Alex Cross, Run (Alex Cross 20)

Poor Ava. That girl couldn’t catch a break, could she? Unless you counted getting in with the Cross family to begin with. They were “good people,” on paper. Guidice was even starting to like them a little more than he would have preferred. The grandmother and the kids, anyway. It happened all the time. He couldn’t help getting involved with his subjects.

Would they be devastated when Alex was dead and gone? Of course they would. That was the part that couldn’t be helped. The world was full of innocent victims.

He’d been one himself, once. Thanks to Alex.

But none of that mattered—not as long as he kept an eye on the bigger picture. Always the bigger picture.

That’s where Alex Cross was a dead man walking.

CHAPTER

10

I SKIPPED LUNCH WITH THE FAMILY AND GOT MYSELF STRAIGHT OVER TO THE new Consolidated Forensic Lab at Fourth and School Streets. It’s an amazing building—two hundred and eighty thousand square feet of facilities under one enormous roof. MPD finally had firearms, toxicology, DNA, fingerprint analysis, and the medical examiner’s office all in one place.

As soon as I got there, I threw on a surgical gown and mask and pushed in through the swinging door of the examination suite where Joan Bradbury was already halfway through Elizabeth Reilly’s autopsy.

“What have we got so far, Joan?” I asked.

“A lot,” she said. “Come on in.”

The body was open on the table, with a long Y cut down the middle of the torso, which had been flayed open by now. I’ve sat through more autopsies than I can remember, and my stomach’s way past any kind of trouble with this stuff. At the same time, I never let myself forget the reason I’m there. I owed Elizabeth that much, at least.

“I did a tox screen on her blood last night, just to get a jump on things,” she told me. “We got a positive read for antidepressants, and, get this—Pitocin.”

“Pitocin? You test for that?”

“Not usually, but under the circumstances, I thought I might check. Glad I did, too. Pitocin doesn’t stay in the system too long, only around forty-eight hours. Which means Elizabeth Reilly induced her labor less than two days before she died.”

My mind started spinning around this new piece of information. So far there were no hospital records for Elizabeth Reilly in the area, and no record of any live births under that name, much less an induced labor.

Was it possible she’d done this on her own for some reason? She’d been a nursing student. She could have easily known how to get her hands on some Pitocin, and maybe even known how to administer it.

But why?

And meanwhile, was there a three-day-old baby out there somewhere? I needed to find out, ASAP.

“By the way,” Joan went on. “We didn’t find any rope fibers on her fingers or palms at all. Someone else put that noose around her neck. And if all that weren’t enough, the break in the second and third vertebrae was definitely postmortem. I’ve got a few hours to go here, but I can tell you right now, my report’s going to rule out suicide.”

Ultimately, cause of death is the ME’s to call. I hardly ever disagreed with Joan’s conclusions, and I didn’t have any reason to do it today, either. This was now officially a homicide investigation.

Maybe also a missing persons case.

I had my work cut out, that was for sure.

CHAPTER

11

THE FIRST THING I DID WHEN I LEFT THE MORGUE WAS FIND SAMPSON. HE WAS catching up on his reports at the Second District station house, and I pulled him outside for a talk.

I’ve known John all my life, and I trust him as much as anyone at MPD. He’s also been around long enough that he knows people all over the city. More specifically, he knew which people at which agencies were going to be willing to talk to him about a missing baby without eighteen and a half signatures on two dozen forms first. I understand why we’ve got a lot of the paperwork we do, but there’s a time and a place. This wasn’t it. If speed was my number one priority right now, discretion was a close second.

We stood out by my car in the station house parking lot, downing some sandwiches and going over the details.

“All indications are that this was a vaginal birth. No signs of epis

iotomy, or any hospital intervention at all,” I told him. “Given the Pitocin in Elizabeth’s system, and the fact that nobody we’ve talked to said anything about any pregnancy, it seems pretty clear she was trying to keep this a secret.”