Cross Fire ак-17

by James Patterson

  And then he got his wish – I snapped, lost it.

  “Listen to me, you piece of shit! Stay away from us. I swear to God, if you ever–”

  “If I what?” he fired back just as forcefully. “Hurt your ridiculous family? Take away your precious fiancee?” His tone had changed on a dime to pure rage. “How dare you talk to me about what’s been taken away. What you get to keep! Just how many lives have you taken, Alex? How many families have you shattered with that nine millimeter of yours? You don’t even know the meaning of loss – not yet, you fucking hypocrite!”

  I’d never heard him go on like this before. In fact, Kyle rarely even cursed. Not the Kyle I’d known.

  Was he devolving in some way? Or was this just another one of his carefully timed acts?

  “Do you want to know the real difference between us, Alex?” he went on.

  “I already know the difference,” I said. “I’m still sane and you’re not.”

  “The difference is, I’m alive because none of you people have been able to bring me down, and you’re alive because I haven’t decided to kill you yet. Please tell me that obvious fact hasn’t escaped you.”

  “I’m not going to kill you, Kyle.” The words were just spilling out of me now. “I’m going to make sure you rot to death, slowly, back in that cell in Colorado where you came from. You’re going back.”

  “Oh, that reminds me,” he said – and then abruptly hung up. It was pure Kyle, just one more way of saying he’d started this thing and he was going to finish it, his way. Control was like oxygen to him.

  Suddenly, Bree was right there, with her arms around me. “I spoke to Nana,” she said. “Everything’s fine, but she knows we’re coming home. And I’ve got a squad car headed over there right now.”

  I got up and started dressing as fast as I could. My body was shaking with anger, and not just at Kyle.

  “I messed up, Bree,” I said. “Bad. I can’t let him get to me like that. I can’t! It’s only going to make things worse.”

  If that was possible.

  Chapter 19

  GODDAMN HIM! For everything.

  Kyle had just accomplished exactly what he wanted, which was to inject himself into my life. He had my number, in more ways than one. Now I had no choice but to respond.

  An MPD cruiser was in front of the house when we got there, with another uniformed officer in the back by the garage. Sampson was there, too; I’m not even sure who called him, but I was glad he came.

  “All cool, sugar, we’re good here,” he said as we came in. He and Nana were hanging out in the kitchen. She’d even managed a ham sandwich and chips for him by then.

  “This isn’t over,” I said. It was a struggle to keep my voice down while the kids slept upstairs. “We have to talk about moving the family.”

  “Oh, is that so?” Nana said, and the temperature in the room dropped about twenty degrees.

  “Nana–”

  “Alex, no. Not again. You do what you need to with the children. I, for one, meant it the last time when I said it would be the last time. I’m not moving out of this house, and that’s my final word on the subject.”

  Before I could even respond, she decided she wasn’t done after all.

  “And another thing. If this Kyle Craig is as good as you say he is, then it doesn’t matter where you put the children. What matters, Detective Cross, is that you protect them where they are.” Her voice was shaking, but her finger was steady as she pointed it right at my face. “Defend your home, Alex. Make it happen! You’re supposed to be good at your job.”

  She smacked the table twice with the flat of her hand and leaned back again. My move.

  First, I took a breath and counted to ten. Then I asked Bree to start the APB process right away. “Get it out on WALES, all jurisdictions, and then NCIC at the Bureau as soon as we can.” For that, we’d need a warrant number, and Sampson got on the stick to track it down.

  I put in my own call to the FBI field office in Denver. Technically, Kyle was their case, since he’d escaped from prison in Colorado.

  Over the phone, an Agent Tremblay told me that they had nothing new to report but that he’d be in touch with all mid-Atlantic field offices right away. This was a priority case for them, too, and not just because of the damage Kyle had done to the Bureau’s reputation the first time around. I had a feeling I’d be hearing from Jim Heekin at the Directorate in Washington first thing in the morning.

