We each held up our badge and ID to a tiny camera on the ceiling.
A moment later, we heard large metal bars disengage and slide back. A section of the wine cellar’s rear wall swung open hydraulically, revealing Elena Guryev studying us from a space about the size of two prison cells.
She was tall, willowy, and in her late thirties, with sandy-blond hair and the kind of bone structure and lips that magazine editors swoon over. Black cocktail dress. Black hose and heels. Hefty diamonds at her ears, wrists, and throat.
Her hazel eyes were puffy and bloodshot, but she acted in no way distraught. Indeed, she seemed to exude a steely will as she stood with her arms crossed in front of a bunk bed. On the lower bunk, a boy of about ten slept, curled up under a blanket, his head wrapped in gauze bandages.
Across from the bed, six small screens showed six different views of the house and grounds.
“Mrs. Guryev,” Mahoney began softly.
“Dimitri cannot hear us,” she said. “He is stone-deaf and on pain drugs. He had a cochlear implant operation two days ago at Johns Hopkins.”
I said, “Do you want a doctor to see him?”
“I am physician,” she said. “He’s fine and better sleeping.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“No,” she said, her fingers traveling to her lips, her eyes gazing at the floor as if contemplating horror. “I don’t know what I’ll tell him about his father.”
A moment later, she raised her head and that toughness was back. “What do you want to know?”
Sampson gestured at the screens. “You saw what happened?”
“Some of it,” she said.
“Is the feed recorded?” Mahoney asked.
“It is,” she said. “But they knew where the big hard drive was stored and took it with them.”
“Got away clean again,” Sampson grumbled.
“They only think they got away clean,” Mrs. Guryev said, reaching down to the bed. “But I make sure they will pay.”
She held an iPhone in her hand like a pistol. “I videoed them, two without their hoods.”
CHAPTER
77
ON A SCREEN in Bree’s office a few hours later, we watched a precision military force massacre the victims we’d found in the house, including Antonin Guryev, who begged for his life and offered the killers millions before he was shot to death in his bedroom.
The iPhone camera went haywire at that point and you heard Elena Guryev gasp and then cry out in Russian. The camera showed her shoes as she wept for several minutes and then returned to the feed from her bedroom.
“Here it comes,” I said.
The gunman who killed Guryev had gotten down on his knees by the bed. He reached under it and yanked out the hard drive that recorded all security feeds on the grounds. He tucked it under one arm, tore off his hood, and wiped at his sweaty brow before he walked out of sight.
I backed the recording up and froze it at the moment the hood was off, showing a face I’d seen before, the one that was a fusion of Asia and Africa.
“Say hello to Lester Hobbes,” Sampson said.
Bree sat forward, said, “No kidding.”
“Wait,” I said. “The second one’s coming up.”
The iPhone camera swung shakily to another feed in the panic room, and then it focused, showing the six hooded gunmen cleaning their way out of the entertainment area of the house, picking up their brass and even vacuuming around the bodies. When they reached the French doors that opened onto the terrace, one of them unzipped the back of the vacuum, removed the dust bag, and turned to leave while tugging off the hood.
You caught a flash of her, a woman with blond hair. It took a few tries at the computer to freeze her with her face in near profile.
“Who is she?” Bree asked
“No idea yet,” Sampson said.
“Who were the victims besides the congressman?” Bree asked.
“Russian mobsters, representatives from the Sinaloa drug cartel, two bankers from New York and their wives, and someone we didn’t expect.”
“Who?”
“We’ll get to him in a second,” I said.
We explained that, according to Elena Guryev, the party had actually been a kind of emergency board meeting of a loose alliance of criminals who trafficked in everything from narcotics to humans.
“What was the meeting about?” Bree asked.
“Ironically enough, the vigilantes,” Sampson said. “Every target they hit—the meth factories and the convoy—were part of the alliance’s business.”
“And then the vigilantes came in and wiped the leaders out,” Bree said.
“Like cutting off all the hydra’s heads at one time,” I said.
“How did Guryev get involved?”
We told her what Elena Guryev had told us: Several years ago, her husband had overextended himself financially and gotten in huge money trouble. Members of the alliance offered him a way out of his predicament—smuggling—and his global shipping business had exploded with unseen profits.
Elena Guryev claimed she didn’t know what her husband had gotten involved in until it was too late. When she discovered the depth of his criminality, she told him she wanted a divorce.
“She says he threatened to kill her and their son if she tried to leave or tell the police,” I said. “That was three months ago.”
Bree thought about that. “Why was she in the panic room?”
“Her son, Dimitri, had had an operation two days before and needed to sleep somewhere he wouldn’t be disturbed,” I said. “She put in an appearance at the beginning of the party and then went down to be with her son. She was there when the attack began.”
“Did she recognize Hobbes or the woman?”
“Said she’d never seen either of them before.”
“Where are Elena and the son now?”
I shrugged. “Mahoney’s got them stashed in a safe house. I suspect he’ll be questioning her for days if not weeks before she goes into witness protection. Which brings us back to this guy.”
