Criss Cross (Alex Cross #27)(2)

We left the witness chamber, trying to ignore Edgerton’s mother, who alternated between emotional collapse and spitting rage.

“I will see you both destroyed for this!” she screamed at one point. “With every last cent I’ve got, I will see you both sitting in that chair for what you did to my son!”

We had to listen to that and the angry responses from the relatives of Edgerton’s victims until the final steel gate slammed shut behind us and we walked out of the penitentiary into drizzling rain and fog.

The Edgerton family came out moments later and walked to a waiting limousine. We went in the opposite direction, toward the squad car we’d driven down.

“Dr. Cross? Detective Sampson?”

I turned, expecting a journalist to shove a microphone in my face. Instead, Crystal Raider, the woman in the Georgia Tech sweatshirt, was standing there looking at us with an expression that was a rough sea of emotions and thoughts.

“He did that to torture us,” she said. “To stick the knife in us after all that he did to my sister and the others.”

“He did,” I said. “And he succeeded.”

Crystal raised her head defiantly. “Maybe. But I think somewhere my Kissy is thinking it was a good thing, how he went. I bet the other girls think so too.”

“Go home now,” I said softly. “Find Kissy in her son and let this all be a bad memory that you rarely visit.”

She cried at that and gave us both a hug. “Thank you for standing up for her, Dr. Cross, Detective Sampson. Neither of you ever judged her, and I’m grateful for that.”

“Pole dancers are people too,” Sampson said. “Good people. Like your sister.”

She cried through a weak smile, then she gave us a weaker wave and walked toward a waiting pickup truck with Florida plates.

The three-hour drive north was quiet and uneasy, both of us lost in our thoughts.

It wasn’t until we were almost to Washington, DC, that the rain stopped. Sampson cleared his throat. “I wasn’t expecting that, Alex,” he said in a hoarse voice.

“None of us were expecting it. Except Edgerton,” I said, suppressing a shudder.

My lifelong friend glanced at me. “Alex, right now I don’t know whether I should be satisfied at justice served or praying for my sins.”

My stomach soured, but I shook it off, said, “Mikey Edgerton did the dirty work on the eight and maybe more. There’s no doubt about it in my mind.”

There was a long pause as Sampson took the exit off 95 onto the Beltway, heading toward my home on Fifth Street in Southeast DC.

“No doubt in mine either,” Sampson said at last. “But still, you know?”

I swallowed hard. Before I could respond, my phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out, saw a familiar number, and answered. “This is Cross,” I said. “How are you, Chief?”

“I should be asking you that,” said Metro Police chief of detectives Bree Stone, my wife. “But I don’t have time, and neither do you.”

I sat up straighter, said, “What’s going on?”

She gave me an address in Friendship Heights and said to go there immediately. Then she told me why, and the sourness that lingered in my stomach became the worst kind of nausea, that terrible taste you get at the back of your throat just before you say goodbye to everything you’ve eaten all day.

“We’re on our way,” I said, then hung up.

“What’s the matter?” Sampson said.

“John,” I said in a hoarse whisper. “What in God’s name have we done?”





CHAPTER 3





WE DROVE TO FRIENDSHIP HEIGHTS, in the far northwest corner of DC, parked on Forty-First Street, and ran up the sidewalk to Harrison Avenue, where a patrol car with lights flashing was in front of a barrier.

“Which one is it?” Sampson asked the patrol officer.

“Third on the right, sir. There’s a few plainclothes there already.”

“And I imagine there will be more,” I said, moving around the barrier toward a gray Craftsman house with a tidy front yard and a medical examiner’s van parked out front.

On the scene, there were three uniformed officers and two in plainclothes whom I recognized as junior homicide detectives Owen Shank and Deana Laurel.

They were talking to two very upset women in their late thirties. Laurel spotted us, excused herself, and came over.

She told us that the two women—Patsy Phelps and Anita Kline—were neighbors of the Nixons, who owned the Craftsman. Gary Nixon, the father, was a successful attorney on K Street. Mr. Nixon had taken his two young children on a four-day trip to see his ailing mother in San Diego. Katrina, his wife of fifteen years, had a successful speech-pathology practice and couldn’t make the trip.

“They said the Nixons made it a point to talk twice a day, no matter where they were,” Detective Laurel said. “So when Mrs. Nixon didn’t answer her phone this morning or this evening, Mr. Nixon called Mrs. Phelps and Mrs. Kline to go over and check on their—”

Detective Shank came over and cut her off. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, Dr. Cross, Detective Sampson. But are you sure it’s okay for the two of you to be here? I mean, isn’t this kind of a conflict of interest?”