The People vs. Alex Cross (Alex Cross 25)

“Seven,” Wally Christian said. “We’ve moved them to the common room upstairs. The chaplains are with them.”

“Who’s the missing girl?” Fox asked. “The blonde?”

“Patsy Mansfield,” Christian said. “A sophomore. Real star.”

“As in, people knew who she was?” Sampson said.

“On campus, you bet. She plays lacrosse, all-American as a freshman, and, well, you’ve seen the picture of her I put out with the Amber Alert. She’s quite the looker.”

As all of them took the stairs to the second floor of the dorm, Sampson thought of what Alex had told him over the phone about the three freshmen at Catholic University with bad attitudes about blondes. He wondered if they were involved here and made a note to check on their whereabouts at the time of the incident.

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sp; The seven witnesses to the homicides of the brunettes and the kidnapping of Patsy Mansfield all told much the same story. Eleven students were hanging out in the lounge around seven that Saturday evening when two men came in from outside. They wore black balaclavas and olive-green workman’s coveralls with Georgetown University written on the back. They drew pistols with silencers and ordered everyone to the floor except Patsy Mansfield.

“Wait,” Detective Fox said. “They used her name?”

“Definitely,” said Tina Hall, a freshman. “They knew who she was.”

Hall and the others said the two men told Mansfield that things would go easier if she just went with them. But then Keoni Latupa, a linebacker on the football team and a good friend of Patsy’s, grabbed one of the men and threw him to the ground so hard that his gun clattered away. Latupa scrambled for it, but the other man shot and wounded him before he could get to it.

The loose gun came to a stop at the feet of Macy Jones, the brunette in the Hoyas sweatshirt. She went for it and was shot too. At that point, Denise O’Toole, Jones’s roommate, went to help her friend. She was shot in the leg.

“Then the first guy got up and retrieved his pistol,” said Tina Hall. “He went over to Keoni and shot him again. Then he went to Denise, who pleaded with him not to shoot her, just to take her but not shoot her.”

Hall paused, tears welling in her eyes and then dripping down her cheeks. She went on, “Know what he said before he killed Denise? He said, ‘Why would we take you? Nobody pays for brunettes anymore.’”

CHAPTER

17

THE DC POLICE union had referred my latest client to me. She knocked on my basement door shortly after nine Monday morning.

I opened the door and found a dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties standing there, her shoulders slumped. I knew her, but she was so haggard I almost didn’t recognize her.

“Tess?” I said, holding out my hand. “It’s good to see you.”

Detective Tess Aaliyah lifted her head, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’m embarrassed and uncomfortable to be here, Dr. Cross, but my union rep said you were the only counselor available on short notice.”

“Come inside, and please don’t be embarrassed or uncomfortable. I’m not a detective now and not here to judge you in any way. You need to talk. I’m available to listen. And, of course, nothing said ever leaves the room.”

The detective hesitated and then came inside. I followed her into my office, remembering the confident, smart, and attractive woman who’d helped save my family after they were taken by a madman named Marcus Sunday.

Aaliyah was from a police family. Her father, Bernie, had been a top detective in Baltimore, and she’d lived and breathed the job when we’d worked together. I knew some of the trauma she’d been through lately, and as I shut the office door, I prayed that I was up to the task of counseling her.

I got coffee for her and gestured to a chair. She sat down, her head tilted low and her upper torso and shoulders rolled forward, as if in surrender.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“You’ve seen the news? How should I feel?”

“Forget the news,” I said. “Lift your chin, straighten your shoulders, and give me your side of it.”

Conflicting emotions flickered on the detective’s face as she made a slight alteration in her slouch before telling me the story.

She and her partner, Chris Cox, had gone to a high-rent apartment complex off Judiciary Square to serve a warrant on and arrest one Drago Kovac. Kovac had immigrated to the U.S. from Serbia when he was nine, become an American citizen at fifteen, and become a car thief shortly thereafter. He wasn’t very good at his chosen field at first. Kovac was caught and convicted of grand theft auto twice before his eighteenth birthday. After that, he wised up and got sophisticated. He formed an auto-theft ring that worked the Miami-to-Boston corridor, boosting in-demand cars, chopping them up for parts, and then selling the parts over the Internet.

Kovac was now twenty-seven and operating his illegal enterprise from his luxury flat on Third Street in DC. Aaliyah, looking for spare parts for her Ford Explorer, had happened on one of his websites, which offered “gently used” parts for a third of what other sites and stores were asking. When she learned the company and Kovac were based in DC, one thing led to another, and then to a year of additional investigative work.