Cross Kill (Alex Cross 24.50)

“You’re technically under arrest. I’ve just been a nice guy until now.”

The computer coder didn’t look happy as she came over. I got out my cuffs and buckled down her wrists, arms forward. She’d been cooperative for the most part and didn’t seem much of a threat.

“What am I under arrest for?” Binx demanded. “Free speech?”

“How about fomenting and abetting attempted murder of a cop?”

“I did not!”

“You did,” I said, pushing her in front of me.

We passed through the gate, crossed fifteen yards of scrub ground where purple crocuses poked out of weeds by a metal double door. Binx seemed on the verge of tears, opening one of the doors and saying, “I would never hurt a cop. My dad was a cop in Philly.”

That surprised me. “Was?”

“He’s retired,” she said. “With a gold shield.”

I looked at her differently now, the daughter of a good cop. Why would she get involved in something like this?

“You said you wanted to meet Claude,” Binx said, trying to wipe her tears with her sleeves. “Let’s go.”

At first a voice in my head said not to enter the abandoned factory, to wait for backup, but then the voice was gone, replaced by a surge of clarity and confidence.

Keeping Binx squarely in front of me, I went inside.

Whenever you leave a sunny day for a darker quarter, there’s always a fleeting moment when you’re all but blind before your eyes adjust. It’s also a time when you tend to be silhouetted in the doorway and are therefore an easy target.

But I heard no shot, and my vision refocused on a large, airy space, ten, maybe fifteen thousand square feet, with a ceiling that was warehouse-high and crisscrossed with rusted overhead tracks for heavy industrial lifts and booms.

Ten-foot-tall partitions carved the space up like a broad maze. The cement floor right in front of us was cracked, broken in places, and bare but for stacks of pipe and sheet metal, as if a reclaiming operation was under way. Thick dust hung in the air. Waves of it danced and swirled in the weak sunlight streaming through a bank of filthy windows high on the walls.

“I’m not seeing any paintings or studio,” I said. “Where’s Watkins?”

“He and the studio are in the back,” Binx said, gesturing into the gloom. “I’ll show you the way.”

For the second time that day, that internal voice of mine, born of years of training and experience, raised doubts about following her until I had someone watching my back. And for the second time that day, I felt my heart beat faster, sensed more sharply my surroundings, and surged with another rush of complete confidence in my abilities.

“Lead on,” I said, smiling at her, and feeling good, real good, like I was perfectly fine-tuned and ready for anything that might come my way.

Binx took me down one dim hallway, and then another, passing empty workroom after empty workroom before I smelled marijuana, fresh paint, and turpentine. The smells got stronger as we walked a short third hallway that dog-legged left and opened into a large, largely empty assembly-line room with dark alcoves off it on all four sides.

The only lights in the room were strong portable spots trained on one of several large paintings hanging on the far wall about fifty feet away. The painting showed a crane lifting a coffin from the ground. The headstone above the grave read “G. SONEJI.” Two men stood by the grave. A Caucasian in a dark suit. And an African American in a blue police slicker. Me.

I almost smiled. Someone who’d been at the exhumation, probably Soneji or one of his followers, Watkins, had painted this, and yet I had to fight to keep from grinning at all the goodwill I felt inside.

The furthest of the three spotlights went dark then, revealing a man I couldn’t see before because of the glare. He wore paint-speckled jeans, work boots, and a long-sleeved shirt, but his face was lost in shadows.

Then he took a step forward into a weak, dusty beam of sunlight coming through the grimy windows, revealing the wispy red hair and distinctive facial features of Gary Soneji.

“Dr. Cross,” he said in a cracking, hoarse voice. “I thought you’d never catch up.”

Chapter 28

Soneji moved his arm then, and I saw the gun he held at his side, a nickel-plated pistol, just like the ones he used to shoot Sampson and me.

Take him!

The voice screamed in my head, ending all of those strange good feelings that had been inexplicably surging through me.