Cross the Line (Alex Cross 24)

“He said he was conducting an FBI investigation and needed to ask me a few questions,” Camille said. “First question after my name was why I always eat alone. It was my question for him too.”

They were good together and we laughed and ate and probably drank a little too much. The moon rose. Nana Mama turned in. Ali fell asleep on the couch. Mahoney and Camille took a walk north on the beach, and Bree and I walked south and admired the moon tracking on the ocean and the waves.

“It’s good to be with you,” I said, wrapping a blanket around both of us.

“Hard to imagine the job right now,” Bree said.

“Means you’re tuning out, giving your brain a needed rest.”

“Parks came through surgery fine,” she said. “Lincoln too.”

“Good,” I said, and I whispered a suggestion.

“What?” She laughed softly. “Here?”

“Back in the dunes somewhere. We’ve got a blanket. Be a shame to waste the opportunity.”

She kissed me and said, “Sounds like the perfect end to a perfect day.”

Chapter

54

Five days later, on the Thursday after Labor Day, Sampson and I climbed out of an unmarked car in the parking lot of Bayhealth Kent General Hospital in Dover, Delaware.

“Let’s hope she’s alert enough to help,” I said.

“We knew we were taking a chance,” Sampson said. “If she’s not, we’ll just come back.”

The day before, we’d received two reports that had brought us to the Bayhealth hospital. The first report, filed the week before by a Maryland state trooper, described a Ford Taurus found flipped in Maryland just south of Millersville.

The driver, a twenty-nine-year-old waitress, was later found to have died of a .45-caliber gunshot wound to the head. The shooting had to have occurred in broad daylight, yet no witnesses had come forward.

The second report, from the sheriff’s department in Kent County, Delaware, concerned a white Mustang convertible that crashed into a tree along Route 10 between Willow Grove and Woodside East. The driver, twenty-four-year-old Kerry Rutledge, a clothes buyer for Nordstrom’s, was found unconscious but alive around two a.m. on Labor Day. Rutledge had broken ribs, facial injuries, a concussion, and a four-inch-long wound across the back of her head.

Ms. Rutledge regained consciousness after a few hours, but she was confused and unable to remember anything about the crash. A sheriff’s detective interviewed her the following day. She told the detective she thought she’d been shot but couldn’t remember how it had happened or why. The wound to the back of the head was consistent with a bullet grazing the skin, so we thought it worth the drive to try to talk to her ourselves.

At the front desk, we learned that Kerry Rutledge was out of intensive care and under observation pending the results of neurological tests. When we reached the nurses’ station, we showed our badges. The head nurse said Rutledge’s parents had been in to see her earlier, and the last time she’d checked, her patient was asleep.

But when we knocked softly and entered her room, the Nordstrom’s buyer was propped up, sipping a cup of ice water, and gazing at a television on mute. She was a wisp of a woman with pale, freckled skin and fine copper hair that hung about the bandages that covered her bruised face.

“Ms. Rutledge?” I said, and I introduced Sampson and myself.

“You’re here because I was shot,” she said with a flat affect.

“That’s right,” Sampson said. “Did you see the person who shot you?”

Her head rotated a degree to the right and back. “I’m having trouble remembering things.”

I hesitated, thinking how best to proceed, and then said, “How do you know you were shot, Ms. Rutledge?”

Her head rotated again, and stayed cocked to the right as she blinked and pursed her lips. “He was right there. He…he had a gun. I saw it.”

“That’s good. What kind of gun?”

“A pistol?”

“Even better. Where was he? And where were you?”