Target: Alex Cross

by James Patterson

  The message asked me to help but didn’t say how. I sensed that was deliberate and designed to irritate me, to get me asking myself unanswerable questions like Who’s sending these messages? And why?

  The mind is an ancient contraption controlled by questions, which is both a positive and a negative. Ask yourself a good, definable question, and your mind will do everything in its power to answer it, and it probably will be able to if given enough time.

  But if the question is unanswerable, the brain spins, hearing the question over and over and over and getting no response. Why does this always happen to me? Or Why can’t I get over this tragedy? Or Who’s sending these messages?

  Like twisting the key in the ignition of an engine that won’t turn over, the brain whirls on these unsolvable or as-yet-unsolved queries. Eventually, without answers, the brain gets agitated, angered, and then ground down. Eventually, it burns its way into a crisis or stalls entirely.

  Is that what these messages are meant to do? Get me wondering and then fixated on who is sending them and why? Get me—

  I heard a knock at my outer basement door. After putting the message in the top drawer of my desk, I went to answer the door and found Nina Davis, the Justice Department attorney, waiting.

  “I’m glad you decided to come back,” I said.

  She smiled weakly. “I didn’t know if I would until just a few minutes ago.”

  Nina made her way to my office and took the same seat she’d occupied during our first appointment.

  I sat opposite her. “How are things?”

  “Oh, you know, busy, busy, busy.”

  “Did you have the chance to do that exercise we discussed yesterday? Where you looked for good memories of your mother?”

  Her face fell. “You know, Dr. Cross, work’s been so crazy, I … no, actually, I didn’t go there.”

  I noted that, said, “Because those memories don’t exist?”

  Nina shrugged. “Because it’s a waste of time. If they did exist , they were blotted out by other memories, but really, that’s not what I’m here for.”

  “Okay.”

  She struggled, said, “I told you I can’t feel love, but that’s not totally true. I …”

  She looked at her lap.

  “As I’ve said, Nina, this is a safe place. You’ll get no judgment from me, and nothing you tell me ever leaves here. And honestly, I’ve heard so much and seen so much over the years, very little shocks me. I’ve found that most behaviors and problems, they aren’t all that unique once you talk them out, get to the root of things.”

  She crossed her arms and seemed offended, which didn’t surprise me.

  “You have no idea the things I’ve done, Dr. Cross,” she said. “The things I do when I’m not at work.”

  I kept quiet and gazed at her expectantly. I’d intentionally broken her pattern of thinking by intimating that her story, whatever it was, was not unique.

  Why? People in mental crisis are often convinced that they’re the only ones in the world suffering like this, which simply isn’t true. Once they abandon that notion, after realizing that most people have thoughts just like theirs, it’s often easier to get them to open up fully.

  “I do feel something like love,” Davis said at last. “Not the real thing, but close enough to crave it.”

  “When does that feeling happen?”

  Davis hesitated, glanced at the floor, then stiffened her shoulders and looked back up at me. “When I put myself in extreme situations. Sexually, I mean.”

  Over the course of the next forty-five minutes, Nina Davis told me of Kaycee Janeway, her dark side and alter ego when it came to sex.

  Nina liked to stalk men, big strong men who could dominate her.

  She would see a man like that, usually outside of work, and actually feel something, a tingle of attraction, perhaps, a twinge of risk, or a more primitive reaction to his particular musky smell. Whatever it was, there was always something else about him that took it further, triggered fantasies, and changed her fully from Nina to Kaycee.

  “I follow them when I can,” Nina said, staring off. “The men. At night, mostly, in bars, restaurants, even movie theaters. With their wives and girlfriends, or without. And the entire time I’m thinking of having sex with them. Rough stuff, mostly, but other times tender and sweet, and everything it’s supposed to be.”

  After several nights of stalking, Nina would try to ambush or accidentally encounter her prey and lure him in.

  “Once I know the fantasy I want to fulfill, I’ve never had problems attracting the men, or anyway Kaycee hasn’t,” Nina said. “And once the men know what I want, it’s not hard to convince them to give it to me, or at least try to give it to me.”

