I, Alex Cross

this time he was right.

Chapter 12

    THE BIZARRE MURDER case was spreading out like spidery legs around me, but one question hung over the rest:
Were there others who had died like Caroline? Was that a possibility? A probability?
    Obtaining a credible account of missing persons in DC is harder than it might seem. After speaking with someone at the Youth Investigations Bureau, which has a centralized database, I had to go district by district, personally talking with detectives all over the city. Incident reports are public information, but what I needed were PD252s, which are private case notes.
    That’s where I could start to filter for students, runaways, and above all, anyone with a known or suspected history of prostitution.
    I brought home the files I’d gathered and took them to my office in the attic after dinner. I cleared off one entire wall and started tacking up everything — pictures of the missing, index cards with case vitals that I’d written up. Plus a DC street map, flagged everywhere that victims had last been seen.
    When all that was done, I stood back and stared, looking for some kind of pattern to reveal itself.
    There was Jasmine Arenas, nineteen, two priors for solicitation. She worked Fourth and K, where she’d last been seen getting into a blue Beemer around two a.m. on October 12 of last year.
    Becca York was just sixteen, very pretty, an honor student. She’d left Dunbar High School on the afternoon of December 21 and hadn’t been seen or heard from since. Her foster parents suspected she’d run away to New York or the West Coast.
    Timothy O’Neill was a twenty-three-year-old call boy who had been living with his parents in Spring Valley at the time of his disappearance. He drove away from the house around ten p.m. on May 29 and never came home again.
    It wasn’t like I actually expected any kind of connect-the-dots pattern to jump out at me. This was more like
building the haystack
. Tomorrow, we’d start looking for the needle.
    That meant fieldwork, and lots of it, following up on every one of these tawdry files. If just one of them showed a connection to Caroline, it could be huge. This was the kind of homicide that used to make me wonder why I keep coming back for more, year after year. I knew that on some level I was addicted to the chase, but I used to think that if I figured out why, then I’d stop needing it so much, maybe even turn in my badge. That hadn’t happened. Just the opposite.
    Even if Caroline hadn’t been my niece, I still would have been standing in my attic at two in the morning, staring at that terrible board, as determined as ever to find out who had killed her and maybe these other young people — and why.
    Remains.
    That was the single word, or maybe the concept, that I couldn’t get out of my head, couldn’t shake if I wanted to.

Chapter 13

    I FELL ASLEEP hard that night and woke up the same way, diving into sleep and having to be ripped out of it. I ate breakfast with Nana, Bree, and the kids, but when I left the house I still wasn’t completely awake. It didn’t augur well, if you believe in auguring.
    The one appointment I needed to keep that day was my meeting with Marcella Weaver. Three years earlier, the breakup of her high-priced escort service had made national headlines and earned her the nickname "Madam of the Beltway." An alleged client list had never surfaced but still had power brokers all over town shaking in their Florsheims.
    Since then, she’d bounced back Heidi Fleiss–style, with a syndicated radio show, a couple of lingerie boutiques, and a speaking fee reported to be five thousand.
An hour,
ironically enough.
    I didn’t care about any of that. I just wanted her insight into the possible murders of escorts. Once I’d agreed to have her lawyer present, she said she’d meet with me at her apartment.
    The place was a gorgeous duplex not far from Dupont Circle. She answered the door herself, looking casual and refined in jeans and a black cashmere sweater. She also wore diamond earrings and a diamond-studded cross.
    "Is it Detective or Dr. Cross?" she asked.
    "Detective, but I’m impressed that you asked."
    "Old habits die hard, I guess. I’m careful. I do my research." She smiled easily, way more laid back than I’d expected her to be. "Come on in, Detective."
    "In the living room, she introduced me to the lawyer, David Shupike. I recognized him from a couple of high-profile cases around town. He was a dour, balding