I, Alex Cross

sat in one of the old club chairs. Bree always looked good, but I preferred her like this, casual and comfortable in jeans and bare feet. Her eyes started on the floor and worked their way up to mine.
    "Come here often?" she asked.
    "Once in a while, yeah. You?"
    She sipped her beer and casually cocked her head. "Want to get out of here?"
    "Sure thing." I jerked my thumb toward the kitchen door. "Just as soon as I get rid of those pesky, um —"
    "Beloved family members?"
    I couldn’t help thinking that this birthday was getting better and better. Now I had two big surprises coming up.
    Make that three.
    The phone rang in the hall. It was our home line, not my cell, which everyone knew to use for work. I also had a pager up on the dresser where I could hear it. So it seemed safe to go ahead and answer. I even thought it might be some friendly soul calling to wish me a happy birthday, or at the very worst, someone trying to sell me a satellite dish.
    Will I ever learn? Probably not in this lifetime.

Chapter 2

    "ALEX, IT’S DAVIES. I’m sorry to bother you at home." "Ramon Davies was superintendent of detectives with Metro, and also my boss, and he was on the line.
    "It’s my birthday. Who died?" I asked. I was ticked off, mostly at myself for answering the phone in the first place.
    "Caroline Cross," he said, and my heart nearly stopped. At that very moment, the kitchen door swung open and the family came out singing. Nana had an elaborate pink-and-red birthday cake on a tray, with an American Airlines travel folio clipped on top.
    "Happy Birthday to you…"
    "Bree held up a hand to quiet them. My posture and my face must have said something. They all stopped right where they were. The joyful singing ended almost midnote. My family remembered whose birthday this was:
Detective Alex Cross’s
.
    Caroline was my niece, my brother’s only daughter. I hadn’t seen her in twenty years; not since just after Blake died. That would have made her twenty-four now.
    At the time of her death.
    The floor under my feet felt like it was gone. Part of me wanted to call Davies a liar. The other part, the cop, spoke up. "Where is she now?"
    "I just got off the phone with Virginia State Police. The remains are at the ME’s office in Richmond. I’m sorry, Alex.
    I hate to be the one to tell you this."
    "Remains?" I muttered. It was such a cold word, but I appreciated Davies not over-handling me. I walked out of the room, sorry I’d said even that much in front of my family.
    "Are we talking homicide here? I assume that we are."
    "I’m afraid so."
    "What happened?" My heart was thudding dangerously. I almost didn’t want to know.
    "I don’t have a lot of details," he told me, in a way that instantly gave me a hint —
he was holding something back.
    "Ramon, what’s going on here? Tell me. What do you know about Caroline?"
    "Just take one thing at a time, Alex. If you leave now, you can probably be there in about two hours. I’ll ask for one of the responding officers to meet you."
    "I’m on my way."
    "And Alex?"
    I’d almost hung up the phone, my mind in splinters. "What is it?"
    "I don’t think you should go alone."

Chapter 3

    RUNNING HARD, AND using my siren most of the way, it took less than an hour and a half to get down to Richmond.
    The Department of Forensic Science was housed in a new building on Marshall Street. Davies had arranged for Detective George Trumbull from the State Police CI Bureau to meet us there — Bree and me.
    "The car’s been towed to our lot up at division headquarters on Route One," Trumbull told us. "Otherwise, everything’s here. The remains are downstairs in the morgue. All the obvious evidentiary material is in the lab on this level."
    There was that terrible word again.
Remains
.
    "What did you bag?" Bree asked him.
    "Troopers found some women’s clothing and a small black purse wrapped in a mover’s blanket in the trunk. Here. I pulled this to show you."
    He handed me a Rhode Island driver’s license in a plastic sleeve. The only thing I recognized at first was Caroline’s name. The girl in the photo looked quite beautiful to me, like a dancer, with her hair pulled back from her face and a high forehead. And the big eyes — I remembered those, too.
    Eyes as big as the sky
. That’s what my older brother Blake had always said. I could see him now, rocking her on the old porch glider on Fifth Street and laughing every time she blinked up at him. He was in love with that baby