Patterson, James - Alex Cross 5 - Pop Goes the Weasel

Death had to leave! This instant! There could be no murders tonight!

No! He wouldn't do it! To hell with the dice. He wouldn't leave. He couldn't. He was losing all impulse control, wasn't he? Well, so be it. Alea jacta est, he remembered from his schoolboy Latin class. Julius Caesar before he crossed the Rubicon - the die is cast.

This was a monumental night. For the first time, he was breaking the rules. He was changing the game forever.

He needed to kill someone and the urge was everything to him.

He hurried to the house before he changed his mind. He was nervous. Adrenaline punched through his system. He used his glass cutter at first, but then just smashed in a small window with a gloved hand.

Once inside he moved quickly down the darkened hallway. He was swearing - so unlike him. He entered Deirdre's bedroom. She was asleep, despite the breaking of the glass. Her bare arms were thrown up over her head, the surrender position.

'Lovely,' he whispered.

She was wearing white bikini panties and a matching bra. Her long legs were spread delicately, expectantly. In her dreams, she must have known he was coming. Shafer believed that dreams told you the truth, and you had better listen.

He was still hard and was so glad he'd chosen to disobey the rules.

'Who the hell are you?' he heard, suddenly. The voice came from behind.

Shafer whirled around.

It was Lindsay, the daughter. She wore nothing but coral-pink underwear, a brassiere and briefs. He calmly raised his gun until it pointed between her eyes.

'Shhh. You don't want to know, Lindsay,' he said, in the calmest voice, not bothering to disguise his English accent. 'But I'll tell you anyway.'

He fired the gun.

Alex Cross 5 - Pop Goes the Weasel

CHAPTER Fifty-Four

For the second time in my life I understood what it felt like to be a victim of a terrible crime rather than the detective investigating it. I was disconnected and out of it. I needed to be doing something positive on a case, or get back to volunteer work at St Anthony's, anything to take my mind off what had happened.

I had to be busy, but I knew I'd lost my ability to concentrate, something that had come so naturally to me. I came across a pair of shocking murders in Maryland that bothered me for some unspecified reason. I didn't follow up on them. I should have.

I wasn't myself; I was lost. I still spent endless hours thinking about Christine, remembering everything about our time together, seeing her face wherever I went.

Sampson tried to push me. He did push me. He and I made the rounds of the streets of Southeast. We put the word out that we were looking for a purple-and-blue cab, possibly a gypsy. We canvassed door-to-door in the Shaw neighborhood where Tori Glover and Marion Cardinal had been found. Often we were still going at ten or eleven at night.

I didn't care. I couldn't sleep anyway.

Sampson cared. He was my friend.

'You're supposed to be working the Odenkirk case, right? I'm not supposed to be working at all. The Jefe would be livid. I kind of like that.' Sampson said as we trudged along S Street late one evening. Sampson had lived in this neighborhood for years. He knew all the local hangarounds.

'Jamal, you know anything I should know?' he called out to a goateed youth sitting in shadows on a graystone stoop.

'Don't know nothin'. Just relaxin' my mind. Catchin' a cool night breeze. How 'bout yourself?'

Sampson turned back to me. 'Damn crackrunners working these streets everywhere you look nowadays. Real good place to commit a murder and never get caught. You talk to the police in Bermuda lately?'

I nodded and my eyes stared at a fixed point up ahead. 'Patrick Busby said the story of Christine's disappearance is off the front pages. I don't know if that's good or bad. It's probably bad.'

Sampson agreed. 'Takes the pressure off them. You going back down there?'

'Not right away. But yeah, I have to go back. I have to find out what happened.'

He looked me in the eye. 'Are you here with me right now? Are you here, sugar?'

'Yeah, I'm here. Most of the time. I'm functioning okay.' I pointed up at a nearby red-brick building. 'That place would have a view of the front entryway into the girl's building. Any of those windows. Let's get back to work.'

Sampson nodded. 'I'm here as long as you want to be.'

There was something about pounding the streets that appealed to me that night. We talked to everyone in the building that we could find at home, about half the apartments. Nobody had seen a purple-and-blue cab on the street; nobody had seen Tori or Marion either. Or so they said.

'You see any connections anywhere?' I asked as we came down the steep stairs of a fourth-floor walk-up. 'What do you see? What the hell am I missing?'

'Not a thing, Alex. Nothing to miss. Weasel didn't leave a clue. Never does.'

We got back down to the entrance, and met up with an elderly man carrying three clear plastic bags of groceries from the Stop Shop.

'We're homicide detectives,' I said to him. 'Two young girls were murdered across the street.'

The man nodded. 'Tori and Marion. I know 'em. You want to know 'bout that fella watchin' the buildin'? He was sittin' there most the night. Inside a slick fancy black car,'he said.'Mercedes, I think. You think maybe he's the killer?'

Alex Cross 5 - Pop Goes the Weasel

CHAPTER Fifty-Five

'I've been away awhile, see. Visitin' wit' my two old bat sisters in North Carolina for a week of good memories, home-cooked food.' the elderly man said as we climbed to the fourth floor. 'That was why I was missed during the earlier time through here by your detectives.'

This was old-school police work, I was thinking as I climbed stairs - the kind too many detectives try to avoid. The man's name was DeWitt Luke and he was retired from Bell Atlantic, the huge phone company that services most of the Northeast. He was the fifty-third interview I'd had so far in Shaw.

'Saw him sittin' there around two in the mornin'. Didn't think much of it at first. Probably waitin' for somebody. Seemed to be mindin' his own business. He was still there at three, though. Sittin' in his car. Seemed kinda strange to me.' He paused for a long moment as if trying to remember.

'Then what happened?' I prompted the man.

'Fell asleep. But I got up to pee around four thirty. He was still in that shiny black car. So I watched him closer this time. He was watchin' the other side of the street. Like some kind of damn spy or somethin'. Couldn't tell what he was lookin'at, but he was studyin' somethin' real hard over there. I thought he might be the police. 'Cept his car was too nice.'

'You got that right,' Sampson said, and barked out a laugh. 'No Mercedes in my garage.'

I pulled up a card-table chair behind the darkened window in my apartment. Made sure there were no lights on, so he couldn't see me. By now he'd caught my attention some. Remember the old movie Rear Window? I tried to figure out why he might be down there sittin', waitin'. Jealous lover, jealous husband, maybe some kinda night stalker. But he wasn't botherin' anybody so far as I could see.'

I spoke again. 'You never got a better look than that? Man sitting in the car?'

'Around the time I got up to pee, he got out of the car. Opened the door, but the inside light didn't come on. That struck me strange, it bein' such a nice car and all. Fueled my mind even more. I squinted my eyes, get a better look.' Another long pause.

'And?'

'He was tall, a blond gentleman. White fella. We don't get too many of them around here at night, or even in the daytime, for that matter.'

Alex Cross 5 - Pop Goes the Weasel

CHAPTER Fifty-Six