I, Alex Cross

and noise, I got word from Detective Trumbull down in Virginia. Prints on the stolen car matched up to a John Tucci of Philadelphia, now at large.
    I played some fast connect-the-dots — from Trumbull in Virginia, to a friend at the FBI in Washington, to their field office in Philly and an agent, Cass Murdoch, who threw down another piece of the puzzle for me: Tucci was a known but small-time cog in the Martino crime family organization.
    That information cut both ways. It was a specific lead early in the case. But it also suggested that the driver and the killer might not be the same person. Tucci was probably part of something bigger than himself.
    "Any guesses what Tucci was doing all the way down here?" I asked Agent Murdoch. Bree and I had her on speakerphone.
    "I’d say he was either reassigned or else moving up in the organization. Taking on bigger jobs, more responsibility. He’d been arrested but never served time."
    "The car was stolen in Philadelphia," Bree said.
    "So then, yeah, he was working from home, emphasis on the
was
. My guess is he’s probably dead by now, after a screwup like that,
whatever
the hell happened out there on I-95."
    "How about possible clients in Washington?" I asked. "Does the Martino family have any regular business down here?"
    "Nothing I know of," Murdoch said. "But there’s obviously someone. John Tucci was too small-time to have drummed this up on his own. He probably thought he was lucky to get the assignment. What an asshole."
    "I hung up with Murdoch and took a few minutes to scribble some notes and synthesize what she’d told us. Unfortunately, every new answer suggested a new question.
    One thing seemed pretty clear to me, though. This wasn’t just a homicide anymore, and it was no individual act. Maybe it involved a sex-and-violence creep — but maybe it was a cover-up? Or both?

Chapter 9

    THERE WAS MORE, of course, lots more, the kind of upsetting detail that keeps certain stories in the news for months, and some of it came right away for a change. Dr. Carbondale reached me in my car on the way home. Bree was driving her own car. "Toxicology shows no known poisons in Caroline’s system," Carbondale told me. "No drugs of any kind, other than a .07 blood alcohol level. She couldn’t have been more than tipsy at the time of death."
    "So Caroline hadn’t been on drugs, and she hadn’t been poisoned. That wasn’t much of a surprise to me. "What about other causes?" I asked Carbondale.
    "I’m more and more certain that’s going to be an unanswerable question. All I can do is rule out certain possibilities. There’s no way of determining, for example, if she was beaten or strangled or —"
    She stopped short.
    The words came out of me like bile. "Or put right into that machine."
    "Yes," she said tightly. "But there is one other thing to tell you."
    I gritted my teeth and wanted to hit something with my fist. But I had to listen.
    "We’ve isolated the remaining fragments. There’s some indication of antemortem bite marks."
    "Bite marks?" I looked around for a place to pull over. "
Human
bite marks?"
    "I think so, yes, but I can’t be certain at this point. Biting can look almost identical to bruising, even under the best of circumstances. That’s why I’m bringing in a forensic odontologist to consult. What we’re working with is bone fragments where some of the tissue survived, so I can only see —"
    "I’m going to have to call you back," I said.
    I pulled to the side of Pennsylvania Avenue and just let people honk their horns and go around me. This was too much — the unfairness, the cruelty, the violence, all those things I’m usually so good at dealing with.
    I threw back my head and cursed at the car ceiling, or God, or both.
How could this be allowed to happen?
Then I laid my head against the steering wheel and I started to tear up. And while I was there, I said a prayer for Caroline, who didn’t have anyone with her when she needed it most.

Chapter 10

    EDDIE TUCCI KNEW he had screwed up really bad this time.
Unbelievable!
It was a terrible mistake to give that job — or any job — to his nephew Johnny. Not for nothing did they call the kid Twitchy. Now he’d gone AWOL and Eddie had spent the past three days waiting for the rest of the shitstorm to hit the fan.
    Even so, when the lights in his bar went out just after closing on Wednesday night, Eddie didn’t think too much about it. The building was going to shit, the whole neighborhood.