Cross Kill (Alex Cross 24.50)

“Tell me what happened,” Bree said.

I did to the best of my abilities, finishing with “But all you really need to know is they set up an ambush, lured me, and I walked right into it.”

Bree thought about that, and then said, “There’ll be an investigation, but from what you said, it’s cut-and-dry. Self-defense, and justified.”

I didn’t say anything because somehow it didn’t seem quite right to me. Justified, yes, but cut-and-dry? They’d tried to kill Sampson, and me, twice. But some of the threads of what had happened just didn’t—

“By the way,” Bree said, interrupting my thoughts. “The labs came back on the exhumation.”

I looked at her, revealing nothing. “And?”

“It was him in the coffin,” she said. “Soneji. They compared DNA to samples taken when he was in federal custody the first time. He’s dead, Alex. He’s been dead more than ten years.”

One of the EMTs called out to us before I could express my relief. We went to the Soneji in the far alcove, then the one who’d been crawling away, leaving blood like a snail’s track.

They’d shot him up with morphine and he was out of it. They’d also cut off his shirt and found the raised latex edge of a mask that could have been crafted by one of Hollywood’s finest.

After photographing the mask, we sliced and peeled it off, revealing the ashen face of Claude Watkins, painter, performance artist, and wounded idolizer of Gary Soneji.

The second Soneji was up on a gurney and headed for an ambulance when we caught up to him.

We tore open his shirt, found the latex edge of an identical mask, photographed it, and then had the EMTs slice it off him. The man behind the mask was in his late twenties and unfamiliar to us. But as they wheeled him out, I had no doubt that, whoever he was, he’d been worshipping Gary Soneji for a long, long time.

We waited for the medical examiner to arrive and take custody of the dead Soneji before we cut off the third mask.

“It’s a woman,” Bree said, her hands going to her mouth.

“Not just any woman,” I said, stunned and confused. “That’s Virginia Winslow.”

“Who?”

“Gary Soneji’s widow.”

“Wait. What?” Bree said, staring at the dead woman closely. “I thought you said she hated Soneji.”

“That’s what she told me.”

Bree shook her head. “What in God’s name possessed her to impersonate her dead husband and then try to kill you? Did she shoot John? Or did Watkins? Or that other guy?”

“One of them did,” I said. “I’ll put money one of the pistols matches.”

“But why?” she said, still confused.

“Binx and Watkins and, evidently, Virginia Winslow made Soneji into a cult, with me being the enemy of the cult,” I said, and thought about Winslow’s son, Dylan, and the picture of me on his dartboard.

Where was the kid in all of this? Seeing Binx being led out, I thought that if we leaned on her hard enough, she’d eventually want to cut a deal and tell all.

“You look like hell, you know,” Bree said, breaking my thoughts again.

“Appreciate the compliment.”

“I’m serious. Let’s go, let the crime-scene guys do their work.”

“No formal statement?”

“You’ve made enough of a statement to satisfy me for the time being.”

“Chief of detectives and wife,” I said. “That’s a conflict of interest any way you look at it.”