Sunday hesitated but then saw that a cable linked the helmet to the server. He put the helmet on, lowered the visor, and gasped. He was now looking at a 3-D image of Cross’s house.
It hovered there in front of him like a hologram.
“Touch the front door,” Acadia said through speakers in the helmet. “Your hands guide you.”
Chapter
17
Sunday reached toward the door. It swung open and he moved inside a digital model of Cross’s house, not quite architectural rendering, not quite photograph. He was in the front hallway
. He moved his right hand and was quickly peering into the front room. He moved his left hand and a closet opened.
“The entire place like this?” he said.
“Top to bottom,” Acadia said. “You can see the house as it is now, and as it will be during and after the construction.”
Fascinated now, the writer climbed the virtual staircase and found Alex Cross’s bedroom. He looked at the bed, thought of Bree Stone in those jeans she’d been wearing. Despite that pleasurable image, he did not linger.
There was one place in particular he very much wanted to see. He navigated out of the bedroom and climbed a second, narrower staircase to the attic and Cross’s home office, which was depicted with near-photorealism.
The writer was ecstatic. This was where Dr. Alex did some of his best work, at least according to a fawning profile of him that had run a few years back in the Post’s Sunday magazine. The piece had included the photograph of the attic that Preston had somehow melded into the cyber-rendering.
Sunday panned about, seeing the desk, the chair, the filing cabinets, even the snapshots of the victims of unsolved murders and various news clips regarding those cases thumbtacked to the wall. He spotted two and almost gasped.
Could it be? Cross was still obsessed with the Perfect Criminal cases?
Sunday pointed at one clip. To his delight, it was enlarged, and he scanned a story from the Austin American-Statesman about the Monahan murders, pausing on a picture of Alice, the young mother and wife. In Sunday’s mind he saw her as he always did: naked in the bathroom, screaming before the razor cut her throat.
But rather than dwell on that, he pointed at the second clip, a story from the Omaha World-Herald describing the brutal slayings of the Daley family. He lingered on the wife and mother, Bea. She was older than Alice Monahan by nearly twenty years. In his mind he saw her naked, too, and begging for mercy before the razor slashed her—
“Love it, sugar?” Acadia asked over the headset, breaking his attention.
“I do.”
There was no doubt about that. Through his clever invention, young Preston Elliot had made Sunday invisible, free to roam Cross’s house at will, free to become familiar with every inch of the place so that someday soon he could creep into it in the dark for real.
That would be exciting. Wouldn’t every cell in his body buzz?
Yes. Oh, yes, it would. But there was more than that. Looking around the cyberversion of the office, Sunday felt as if he’d already violated Dr. Alex’s privacy, slipped inside the detective’s sanctuary, and made himself right at home.
What could be better? What could make things better?
Nothing!
Feeling untouchable now, Sunday tore off the helmet and smiled at Preston. “Acadia said you were a genius, my friend. She’s right.”
Preston glanced at Acadia, blushed, and squirmed in his seat.
“No one knows you’ve done this work for us, correct?” Sunday asked.
“Ju-ju-just me,” Preston said. “Like A-A-Acadia asked.”
Sunday looked at her. “And you know how to enter future data?”
“Preston’s a very good teacher,” Acadia said, rubbing the young man’s shoulders sensually.
“Pay him,” Sunday said, heading toward the door.