The People vs. Alex Cross (Alex Cross 25)

“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.