Double Cross

let go of the Beretta. Then, nothing at all.
    Nothing.
    Blessedly,
nothing
.
    I hurried forward, kicked away his gun. I crouched beside Kyle, who I’d once thought was a friend and who had turned into my worst enemy. His eyes were open, and he looked at me, right into my eyes, maybe my soul. He stared, and I wondered if he was dying at that instant, and if he knew it.
    Then Kyle spoke, and he said something so very strange, something I didn’t understand, not to this day. “In your honor,” he said.
    Then a horrible rattle began to stir somewhere back in his throat.
    And I liked it. Sad to say, horrifying to me, I was relieved and exultant. I’d liked being in
the audience
, so much so that I clapped my hands together and applauded Bree.
    And then, suddenly, Kyle was on all fours, then up on his feet. He pulled another gun from a holster behind his back.
    Bree had lowered her gun, and now he had us.
    “Put down the gun, Detective,” he said in the calmest voice I’d ever heard. “I don’t want to kill you right now. Not just yet.
Tell her, Alex
.”
    “She won’t listen,” I said.
    “Then she’s a dead girl.
Put the gun down
. For Christ’s sake, if I wanted to kill you, I would have pulled the trigger already.”
    Bree bent at the knees and lowered her gun to the ground.
    Kyle pulled the trigger.
    But he missed her on purpose.
    “You know, Bree,” he said in the same deadly calm voice, “the advice about chest shots versus head shots is good as far as it goes, but”—he patted his own chest—“it doesn’t allow for the possibility of vests, which I always wear to parties like this one. You should too. Especially with that exemplary chest of yours.”
    Kyle started to back away from us. Then he smiled and said, “Oh, what the hell! Sorry, Alex!”
    He fired in Bree’s direction—twice—and purposely missed again. Then he laughed and ran down the alley, disappearing around the first corner, still laughing.
    The Mastermind.

Chapter 126

    DCAK WAS STILL ALIVE. Bree and I met up with Nana and the kids at Washington Hospital Center, where Sampson and “Anthony” were being treated. “Sandy Quinlan” hadn’t made it; she died before the ambulance came.
    Sampson was going to be fine, according to his doctors. He needed stitches and fluids, but I had no doubt he’d be driving the staff crazy by checkout time tomorrow. Eventually, we retreated to a waiting area so that Billie and Djakata could have some alone time with the Big Man. Billie didn’t seem too happy with him, though, or with me.
    The kids were full of questions, and Bree and I answered as many as we could. Though—as always—we didn’t have all the answers ourselves. Not yet, and maybe not ever. Especially where Kyle Craig was concerned.
    “So, who were those people really? DCAK?” Jannie wanted to know. I’ve always loved her curiosity, but I wasn’t sure what to make of this budding interest in things forensic. The last thing we needed was another Dragon Slayer in our house on Fifth Street.
    “We should know more soon,” I told her. Both Anthony and Sandy—her body, anyway—had been fingerprinted. I thought they’d probably show up somewhere, in somebody’s files, maybe even in Kyle Craig’s old notes from his FBI days.
    I finally sent the family home, and Bree and I went to look in on our captive. We watched “Anthony” through a window while a post-op medical team got him stabilized for transfer. He was handcuffed to a hospital bed and lay there the whole time, staring at the ceiling. I’d seen this stillness in him earlier that day. It was impossible to read.
Was it defeat? Calculation? Boredom
? The answers would help us know whether he was headed for a penitentiary or a psych ward.
    “The names are Aaron and Sarah Dennison.”
    I turned to see Ramon Davies standing behind us. “IAFIS turned Aaron up. He’s wanted in two states that we know of so far. California and Nevada. Aaron was a suspect in two murder cases, one in each state. His sister Sarah’s record was clean. They did some acting in Vegas, Tahoe, Sacramento—mostly regional theater.”
    “Where were they right before DC? Do we know that?” I asked the superintendent.
    “In and out of LA. Why?”
    I shook my head and looked back through the window at him—
Aaron
, not Anthony. “Just curious if any of it was the truth, the things he told me. LA would be where he followed the case with Michael Bell. The Mary, Mary case. He must have been