Detective Cross (Alex Cross 24.50)

Fifteen minutes later, Mickey boarded the DC Circulator bus at Union Station with a slew o

f tourists. He stood in the aisle near the rear exit, holding the strap as the bus rolled down Louisiana Avenue.

He got off at the third stop, 7th Street, walked around the block, noted the increased police presence on the Mall, and returned to wait for the next bus to arrive. He boarded it, found a spot as close as he could to the rear exit and rode it until the eighth stop, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial.

He got off. It was 11 a.m.

Seventeen minutes later, Mickey re-boarded the Circulator at the ninth stop, Lincoln Memorial. Taking his usual position by the rear exit, Mickey felt lighter, freed, as if he’d left things in his past, on the verge of a brighter future.

He waited to get off until the fourteenth stop, National Air and Space Museum. While tourists poured out the door after him, he dug in his pants pocket and came up with a burner phone. He walked away from the knot of people trying to get into the museum and thumbed speed dial.

“Yes?” the woman said.

“Chief Stone?” Mickey said, trying to make his voice soft and low. “It’s your worst nightmare again.”

Chapter 12

Bree slapped the bubble on the roof, hit the sirens, and said, “Hold on, Alex.”

I braced my feet on the passenger side. She glanced in her side view and stomped on the gas.

We squealed out of 5th Street, ran the red light at Pennsylvania, and headed toward the Mall with Chief Stone calling the shots over a handheld radio.

“He says it’s at the Korean War Memorial, but clear the MLK and Lincoln Memorials, too,” she said. “Close Ohio Drive and Independence Avenue Southwest. I want to know the second those five are clear. Am I clear?”

“Yes, Chief,” the dispatcher said.

“Call IT,” she said. “Find out if they got a trace on the call that just—”

Her cell phone started ringing. She glanced down, said, “Forget it, they’re calling me.”

Cradling the radio mike, she snatched up her cell, said, “Chief Stone. Did you get it?”

Bree listened and said, “How much damn time do they need?”

A pause, then, “You’d think in this day and age, it would be a hell of a lot less, but okay. If there’s a next time I’ll try to keep him talking.”

Hanging up and letting her phone plop in her lap, she let out a sigh of exasperation. “A minute ten at a minimum to hone in on an on-going cell signal. He spoke to me for twenty-one seconds.”

“They have no idea where he is?”

“Somewhere in DC but they can’t pinpoint the call. And even if they could, he has to be using a burner.”

“You’d think,” I said.

Six minutes later, Bree threw the car in park near the Ash Woods on Independence Avenue.

“You should stay here until you’ve got Mahoney at your side.”

“Agreed,” I said. “Be safe.”

She kissed me and said, “I’ll let the pros take care of the dangerous stuff.”

I watched her get out and walk toward the traffic barrier closing off the west end of the National Mall. She couldn’t be seen bringing me into a Metro investigation while I was on suspension.

Mahoney, however, could bring me in as a consultant. I left the car a few minutes later when he arrived with the FBI’s bomb squad and a dog team of three.

The wind was out of the southeast, so Mahoney sent the dogs between the Lincoln Memorial and Korean War Veterans Memorial, a dramatic, triangular space with nineteen steel statues of larger than life soldiers on patrol, some emerging from a loose grove of trees and others in the open, walking across strips of granite and low-growing juniper.