Criss Cross (Alex Cross #27)(17)

Hearing sirens in the distance, no doubt summoned by Craig’s shots, I said, “How did you get onto him?”

“I knew he was bad from the get-go, kind of smelled it, especially after he sent us all to see that old man at the cupcake shop. So I dug into him a little. He’s not Bernard Mountebank, and he’s not from England. Meet Gerald St. Michel, suspected serial sex offender from the British Virgin Islands.”

He told us St. Michel had entered the United States after obtaining a green card by marrying a woman from Northern Virginia. St. Michel hadn’t said anything to her about his criminal past, nor did he mention that in his application for permanent-resident status or in his dealings with his business partner Nathan Daniels.

But Craig had found documents through an FBI database that showed St. Michel had changed his name to Mountebank a year before leaving the Virgin Islands. Craig had contacts on the islands who put him in touch with a police detective there.

“He hadn’t heard that St. Michel had gotten resident status,” Craig said. “No one had ever contacted the BVI about him. If someone had, the detective would have said that St. Michel was a suspect in several sexual assaults down there, often of female tourists.”

The detective believed St. Michel had abducted five different young women over the course of seven years. In each case, he’d kept the woman as a sexual slave for three days, then drugged her and let her go.

“He always wore a mask,” Craig said, gesturing at the one he’d set by the dead man’s head. “And he was careful to clean the women up. But the detective said there was no doubt in his mind that St. Michel was his man.”

“You think he’s the one who killed Kissy Raider?” Sampson asked.

“He’s looking awful good for it to me,” Craig said.

I took a flashlight from my pocket and shone it inside the van, where there was a kit waiting: strips of duct tape for his victim’s mouth and ankles, hanging above a pair of handcuffs linked through a bracket welded into the van’s wall.

“He had it worked out. Looks just like what happened to Kissy,” Sampson said.

“But it’s not,” I said. “Kissy was restrained by nylon webbing and eyebolts.”

“Close enough,” Craig said.

“Maybe,” I said, opening the passenger door of the van.

The dome light had been turned off, but I beamed my flashlight under the seats, across the dash console, and into the glove compartment.

Then, as the first Fairfax County Sheriff patrol cars pulled into the parking lot, I went through St. Michel’s pockets. I found nothing.

“Is it the same guy?” Sampson said after I’d taken a step or two back from the scene.

“I don’t know,” I said. “If it is, where’s the bleach solution? More important, where’s the tie he was going to strangle her with?”





CHAPTER 21





Present day



EVENTUALLY I PUT AWAY THE files in the attic and went back to bed. The next day, operating on less than five hours of sleep, I managed to see several private clients in my basement office. But in the gaps between appointments, my mind slipped repeatedly into the deep past, replaying how Kyle Craig had appeared out of nowhere to shoot Gerald St. Michel.

But no nylon webbing. No eyebolts in the van wall. No bleach. No tie.

A dozen years later, I could still feel the instinctive response I’d had to those discrepancies in the pattern, could still remember how I left the crime scene with lingering doubts that St. Michel was our serial rapist and killer.

But as Sampson kept saying, St. Michel had targeted a blond single mom who had a young son and worked at Hooters. What were the odds of two different killers sharing the same target profile? Pretty slim, and that and the fact that there were no new attacks for a while had allowed me to dismiss my doubts.

Then a man grabbed a young blond woman late at night in Falls Church, Virginia. He used a necktie to bind her hands and threw her in a panel van. She managed to escape when he stopped at a light and was able to give police a rough description of her assailant.

I was lost in thought when a knock came at my office door, and I shot up about a foot in the air, I was so startled.

“Yes?” I said, frowning because I was done with patients for the day.

“Alex, I’m baking brownies,” my grandmother said, opening the door. “And Ali’s home from school.”

Brownies. I glanced at my watch. Half past four. A good time for a break.

“I’ll be right up,” I promised, and I shut down my laptop.

When I entered the kitchen, the smell of baking brownies was incredible.

“Don’t you go looking in that oven,” Nana Mama said. “I’ve got them on a timer.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said, pouring myself some orange juice, but I desperately wanted to open the oven and breathe in the aroma of my grandmother’s heavenly brownie concoction, which had three different kinds of chocolate and chopped walnuts and pistachios.

Ali came into the kitchen and put his school bag on the counter. “Hi, Dad. How long, Nana?”

“Ten minutes. Anyone can wait ten minutes.”

He started to protest, but I said, “Rule number one: Listen to Nana. Rule number two: See rule number one.”