Cross the Line: (Alex Cross 24)

by James Patterson

  “Yeah, but now Damon’s introducing me to girls he’s trying to pick up.”

  “Too much information,” I said. “We’ll be back for you tomorrow afternoon. Keep that foot elevated. No weight.”

  “I heard the doctor,” she said. “I’m glad you were there.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Now go have fun.”

  Bree and Ali went out to the beach beyond the dunes. Nana Mama and I shucked corn on the back deck of Mahoney’s cottage. He’d inherited the place from his aunt, a devout Catholic who’d attended mass daily.

  “I’m convinced it’s why it survived Hurricane Sandy,” Mahoney said as he loaded charcoal into a Weber kettle grill. “Bunch of places just to the north of here were leveled, pretty much splintered.”

  “So it’s got good karma,” I said.

  “If I agreed with you on that, my aunt would probably throw a lightning bolt down at me,” he said. “But yes. This place calms me.”

  “How couldn’t it?” my grandmother said. “Cool ocean breeze. The sound of the waves. It’s very tranquil.”

  “Glad you could come, Nana Mama,” Mahoney said. “When was the last time you were at the beach?”

  “I can’t remember,” she said, finishing the last ear of corn. “That happens a lot lately. I’ll start the water on the stove.”

  I knew better than to argue as she got up. She was heading for the kitchen, her favorite place in any house.

  “How bad is Jannie’s break?” Mahoney asked, lighting the charcoal.

  “Hairline fracture of one of the metatarsal bones,” I said. “Crutches for two weeks, and a hard walking boot for another three. She can run in two months.”

  “Too bad she couldn’t come out.”

  “Go to the beach with her stepmom, dad, great-grand-mother, and little brother, or hang out with her new friends in the track world and her big brother at college for a night …”

  “Enough said.”

  We saw Bree and Ali walking back along the path from the dunes. He had a towel around his shoulders and a grin that made me glad to be alive.

  “He’s like a dolphin himself,” Bree said, coming up onto the deck. “You should have seen him in the waves out there.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “First thing.”

  Ali started toward the sliding doors, but Mahoney caught him. “Around the corner, there’s an outdoor shower. Get the sand off and dry off before you go in or my lady friend will not be happy.”

  “I’ve never been in an outdoor shower,” Ali said.

  “It’s life-changing,” Mahoney said and he returned to his grill.

  “I’m next,” Bree called to Ali as he rounded the corner.

  I went to the cooler and fished us out bottles of cold Old Dominion beer, a Delaware favorite, and opened them.

  “I needed this,” Bree said, taking her beer. “A break from everything.”

  “I think we all needed this,” Mahoney said.

  “We going to meet the mysterious lady friend?” Bree asked.

  “Right here!” said a pretty brunette in white pedal pushers, sandals, and a gauzy blue top as she came around the corner with a plate of fresh-baked cookies.

  She set down the plate, beamed at us, and said, “I’m Camille.”

  “Not lady-friend Camille?” I said.

  Camille laughed. “Indeed. Lady-friend Camille.”

  “You’re spicing up the party,” Mahoney said.

  “I try,” she said, and she shook our hands. “Ned’s told me so much about you both, I feel like I already know you.”

  Camille was a real estate agent in the area, a widow, and as bubbly as they come. She and Ned had met at a local seafood restaurant after they’d both noticed each other eating alone on two consecutive Saturday nights. On the third Saturday, Mahoney went over and showed her his badge.

  “He said he was conducting an FBI investigation and needed to ask me a few questions,” Camille said. “First question after my name was why I always eat alone. It was my question for him too.”

  They were good together and we laughed and ate and probably drank a little too much. The moon rose. Nana Mama turned in. Ali fell asleep on the couch. Mahoney and Camille took a walk north on the beach, and Bree and I walked south and admired the moon tracking on the ocean and the waves.

  “It’s good to be with you,” I said, wrapping a blanket around both of us.

  “Hard to imagine the job right now,” Bree said.

  “Means you’re tuning out, giving your brain a needed rest.”

  “Parks came through surgery fine,” she said. “Lincoln too.”

