Джеймс Паттерсон - Target - Alex Cross

Was the fact that she was shot outside her home meant as a statement, like a Mafia killing? Or was it merely a zone of opportunity?

I decided it was the latter. Before I left the crime scene, Lieutenant Lee had told me that the senator attended a yoga class Monday through Thursday. Every morning. It helped her clear her mind, he said.

It also helped her killer, I thought. The shooter knew about the pattern through personal observation or because he had been told about it.

Mr. and Mrs. Fairfax had been down in Palm Beach for two months. Mahoney believed it was possible the killer had been inside the house scouting Senator Walker multiple times and for extended periods. He had called for a second forensics team to comb the bedroom for DNA and microfibers, but I doubted they’d find much.

Making repeated trips inside the Fairfaxes’ residence felt unprofessional to me. If I were a gun for hire, I’d want to spend as little time as possible in the kill zone. Whenever a human brushes up against something, he or she leaves tiny bits of skin and hairs that people like Sally Burton can gather and analyze. A trained assassin would know that.

No, I thought as I turned down Fifth Street and saw people out shoveling their sidewalks. The killer went in there based on someone else’s intelligence, so maybe once or twice, no more than—

“Dad!”

I started, looked up, and saw a snowman in front of our house. Ali was beside it, excited and waving. I grinned. My youngest child had a real passion for life. Whatever he was into at the moment, he was fully there and usually having a heck of a good time.

“Nice one,” I said.

“I built it just since breakfast!”

“No school?”

“Snow day,” he said, beaming. “I get to play.”

“Well, your dad gets to work. Have fun and don’t get wet. You’ll catch a cold.”

“You sound like Nana.”

“Maybe there’s hope for me,” I said. I rubbed the top of his wool cap and went around the side of the house in fresh untracked snow up to my ankles to steps that led down to the basement door.

I used a key to open it and pushed the door in. Snow fell inside on the mat. So did a folded piece of paper.

I picked it up, unfolded it.

I turned it over. Nothing.

Behind me, in a trembling voice, a woman said, “Dr. Cross?”

I pivoted to find a very attractive woman in her thirties looking down at me through the open door. Wearing a knit cap and mittens and hugging herself in her baby-blue down coat, she had fresh tears on her cheeks. Her posture was hunched, which I read as more despondent than distressed.

“Yes, I’m Alex Cross,” I said, smiling. I stuffed the note in my jacket pocket and gestured her inside. “I’m sorry about not shoveling the path in. Ms. Davis?”

Nina Davis smiled weakly through her tears as she passed me.

“I rather like all the snow, Dr. Cross,” she said. “It reminds me of home.”

Nina Davis had been born and raised in Wisconsin, outside Madison, and she had always thought of snow as a bandage.

“You can’t see the wounds and scars when there’s snow falling,” she told me. “I loved it as a child.”

We chatted while she filled out paperwork. Davis was thirty-seven, bright, attractive, and committed to her career at the U.S. Justice Department, where she was a supervising attorney working on organized-crime prosecutions.

“Once upon a time I was with the FBI,” I said.

“I know,” Davis said. “It’s why I sought you out, Dr. Cross. I figured you might understand or at least be sympathetic to my position.”

I smiled. “I’ll try to do both.”

Davis returned the smile without conviction. “I don’t know quite where to begin.”

“Tell me why you wanted to see me.”

She looked at her hands in her lap, shoulders slumped, and sighed. “I don’t think I know how to love, Dr. Cross.”

“Okay,” I said, and I settled in to listen, really listen.

Davis told me that in her entire life, she’d felt love for only one person: her father, Anderson Davis, a small-town attorney who had spent lots of time with his sole child. Katherine, his wife, had emotional problems and wasn’t much interested in things physical. But Nina’s father loved to hike and roam around the Wisconsin countryside.

“He called those walks tramps,” she said wistfully. “He’d say, ‘Come on, Nina, time for a tramp up to Beech Ridge.’”

Davis blinked and wiped at a tear. “Even now, I miss tramping with him. I was thirteen when he died.”

Tough age, I thought, and I made a note before saying, “How did he die?”

“They were in the car, and my mother was driving. She was yelling at him about something, took her eyes off the road, and ran a red light. He was killed instantly.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. It must have been hard.”

Davis breathed in deep, pursed her lips, and shrugged. “My dad was gone, and my mom killed him. What can you say?”

I absorbed that, then said gently, “So you blame your mother?”

“Who else?” she said. “She’d kept her eyes on the road, my dad would’ve lived to a ripe old age. She’d kept her eyes on the road, and I wouldn’t have had a series of creepy men living in the house when I was a teenager.”

Davis had gone cold, and I decided to leave the statement for another time.

“She alive, your mother?”

“Last I heard.”

“When was that?”

“Three weeks ago, when I signed the monthly check that pays for her assisted-living facility back home.”

“I’m hearing a lot of conflicted feelings,” I said. “You blame her for all these things, and yet you stay involved in her care.”

“Yes, well, there’s no one else to do it,” Davis said as another tear formed and slipped down her cheek.

The timer dinged. She looked disappointed.

“I promise you our next talk will be longer,” I said. “When you’re a one-man shop like I am, first sessions get taken up as much by paperwork as by real substance. And I charge your insurance for only a thirty-minute session rather than the hour. I can see you for a full hour tomorrow morning.”

Her knitted brow eased. “That works.”

“Before you go, and just until we speak at our next appointment, I want you to remember those times when your mother made you happy, those times, maybe before your father’s death, when you were grateful for her rather than resentful.”

Davis’s laugh was short and sharp. “I’ll have to dig deep for memories like that.”

“I’d expect no less,” I said gently. We fixed a time for the next appointment, then I stood and opened my office door.

She walked through somewhat uncertainly, and I wondered whether she would ever return. I’d found over the years that a fair number of clients believed that they were going to get to the root of their problems in a session or two. When they realized that the process was less about cutting and more about peeling, some of them gave up. I never heard from them again.

“I’ll see you tomorrow?” I asked as she opened the basement door.

“I’ll be here, Dr. Cross,” she said, but she did not look back.

“I very much look forward to it, Nina,” I said, and I shut the door and the cold wind behind her.

Going back into my office, I wondered at the human brain’s ability to seize on some terrible personal event and let that event define and control every action for years, decades, even lifetimes. I—

Three short, sharp knocks came at the basement door.