Cross Justice (Alex Cross 23)

“Have you ever had a portrait of yourself done by an artist named Coco?”

For a moment, the cloud that was Coco lifted, and Mize felt panic surge through him. But in the next instant, Coco reasserted control and said, “The only formal portraits of me and my family are photographs. What’s this about? I have guests to entertain.”

“Just running down leads, ma’am,” Johnson said. “Again, I’m sorry for interrupting your evening.”

The line clicked dead.

Coco set the phone back in the cradle, feeling like an immediate danger had been averted. But he stood there several long beats also feeling like the police were closing in.

The Mize circuitry in his brain broke through: Johnson has met Coco and me. Johnson was pounding on the front door at the house this afternoon. He’ll go back to the shop in the morning. You should run now. Take all you can and run.

But these days, Coco was dominant. He pushed aside the thought of leaving just as easily as he’d pushed aside what his house looked like and hid every other thing that might mar his appearance to the outside world.

This was all that mattered. Appearance. This night. This moment.

One last time?

Dressed only in La Perla black panties and a gorgeous Chantal Thomass blush-and-black corset, Coco padded back into the master bedroom, where Pauline Striker, naked, was gagged and lashed to a chair, clearly terrified.

“What do you think?” Coco asked, running his fingers down the sides of the corset. “Slimming. And sensual. Why, Pauline, in my wildest moments I didn’t imagine you and Edwin as the merry-widow type, but I suppose what happens behind closed doors just happens and evolves. And then one day I’m here playing in your kinky side, and you’re…you’re there.”

Coco was transfixed by Pauline’s fear and didn’t move for several moments. Then he grabbed a pair of fine black silk hose, fresh from Paris, and sat in a chair at the vanity. He rolled them on over his toes and up his calves and thighs. Coco loved that sensation. It never got old.

“Have you ever had the sense there were two of you living inside your brain?” Coco asked Pauline, and then he gestured to the corset. “Finding this in your drawer tells me you have. So in case you were wondering, that’s what we’re doing here, exploring our personalities, acting out fantasies, you know?”

Pauline Striker’s eyes were glued on Coco.

As Coco went by her, he ran the fingernails of his left hand over her cheek softly, saying, “Tonight there’s someone else playing in your head, Pauline. Her name is Miranda. She’s a wild child, and I love her.”

Pauline’s brow was knit with confusion when Coco came around the other side of the chair and faced her.

“Miranda’s a wild child, and I love her,” he said again and felt himself harden. “But she’s also my mother, and I hate her.”

Coco slapped Pauline across the face so hard it left a palm print.

Over Pauline’s cries and whimpers of pain, Coco said coldly, “Gloves are off, Mummy. No more making things look like suicide for Jeffrey’s sake. There’s just nothing fulfilling in that anymore.”

Chapter

71

“I’m telling you, Sarge, some of the time it sounded like Coco,” Johnson said. “She had this distinctive cadence when she talked, and so did that lady.”

“Cadence?” Drummond said, skeptical.

“Yeah, like where the word emphasis was,” Johnson said. “My wife’s a speech pathologist. She knows about this stuff, so I know about this stuff. Did you notice how the voice broke every so often? Old and then kind of younger?”

I’d never heard Coco’s voice, so I couldn’t say, but there had been something odd about the way Johnson’s questions had been answered.

“We can’t go in on the basis of you saying one woman sounded like another one on a cell phone,” Dru

mmond said.

“But maybe I can,” I said.

“What?” the sergeant said, swiveling in his seat to look at me.

“You’re on the job,” I said. “You’re handcuffed by the law, but right here, right now, I have no jurisdiction. I am a private citizen with information that suggests a woman might be in danger in that house. Acting on that suspicion, I go into the compound. I look in a few windows. If there’s a party going on with Edwin, Pauline, Mize, and others, I slip out. If I see probable cause, I call you.”