  Meanwhile, I made another call – and woke up my good buddy and sometimes sparring mate Rakeem Powell.

  Rakeem had been with the force for fifteen years, and a detective with the 103 for eight. Then, in the same six-month period, he’d gotten married and shot, in that order, and ended up taking early retirement.

  No one ever thought Rakeem would leave the department, but then again, no one thought he’d ever settle down either. Now he had his own close-security firm in Silver Spring, and I was about to become a client.

  By seven that morning, we had a whole system in place. The kids were covered to and from school by me and Bree, with Sampson as backup. Rakeem’s firm would provide overnight security, front and back, with daytime coverage as needed. They’d also spend the first day working up an assessment of penetrable areas of the house and try to have them wired up before the kids got home.

  Nana tried to put her foot down about FBI agents in the yard, but I came out on top of that one. As instructed by her, I was doing whatever I needed to do to make things happen. She and I were barely speaking at this point, and no one was happy about any of it, but this was our reality now.

  Life under siege. Kyle Craig was back in our lives.

  Chapter 20

  AND THEN LIFE does go on, ready or not.

  Once I got the kids to school, I made it over to St. Anthony’s in time for my second appointment of the morning, after missing the first. I’d been doing pro bono counseling for the hospital ever since I shut my private practice. These were high-need folks who couldn’t afford even basic mental-health care, so I was glad to do my part. It also helped keep me sharp and on my toes.

  Bronson “Pop-Pop” James pimp-walked into my dank little office with the same too-cool-for-school attitude as always. I’d met him when he was eleven; now he was a little older, and more confident in his cynical assessment of the world than ever.

  Two of his friends had died since I’d started seeing him, and most of his heroes – street thugs barely older than he was – were already dead, too.

  Sometimes I felt as if I were the only one in the world who cared about Bronson, which is not to say he was easy to work with, because he wasn’t.

  He sat on the vinyl couch across from me, with his jaw pointed at the ceiling, looking at something up there, or probably just ignoring me.

  “Anything new since the last time?” I asked.

  “Nothin’ I can talk about,” he said. “Man, why you always bringin’ that Starbucks in here?”

  I looked at the cup of Tall in my hand. “Why? Do you like coffee?”

  “Nah, never touch the stuff. It’s nasty. I like them Frappuccino shits they sell, though.”

  I could see him angling now, like maybe I’d pick him up a treat next time. Get him all sugared up. It was one of those rare flashes where the actual kid showed through the armor he seemed to wear day and night.

  “Bronson, when you said it’s nothing you can talk about, does that mean there’s something going on?”

  “You deaf? I said, Nothin’. I can. Talk about!”

  His leg jerked out, and he punctuated his words with kicks at the little table between us.

  Bronson was the type of boy people write psych papers about all the time – the debatably untreatable kind. As far as I’d been able to tell, he had no empathy for other people whatsoever. It’s a basic building block of what could become antisocial personality disorder – Kyle had it, too, in fact – and it made acting out his violent impulses very easy to do. Put another way, it made it very
hard for him not to act on them.

  But I also knew Bronson’s little secret. Inside that street-ready shell of his and behind the mental-health issues was a scared little kid who didn’t understand why he felt the way he did most of the time. Pop-Pop had been bouncing around the system since he was a baby, and I thought he deserved a better shake than life had ever given him. That was why I came to see him twice a week.

  I tried again. “Bronson, you know these talks of ours are private, right?”

  “ ’Less I’m a danger to myself,” he recited. “Or someone else.” The second point seemed to make him smile. I think he liked the power this conversation gave him.

  “Are you a danger to someone else?” I asked. My main concern was gangs. He hadn’t shown any tats or noticeable injuries – no burns, bruises, or anything else that looked like an initiation to me. But I also knew that his new foster home was near Valley Avenue, where the Ninth Street and Yuma crews ran, pretty much right on top of each other.

