“We’re sure they’re gone?” Sampson asked.

“She said they’d left almost an hour before she called, and then she hung up,” Mahoney said. “That was an hour ago, so we’re two hours behind them.”

“She call from in the house?” I asked as the chopper landed.

“She wasn’t on with the 911 operator long enough for us to tell.”

We got out, ducked under the rotor blades, and stopped to put on booties and gloves. If we were the first on the scene, we didn’t want to contaminate it for the forensics investigators sure to follow.

“What’s the Russian owner’s name?” Sampson said.

“Antonin Guryev,” Mahoney said. “Made his money in shipping and, as far as we know, clean. We’ve got Critical Incident Response Group agents at Quantico looking at him, but so far the name hasn’t rung any bells.”

Walking up onto the terrace and seeing the bodies was a bizarre experience. Judging from the way they were clustered and from their various positions, the victims seemed to have been shot down unawares.

There was a bar at one end of the terrace stocked with top-tier booze; a beefy bartender sprawled behind it. Another man had fallen near the piano. The others died in two small clusters, as if they’d been chatting when the bullets found their marks.

The lights were blazing inside. We went through open French doors into an opulently decorated home that clashed with the antebellum exterior—lots of marble, chrome, gilt, and mirrors.

“Looks like a Moscow disco, for Christ’s sake,” Mahoney said.

There was a long table to our left loaded with food, and four more dead people around it. To our right there was a large entertaining area and a kitchen.

Nine died in there, though at least four appeared to have died fighting. There were pistols and spent casings on the floor near them.

“I think I know this guy,” Sampson said, crouching by a man in a suit with perfectly coiffed silver hair. He was in his fifties and looked vaguely familiar to me despite the wound to his throat.

“I think I do too, but I can’t place him,” I said.

Sampson carefully reached into the victim’s breast pocket, got out his wallet.

He opened it and whistled. “Here’s your first corrupt politician. That’s Congressman Rory McMann.”

“Shit,” Mahoney said. “Justice has spent years trying to get that guy.”

Rep. McMann of Virginia Beach, Virginia, had been investigated several times, but no prosecutor had ever made charges stick. He was a good ol’ boy who chased skirts and liked to drink. Those vices had almost gotten him censured by the House of Representatives, but he’d managed to wriggle free of that as well. Now here he was, the victim of vigilantes.

“It’s going to take us days to process this place and identify everyone,” I said, bewildered by the carnage.

“I can tell you who they are,” a woman said loudly in a thick Russian accent. We started and looked around.

But there was no one alive in the room but us.

Chapter

76

“I will tell you everything, but I…I want witness protection,” she said, and we realized she was talking to us through Bluetooth speakers mounted high in the corners of the room.

“Who are you?” Mahoney asked. “Where are you?”

“My name is Elena Guryev,” she said. “I am in the panic room.”

“How do we find you?” Sampson asked.

“I tell you when I have witness protection.”

I looked at Mahoney and said, “With this many victims, I can’t see that being a hard sell.”

Tags: James Patterson Alex Cross Mystery
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