  “Good,” I said, and I whispered a suggestion.

  “What?” She laughed softly. “Here?”

  “Back in the dunes somewhere. We’ve got a blanket. Be a shame to waste the opportunity.”

  She kissed me and said, “Sounds like the perfect end to a perfect day.”

  CHAPTER

  54

  FIVE DAYS LATER, on the Thursday after Labor Day, Sampson and I climbed out of an unmarked car in the parking lot of Bayhealth Kent General Hospital in Dover, Delaware.

  “Let’s hope she’s alert enough to help,” I said.

  “We knew we were taking a chance,” Sampson said. “If she’s not, we’ll just come back.”

  The day before, we’d received two reports that had brought us to the Bayhealth hospital. The first report, filed the week before by a Maryland state trooper, described a Ford Taurus found flipped in Maryland just south of Millersville.

  The driver, a twenty-nine-year-old waitress, was later found to have died of a .45-caliber gunshot wound to the head. The shooting had to have occurred in broad daylight, yet no witnesses had come forward.

  The second report, from the sheriff’s department in Kent County, Delaware, concerned a white Mustang convertible that crashed into a tree along Route 10 between Willow Grove and Woodside East. The driver, twenty-four-year-old Kerry Rutledge, a clothes buyer for Nordstrom’s, was found unconscious but alive around two a.m. on Labor Day. Rutledge had broken ribs, facial injuries, a concussion, and a four-inch-long wound across the back of her head.

  Ms. Rutledge regained consciousness after a few hours, but she was confused and unable to remember anything about the crash. A sheriff’s detective interviewed her the following day. She told the detective she thought she’d been shot but couldn’t remember how it had happened or why. The wound to the back of the head was consistent with a bullet grazing the skin, so we thought it worth the drive to try to talk to her ourselves.

  At the front desk, we learned that Kerry Rutledge was out of intensive care and under observation pending the results of neurological tests. When we reached the nurses’ station, we showed our badges. The head nurse said Rutledge’s parents had been in to see her earlier, and the last time she’d checked, her patient was asleep.

  But when we knocked softly and entered her room, the Nordstrom’s buyer was propped up, sipping a cup of ice water, and gazing at a television on mute. She was a wisp of a woman with pale, freckled skin and fine copper hair that hung about the bandages that covered her bruised face.

  “Ms. Rutledge?” I said, and I introduced Sampson and myself.

  “You’re here because I was shot,” she said with a flat affect.

  “That’s right,” Sampson said. “Did you see the person who shot you?”

  Her head rotated a degree to the right and back. “I’m having trouble remembering things.”

  I hesitated, thinking how best to proceed, and then said, “How do you know you were shot, Ms. Rutledge?”

  Her head rotated again, and stayed cocked to the right as she blinked and pursed her lips. “He was right there. He … he had a gun. I saw it.”

  “That’s good. What kind of gun?”

  “A pistol?”

  “Even better. Where was he? And where were you?”

  Rutledge’s eyes got soft and her head started to droop ever so slightly before she frowned and came out o
f it and said, “I’m an idiot. What was I …”

  “Ms. Rutledge?”

  “I was texting,” she said. “I’d been to a party and I was on my way to my parents’ house in Dover. I had the top and the windows down. It was a pretty night and I was texting a friend. I remember that. Just before I was shot.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I don’t know. Late.”

  “So you’re driving,” Sampson said. “Eyes on and off the road because you’re texting?”

  Her mouth hung slightly open, but she gave a faint nod. “I’ve driven that road a thousand times. Maybe more. Oh God, what’s my car look like?”

  “A mess,” I said. “But you were texting, and then you saw the pistol?”

  “Yes. I mean, I think so.”

  “What happened in between? Before you saw the gun and after you stopped texting?”

  She looked at me blankly, and I decided to take another approach.

  “How fast do you think you were going?”

  “Not fast. Fifty? I …” Rutledge said, and she paused as if noting distant and dim things.

  “What are you seeing?” I said.

  “There was a headlight,” she said. “A single one in the rearview.”

