Джеймс Паттерсон: Detective Cross

“I try,” Mickey said, gave him a high five, and left.

He walked the six blocks to the Capitol Self Storage facility at 3rd and N Streets, and went inside to a small unit, where he unlocked and rolled up the door. Stepping inside, he pulled the door down and switched on the light.

Six minutes later, Mickey emerged. Gone were the dirty denim jeans, the canvas coat, and the ragged Nikes, replaced by khakis, a lightly used blue windbreaker sporting the embroidered logo of a golf academy in Scottsdale, Arizona, and a pair of virtually new ASICS cross-trainers. It was remarkable what you could find in a Goodwill store these days.

Mickey put on a wide-brim white baseball cap and a pair of cheap sunglasses. Around his waist, he wore a black fanny pack with a water bottle in a holder. Around his neck hung an old Nikon film camera with no film inside.

There, he thought as he locked the unit, I could be any Joe Jackass come to town to see the sights.

Mickey left the storage facility and walked south, aware of the fanny pack, the water bottle, and the camera, and doing his best to contain his excitement. Be chill, brother. Stroll, man. What would Hawkes say? Be who you’re supposed to be . You’re Joe Jackass on vacay. All the time in the world.

Fifteen minutes later, Mickey boarded the DC Circulator bus at Union Station with a slew of tourists. He stood in the aisle near the rear exit, holding the strap as the bus rolled down Louisiana Avenue.

He got off at the third stop, 7th Street, walked around the block, noted the increased police presence on the Mall, and returned to wait for the next bus to arrive. He boarded it, found a spot as close as he could to the rear exit and rode it until the eighth stop, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial.

He got off. It was 11 a.m.

Seventeen minutes later, Mickey re-boarded the Circulator at the ninth stop, Lincoln Memorial. Taking his usual position by the rear exit, Mickey felt lighter, freed, as if he’d left things in his past, on the verge of a brighter future.

He waited to get off until the fourteenth stop, National Air and Space Museum. While tourists poured out the door after him, he dug in his pants pocket and came up with a burner phone. He walked away from the knot of people trying to get into the museum and thumbed speed dial.

“Yes?” the woman said.

“Chief Stone?” Mickey said, trying to make his voice soft and low. “It’s your worst nightmare again.”

Bree slapped the bubble on the roof, hit the sirens, and said, “Hold on, Alex.”

I braced my feet on the passenger side. She glanced in her side view and stomped on the gas.

We squealed out of 5th Street, ran the red light at Pennsylvania, and headed toward the Mall with Chief Stone calling the shots over a handheld radio.

“He says it’s at the Korean War Memorial, but clear the MLK and Lincoln Memorials, too,” she said. “Close Ohio Drive and Independence Avenue Southwest. I want to know the second those five are clear. Am I clear?”

“Yes, Chief,” the dispatcher said.

“Call IT,” she said. “Find out if they got a trace on the call that just—”

Her cell phone started ringing. She glanced down, said, “Forget it, they’re calling me.”

Cradling the radio mike, she snatched up her cell, said, “Chief Stone. Did you get it?”

Bree listened and said, “How much damn time do they need?”

A pause, then, “You’d think in this day and age, it would be a hell of a lot less, but okay. If there’s a next time I’ll try to keep him talking.”

Hanging up and letting her phone plop in her lap, she let out a sigh of exasperation. “A minute ten at a minimum to hone in on an on-going cell signal. He spoke to me for twenty-one seconds.”

“They have no idea where he is?”

“Somewhere in DC but they can’t pinpoint the call. And even if they could, he has to be using a burner.”

“You’d think,” I said.

Six minutes later, Bree threw the car in park near the Ash Woods on Independence Avenue.

“You should stay here until you’ve got Mahoney at your side.”

“Agreed,” I said. “Be safe.”

She kissed me and said, “I’ll let the pros take care of the dangerous stuff.”

I watched her get out and walk toward the traffic barrier closing off the west end of the National Mall. She couldn’t be seen bringing me into a Metro investigation while I was on suspension.

Mahoney, however, could bring me in as a consultant. I left the car a few minutes later when he arrived with the FBI’s bomb squad and a dog team of three.

The wind was out of the southeast, so Mahoney sent the dogs between the Lincoln Memorial and Korean War Veterans Memorial, a dramatic, triangular space with nineteen steel statues of larger than life soldiers on patrol, some emerging from a loose grove of trees and others in the open, walking across strips of granite and low-growing juniper.

The FBI dog handlers spread out and released the bomb sniffers. Muzzles up, panting for scent, they cast into the wind toward the statues. Back and forth they ran, coursing through the trees and the steel patrol soldiers. I stood beside Bree, looking around to spot my favorite part of the memorial: three statues crouched around a campfire, set on a granite slab inscribed with THE FORGOTTEN WAR.

“C’mon,” Bree said in a low voice. “Find it.”

At the northeast end of the memorial, two of the dogs circled a low, dark wall that read FREEDOM IS NOT FREE. They returned to their handlers waiting on the walkway. The third shepherd took a longer loop downwind of the MLK Memorial before trotting back to his handler and the others.

“Rio and Ben are not picking up anything here,” a handler said on the radio. “And Kelsey wasn’t smelling anything at MLK. We can run the Lincoln if you want us to.”

“Yes,” Bree said. “Better safe than sorry.”

Mahoney said, “This the boy who cried wolf?”

“An effective tactic,” I said. “Gets us all worked up, calls us to action. He probably gets a kick out of—”

The bomb exploded behind us.

We dove to the ground and covered our heads. Bits of gravel rained down on my back. When it stopped, I lifted my head to see a thin plume of charcoal-gray smoke rising to the right of a walkway that led toward King’s Memorial.

“Jesus,” Mahoney said, getting up and dusting his suit off. “How’d we miss that?”

Bree, rattled but fine, said, “The dogs were just through there.”

The lead dog handler shook his head in bewilderment. “If there was a bomb they would have smelled it.”

“Well, they didn’t,” Mahoney snapped, before calling for a forensics team to gather the bomb debris for analysis.

We all put on blue hospital booties and moved toward the explosion site, everyone seeming jittery and uncertain. Yesterday he’d put two bombs on the National Mall. If the dogs didn’t smell the first one, couldn’t there be another?

No more than a foot across and five inches deep, the smoking crater was two feet off the pedestrian walkway, on the other side of a slack black chain fence. The bomb had been hidden under a low juniper, now charred and broken.

A mangled, burnt metal casing lay on the ground several feet away.

“Looks like a camera body,” Bree said. “Or what used to be one.”

That spooked me. How many tourists in DC carry a camera? It would never be noticed, at least not while the bomber was carrying it. He was smart. He was creative. But something about the explosion bothered me.

“It didn’t do a lot of damage,” I said. “I mean, it could have been bigger, made more of a statement.”

“He wounded two agents yesterday,” Bree said.