Double Cross (Alex Cross 13)

She blew out a mouthful of air. This was difficult, but Beth Kitzmiller was making it a lot easier for us. “Try Gummi Worm, with an i. He used that one sometimes.”

The three of us exchanged a kind of shy, painful smile.

“It was his nickname for Emily,” she offered. “And occasionally for me.”

Sampson tapped in Gummi Worm.

Chapter 92

IT WAS KITZ’S PASSWORD—at least, on the computer at home—and while Sampson feverishly worked the keyboard, I started in on the desk drawers.

I turned up a thick stack of pending case files, most of them serial-related, and all filled with Xeroxes of original material. I had to wonder if these were “unauthorized” copies he’d brought home from work. Kitz had been a “fan” of this kind of stuff, right? If he was a little obsessed, it was part of what made him good at his job. Of course, in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help thinking, Kitz was FBI, and Kyle Craig had been too. Unfortunately, that particular line of thinking also made me a suspect.

The first case I looked at was one I’d heard about before. Someone was breaking into suburban Maryland homes at night and strangling women in their beds. No theft, no vandalism—just the vicious murders themselves. So far, there had been three in a span of five months, one every seven weeks.

The next file was coded “Mapmaker,” and outlined a series of shootings, always with the same gun. The victims were apparently random, the only consistency being their location. The shootings, four so far, had taken place on street corners along a straight line running through Northwest DC.

Then I discovered a file Kitz had put together on Kyle Craig. It even included information on how I had taken Kyle down. Plus, Kitz had been going through all of Kyle’s old case notes, including the ongoing investigations at the time he was arrested.

When I found the DCAK file, it was mostly old information on the Washington-area murders: copies of crime reports, map sections, lab results, interviews—hundreds of them, all tied to the known homicides. Not much that was new or helpful. And nothing directly linking DCAK to Craig.

“How’s it going over there?” I asked Sampson. “Any luck so far? Good or bad?”

“There’s a lot to look at,” he said. “He’s got Techno

rati, Blogdex, PubSub . . . tracking software, Alex. With the right setup, he could ping anyone who commented on a blog or surfed a site.”

“So how do we find out what Kitz knew? Where did he keep it?”

Sampson thrummed his fingers on the desk. “I could check his Internet history, see if there were sites he went to a lot. Guess I’ll start there.”

A few minutes later, Sampson suddenly sat back in Kitz’s desk chair. He whistled through his teeth. “I’ll be damned. Come over here, Alex.”

I peered over his shoulder.

“Look familiar?” Sampson asked. “It should.”

He’d pulled up a long list of sites, many of them with names I recognized from my own surf-sleuthing. But that’s not what had my attention now. In addition to the named sites, the list included dozens of numbers. As I looked closer, I saw that it was actually the same number, repeated over and over, subdivided in different ways with periods and slashes.

344.19.204.411

34.41.920.441/1

34.419.20.44/11

344.192.04.411

The list continued beyond the figures on the screen, but what we had was our mystery number—the one from the side of the mailbag at the Smithsonian.

“It’s an IP address, Alex. A Web site. At least, Kitz seemed to think so.”

“Why didn’t he tell us about it?” I asked. “What’s going on here, Sampson?”

“Maybe he hadn’t found the right combination. Maybe he hadn’t gotten around to checking it yet. Or the site could be inactive.”

“One way to find out,” I said. “Let’s start at the top and work our way down the list.”

Chapter 93