Deadly Cross

by Patterson, James

  Willingham threw his hands up in surrender and stood. “I wish I could help more, but duty calls.”

  “One more thing, sir,” Mahoney said, also standing up.

  “Yes?”

  “No one’s come forward to claim your ex-wife’s body.”

  He appeared nonplussed by the comment for a moment. He glanced at his chief of staff, then said, “Of course I’ll claim her and contact the executor of Kay’s — ”

  His chief of staff’s cell phone rang. She answered it, listened, held up one finger, then said, “You’re sure? Yes, please send a copy to my e-mail.”

  She hung up, looked at Willingham. “There it is, then, Walter. That was the Quantico lab. The gun’s a match for the bullets that killed Kay and Mr. Christopher.”

  CHAPTER 34

  LATER THAT DAY, BREE LEANED back in her chair in her office inside Metro Police headquarters downtown. “Did you expect it?”

  “That it was as simple as jealous rage and a love triangle?” I said. “No, actually. But the ballistics are a match and, as Willingham’s aide said, ‘There it is.’ ”

  “She fit to stand trial?”

  “That I do not know,” I said.

  After a moment, Bree said, “Kay Willingham was in a psychiatric institution?”

  “Committed to multiple three-month stays over the course of almost thirty years. Considered a danger to herself and others.”

  “What happened, exactly?”

  I gave her the CliffsNotes version of the medical file I’d read that included only the details of her most recent stay at West Briar and references to earlier stays at the facility. In the wake of her mother’s death, Kay Willingham had sunk into a depression, which concerned her husband, as she’d already endured severe bouts with the illness, the first one at age seventeen. During the three breakdowns that followed, Kay bottomed out and had psychiatric breaks; she had to be hospitalized for her own safety.

  “Did Willingham bring her to the psychiatric facility?” Bree asked.

  “The first two times,” I said. “The most recent stay, she was evidently brought in by a childhood friend in Alabama. Kay was in a dissociative state after attempting suicide by trying to cut her femoral artery with a pair of kitchen shears. It explains the scars we saw in the autopsy report.”

  Bree looked appalled. “She tried to commit suicide by stabbing herself in the leg?”

  “Repeatedly,” I said.

  “That’s a harsh way to try to kill yourself.”

  “The wrists are easier,” I said.

  “Punishing herself,” Bree said.

  “Yes. But for what, I don’t know. And given the chemical imbalances she was experiencing, who knows whether her reasons mattered.”

  “It’s all just gossip fodder now,” she said. “Elaine Paulson is the killer, so you can spend more time now on the Maya Parker and Elizabeth Hernandez cases.”

  “You’ve got it,” I said. “Anyplace specific you want me to start?”

  Bree said she’d been looking at the old files regarding the earlier rapes and murders. A year before Elizabeth Hernandez disappeared, there was a woman named Peggy Dixon who claimed she was attacked and got away from the rapist. “She was a druggie and I think the detectives who talked to her might have discounted what she said. She evidently called here again a few days ago, wanting to talk to someone about Hernandez and Parker.”

  “Contact information?” I asked.

  “Right here,” Bree said and slid a piece of paper across the desk to me. She glanced at the desk clock. Quarter to six. She made a sour face. “I’m fifteen minutes from yet another update meeting with the chief and Commissioner Dennison. See you at home afterward?”

  “Yes. By the way, Willingham said he’d prefer to keep Kay’s psychiatric history quiet.”

  “Of course. Have you heard from John?”

  “No,” I said. “Maybe I should stop by before dinner?”

  “I think he’d like that.”

  CHAPTER 35

  WHEN I REACHED SAMPSON’S HOME, the front door was ajar. I knocked but got no answer, so I pushed open the door and called out, “John?”

  “Kitchen,” he called back.

  I found him drying pots and pans. “I was going to invite you to our house to eat.”

  He shrugged, kept drying. “Andrew and Kari came in hungry, so we ate early.”

  “They here?”

