The gunman returned fire, but the shot went wide. Sampson’s shot went wide as well, two feet to the gunman’s right, shattering the truck’s driver-side window. The brakes went on. A Volvo station wagon turning the corner onto South smashed into the truck’s rear corner panel, throwing the gunman off his feet. He fell behind the walls of the truck bed.
I hobbled after a charging Sampson, his gun and badge up to oncoming traffic, and my gut feeling was that something terrible was going to happen unless I kept up with my partner.
Trying to back up, the Volvo almost ran us over. We dodged around it as the pickup’s brake lights went off and the truck started to roll again, passing beneath street lamps as it slowly gained speed.
We ran with it, and I caught a glimpse of the driver, a scruffy-faced guy with a tangle of dark hair and bleeding cheeks. The pickup pulled away. The gunman rose to his knees in the bed and looked at us, grinning.
The truck sped up and was gone into a mash of red taillights long before the police sirens started to wail.
“No light on the license plate,” Sampson said in disgust as we walked through the still-pouring rain back to the smoking Sebring. “Probably smashed when it got rear-ended.”
“There was enough light on the shooter, though,” I said, limping and feeling twisted and toyed with. “He likes to call himself Alden Lindel.”
Part Five
ALL BLONDES MUST DIE
CHAPTER
100
AT HOME THE next evening, I was on my back with my ankle elevated and iced, watching coverage of the shooting incident on a DC station.
“There Detective Cross goes again,” said assistant U.S. attorney Nathan Wills, peering in disgust at the camera from under an umbrella. “He’s not back on the job a week and already the bullets are flying.”
“Those bullets flew my way first,” I said and stabbed the remote until the screen went black.
“The brass know that,” Bree said, coming out of the kitchen into our great room and setting a cup of coffee on the table beside me.
“Michaels put me on leave,” I said. “Again.”
“Department regulations,” Bree said, sitting beside me. “Sampson’s no better off than you.”
“Better ankle,” I said.
“Well, there’s that,” Bree said.
We fell into a silence that got longer. I stared at the blank screen, wondering for the hundredth time why the man impersonating Alden Lindel was fixated on me. Was he part of the crew that tried to frame me for murder? Picking up where Claude Watkins and Kimiko Binx left off?
And what about Lourdes Rodriguez? Was that even her real name?
In the wake of media uproar surrounding the shooting in Philly, Chief Michaels had been in no mood to seek a search warrant for her new apartment, even when we explained that she’d set us up to be assassinated.
“I’m beginning to wonder if this is worth it anymore,” I said, looking over at Bree. “Being a cop, I mean.”
Cocking her head, frowning, she set her coffee down. “You’re serious?”
“I’m serious enough to know that I want to stay being a psychologist, a counselor, at least part-time,” I said. “I enjoy it. It feels right and matters in a way hunting down bad guys just doesn’t anymore, Bree.”
She gazed at me, blinked. “You are serious.”
“I guess I am. Maybe it’s time. They say most people have five careers in their lives. Maybe this is how I’m supposed to be the best I can be in the future.”
“A higher calling?”
I sighed. “Is that so hard to believe?”
Bree smiled at me, but there was a tinge of sadness in it. “No, I could understand it. At least of an ordinary cop, who’d seen too much. But you’re no ordinary cop, Alex Cross.”
“That’s debatable.”
“Tell that to the awards and citations you have piled in your attic office. Tell that to all the families of victims you’ve helped just by being you, relentless, smart, and professional with a moral compass that is unwavering.”
“I’m impulsive,” I said. “I get shot at. A lot.”
“Because you have the God-given knack of getting close to bad guys and upsetting their plans. You actually do that on a regular basis, Alex. Very, very few detectives can say that.”
Before I could reply, Ali pounded through the kitchen and out to us.
“Dad!” he said. “I think I’ve finally found my sport!”
Of my three children, my youngest might be the brightest, but he is, shall we say, challenged athletically. Ali had tried various sports—basketball, baseball, and even lacrosse—but nothing ever clicked, and he seemed to trip over his own feet a lot.
