Cross the Line: (Alex Cross 24)

by James Patterson

  Bree stepped up to the mike and nodded to me, all business.

  Multiple photographs appeared on a screen in the corner.

  “As of now, we have twenty out of twenty-two confirmed identities for the victims,” Bree said. “Any one of these people could be linked to the killers, so we are going to need workups on all of them.”

  She nodded to someone, and the photos were reduced to five.

  “This has not come out yet, but we know quite a bit about these five from a witness who came forward late last night,” she said. “All five are classmates in the graduate chemistry program at Georgetown University.”

  That sent a rumble through the crowd. Georgetown? Chemists from a prestigious university running a meth lab?

  Bree gestured to a photo of a dark-complected curly-haired man and said, “This is Laxman Dalal. Twenty-two years old. PhD candidate. Born in Mumbai, he went to the University of Southern California on a full academic ride and finished in two years. We believe he was the brains and driving force behind the drug lab.”

  From there she gave them a story of four very smart, very driven people who’d been seduced into crime and easy money by Laxman Dalal, a man whom Campbell had described as “brilliant, charismatic, and morally corrupt.”

  “Dalal evidently didn’t think the laws applied to him,” Bree said. “By sheer force of brains and personality, he convinced his fellow students, including Alexandra Campbell’s ex-boyfriend Carlo Puente, that they could earn a whole lot of cash by making meth at night, on weekends, and during their summer breaks.”

  They got good fast, and their illegal business started to grow even faster. Campbell said it had started in a small garage in Southeast DC, but they’d soon moved to the factory in Anacostia.

  “Campbell said her boyfriend showed her bags of money back in March,” Bree said. “That’s when she said she called it quits with Puente. She says she told him Dalal was going to get him killed. And he did. That’s it for me. Special Agent Potter?”

  Bree stepped away from the lectern, and the DEA SAC took her place.

  Potter said, “Before last year, I would have told you that there was no drug gang brazen enough or capable enough to pull off this kind of massacre. But in the last six months, across northern Mexico and the desert Southwest, we’ve seen a rise in deadly turf wars. Traffickers shot and left for dead. Labs like this one blown up. When I was in the El Paso office, it looked like some group was bent on cornering the market in illicit drugs, forming kind of a supercartel that was willing to kill anyone in its way.”

  “We have a name for this supercartel?” I asked. “People involved?”

  Potter looked at me, said, “I wish we did, Dr. Cross. In El Paso, it was like chasing ghosts, and then I was transferred here.”

  “Did you have any intelligence about that factory?” Sampson asked.

  Potter looked at his men, who shook their heads.

  “It was as big a surprise to us as it was to you,” Potter said, and then he sighed. “But then again, we’ve been shorthanded. Budget cuts.”

  Ned Mahoney cleared his throat, said, “I don’t know about a supercartel, but I think you’re right about brazenness being a factor here. You’d have to be stone-cold to do this, so I think we have to agree from the start that this was professionally done and proceed from there.”

  “No doubt,” Potter said. “These guys were highly trained.”

  “SWAT level?” Bree asked.

  “I think we’re dealing with a group that’s quite a few steps above SWAT,” Mahoney said. “This feels commando-trained, at a minimum.”

  “So, mercenaries?” Sampson asked.

  “Could be,” Mahoney replied. “There are a lot of private security contractors around, now that Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down. I don’t think you’d have trouble putting together an elite team if the money was right.”

  “Hold that thought,” Bree said, and nodded.

  Photos of the remaining two John Does, the ones dressed for business, got bigger on the screen.

  “We think these two are the moneymen,” she said. “Either they funded the lab’s construction and equipment or they were involved in the sale of—”

  Mahoney’s phone started beeping. So did Bree’s. And Potter’s.

  They all went for their phones. Bree’s was right in her hand. She scanned the screen, stiffened, and said, “Two more drug labs have been hit. One in Newark. Another in rural Connecticut. Multiple deaths confirmed in both places.”