  “With Willow. They took her out for ice cream.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “I have the feeling I’m going to get sick of that question awful fast.”

  “Understandable,” I said. “Take a walk?”

  Sampson thought about that for a moment and then nodded.

  It was a warm night, perfect for walking, which we did in silence for ten minutes, moving side by side, me trying to keep up, trying to subtly mirror his every motion so he felt comfortable enough to open up.

  “This was a good idea,” Sampson said at last. “Before you suggested it, my chest hurt and it felt like I wasn’t breathing right.”

  “You’ve probably been breathing shallow because of everything,” I said. “And when your breathing deviated from its natural depth and rhythm, you got out of what neuropsychologists call heart coherence. Because of that, you felt the pain.”

  John stopped, looked at me. “Heart coherence? For real, Alex?”

  “For real what?”

  “Nothing,” he said and started walking again.

  I jogged to catch up. “What was that about?”

  Sampson shook his head, got teary. “It was like she was preparing me, man.” Over the next ten minutes, John reminded me of Billie’s long-standing interest in meditation, a practice she’d begun after her first husband was unjustly executed. Billie’s interest had led to a retreat in the Poconos, which was most likely where she’d been bitten by the tick.

  “Anyway,” Sampson said. “That’s what the entire retreat was about — heart coherence — using your breath to get your heart, I don’t know, beating in sync with its natural rhythm or something? Honestly, I thought it was a bunch of woo-woo — heart coherence—but it made her happy to think it was real. I’ll say this — even though she was sick, she wasn’t beat down by it.”

  “That’s because heart coherence is real,” I said. “It’s scientifically measurable. I’ve seen it achieved. On the screen of a sensitive electronic-monitoring system, anyway. But if you can learn to find it, there are all sorts of health benefits, mental as well as physical.”

  I explained that neuropsychologists at Michigan State had developed a way to measure a person’s depth and pattern of breathing at the same time they were tracking the heart through a finger sensor that monitored not only the pulse but the quality of the pulse.

  Sampson frowned. “I didn’t know pulse had a quality.”

  “Well, it’s the quality of the electrical impulse given off by the heart beating, but the point is that when people start out, especially when they’re under stress, their breathing is usually shallow and ragged. And their hearts react in kind, throwing off the sharp spikes you see on cardiac monitors on medical dramas on TV.”

  Sampson’s jaw tightened, and I realized that in his mind he might be seeing the monitor in the room where Billie died.

  “John,” I said, touching him on the elbow. “Stay with me.”

  He blinked, looked at me oddly, said, “I’m with you.”

  I said that the scientists taught their subjects first how to breathe deeply from the abdomen in order to create a pattern on a monitor that looked like one perfect bell curve after another. Within minutes, the heart responds to this breathing pattern by sending out a different electrical signal.

  “The tracing on the cardiac monitor looks entirely different,” I said. “Not jagged at all. More like a series of curves that stack up to a peak and then step down, forming a soft pyramid of sorts. But what’s remarkable is when you see people who are good at it. On the monitors, their heartbeat
s shift and get inside their breath curves and they, as Billie told you, sync up.”

  “And that’s good, huh?”

  “Supposedly the best thing you can do for yourself.”

  “Billie was onto something, then.”

  “From a different angle, but yes.”

  “She was trying to teach me something, like she could sense it.”

  “I’m not going to deny it.”

  We’d come by a roundabout route back to his house. His stepchildren and his daughter were already home. We could hear a television droning inside.

  “Maybe I’ll have to look into it,” Sampson said. “Heart coherence, I mean.”

  I nodded. “It will help. And it will honor Billie.”

  He nodded sadly, then gestured with his head toward the house. “I just wish I understood it well enough right now so I could go in and teach it to three other people with busted hearts.”

  CHAPTER 36

  WHEN I GOT HOME ABOUT an hour later, I felt wrung out.

  Jannie was stretching on the floor in the front room watching Ozark on Netflix, the latest binge-watch series in the family.

  “Hello, darling,” I said.

