Barnes shook his head vigorously. “I never looked back.”
“You see his face?”
He hesitated, but then nodded. “He had his hood up, but there was a streetlight there. I guess I saw him pretty good.”
I wanted to pump my fist in the air but said, “You’d be willing to work with an artist?”
He nodded again.
“And you think you remember what he looked like?”
Barnes gazed into his lap, said quietly: “I don’t suppose you could forget the face of the man who missed killing you by a couple of minutes.”
The attorney had no sooner said those words than he got a pained expression on his face that was replaced almost immediately by one of terror. His arm came up, traveling toward the breast pocket of his suit coat, and he looked at me and choked, “I’m…”
Barnes keeled forward onto the floor, gasping.
“John!” I bellowed as I threw myself down on my knees next to him. “Call 911! He’s having a heart attack!”
Chapter
56
Cross returned home around midnight. Sitting in the van down the street, Sunday and Acadia watched the detective go inside and turn off the porch light. Most of the other lights in the house were already off.
“You sure this is the night, sugar?” Acadia asked with slight worry.
“Thanks to your brilliant three-D model, yes,” Sunday replied. “Besides, we need better, more up-to-date information if this is going to go like clockwork.”
“You know I’m moving on if you’re caught in there,” she said.
He smiled at her, stroked her cheek with his finger, and said, “I wouldn’t expect anything less from a girl who fed her own daddy to gators.”
Acadia bit gently at his knuckle, said, “How long are you going to wait?”
The last light in Cross’s house had just died.
“Couple of hours,” Sunday said. “Let them all get good
and deep.”
“I’m going to nap until you’re ready,” she said, then crawled into the back of the van and a sleeping bag on a pad they’d brought along.
To pass the time, the writer reached forward, turned the radio on, and tuned to WTOP, the twenty-four-hour news station in the nation’s capital. The news was all about the latest nonsense in the Middle East, the upcoming primary season, and the opening day of baseball season the following week.
But then, at 1:45 a.m., the announcer said, “In local news, the Washington Post is reporting in an article posted on its website that police now believe that the kidnapping of infants Joss Branson and Evan Lancaster may be linked to the unsolved killing of Mad Man Francones and several others at a local massage parlor earlier this month.”
Sunday wanted to put his fist through the windshield when the announcer introduced Detective Bree Stone, who said, “We believe that this has happened before, variations of it, anyway, in Albuquerque and in Tampa. We are looking for a couple, one white male, one white female, who may be posing as the parents of the babies. They may have a Vietnamese girl about twenty with them. If you see people matching this description, please call our tip line immediately.”
The story ended.
Furious that Cross and his wife had one-upped him, Sunday punched off the radio, climbed into the back, and shook Acadia awake. “It’s time.”
She groaned, nodded, and sat up against the van’s inner wall. She got a laptop, opened it, and called up Skype. She dialed a number. Sunday heard the ring in the Bluetooth device in his ear, answered, and said, “Test.”
Acadia gave him the thumbs-up, and he slipped from the van without further ado. Wearing black clothes and snug 5mm neoprene booties found in a dive shop over on S Street, he padded toward Cross’s house. It was windy out, and the air smelled like a storm was coming.
Sunday had once again gone through the virtual version of the detective’s home earlier in the day. As he moved into the narrow space between the real thing and the house next door, he felt supremely positive about his chances.