  CHAPTER

  24

  BOTH METH LABS had been taken down within minutes of each other, and with the same attention to detail. All the people inside the drug factories were dead. There were no cartridge casings at either scene. In each case, hundreds of thousands of dollars and multiple kilos of methamphetamine were left untouched.

  Ned Mahoney and the FBI seized control of the larger investigation at that point. Three different massacres across state lines demanded it, though Chief of Detectives Bree Stone remained in charge of the Anacostia slayings.

  It was a little odd at first, having my wife be my boss, but then I realized she and Nana Mama ruled the roost at home anyway, and I got over it. Even better, Bree was good at being a chief. Right off the bat. She had a knack for pulling the levers, getting you what you needed.

  But despite her efforts, for several days we made little progress. Then, ninety-six hours after we arrived at the massacre scene in Anacostia, we identified the two dead businessmen through missing-persons reports in Virginia and Maryland.

  Chandler Keen of Falls Church ran a small investment firm currently under investigation by the SEC. Matthew Franks was a Bethesda-based real estate developer who’d been hit with several multimillion-dollar legal judgments in construction-default lawsuits.

  The FBI raided their offices and homes, but it was going to take some time to cull through the seized evidence. It was clear, though, that both men had had adequate reasons to get involved in the lucrative business of illegal drug manufacturing. But how it had happened and why they and the twenty others had been targeted for death remained a mystery.

  Cable news, not surprisingly, went bonkers over the case, especially the Georgetown University angle. Students were back on campus and some of them were more than happy to talk. As a result, we knew a lot more about the five genius victims, but nothing game-changing.

  On the sixth morning after the massacre, I told Bree I was going back to work the Tom McGrath case while we waited for forensics to give us some kind of tangible lead on the factory killings.

  “Wish I could go with you,” she said, sitting behind her desk with a stack of papers before her. “But between fielding calls from the brass and making decisions on overtime, I’m going to be here for a while.”

  “I feel for you. Take my dad’s advice: delegate the worst of it.”

  “I can’t delegate anything until I understand the job.”

  “True,” I said. “You’re doing great, by the way.”

  “You think?”

  “Not just me. Keep trusting your instincts.”

  Bree laughed. “They’re all I’ve had so far. Where are you going?”

  I told her I was going to look for an American University law student named JohnnyBoy5.

  CHAPTER

  25

  SAMPSON AND I made a trip to the administrative offices of American University’s law school. We explained we were working on Edita Kravic’s murder case, and that got us fifteen minutes with the dean, who told us Kravic had been a star student, a role model for foreign students and women entering school at a relatively late age.

  “We could use some help, then,” I said, and I told him about JohnnyBoy5. “That’s his online name, but he’s a student here, and we want to talk with him. Can you figure out who he is?”

  “May I ask why?” the dean said.

  “He was obsessed with Ms. Kravic,” Sampson said. “Maybe enough to kill her and Chief McGrath.”

  T
he dean cringed at the idea that one of his students might have murdered another as well as the police chief. He hesitated, said, “There are privacy issues.”

  “More important than bringing a double murderer to justice?” I said flatly. “Do we have to go to the press and tell them that the dean of a law school is being obstructive in the hunt for a cop killer?”

  Five minutes later, we had a bead on one John Boynton, aka JohnnyBoy5, a second-year law student from Indiana who was attending a summer class on torts in the school amphitheater. The dean texted us his photo.

  We waited in the hallway on the second floor of the law school for the lecture to end. A crowd of students began exiting the amphitheater, and I soon had eyes on JohnnyBoy5, who was still inside the room, about ten feet back from the door.

  “Check out the hairdo,” I said.

  “I see it,” Sampson said. “Flashy.”

