Джеймс Паттерсон - The People vs. Alex Cross

“Stop,” Sampson whispered.

We did. Nothing.

“He’s going for his apartment, for the computer and that video clip,” Sampson said softly, and he started to climb again.

We reached the fourth floor and opened the stairwell door. Several quick looks revealed no one in the hallway. I grabbed the sleeve of Sampson’s coat and said loudly, “His place.”

Then I let the door shut and held my finger to my lips. Sampson nodded. We stood there in the stairwell, listening. Ten seconds went by. Then twenty. I was about to concede that Parks had indeed gone to his apartment when I heard a squeak above me, and then another.

“Neal Parks?” Sampson yelled. “This is DC Metro. We’ve got you surrounded.”

We could hear him pounding up the stairs again, and we chased him and saw him climb up a ladder bolted into the wall. It gave access to a hatch, which was open. John went first, climbing up and onto the gravel roof. The bluish light cast by the Parrot’s neon sign made the shadows strange.

Sampson gestured to me to take the left flank while he went right. We flipped on Maglites and cast the beams about. There were air-conditioner compressors on the roof, eight of them. Parks was either hiding behind one of them or going for a fire escape.

We crept forward, staying parallel to each other, about eighty feet apart, using the flashlights to pierce the shadows and the darkness. We’d gone by the fifth and sixth compressors when Sampson flushed him out.

Parks exploded from behind one of the two remaining compressors and ran at a diagonal across the roof. I flipped off my light and tried to cut him off.

He was running out of roof and I was running out of time when I realized he meant to jump to the roof of the next building.

The pimp was three steps from doing just that when I managed to snag him by the collar of his jacket and shirt. I meant to haul him back and down. Instead, his momentum yanked me forward two steps.

My lower legs hit the raised roof edge hard, so hard I started to topple over, along with Parks, into the seventy feet of air that separated us from the pavement in the alleyway below.

My head whipped forward and smashed into Parks’s head as my body jerked backward. Sampson had somehow gotten two handfuls of my shirt, and he pulled both me and Parks to safety.

My heart was racing, my stomach had turned sour, and I gasped for air. I’d almost fallen six stories to certain death. The pimp was equally shaken and offered no resistance when Sampson cuffed and searched him.

Parks was unarmed and without his cell phone, which was suspicious, given that Sally Sweet told Sampson that Parks operated his entire cyber-prostitution ring with it.

“Where’s your phone?” I asked, shining my flashlight in his face.

“Lost it the other day,” Parks said, blinking and lowering his head. “I was going to get a new one tomorrow.”

“Uh-huh,” Sampson said. “Why’d you run?”

“I like to run,” Parks said.

“You mean you like to run prostitutes,” I said.

“No, like, for fitness,” he said, calm and collected now.

“No, like, for hookers,” Sampson said. “You’ve got a whole stable of them.”

“Not true,” Parks said, and he laughed. “Now, who says that?”

“Vice.”

He looked up then, squinting, and said, “You’re not vice?”

“We’re homicide,” Sampson said. “You know Emily McCabe?”

Parks acted puzzled. “No, I don’t know an Emily McCabe.”

“Don’t be cute,” I said. “We can prove you know her.”

The pimp said nothing.

“We’re investigating her murder,” Sampson said.

“Her murder?” he said, seeming genuinely surprised. “She’s dead?”

“She’s dead, and you killed her,” I said. “Strangled her on-camera.”

Parks seemed thrown. His mouth hung slightly open, and he stared down at the ground, his mind whirling with questions, no doubt. How had we gotten hold of the video? How should he respond?

Sampson said, “We know you made a snuff film, Neal. We’re gonna see you fry for it.”

“No way,” he said. “I didn’t kill no one.”

“You put a rope around Emily’s neck while you were having S-and-M sex with her,” I said. “And then you strangled her to death.”

“No,” he said. “I—”

“Killed her,” Sampson said.

“No,” Parks said, struggling, and then he apparently resigned himself to the situation. “Look, okay, I know Emily, but I did not kill her, because she is not dead. That video was just a fantasy. She made it for me as a kind of going-away present.”

“Give us a break,” I said.

“It’s true,” Parks said. He went on to claim that Emily McCabe had told him she’d saved enough money to quit the business and was going to school in Florida somewhere.

“Florida somewhere?” Sampson said. “That’s the best you can do?”

Parks lost his cool then and snapped, “It’s the only thing I have. Look, I liked Emily. A lot. I would never kill her.”

“So tell us how to reach her,” I said.

“I don’t know how to reach her,” he said. “She didn’t want me to know. She wanted a clean break and an entirely new life. I respected that.”

“No phone number?” I asked.

“Lost my phone, remember?”

“I’m not buying it,” Sampson said, marching him back toward the roof hatch. “We’re taking you in, and we’ll be searching your apartment. That snuff film you made is going to send you to prison for the rest of your life.”

“No, wait,” Parks said. “I’m not lying. Emily’s alive. Somewhere.”

“Hell of a defense,” I said.

He said nothing this time. After I’d climbed down through the hatch, Sampson removed Parks’s handcuffs and ordered him at gunpoint onto the ladder. The pimp dropped down and offered no resistance when Sampson put the cuffs back on.

When we led him down the staircase, Parks said, “How about I help you and you help me here?”

Sampson grunted. “How can you help us, Neal?”

Parks licked his lips and said, “I want you to know that I could be killed for saying this, but I can tell you about real snuff films and the crazy, sick bastards that make them.”

“Uh-huh, and what good does that do us?” I asked.

Parks hesitated again but then said, “Maybe you’ll figure out what happened to those blondes that have been disappearing.”

“Like Emily McCabe?” Sampson said.

“No,” Parks said. “Like two blond lesbian bitches from Pennsylvania.”

Two girls crying .

Those were the last clear sounds Gretchen Lindel had heard, and that had been hours ago.

Two girls crying, Gretchen thought, and she strained to hear more.

But through the plywood walls, the seventeen-year-old heard nothing. No voices. No floorboards creaking. Not even a jangle of chain. Or a desperate sob.

The silence made Gretchen mad beyond reason. She kicked and shook the chain that ran from her left ankle to the wall, and she glared at the little camera mounted high in the far corner, where she couldn’t reach.

“Who are you?” she screamed. “Why am I here? What do you want?”

Gretchen collapsed into sobs as she had too many times since she’d woken up in a plywood box about the size of a prison cell dressed in a cheap white flannel nightgown, lying on a new mattress still in its wrapper, and covered with thick wool army blankets.

There’d been food. A big tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken and bottles of Gatorade. A metal bucket to relieve herself in the corner where her chain would reach. And the single LED light overhead that never went off.