  No judgments, I reminded myself.

  “And you feel something like love during these encounters?”

  She brightened then, became almost radiant, and for the first time I realized just how beautiful Nina Davis was. Those eyes, those lashes, her dazzling smile. I understood in that moment that most men she stalked would indeed succumb to her.

  “Yes,” she said. “I feel … desperate emotion, during the sex and after. Other than the brief happiness I get from a job well done, they’re the only times I feel deeply—when they’re rough and domineering and … especially when they’re strangling me.”

  “So you engage in asphyxiation sex?”

  “As often as Kaycee can get it,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Nina said that when the blood flow to her brain was cut off by strangulation during intercourse, she almost always orgasmed and almost always felt flooded with warm feelings and positive emotions afterward.

  “But they don’t last,” she said. “After a few hours, I’m back to Nina, and there’s nothing to really feel again.”

  I said nothing, took a few notes.

  “So I’m a basket case, right?” Nina asked as the hour ended.

  “No,” I said. “Not in the least.”

  “But you’ve never heard of something this weird, this disturbed, have you?”

  I smiled, determined to break her of the idea that her issues were unique, and said, “Actually, I’ve heard stranger, and much more disturbed.”

  She blinked. Her face tightened. “Well, then, I guess …”

  “You guess?”

  After a moment’s struggle, she stood and said, “Nothing, Dr. Cross.”

  “Maybe something to talk about next time?”

  She hesitated again. “Maybe. Do you think I could come back tomorrow to talk about this?”

  I checked my schedule. “Yes, tomorrow at one thirty.”

  “Thank you. And, again, thank you for listening without judgment. I’m still trying to understand myself.”

  “We all are. Thank you for sharing. It had to have been difficult.”

  She knitted her brow. “You know? Not really.”

  When Nina Davis had gone, I let myself admit again how very attractive she was before thinking how defensive Nina had been when I’d challenged her. It was a clear sign to me that she was heavily invested in the role of a hypersexual woman.

  This was beyond sex with strangers as a way to unlock emotions. This was some deep, dark story she told herself or tried to forget, a story I didn’t think I’d come close to hearing all of yet.

  CHAPTER

  23

  El Paso County, Texas

  AFTER SEEING TO his two horses, Dana Potter picked up the last plastic storage box from the bed of the white Dodge Ram pickup with Kansas plates that he’d stolen in Abilene the evening before.

  Potter lugged the boxes across the dusty yard to the back of an old ranch house surrounded by steep, rocky, arid hills in the middle of a nowhere that began thirty miles to the east and went on all the way to the New Mexico border.

  A tall, wiry, and weathered man in his early forties, Potter toed open the kitchen door with his cowboy boots and went inside.

  “That’s the lot of it,” he said.

&nbs
p; Mary, his wife, looked up from the ultralight rifle she had mounted lengthwise in a portable gunsmith vise set up on an old wooden table covered in grocery bags.

  “Put them there,” Mary said, gesturing with a screwdriver to the floor.

  He put the boxes down and went over to his wife. “She come through zeroed?”

  “Only one way to find out,” she said.

  He hugged her. “I’ll do the basic check if you want to call on the sat phone. We can shoot her tomorrow.”

  She hugged him back. “Thanks. I’ve been worried.”

  “I know. Go on, now.”

  Potter leveled the bolt-action rifle in 6.5mm Creedmoor using a bubble level he placed on the elevation turret of the gun’s Schmidt and Bender tactical telescopic sight. Then he dug in an open box of tools next to the gun vise and came up with a hard plastic case that contained a bore-sighting system precisely calibrated to the gun.

  Mary was on her phone. “Jesse?”

  She listened, smiled, said, “Long drive, but it’ll be worth it. How’re you feeling?”

  In the silence that followed, Potter leveled and taped a custom cardboard chart to the kitchen wall. Then he got out the bore-sighting device itself.

