James PATTERSON - Cross Fire

“I guess nobody’s getting my memos about that. Listen, I can cover this if you need to take a pass.”

“Where are you?” I asked him.

“The bus terminal behind Union Station. Seriously, though, you sound like the bad half of a hangover, Alex. Why don’t you stay put, and forget I called?”

“No,” I said. Every part of me wanted to stay attached to that mattress, but you get only one first shot at a crime scene. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Bree grabbed at my arm as I sat up and swung my feet to the floor.

“God, Alex, this is, like, the definition of ‘early.’ What’s going on now?”

“Sorry to wake you,” I said, and leaned back far enough to kiss her good morning. “You know, I can’t wait to marry you, by the way.”

“Oh yeah? How’s that going to change any of this?”

“It won’t,” I said. “I just can’t wait.”

She smiled, and even in the semidark it was a beautiful thing to see. No woman I’ve ever known can look as good as she does in the morning. Or as sexy. I had to get up again fast before I started something I couldn’t finish.

“Do you want me to come with you?” she asked, a little groggy but up on one elbow now.

“Thanks, no. I’ve got this. But if you could get the kids to school–”

“Done. Anything else?”

“A couple of quick, unspeakable acts before I leave?”

“Rain check,” she said. “Sampson’s waiting. Now go – before we both do something we won’t regret.”

I was gone a few minutes later, and had to wave off the security detail in the backyard when they saw me launch out the door. It had been only a few hours since I’d come dragging past them, moving in the opposite direction.

“Hey, guys. Regina’s just getting up,” I said. “Coffee’ll be out for you soon.”

“And biscuits?” asked one of them.

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” I said, and laughed.

This was getting out of hand, though. I knew about crazy hours as well as the next guy, but leaving the house before Nana Mama even gets her kitchen up and running for the day? That is the definition of “early.”

ALL OF THE EARLY-MORNING buses were lined up on the street outside Union Station when I got there.

Sampson had already shut down the rear terminal, and there were traffic cops in orange vests everywhere, pointing people to where they needed to go. One more colossal headache, but at least it wasn’t mine.

I pulled around back and walked up from street level to the cavernous main deck of the parking garage. Sampson was waiting for me with a large coffee in each hand.

“I’m hating this one, sugar. Hating it real bad,” he said, handing over my morning fuel.

We walked toward the back, where I could see a row of big brown Dumpsters against the wall on the H Street side. Only one of them was sitting open.

“Nude this time,” Sampson said. “And the numbers are all down her back. You’ll see. Also, it looks like she was stabbed instead of beaten to death. All in all, a real nasty scene.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s do this. See what we’ve got.” I slipped on my gloves and stepped up to survey the damage.

She was facedown on top of the refuse inside – mostly bags of garbage from the terminal. The numbers were etched into her skin in two parallel rows on either side of the spine. It wasn’t an equation, though. This was something else.

N38°55′46.1598"

W94°40′3.5256"

“Are those GPS coordinates?” I said.

“Be curious to see where they point, if they are,” Sampson said. “This guy’s evolving, Alex.”

“Anyone move the body?”

“ME still hasn’t gotten here. I don’t know what the holdup is, but I don’t think we should wait anymore.”

“I agree. What a way to start the day. Give me a hand here.”

We both took a deep breath and climbed up into the Dumpster. It was hard to maneuver with the shifting bags underfoot, much less try to maintain the scene. As quickly as we could, we got a grasp of the victim and gently turned her over.

What I saw there knocked me right back on my ass. I leaned over the edge of the Dumpster and, for the first time in a long while, nearly lost the contents of my stomach.

Sampson was right there with me. “Alex, you okay? What’s going on?”

The taste of metal filled my mouth; I felt dizzy from the rush of adrenaline, from being blindsided so badly.

“She’s an agent, John. At the Bureau. Remember her? The DCAK case? It’s Anjali Patel.”

POOR ANJALI. And goddamnit! How did this happen? How the hell could it?

There’s something inescapable about knowing the victim of a homicide, especially a killing as brutal as this. Unwelcome questions kept pushing to the surface: Did she see it coming? Did she suffer much? Was it over quickly for her?

I tried to remind myself that any precision knife work would have been postmortem, but that thought was cold comfort right now. Besides, the best I could do for Patel was to focus on my job and on this crime scene as objectively as possible under the messed-up circumstances.

Right away, I got on the phone to the ME’s office. I wanted to make sure Porter Henning was assigned to this one, and also to find out what the hell was taking them so long. They should have been here by now. Hell, I was.

Sampson took down the numbers we’d found on Anjali’s back and got on his BlackBerry to see what he could find out about them in the short term.

By the time I’d spoken with Porter, who was caught in traffic on the Eisenhower Freeway, John was waving me back over to see something.

“I don’t know, Alex. This is pretty random.” He turned the screen around to show me the map he’d pulled up.

“It’s an address in Overland Park, Kansas. This thing’s just getting weirder and weirder. Maybe it’s some kind of math formula after all.”

“What about a reverse search on the address?” I asked.

“Working on it.” It was slow going, though, with his man paws and that tiny keyboard. This is why Sampson almost never texts anyone.

“Here we go, I got it. It’s a restaurant,” he said. “KC Masterpiece Barbecue and Grill?”

Sampson was shaking his head as if it couldn’t be right, but the name hit me like cold water. It must have shown on my face, too, because Sampson waved his hand in front of my eyes.

“Alex? Where’d you go?”

My own hands had tightened into fists. I wanted to hit something. Bad. “Of course,” I said. “This is exactly how the son of a bitch works.”

“How who works?” John said. “What are you–?”

But then he got it.

“Oh Jesus.”

It all made sense now, in the worst possible way. There was the Alex Rifle reference from the night before, and now this – KC Masterpiece.

Kyle Craig’s masterpiece.

He’d done this before, leaving tokens behind at crime scenes, always aimed at getting him credit where credit was due. Both of these murders were references to my own open cases – the sniper-style hit on Tambour, and the numbers so brutally etched into Anjali Patel’s skin.

Obviously Kyle had killed them both. Or had someone do it for him.

Then, with a horrible kind of aftershock, I remembered something else: Bronson “Pop-Pop” James, my young client. He’d been shot trying to rob a store – a place called Cross Country Liquors. Of course. Why hadn’t I come back to that fact until now?

It all added up – another ton of bricks dropped onto my shoulders. Kyle was circling me and closing in as he did it, wreaking as much havoc as possible in the process. This wasn’t just blind savagery either. It was much more specific than that and, unless I was mistaken, much more personal.