Cross My Heart (Alex Cross 21)

Marylyn Green’s hand went to her mouth. “My God, we had no—”

“Why would you?” Adams snapped. “In any case, I am here because we are concerned that Joss has been exposed to a multitude of toxins. Because of an ongoing federal investigation, we are not free to step in and take Joss, but I have a writ that allows me to take her to have her blood, skin, and clothing tested so we have a clear idea of her level of exposure. I am assuming you can keep this confidential? As I said, there is an ongoing FBI investigation of her parents. And I won’t be long. We’ll go to Bethesda.”

“Yes, of course, my God, whatever is best for Joss.”

“Should I get her things?” Eliza asked.

“That would be much appreciated,” Adams said, bouncing Joss in her arms. “The sooner I can get her to the lab, the sooner I can have her back.”

“Oh, you’ve got time,” the day care owner said. “Mr. Branson is rarely here before five to get her.”

For the first time, Adams smiled. “That makes things a little easier.”

Chapter

14

Around four that afternoon, Cynthia Wu slowly peeled back the Mad Man’s scalp, revealing a nasty splintered hole where the .40-caliber hollow-point bullet had entered the back of his head, and finally the shattered cheekbone where the bullet had exited.

“How far was the shot?” John Sampson asked.

“Ten? Fifteen feet?” the medical examiner replied.

“Like you said, John, looks like a pro,” I commented.

“Either that or obsessed,” Sampson replied, gesturing across the room, where another medical examiner was working on Kim Ho, one of the dead Korean women from the massage parlor. “Everyone in the spa except our boy here was shot at close range. I’m thinking the shooter likes to see their faces, their reactions just before he pulls the trigger, but he got intimidated when he saw Francones’s size.”

It was possible, I supposed, another variation in the catalog of strange fetishes we’d seen over the years in association with mass and serial murderers.

“Sometimes close-range shots like this are meant to disfigure as well as kill,” I said. “But that’s usually the case in murders provoked by the infidelity of one partner or another.”

“Far as I can tell, the Mad Man was all about infidelity,” Sampson replied. “But you believe the gossip, he somehow managed to get along with all of them, you know, like Charlie Sheen in Two and a Half Men.”

“Charlie disgusted most of the women he slept with eventually. Didn’t you see the one where he dies and they have the funeral?”

“No, I must have missed that one,” Sampson said.

“Any clue where Mad Man’s girlfriends were at the time of death?”

“I don’t have a complete inventory of his harem, but according to People Magazine, he’s been seen in public quite a bit with Mandy Bell Lee, the country-western singer. They met after a Titans game in Nashville last year.”

“Where’s she?”

“I can find out.”

“Mad Man must have had an agent, lawyer, some kind of business manager. Those people might know about enemies or financial grudges. Maybe about coke use, too. Anything else?”

“Quintus and the DA have filed for a warrant in Virginia so we can search his place out in McLean. Until it comes through, the sheriff over there has the estate blocked off.”

I was about to ask when the warrant was likely to come through when my phone beeped, alerting me to an e-mail. I stepped aside and opened it, seeing documents attached courtesy of Captain Quintus.

I scanned them. A Delaware real estate trust had bought the building that housed the Superior Spa the year before. The massage parlor was a DBA of Relax LLC, a Falls Church, Virginia, company with a post office box address and a Trenton Wiggs named as president.

One more piece of the puzzle, I thought, and considered what I’d been able to dig up after moving the last of the kitchen into boxes and the basement and wa

tching the horror in my grandmother’s face when Billy DuPris entered the house with crowbars and rolls of plastic sheeting.

Donald Blunt, the dead night manager of the massage parlor, had been working on his doctorate in molecular biology at the University of Maryland. I’d tracked down his two roommates at their apartment in College Park.