James Patterson - Double Cross

“Forrest, what have you got?” asked Abate in a curt, take-charge voice. “Tell us everything you can about Bell.”

“Far as we can tell, he was pretty much cut off from the world. His Verizon account was prepaid through December, including minutes he hasn’t used, for whatever reason. And there’s one credit card, a Visa, totally dormant.”

“Well, he did have a million or so at his disposal,” Sampson said.

“He took only a few things from his place,” Mills contributed. “His phone, wallet, some clothes. Not that there was so much to leave behind. He lived rather simply. Off the grid and all.”

“He doesn’t sound like a cell-phone person to me,” I said.

“Except when the alternative is having wires strung out to your property,” Mills said. “I doubt he ever used the cell much, though.”

“Well, someone used it.” Patel looked down at the phone report in front of her. “Yesterday, two ten p.m.”

“Someone?” Christopher Forrest asked. “Do you have reason to believe it wasn’t him?”

“Not at all. We just don’t have any hard evidence that it was him,” said Bree.

“Mighty big coincidence if it wasn’t,” Mills said. “Don’t you think?”

“Agreed.” Patel sounded a little testy; they weren’t keeping up with her. She’d also been working for more hours than she could count.

“What else about Bell?” Bree asked. “How soon can we get a picture of him?”

“Here you go,” Forrest said. “I just sent it your way.”

With a few keystrokes, Patel brought up an image of Tyler Bell’s Montana driver’s license. She flipped it over to the conference-room screen.

I remembered meeting his brother in California and how my first impression had been lumberjack but in a California rock-and-roll sort of way, like some lost member of the Eagles. Tyler looked like the real thing. His brown hair and full beard were shaggy but not unkempt. The license stats put him at six three, 220 pounds.

“What do you think, Bree? Recognize him? Could he be your AP reporter?”

She squinted at the license and took her time before answering. “The way he can change his looks? Sure, it’s possible. The reporter was a big man. Maybe six three.”

“What does your gut say?”

Here, she didn’t pause. “It tells me we just found the creep we’ve been looking for. And like I said before-he’s going down.”

AS SOON AS WORD about a possible suspect named Tyler Bell reached the chief of police’s office, a reply boomeranged back to us. We were told to “go public” with the information immediately. Easy to say-a whole lot harder to do.

Certainly we had to tell the press something . If another murder came down and we hadn’t shared what we knew, it wouldn’t matter why we had made the decision to withhold. The damage control would become a huge time suck, and the investigation would suffer badly.

On the other hand, our suspect was definitely part of the receiving public. Putting out too much information about what we knew, and didn’t know, was a mistake that couldn’t be undone.

So what should we do?

Our compromise was a quick, unscheduled press briefing out on the steps of the Daly Building. It was something none of us wanted to do, but there didn’t seem to be an alternative that the chief was willing to agree to. He needed to communicate “progress” on the case, no matter what the possible consequences for the investigation.

At eight that night, Sampson and I spoke with reporters, all right, but only long enough to name Tyler Bell as our primary suspect and to say that we weren’t taking any questions at this time.

Bree stayed off camera. It was her decision all the way. She didn’t want to make her recent attack any more of the story than it already was.

Afterward, the three of us went straight into an emergency session upstairs. It was hard to imagine that this case was heating up, but it was. DCAK seemed to want it that way.

Someone certainly did.

WHAT A MESS THIS WAS, and maybe getting worse. The extended team was waiting for us upstairs, along with just about every Major Case Squad detective and at least one representative from every district station house in the entire city.

Someone passed an envelope for Officer Pearsall’s family while I was up in the front getting ready to talk and answer any questions I could. I waited an extra couple of minutes for the sad, depressing collection to end, then I began.

“I’ll make this as quick as I can. I know you want to get back out there on the street. So do I.” I held up Bell ’s photo. “This is Tyler Bell. We’ll pass around copies of the picture. There’s a real good chance that he’s DCAK.

“By the eleven o’clock news, this will be the most famous picture in Washington, probably in the entire country. The problem is, there’s no way Bell ’s going to be seen looking like this. For what it’s worth, we’re working up simulations without all the hair. His height is the only given. Six two or six three. That’s something he won’t be able to change very much.”

One of the Second District guys raised a hand. “Dr. Cross, if this is about revenge for Bell ’s brother, why do you think he hasn’t come directly after you?”

I nodded. It was a good question to get out of the way.

“First of all, I’d say that he has come after me, but not in the way you mean. The closer he can put himself to those of us who are looking for him, the bigger his emotional payoff. I’m guessing it’s an extension of the kick he gets from killing in front of an audience. But it’s only an educated guess at this point. We just don’t know for sure.

“Second, I’m not convinced yet that this is about revenge. We’ll have to see. If anything, I’d say he might be trying to succeed against me where his brother failed, and he’s using the brother to misdirect us. Maybe even to delude himself that this is serving something more than his own ego. But really it’s all been about him from the beginning. Not revenge, not his brother- his huge ego .”

Lisa Johnson, one of our D-2s, looked up from her notes. “How would Bell even know you’d be assigned to the case? You weren’t back on the force when he started. That’s right, isn’t it?”

Bree took that one. “Lisa, even if Alex wasn’t involved at the beginning, the Michael Bell connection would have gotten him involved eventually. And remember, we were led right to this connection.”

“So you think he used the cell phone on purpose?” Johnson asked. “Am I tracking this right?”

“Absolutely. I don’t think he does anything without a reason,” I said. “If we dropped the ball at some point, missed a clue, he would have lobbed another one our way. The more of this he can engineer, the more his needs will be met in the end.”

“Meaning the need to kill and get away with it?” somebody asked from way in the back.

“I was going to say, the need to beat our brains in at any cost, show us up. That’s what he’s done so far.”

LATE THAT NIGHT, as if to underscore everything that had happened so far, I got a direct reply from DCAK that seemed to say, Ready or not, here I come-right in your face !

I was home, doing online research. On account of the Michael and Tyler Bell connection, I was particularly curious about sibling relationships in serial-murder cases. I’d found out about Danny and Larry Ranes, who had gone on separate sprees in the ’60s and ’70s. And there was a case in Rochester, the identical-twin Spahalski brothers. One twin had confessed to two murders and was suspected in at least two others, while his brother was serving time for a single, much earlier, homicide.