Alex Cross, Run (Alex Cross 20)

“Did you tell him you’ve got a prior connection to the case?”

“He wasn’t having it,” she said. “They’ve got this place tied down tight.”

“What about Valente?” I asked.

“He’s down by the water. I’m going to hang out a little and see if he comes up for air, but I’ve got to be at the ME’s office before five, and then . . .” Bree’s voice trailed off. “Oh, for crap’s sake,” she said then. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“What is it?” I asked. I hated getting all of this secondhand.

“It’s Ron Guidice. He’s over on the line with the other reporters. Son of a bitch just took my picture,” she said.

My face started burning, just thinking about it. Of course he was there. He was everywhere these days.

“Don’t give him the satisfaction of a response,” I said. “That’s exactly what he wants.”

“I’d like to wrap that camera strap around his throat.”

“Believe me, I know how you feel,” I said. “But don’t do it, Bree. Ignore him.”

I heard her take a deep breath. I did the same.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “I’ll let him live. But listen, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you if I get anything off of Valente. Love you.”

“You too,” I said, and then she was gone.

Usually, I can read Bree pretty well. Not this time. After we hung up, I sat there wondering if she’d told me what I needed to hear, or if she really was going to give Guidice some distance. She hated the guy just as much as I did.

For all I knew, she’d already punched his lights out before I’d even taken my next call.

CHAPTER

81

JOHN SAMPSON WAS IN HIS CAR WHEN HE GOT BREE’S TEXT.

Eyes on Guidice. Go now if u can.

They’d been waiting for this opportunity. Instead of continuing down Mass Ave. to the police training he was supposed to hit that day, he took a hard right on K Street and headed off to Virginia instead.

Accurint records showed Ron Guidice’s name on a house rental in Reston for the last three years. The place belonged to a developer out of Atlanta, with a management company based in DC, but none of those people had anything interesting to say about their tenant. Guidice had decent credit, paid his rent on time, and looked normal on paper.

The house itself was surprisingly suburban, for lack of a better word. It was a simple little Cape, painted an ugly light blue, in the middle of a tightly packed neighborhood, Sampson saw as he drove in. It wasn’t nearly the hole in the ground you might expect a bottom-feeder like Guidice to crawl out of.

At the front door, he rang the bell just in case. When no one answered, Sampson stepped off the low porch and did a quick half lap around to the back. There was no car in the driveway, no garage, either. Just a nonexistent scrub of fenced-in backyard.

If there was any concern at all, it was the lack of deadbolts on Guidice’s doors. There weren’t even shades or curtains on the windows. Going by first impressions, it didn’t seem like the guy had anything to hide. But there was one way to find out.

Sampson slipped the license out of his wallet and easily carded his way past the cheap lock on the back door.

From there, it didn’t take long to case out the first floor. Empty seemed to be the operative word. There wasn’t much of anything in the fridge, and just a single recliner next to a folding TV table in the living room. A stack of newspapers by the front door went back about three weeks—Post, New York Times, and Al-Sabah, for whatever that was worth.

He continued upstairs and found a simple layout of three small bedrooms. One was completely empty. One had a futon on the floor, with a few piles of folded clothes against the wall.

The third bedroom seemed to be Guidice’s makeshift office. There was a card table piled with Pendaflex files, and a cheap Lexmark printer on the floor. The files didn’t seem to

have much rhyme or reason. There were clippings about everything from police brutality to financial planning, car engine repair, and even the White House vegetable garden.

The whole place was kind of depressing, actually. It was pretty easy to imagine Guidice living out his pathetic nights here, working up his conspiracy theories, and writing his shitty little blog.