Double Cross

been there before, many, many times, only maybe now I knew how my family felt.
    “You’d better get going. You’ve probably got half the MPD up there, drooling all over your crime scene.”
    A couple of uniformed officers stared our way as Bree leaned in and gave me a good-bye kiss. “What I said before?” she whispered. “I meant it.”
    Then she wheeled around on the uniforms. “What the hell are you two doing? Get back to work. Wait! Scratch that. Somebody show me where to go. Where’s my crime scene?”
    The transformation in Bree was a thing to behold. Even her posture changed as she strode toward the murder scene. She looked in charge, reminded me of myself, but she was still the sexiest woman I’d ever met.

Chapter 10

    THAT NIGHT, a man and a woman in jogging outfits were hidden deep in the crowd gathered on Connecticut Avenue, across from the Riverwalk apartments. As police cars continued to arrive, they were there, admiring their handiwork.
    The brilliant creation, Yousef Qasim, was no more. Poof—gone but not forgotten. The male had played Yousef brilliantly, and the audience had been held spellbound from the moment he stepped out on the terrace, his stage. Apparently, many of these onlookers were still in awe of the bravura performance, still talking about it in hushed whispers.
    What a fitting encore this was. Hours and hours after the show, all these looky-loos remained outside the luxury apartment building. New admirers arrived every few minutes. The press was all over it—CNN, the other majors, newspapers, radio, video artists, bloggers.
    The man nudged the woman with his elbow. “You see what I see?”
    She craned her neck, looking left, then right. “Where? There’s so much to look at. Help me out, here.”
    “Four o’clock. Now do you see? That’s Detective Bree Stone getting out of the car. And the other one—that’s Alex Cross. I’m certain it is. Cross has come, and it’s only our first show. We’re a hit!”

Chapter 11

    FOR THE FIRST HALF HOUR, I tried to convince myself that I was content just sitting in the car, staying on the sidelines. The Mercedes, half station wagon, half SUV, was as comfortable as the easy chair in my living room. A copy of
The History of Love
by Nicole Krauss sat on my lap while I flipped through various stations on satellite radio, then listened to the local news. I had been savoring the Krauss, because it reminded me of how it was when I first fell in love with fiction. I had another good one at home,
Winter’s Bone
by Daniel Woodrell, that I was equally enthralled with.
    Plenty of time for reading now that I was out of the game.
But was I out of the game
?
    Listening with one ear, I picked up on a few obvious inaccuracies in the news coverage, the worst being a report that the killer at the Riverwalk was some sort of terrorist. It was too early to jump to that kind of conclusion. Every news outlet in town was on this story, though, the nationals too, all scrambling for a unique angle. That usually led to mistakes, but the media didn’t seem to care as long as they could attribute a theory to some kind of “expert,” or even another news outlet.
    Not that the killer would care about accuracy. It seemed obvious to me that what he wanted more than anything was simply attention.
    I wondered if any Metro Police personnel had been assigned to follow the news coverage itself. If it were my case, that would be one of the first things I took care of. Emphasis on the
if
. Because this wasn’t my case. I didn’t have cases anymore. I didn’t miss them either, at least that’s what I told myself as I watched the action from my car.
    There was something about being at the busy homicide scene that kicked in my instincts, though. I’d been formulating theories and running different scenarios in my head from the moment I got there—I couldn’t help myself.
    The killer had obviously wanted an audience; he’d been consistently described as looking “Middle Eastern,” which added up to . . . what?
Was it possible that this was a new kind of terrorism—the door-to-door variety? How did a bestselling crime writer fit in
? There had to be some tie-in.
Was the killer acting out a brutally sadistic scene he had imagined many times before? Was it something the author had written about? What kind of psychopath wanted to throw victims off twelve-story buildings
?
    Eventually, my curiosity moved me to my feet. I got out of the car and gazed toward the top