I showed her a picture on my phone of a dead man in his late thirties, handsome, with a thick shock of dark hair and a bullet hole in his chest.
“Who is he?”
Sampson said, “According to Elena Guryev, his name is Karl Stavros, and he’s the owner of, among other businesses, the Phoenix Club.”
“Wait,” Bree said. “Where Edita Kravic worked?”
“One and the same,” I said. “So what are the odds that Tommy McGrath was onto something criminal going on in that club that Edita told him about?”
“I’d say very good,” Bree said. “Very, very good.”
“I think the answer to who killed Tommy is in that club,” Sampson said.
“We’ll need warrants,” she said.
“The Feds are filing,” I said. “Ned promised we’ll be part of any search, but it’s not going to be today.”
I yawned. So did Sampson.
“You two look like hell,” Bree said. “Go home. Get some sleep.”
Sampson got up and left without any argument.
I held up my hands. “No, I’m good. Nothing a cup of coffee won’t fix.”
“That’s a direct order, Detective Cross. Home, nap, and then I’d bet Nana Mama would appreciate you going to Ali’s interview for the Washington Latin charter school this afternoon.”
“Is that today?”
“It is. Five o’clock.”
“Then heading home as ordered, Chief Stone. See you at dinner?”
“If I’m lucky,” she said. “Love you.”
“Love you too,” I said, and I went out her door fantasizing about my bed and a two-hour coma.
CHAPTER
78
BREE WATCHED ALEX leave, feeling a little cheated not to be an active part of Tommy McGrath’s murder investigation, or not really, anyway.
If Alex and Sampson were right about the Phoenix Club, the case was essentially in the FBI’s ha
nds now. Even though Mahoney had promised that DC Metro would be part of any search, the FBI would be calling the shots.
Bree tried to put it out of her mind and deal with the barrage of paper that now dominated her working life. But after ten minutes of scanning a series of administrative memos, she couldn’t take it anymore.
She had to do something that engaged her mind, that wasn’t mundane, that would do some good. Wasn’t that what being a cop was? Doing some good?
Bree pushed the paper pile aside and found copies of the murder books for Tommy McGrath, Edita Kravic, and Terry Howard. She started back through them, trying to suppress any preconceived ideas she had about the case, trying to see it all anew, with a beginner’s mind.
As she reviewed the investigative notes and forensics reports, she realized that they’d all been looking at the case as a revenge killing of some kind, done by Howard or someone else who had a beef with McGrath, and maybe with Edita Kravic too.
Bree consciously tried to erase that filter from her mind and played with possible other motives. Bree started by asking herself who would benefit from Tommy McGrath dying. Or from Edita Kravic dying, for that matter.
Someone inside the Phoenix Club, she supposed. Karl Stavros? He was the owner. If Stavros thought Tommy was onto him, maybe he’d had Tommy and Edita killed to protect himself and the alliance.
She started down through a list of the evidence gathered at their apartments and, after the encryption codes were broken, from their computer hard drives. For almost an hour and a half, she studied each item in turn and tried to see it as a benefit or a loss to a killer. She ran a search for the Phoenix Club on McGrath’s hard drive and got nothing. She ran a search on Edita Kravic and got the same.
Then she started through McGrath’s financial affairs. The late COD had had $325,000 in his retirement account, $12,000 in his checking account, and zero debt. McGrath didn’t own a home, had paid cash for his car, and paid off his credit cards every month.
His will was brief, drafted four years before. To Bree’s surprise, it named Terry Howard as his sole heir. If Howard was not alive at the time of McGrath’s death, the modest estate was to go to McGrath’s wife, Vivian.
Bree thought about that. Tommy McGrath still cared about his old partner enough to leave him his money. Could Howard have known and killed him to collect? Or could Vivian have …
She dismissed that out of hand. McGrath’s estranged wife was loaded, worth multimillions. Why would she kill Tommy for a measly three hundred grand and change?
She turned to the last page of the will and saw a reference to a document in the appendix that caused her to pause. Bree dug deeper into the financial files and found the document she was looking for. She flipped through it and then stopped at one item, thinking: Now that might be something worth killing or dying for.
Bree took the document out and went down the hall to Muller’s cubicle. She found the senior detective not looking like his ordinary disheveled self; he was sharply dressed in a nice suit and freshly polished shoes.
“Kurt,” she said, showing him the document. “Did we ever look into this?”
Muller took it, scanned it, and nodded. “It’s unclaimed, at least as of two days ago. I check that kind of thing regularly.”
Some of the wind went out of Bree’s sails. She’d thought she was really onto something, something they’d missed, and she’d briefly felt like she was doing some good.
But Muller had things under control.
Some of her disappointment must have shown because he said, “We’ll figure it out, Chief. We always do. But for now, I have to skip out. Got a date.”
Bree smiled. “You haven’t had a date in years.”
“Don’t I know it,” Muller said, adjusting his tie.
“Who’s the lucky lady?”
“The divine Ms. Noble,” Muller said, and he winked.
Bree laughed and clapped her hands, feeling better than she had all day. “I thought there was a spark between you two there in the FBI lab.”