  I don’t know what about us tipped Boynton. Maybe it was his Spider-Man instincts. Or maybe just the memory of a big guy threatening to break his face. Whatever triggered it, the guy with the spiked blond hair took one look at us and shoved several students forward hard, causing people in the crowd to stagger and fall like dominoes. Then he spun and took off deeper into the lecture hall.

  “Sonofabitch, he’s running!” Sampson roared. He drew his service weapon and sped after him, throwing students out of his way and yelling, “Police! Get down!”

  I went another route, running down the hall toward an exit sign. I shouldered the door open and took the stairs four at a time. When I hit the bottom I threw open a second door, saw students fleeing the amphitheater through an exit at the end of the hall.

  A girl looked over her shoulder and screamed. I stepped into a janitor’s closet next to the stairwell, leaving the door open.

  Boynton came out of the amphitheater, smashing people out of his way, then sprinted down the hall right at me. I waited until he was just past me and then hit him hard across his back with the head of a heavy, wet industrial mop.

  JohnnyBoy5 smashed into the stairway door and fell in a heap, groaning.

  CHAPTER

  26

  BOYNTON SAT ON the floor, held his nose, which was gushing blood, and moaned. “I’m suing. Whoever you are, I’m suing.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said as Sampson came up behind me. “We’re homicide detectives investigating Edita Kravic’s murder. We saw the e-mails you sent her.”

  That rocked him. He wiped at his nose, groaned, muttered, “I had a bad reaction to a generic version of Singulair, an asthma drug. Talk to my allergist. He said in rare cases, it could make you manic. It definitely made me that way.”

  “Some of the things you wrote sounded threatening and psychotic,” I said. “She was going to file a restraining order against you.”

  His shoulders slumped. “I swear to you, Detective, that wasn’t the real John Boynton writing those things. It was a hopped-up, crazed version of me. Two days after getting off that goddamned drug, I was fine.”

  The way he said it, exposed and defeated, made me believe it was possible that some of the messages had been fueled by a bad reaction to a drug.

  “Okay, let’s put those particular e-mails aside,” I said. “The fact is, you seem to have had an escalating obsession with Edita Kravic from the first day of law school. Did you love her?”

  Boynton looked ready to deny it but then surrendered and nodded. “I thought she was perfect.”

  “But she didn’t feel that way about you?”

  “She liked me at first, then I got all weird with the medicine.”

  “You wrote to her once accusing her of hiring muscle to threaten you.”

  “Said he’d take a baseball bat to my face if I didn’t end all contact with Edita.”

  “Who was it?”

  Boynton shrugged. “The cop she was sleeping with, and died with.” Something about the way he moved just then made me recognize him—this was the guy with the knapsack who’d run out of McGrath’s apartment.

  “Can I go to a hospital, please?” he whined.

  “When we’re done talking,” I said. “You’re not going to die from a nosebleed. Why did you break into Chief McGrath’s place?”

  He hesitated. Then he said, “She asked me to.”

  “Bullshit,” Sampson said.

  “She did,” he insisted.

  Boynton claimed that Edita had called him and said that she’d done some research and now believed him about the medicine. She’d also said she was in trouble and needed his help. They met, and she asked him to steal McGrath’s laptop.

  “She said McGrath had stuff on the computer that could get her in big trouble, prevent her from becoming a lawyer,” Boynton said.

  “Like what kind of stuff?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me, but she was convincing,” Boynton said. “You could hear it in her voice and see it in her body language. She was scared by whatever he had on the laptop.”

  Recalling the e-mails I’d seen in Edita’s computer, I said, “You were supposed to meet at ten the night before she was killed?”

  He nodded and said she’d come over later than that, around eleven, to give him McGrath’s apartment key and to have sex.

  “Edita was sleeping with you both?” Sampson asked, eyebrows raised.

  “She was going to break up with McGrath after I gave her the laptop,” he said, looking crestfallen. “She was finally going to be mine.”