  “A motorcycle headlight?”

  Rutledge’s eyes went wide at that. She took a deep, sharp breath and pressed hard back into the raised mattress, not realizing how much that would hurt her ribs.

  “Ohh,” she moaned. “Ohh, that was just … bad.”

  She closed her eyes. A minute passed, then two, and gradually the spasm of pain released her and left her breathing so rhythmically I feared she’d fallen asleep.

  But then her eyelids fluttered open and she looked at us more clear-eyed.

  “I’m seeing more of it now,” she said. “He drove up alongside of me, like he was passing, and then he backed off and pulled in behind me again. I put my phone on the console, got both hands on the wheel, and that’s when he came again, right up beside me on one of those big motorcycles with a windshield. I looked to my left and he was right there, five or six feet away, with, like, a black helmet and visor, aiming the gun at me. He … he …”

  Rutledge looked at us with growing disbelief. “Before he pulled the trigger, I remember now, he yelled something like ‘Let this be a lesson. Never text and drive.’”

  CHAPTER

  55

  THURSDAY AFTERNOON, IN her office in the Daly Building, Bree realized that by agreeing to become chief of detectives, she’d also agreed to go surfing on a tsunami of memos, overtime requests, and high-pressure meetings at which she was called upon to defend her handling of a job that she hadn’t been given enough time to learn.

  The good times on the Delaware shore, watching Alex and Ali playing in the waves, seemed such a distant memory that Bree wanted to throw something just to hear it break.

  A knock on the doorjamb jolted her from her funk. Detective Kurt Muller ducked his head in and said, “Howdy, Chief Stone.”

  Looking at his waxed mustache, she couldn’t help but grin. “Howdy?”

  “I’m showing my inner Oklahoman today,” Muller said. “Anyway, I know you’re COD now and all, but I’m going to Terry Howard’s storage unit. His ex-wife gave me permission to look through it, and she also gave me the combinations to two safes, which he evidently gave her in case he died.”

  “I didn’t even know Howard had an ex-wife,” Bree said. “Patty,” Muller said. “They divorced seven years ago. She’s remarried to a veterinarian. Lives in Pensacola. She said she’s in shock about Howard’s suicide and the cancer. He never told her, or their daughter, who is nine. Anyway, I wanted to know if you felt like tagging along.”

  Bree almost dismissed the offer out of hand. The case was closed. Why would she want to pick through a dead man’s storage unit?

  But then she remembered Alex’s dissent when Chief Michaels declared the homicides of Tommy McGrath and Edita Kravic solved, pinning them on the bitter ex-cop who’d blown his head off with the kind of gun he had never owned and didn’t like to use.

  “Sure, I’ll go with you, Muller,” Bree said at last, getting up from behind her desk. “It’ll help me to clear my head, get me out of the spin cycle I’ve been on.”

  “I felt like that once,” the detective replied. “Inner-ear infection. You would have thought I was on deck in a hurricane sea or drunk off my ass. I couldn’t tell which way was up.”

  On the way to the storage unit in Tacoma Park, Bree actually enjoyed listening to Muller drone on about the role of the eustachian tube in regulating equilibrium.

  They cut off the lock to the unit and threw open the overhead door. Near the wall to their immediate right was a baby’s crib with a mattress, mobiles, and folded dusty blankets. Behind that were stacks of boxes, an old bicycle, a rolled-up volleyball net, and two large Cannon 54 safes.

  “You have the combinations?” Bree asked.

  “They’re on here somewhere,” Muller said, pulling out his phone.

  Bree went to the safes, noting four green army-surplus ammunition boxes on top of one.

  “You still think Howard shot himself?” Bree asked, taking one box down.

  Muller shrugged, still scrolling on his phone. “Seems a little convenient in retrospect. McGrath and Howard have a bad beef. Howard kills McGrath and shoots himself because he has cancer and because he’s had his revenge.”

  “It wraps up in a nice package, doesn’t it?” Bree said.

  She opened the box and found smaller cardboard boxes of .40-caliber ammunition stacked neatly inside. The second box was half full of nine-millimeter ammunition. The third box carried .30-06 rounds and a single cardboard container of Federal .45-caliber pistol ammunition.

