Alex Cross, Run (Alex Cross 20)

“So, you’re not familiar with The Real Deal?” someone else asked.

“Believe me, I will be in about ten minutes,” I said. It got a few chuckles around the room, and then Joyce was there at the podium.

“Ladies and gentlemen, that’s all we have time for this morning. The investigative team has other business to attend to, but we will be updating you throughout the day, if there’s anything to tell.”

It’s a thin charade, but absolutely preferable to letting the press conference spiral out of control. We’d come in trying to play offense, and already we were back on our heels.

Things weren’t looking so good for the department right now. And maybe even worse for me.

CHAPTER

35

FIVE MINUTES AFTER THE PRESS CONFERENCE LET OUT, OUR CORE TEAM WAS up in Chief Perkins’s office on the fifth floor.

“What the hell just happened down there?” Perkins wanted to know.

“We got coldcocked by some random blogger,” D’Auria said. “A million nobodies tapping away out there, and you never know which one’s going to blow up until you’re picking shrapnel out of your ass.”

Perkins didn’t keep a computer in his office, so Huizenga opened her laptop on the big round conference table. After a quick Google, she had The Real Deal up in front of her, and we all gathered around.

“Oh God,” she said. “One of these.”

The blog had a simple masthead—THE REAL DEAL, in a plain black font. Beneath that was a subheading, “Who’s Policing the Police?”

In the margin, there was a numbered list of twenty-three MPD officers, each one clickable to some other page. I recognized several names right away. They were all cops who had been arrested in the last year, for anything from petty theft to domestic abuse, and even one murder. There was also a small map of the city’s police districts, with different colored dots, presumably corresponding to various types of crimes.

The most recent blog entry was dated that morning. Its title was “America’s Most Dangerous City?” Beneath that, “Murder Season in DC.” And then, “Detective Cross: Asleep at the Wheel?”

“Looks like this guy’s got a crush on you,” Huizenga said. My name was clickable, like the others, and she hovered her pointer over it. “You mind?”

“I can hardly wait,” I said.

What opened up then was a whole page dedicated to yours truly. It included my CV with the department, an old ID photo, a list of current and previous cases, and several other small images.

The first of those was a picture that had been taken from below, on Vernon Street, just as I’d gone to pull Elizabeth Reilly’s body out of the window where she’d been hanging. Her face was even fuzzed out, in some kind of twisted nod to journalistic propriety.

The other picture showed Kinkead’s restaurant from the outside. Beneath that was a screen capture of a tweet that had apparently been sent to go with it:

Three dead, and where’s DC’s favorite cop? Out to dinner. More like out to lunch! Priorities, anyone? #incompetentcops.

Finally, there was a long screed at the bottom, all about how I was the wrong one to be coordinating on these cases, and blowing it at every turn, apparently.

“Who the hell is this guy?” Valente asked.

The blog did have a contact page, but when Huizenga pulled it up, it gave us everything but a name. You could e-mail The Real Deal with questions, tips, or other thoughts about the job MPD was doing. There were invitations to follow The Real Deal on Twitter, or like it on Facebook, or “join the conversation” on something called NewsNet. For someone who had just gotten started, this so-called reporter was clearly going all in.

And I was starting to think I knew who he was. Or at least that we’d met.

“We need to get him out in the open,” I said to Perkins. “Let me run a subpoena on the blog’s ISP records, and see who’s attached to the account.”

I was remembering the bearded jag-off from the morning Cory Smithe’s body had been found. This was the guy with no press credentials who had refused to give me his name.

Perkins shoved back in his chair.

“Alex, I’ve got to ask you. Did you pull Elizabeth Reilly’s body before the ME reached that scene?”

“I did,” I told him. I wasn’t going to start tap dancing for the chief right now. It was all in the report, anyway.