Cross My Heart (Alex Cross 21)

“Got it with you?”

“I do,” she said, crossing to her purse and pulling out a folded composite drawing of a woman I figured must be in her early thirties.

“She’s got soft features in some ways, but her eyes and lips are hard-looking,” I observed.

“I guess you’d have to have hard-looking eyes or lips to be brazen enough to steal a baby out of a day care center,” Bree replied before sighing. “Anyway, am I wrong to feel guilty about not going out to look for Ava tonight?”

“I told you, we’ve got something solid with her sweater and the guy who hit me. Let’s give it another night for him to come back.”

She made a puffing noise but then shrugged and nodded before gesturing at the plastic sheeting the contractors had put up to seal off the construction site. “Do we dare look?”

“Why not?” I said, grabbed a second beer.

Bree had already peeled back enough duct tape to slip through and turn on the lights. I followed her and got an immediate sense of why my grandmother was so upset.

The appliances and fixtures were long gone. The linoleum had been torn out. The Sheetrock was gone, too, leaving only the skeleton of the load-bearing walls. Red chalk marked the area where the back wall would be cut out to accommodate the addition.

“They’ll be kicking us out of our room before you know it,” I said.

“Not tonight,” Bree said. “I’ve got plans.”

I arched an eyebrow. “That right?”

She smiled. “I’ve been thinking about you all day, baby. So why don’t you get upstairs and take that shower already?”

I saluted her, did an about-face, and headed quickly back into the house.

Chapter

27

Nearing midnight, Marcus Sunday roamed the bars of Old Town Alexandria, across the Potomac from DC. After a quick trip to the apartment, where Acadia was already asleep, he’d retrieved Preston Elliot’s chilled condom and come here, where single young professionals gathered in search of anonymous hookups on Saturday night.

The writer had spotted several likely candidates, all of them in their late twenties, early thirties. But when he’d slipped past them and sniffed the trailing air, he’d failed to catch the specific aroma he was seeking.

Sunday was about to give up and return to the apartment for a few hours, when he spotted a prospect leaving Bilbo Baggins pub on Queen Street. Long, willowy, with pale skin and sandy hair that hung well down her back, she wore a tight black skirt and was laughing and hanging on to one of those long-jawed, sculpted-haircut types who seemed to populate the DC area.

The writer walked at them, head down, a man with places to be, as she said, “Let’s walk to my place, Richie. It’s not that far.”

Sunday went past without eye contact and caught her scent. It smelled of sweat, lilacs, and fertility. In an instant, he knew she was the one. Walking on twenty more yards, he jogged across the street and ambled in the other direction, watching the couple take a right off the main drag onto North Lee Street.

Tailing them six blocks to a brick-faced town house with steep stairs that climbed off a sidewalk shadowed by old oak trees, Sunday timed his approach almost perfectly.

As she fumbled for her keys, her hookup nuzzled her ear, causing her to giggle and say, “Give me a chance, Richie.”

Sunday bounded up the stairs, drawing a small Colt pistol, which he jammed against the back of the young man’s head.

“If either of you so much as thinks of turning to look at me, I’m going to blow poor little Richie’s head off,” he growled in a thick accent.

“Rich?” the woman cried softly.

“Claudia, please,” Richie said, shaking now. “Do what he says.”

“Go inside, now, Claudia,” the writer ordered.

Claudia pulled open the front door.

Keeping t