Still no people, though, dead or alive.
I could hear more police arriving downstairs, quite the crowd on hand already. Nervous whispers and radio chatter. The high-pitched voice of Officer DiLallo—somebody called him Richard, as in Richard, calm down.
Bree reappeared in the hallway below me. She gave an all-clear sign, and I motioned for her to come up.
“You lonely?” she asked.
“For you . . . always.”
When she joined me upstairs, I pointed to the bedroom door. “Only one that’s closed,” I said.
I steeled myself for what we might find, then burst in through the door. I trained my Glock on the far corner, swept left, swept right.
I didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved. There was nothing in the room. Nothing there that shouldn’t be. A platform bed was neatly made in one corner. The open closet held women’s clothes.
What the hell were we missing? We were at Nineteenth and Independence, right?
Just then, we both heard the first faint chop of a helicopter, approaching fast. A moment later, it was hovering right over the house.
Other sounds filtered in from the street. One loud shout cut through. It reached us at the top of the stairs.
“It’s on the roof!”
I looked up, and that’s when I realized the domed skylight was also a hatch.
Chapter 85
“WE NEED A LADDER UP HERE!” Bree yelled to the cops below. “We need it in a hurry.”
I could see black scrape marks on the wall where there normally was a ladder of some kind for roof access. Not anymore, though. Somebody had taken it away.
The skylight was out of reach without it, even if I got on someone’s shoulders.
Bree and I hurried outside—there was no hiding the situation from the media now. Two other helicopters had joined the first one, circling the house like scavengers overhead. Neighbors, passersby, and more press than I could count were clogging the front walk and the street beyond. What a pain-in-the-ass mess this was turning out to be, and we hadn’t even gotten to the punch line yet.
“Clear this whole area,” I said to the nearest officer. “I’m not fooling around. DCAK has been here!”
Bree and I split up then, and I pushed my way through to get to the first news van I could find with a broadcast tower. It turned out to be Channel Four, parked in front of the armory across the street.
A reporter was already giving her rapid-fire spiel to the camera as I approached on the run. I interrupted her midsentence.
“Do any of those choppers belong to you?” I shouted, and pointed an arm up at the sky.
She was attractive, ash-blond, twentysomething, and immediately indignant. “And who are you?” she asked. Whoever I was, her cameraman swung around to get me in the shot.
I didn’t wait for the answer that I needed from the reporter. I stepped right past her and slid open the panel door on the Channel Four van.
“MPD!” I showed my badge to the wide-eyed tech sipping a “vente” Starbucks at his console. “I need to see exactly what your chopper is seeing.”
Midsip, and without a word, he pointed at one of the screens. A piece of electric-blue tape underneath it said LIVE FEED.
Here was the audience, I realized suddenly.
I’d been wondering how DCAK’s next plan would come into play. Now I knew. Anyone watching television would see this. That sonofabitch had planned everything just so.
I looked at my watch—just past six o’clock, the evening-news hour. That’s why the killer had waited to send out the second e-mail, wasn’t it?
The helicopter shot wasn’t close enough to capture every detail, but there definitely was a body up there. I was fairly sure it was a male, but not 100 percent. Dark pants, light shirt, and what seemed to be blood coming from the neck. The face looked strange, though, distorted in some way that I couldn’t make any sense out of yet.
A collapsible ladder lay on the roof nearby. “Tell your man up there to pan around,” I said. “Please do it right now.”
“You don’t take orders from him.” The young reporter had her helmet of blond hair stuck inside the van now too. It was getting crowded in there.
“You do unless you want to get arrested,” I told the tech. “I will lock you up. Both of you.”
He nodded and spoke into his headset. “Bruce, pan around the rooftop, will ya? Get in closer if you can. This is a police request. Roger that.”
Other than the body, the roof looked deserted, at least from the camera angles. “Okay, that’s good,” I said.
“Back on the body,” the reporter barked from behind me. “This is live.”
“Alex!” Bree was shouting from the sidewalk. “We’ve got a ladder. Let’s go on up there.”
I took one more glance at the screen, and as I did, I saw the victim’s arm move. It was very slight but discernible. I was out of the van in a hurry, nearly knocking Miss Channel Four right off her high heels.
“Bree! This one’s still alive!”
Chapter 86
I WAS THE FIRST ONE up on the roof. Bree was next, with two very nervous EMTs right behind her. After a quick visual scan to make sure the area was clear, the EMTs scampered over to help the victim, who, we hoped, was still alive.
There was a wooden deck next to the hatch. A flat, open area of tar paper stretched beyond that, which was where the body lay. The roof was steaming in the sun. Heat vapors rose up around the body too, and I could see that the pool of blood leaking from his neck had grown considerably.
“Doesn’t look very good,” Bree groaned.
“No, it doesn’t.”
The most jarring thing of all was the mask over the victim’s face. That’s why he had looked so strange in the shot from the helicopter. It was another Richard Nixon caricature—like the one used at the George Washington Memorial Parkway murder scene.
“Why do I think this isn’t the copycat?” I shouted in Bree’s ear over the roar of helicopters swarming above us. “Or that there ever was one?”
