Double Cross

horrendous mess.
    “Kitz!” I took his hand and applied slight pressure. “It’s Alex. Help is on the way.”
    His fingers fluttered in mine, barely a squeeze, but he was still with us.
    His eyes finally opened, and he seemed confused at first.
    When he saw it was me, though, he tried to say something. His puffy and blistered lips moved, but if he made a sound, I couldn’t hear it.
    “Hang in there,” I told him. “We’ve got you now. You’re going to be okay. Hold on, Kitz.”
    He tried to talk again, but nothing that I could understand came out of his mouth.
    With what looked to be great effort, he blinked twice. Then his eyes rolled back in his head. The EMTs kept at it, but by the time the gurney got there, it was all over.
    Kitz was gone. And he had died on camera, just the way DCAK planned it.
    I turned to Bree. My mind was working overtime. “Kitz blinked twice.
Two
killers?”

Chapter 87

    BEFORE THE POLICE and TV news choppers got there, DCAK had worked his way across two sections of roof. Then he scuttled down a wobbly painting scaffold to a community parking area in the back, where he would be safe.
    He was traveling heavy today, with a laptop and camera in a black satchel slung over his shoulder—but it was nothing he couldn’t handle. He was jacked up, and he was definitely into this new role . . . and the
story
.
    He slipped off the latex gloves, then plucked a silver lighter out of his pocket. Seconds later, the gloves were a lump of melted rubber on the cement.
Let the cops try to print that and trace the puddle back to him
.
    Everything else about him stayed as it was: long blond hair in a ponytail, light growth of beard to match the bleached eyebrows, brown contacts, steel-rimmed glasses, and a White Sox cap turned backward on his head.
    The name for today was Neil Stephens, he had decided. He was supposed to be an AP photographer based out of Chicago. The camera was a brand-new Leica. He’d blend right in here. No problems about that. Plus, he’d get to watch the whole thing come to a climax. See all the players close-up, check out their reactions under pressure. No one could have done this better, not even Kyle Craig on his best day.
    When he came around from the A Street side of the development, the block on Nineteenth looked like a Barnum and Bailey Circus—
in a good way
. He stood on the bumper of a parked car and took several wide-angle shots—police cruisers up and down the block, ambulances, a SWAT truck in the armory parking lot, a dozen or more TV and radio stations on the scene. Hundreds of locals, it looked like. They were loitering up and down the street, trying to figure out what the hell was going down.
    Did anybody know yet? Had they figured it out?
DCAK was about to put their mopey little neighborhood on the map. Soon they would all start thanking God it hadn’t happened to them.
    Yes, little minds would be blown sky-high tonight. He was one of the best ever now, wasn’t he? Right up there with Kyle Craig.
    By the time the helicopters arrived, the police on the ground had gotten their act together enough to wrangle the masses out of harm’s way. Alex Cross was on the scene—and Bree Stone too. Actually, she was getting a little too big for her britches, he was thinking. Maybe it was time to do something about that.
    That could be his next story.

Chapter 88

    NEIL STEPHENS, AP, jostled shoulder to shoulder with the other press, all of them competing for “money shots” across the street from the yellow house where the FBI man’s body had been found. Of course, he already had his million-dollar shot—a nice close-up on Brian Kitzmiller’s face. Eyes wide open, neck bleeding out like a stuck pig’s.
    “Some crazy scene, huh?” Another lensman turned to speak to him. A brown-skinned fireplug of a guy. “Whole story’s unbelievable, right? You been covering it from the beginning?”
    You could say that,
DCAK thought to himself.
    “Just got to town,” he said, making sure to flatten his vowels for a kind of nasal Chicago accent.
Jest gaht to town
. He loved details like that. That’s where the grace was, and the devil too. “Doing a piece on the detectives and CSI. That’s my angle here. Folks love their CSI. This little turn of events is just a, uh —”
    “Lucky coincidence?”
    The killer returned the guy’s cynical smile. “That’s right, I guess. Lucky me.”
    “Here they come!” someone shouted, and Neil Stephens of the AP raised his