I, Alex Cross

Cole had established probable cause and gotten the Bureau back onto the property out in Virginia. By the time I reached Ned Mahoney on his cell, the FBI had a full Evidence Response Team on site.
    Bree spelled me at the hospital — Aunt Tia would spell Bree later — and I drove out to Virginia in the afternoon to have another look around Blacksmith Farms.
    Ned met me out front so he could walk me through with his creds. The primary area of interest was a small apartment out back. The access was an interior staircase from a three-bay parking garage underneath.
    Inside, the place looked like a suite at the Hay-Adams. The furniture was all soft linens and upholstery, mostly in lighter tones. There was a decorative dropped ceiling over the dining area, and a highly polished walnut-manteld fireplace.
    If you subtracted the techs in their tan cargos and blue ERT polo shirts, the place was pristine.
    "It’s the bedroom that’s the puzzle," Ned said. I followed him in through a set of curtained French doors. "No carpet, no knickknacks, no bedding, nothing," he said, stating the obvious. Other than a bare bed, dresser, and two nightstands, it looked like someone had recently moved out.
    "Prints and fibers came up with nothing. So we went to luminol."
    That explained the portable UV lamps set up in the room. Mahoney turned off the ceiling light and closed the door. "Go ahead, guys."
    Once they powered up, the whole room seemed to go radioactive. The walls, the floor, the furniture, all fluoresced bright blue. It was one of those occasions when my life actually did feel like an episode of
CSI.
    "Someone cleaned in here professionally," Mahoney said. "And I don’t mean Merry Maids of Washington."
    One of the limitations with luminol is that although it can bring out traces of blood, it also responds to some of the things people use to get rid of blood, like household bleach. That’s what we were looking at. It was as if the room had been painted with Clorox.
    This looked like a crime scene for sure. And maybe a murder scene.

Chapter 50

    THE NEXT THING that happened, nobody saw coming. It was maybe half an hour later, and I was still on the case at Blacksmith Farms.
    A rumble of conversation came from the apartment’s living room, and Ned and I went out to see what was going on. Several techies were gathered around a bearded guy on a short ladder near the door. He had the plastic cover of a smoke detector in one hand, with the exposed unit on the ceiling above him. That’s what everybody was staring at.
    The tech reached up with a pencil and pointed at an innocuous plastic nub tucked into the circuitry. "I’m pretty sure it’s a camera. Fairly sophisticated."
    Talk about grinding the gears.
    Immediately, Ned ordered a second sweep of both buildings. Everyone turned off their cell phones, and all the televisions and computers we could find were disconnected. That would keep them from interfering with the radio-frequency detectors.
    Once the search got going, it was fast work. Ninety minutes later, most of the on-site personnel were gathered in the main house foyer for a briefing. I saw a few familiar faces, including the assistant director in charge, Luke Hamel, and also Elaine Kwan from the Behavior Analysis Unit, my old office.
    I was surprised the case hadn’t been graded major yet, just based on the firepower in the room.
    The special agent in charge of ERT was Shoanna Spears. She was tall and big boned, with a heavy Boston accent and a tiny ivy tattoo that just peeked over the top of her white oxford collar. She stood on the grand staircase to address the group.
    "Basically, there’s nowhere in the house that isn’t covered. We found cameras in every room, including the bathrooms and the apartments out back."
    "How do we find out what all those cameras have been
filming
?" Hamel asked the question percolating in everyone’s brains.
    "Hard to say. These are wireless units; they can transmit to any base station within a thousand feet, maybe more than that. We did find a hard drive on the third floor with the right software, but no archived files. That means either that all the surveillance was done live or, more likely, that somebody took the files off site."
    "In which case we’d be looking for what?" Mahoney spoke up from the back of the room. "Disks? A laptop? E-mails?"
    Agent Spears nodded. "Keep going," she said. "There’s nothing terribly sophisticated about those files. They can pretty much be stored