“I’m hoping your sport’s not ice hockey,” I said.
“What?” Ali said, almost indignant. “No.”
“Horse jumping?”
“No. Darts.”
“Darts?”
“There’s a tournament coming up,” he said. “I’ve been playing a bunch at my friend Charley’s house after school, but I need my own board and a set of good darts if I’m going to have any chance of qualifying.”
Feeling a twinge in my ankle, I closed my eyes. I heard Bree say, “Where’s this tournament?”
“At a bar on Capitol Hill,” Ali said.
“A bar?” I said, opening my eyes.
“Technically, a tavern. I walk by there all the time after the bus drops me.”
“You’re not going to a bar or a tavern to play darts.”
“It’s a ten-thousand-dollar prize, Dad!”
“You’re too young to be playing darts where people are drinking alcohol.”
“No, I went in and asked. As long as you’re with me, they said I can play.”
The doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it,” Bree said.
“Let Ali,” I said.
“Can I get the dartboard?”
“Start by getting the door.”
He hesitated, then ran out.
“Darts?” Bree said, trying to hide her smile. “In a tavern?”
“Nana Mama is going to have a cow,” I said, laughing.
“She’s going to have two cows. Maybe an entire dairy farm if this becomes a regular thing.”
“Darts,” I said, and I shook my head at how quickly Ali went from a sharp and analytical adult-like person to a young boy attracted by the next shiny object.
I heard his footsteps pound back to us, and I thought for sure he was going to ask about the darts again.
Instead, he said breathlessly, “It’s Ned and Krazy Kat!”
CHAPTER
101
KEITH RAWLINS’S MOHAWK had been redyed flaming red and shellacked to jut off his head like a jaunty rooster’s comb. But the normally upbeat cybercrimes expert looked subdued when he came into the room.
“Dr. Cross, Chief Stone,” he said. “I need to show you something. With your permission, I’d like to connect my laptop to your television screen?”
“Go ahead,” Bree said.
“What’s going on?” I asked Mahoney when he came into the room after speaking with Nana and my dad.
Ned said, “Rawlins says he knows why Lourdes Rodriguez was so quick and quiet about leaving her old apartment. He started to explain it on the way here, but most of it went right over my head.”
“I’ll try to dumb it down further, Agent Mahoney,” Rawlins said, sounding annoyed as he typed on his laptop.
A moment later the television screen came on, showing a gibberish of coded numbers, letters, and symbols. Rawlins scrolled down through the mess until he found what he wanted.
He highlighted a sequence in the sea of code. “That’s a time stamp from a few days ago, immediately after Lourdes Rodriguez’s name was entered into the FBI’s database as part of the ongoing investigation.”
Rawlins typed. The screen jumped to another coded document and highlighted a new sequence.
He said, “Two seconds after Rodriguez’s name goes i
n, this second time stamp is triggered in a different file, a familiar file, that ingenious, eloquent piece of malware code I found in your computer and then in the FBI database.”
Bree said, “You’re saying Rodriguez’s name triggered the malware?”
“And the malware triggered Rodriguez’s swift departure from that apartment. The troubling thing is that I should have seen this sooner, but after the marathon work session I put in to resurrect Timmy Walker’s iPhone, I went home and slept for twenty hours, and I woke up with a nasty stomach bug that cost me another day.”
Rawlins said that he’d finally returned to his lab earlier that morning to see the alert from the code he’d attached to the malware.
“Where did the stuff about Rodriguez go?” Bree asked.
“Through onion routers, of course,” Rawlins said, typing. “A dozen in all. But I intentionally overrode the malware’s code so that every time it passed through the onion it would send me a ping so I could track it.”
The screen jumped to a map of the world with glowing lime-green pins denoting onion routers and orange arrows showing the direction of travel after the message cleared the device. From Quantico to India to China to the Philippines to Ecuador and on and on, until Rodriguez’s name reached Japan.
