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

On the sixth morning after the massacre, I told Bree I was going back to work the Tom McGrath case while we waited for forensics to give us some kind of tangible lead on the factory killings.

“Wish I could go with you,” she said, sitting behind her desk with a stack of papers before her. “But between fielding calls from the brass and making decisions on overtime, I’m going to be here for a while.”

“I feel for you. Take my dad’s advice: delegate the worst of it.”

“I can’t delegate anything until I understand the job.”

“True,” I said. “You’re doing great, by the way.”

“You think?”

“Not just me. Keep trusting your instincts.”

Bree laughed. “They’re all I’ve had so far. Where are you going?”

I told her I was going to look for an American University law student named JohnnyBoy5.





CHAPTER


25


SAMPSON AND I made a trip to the administrative offices of American University’s law school. We explained we were working on Edita Kravic’s murder case, and that got us fifteen minutes with the dean, who told us Kravic had been a star student, a role model for foreign students and women entering school at a relatively late age.

“We could use some help, then,” I said, and I told him about JohnnyBoy5. “That’s his online name, but he’s a student here, and we want to talk with him. Can you figure out who he is?”

“May I ask why?” the dean said.

“He was obsessed with Ms. Kravic,” Sampson said. “Maybe enough to kill her and Chief McGrath.”

The dean cringed at the idea that one of his students might have murdered another as well as the police chief. He hesitated, said, “There are privacy issues.”

“More important than bringing a double murderer to justice?” I said flatly. “Do we have to go to the press and tell them that the dean of a law school is being obstructive in the hunt for a cop killer?”

Five minutes later, we had a bead on one John Boynton, aka JohnnyBoy5, a second-year law student from Indiana who was attending a summer class on torts in the school amphitheater. The dean texted us his photo.

We waited in the hallway on the second floor of the law school for the lecture to end. A crowd of students began exiting the amphitheater, and I soon had eyes on JohnnyBoy5, who was still inside the room, about ten feet back from the door.

“Check out the hairdo,” I said.

“I see it,” Sampson said. “Flashy.”

I don’t know what about us tipped Boynton. Maybe it was his Spider-Man instincts. Or maybe just the memory of a big guy threatening to break his face. Whatever triggered it, the guy with the spiked blond hair took one look at us and shoved several students forward hard, causing people in the crowd to stagger and fall like dominoes. Then he spun and took off deeper into the lecture hall.

“Sonofabitch, he’s running!” Sampson roared. He drew his service weapon and sped after him, throwing students out of his way and yelling, “Police! Get down!”

I went another route, running down the hall toward an exit sign. I shouldered the door open and took the stairs four at a time. When I hit the bottom I threw open a second door, saw students fleeing the amphitheater through an exit at the end of the hall.

A girl looked over her shoulder and screamed. I stepped into a janitor’s closet next to the stairwell, leaving the door open.

Boynton came out of the amphitheater, smashing people out of his way, then sprinted down the hall right at me. I waited until he was just past me and then hit him hard across his back with the head of a heavy, wet industrial mop.

JohnnyBoy5 smashed into the stairway door and fell in a heap, groaning.





CHAPTER


26


BOYNTON SAT ON the floor, held his nose, which was gushing blood, and moaned. “I’m suing. Whoever you are, I’m suing.”

“No, you’re not,” I said as Sampson came up behind me. “We’re homicide detectives investigating Edita Kravic’s murder. We saw the e-mails you sent her.”

That rocked him. He wiped at his nose, groaned, muttered, “I had a bad reaction to a generic version of Singulair, an asthma drug. Talk to my allergist. He said in rare cases, it could make you manic. It definitely made me that way.”

“Some of the things you wrote sounded threatening and psychotic,” I said. “She was going to file a restraining order against you.”

His shoulders slumped. “I swear to you, Detective, that wasn’t the real John Boynton writing those things. It was a hopped-up, crazed version of me. Two days after getting off that goddamned drug, I was fine.”

The way he said it, exposed and defeated, made me believe it was possible that some of the messages had been fueled by a bad reaction to a drug.

“Okay, let’s put those particular e-mails aside,” I said. “The fact is, you seem to have had an escalating obsession with Edita Kravic from the first day of law school. Did you love her?”

Boynton looked ready to deny it but then surrendered and nodded. “I thought she was perfect.”

“But she didn’t feel that way about you?”

“She liked me at first, then I got all weird with the medicine.”