  She hit Pause, looked up, and smiled quizzically at me. “Hi, Dad. You look tired.”

  “A long day that ended at Sampson’s house,” I said.

  Her face fell. “How are they?”

  Nana Mama came out from the kitchen and called to us, “No use repeating it three or four times, Alex. Dinner’s on, so come tell us there so we can all hear you at once.”

  With that, my grandmother barreled back in the direction she’d come from. I looked at Jannie and we both started laughing.

  Jannie whispered, “Sometimes I wonder whether Nana’s got every room in the house bugged. Ali thinks she does.”

  I snickered at the idea. “No.”

  “Ali thinks she has this panel hidden up in her room and she can listen in on — ”

  My grandmother appeared again, sterner now. “Dinner’s on. We’re waiting.”

  We exchanged smiles and headed to the kitchen, where Bree was already sitting at the table. Two whole chickens slow-roasted in a mustard sauce lay carved on a serving tray next to boiled root vegetables and sautéed greens, garlic, and onions.

  “If I knew it smelled like this in here, I would have run in,” I said, kissing Bree on the cheek and then taking a seat next to my youngest child, who was staring into space while playing with the lobe of his right ear.

  “Hey, kiddo,” I said. “What’s buzzing around up there?”

  He looked at me in surprise. “Oh, hi, Dad. When did you get here?”

  “Like five seconds ago,” Jannie said, waving her hand in front of his face. “Hello? Earth to Ali. Earth to Ali. Too much radio silence.”

  He scrunched up his face. “Bill Gates’s mom used to say that kind of thing to him when he was a kid down in the basement.”

  “What? She did not.”

  “She did so. If Gates was there and she hadn’t heard from him in a while, she’d yell down to ask what he was doing. And he’d yell back, like, ‘Thinking, Mom. You’ve heard of that, right? Thinking?’ ”

  “He did not.”

  “Look it up,” Ali said.

  “That’s enough,” Nana Mama said, taking her seat. “We’re here to eat as a family, which, as we know from Billie’s passing, is a blessed but fragile thing.”

  “Amen,” Bree said.

  “Amen,” I said, and we all bowed our heads and gave thanks and praise for the miracle of our lives and our food.

  After we’d eaten much of the delicious meal, Nana Mama sat back. “How are they?”

  “I asked John the same thing and he said he was going to get sick of that question, but he’s fixated on making sure Billie’s funeral befits her and trying to be a rock for his children.”

  Bree said, “It gives him a purpose to get through the initial loss.”

  “What’s that mean?” Ali asked.

  I said, “After someone dies, people go through the same stages of grief, but they work through them in different ways and in different sequences, sometimes over and over.”

  “But John’s going through grief by making sure her funeral’s beautiful?”

  “Yes. But that lasts only until the funeral is over. Then the tough part begins.”

  Jannie said, “It’s so sad. After Billie’s kids go home, Sampson will be alone with Willow. How’s he going to do that?”

  “With our help,” Nana Mama said. “Once he’s ready to accept it, we’ll offer it.”

  “We already have,” I said.

  “We keep offering it, then.”

  “Anything John or Willow needs,” Bree said, nodding and looking around. “The Sampsons are as much part of this family as any of us.” We all nodded and there were more than a few watery eyes at the table.

  I couldn’t have been prouder of Bree and Nana Mama for getting the sentiment just right or more in love with my family for opening up their lives and their hearts. Sampson was already my best friend, but in shared grief and out of sheer goodness, they’d just made John and Willow so much more.

  CHAPTER 37

  BOTH OF OUR CELL PHONES started buzzing and ringing at five forty-five a.m.

  “Not good,” Bree said, accepting her call.

  I did the same and we both learned that a congresswoman from Michigan had just been shot mere blocks from our house. Officers and ambulances were racing to the scene and a commander was requested. Bree said we’d be there in ten minutes.