“That’s only eleven routers,” Ali said. “You said twelve.”
“I did indeed,” Rawlins said and he typed. The screen switched to Google Earth, a satellite view of a checkerboard of woods and farmland.
“You are looking at an unincorporated area in southwestern Pennsylvania due east of the Michaux State Forest,” he said, then zoomed down on a compound of three buildings. The biggest, a mansion, really, was sprawling and sat beside a large pond surrounded by hardwoods and pine thickets.
“That’s a twelve-thousand-square-foot home with carriage house, barn, and personal bass pond,” Rawlins said. “But notice the satellite dishes on the roof. Even for a big place, it’s overkill.”
“And this is where the malware went after Japan?” I said.
“Most definitely.”
“Who owns it?”
The cybercrimes expert sobered. “Nash Edward Edgars. You’ve probably never heard of him, but Mr. Edgars is infamous in certain circles. Circles that often disappear into the dark web.”
Rawlins described Edgars as a secretive, reclusive, and extremely wealthy computer-code writer in his late thirties. At seventeen, after his freshman year at Cal Poly, Edgars left and became the behind-the-scenes coder for several edgy, successful tech businesses.
“That we know for sure,” Rawlins said. “The dark-web stuff is rumor and conjecture, but some very smart people swear Edgars has been developing and operating in the unorganized, encrypted, and untraceable Internet for a decade. Maybe longer.”
I squinted at the screen. “What connects him to Rodriguez?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“No photo of him?”
“A poor one, seven years old,” Rawlins said. “But first …” He returned to his typing. “We’re lucky this sat view was shot in late winter or early spring, or I wouldn’t have noticed them.”
Rawlins scrolled down the Google Earth image, taking us past the compound and over the forest. The image stopped where we could look down through the branches of bare hard-wood trees.
Rawlins put his cursor on a smudge and zoomed in, revealing another structure, a long building with a tin roof. He moved his cursor to a second smudge on the satellite view and magnified it to reveal the lines of a large square.
“What is that?” I asked.
“I believe it’s an old foundation, with a high stone wall here, similar to the one Gretchen Lindel was put up against during the mock execution.”
“Jesus,” I said, sitting forward. “Can we see that photo of Edgars?”
The question seemed to irritate Rawlins, who typed and said, “Give me a second to find it. But what’s critical to understand here is that Edgars didn’t leave Cal Poly to follow Bill Gates and strike out on his own at seventeen. In fact, Edgars was expelled from Cal Poly at seventeen, when he was still a juvenile, so the case is sealed.”
“No idea why?” Bree asked.
“I know exactly why,” he said as the screen changed to a blurry photograph of two men leaving an urban restaurant. One was scruffy, dark-haired, and wore jeans, a Metallica T-shirt, and flip-flops. The other man was slightly older with a military haircut and aviator sunglasses.
Blurred or not, the picture made my stomach lurch.
Rawlins’s cursor moved to the scruffy, bearded guy. “This is Nash Edgars. The other one’s name is Mike Pratt. He’s Edgars’s bodyguard.”
I said, “Edgars was driving the pickup in Philadelphia the other night. Pratt was both the shooter and the Alden Lindel impersonator.”
Rawlins looked deflated to have some of his thunder stolen from him, but then he recovered and said, “Here’s the kicker from my corner. I hacked into Cal Poly’s system and found Edgars’s file. He was accused of sexually assaulting three coeds his freshman year. Every one of them was blond.”
CHAPTER
102
CLOUDS OF STEAM billowed from our lips at 4:10 the following morning.
It was bitter cold as we huddled in puffy jackets, wool caps, and gloves around a laptop computer bolted to a steel table inside an FBI special weapons and tactics van parked in the barnyard of a dairy farmer who lived two miles from Nash Edgars and who had nothing good to say about his reclusive neighbor.
“Give us the drone feed,” Mahoney said into a cell phone.
