Джеймс Паттерсон - Cross the Line

“Oh yeah,” Sampson said.

“In a manner of speaking, anyway,” I said. “He’s highly intelligent. Knew what we were up to the second we mentioned the massacre.”

“You ask him where he was on the night in question?”

“He wouldn’t answer,” Sampson said. “Said he’d learned the hard way never to talk with an investigator of any kind without an attorney present.”

“But you put him on notice that he’s a suspect,” Bree said. “That can be a good thing.”

“It can,” I said. “But we can’t exactly put him under surveillance from here, and we don’t have evidence to support a search warrant.”

“Find me one thing that links Condon to that factory, and I’ll call in some favors with the state police in Maryland. Have them put him under surveillance.”

“I find one thing that links Condon to that factory and I think Mahoney will take over and call in the FBI cavalry, and it will be out of our hands.”

Sampson said, “I’m going to check if Condon has a Tannerite waiver. If not, he’s stockpiling explosives and we can walk in his front door with an army behind us.”

“Good,” Bree said.

We started to leave, but Bree called after me, “Alex? Can we talk?”

“Fine,” Sampson said. “I know when I’m not wanted.”

He closed the door as he left. Bree sagged back in her chair.

“You okay?” I said.

“Not today,” she said. “This morning, the mayor and the chief took turns using me as their verbal punching bag over the massacre.”

“And a few days ago, you helped them get the pressure off their backs by naming Terry Howard as Tom’s killer. You can’t go up and down emotionally along with their roller-coaster whims. Accept the fact that getting pressure from above is part of the job but doesn’t define it. Focus on doing the best you can. Nothing else. Three months from now you’ll have a whole different outlook on things.”

Bree sighed. “Think so?”

“I know so,” I said, coming around to massage her shoulders and neck.

“Ohhhh, I need that,” she said. “My lower back’s hurting too.”

“You’re sitting down too much,” I said. “You’re used to being up and active, and your body’s protesting.”

“I’m a desk jockey now. Part of the territory.”

“Get the chief to buy you one of those stand-up desks. Or better yet, a treadmill desk.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Bree said.

“I’m full of good ideas today.” I bent over and kissed her on the cheek.

“I miss you,” she said.

“I miss you too,” I said and nuzzled her neck. “But we’re good, right?”

“Always.”

There was a knock at the door.

Sampson called out, “You still dressed?”

“No, we’re buck-naked,” Bree called back. “C’mon in.”

He opened the door cautiously, saw me massaging her neck, and said, “Sorry to disturb you in the middle of things, but I had a ViCAP going on drivers who were shot like Mr. Maserati there in Rock Creek.”

I stopped kneading Bree’s neck. “You got a hit?”

“You tell me.”

A few weeks before Aaron Peters was shot to death by a motorcyclist on the Rock Creek Parkway, thirty-nine-year-old Liza Crawford, a successful real estate agent in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was found dead in her brand-new Corvette on a winding rural road lined in places with stacked stone walls.

The investigator said Crawford was traveling at a high rate of speed when she hit a stone wall. The Corvette flipped over and landed on its roof, crushing her.

The extensive damage to Crawford’s head had initially hidden the .45-caliber-bullet entry and exit wounds, but they were discovered during the autopsy. She’d been dead before the crash. The slug was retrieved from the passenger-side door and it was now being processed at Pennsylvania’s state crime lab.

Samuel Tate, twenty-three, died two months before Peters and Crawford. An auto mechanic, Tate was found dead inside his souped-up Ford Mustang, the front end of which was wrapped around an oak tree on a rural road west of Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Tate was known to be an excellent driver who never drank or got high. There were no skid marks on the road, and yet he’d been going well over one hundred miles an hour when he lost control. A medical examiner found a hole made by a .45-caliber bullet in the left side of his head. The bullet had already been processed.

“Look at that,” Sampson said now, tapping on his computer screen, which displayed the report on Tate’s bullet and the report on the bullets taken from the Rock Creek victim. “They’re a dead-on match.”

“Crawford’s will be too,” I said, studying a map. “She died about the same distance from Washington as Tate did, but she was to the north of it and he was to the south. So a ninety- to ninety-five-minute radius.”

“Which means what?”

“We’ve got a serial killer. A hunter on a motorcycle. Draw a ninety-minute circle around us. That’s his hunting ground.”

“What’s he hunting?”

“Maseratis. Corvettes. Mustangs.”

“High-performance cars,” Sampson said.

“Well, the people who drive high-performance cars.”

“And drive them very fast.”

Tapping my lip with one finger, I thought about that.

“What’s the point?” Sampson asked. “Is it a game?”

“Could be,” I said. “That video from Peters’s car shows they were playing cat and mouse, and the motorcyclist was better at being the cat.”

Sampson shook his head. “The media’s going to have a field day with this one too. Remember the Beltway Sniper attacks?”

“How could I forget?”

I was still with the FBI on the morning of October 3, 2002, when four people were randomly shot to death in suburban Maryland. That night, inside the District, a seventy-two-year-old carpenter was shot and killed while taking a walk on Georgia Avenue.

The press called them the Beltway Sniper attacks. But it soon became clear to the FBI that the shooting spree had started eight months before in Tacoma, Washington. In all, we found twelve people who’d been wounded or killed by the snipers prior to October 3, from Arizona to Texas to Atlanta to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

We eventually caught the two troubled men with a Bush-master AR-15 rifle, but before it was over, seventeen people died. Another ten were wounded but survived.

“Malvo and Muhammad did it for sport,” Sampson said. “It could be what we’re looking at here.”

“Possibly,” I said. “A challenge to the motorcyclist, chasing the fast car down and getting off a lethal shot at the driver.”

“And escaping unharmed?”

I nodded, thinking how bad this could get. The country had been caught up in twenty-three days of fear when the Beltway Snipers were shooting and killing. Those twenty-three days had been some of the most stressful of my life.

“You going to tell Bree? She’s got a lot on her shoulders already.”

Before I could answer, my wife appeared at the door to my office, breathless.

“O’Donnell, Lincoln, and two patrolmen came under automatic-weapon fire in Northeast five minutes ago,” she said. “Lincoln was hit. So was a patrolman. O’Donnell says Thao Le was one of the shooters.”

We raced through the city, blues flashing and sirens wailing. I drove. Sampson struggled into body armor in the seat beside me. Bree was in the back, fielding calls, fighting to get a full understanding of the situation, and coordinating with the other chiefs to send the right personnel to the scene.

Evidently, Detectives Lincoln and O’Donnell had been tracking Thao Le through his girlfriend Michele Bui. She had texted O’Donnell that Le was moving a load of drugs through a row house in Northeast that afternoon.