I, Alex Cross (Alex Cross 16)

“That’s not what I asked you, Ed. I asked if you knew where he was.” The voice was cool, the two of them watching him like he was a specimen in a lab.

“Hand to God, I don’t know where Johnny is. You gotta believe me on that.”

“Okay, I hear you.” The dark one nodded. “I believe you, Ed. Let’s just be sure, though.”

Eddie’s heart jumped into his throat before they even moved on him. The white one put him in another powerful headlock, grabbed his jaw, and forced the handle of a screwdriver into his mouth. Then he pinched Eddie’s nose closed with two fi

ngers.

The other dude came back into view, holding the running end of a green rubber hose. He held it over Eddie’s face and let the water pour into his mouth.

Eddie gagged hard. This was bad! The water was coming too fast to swallow. He couldn’t breathe; he nearly bit through the screwdriver handle trying to spit it out.

Pretty soon, his chest began to burn and his lungs were pulling for air. He bucked on the table, but the cuffs yanked him right back down. Pressure was building behind his eyes and nose, and he realized suddenly that he was going to die.

That’s when the panic really took over. There was no pain anymore, no sound of him choking—just overwhelming fear. It was worse than any nightmare he could imagine, because this was real. It was happening in the back room of his own gin mill in Philly.

Eddie didn’t even know that the water had stopped at first. The white guy tilted his head to the side, pulled out the screwdriver, and let him hack it out for a minute. It felt as if he were going to cough up a lung.

“Most people last a couple of minutes before they cave. Of course, these are soldiers I’m talking about.” One of them patted him on the belly. “That doesn’t quite describe you, Ed. So let me ask you again. Do you know where Johnny is?”

Eddie could barely talk, but he choked out a fast answer. “I’ll find him. I swear to God I will!”

“See, this is what I hate about the mob.” The voice came a little closer to his left ear. “You people just say whatever you need to say, whenever you need to say it. There’s no integrity. Nothing you can depend on.”

“Give me a chance! I’m begging you!”

“You don’t get it, Ed. This is your chance. You either know where Johnny is or you don’t. Now, which is it?”

“I don’t know!” He was blubbering, half out of his mind. “Please… I don’t know.”

They broke a couple of teeth getting the screwdriver back in his mouth. Eddie clenched his jaw and thrashed and begged for his life, but only until the torrent of water cut him off again. It didn’t take long before he was right back where he’d been a minute ago, absolutely convinced he was about to die.

And this time he was right.

Chapter 12

THE BIZARRE MURDER case was spreading out like spidery legs around me, but one question hung over the rest: Were there others who had died like Caroline? Was that a possibility? A probability?

Obtaining a credible account of missing persons in DC is harder than it might seem. After speaking with someone at the Youth Investigations Bureau, which has a centralized database, I had to go district by district, personally talking with detectives all over the city. Incident reports are public information, but what I needed were PD252s, which are private case notes.

That’s where I could start to filter for students, runaways, and above all, anyone with a known or suspected history of prostitution.

I brought home the files I’d gathered and took them to my office in the attic after dinner. I cleared off one entire wall and started tacking up everything—pictures of the missing, index cards with case vitals that I’d written up. Plus a DC street map, flagged everywhere that victims had last been seen.

When all that was done, I stood back and stared, looking for some kind of pattern to reveal itself.

There was Jasmine Arenas, nineteen, two priors for solicitation. She worked Fourth and K, where she’d last been seen getting into a blue Beemer around two a.m. on October 12 of last year.

Becca York was just sixteen, very pretty, an honor student. She’d left Dunbar High School on the afternoon of December 21 and hadn’t been seen or heard from since. Her foster parents suspected she’d run away to New York or the West Coast.

Timothy O’Neill was a twenty-three-year-old call boy who had been living with his parents in Spring Valley at the time of his disappearance. He drove away from the house around ten p.m. on May 29 and never came home again.

It wasn’t like I actually expected any kind of connect-the-dots pattern to jump out at me. This was more like building the haystack. Tomorrow, we’d start looking for the needle.

That meant fieldwork, and lots of it, following up on every one of these tawdry files. If just one of them showed a connection to Caroline, it could be huge. This was the kind of homicide that used to make me wonder why I keep coming back for more, year after year. I knew that on some level I was addicted to the chase, but I used to think that if I figured out why, then I’d stop needing it so much, maybe even turn in my badge. That hadn’t happened. Just the opposite.

Even if Caroline hadn’t been my niece, I still would have been standing in my attic at two in the morning, staring at that terrible board, as determined as ever to find out who had killed her and maybe these other young people—and why.