Cross the Line (Alex Cross 24)

In the last room we found the cash. On a pallet, there were banded fifty-dollar bills, similar to the ones we’d seen at Edita Kravic’s place, stacked three feet high and wrapped in cellophane. Next to that were two guys in their mid- to late thirties wearing suits and ties. Both had been shot between the eyes.

“Has to be at least a million dollars right there, and they leave it,” Sampson said. “I don’t get it.”

“I don’t either,” I said.

“Revenge?”

“Maybe. Not one of the victims seems to have put up any kind of resistance. It’s as if every single one of them was surprised and killed with a single shot.”

“Which means suppressors on all the weapons.”

“Definitely.”

Sampson said, “Everything about this is scary smart and precise. The shooting. Picking up the brass. Sweeping as they left. The lack of a reason.”

“Oh, there’s a reason, John,” I said. “You don’t kill twenty-two people if you don’t have a damned good reason.”

Chapter

21

An hour later, in the full heat of the day, Bree stepped up in front of a bank of microphones outside the factory fences.

“I know this has been frustrating, but we wanted to give you accurate facts and it took time to gather them,” she said in a clear, commanding voice. “We are dealing with multiple homicides in the unstable environment of an extremely large methamphetamine lab. Twenty-two are known dead.”

Gasps went up. Reporters started bellowing questions. Screams of horror and grief gathered force in the crowd beyond the media throng.

“Please,” Bree said, holding up her hands. “The bodies have been stripped of identification. Someone out there knows someone who worked in this factory—a wife, a mother, a friend, a husband, a father, a son or daughter.

“If you’re that someone, we ask that you come forward to identify the body and help us understand who might be responsible for committing these cold-blooded killings and why.”

The media went nuts and bombarded Bree with questions. She kept calm and told them essentially the same thing over and over again.

“Well done,” I said when she walked away from the microphones after promising to update them on the hour.

“Just have to know how to feed them,” Bree said. “Bit by bit.”

No one came forward initially, not even those people openly grieving. Then the bodies started leaving the factory in black bags, and the massacre was real, and their loss was heartbreaking.

Vicky Sue Granger was the first to talk. In her late twenties, she looked devastated, and she said she was sure her husband, Dale, was in there.

“He work in the lab?” Bree asked.

“Shamrock City,” she said weakly. “That’s what they called it. If you were lucky enough to get inside, and you worked hard, the money just came pouring—”

She stopped talking. I guess she figured the less she said about illegal cash, the better.

I said, “Who was in charge?”

Mrs. Granger shrugged, said, “Dale got in through T-Shawn, his cousin.”

Other relatives started coming forward once we’d moved the bodies to an air-conditioned space at the medical examiner’s office. Family after family was forced to walk down the line of corpses lying in open bags on the cement floor. One man was looking for his eighteen-year-old son. Two girls were there for their older sister. A grandmother broke down in Bree’s arms.

Dale Granger was there. He worked in packaging and had taken a bullet to the chest. His cousin Tim Shawn Warren, a part-time bouncer at a strip club, was one of the muscular guys who’d been strangled outside.

Few of the relatives wanted to talk. The ones that did come up to us claimed to know little of what their loved ones had been doing, only that they’d gotten jobs and suddenly had a lot of cash on hand.

Then Claire Newfield walked in. She saw her younger brother, Clyde, a guard with a broken neck, and became hysterical. When she finally got herself under control, she said Clyde had told her that he worked for scientists.