The screen changed from the sharpness of Google Earth to an opaque gray-green that revealed bare-limbed trees and then the road that led past Edgars’s gate. Thermal images appeared: two men were guarding the gate, carrying weapons. Flying on, the drone found the mansion, but the screen showed no thermal images of bodies—or much of anything, for that matter.
Mahoney said, “Drone pilot says the place appears heavily insulated so there might be people inside or not. We’ll have to go on the assumption the house is manned and heavily armed.”
“Smart,” I said.
Mahoney said into his cell, “Fly to that structure out in the woods.”
The drone found the building. A thermal sensor revealed four faint images of people inside, all lying flat or curled up, located in separate little rooms.
“Those could be some of our missing women,” Special Agent Batra said.
“Easily,” Bree said, and she sipped from a go-cup of steaming coffee.
“That changes things,” Mahoney said. “Show me the Google Earth image again.”
Rawlins switched it back to the satellite image.
Mahoney pointed to a rocky knoll on the estate’s far north boundary. “This is excellent high ground. We’ll put four agents there to cover the back door.”
I noticed something in the trees along a creek well to the east of the knoll, but before I could say anything, Rawlins switched back to the drone’s feed showing more gray-green forest but no other distinct thermal images.
“Thanks for the flyby,” Mahoney said into his cell, then he ordered four agents to enter the woods at the estate’s northeast corner. He also moved a six-man hostage-rescue team, or HRT, into position to get to and storm that building in the woods as soon as possible. Bree and Sampson would ride with Mahoney and follow a breach team of FBI agents onto the property to arrest Edgars and Pratt.
“Alex, you’ll be with Batra and Rawlins in a follow car, where you will remain until the clear is given,” Mahoney said.
Before I could protest, Bree said, “Be practical, Alex. With your ankle like that, you won’t be much help if things go south.”
“It’s not that bad, really,” I said. “I’m not even on crutches. But I hear you.”
“We’ll give you a radio,” Mahoney said. “For once you’ll have to just listen to the action.”
CHAPTER
103
AS I LIMPED into the bac
kseat of Agent Batra’s black Chevy Tahoe, I had to admit I was feeling guilty for wanting to be part of the raiding party and hostage-rescue attempt.
The evening before, I’d been telling Bree that I wanted to get out of police work, away from dangerous moments like these when the adrenaline starts to drip and your senses get super-sharp and super-clear.
But as I shut the door and Batra started the engine, I knew a part of me could never leave the police game. Not entirely. Being a psychologist had its own deep and fruitful rewards, but it could never replace the rush of catching bad guys, ending their dark work, and seeing them get just punishment.
“Let’s roll,” Mahoney said.
I heard his voice over the radio and the light headset they’d given me.
“Isn’t this exciting, Dr. Cross?” Krazy Kat Rawlins said, looking over the front seat at me as Batra put on her headlights and followed Mahoney’s Tahoe onto a rural route heading east.
“The trick is not to get too excited,” I said. “You have to keep your head.”
“Oh, of course,” he said, slightly crestfallen. “I guess I’m just looking forward to seeing Nash Edgars in handcuffs and telling him that I beat him. Do you ever feel that way?”
“From time to time, sure,” I said.
“Right now?”
“Right now, I look forward to seeing those women safe and sound.”
Over my headset, Mahoney said, “Half a mile out. HRT, you are go. Breaching team, you are go.”
The acknowledgments came back fast, and in my mind I was seeing the rescue team flipping on their thermal-imaging goggles, surging into the woods, and angling through the forest toward the shed and four of the missing women.
We came over a rise in the road and saw a huge, black, six-wheel-drive armored FBI truck roll to the gate. I expected the guards to immediately stand down, but instead there were flashes from behind the gate and reports of gunfire over the radio.
“Take it down,” Mahoney said.
The big armored rig backed up and then sped at the steel gate and blew it off its hinges. Agents inside the truck fired from portholes at the guards, who’d retreated up the hill into the trees toward the compound. Mahoney followed the armored truck, driving across the downed gate, with us trailing.