Pop Goes the Weasel (Alex Cross 5)

On Sunday night, Patrick Busby showed up at the Belmont Hotel around nine. He asked me to ride with him out past Southampton, about a six-mile drive that he said would take us twenty minutes or more. Bermudians measure distances in straight lines, but all the roads run in wiggles and half-circles, so it always takes longer to travel than you might think.

“What is it, Patrick? What’s out in Southampton?” I asked as we rode along Middle Road. My heart was in my throat. He was scaring me with his silence.

“We haven’t found Mrs. Johnson. However, a man may have witnessed the abduction. I want you to hear his story. You decide for yourself. You’re the big-city detective, not me. You can ask whatever questions you like. Off the record, of course.”

The man’s name was Perri Graham, and he was staying in a room at the Port Royal Golf Club. We met him at his tiny apartment in the staff quarters. He was tall and painfully thin, with a longish goatee. He clearly wasn’t happy to see Inspector Busby or me on his doorstep.

Busby had already told me that Graham was originally from London and now worked as a porter and maintenance man at the semiprivate golf club. He had also lived in New York City and Miami and had a criminal record for selling crack in New York.

“I already told him everything I saw,” Perri Graham said defensively as soon as he opened the front door of his room and saw the two of us standing there. “Go away. Let me be. Why would I hold back anything or—”

I cut him off. “My name is Alex Cross. I’m a homicide detective from Washington. The woman you saw was my fiancée, Mr. Graham. May we come in and talk? This will only take a few minutes.”

He shook his head back and forth in frustration.

“I’ll tell you what I know. Again,” he finally said, relenting. “Yeah, come in. But only because you called me Mr. Graham.”

“That’s all I want. I’m not here to bother you about anything else.”

Busby and I walked inside the room, which was little more than an alcove. The tile floors and all the furniture were strewn with wrinkled clothes, mostly underwear.

“A woman I know lives in Hamilton,” Graham said in a weary voice. “I went to visit her this Tuesday past. We drank too much wine. Stayed the evening—you know how it is. I got up somehow. Had to be at the club by noon, but I knew I’d be late and get docked some of my pay. Don’t have a car or nothin’, so I hitched a ride from Hamilton, out South Shore Road. Walked along near Paget, I suppose. Damn hot afternoon, I remember. I went down to the water, cool off if I could.

“I came back up over a knobbly hill, and I witnessed an accident on the roadway. It was maybe a quarter of a mile down the big hill there. You know it?”

I nodded and held my breath as I listened to him. I remembered the stifling heat of that afternoon, everything about it. I could still see Christine driving off on a shiny blue moped, waving and smiling. The memory of her smile, which had always brought me such joy, now put a tight knot in my stomach.

“I saw a white van hit a woman riding a blue moped. I can’t be sure, but it almost looked like the van hit her on purpose. Driver, he jumped out of the van right away and helped her up. She didn’t look like she was hurt badly. Then he helped her inside the van. Put the moped inside, too. Then he drove off. I thought he was taking her to the hospital. Thought nothing else of it.”

“You sure she wasn’t badly hurt?” I asked.

“Not sure. But she got right up. She was able to stand all right.”

There was a catch in my voice when I spoke again. “And you didn’t tell anybody about the accident, not even when you saw the news stories?”

The man shook his head. “Didn’t see no stories. Don’t bother with the local news much. Just small-time shit and worthless gossip. But then my girl, she keep talking about it. I didn’t want to go to the police, but she made me do it, made me talk to this inspector here.”

“You know what kind of van it was?” I asked.

“White van. I think it was maybe a rented one. Clean and new.”

“License plate?”

Graham shook his head. “Don’t have no idea.”

“What did the man in the van look like?” I asked him. “Any little thing you remember is helpful, Mr. Graham. You’ve already helped a lot.”

He shrugged, but I could tell that he was trying to think back to that afternoon. “Nothing special about him. Not as tall as you, but tall. Look like anybody else. Just a black man, like any other.”

Chapter 49

IN A SMALL APARTMENT in a suburb of Washington called Mount Rainier, Detective Patsy Hampton lay in bed, restlessly flipping through the pages of the Post. She couldn’t sleep, but there was nothing unusual about that. She often had trouble sleeping, ever since she was a little girl in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Her mother said she must have a guilty conscience about something.

She watched a rerun episode of ER, then fetche

d herself a Stonyfield yogurt with blueberries and logged on to America Online. She had an e-mail from her father, now relocated in Delray Beach, Florida, and one from an old college roommate from the University of Richmond, whom she had never been that close to anyway.

The roommate had just heard from a mutual friend that Patsy was a hotshot police detective in Washington, and what an exciting life she must lead. The roommate wrote that she had four children and lived in a suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina, but added that she was bored with everything in her life. Patsy Hampton would have given anything to have just one child.