Джеймс Паттерсон - Cross the Line

“Runaway blimp,” Nana Mama said, shaking her head.

“You don’t hear that every day,” I said, pouring myself some coffee.

Before I could take a sip, my phone buzzed, alerting me to a text, and then another, and then a third. Annoyed, I set the coffee down and dug the phone from my pocket.

Call me.

Kerry Rutledge.

Urgent.

A fourth text came in. A phone number.

I took my coffee, went out into the great room, and called the young woman who’d survived the road-rage attack.

“Dr. Cross?” she said.

“Right here, Kerry,” I said. “What’s so urgent?”

“You told me to call if I remembered anything more. I did. I mean, I do.”

She sounded breathless, almost panicked.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s calm down a little, and then you’ll tell me what’s going on. Where are you?”

“At a rehab center in... I can’t remember that,” Kerry said, and she took a deep breath. “But I do remember now that the motorcycle was a dark Honda, big, with a windshield and, like, a lit-up dashboard, you know?”

“How do you know it was a Honda?”

“It was on the gas tank. I could see it in the light from the dashboard.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes, but it’s probably nothing.”

“Let me be the judge of that,” I said.

Kerry said, “There was something on the windshield, a decal, on the lower right-hand corner. It was square and I keep thinking that there was an anchor and a rope on it.”

“An anchor and a rope on a decal?” I said. And then a memory was triggered, and my heart began to pound a little faster. “A decal like a parking sticker?”

Bree sat at her desk drinking her second cup of coffee and reading over reports of complaints against one of her detectives. She tried to pay close attention to the details of the report and to the detective’s response, looking for differences and similarities. She hated second-guessing a cop who’d been acting in the heat of the moment, but if she was going to do the job right, she had to study the situation before rendering judgment.

For the most part, she stayed on task. But then her attention wandered and flickered over to what Katya Kravic had told her about Edita and McGrath. Had Tommy pushed her too far? Had Stavros or Bogrov shot them both and then — what, planted the gun at Terry Howard’s? Made his death look like a suicide?

Those unanswered questions only raised more unanswered questions, so she took a deep breath, told herself to compartmentalize, and tried to refocus on the disciplinary report.

A knock came at her doorjamb. She sighed and looked up. Kurt Muller was standing there with that goofy grin on his face again.

“I gather the date with Ms. Noble the other night went well?” Bree asked, sitting back in her chair.

“Better than well,” Muller said. “I’m smitten.”

Bree laughed. “I could see that the moment you met her. Is she smitten?”

“I get that feeling,” he said, the grin growing.

“Good for you. Now get back to work so I can get back to work.”

Muller sobered, said, “I actually wanted to tell you we may or may not have caught a break.”

Muller said he’d been checking on the status of Tommy McGrath’s life insurance policy every few days since his death, and the beneficiary had not come forward to make a claim. When he’d called that morning, however, he found that an adjuster with the insurance company’s claims department had learned of the chief of detectives’ murder and tried to contact the beneficiary but had been directed to the beneficiary’s attorney.

“So the beneficiary did not initiate contact?” Bree said, disappointed.

“Life ain’t neat,” Muller said, flipping through a reporter’s notebook. “The attorney’s name is... Lance Gordon... practices in McLean. The insurance adjuster said Gordon consulted with his client, who declined to make a claim at first. Then, three hours later, Gordon called back and filed the claim, saying his client was going to donate the money to a charity.”

“This muddies everything, doesn’t it?” Bree said, turning to her computer and doing an Internet search on Lance Gordon.

She found his law firm, looked at the partners’ page on the website, and clicked on Gordon. A picture popped up of a handsome man in his late forties, very long and lean and dressed in a well-tailored suit.

There was something about Gordon’s face that was familiar, but Bree couldn’t place him at first. Then she did, in another time and location, seeing herself turn after Gordon and sniff. He’d smelled like something, hadn’t he? What was it?

“Chief?”

Bree startled, looked at Muller.

“I was asking how you wanted to handle this.”

“Give me a second,” she said, making a possible connection in her head. She yanked open a desk drawer and rummaged around until she found what she was looking for: a small brown bottle with a yellow label. She opened the bottle and sniffed.

Bree saw Gordon again in her mind, clearer now. She sniffed again, and all sorts of distorted puzzle pieces shifted and came together.

Bree smiled at Muller and said, “Shut the door, Detective. We’ve got work to do.”

Colonel Jeb Whitaker’s Honda Blackbird was in the same U.S. Naval Academy parking lot as before when Sampson and I checked around two that afternoon. Sampson walked past the powerful motorcycle, pretended to admire the bike, and planted a GPS tracking device under its rear fender.

We knew a whole lot more about Whitaker now, and, like Tommy McGrath had felt about the Phoenix Club, the more we learned, the more we wanted to know.

Colonel Whitaker had a stellar record, first off. He’d graduated from the Naval Academy in the upper quarter of his class and later won the U.S. Navy Cross for valor, risking his life repeatedly to bring wounded Marines off the streets of war-torn Fallujah. Then shrapnel from an IED nearly cut off his leg, ending his tour of duty.

The colonel had subsequently earned a doctorate from the War College and then joined the faculty of the Naval Academy, where he taught strategy and amphibious warfare. He was known as a charismatic teacher and was rated highly by students on several faculty-review sites we found on the web.

On paper, Whitaker did not seem like someone we should have been looking at. But then we found out his wife had died three years before in a car accident, hit head-on by a drunken, high twenty-two-year-old who had been not only speeding but texting.

Whitaker’s Honda Blackbird turned out to be the fastest production motorcycle available on the planet, capable of blowing the doors off a Maserati. And Whitaker knew how to drive it. He’d raced motorcycles earlier in his life.

Sampson and I had debated bringing the colonel in for questioning but decided in the end to hang back, follow him, and learn more before we got in his face. Whitaker helped us out by appearing forty minutes after we’d set up surveillance on the Blackbird. He limped to the motorcycle, put on his helmet, and set off.

We trailed Whitaker a mile back, watching his progress on an iPad connected via satellite to the GPS transmitter. We thought the colonel might go north to his home on Chesapeake Bay, but instead he headed west and drove to the George Washington University Medical Center in DC.

He parked in the visitors’ lot, and we drove into it just in time to see Whitaker walking toward the hospital. I jumped out and trotted after him.

Because of the limp, the colonel wasn’t hard to keep up with. But once we got inside the hospital, I had to hang back, and I lost Whitaker when he got an elevator. Before the doors closed, though, I heard him tell someone he was going to the ICU.