  It had a long tapered front end that fit snugly down the barrel of the rifle. The rear of it was the size of a Bic lighter and featured a laser.

  Mary listened intently, and then her face clouded. “Put on Patty.”

  Potter said, “What?”

  His wife held up a finger.

  Potter threw up his hands and turned around to peer through the scope. He adjusted the gun and the vise until the crosshairs were dead on a similar set of crosshairs printed on the chart taped to the wall.

  Mary said, “Patty, I’m thankful for you being there. What’s his temperature?” Her expression darkened further. “Well, no matter what happens, he has to take his meds. Okay? Tell him his dad and I will call again later.”

  She hung up, angry. “Jesse refused two doses of his medicine, and he’s running a steady low-grade fever because of it.”

  Potter felt himself tighten, and then he sighed.

  “Look at it from his perspective. He’s a fifteen-year-old who’s been told he’s going to die unless he can get access to an insanely expensive treatment his government doesn’t believe in and won’t pay for. He’s trying to get some control over his life, and refusing meds is his answer.”

  Mary tried to stay angry, but then she let it go, appearing more sad than convinced. “I don’t like being away from him like this. Every moment, it’s …”

  “Did we have a choice?”

  “No,” she said, and her expression hardened. “We didn’t. We don’t. It’s no use wishing we had the money any other way. How’s my doll looking?”

  He went to the gun and flipped on the laser sticking out of the barrel. A glowing red dot appeared on the chart three inches above the printed crosshairs.

  “Perfect,” he said. “You’re three high at a hundred meters, dead on to three hundred. Two turret clicks and you’re zero at five hundred.”

  “I do like precision.”

  “It’s everything,” he said, taking her rifle from the vise and setting it aside.

  Potter picked up his own rifle. Green custom stock with a nice grip, the gun was also chambered in 6.5mm Creedmoor, but it carried a Leica sniper scope with an illuminated reticle.

  When properly sighted in, Potter’s rifle was more than capable of handling a five-hundred-yard shot. He just wanted to make sure it would when the time—

  The sat phone blinked and beeped before he could start testing the rifle.

  It was a number he recognized, and he answered.

  “Peter here,” said a male voice with a slight British accent. “How was the drive?”

  “Just beat that storm coming.”

  “Any trouble entering the country?”

  “None.”

  “I told you the passports and veterinarian papers were solid.”

  “We didn’t even need them. You going to give us our assignment?”

  “It’s all there, in the closet in the back bedroom. Everything you’ll need.”

  Mary left the kitchen, heading toward the back bedroom.

  Potter stayed where he was. “You’ll deposit the down payment?”

  “As soon as you tell me you’re taking the job.”

  “We’re here, aren’t we?”

  “Just the same.”

  Mary came back into the kitchen carrying a thick manila envelope. She’d lost several shades of color.

  “I’ll call you back,” Potter said, and he clicked off. “What’s the matter?”

  “Jesus Christ, Dana,” she said, handing him the envelope. “What the hell are we into now?”

  CHAPTER

  24

  HANDCUFFED AND WEARING an orange prisoner jumpsuit, the only surviving member of Romero’s crew glared at the tabletop as Bree followed Ned Mahoney into an interrogation room at the federal detention facility in Alexandria, Virginia.

  I was in an observation booth with U.S. Secret Service agent Lance Reamer and Capitol Police lieutenant Sheldon Lee.

  “She still hasn’t said anything?” Special Agent Reamer asked.

  “She’s asked for an attorney,” I said.

  “Course she did,” Lieutenant Lee said bitterly.

  Mahoney and Bree took seats opposite her. She raised her head, saw Bree, and acted as if she’d sniffed something foul. She had spiderweb tattoos on both hands and another climbing the left side of her neck.

  “Your prints came up,” Mahoney said, sliding a piece of paper in front of her. “Lupe Morales. Multiple arrests as a juvenile. Four as an adult, for solicitation, drug dealing twice, and abetting an armed robbery. Looks like you did three years in the California Institution for Women at Lompoc for that one.”

