Criss Cross (Alex Cross #27)(11)

“Guilty men have come up with stranger stories,” she said.

I turned off the light, thinking, Then again, Craig used the alias Mastermind for a time, didn’t he? Is he now M? Could he possibly have survived that blast?

My rational mind said, No. Absolutely not.

After a few minutes, Bree was snoring gently. I started to drift off …

That dog began to bark again, and I snapped wide awake. I was about to get dressed and go have it out with the owner at last when I heard tapping against the window and realized it had started to rain. I figured that would end the barking.

I was wrong. Twenty minutes later, I was still awake, and the dog was still barking in that damn repeating pattern.

Finally, I got up and climbed the stairs to my attic office. I closed the window behind my desk, turned on the light, and looked at the boxes stacked waist-high by seven bulging upright filing cabinets. Evidence of old cases, some solved, others not.

Though I did not want to, I knew where I needed to go— back to the beginning, back to the hunt for Mikey Edgerton, long before M had come into the picture.

I found what I was looking for in a box labeled kissy at the bottom of the stack in the right corner of my office, where I thought I’d put it to rest forever. I set the box on the desk but hesitated to open it, wondering if I was wise to dig into this part of my past. A smart part of me said that it was wiser than not digging into it.

I pulled off the box cover, took out the first file, and almost immediately fell back in time.





CHAPTER 13





Twelve years before



IN A DRIVING RAIN ON a late May afternoon, John Sampson and I hurried north on Wisconsin Avenue toward La Cravate, an upscale men’s-necktie store that catered to the rich and powerful in Washington, DC.

I carried a tie in a plastic evidence bag. The tie was silk and in a blue-and-red-paisley print, the kind you might see on a high-powered lobbyist on K Street. At least, that was the impression I got seeing it, brilliantly colored, crisp along the edges, and the knot near perfect around the neck of throttled twenty-six-year-old Cassandra “Kissy” Raider.

Two homeless men looking for a place to crash for the night had found Ms. Raider’s corpse in a stolen and abandoned panel van in Southeast DC. She had been naked and spread-eagled on the floor, her wrists and ankles lashed with half-inch nylon webbing through eyebolts turned into the walls of the van, which reeked of bleach.

An autopsy found the killer had drenched Raider’s body in a diluted bleach solution, which had destroyed any DNA evidence that might have been left after she was savagely and repeatedly beaten and raped prior to her strangulation.

At first, we treated the rape and murder as a one-off, and in the crucial first forty-eight hours, we focused on Raider’s work at the Stallion Club, a strip joint in suburban Maryland, and on her ex-boyfriend, a biker from Roanoke, Virginia, who’d been convicted of some minor crimes in the past.

But when we ran the basic facts about the Raider case through the FBI’s files, we got seven hits, including one in Boca Raton, Florida, and another in Newport Beach, California.

Like Kissy Raider, both victims had been petite, buxom blondes and single moms of young children. And like Kissy Raider, both women had been raped, beaten, and then throttled with a fine silk tie.

None of the ties carried a manufacturer’s mark, which had us stymied for almost a week. But then Sampson started researching shops that specialized in high-end ties, and that was what led us to the Georgetown boutique.

We went inside and were greeted with the scent of some kind of essential oils misting the air, cedar and something I couldn’t quite place. Whatever it was, it seemed to put me in a better mood, although that could have been due to just getting out of the pouring rain.

A fit, balding man in his forties with tan skin stood behind the counter. A second man was stocking the racks upon racks of men’s neckties. He was as tall as the other guy but must have weighed close to three hundred pounds. But you wouldn’t have known that at first glance; the tailoring of his suit hid it until he started moving.

The one behind the counter fixed us with a What are you two doing in an upscale place like this? stare and said in an English accent, “We take deliveries around back.”

Sampson pulled himself up to his full height—well over six feet—and shot the man a surly look. Then he dug out his badge and ID while I did the same.

“We’re not here to make a delivery, Chatsworth,” Sampson said.

I said, “We’re homicide investigators with Metro PD.”

The man behind the counter looked indignant and then sputtered, “My name is not Chatsworth, it’s Bernard Mountebank, and we know nothing about any murder.”

“Nothing at all,” the other man said in a mild Southern accent. He was Nathan Daniels, he told us, and he and Bernard owned the shop.

“We didn’t say we thought you were involved in a murder,” Sampson growled. “We need your help.”

“We hoped you could help identify this tie, gentlemen,” I said, holding out the evidence bag. “The manufacturer, anything at all you can tell us.”

That seemed to somewhat mollify Daniels, but Mountebank still seemed insulted by Sampson having called him Chatsworth. I thought it was kind of funny as well as justified, given that he’d taken us for deliverymen.