Cross the Line (Alex Cross 24)

“No, but I caught Azore licking her muzzle, so I don’t know what you’ll get from her.”

“Okay,” Mahoney said, folding back the fabric, revealing something silkscreened on the other side and a cardboard box.

He lifted the box up. We could see now that the fabric was a piece of a T-shirt featuring artwork for Reggae Sunsplash, a Jamaican music festival.

“I wondered where that went,” Condon said.

“Stolen?”

“Or I left it at the gym. Either way, my DNA will be all over it.”

Mahoney opened the cardboard box. There was a large envelope inside and a .45-caliber Remington model 1911.

“That yours?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Nice gun, though I prefer a Glock in a forty caliber.”

“Me too, actually,” Mahoney said, opening the envelope.

He pulled out several pages of architectural drawings and diagrams.

“Yours?” Sampson asked.

Condon looked them over and shook his head. “No. What are they?”

Mahoney shrugged and gave them to me. I studied them and almost handed them off to Sampson before it dawned on me what they were.

“These are drawings of the attack locations,” I said. “This one’s the factory where they killed the meth makers. And this one shows an aerial view of the tobacco-drying sheds and the road coming down the middle.”

Condon said, “Before you say anything, there is no way those are mine. This was supposed to be a diversion. Kill me and plant evidence. Keep you guys off the trail of the real vigilante crew.”

The more I thought about it, the more I thought Condon was right—unless, of course, he’d shot his dummy-on-a-rope and put the evidence in his saddlebag to keep us from suspecting he was part of the vigilante group.

For the time being, however, I was going to trust him.

“So whoever they are, they think you’re dead,” Sampson said.

“A fair assumption,” Condon said.

“Let’s let them think it,” I said.

Mahoney looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “What for?”

“Make them believe that they’ve succeeded and the investigation has shifted to looking at Condon’s circle of mercenary friends.”

“And we start quietly looking for a victim of a dog bite,” Sampson said.

“Among other things,” I said, trying to wrap my head around this entire incident. Why implicate Condon? Why not someone else? Why attempt to kill him?

The only solid answer I came up with was that they knew of Condon’s past and had decided he would be the perfect fall guy.

“I thought of that while I was waiting for you to get here,” Condon replied. “But maybe it was more than that. Maybe they were trying to kill me because I do know something about your vigilantes. Two of them, anyway.”

Chapter

67

That morning, as Alex, Sampson, and Mahoney were talking to Condon, Bree was struggling to make connections between the late chief of detectives Tom McGrath, Edita Kravic, and a competition pistol shooter.