I, Alex Cross (Alex Cross 16)

When I put my Maglite on it, I saw that the arm had been carved, not written on.

A six-inch hunting knife was on the ground at Williams’s feet, streaked the same reddish brown as his skin. The letters were still easy enough to read:

SORRY

Chapter 98

A LOT HAPPENED really fast after we found Williams. Within a few hours, we had new versions of all the old players on the scene—Virginia State Police out of Richmond and the FBI team from Charlottesville. There was no one I knew here, which was maybe a good thing and maybe not. I’d find out which pretty soon.

The Bureau’s Evidence Response Team included serious-looking folks from serology, trace analysis, firearms, photography, and fingerprinting. They set up a tent and spread long sheets of butcher paper over plywood-and-sawhorse tables.

The ground around the wood chipper was sectioned into eight-inch squares, and they started right in, meticulously sifting one square at a time, separating potential evidence from dirt and debris.

The chipper itself would be disassembled in a lab in Richmond, but blood-enhancement agents had already shown trace amounts of serum. A visual inspection also turned up some likely bone fragments in the mechanism’s blades.

Everything was duly photographed, documented, and either set out to dry or put into manila envelopes for transport.

The faster job turned out to be a search of the woods. A lieutenant colonel with the state police called in two K-9 units, and within the first hours, they’d sniffed out a freshly turned patch of earth half a mile east of the cabin.

Some careful digging brought up two plastic bags of “remains” from about five feet down. Everyone on the site was carrying around a hangdog face. No one is ever ready for this kind of murder scene.

The new remains looked exactly like Caroline’s had, and the consensus was that they hadn’t been in the ground for more than three days. Right away, I thought of Tony Nicholson and Mara Kelly, who were still officially MIA.

“It adds up, on paper anyway,” I said to Sampson. “Get them out of jail, and you can make them disappear once and for all. We were supposed to think they fled the country.”

“Hell of a way to cover your tracks,” Sampson said. “But I have to admit, effective.”

We were sitting on the edge of the porch around one a.m., watching an agent tag what was left of the newly deceased as evidence, before they went into body bags. John couldn’t take his eyes off it, but I’d seen enough. It depressed me to know that my own niece’s case was becoming the single grisliest piece of work I’d ever investigated.

But that fact kept me moving too. For the fourth time in as many hours, I dialed Dan Cormorant’s phone number.

This time the Secret Service agent actually picked up.

“Where the hell are you guys?” I asked him. “Are you even tracking this?”

“You’re obviously not watching TV right now,” he said. “It looks like they’ve got everyone but ESPN out there in those woods.”

“Cormorant, listen to me. Remy Williams wasn’t Zeus, any more than Tony Nicholson or Johnny Tucci was. Williams may be a stone-cold killer, but he’s not the one we’re looking for.”

“I agree with you,” Cormorant said, “and you know why? ’Cause we’ve got Zeus pinned down. Right now. You want to be part of the sideshow, you stay where you are. But if you want to be here when we finish this thing once and for all, I’d suggest you get your ass back to the city. Pronto, Detective Cross. This case is about to close. You should be there.”

Chapter 99

SAD TO SAY, I was operating on nothing but adrenaline and caffeine by the time we got to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across from the West Wing. It was nearly four a.m. at this point, but the Joint Operations Center was buzzing like midday.

The mood in the briefing room was tense to say the least. They had CNN on one of a dozen flat screens arrayed on the wall, with an overhead shot of Remy Williams’s cabin and the subhead Secret Service Agent Found Dead.

At the front of the room, a fiftyish agent in shirtsleeves was shouting on the phone, loudly enough to be heard over everyone else.

“I don’t give a shit who you need to speak to; he’s not a member of the Secret Service. Now change the damn graphic!”

I had already spotted several people I knew, including Emma Cornish, who was MPD’s liaison to the Service’s High Intensity Violent Crimes Task Force; and Barry Farmer, one of two Secret Service agents assigned to Metro’s Homicide Unit. It was as if the two departments had suddenly been knitted together, right there in the middle of the night.

For show, maybe?

I wasn’t ready to say yet.

We all gathered around a long oval table for the first briefing. The man with the big voice in front turned out to be Silo Ridge, deputy special agent in charge. He was the whip on this one, and he stood up with Agent Cormorant.