  CHAPTER

  56

  BREE PICKED UP the box of ammunition and opened it.

  Six of the twenty bullets were missing from the plastic rack inside.

  But there they were: fourteen .45-caliber bullets. Ammunition for a gun Terry Howard had claimed he never used.

  “Got the combinations,” Muller said. “Ready, Chief?”

  “Gimme a second,” Bree said, pulling out one of the bullets, noting the copper full-jacket bullet and the slight hollow spot at the tip. She inspected the primer and the rim around it and saw something that made her pause.

  After a moment, she dug in her pocket and put the bullet and the box in an evidence bag.

  “Ready?”

  “Just let me finish here,” she said, opening the fourth ammo box.

  Bree found a gun-cleaning kit with jars of bore solvent, all tightly closed but still tainting the air with their peculiar smell. She reached in and pulled out a small bottle of Hoppe’s #9.

  She opened the top and sniffed. The liquid bore cleaner smelled like she remembered it, sweet, almost like hot caramel. It was bizarre that something that smelled that good stripped out spent gunpowder and metal fouling.

  Something deep in her brain stopped her train of thought. She stared at the bottle of Hoppe’s #9 and sniffed it again, grasping for a memory and not knowing exactly why.

  “You ready now, or do you want some glue to sniff?”

  “Funny,” she said. She put the gun-cleaning kit away and stood in front of the safe’s electronic keypad. “Tell me.”

  Muller called out a series of numbers that she entered and soon there was a chunking noise as the locks released. Bree opened the safe and shone her flashlight inside.

  Muller whistled. “He’s got an arsenal in there.”

  They would later count sixty-three guns in the two safes. There were Smith and Wesson pistols in .40, .357 Magnum, and .44 Magnum calibers on one shelf in the first safe. There was a 1962 Winchester Model 70 bolt-action hunting rifle in .30-06 caliber on another shelf. The other fifty-five weapons in the safes were gleaming side-by-side double-barreled shotguns.

  Bree ignored them and started to pull open the stacked drawers below the pistol shelf. Muller, however, got out hi
s own flashlight and shone it on one of the shotguns. Then he pulled out a pair of reading glasses, got down on his knees, and looked closer at the barrel.

  “Mother of God,” Muller said, fishing in his pocket for latex gloves.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Let me make sure,” he said, and he removed the gun as if it were fine crystal. He peered at the writing on the barrel and shook his head in wonder. “This was made by Purdey and Sons.”

  “Never heard of them,” Bree said.

  “They’re the best,” Muller said. “I had an oil-rich uncle back in Oklahoma who had one. I’ll bet this one gun is worth somewhere between twenty-five and fifty thousand dollars.”

  Bree stopped pulling out drawers. “Is that right?”

  “Purdeys are handmade in London,” Muller said. “They never lose value. If all the guns in here are this fine, we could be looking at two million dollars, maybe more.”

  “Two million?” Bree said, shocked. “How the hell did Howard get …”

  And then she knew. Of course. Howard had been guilty. The drugs. The money. But why shotguns?

  She went back to opening drawers. The next two were empty. But the third contained a large manila envelope. Bree drew it out, seeing Howard’s writing across the front: To be opened in the likely event of my death.

  There was a second envelope in the drawer, white, legal-size.

  There was a pen scrawl there too.

  It read: To COD Thomas McGrath, DC Metro.

  CHAPTER

  57

  BASED ON INFORMATION gleaned from Kerry Rutledge’s accident report, Sampson and I found the tree her Mustang had collided with, an ancient oak off Route 10 that had a nasty gouge in it.

  “Fifty miles an hour?” Sampson said doubtfully. “Looks faster.”

  “She said she hit the gas just before he shot,” I reminded him. “So she could have been going sixty or sixty-five if she’d reacted to the bullet grazing her head by stiffening and keeping the accelerator pinned to the floor.”

  As we returned to the unmarked car, Sampson said, “I keep going back to his amplified voice.”