  “Eighteen months,” Lupe said, and she yawned. “I’ve asked for a lawyer. Twice now.”

  “The federal defender’s office has been notified,” Bree said. “In the meantime, you can do yourself a whole lot of good by talking to us.”

  She sniffed. “I’ve heard that one before.”

  Bree showed no reaction. “The U.S. attorney is preparing to charge you with four counts of kidnapping, three counts of attempted murder, and two counts of firing on police officers in the course of duty. Oh, and co-conspirator in the plot to murder a sitting U.S. senator. I’m thinking life without parole times two, maybe more.”

  “If not the federal death penalty,” Mahoney said. “The new administration’s big on taking that road whenever possible. Or hadn’t you heard?”

  Lupe sat forward, her upper lip curled. “I’m guilty of nothing but being stupid and going along for a ride I shouldn’t never have been on. Know what I’m saying?”

  “No, actually,” Bree said.

  “Spell it out,” Mahoney said.

  “Check my gun,” she said. “That little Glock? No bullets, and not because I ran out. It’s clean because I’ve never shot it. I didn’t shoot at no one. Never have. Never will. And especially no senator.”

  In the booth, I put a call in to the FBI lab at Quantico and asked a tech to check her assertion about her gun. He put me on hold. As I waited for an answer, I heard Lupe denying knowing exactly why Fernando Romero had decided to drive across country from Oakland to Washington, DC.

  “Only thing I knew is he said he was gonna set some things straight and make a pile of Benjamins doing it,” Lupe said. “I was just along for the ride.”

  “Armed to the teeth?” Mahoney said.

  “Not me. Like I said, that piece was all show.”

  “Tell us about Senator Walker,” Bree said.

  She shrugged. “Fernando hated her.”

  “Enough to kill her?”

  Lupe thought about that and then nodded. “But he’d have to have been seriously messed up on meth and Jim Beam and have her, like, show up at the door when he was all hating the world and shit.”
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br />   Mahoney said, “C’mon, Ms. Morales. Romero or his other man or you shot Senator Walker early yesterday morning from an empty town house in Georgetown.”

  “The hell I did,” Lupe said, sitting up, indignant. “Fernando didn’t either, or Chewy. We might’ve hated Walker, but we sure didn’t kill her.”

  “Romero confessed,” Bree said. “I heard him. So did two other police officers.”

  “No way!”

  “Way,” Bree said. “When you were out on the porch with the girls, when Romero and I were negotiating for time, he told me we had ten minutes and after that he didn’t give a damn, that little girls and Mommy were going to start dying, quote, ‘just like that bitch Betsy Walker did.’”

  “So?” Lupe said. “That’s no confession. He was just, like, comparing it.”

  “That’s not the way I heard it.”

  “You hear it any way you want, that don’t make it so. Was Fernando happy Walker was dead? Totally. He went out into the damned snow and did a dance when he heard. But he did not kill Betsy Walker. None of us did. Early yesterday morning? When she was shot? We were stuck in a shithole motel ’cause of that ice storm. The Deer Jump Lodge or something in, like, Roanoke. You go on and check. We gotta be on security cams there. People can’t be two places at once.”

  Bree started to say something but Mahoney beat her to it.

  “We will check, Ms. Morales. But again, if you weren’t here to kill Senator Walker, why did you and Mr. Romero and this Chewy come to Washington in the first place? And armed to the teeth?”

  “Like I said, I don’t know for sure,” Lupe said evasively. “I came along for the ride, mostly. I always wanted to see like the Lincoln Monument. Know what I’m saying?”

  Bree said, “But Mr. Romero was coming for other reasons, to set things right and make a lot of money? Is that correct?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Were you going to make money?”

  Lupe didn’t reply for several beats. “I dunno, maybe. It hadn’t been decided if I was in or out yet, like, if I was needed. Necessary, I guess.”

  “To do what?” Bree asked.

  Lupe’s face scrunched up. “No clue, I said.”