Pop Goes the Weasel (Alex Cross 5)

Our dinner broke up at around eleven, and Jones and I promised to keep in touch. There was one bit of disturbing news, though no one wanted to overstate the significance of it: Geoffrey Shafer’s body still hadn’t been found. Somehow that seemed a fitting end.

Sampson and I were due to catch the first flight to Washington on Tuesday morning. It was scheduled to leave at ten past nine.

That morning, the skies were swirling with black clouds. Heavy rain pounded on our car’s roof all the way from the hotel to the Donald Sangster Airport. Schoolchildren ran along the side of the road, shielding themselves from the rain with flopping banana-tree leaves.

The downpour caught us good as we tried to dash out from under the cover of the tin overhang outside the rent-a-car depot. The rain was cool, though, and it felt good on my face and head and on the shirt plastered to my back.

“It’ll be real good to be home,” Sampson said as we finally made it to a shelter under the metal roof painted a bright yellow.

“I’m ready to go,” I agreed. “I miss Damon and Jannie and Nana. I miss being home.”

“They’ll find the body,” Sampson said. “Shafer’s.”

“I knew who you meant.”

The rain hammered the airport’s roof without mercy, and I was thinking how much I hated to fly on days like this—but it would be good to be home, to be able to end this nightmare. It had invaded my soul, taken over my life. In a way I supposed it was as much a “game” as any that Shafer had played. The murder case had obsessed me for over a year, and that was enough.

Christine had asked me to give it up. Nana had asked, too, but I hadn’t listened. Maybe I hadn’t been able to see my life and actions as clearly then as I did now. I was the Dragonslayer, and all that meant, the good and the bad. In the end, I held myself responsible for Christine’s kidnapping and murder.

Sampson and I walked past the colorful concession stands without any real interest, barely a passing nod. Street hawkers, called higglers, were selling wooden jewelry and other carvings, but also Jamaican coffee and cocoa.

Each of us carried a black duffel bag. We didn’t exactly look like vacationers, I was thinking. We still looked like policemen.

I heard a voice calling loudly from behind, and I turned back to look at the commotion coming up from the rear.

It was one of the Jamaican detectives, John Anthony, shouting out my name in the noisy terminal, running our way. He was several steps ahead of Andrew Jones, who looked powerfully dismayed.

Jones and Anthony at the airport? What in God’s name was happening now? What could possibly have gone wrong?

“The Weasel?” I said, and it came out like a curse.

Sampson and I stopped to let them catch up with us. I almost didn’t want to hear what they had to tell us.

“You have to come back with us, Alex. Come with me,” Jones said, slightly out of breath. “It’s about Christine Johnson. Something’s turned up. Come.”

“What is it? What’s happened?” I asked Jones, and then turned to Detective Anthony when the Englishman was slow in answering.

Anthony hesitated, but then he said, “We don’t know for sure. It could be nothing at all. Someone claims to have seen her, though. She may be here in Jamaica, after all. Come with us.”

I couldn’t believe what he had just told me. I felt Sampson’s arm wrap tightly around me, but everything else seemed unreal, as in a dream.

It wasn’t over yet.

Chapter 121

ON THE ROAD out of the airport, Andrew Jones and Detective Anthony filled us in on what they knew. I could tell they were trying not to build up my hopes too much. I’d been in the same untenable situation many times, but not as a victim of a crime.

“Last night we caught a small-time local thief breaking into a house in Ocho Rios,” Anthony said as he drove, the four of us packed tightly in his Toyota. “He said he had information to trade. We told him we would hear what he had to say, and then we would decide. He revealed that an American woman had been kept in the hills east of Ocho Rios, near the town of Euarton. There’s an outlaw group lives up there sometimes.

“I learned about it only this morning. I called Andrew, and we hurried to the airport. The man says she was called Beatitude. No other name was used. I contacted your hotel, but you had already left for the airport. So we came out here to get you.”

“Thank you,” I finally said, realizing I had probably been told as much as they knew.

Sampson spoke up. “So why does this helpful thief appear now, after all this time?”

“He said there was a shooting a few nights ago that changed everything. Once the white men died, the woman wasn’t important anymore. Those were his words.”

“You know these men?” I asked Detective Anthony.