James Patterson - Cross

Is he putting on a show for us? Is he doing it on purpose? Or did it just happen this way?

I heard a car alarm whining and glanced back toward the street. What a strange, curious sight: police, news reporters, a growing crowd of looky-loos.

Fear was plainly stamped on many of the faces, and I couldn't help thinking that this was a familiar tableau of the age, this look of fear, this terrible state of fear that the whole country seemed to be caught up in – maybe the entire world was afraid right now.

Unfortunately, it was even worse inside the brownstone. The crime scene was already being tightly controlled by somber-faced homicide detectives and techies, but Sampson was let inside. He overrode a sergeant's objections and brought me along.

Into the kitchen we went.

The unthinkable murder scene.

The killer's workshop.

I saw poor Mena Sunderland where she lay on the reddish-brown tile floor. Her eyes were rolled back to the whites, and they seemed pinned to a point on the ceiling. But Mena's eyes weren't the first thing I noticed. Oh, what a bastard this killer was.

A carving knife was stuck in her throat, poised like a deadly stake. There were multiple wounds on the face, deep, unnecessarily vicious cuts. Her top, a white tee, had been torn away. Her jeans and panties had been pulled down around the ankles but hadn't been stripped off. One of her shoes was on, one off, a pale-blue clog lying on its side in blood.

Sampson looked at me. "Alex, what are you getting? Tell me."

"Not much. Not so far. I don't think he bothered to rape her," I said.

"Why? He pulled down her pants."

I knelt over Mena's body. "Nature of the wounds. All this blood. The disfigurement. He was too angry at her. He told her not to talk to us, and she disobeyed him. That's what this is about. I think so. We might have gotten her killed, John."

Sampson reacted angrily. "Alex, we told her not to come back here yet. We offered her surveillance, protection. What more could we do?"

I shook my head. "Left her alone maybe. Caught the killer before he got to her. Something else, John – anything but this."

SO NOW WE WERE INVESTIGATING the case for Mena Sunderland, too, in her memory – at least that was what I told myself, that was my rationalization. This was for Maria Cross, and Mena Sunderland, and all the others.

For the next three days I worked closely with Sampson during the day and then went out on the street with him at night. Our night shift usually took place from ten until around two. We were part of the task force patrolling Georgetown and Foggy Bottom, areas where the rapist-killer had struck before. Emotions were running high, but no one wanted him more than I did.

Still, I was trying my best to keep the very tense investigation in some kind of perspective and control. Almost every night, I managed to have dinner with Nana and the kids. I checked in with Kayla Coles in North Carolina, and she sounded better. I also conducted half a dozen sessions with my patients, including Kim Stafford, who was coming to see me twice a week and maybe even making some progress. Her fiance had never mentioned our "talk" to her.

My morning ritual included grabbing a coffee at the Starbucks, which was right in my building, or at the Au Bon Pain on the corner of Indiana and Sixth. The problem with Au Bon Pain was that I liked their pastries too much, so I had to stay clear of the place as much as I could.

Kim was my favorite patient. Therapists usually have favorites, no matter how much they rationalize that they don't. "Remember, I told you that Jason wasn't such a bad guy?" she said about fifteen minutes into our session one morning. I remembered, and I also recalled cleaning his clock pretty good at the station house where he worked.

"Well, he was pure, unadulterated garbage, Dr. Cross. I've figured that much out. Took me a lot longer than it should have."

I nodded and waited for more to come. I knew exactly what I wanted to hear from her next.

"I moved out on him. I waited until he went to work, then I left. The truth? I'm scared to death. But I did what I had to do."

She got up and went to the window, which looked out onto Judiciary Square. You could also see the US District Courthouse from my place.

"How long have you been married?" she asked, glancing at the ring I still wore on my left hand.

"I was married. I'm not anymore." I told her a little about Maria, about what had happened more than ten years before – the abridged version, the unsentimental one.

"I'm sorry," she said when I was through. There were tears in her eyes, the last thing I'd wanted. That morning, we got through a couple of rough patches, made some progress. Then a strange thing happened – she shook my hand before she left. "You're a good person," she said. "Good-bye, Dr. Cross."

And I thought that I might have just lost a patient – my first – because I'd done a good job.

WHAT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT blew my mind. Actually, everything had been really good about the night, until it went bad. I had treated Nana and the kids to a special dinner at Kinkead's, near the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, our favorite restaurant in Washington. The great jazzman Hilton Fenton came over to our table and told us a funny story about the actor Morgan Freeman. Back at home, I climbed the steep wooden stairs to my office in the attic, cursing the steps under my breath, one by one.

I put on some Sam Cooke, starting with a popular favorite, "You Send Me." Then I pored over old DC police files from the time of Maria's murder – hundreds of pages.

I was looking for unsolved rape cases from back then, particularly ones that had occurred in Southeast or nearby. I worked intently and listened to the music, and was surprised when I looked at my watch and saw that it was ten past three. Some interesting things had surfaced in the files from the serial case I'd remembered was going on around the same time Maria died.

In fact, the rapes had started a few weeks before Maria was shot and ended just after the murder. They never started up again. Which meant what – that the rapist might have been a visitor to Washington?

Even more interesting to me, there were no IDs of the rapist from any of the victimized women. They had received medical attention but refused to talk to the police about what had happened to them. It didn't substantiate anything, but it kept me flipping through more pages.

I went over several more transcripts and still found no IDs from the victims.

Could it be a coincidence? I doubted it. I kept reading.

Then I was stopped cold by a page in the police notes. A name and more information jumped out at me.

Maria Cross.

Social worker at Potomac Gardens.

A Detective Alvin Hightower, whom I had vaguely known back then – I was pretty sure he was dead now – had written a workup on the rape of a college girl from George Washington University. The attack took place inside a bar on M Street.

As I continued to read, I was having a hard time breathing. I was remembering a conversation that I'd had with Maria a couple of days before she died. It was about a case she was working on, about a girl who'd been raped.

According to the detective's report, the coed had given some kind of description of the rapist to a social worker – Maria Cross. He was a white male, a little over six foot, possibly from New York. When he had finished with the girl he had taken a little bow.

My fingers shaking, I turned the page and checked the date of the initial report. And there it was – the day before Maria was murdered.

And the rapist?

The Butcher. The mob killer we'd been tracking. I remembered his rooftop bow, his unexplainable visit to my house.