  We dressed fast and didn’t bother with a car; we just ran toward Pennsylvania Avenue, Seward Park, and the flashing blue and red lights. Before we got there, the ambulance had already raced away. The uniformed Metro and Capitol Hill Police officers on the scene recognized Bree immediately.

  “You got here fast, Chief Stone,” one of them said.

  “We don’t live five blocks from here,” she said, gasping. “What happened?”

  “Someone shot Congresswoman Elise McKenna while she was out jogging. Bullet hit the flank of the right buttocks, exited the left. She said she didn’t hear the shot. That’s all she said before we left.”

  “Witnesses?” Bree asked.

  “One so far,” he said. “Lady she was running with. Another congresswoman. Tracey Williams. From Arkansas. She’s over there.”

  He gestured with his chin across the crime scene toward a woman in running gear, her arms crossed, talking to a female uniformed officer.

  Bree looked at me. “Can you call in FBI forensics? I don’t want any conflict on jurisdiction between Metro and Capitol Police to screw up the evidence.”

  “Smart,” I said and made the call to Ned Mahoney as we walked around the crime scene, seeing a sizable smeared pool of blood on the brick sidewalk and growing crowds of onlookers across the street by the park.

  A satellite news van rolled by with a cameraman hanging out the window.

  “Keep them moving!” Bree yelled at the uniforms.

  The female Capitol Police officer saw us coming and walked to meet us. “You can hear it from her, Chief,” she said, and she kept going.

  Representative Williams, who was in her late thirties, was extremely agitated. We introduced ourselves and shook her trembling hand.

  “I feel like I need a cigarette and I quit smoking ten years ago,” she said in a soft Southern accent. “Maybe a carton of cigarettes.” She tried to laugh before looking over at the bloody sidewalk in a daze. “That could have been me, and I left my phone at the apartment so I can’t call my husband and kids back home and tell them I’m all right, and I gave Elise’s phone to the EMTs… Jesus, why would someone do such a thing?”

  Bree handed over her cell phone. “Call your husband, Congresswoman, and then we’ll talk.”

  Williams hesitated but then took the phone and called her husband.

  “I’m okay, but something’s happened,” she said. “I’m fine, really. I’ll call after I talk
to the police and I’ll tell you everything. I love you. Kiss the kids.”

  She smiled at us, her eyes glassy, and thanked Bree before describing how she, Elise McKenna, and a third freshman congresswoman lived together in a small apartment east of the Capitol. Four mornings a week, she and McKenna went for an early run.

  They had taken their normal four-mile route and were roughly three miles into it when McKenna, who was leading, suddenly screamed and then sprawled on the sidewalk.

  “I had no idea what had happened,” Williams said, tearing up again. “I ran to her, she was grabbing at her… butt cheeks and screaming she’d been shot. I saw the blood, used her phone, and called 911, and here we are.”

  “You never saw the shooter?”

  “I never heard the gun,” she said. “We were running and then she was down.”

  “Traffic?”

  Williams nodded, but looked puzzled. “Yes. I mean, I think so.” She turned to orient herself so she was facing east, then waved her left hand. “Yes, there was traffic, but I couldn’t tell you what cars they were or how many because I don’t think the shot came from Pennsylvania Avenue.” The congresswoman pivoted clockwise and gestured back across the intersection with Fifth Street toward a line of cars parked against the far sidewalk by the Capitol Hill United Methodist Church. “You ask me, it came from back there.”

  “Why do you think that?” Bree asked.

  Williams thought about that before she faced east again, shifted her torso and hip to her left and forward, northeast.

  “Because Elise kind of did that before she screamed and went down,” the congresswoman said. “Am I free to go?”

  “We can arrange a car if you don’t want to face the media horde,” Bree said.

  “Kind of you, Chief, thank you, I’ll take you up on that offer,” she said. “I’m going to shower and head straight to the hospital to see Elise.”

  Bree and I walked over to where the congresswoman thought the shooter must have stood, behind that line of cars parked by the church. Low on the church wall was newly painted graffiti that said Shoot the Rich!