  “There’s nothin’ happenin’,” he said with conviction. “Just talkin’.”

  “And which crew are you ‘just talking’ with these days? Ninth Street? Yuma?”

  He was starting to lose patience now and trying to stare me down. I let the silence hang, to see if he might answer. Instead, he jumped up and pushed the table aside to get in my face. The change in him was almost instantaneous.

  “Don’t be grittin’ on me in here, man. Get your fuckin’ eyes off me!”

  Then he took a swing.

  It was as if he didn’t even know how small he was. I had to block him and sit him back down by the shoulders. Even then, he tried for me again.

  I pushed him onto the couch a second time. “No way, Bronson. Don’t even think about that with me.” I absolutely hated getting physical with him, given his history, but he’d crossed the line. In fact, it didn’t seem to matter to Bronson where the line was. That’s what scared me the most.

  This boy was headed over a cliff, and I wasn’t sure I could do anything to stop him.

  Chapter 21

  “COME ON, BRONSON,” I said, and stood up. “Let’s blow this joint.”

  “Where we goin’?” he wanted to know. “Juvie Hall? I didn’t hit you, man.”

  “No, we’re not going to Juvie,” I said. “Not even close. Let’s go.”

  I looked at my watch. We still had about thirty minutes left in the session. Bronson followed me into the hall, probably more out of curiosity than anything else. Usually when we left the room together, I escorted him out to his social worker.

  When we got outside and I clicked open the doors to my car, he stopped short again.

  “You a perv, Cross? You takin’ me somewhere private or something?”

  “Yeah, I’m a perv, Pop-Pop,” I said. “Just get in the car.”

  He shrugged and got in. I noticed him running his hand over the leather seat, and his eyes checking out the stereo, but he kept any compliments, or any digs, to himself.

  “So what’s the big secret, then?” he said as I pulled out into traffic. “Where the hell we goin’?”

  “No secret,” I said. “There’s a Starbucks not far from here. I’m going to buy you one of those Frappuccinos.”

  Bronson turned to look out his window, but I caught a little flash of a grin before he did. It wasn’t much, but at least for a few minutes that day, he just might have thought we were on the same side.

  “Venti,” he said.

  “Yeah, Venti.”

  Chapter 22

  THE IMBECILES WERE still in charge of the Bureau, or so it seemed. As far as Kyle Craig could tell, no one had even blinked when the freshly debriefed and newly reactivated Agent Siegel got himself assigned to the sniper case in DC. Siegel’s earlier stint in Medellin, Colombia, during their “murder capital of the world” days, was a matter of record, and an impressive calling card at that. They were lucky to have him on this one.

  Luckier than they knew – two agents for the price of one! He sat at his new desk in the field office, staring down at the photo ID he’d been issued that very morning. Max Siegel’s mug stared back. He still got a rise just looking at it – still half expected to see the old Kyle whenever he passed by a mirror.

  “Must be strange.”

  Kyle looked up to see one of the other agents standing over the cubicle wall. It was Agent What’shisname, the one everyone called Scooter, of all absurd things – Scooter, with the eager eyes and constant snacking on sugared carbs.

  Kyle slid the ID back into his pocket. “Strange?”

  “Returning to fieldwork, I mean. After all that time.”

  “Miami was fieldwork,” Kyle said, salting his speech with a dash of Siegel’s New Yawk attitude and patois.

  “I hear you. Didn’t mean to imply anything,” What’shisname said. Kyle just stared and let the awkwardness hang like a sheet of glass between them. “All right, well… you need anything before I head out?”

  “From you?” Kyle said.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “No thanks, Scooter. I’m all set.”

  Max Siegel was going to be antisocial. Kyle had decided that before he’d arrived. Let the other agents coo over baby pictures and share microwave popcorn in the break room. The wider the berth they gave him around here, the more he could get done, and the more secure his masquerade.

