in for an episode of Once Upon A Time. John, Bree, and I took the beer up to my office in the attic and got back to work.
“Catch me up,” John said, twisting off a cap. “Where are we?”
Bree unwrapped the red figure-eight string from a big manila envelope and took out the case materials she’d picked up that afternoon. A tan clip folder and several black-and-white crime-scene photos spilled onto her lap.
“I’ve been cross-referencing cases all day, and I found this. I can’t say it’s definitively tied to Elizabeth Reilly, but it seems like a red flag, anyway.”
She picked up the crime report and looked it over as she kept talking.
“The name’s Amanda Simms. Ran away from an abusive home in West Virginia at age fifteen. Then no sign of her at all for eleven months, until a maid found her body in the tub at an Econo Lodge in Takoma Park. That was four and a half years ago.”
“Four and a half years?” Sampson said. “What’s the supposed connection to Elizabeth Reilly?”
Bree turned one of the crime-scene photos around to show him. John looked like he felt sick to his stomach.
“She was pregnant,” Bree said. “The autopsy showed heavy doses of Rohypnol and morphine. All indications are that she was drugged, cut open, and left for dead.”
“And the baby?”
“Never found.”
“Jesus.” John scrubbed at his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. We’d all had long days.
“So basically,” I said, “we’ve got a young girl, away from home for the first time, and pregnant. All of that’s in line with Elizabeth Reilly.”
“What about this phantom boyfriend, Russell?” John asked.
Bree shook her head. “I’ve got nothing. Presumably, that’s not his real name.”
“But let’s assume he’s part of the picture,” I went on. “Maybe Elizabeth finds out about Amanda somehow. She figures out her boyfriend is a monster, and she’s carrying his baby. That could go a long way to explain why she’d go all the way to Georgia to induce labor.”
“For that matter, maybe Amanda’s not the only other one,” Bree said. “I’m still looking.”
After a long stretch of silence, Sampson spoke up again.
“You said something else on the phone this morning. This blogger. What’s his deal? And why’s he hating on you?”
“Good question,” I said, and pulled up The Real Deal on my desktop. There was a new entry now, “MPD Whiffs Its Own Press Conference.” It had been posted at four that afternoon, and it already had ninety-two comments. Word was definitely getting out on this thing.
“He’s either got a vested interest in Elizabeth Reilly, or against me,” I said. “Or both.”
“Or,” Sampson said, “maybe he’s just looking to make a name for himself—trying to establish the blog and get some attention with a couple of big stories.”
“Y
eah, well, he’s got my attention,” Bree said. She was at least as put out by the whole thing as I was—most especially by that picture of Kinkead’s from the night we were there.
“Alex, let me take a run at this guy,” John said. “You’ve got five homicides on the line. Six now, if we’re counting Amanda Simms.”
“Thanks. I’d welcome the help, actually,” I said. “Not to mention, you can be damn scary when you want to be.”
Sampson just grinned. “What’s the name on the account?” he asked.
“Still waiting on that.”
It wasn’t until close to eleven, when John was just getting up to leave, that I finally heard from Krause. It was perfect timing, actually.
“Sorry to take so long,” he said. “But I tracked a couple of tweets back to a phone number with a DC exchange. No real address on the account, just a PO box, but I do have a name for you.”
I grabbed a pencil off my desk and the nearest piece of paper—a takeout menu from Fusion Grill.
“Go ahead.”
“The name is Ron Guidice,” he said, and spelled it for me, then gave me the number. “You want me to bring him in?”
“No, but thanks,” I said. It seemed like everyone wanted a piece of this guy, which was fine with me. I tore off the corner of the menu and put it into Sampson’s very large outstretched hand. “We’ve got it from here.”
CHAPTER
38
HOURS AFTER SAMPSON LEFT, I WAS STILL AWAKE. SOMETHING WAS BUGGING me, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. That name, Ron Guidice, was sticking in my head for some reason. Was it familiar? Or did I just want to think so?
Finally, I got out of bed and headed back up to the office.
“Where are you going?” Bree asked me, still half asleep.
“I just want to check something,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
Up at my desk, I got online and logged into the MPD case files. Members of Homicide have the highest level of clearance on investigative reports, which meant I could access the system from any departmental computer, including the laptop I had at home.