Cross the Line: (Alex Cross 24)

by James Patterson

  “I try not to,” Condon said.

  “There was a mass murder in a methamphetamine factory in Washington, DC,” I said. “Twenty-two people died. The assault seemed professional, as in highly trained. Probably ex-military.”

  As if he were seeing an enemy in the distance, the sniper’s eyes hardened.

  “I know where this is going,” he said. “I’ll save you some time. I had nothing to do with that. Now, unless you have a warrant, Detective Cross, I’m going to have to ask you to get out of my house and off my land.”

  “Mr. Condon—”

  “Now. Before I get all loony and PTSD, start thinking you’re the Taliban.”

  Part Three

  MERCURY RISING

  CHAPTER

  36

  MERCURY RARELY RODE his motorcycle in broad daylight.

  He generally took the bike out only at night and on patrol. But heading south on Interstate 97, he felt like nothing could shake him today, as if more balance were coming into the world, and into his life. He had been the avenger now in more ways than one, and he rather liked the role.

  Hell, he loved everything about what he’d been doing these past few weeks—taking charge and acting when no one else would. Certainly not the police. Certainly not the FBI or NCIS. Do-nothings, one and—

  Mercury noticed a beige Ford Taurus weaving in the slow lane just south of the Maryland Route 32 interchange. He hung one car back and one car over.

  The Taurus drifted, and the Porsche SUV in front of Mercury honked at it. The Taurus wandered back into its lane.

  The Porsche accelerated. Mercury sped up as if to pass the Taurus too and got just far enough to see what was really going on.

  “Stupid bitch,” he muttered, anger beginning to build, boiling away all that good feeling. “Don’t you read? Don’t you listen?”

  He backed off, telling himself that this wasn’t the time or the place.

  But as he entered a long, slow, easterly curve in the four-lane highway, Mercury realized that, except for the Taurus, the southbound lanes were clear in front and behind him.

  He made a split-second decision and zipped open his jacket. With his right hand he twisted the throttle, and with his left, he drew the pistol.

  The motorcycle sped up until it was right beside the Taurus. The stupid bitch driving didn’t look at him, and she wasn’t looking at the road ahead.

  She was texting on an iPhone while driving sixty-two miles an hour.

  Years of practice had made Mercury an ambidextrous shot. He was about to pull the trigger when Ms. Textaholic actually took her eyes off the goddamned screen.

  She looked over. She saw the gun.

  She dropped the iPhone and twisted as he shot.

  The tail end of the Taurus swung violently into his lane, almost knocking over the motorcycle, and then it veered back the other way, did a 360-degree spin, ran up an embankment, and flipped over onto its roof.

  He put away the pistol and drove on at a steady sixty-three, two miles below the speed limit.

  No need to draw any attention now that the traffic laws were being obeyed and a sense of balance, a sense of order, had been restored.

  CHAPTER

  37

  THAT AFTERNOON AFTER we talked to Condon, we went to Bree’s office and gave her our report.

  “So Condon threatened two law enforcement officers?” she asked, looking as stressed and tired as I’ve ever seen her.

  “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 Tanner-ite 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.”

  CHAPTER

  38

  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 proce
ssed.

  “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.”

  CHAPTER

  39

  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.

  The detectives had gone to check it out and called for backup. One patrol car drove into the alley behind the house. Another patrol car came onto the block at one end, and Lincoln and O’Donnell came from the other. They saw Le and three of his men chilling on the front porch.

  O’Donnell had stopped his vehicle just shy of the house. The other patrol car did the same. All four officers jumped out, guns drawn, and ordered the men on the porch to lie down. Le came up with an AK-47 and opened fire.

  Lincoln and a patrolman were hit; Lincoln took a bullet through his thigh and another through his hand. O’Donnell had been able to pull him behind a car across the street. The injured patrolman, Josh Parks, had been shot through the pelvis, but he’d dragged himself up against the base of the porch, where he could not be seen or shot at from inside.

  “How are you, Parks?” Bree asked over the radio.

  “Feel like I got a drill bit through my groin to my spine, but otherwise peachy,” the officer said.

  “O’Donnell?”

  “We need to get Lincoln and Parks to the hospital without getting shot.”

  “I hear you,” she said. “Cavalry’s on its way. ETA four minutes.”

  “I heard a lot of screaming inside. I’m thinking he’s got hostages.”

  We heard shouting and automatic gunfire, and then the connection died.

  “Shit!” Bree shouted.

  She tried to redial, but her phone rang before she could.

  “O’Donnell?” Bree said, and listened. “Where are you?”

