Cross (Alex Cross 12)

He finally pulled off the West Side Highway at around midnight; then he went straightaway to the Morningside Apartments on West 107th. He’d stayed there before and knew it was just out of the way enough to suit his purposes. Convenient too, with four different subway lines going through the two nearby stations.

No air-conditioning in the rooms, he remembered, but that didn’t matter in November. He slept like a baby safe in a mother’s womb. When Sullivan woke at seven, covered in a light sheen of his own sweat, his mind was focused on a single idea: payback against Junior Maggione. Or maybe an even better idea: survival of the fittest and the toughest.

Around nine that morning he took a subway ride to check out a couple of possible locations for murders he wanted to commit in the near future. He had a “wish list” with several different targets and wondered if any of these men, and two women, had an idea that they were as good as dead, that it was up to him who lived and died, and when, and where.

In the evening, around nine, he drove over to Brooklyn, his old stomping grounds. Right into Junior Maggione’s neighborhood, his turf in Carroll Gardens.

He was thinking about his old buddy Jimmy Hats and missing him some, figuring that Maggione’s father had probably popped Jimmy. Somebody had, and then made the body disappear, as if Jimmy had never been born. He’d always suspected it had been Maggione Sr., so that was another score for the Butcher to settle.

It was building up inside him, this terrible rage. About something. Maybe about his father—the original Butcher of Sligo, that piece of Irish scum who had ruined his life before he was ten years old.

He turned onto Maggione’s street, and he had to smile to himself. The powerful don still lived like a mildly successful plumber or maybe a local electrician, in a yellow-brick two-family house. More surprising—he didn’t spot any guards posted on the street.

So either Junior was seriously underestimating him, or his people were damn good at hiding themselves in plain sight. Hell, maybe somebody had a sniper rifle sight pinned on his forehead right now. Maybe he had a couple of seconds to live.

The suspense was killing him. He had to see what was going on here. So he hit his car horn once, twice, three times, and not a goddamn thing happened.

Nobody shot him through the skull. And for the first time, the Butcher let himself think, I might win this fight after all.

He’d figured out the first mystery: Junior Maggione had moved his family out of the house. Maggione was running too.

Then he stopped that train of thought with just one word—mistake.

He couldn’t make any—not one misstep from now until this was all over. If he did, he was dead.

Simple as that.

End of story.

Chapter 91

IT WAS LATE, AND I DECIDED to go for a drive in the R350. I was loving the car. The kids felt the same way. Even Nana did, praise the Lord. I found myself thinking about Maria again. The long investigation into her murder I had conducted and failed at. I was messing with my own mind, trying to picture her face, trying to hear the exact sound of her voice.

Later that night, back at home, I tried to get to sleep but couldn’t. It got so bad that I went downstairs and watched Diary of a Mad Black Woman again. Actually, I found myself cheering like a crazy person at the flickering TV screen. Tyler Perry’s movie matched up perfectly with my frame of mind.

I called up Tony Woods at the director’s office around nine the next morning. Then I swallowed my pride and asked Tony for some help on the rape and murder case. I needed to find out if the Bureau had anything on the contract killer called the Butcher, anything that might be helpful to Sampson and me—maybe something classified.

“We knew you’d call one of these days, Alex. Director Burns is eager to work with you again. You up for some consulting? Just light stuff. It’s your call what and where, especially now that you’re taking on cases again.”

“Who said I’m taking on cases? This is a special situation,” I told Tony. “The Butcher probably murdered my wife years ago. It’s the one case I can’t leave unsolved.”

“I understand. I do understand. We’ll try to help if we can. I’ll get you what you need.”

Tony arranged for me to use the office of an agent who was out of town, and he said it was okay if I wanted to start a dialogue with an FBI researcher-analyst named Monnie Donnelley.

“I already talked to Monnie,” I told him.

“We know you did. Monnie told us. We cleared it for her now. Officially.”

The next couple of days, I pretty much lived in the FBI building. Turned out, the Bureau had quite a lot on Michael Sullivan, the Butcher. His file included dozens of photographs. One problem was that the photos were five to seven years old, and there didn’t seem to have been any contact with Sullivan recently. Where had he disappeared to? I did learn that Sullivan grew up in a part of Brooklyn known as the Flatlands. His father had been a real butcher there. I even got the names of some old contacts and friends of Sullivan’s from his days in New York.

What I read of Sullivan’s backstory was curious. He’d attended parochial schools through tenth grade, and he’d been a good student, even though he never seemed to work at it. Then Sullivan dropped out of school. He took up with the Mafia and was one of the few non-Italians to break in. He wasn’t a “made man,” but he was well paid. Sullivan earned in the six figures when he was in his early twenties and became Dominic Maggione’s go-to hit man. His son, the current don, had never approved of Sullivan.

Then something strange and disturbing to all concerned started to happen. There were reports of Michael Sullivan torturing and mutilating the bodies of victims; murdering a priest and a layman accused of misconduct with boys at his old grade school; a couple of other vigilante hits; a rumor that Sullivan might have murdered his own father, who disappeared from his shop one night and whose body had never been found to this day.

Then Sullivan seemed to completely disappear off the Bureau’s radar screen. Monnie Donnelley agreed with my assessment: that Sullivan might have become somebody’s informer in the Bureau. It was possible that the FBI, or the New York police, was protecting him. Even that Sullivan might be in Witness Protection. Was that what had happened to Maria’s killer?

Was he somebody’s snitch?