Alex Cross, Run (Alex Cross 20)

Huizenga started up that way a beat before I did.

“Whoever you are, this is the police. Stop right there! Don’t make me chase you!”

I’ve got legs almost twice as long as hers, and by the time I was up the bank and past the tree line, I’d already left her behind. My Glock was out in one hand, my Maglite in the other. Maybe this was just some homeless person we were chasing, or a curious kid, but if not—I wanted this guy, bad.

About twenty yards in, I stopped and listened. Whoever it was, they’d been heading toward the Sixteenth Street side of the park, but now he—she? he?—had turned and was running parallel to the creek instead.

Meanwhile, I could hear Huizenga on the radio, somewhere behind me.

“—any available units to Sixteenth Street, north of Sherrill Drive. We’ve got an unsub, on foot, possibly headed out of Rock Creek Park—”

I took off at a sprint again, catching a few low branches in the face as I went. The adrenaline was driving me as much as anything right now.

Again, the footfalls ahead of me changed direction—but this time I caught him with the beam of my light. It was a man, anyway, in dark clothes. That’s all I saw. He’d just disappeared up and over a small rise, straight ahead.

I was right behind him, and a few seconds later I spilled out onto the pavement of Sherrill Drive. The road curved here, in a hairpin turn on its way out of the park. There was no sign of the guy, though. Had he kept going, back into the woods? Turned and run up the road?

If I’d had another half second, I would have realized why

I didn’t hear him running anymore. But the next thing I felt was something hard, slamming into the back of my head. My knees buckled, and what little vision I had in the dark blurred out completely. Pain shot down my neck and back as I hit the pavement.

I tried to jump right up, but it was no good. Everything spun. The ground turned sideways, and I was down again.

“Alex?”

I heard Huizenga now, moving through the woods behind me.

“Sixteenth Street!” I shouted back. “Keep going!”

I wasn’t even sure about that, but a guess was better than nothing at this point. All I could do was kneel there waiting for some sense of equilibrium to come back while the seconds ticked away—when seconds mattered.

By the time I finally caught up to Huizenga, our guy was gone, gone, gone.

CHAPTER

32

I MISSED A GOOD HALF HOUR WITH THE PARAMEDICS BEFORE HUIZENGA would let me get back to work. There was no concussion, just a gash and a bad headache. Even then she wanted me to go home, but she didn’t insist.

By the time I was back in the loop, Chief Perkins was on-site, along with Jessica Jacobs as well. Jacobs was the primary investigator on the Cory Smithe murder. By all indications, we either had one very busy psychopath on our hands, or more likely, two cases that had more to do with each other than we’d previously imagined.

Neither of the latest victims had been identified yet, but it had already been decided that MPD was going to hold a major press conference later that morning, to report out on the situation.

“Are we sure that’s a good idea?” I said. “I know I’m coming late to the conversation, but—”

“You also weren’t on the receiving end of the mayor’s calls,” Huizenga told me. “It’s done, Alex. This is our reality now. Let’s move on. Tell us what you’re thinking here.”

For better or worse, I’m the go-to profiler in the Homicide Division, not that there’s any official title to that effect. Either way, I’d already started working up a few new ideas.

“Assuming we’re talking about two killers,” I said, “I’d say they’re both white, like their victims, just going by statistics. Also bright, and well organized—but angry, too. Not necessarily about the same thing.”

It wasn’t such a stretch that murder and anger would go hand in hand, but that was the quality that struck me the most about all four of these homicides. None of them were simple or straightforward, in terms of methods. The knife work in particular had gone above and beyond the necessary, in terms of strictly taking lives.

That meant there was some emotion to it. Maybe some level of fantasy playing out here as well. And almost certainly some kind of high-functioning psychosis, which is the slipperiest aspect of all when it comes to pinning down any perpetrator.

Much less two of them.

I gave the others my spiel, and then shut up and listened again while D’Auria divvied the work to be done in the coming hours. If nothing else, we had a pretty good investigative machine up and running.