Double Cross

shootings, always with the same gun. The victims were apparently random, the only consistency being their location. The shootings, four so far, had taken place on street corners along a straight line running through Northwest DC.
    Then I discovered a file Kitz had put together on Kyle Craig. It even included information on how I had taken Kyle down. Plus, Kitz had been going through all of Kyle’s old case notes, including the ongoing investigations at the time he was arrested.
    When I found the DCAK file, it was mostly old information on the Washington-area murders: copies of crime reports, map sections, lab results, interviews—hundreds of them, all tied to the known homicides. Not much that was new or helpful. And nothing directly linking DCAK to Craig.
    “How’s it going over there?” I asked Sampson. “Any luck so far? Good or bad?”
    “There’s a lot to look at,” he said. “He’s got Technorati, Blogdex, PubSub . . . tracking software, Alex. With the right setup, he could ping anyone who commented on a blog or surfed a site.”
    “So how do we find out what Kitz knew? Where did he keep it?”
    Sampson thrummed his fingers on the desk. “I could check his Internet history, see if there were sites he went to a lot. Guess I’ll start there.”
    A few minutes later, Sampson suddenly sat back in Kitz’s desk chair. He whistled through his teeth. “I’ll be damned. Come over here, Alex.”
    I peered over his shoulder.
    “Look familiar?” Sampson asked. “It should.”
    He’d pulled up a long list of sites, many of them with names I recognized from my own surf-sleuthing. But that’s not what had my attention now. In addition to the named sites, the list included dozens of numbers. As I looked closer, I saw that it was actually
the same number
, repeated over and over, subdivided in different ways with periods and slashes.

    344.19.204.411
    34.41.920.441/1
    34.419.20.44/11
    344.192.04.411

    The list continued beyond the figures on the screen, but what we had was our mystery number—
the one from the side of the mailbag at the Smithsonian
.
    “It’s an IP address, Alex. A Web site. At least, Kitz seemed to think so.”
    “Why didn’t he tell us about it?” I asked. “What’s going on here, Sampson?”
    “Maybe he hadn’t found the right combination. Maybe he hadn’t gotten around to checking it yet. Or the site could be inactive.”
    “One way to find out,” I said. “Let’s start at the top and work our way down the list.”

Chapter 93

    BREE STONE STOOD ALL ALONE on the roof of the Nineteenth Street house, staring at the spot where the sun had baked Brian Kitzmiller’s blood to a cracked black stain. All the wrong questions were running through her head:
Did you suffer much, Kitz? Were you blindsided? Did you even have a fighting chance? Any chance at all? Did you know who did this
?
    They were inevitable questions, human ones, but also unhelpful to this investigation. She needed to focus on the killer’s methods and then trace any evidence he might have left here.
    Tonight, Bio-Tec was coming in to clean the “yellow house.” The homeowners would be back in town tomorrow. This was the last walk-through, her final chance to find some shred of evidence that everyday life would soon erase.
    Every indication was that the killer had come up through the roof hatch and had exited by the scaffold in the back, two houses over. Kitz’s postmortem had shown abrasions under the arms and fibers on his shirt where he’d been hauled up with a strong nylon rope, or a cord of some kind. Nonfatal levels of chloral hydrate were in his bloodstream, indicating he’d been unconscious, which was the only good news so far.
    No blood was found inside the house, at least none that mattered. Kitz’s throat had been cut right here on the roof, not long before the police arrived. The killer probably could have timed it any way he wanted.
    The bastard chose the close call, didn’t he? He planned everything about this, including that Kitz should die soon after we arrived.
    Bree pressed her knuckles into the back of her neck. The pulsing headache she’d woken up with was turning into an all-day event. And the dark shirt she was wearing was a really bad call. It was already soaked through with sweat.
    She walked toward the scaffold, past a litter of cigarette butts and half-crushed tall boys that hadn’t been there before, which meant that
somebody
had been. “Psychotourists,” Alex liked to call