Cross the Line (Alex Cross #24)(21)

“I don’t either,” I said.

“Revenge?”

“Maybe. Not one of the victims seems to have put up any kind of resistance. It’s as if every single one of them was surprised and killed with a single shot.”

“Which means suppressors on all the weapons.”

“Definitely.”

Sampson said, “Everything about this is scary smart and precise. The shooting. Picking up the brass. Sweeping as they left. The lack of a reason.”

“Oh, there’s a reason, John,” I said. “You don’t kill twenty-two people if you don’t have a damned good reason.”





CHAPTER


21


AN HOUR LATER, in the full heat of the day, Bree stepped up in front of a bank of microphones outside the factory fences.

“I know this has been frustrating, but we wanted to give you accurate facts and it took time to gather them,” she said in a clear, commanding voice. “We are dealing with multiple homicides in the unstable environment of an extremely large methamphetamine lab. Twenty-two are known dead.”

Gasps went up. Reporters started bellowing questions. Screams of horror and grief gathered force in the crowd beyond the media throng.

“Please,” Bree said, holding up her hands. “The bodies have been stripped of identification. Someone out there knows someone who worked in this factory—a wife, a mother, a friend, a husband, a father, a son or daughter.

“If you’re that someone, we ask that you come forward to identify the body and help us understand who might be responsible for committing these cold-blooded killings and why.”

The media went nuts and bombarded Bree with questions. She kept calm and told them essentially the same thing over and over again.

“Well done,” I said when she walked away from the microphones after promising to update them on the hour.

“Just have to know how to feed them,” Bree said. “Bit by bit.”

No one came forward initially, not even those people openly grieving. Then the bodies started leaving the factory in black bags, and the massacre was real, and their loss was heartbreaking.

Vicky Sue Granger was the first to talk. In her late twenties, she looked devastated, and she said she was sure her husband, Dale, was in there.

“He work in the lab?” Bree asked.

“Shamrock City,” she said weakly. “That’s what they called it. If you were lucky enough to get inside, and you worked hard, the money just came pouring—”

She stopped talking. I guess she figured the less she said about illegal cash, the better.

I said, “Who was in charge?”

Mrs. Granger shrugged, said, “Dale got in through T-Shawn, his cousin.”

Other relatives started coming forward once we’d moved the bodies to an air-conditioned space at the medical examiner’s office. Family after family was forced to walk down the line of corpses lying in open bags on the cement floor. One man was looking for his eighteen-year-old son. Two girls were there for their older sister. A grandmother broke down in Bree’s arms.

Dale Granger was there. He worked in packaging and had taken a bullet to the chest. His cousin Tim Shawn Warren, a part-time bouncer at a strip club, was one of the muscular guys who’d been strangled outside.

Few of the relatives wanted to talk. The ones that did come up to us claimed to know little of what their loved ones had been doing, only that they’d gotten jobs and suddenly had a lot of cash on hand.

Then Claire Newfield walked in. She saw her younger brother, Clyde, a guard with a broken neck, and became hysterical. When she finally got herself under control, she said Clyde had told her that he worked for scientists.

“He said they were like geniuses,” Newfield said. “They’d figured out a new way to make meth and they were going to rule the entire East Coast.”

“You have names?”

“No, I didn’t want to know.”

Around eight that night, we were left with seven bodies on the chill cement floor, and no one waiting outside. Two Jane Does. Five John Does. Two were the older Caucasian males in suits who’d been found with the cash; the remaining five were all in their late twenties and had been discovered in the meth lab.

I knelt next to the bodies and looked at them. What had brought them to this? Who the hell were they?

“Let’s get these bodies on ice,” I said.

“Dr. Cross?” called one of the patrolmen by the door. “There’s a young lady out here who wants to look for her friends.”

“Okay, one more.”

Alexandra Campbell shuffled in as if against her will, shoulders rolled forward, looking everywhere but at the bodies. She was a reedy woman in her twenties with a colorful sleeve tattoo and blond hair dyed peach in places.

“You think you know someone here?” I asked after introducing myself.

Campbell shrugged miserably, said, “Gotta look. Make sure.”

I led her over. Campbell stopped eight or nine feet from the remaining seven bodies. Her hand trembled up to cover her mouth.

“Carlo,” she choked out. “Now look where you’ve left me.”

She kind of folded down into herself then, wrapped her arms around her knees at the feet of the body bags, and sobbed her poor heart out. I gave her some time and then crouched at her side and offered her a tissue box.