Double Cross

floor. I couldn’t see Bree or anyone else up there.
    Just a quick look around,
I told myself.
For old times’ sake. No harm in that.

Chapter 12

    WHO WAS I TRYING TO KID, anyway? The Dragon Slayer was on the prowl again, and it felt natural, like I had never been away. Not even for the months I had been.
    Most of the television-news cameras were set up around the MPD street-level command center. As I walked nearby, I recognized the captain of Violent Crimes, Thor Richter. Richter was standing behind a bouquet of microphones that had been stuck in the middle of all the chaos, and he was handling the interviews himself.
    That probably meant Bree was still upstairs. Fine by her, I was sure. She didn’t like police politics, or Richter in particular, and neither did I. He was too much by-the-book, a ruthless prick and shameless ass-kisser. Plus, who the hell was named Thor? I was being unkind, I knew, but I just didn’t like the captain.
    The lobby of the apartment building was relatively quiet, and I was recognized by a couple of uniforms who didn’t seem to know that I wasn’t on the Job anymore and hadn’t been for a while. As I rode the elevator to twelve, I didn’t really expect to get much farther than the primary perimeter. Somebody would be checking badges there.
    Somebody was—an old friend, it turned out, Tony Dowell, who used to work in Southeast. I hadn’t seen Tony, or heard from him, in years.
    “Look who it is. Alex Cross.”
    “Hey there, Tony. I thought they retired cops as old as you. Bree Stone around anywhere?”
    Tony reached for his radio but then changed his mind. “Straight down the hall,” he said, and pointed. Then he handed me a pair of latex gloves. “You’ll need these.”

Chapter 13

    I FELT A LITTLE SHIVER of anticipation, then kind of an unpleasant chill. Was it that easy to step back into the line of fire, or whatever this was? At the front door to apartment 12F, a small Asian man I recognized as an MPD techie was dusting for prints. That told me it would be relatively calm inside. Chemical elements aren’t introduced until the evidence-collection teams are finished.
    I found Bree standing all by herself in the middle of the living room, looking pensive and far away.
    A line of dark streaks, probably the victim’s blood, ran across the ivory carpet. A sliding glass door was open to the terrace, and a light breeze rustled the curtains.
    Otherwise, the living room looked pretty much undisturbed. There were built-in bookshelves on every wall, and they were filled with hardbacks, mostly fiction, several of them by the victim herself, including foreign editions.
Why a crime writer
? I wondered. There had to be a reason, at least in the killer’s mind. Was that train of thought correct? Maybe, maybe not, but I was definitely analyzing the scene.
    “How’s it going?” I finally spoke.
    Bree’s eyebrows went up in a
How did you get in here
? kind of way, but she skipped the chitchat entirely. I had never seen her on the Job before, and she was a completely different person.
    “Looks like he came in through the front door. No sign of forced entry anywhere. Maybe he posed as a serviceman of some kind. Unless she knew him. Her clothes, and her purse, are here.”
    “Anything missing?” I asked the natural question.
    Bree shook her head. “Nothing real obvious. Doesn’t look like she was robbed, Alex. She was wearing a diamond bracelet and earrings when she went over the railing. So maybe you
can
take it with you.”
    I pointed at the streaks on the carpet. “What do you know about these?”
    “The ME says the victim’s
knees
were bloody before the fall—and get this: she was wearing a dog leash when he tossed her off the balcony.”
    “Somebody on the radio said it was a rope. I was thinking noose, but that didn’t totally make sense to me either. A dog leash? That’s interesting. Bizarre, but interesting.”
    Bree pointed toward an archway and a formal dining room beyond, with lots of glass cabinets full of dinnerware. “Bloodstains start back there and then end here in the middle of the room. She was crawling, and she was under duress.”
    “Like a dog. So he needed to humiliate her, and in public. What could she possibly have done to him? How could she deserve this?”
    “Yeah, sure feels like it was personal. Maybe a boyfriend, or somebody who fantasized about her?” She breathed in and out slowly. “You know, this probably would have been your case if