She nodded. “I suspect you’re right.” We were thinking the same thing again. The so-called copycat murders were DCAK’s own homage to himself. And this was the moment when we were all meant to know it—with the television cameras rolling overhead. The whole world was supposed to be watching as the bastard put one over on us again.
“Is he alive?” I shouted to the nearest EMT. I hadn’t seen any movement from the victim since we’d come up on the roof.
“BP’s nonpalpable. Pulse one twenty,” he called to us. Meanwhile, his partner was radioing down for a gurney.
“Get that mask off him!” Bree said.
Easier said than done. Apparently the latex had melted onto the hot roof at the back of his head. Finally the EMTs had to cut the mask up the front.
Then, as the latex pulled away, a familiar face emerged.
Bree gasped, and I took her arm, partly for the support that I needed myself.
It was Kitz!
The FBI man who’d given us so much computer intel was ghostly pale and covered with swollen beads of sweat. His eyes were closed.
I dropped to my knees next to Brian Kitzmiller. The pads at his neck couldn’t keep up with the bleeding. It was a sad, horrendous mess.
“Kitz!” I took his hand and applied slight pressure. “It’s Alex. Help is on the way.”
His fingers fluttered in mine, barely a squeeze, but he was still with us.
His eyes finally opened, and he seemed confused at first.
When he saw it was me, though, he tried to say something. His puffy and blistered lips moved, but if he made a sound, I couldn’t hear it.
“Hang in there,” I told him. “We’ve got you now. You’re going to be okay. Hold on, Kitz.”
He tried to talk again, but nothing that I could understand came out of his mouth.
With what looked to be great effort, he blinked twice. Then his eyes rolled back in his head. The EMTs kept at it, but by the
time the gurney got there, it was all over.
Kitz was gone. And he had died on camera, just the way DCAK planned it.
I turned to Bree. My mind was working overtime. “Kitz blinked twice. Two killers?”
Chapter 87
BEFORE THE POLICE and TV news choppers got there, DCAK had worked his way across two sections of roof. Then he scuttled down a wobbly painting scaffold to a community parking area in the back, where he would be safe.
He was traveling heavy today, with a laptop and camera in a black satchel slung over his shoulder—but it was nothing he couldn’t handle. He was jacked up, and he was definitely into this new role . . . and the story.
He slipped off the latex gloves, then plucked a silver lighter out of his pocket. Seconds later, the gloves were a lump of melted rubber on the cement. Let the cops try to print that and trace the puddle back to him.
Everything else about him stayed as it was: long blond hair in a ponytail, light growth of beard to match the bleached eyebrows, brown contacts, steel-rimmed glasses, and a White Sox cap turned backward on his head.
The name for today was Neil Stephens, he had decided. He was supposed to be an AP photographer based out of Chicago. The camera was a brand-new Leica. He’d blend right in here. No problems about that. Plus, he’d get to watch the whole thing come to a climax. See all the players close-up, check out their reactions under pressure. No one could have done this better, not even Kyle Craig on his best day.
When he came around from the A Street side of the development, the block on Nineteenth looked like a Barnum and Bailey Circus—in a good way. He stood on the bumper of a parked car and took several wide-angle shots—police cruisers up and down the block, ambulances, a SWAT truck in the armory parking lot, a dozen or more TV and radio stations on the scene. Hundreds of locals, it looked like. They were loitering up and down the street, trying to figure out what the hell was going down.
Did anybody know yet? Had they figured it out? DCAK was about to put their mopey little neighborhood on the map. Soon they would all start thanking God it hadn’t happened to them.
Yes, little minds would be blown sky-high tonight. He was one of the best ever now, wasn’t he? Right up there with Kyle Craig.
By the time the helicopters arrived, the police on the ground had gotten their act together enough to wrangle the masses out of harm’s way. Alex Cross was on the scene—and Bree Stone too. Actually, she was getting a little too big for her britches, he was thinking. Maybe it was time to do something about that.
That could be his next story.
Chapter 88
NEIL STEPHENS, AP, jostled shoulder to shoulder with the other press, all of them competing for “money shots” across the street from the yellow house where the FBI man’s body had been found. Of course, he already had his million-dollar shot—a nice close-up on Brian Kitzmiller’s face. Eyes wide open, neck bleeding out like a stuck pig’s.
“Some crazy scene, huh?” Another lensman turned to speak to him. A brown-skinned fireplug of a guy. “Whole story’s unbelievable, right? You been covering it from the beginning?”
You could say that, DCAK thought to himself.
“Just got to town,” he said, making sure to flatten his vowels for a kind of nasal Chicago accent. Jest gaht to town. He loved details like that. That’s where the grace was, and the devil too. “Doing a piece on the detectives and CSI. That’s my angle here. Folks love their CSI. This little turn of events is just a, uh—”
“Lucky coincidence?”
The killer returned the guy’s cynical smile. “That’s right, I guess. Lucky me.”
“Here they come!” someone shouted, and Neil Stephens of the AP raised his camera along with everybody else.
The door across the street opened. Detectives Cross and Stone came out first, ahead of the body. They both looked like they’d been eating the same shit sandwich—and it looked good in telephoto.
