James Patterson - Double Cross

“Bree! I’m here!”

“What’s going on? Talk to me. Where is here ? Are you okay?”

The coupe took exactly the turn I thought it would and paralleled the thruway toward I-95. We were only a block from the hotel now, our starting point. This whole trip had been another game, hadn’t it? Was that right ?

“Whoever it is, they’re going for the highway! The Miata’s headed to I-95! I still might take her.”

“Where, Alex? Which entrance?”

“Right by the damn hotel!”

I gripped the wheel, ready to take the ramp, but then the coupe flew right by it! A second later, so did I.

Now what?

Almost at the same time, the coupe’s brake lights showed. I heard the skid and saw the car do nearly a one eighty.

Even as I slammed my brakes, the Miata accelerated back in my direction. It swerved to miss me, and before I could even get turned around, the coupe was up the ramp, still accelerating. And gone in a cloud of dust.

“North on 95!” I yelled for Bree. “I’m still on her tail! For the moment.”

I sped up to the highway and maxed out the taxi at close to a hundred for a couple of exits. Eventually, I took my foot off the accelerator and slammed my fist into the passenger seat.

I turned around at the next exit.

Back at the hotel, Bree and Sampson were waiting out front, along with half a dozen Baltimore cruisers, their roof lights flashing in the darkness. Most of the Unhinged crowd was outside too, loving every second of this chaos and madness.

A three-hundred-pound biker with a white beard came charging up to me in the parking lot. “Hey, man, what the hell happened out there?”

“Get away,” I said without stopping. The biker cut me off again. He had on about a hundred-year-old Grateful Dead T.

“Just tell me -”

I was in his face now, and I wanted to pop someone. I might have if Sampson hadn’t grabbed me from behind. “Hey, hey, hey!” he was shouting- at me .

Then Bree came running up to us. “Jesus, are you okay?” she asked. “Alex?”

“I’m fine,” I said, trying to slow my breathing. “Listen, that might have been DCAK I was chasing. Another of his -”

“It wasn’t him,” Bree said, and shook her head. “And we’ve got to go right now.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked as she pushed me away from the crowd and all their eerie questions.

“I just got a call from Davies. Somebody was murdered at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Stabbed to death in front of a crowd of people. He punked us, Alex. He got us real good this time. This whole thing was planned.”

I HAD VISITED the National Air and Space Museum many times with my kids but had never seen anything like this. As we arrived, the building looked dark and foreboding from the outside, except for the glass-walled atrium of the cafeteria. Upon entering, though, we saw dozens of shell-shocked people sitting at tables, waiting to go home. Witnesses , I knew. To a person, they had seen a horrific event tonight. What made it worse: at least half of them appeared to be children, some just two or three years old.

A bulging army of news reporters and photographers had been cordoned off over on Seventh Street near the Hirshhorn. At least it made the vultures easier for us to avoid.

Sampson, Bree, and I had come in directly from Independence Avenue. Gil Cook, one of our D-2s, met us at the cafeteria entrance. He approached Bree on the run, waving one arm over his head.

“Detective Stone, the museum director would like to speak with you before -”

“After,” Bree said, and she kept walking. She was on the Job now, somebody not to be trifled with. I liked how she worked, how she took control of the homicide scene.

Gil Cook followed her like a chastened pup looking for table scraps. “He said I should tell you he’s on his way out to talk to the press.”

Bree stopped walking and pivoted toward the D-2.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Gil. Where is he?”

Cook pointed her in the right direction and then kept pace with Sampson and me. The three of us passed by the darkened Milestones of Flight exhibit, with its life-size planes like giant toys hanging from the ceiling. Very cinematic-right up our thrill killer’s alley. More and more, his work was reminding me of Kyle Craig’s. The theatrics, the viciousness. Had he studied Kyle’s crimes ?

“Victim’s name is Abby Courlevais. Thirty-two years old. White woman, tourist from France. Worst thing about it, she was five or six months pregnant,” Cook told Sampson and me.

The murder had taken place inside the Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater, which showed museum fare during the day but sometimes Hollywood blockbuster stuff at night. The actual killing had occurred right in the middle of my Baltimore speech. And then I’d gotten the note: Guess again, smart guy. I’m not psychotic!… See you back in DC, where it’s all happening… .

He was really going out of his way to mock us now-getting into it good. And the killer seemed to be topping each act with the next. Who was the woman in Baltimore? The Indy race-car driver who had taken me on a wild-goose chase, only to get away on I-95.

A pregnant victim, a visitor from another country-and a more “civilized” one-would capture media attention in a new way, and that wasn’t the half of it. The killer had just pulled off another very public execution inside a national institution. In a post-9⁄11 world, that meant a new level of intensity for everything-press coverage, public paranoia, pressure on the police to get this thing under control, to end it before anyone else died. No one would care that it was an almost impossible assignment. How many years had it taken them to get the Green River Killer-and had they ever gotten the Zodiac?

As to where DCAK might try to take things from here, I didn’t even want to speculate about it.

Right now, I had a body to see.

Two bodies, actually.

Mother and child.

“GODDAMN HIM TO HELL!” Sampson said in an angry voice that he managed to keep under his breath. “That son-ofabitch! That miserable fucker!”

As homicide scenes go, this one was particularly obscene and troubling. This was a place where families went to be entertained. The IMAX theater had soaring walls, textured only with directional lighting. The rows of high-backed seats were steeply raked in a concave arch across the auditorium, like a modern take on an old medical-lecture theater- right down to the cadaver, right ?

The victim had apparently been killed near the base of the five-story-high movie screen. That seemed odd to me, but it was the advance word we’d gotten from Gil Cook, and no one else was questioning it so far. I probably shouldn’t have either. Not yet.

The poor woman’s body lay faceup now. Her hands had been tied behind her back, and even from a distance, I could see silver duct tape wrapped across her mouth. Just like at the Riverwalk . I also spotted a wedding band on her hand.

As I got closer, I saw that the tape was stained dark over her lips where blood had been unable to escape. Probably after internal injuries. Mrs. Courlevais’s white dress was discolored and looked rusty brown all over. She’d obviously been stabbed… repeatedly.

Next to the mutilated body was an oversize canvas rucksack. There were metal grommets around the top. The sack was laced with a thick cord, presumably for tying it closed.

Another present from DCAK? Another clue for us to follow nowhere?