Cross the Line (Alex Cross 24)

We’d retrieved McGrath’s laptop and taken it and Boynton downtown. The laptop went to Detectives Lincoln and O’Donnell, along with marching orders to look for anything related to Edita or the Phoenix Club. Sampson stayed behind to take Boynton’s full statement.

We stood in the foyer and buzzed Howard’s apartment three times but got no answer. We buzzed the other five apartments, but it was a weekday and everyone was out. No response.

“Call him,” I said.

Bree looked up Howard’s number and punched it into her cell phone. No answer. Straight to voice mail.

We were turning to leave when Muller noticed a beater Dodge four-door parked across the street. “That’s Howard’s. He’s here, just not answering.”

“He could have walked somewhere,” Bree said. “Taken the Metro.”

“Not the way he was coughing and wheezing the last time I saw him,” I said.

“Where’s his apartment?”

“The third floor, back.”

We walked around into the alley and located Howard’s apartment and the fire escape. I picked Bree up; she grabbed the ladder and pulled it down. We climbed up the three flights and stopped outside the kitchen window.

The sink overflowed with dishes. Liquor and beer bottles crowded the small table and just about every other surface. A second window was raised slightly and looked into a small dining area and part of the living room where Sampson and I had spoken with Howard. We could see the television was on, tuned to ESPN.

“Call his number again,” I said.

Bree did, and almost immediately I heard the jangle of an old-fashioned rotary phone coming from the apartment. The ringing stopped.

“Voice mail,” Bree said.

“That’s probable cause to do a well-being check, don’t you think, Chief?”

She hesitated, and then said, “No fruit of the poisonous tree.”

Nodding, I pushed up the sash and climbed in, calling, “Terry Howard? It’s Alex Cross. We’re just checking on your well-being.”

No voice replied, but almost immediately I heard a bird squawking.

“That’s Sylvia Plath,” I said, helping Bree and Muller inside. “His neurotic parakeet.”

“Howard always had a twisted sense of humor,” Muller said.

We moved deeper into the apartment, past a dining table buried in stacks of old newspapers to the parakeet that was pacing back and forth on its perch, screeching, bobbing its head, and pecking viciously at its featherless skin, clearly agitated.

We stepped into the living area and saw why.

Terry Howard sat in his easy chair facing the television; a film of blood and gore spattered the ceiling and walls around him. He had apparently put a gun in his mouth and shot himself. A sizable chunk of his skull was gone. A bloody, red Redskins cap was on the floor beside him.

An empty bottle of Smirnoff and a Remington 1911 .45-caliber pistol, the same kind of gun that had killed Tom McGrath, lay in his old partner’s lap.

On the floor beside him, there was a note scrawled in ink.

Rot in hell, Tommy McG, it read. You and your lying bitch of a girlfriend.

Chapter

28

“Case closed?” Sampson asked as we drove past the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in Northern Virginia.

“Bree thinks so,” I said. “So does Michaels. Tough one to swallow, but there it is.”