  That’s why he liked after hours so much. He’d already spent most of the previous night right there at the office, sucking up everything there was to know about the Eighteenth Street shooting. Tonight, he focused on crime-scene photos and anything to do with the shooter’s methods. His profile was shaping up nicely.

  Certain words kept coming to mind as he worked. “Clean.” “Detached.” “Professional.” There had been no specific calling card from this killer, and none of the “come and get me” gamesmanship you so often saw with these things. It was almost sterile – homicide from 262 yards, which was an absolute yawn from Kyle’s perspective, even if the shock and awe of it, to borrow a phrase from the newspapers, were rather elegantly rendered.

  He worked for several hours, even lost track of time, until a ringing phone somewhere broke the silence in the office. Kyle didn’t think too much about it, but then his own line went off a minute later.

  “Agent Siegel,” he answered, with a smile in his voice, though not on his face.

  “This is Jamieson, over in Communications. We just got a homicide report from MPD. Looks like there’s been another sniper attack. Up in the Woodley Park area this time.”

  Kyle didn’t hesitate. He stood up and shrugged on his jacket. “Where am I going?” he said. “Exactly where?”

  A few minutes later, he was pulling out of the parking garage and driving on Mass Avenue at around sixty. The sooner he got up there, the sooner he could head off Metro Police, who were no doubt fouling up his crime scene at that very moment.

  And more important – Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines – this was the moment he’d been waiting for. With any luck, it was time for Alex Cross and Max Siegel to meet.

  Chapter 23

  I WAS AT home when I got the call about the latest sniper murder near Woodley Park.

  “Detective Cross? It’s Sergeant Ed Fleischman from Two D. We’ve got a nasty homicide up here, very possible sniper fire.”

  “Who’s the deceased?” I asked.

  “Mel Dlouhy, sir. That’s why I called you. He fits right into the mold on your case.”

  Dlouhy was currently out on bail but still at the center of what looked to be one of the biggest insider tax scandals in U.S. history. The allegations were that he’d used his position in the District’s IRS office to funnel tens of millions in taxpayer dollars to himself, his family, and his friends, usually through nonprofit children’s charities that didn’t actually exist.

  Another sniper incident, and another bad guy right out of the headlines – we had a pattern.

  The case had just jumped to a new level, too. I was determined we�
��d get this right from the very start. If it had to be a circus, I could at least try to make sure it was my circus.

  “Where are you?” I asked the sergeant.

  “Thirty-second, just off of Cleveland Avenue, sir. You know the area?”

  “I do.”

  Second District was the only one in the city with zero homicides in the last calendar year. So much for that statistic. I could already feel the neighborhood panic going up.

  “Did the fire board get there?”

  “Yes, sir. The victim’s confirmed dead.”

  “And the house is clear?” I asked.

  “We ran a protective sweep, and Mrs. Dlouhy’s with us now. I can ask for consent to search if you want.”

  “No. If anyone’s inside, I want them out. Call DC Mobile Crime. They can start photographing, but nobody touches anything until I get there,” I told Sergeant Fleischman. “Do you have any idea where the shots came from yet?”

  “Either the backyard, or the neighbor’s place behind that. Nobody’s home over there,” Fleischman told me.

  “Okay. Set up a command post on the street – not in the yard, Sergeant. I want officers at the front and back doors, and another at the neighbor’s house. Anyone wants to get into either place, they go through you first – and then the answer is no. Not until I’m on-site. This is an MPD crime scene, and I’m ranking Homicide. You’re going to see FBI, ATF, maybe the chief, too. He lives a lot closer than I do. Tell him to call me in the car if he wants.”

  “Anything else, Detective?” Fleischman sounded just a little overwhelmed. Not that I blamed him. Most 2D officers aren’t used to this kind of thing.

  “Yeah, talk to your first responders. I don’t want any jaw jacking with the press or the neighbors – no one. As far as your guys are concerned, they haven’t seen a thing, they don’t know a thing. Just keep the whole place locked down tight until I’m there.”