Click! Nice little two-shot of the opposition. Beaten to a pulp but not quite defeated. Still standing, anyway.
Cross looked especially pissed off. His hands and shirt were covered in Kitzmiller’s blood.
Click!
Another classic shot.
The two of them joined the other cop—John Sampson, Cross’s friend—who was waiting on the sidewalk. Stone said something in the big lug’s ear—click!—and Sampson shook his head. He apparently couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Probably the news that it was Brian Kitzmiller up on the roof.
Click, click, click!
This shit was golden.
The little guy next to him kept talking while he worked, a real live chatterbox. “They say Cross over there is one of our best. Seems like he’s getting his ass kicked a little on this one.”
“Looks that way, huh?” Neil Stephens said, and kept snapping away, getting each of the three detectives’ faces close-up, as tight as he could go. Nothing too arty, but good stuff. Keeping it real.
Then he pulled back some and got all three of them in one master shot.
Click, click, click!
Then he stopped shooting and just watched their faces through the viewfinder for several heartbeats. Is that how he’d take them out in the end? All three in one shot heard round the world? Or maybe do it nice and slow—one at a time.
Stone.
Sampson.
Cross.
He hadn’t decided yet. There was no rush—better to enjoy the journey and get there when he got there. However it went down, the ending would be the same: dead, dead, and dead. And he would be a legend—right up there with the best.
“So you say you just got to town?” The little guy was still blabbing his ass off. “Guess that means you haven’t talked to any of them yet, huh?”
“Not yet,” Neil Stephens said. Naht yet. “But I’m definitely looking forward to it.”
Chapter 89
THERE IS A SAD LITTLE DEATH of hope and optimism that happens every time something tragic and unforeseen like this goes down. It was as if Kitz’s murder opened up a little more room for hatred in my heart. Was that true? All I could hope for now was that we would get the killer—or killers—and stop all this somehow.
So I did the one positive thing I could do: I kept working the case, harder than ever before. For starters, Bree, Sampson, and I stayed at the house on Nineteenth Street late into the night. We sucked every last drop of evidence out of the crime scene, but truthfully there wasn’t much to go on. The place was clean. It turned out that the homeowners were away for the month. None of the neighbors had seen anything unusual. No one had spotted DCAK before or after he murdered Brian Kitzmiller.
I got home around three thirty the next morning and grabbed a few hours of sleep, then pushed myself to get up and start all over again. There were patients to see first thing, but I used my early-morning run to the office to go over everything in my head one more time. Then again. And again.
What was I missing? He was evolving—that much was clear. Just about every successful serial killer does; it’s only a matter of how. Certainly his methods were improving, and growing more complex. Everything about yesterday was a little bigger—the news coverage, the derring-do, and the amount of live-television time he’d gotten.
It was about control, wasn’t it? That’s what was changing most dramatically here. It crystallized for me as I sprinted across the National Mall, my lungs starting to burn. With each murder, DCAK got a little more control, a little more of an edge on us. Which meant—ironically—that time wasn’t on our side.
I was still thinking of the killer as he, but that might not be true. A man and a woman were probably working together, leaving a trail of clues for us to follow.
Chapter 90
IN MANY WAYS, I felt like I was leading a double life—probably because I was. After Sandy Quinlan’s appointment that morning, I had Anthony Demao on deck, figuring I’d squeeze him in for as many sessions as possible following his meltdown. I still didn’t know how things stood between the t
wo of them since the scene that I’d witnessed in my waiting room.
So I was relieved when they ignored each other on her way out that morning. Sandy looked uncomfortable; Anthony just seemed uninterested. I was glad, because this wasn’t a hookup either of them needed. It just felt wrong.
As soon as Sandy was gone, Anthony’s demeanor began to change. He was clearly agitated and seemed shakier than usual. Despite the heat, he’d worn long trousers and a camo jacket, the latter held tightly closed as he walked inside my office and plopped on the couch.
Then he stood again and began to pace around the room. Anthony was walking rapidly, hands jammed into his pockets, mumbling to himself.
“What’s going on?” I finally had to ask. “You seem agitated.”
“You think so, Doc? I had another dream, couple nights in a row. Dream about Basra. The fucking desert, the war, the whole nine yards of bad shit, okay?”
“Anthony, come and sit down. Please.” He had tried to tell me about Basra before but hadn’t said enough for me to understand where he was going with it. I gathered something terrible had happened to him in the war; I just didn’t know what it was.
When Anthony finally slumped down onto the couch, I spotted a lump under his jacket. I knew what it was, and I sat up straight, my blood pumping.
“Are you carrying?” I asked.
He put his hand over the bulge. “It isn’t loaded,” he snapped. “Not a problem.”
“Please give it to me,” I said. “You can’t have a gun in here.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “I said it’s not loaded. Don’t you believe me? Anyway, I have a license to carry.”
“Not in here, you don’t.” I stood up now. “That’s it. You have to go.”
“No, no. Here, you take it.” Suddenly Anthony reached under his jacket and pulled out a Colt 9. “Take the damn gun!”
“Slowly,” I said. “Two fingers on the handle. Put it on the coffee table. Keep your other hand where it is.”
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