Double Cross (Alex Cross 13)

I was in his face now, and I wanted to pop someone. I might have if Sampson hadn’t grabbed me from behind. “Hey, hey, hey!” he was shouting—at me.

Then Bree came running up to us. “Jesus, are you okay?” she asked. “Alex?”

“I’m fine,” I said, trying to slow my breathing. “Listen, that might have been DCAK I was chasing. Another of his—”

“It wasn’t him,” Bree said, and shook her head. “And we’ve got to go right now.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked as she pushed me away from the crowd and all their eerie questions.

“I just got a call from Davies. Somebody was murdered at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Stabbed to death in front of a crowd of people. He punked us, Alex. He got us real good this time. This whole thing was planned.”

Part Three

THE AUDIENCE IS LISTENING

Chapter 71

I HAD VISITED the National Air and Space Museum many times with my kids but had never seen anything like this. As we arrived, the building looked dark and foreboding from the outside, except for the glass-walled atrium of the cafeteria. Upon entering, though, we saw dozens of shell-shocked people sitting at tables, waiting to go home. Witnesses, I knew. To a person, they had seen a horrific event tonight. What made it worse: at least half of them appeared to be children, some just two or three years old.

A bulging army of news reporters and photographers had been cordoned off over on Seventh Street near the Hirshhorn. At least it made the vultures easier for us to avoid.

Sampson, Bree, and I had come in directly from Independence Avenue. Gil Cook, one of our D-2s, met us at the cafeteria entrance. He approached Bree on the run, waving one arm over his head.

“Detective Stone, the museum director would like to speak with you before—”

“After,” Bree said, and she kept walking. She was on the Job now, somebody not to be trifled with. I liked how she worked, how she took control of the homicide scene.

Gil Cook followed her like a chastened pup looking for table scraps. “He said I should tell you he’s on his way out to talk to the press.”

Bree stopped walking and pivoted toward the D-2.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Gil. Where is he?”

Cook pointed her in the right direction and then kept pace with Sampson and me. The three of us passed by the darkened Milestones of Flight exhibit, with its life-size planes like giant toys hanging from the ceiling. Very cinematic—right up our thrill killer’s alley. More and more, his work was reminding me of Kyle Craig’s. The theatrics, the viciousness. Had he studied Kyle’s crimes?

“Victim’s name is Abby Courlevais. Thirty-two years old. White woman, tourist from France. Worst thing about it, she was five or six months pregnant,” Cook told Sampson and me.

The murder had taken place inside the Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater, which showed museum fare during the day but sometimes Hollywood blockbuster stuff at night. The actual killing had occurred right in the middle of my Baltimore speech. And then I’d gotten the note: Guess again, smart guy. I’m not psychotic! . . . See you back in DC, where it’s all happening. . . .

He was really going out of his way to mock us now—getting into it good. And the killer seemed to be topping each act with the next. Who was the woman in Baltimore? The Indy race-car driver who had taken me on a wild-goose chase, only to get away on I-95.

A pregnant victim, a visitor from another country—and a more “civilized” one—would capture media attention in a new way, and that wasn’t the half of it. The killer had just pulled off another very public execution inside a national institution. In a post-9/11 world, that meant a new level of intensity for everything—press coverage, public paranoia, pressure on the police to get this thing under control, to end it before anyone else died. No one would care that it was an almost impossible assignment. How many years had it taken them to get the Green River Killer—and had they ever gotten the Zodiac?

As to where DCAK might try to take things from here, I didn’t even want to speculate about it.

Right now, I had a body to see.

Two bodies, actually.

Mother and child.

Chapter 72

“GODDAMN HIM TO HELL!” Sampson said in an angry voice that he managed to keep under his breath. “That son-ofabitch! That miserable fucker!”

As homicide scenes go, this one was particularly obscene and troubling. This was a place where families went to be entertained. The IMAX theater had soaring walls, textured only with directional lighting. The rows of high-backed seats were steeply raked in a concave arch across the auditorium, like a modern take on an old medical-lecture theater—right down to the cadaver, right?