Cross the Line (Alex Cross #24)(47)

“Glad you could come, Nana Mama,” Mahoney said. “When was the last time you were at the beach?”

“I can’t remember,” she said, finishing the last ear of corn. “That happens a lot lately. I’ll start the water on the stove.”

I knew better than to argue as she got up. She was heading for the kitchen, her favorite place in any house.

“How bad is Jannie’s break?” Mahoney asked, lighting the charcoal.

“Hairline fracture of one of the metatarsal bones,” I said. “Crutches for two weeks, and a hard walking boot for another three. She can run in two months.”

“Too bad she couldn’t come out.”

“Go to the beach with her stepmom, dad, great-grand- mother, and little brother, or hang out with her new friends in the track world and her big brother at college for a night …”

“Enough said.”

We saw Bree and Ali walking back along the path from the dunes. He had a towel around his shoulders and a grin that made me glad to be alive.

“He’s like a dolphin himself,” Bree said, coming up onto the deck. “You should have seen him in the waves out there.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “First thing.”

Ali started toward the sliding doors, but Mahoney caught him. “Around the corner, there’s an outdoor shower. Get the sand off and dry off before you go in or my lady friend will not be happy.”

“I’ve never been in an outdoor shower,” Ali said.

“It’s life-changing,” Mahoney said and he returned to his grill.

“I’m next,” Bree called to Ali as he rounded the corner.

I went to the cooler and fished us out bottles of cold Old Dominion beer, a Delaware favorite, and opened them.

“I needed this,” Bree said, taking her beer. “A break from everything.”

“I think we all needed this,” Mahoney said.

“We going to meet the mysterious lady friend?” Bree asked.

“Right here!” said a pretty brunette in white pedal pushers, sandals, and a gauzy blue top as she came around the corner with a plate of fresh-baked cookies.

She set down the plate, beamed at us, and said, “I’m Camille.”

“Not lady-friend Camille?” I said.

Camille laughed. “Indeed. Lady-friend Camille.”

“You’re spicing up the party,” Mahoney said.

“I try,” she said, and she shook our hands. “Ned’s told me so much about you both, I feel like I already know you.”

Camille was a real estate agent in the area, a widow, and as bubbly as they come. She and Ned had met at a local seafood restaurant after they’d both noticed each other eating alone on two consecutive Saturday nights. On the third Saturday, Mahoney went over and showed her his badge.

“He said he was conducting an FBI investigation and needed to ask me a few questions,” Camille said. “First question after my name was why I always eat alone. It was my question for him too.”

They were good together and we laughed and ate and probably drank a little too much. The moon rose. Nana Mama turned in. Ali fell asleep on the couch. Mahoney and Camille took a walk north on the beach, and Bree and I walked south and admired the moon tracking on the ocean and the waves.

“It’s good to be with you,” I said, wrapping a blanket around both of us.

“Hard to imagine the job right now,” Bree said.

“Means you’re tuning out, giving your brain a needed rest.”

“Parks came through surgery fine,” she said. “Lincoln too.”

“Good,” I said, and I whispered a suggestion.

“What?” She laughed softly. “Here?”

“Back in the dunes somewhere. We’ve got a blanket. Be a shame to waste the opportunity.”

She kissed me and said, “Sounds like the perfect end to a perfect day.”





CHAPTER


54


FIVE DAYS LATER, on the Thursday after Labor Day, Sampson and I climbed out of an unmarked car in the parking lot of Bayhealth Kent General Hospital in Dover, Delaware.

“Let’s hope she’s alert enough to help,” I said.

“We knew we were taking a chance,” Sampson said. “If she’s not, we’ll just come back.”

The day before, we’d received two reports that had brought us to the Bayhealth hospital. The first report, filed the week before by a Maryland state trooper, described a Ford Taurus found flipped in Maryland just south of Millersville.

The driver, a twenty-nine-year-old waitress, was later found to have died of a .45-caliber gunshot wound to the head. The shooting had to have occurred in broad daylight, yet no witnesses had come forward.

The second report, from the sheriff’s department in Kent County, Delaware, concerned a white Mustang convertible that crashed into a tree along Route 10 between Willow Grove and Woodside East. The driver, twenty-four-year-old Kerry Rutledge, a clothes buyer for Nordstrom’s, was found unconscious but alive around two a.m. on Labor Day. Rutledge had broken ribs, facial injuries, a concussion, and a four-inch-long wound across the back of her head.

Ms. Rutledge regained consciousness after a few hours, but she was confused and unable to remember anything about the crash. A sheriff’s detective interviewed her the following day. She told the detective she thought she’d been shot but couldn’t remember how it had happened or why. The wound to the back of the head was consistent with a bullet grazing the skin, so we thought it worth the drive to try to talk to her ourselves.