  Before she’d left Boynton’s apartment that night, Edita had told him she was taking McGrath to an early-morning yoga class and then to breakfast at her place. Boynton would have plenty of time to use the key and get the laptop. I thought about it, remembered Boynton running with the backpack from McGrath’s place. It all fit in a strange way.

  Boynton said he had the laptop at his apartment. We got him to his feet, handcuffed him, and told him we’d swing by his place on the way to the hospital.

  “Am I under arrest? They’ll throw me out of school.”

  “You’re in custody for now,” I said.

  In the car on the way to his apartment, I turned around in the front seat and looked at him.

  “In one of your e-mails during your manic phase, you wrote something like ‘I know what you do, Edita, and I’ll tell everyone.’ What was that all about?”

  Fear flickered across Boynton’s swollen face. “I was just bluffing, you know? Everyone has a secret, so I figured—”

  “You’re lying to me, Mr. Boynton,” I said with a sigh. “Every time you lie, you get closer to an arrest and the end of law school. So what do you know?”

  “I … I followed her a few times.”

  “You stalked her?” Sampson said.

  “Just followed her. I wanted to see what she did when she wasn’t at school. That’s all.”

  “Get to it,” Sampson said. “Where did she go?”

  “This place in Vienna, Virginia, called the Phoenix Club.”

  Edita went there three or four days a week, he told us. She’d often stay until after midnight. Boynton tried to get inside once but was told it was a private club. He said he stopped following her once he realized someone else was following her.

  “Who?” Sampson said.

  “Another cop,” Boynton said. “At least, he talked like a cop.”

  “He caught you following Edita?”

  “Twice. The second time he told me he had her under surveillance and I had to stop or he’d have me arrested for obstructing justice.”

  “Name?”

  “He never said.”

  “Never showed you a badge?”

  Boynton shook his head. “But like I said, he acted like a cop.”

  “What did he look like?” I said.

  “Tall, big, but he didn’t look too good, like he was sick or something. He coughed a lot. And he wore a red Redskins cap.”

  CHAPTER

  27

  BREE MANAGED TO get away from all her paperwork, and three hours later, Kurt Muller, B
ree, and I pulled up in front of Terry Howard’s depressing apartment building in Northeast DC.

  We’d retrieved McGrath’s laptop and taken it and Boynton downtown. The laptop went to Detectives Lincoln and O’Donnell, along with marching orders to look for anything related to Edita or the Phoenix Club. Sampson stayed behind to take Boynton’s full statement.

  We stood in the foyer and buzzed Howard’s apartment three times but got no answer. We buzzed the other five apartments, but it was a weekday and everyone was out. No response.

  “Call him,” I said.

  Bree looked up Howard’s number and punched it into her cell phone. No answer. Straight to voice mail.

  We were turning to leave when Muller noticed a beater Dodge four-door parked across the street. “That’s Howard’s. He’s here, just not answering.”

  “He could have walked somewhere,” Bree said. “Taken the Metro.”

  “Not the way he was coughing and wheezing the last time I saw him,” I said.

  “Where’s his apartment?”

  “The third floor, back.”

  We walked around into the alley and located Howard’s apartment and the fire escape. I picked Bree up; she grabbed the ladder and pulled it down. We climbed up the three flights and stopped outside the kitchen window.

  The sink overflowed with dishes. Liquor and beer bottles crowded the small table and just about every other surface. A second window was raised slightly and looked into a small dining area and part of the living room where Sampson and I had spoken with Howard. We could see the television was on, tuned to ESPN.

  “Call his number again,” I said.

  Bree did, and almost immediately I heard the jangle of an old-fashioned rotary phone coming from the apartment. The ringing stopped.

  “Voice mail,” Bree said.

  “That’s probable cause to do a well-being check, don’t you think, Chief?”

  She hesitated, and then said, “No fruit of the poisonous tree.”

  Nodding, I pushed up the sash and climbed in, calling, “Terry Howard? It’s Alex Cross. We’re just checking on your well-being.”