  Bree punched the speaker button, and out came the terrified voice of Michele Bui.

  “I’m hiding inside a closet upstairs,” Thao Le’s girlfriend said, clearly on the verge of tears. “Thao and his friends have been snorting coke and meth for days, and they’re out of their minds and paranoid. He’s got them convinced they’re next.”

  “Next for what?”

  “Next to be killed,” she said. “They were so whacked, they thought the cops were those vigilantes killing meth cookers.”

  “Who else is in the house with you?” Bree asked.

  “I don’t know exactly,” she said. “I was upstairs sleeping, but I heard a few of the cutters and packagers come in and work through the night. After the shots, I heard screams and—”

  “What?”

  “Thao’s yelling for me,” she said. “I gotta go.”

  The line went dead.

  CHAPTER

  40

  METRO PATROL CARS were parked in V formations blocking the street at both ends of the road. Other officers were moving through the alleys to evacuate residents closest to the row house Le was in.

  A pair of ambulances had already arrived. We left our squad car down the street and got our first look at the situation through binoculars.

  Halfway down the block on the east side, Officer Joshua Parks was on his side by the stoop to the row house, contorted in agony.

  “We’re here, Parks, with more on the way,” Bree said over her radio.

  “Good,” he said. “I’m getting one hell of a leg cramp lying on the cement like this.”

  Bree couldn’t help but smile. “We’ll have that cramp looked into. Talk to me, O’Donnell.”

  Detective O’Donnell was across the street from Parks on the sidewalk behind a white Ford Explorer. He was holding Lincoln, who looked weak.

  “O’Donnell, talk to me,” Bree said again.

  “Lincoln’s conscious, but hurting bad. What’s the plan?”

  “Working on it,” Bree said.

  She looked at me, said quietly, “I’ve never handled anything remotely like this, Alex. You have, so I’m all ears.”

  I scanned the scene again and then said, “We need to be inside the house directly across the street from Le’s and also in the house directly behind it. And we need Le’s cell phone number.”

  “I’ll try Michele Bui again,” Bree said.

  The SWAT van pulled up. Captain Matt Fuller, dressed head to toe in black body armor, climbed out and hurried toward us.

  “Shit,” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “I’d hoped Captain Reagan was on duty,” I said. “Fuller’s good at what he does, but he wants to do it as often as he can, if you know what I mean.”

  A burly man with soft, almost saggy facial features, Fuller said, “Dr. Cross. Chief Stone. Sampson. How’s the officer down?”

  “Two are down, Captain,” Bree said. “Lincoln, who’s one of my men, and Officer Parks. Both are in critical need of medical attention, especial
ly Parks.”

  Fuller looked at the scene through binoculars. When he put them down, he said, “We’re going to want to be in the house opposite and the one behind.”

  “You took the words right out of my mouth,” I said, and then I looked to Bree again. “Call Michele. Get that number.”

  Captain Fuller, four of his men, Sampson, and I used an alley to reach the row house directly in front of Detectives O’Donnell and Lincoln and across the street from Parks. A frail older woman had been evacuated from the house. She’d given her key to one of the patrolmen who’d helped her, and we used it to go through the back door into her kitchen.

  We passed a steep staircase on our way into the living area, barely taking in the dated furniture, the photos of a lifetime, and a baby grand piano.

  “Maxwell and Keith, you’re upstairs,” Captain Fuller said behind me. “Stay back from the windows, keep it dark.”

  While the two SWAT officers climbed the stairs, Bree pushed aside the window curtains just enough for us to see O’Donnell and Lincoln right there on the sidewalk, backs to the Explorer, no more than fifty feet away. O’Donnell had his belt around Lincoln’s thigh, but Lincoln looked wan, like he’d lost a lot of blood.

  “Lincoln needs medical help now,” Bree said.

  “Both of them do,” I said, watching Parks go through some kind of pain spasm that made him arch in agony.

  The SWAT commander was quiet for several moments and then said, “We’re going to handle this one at a time. Easiest first, which means Lincoln.”

  Fuller looked at his two other men. “How fast can you get out the door, go down those steps, grab Lincoln, and get your asses back inside?”

  “Twenty seconds,” Sergeant Daniel Kiniry said.

  “Maybe less,” Officer Brent Remer said. “Unless we come under fire.”

  “O’Donnell? How long since the last shots?” Fuller asked.

  “Ten, maybe twelve minutes,” the detective came back.

  The captain thought a moment and then spoke into his radio. “Wilkerson?”

  “Go ahead, Captain.”