“That’s funny,” he said. “Because I write what I do to protect the people you’re putting at risk.”
“You’ve got the wrong idea,” I said.
“Do I?” he said. “What about Rebecca Reilly, detective? Can you tell me where she is? Because as far as I know, she disappeared on your watch.”
He was just baiting me now. That much was obvious. I wasn’t going to be able to placate this guy, and I wasn’t sure it was worth trying anymore.
But I did have one other thing to say.
“All right, fine,” I told him. “You want to blog your bullshit, that’s your right. But I’ll tell you something else. If I find you tailing me when I’m with my family again, we’re going to have a very different kind of problem. Do you understand?”
He stepped a little closer. Guidice was a big dude, and obviously not intimidated by much. But neither am I.
“Are you threatening me, Detective Cross?” he asked. “Is that what’s going on here?”
I hadn’t even noticed the recorder in his hand until now. He’d been palming it, just out of sight. Before I thought too much about it, I snatched it out of his hand and threw it as far as I could into the woods. Probably a mistake. Another one for my resume.
“You think that’s going to stop me?” he said. He laughed without smiling before he went on. “This is your other problem. You’ve started to believe your own publicity. Alex Cross, the Dragonslayer. Alex Cross, the Sherlock Holmes of MPD. Alex Cross, the second goddamn coming of Christ! You’re a paper tiger, Alex. A phony! And people need to know about it.”
I was already walking away.
“This isn’t over,” he called after me. “Not even close!”
“That’s one place where we agree, Guidice,” I said as I got into my car. “It definitely isn’t.”
It was time to hit this guy from another angle.
CHAPTER
47
IT’S NOT LIKE I WAS COMPLETELY UNSYMPATHETIC TO GUIDICE. I LOST MY OWN first wife to senseless violence. It was the worst day of my life, and in a strange way it connected the two of us.
But that didn’t mean I was going to let him keep going unchecked. If he wouldn’t talk to me, in a real way, then I had to do whatever else I could to stop him.
I spent the evening pulling everything we had on Guidice, and digging for anything else I could find. Commander D’Auria let me piggyback onto his LexisNexis access, and that
turned up what was basically a bibliography of Guidice’s past work. It gave me a whole new lens on him.
What I already knew was that he’d been with the US Army for several years before receiving an honorable discharge in 2005. That was where he’d cut his teeth, journalistically speaking.
Most of his work in the army had been with administrative and communications units, first at Fort Bragg, then in Newark, New Jersey, with one six-month deployment to Baghdad for the Army Times. Overseas, he’d written a series of PR pieces highlighting US humanitarian efforts and infrastructure projects in Iraq. All of that was a matter of public record.
Then there was everything that came after his discharge. I don’t know what happened to Guidice in the army, but by the time he started writing freelance—and well before Theresa Filmore died—it was like he’d turned a one eighty. His focus at that point was almost entirely on the overreach of the US government, both at home and abroad.
He’d traveled back to the Middle East a few times for some small presses, and he even won a few obscure awards for his work. At the same time, he wrote pieces on everything from police brutality to time-card falsification in law enforcement, and several scathing articles about MPD’s supposed mishandling of the Al Ayla terrorist attacks in DC in the fall.
The one thing he seemed to have never written about directly was the death of his fiancée. For whatever reasons of his own, he’d left that incident off the table, but I could only imagine the kind of fuel it would have poured onto the fire he already had burning.
Now, all of it seemed to be bubbling up to the surface, including the blame he was laying so squarely at my feet.
I didn’t know what exactly to expect from him next, but it was clear to me that I hadn’t seen the last—or the worst—of Ron Guidice yet.
CHAPTER
48
BY TWO O’CLOCK THE NEXT AFTERNOON, I’D GRABBED THE FIRST APPOINTMENT I could get with the US Attorney’s Office. It’s not always the fastest-moving machine over there, and if they could do anything for me about Guidice, I wanted to find out sooner rather than later.