“A crackling spark,” Muller said, walking past her with a grin smeared across his face. “Just crack-crack-crackling.”
CHAPTER
79
NANA MAMA BEAMED at Ali.
“You want your dessert before dinner?” my grandmother asked him. “Blueberry pie and ice cream?”
Unnerved by this break in the routine, Ali glanced at me. I smiled and held up my hands. “You heard her.”
“Yes, please, Nana,” Ali said. “And less Brussels sprouts at dinner?”
“Don’t push your luck,” my grandmother said, fetching the pie from beneath a fine-mesh cage. “Brussels sprouts are a superfood.”
“Kind of bitter,” Ali said.
Nana Mama squinted hard at him.
“Just saying,” Ali said.
My grandmother sighed, cut a thick slice of blueberry pie, plopped a scoop of French vanilla ice cream beside it, then set the plate in front of Ali.
“Any boy who can charm the pants off the admissions board of a fine school deserves this,” Nana Mama said, and then she handed him a spoon.
It was true. The principal and the math, science, and English teachers at Washington Latin had been waiting when we walked in. The principal introduced herself and the teachers and then asked Ali what he had been up to outside of school, on his own time. That set him off on a description of his epic quest to talk to Neil deGrasse Tyson.
“I could tell they were going to admit him about two minutes after he opened his mouth,” Nana Mama said. “I think they were most impressed at how many drafts of that letter he’s already written.”
“Though at some point he needs to just send it,” I said.
“Soon,” Ali said, his mouth full of blueberry pie and ice cream.
“You do me a favor, sugar?” my grandmother said to me. “Take a twenty from my purse and go on down to Chung’s and play my numbers?”
“The next drawing’s not for two days,” I said.
“Those jackpots are getting big,” she said. “I’d rather get in on the action before the stampede.”
“Get in on the action?” I said, smiling.
“Just laying my bets early, that’s all. Now, are you going to help an old lady out or not, Alex Cross?”
“You knew the answer the second you asked,” I said, and I got the money from her purse.
I went outside, feeling pretty good. The two-hour nap had helped. And it was only early September, but a front had come in and cooled things off. It felt nice to walk, and I did my best to focus on nothing but putting one foot in front of the other.
In my line of work, where I’m often bombarded by details and exposed to the worst of life, I have to clear my mind completely at least once a day. Otherwise, it all gets to be stressful chatter upstairs, an endless series of questions, theories, arguments, painful memories, and regrets. It can get overwhelming.
I was feeling even better by the time I reached the grocery and went inside. Chung’s was frigid, like always.
“Alex Cross, where you been, my man?” cried a woman behind the counter. “I was waiting on you or Nana Mama all day yesterday.”
Chung Sun Chung, a Korean American in her late thirties, sat framed in an arched hole in a plate of bulletproof glass. Sun, as she liked to be called, wore a puffy coat and fingerless mittens. She managed to keep an electronic cigarette in the corner of her mouth while smiling broadly at me.
I walked over to her. “We’ve both been busy.”
“How’s Damon like college?”
“Loves it.”
“I saw your Jannie on the YouTube.”
“Crazy, right?”
“She’s gonna be famous, that one. How many chances will Nana Mama be taking at an unlimited future today?”
“That’s your line?”
“Good one, huh?” She beamed and drew on her e-cigarette.
“Give her ten chances each on Powerball and Mega Millions,” I said, laying down the ca
sh.
My grandmother played only the big-money lotteries. If you’re going to dream, you might as well dream big, she liked to say.
“Same number?” Sun asked.
“Sure. Wait! You know what? Let’s change it up. Five each on her numbers and for the rest, add a one to the last number.”
Sun glanced at me. “Nana Mama’s not going to like that.”
“She won’t even look,” I said.
“You like taking your life in your hands?”
We both laughed. We were still laughing as I left.
On my way home to dinner with my family, I decided there were still good people in the world, very good people, like Chung Sun Chung. I guess I’d needed reminding of that after the past couple of weeks I’d had.
The cumulative violence and bloodshed inflicted by the vigilantes was sobering when I thought about it. Climbing the steps to my front porch and smelling a pie Nana Mama had baked, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the violence wasn’t over, that Hobbes and Fender and the other vigilantes were somehow just getting started.
CHAPTER
80
JOHN BROWN SAT forward in a chair, his eyes glued to the big-screen TV, where an NBC news reporter was standing in front of Antonin Guryev’s compound.
“This is the fourth such massacre in less than a month,” she was saying. “Up to now, the killers have left little evidence behind. But FBI special agent in charge Ned Mahoney says that has changed. Mistakes were made.”
Low voices rumbled through the room behind Brown. Many of his followers were looking at one another.
“Mistakes?” Hobbes said, putting down his beer. “No way.”
“Why don’t you shut up and listen,” Cass said, pacing and watching the screen. The scene jumped to Mahoney standing before a bank of microphones.
“We are confirming seventeen dead,” Mahoney said gravely. “We are also confirming that we have a witness, a survivor who saw many of the killings on security cameras in a secret panic room in the basement of the house. This witness got solid looks at two of the killers when they took off their hoods.”
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