Double Cross

to.”
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake, what does that even mean?” she asked as she threw her hands into the air.
    I stood up. My heart was racing. “Whatever it means, I’ll let you know when it’s done. I’m sorry, but that’s as much as I can give you right now. Good night.” I gathered the papers, turned, and walked away from her.
    Her laughter stopped me. It was just a soft chortle at first—the kind of feather that can knock you over, though. I turned back again, and something in my expression sent her into a full cackling belly laugh.
    “What?”
I finally had to ask.
    Nana gained control of herself, mostly, and slapped both hands down on the kitchen table. “Well, look who’s back from the dead!
Alex Cross
.”

Chapter 30

    IT WAS BUSINESS AS USUAL the next day, or maybe I should say business as unusual. Sampson and I were canvassing the neighborhood around the Kennedy Center that afternoon when Bree called.
    “You will not be sorry if you drop whatever you’re doing and come back over here.” She hung up without a hello or good-bye.
    “What happened?” Sampson must have seen the confusion on my face.
    “Something. That’s all I know. Let’s go.”
    We found Bree parked at a computer terminal when we got to the office.
    “Please tell me we didn’t come back here to play solitaire,” Sampson said.
    “Guess who’s got a blog?” Bree said. “I actually got a call from a reporter on this. She didn’t even know it was the first time I was hearing about it.”
    She sat back to make room as we crowded in.
    The home page she showed us was both simple and impressive. It had an all-black background with white writing. In the upper-left corner, there was an animated graphic of a television set with what looked like live static on the screen. White block letters that read MY REALITY faded up, then out, then back again, like credits on a TV show. Underneath that, there were menu options for “Channel One,” “Channel Two,” down through “Channel Eight.”
    Weblog entries took up the bulk of the page, with the most recent one on top. It was marked for twelve thirty a.m., only fourteen hours prior. The title on it was simply
Thanks
.

    “Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives.”—A. Sachs

    Thanks for all the comments. I really like hearing from people who appreciate what I do. I read the negative ones too—just don’t like them as much (grin). So to most of you, I say keep it coming. To the rest, I say get a life.

    Some of you have asked why I’m doing this. I am doing it for myself. Let me repeat that. I am doing it for myself. Anyone who says they know what I’ll do next is full of shit ’cause even I don’t know what I’ll do next. Don’t be fooled by the police! They have no clue what to do with me because they have never seen anything like me before. The only thing they have control of is their sound bites. Be skeptical.

    I can tell you this much: there is more. If that fact pleases you, I can tell you this much again: you won’t be disappointed.
    Keep on living, fuckers.

    Bree scrolled further down the page. “The entries go back a ways, but they’re not all this directed. Sometimes he talks about his day. What he had for lunch. It’s a little bit of everything.”
    “Does he talk about the murders?” I asked.
    “Only indirectly. The entries from those days are all, like, ‘Had a good time tonight’ and ‘Did you see the news?’ ”
    “What about these?” Sampson touched the screen where the menu of channel numbers was.
    “Oh, you’ll like this.” Bree clicked on Channel One. The little television screen in the corner switched from static over to a grainy still image. I recognized it as one of the phone-camera captures from Matthew Jay Walker’s murder, taken by someone in the audience and already shown on several news broadcasts.
    “And then there’s this.” She clicked another one, and an audio file opened. Now the little screen showed a horizontal green line that jumped and spiked with the recorded sound of a woman screaming. I recognized Tess Olsen’s voice right away.
    “That’s her,” I said.
    “Definitely?” Sampson asked.
    “Definitely.” Bree and I said it at the same time. We had watched the videotape of her murder so often, the individual modulations of every scream were familiar, like some sick song we knew by heart.
    The recording that now played had to have been made separately, we realized, given