I, Alex Cross (Alex Cross 16)

I wanted to be right now. I wasn’t ready for it.

“Let’s split up,” I told Bree. “We’ll cover the apartment faster that way.”

I started with the bedroom, forcing myself to keep going. Who were you, Caroline? What happened to you? How could you die the way you did?

One of the first things that caught my attention was a small brown leather date book on a desk near her bed. When I grabbed it, a couple of business cards fluttered out and onto the floor.

I picked them up and saw they were both for Capitol Hill lobbyists—though I didn’t recognize the names, just the firms.

Half of Caroline’s date book pages were blank; the others had strings of letters written on them, starting at the beginning of the year and going about two months ahead. Each string was ten letters, I noticed right off. The most recent, from almost two weeks before Caroline had died, was SODBBLZHII. With ten letters.

The first thing I thought of was phone numbers, presumably coded or scrambled for privacy.

And if I asked myself why at that point, it was only because I was putting off an inevitable conclusion. By the time I’d gone through the big rosewood dresser in her walk-in closet, there was little doubt left about how my niece had been affording this beautiful apartment and everything in it.

The top drawers were filled with every kind of lingerie I could imagine, and I have a good imagination. There was the more expected lacy and satin stuff, but also leather, with and without studs, latex, rubber—all of it neatly folded and arranged. Probably the way her mother had taught her to organize her clothing as a kid.

The bottom drawers held a collection of restraints, insertive objects, toys, and contraptions, some of which I could only guess about and shake my head over.

Separately, everything I’d found was no more than circumstantial. All together, it got me very depressed, very quickly.

Was this why Caroline had moved to DC? And was it the reason she’d died the way she did?

I came out to the living room in a fog, not even sure I could talk yet. Bree was down on the floor with an open box and several photos spread in front of her.

She held one up for me to see. “I’d recognize you anywhere,” she said.

It was a snapshot of Nana, Blake, and me. I even knew the date—July 4, 1976, the summer of the Bicentennial. In the picture, my brother and I were wearing plastic boaters with red, white, and blue bands around them. Nana looked impossibly young and so pretty.

Bree stood up next to me, still looking at the photo. “She didn’t forget you, Alex. One way or another, Caroline knew who you were. It makes me wonder why she didn’t try to contact you after she came to DC.”

The picture of Nana, my brother, and me wasn’t mine to take, but I put it in my jacket pocket anyway. “I don’t think she wanted to be found,” I said. “Not by me. Not by anybody she knew. She was an escort, Bree. High-end. Anything goes.”

Chapter 8

BACK AT THE office, which was buzzing with activity and noise, I got word from Detective Fellows down in Virginia. Prints on the stolen car matched up to a John Tucci of Philadelphia, now at large.

I played some fast connect-the-dots—from Fellows in Virginia, to a friend at the FBI in Washington, to their field office in Philly and an agent, Cass Murdoch, who threw down another piece of the puzzle for me: Tucci was a known but small-time cog in the Martino crime family organization.

That information cut both ways. It was a specific lead early in the case. But it also suggested that the driver and the killer might not be the same person. Tucci was probably part of something bigger than himself.

“Any guesses what Tucci was doing all the way down here?” I asked Agent Murdoch. Bree and I had her on speakerphone.

“I’d say he was either reassigned or else moving up in the organization. Taking on bigger jobs, more responsibility. He’d been arrested but never served time.”

“The car was stolen in Philadelphia,” Bree said.

“So then, yeah, he was working from home, emphasis on the was. My guess is he’s probably dead by now, after a screwup like that, whatever the hell happened out there on I-95.”

“How about possible clients in Washington?” I asked. “Does the Martino family have any regular business down here?”

“Nothing I know of,” Murdoch said. “But there’s obviously someone. John Tucci was too small-time to have drummed this up on his own. He probably thought he was lucky to get the assignment. What an asshole.”

I hung up with Murdoch and took a few minutes to scribble some notes and synthesize what she’d told us. Unfortunately, every new answer suggested a new question.

One thing seemed pretty clear to me, though. This wasn’t just a homicide anymore, and it was no individual act. Maybe it involved a sex-and-violence creep—but maybe it was a cover-up? Or both?

Chapter 9