Cross the Line (Alex Cross #24)(9)

One was Edita’s law school e-mail account. I sat down and scanned through the e-mails, seeing nothing from Tom McGrath. Most of the messages were to and from professors and classmates. One classmate, JohnnyBoy5, had sent six e-mails to her in the eighteen hours preceding her murder.

Really? read one sent around ten thirty the previous night. Standing me up again? This was your meet, remember?

I did a search of her entire in-box, looking for all e-mails from JohnnyBoy5. There were more than a hundred, going back eighteen months. I rearranged them so they were in chronological order and read a tale of growing obsession.

JohnnyBoy5 had evidently been smitten by Edita Kravic from the get-go, and he was not shy about saying so. Though she seemed to flirt with him at times, for the most part, she did nothing to encourage him.

For the first year, she’d managed to keep JohnnyBoy5 at bay. But after that, his tone became irate, and then depressed.

I don’t know what’s come over me, JohnnyBoy5 had written back in March. I’m terrified that I won’t see you again, Edita. I know it’s irrational, but there it is. I can’t shake this dark, dark feeling that I’m going to lose you somehow, that something bad is going to happen to you, that you’re never going to see the real me, and that you’ll never understand how much I truly care about you.

Edita wrote back, This is no good, Johnny. Go away or I get a restraining order. A third-year told me how to do it.

For three weeks after that, there was no contact between Ms. Kravic and JohnnyBoy5. Then he e-mailed her again.

I know what you are, Edita, what you do out of class.

No return e-mail. No follow-up for months. Three weeks before Edita was murdered, however, JohnnyBoy5 wrote her again.

Who is he? The big meathead who threatened to break my face? Really? This is how things are between us? What if I just posted on Facebook about you and the life you don’t want anyone to know about? Will that do it?

Two weeks passed.

Sorry for the rants, JohnnyBoy5 wrote. God, I read back through some of it and that wasn’t me, Edita. The doctor put me on this asthma medicine called montelukast and I had a rare but bad side effect, which put me in a dark way. But I’ve returned to the living! Study group’s starting up again. Love to have you back, of course. No worries about anything else. Everyone’s got skeletons in the closet, am I right?

Edita did not respond. Every day after that, leading up to the day before her death, JohnnyBoy5 wrote—chidingly, in worry, in despair, and in anger.

In so many ways, meeting you was the ruin of my life, he’d written just two days before she died. Everything I built was reduced to rubble the moment I met you. Ruin deserves ruin, Edita. Ruin deserves ruin.

Obsession has been a staple in the recipe book of murder since time immemorial. Sometimes obsession is a major ingredient. Other times, obsession is the oven that makes things too hot to handle.

Some obsessives were taught to be that way through neglect or cruelty. Others developed hatred as the basis of their obsession. This was especially true of organized serial killers. They ritualized their killings, taking their rage out on surrogates for the people who’d spawned their hatred.

But love can be the basis of obsession too, especially if one party or the other is spurned. You see that kind of gradual tick-tick-tick change in a person as he goes from being smitten to being crazy in love to—when he’s rejected—feeling sad, then worthless, then angry, then enraged, and then he grabs a gun because If I can’t have the object of my desire, no one will.

Was that what had happened with JohnnyBoy5? Had he taken the romantic spiral toward homicide and killed Edita and Tommy McGrath, the big guy who’d threatened to break his face? Or was that someone else?

Sampson walked in. “I got something you need to see.”

“Me too,” I said, getting up. “She’s got a stalker.”

“That fits,” he said. He turned and led me into her bedroom.

Big four-poster bed. Matched linens. New dresser. Nice mirror. A walk-in closet with racks bulging with clothes and shelves holding dozens of beautiful shoes.

There were built-in drawers at the far end of the closet.

Sampson had pulled two of them open. The first was filled with fine lingerie. The second featured a wide selection of sex toys and lubricants.

“So she had a kinky side,” I said. “So what?”

He pushed shut the two drawers and opened the ones directly below. I took both in at a glance and said, “Oh, well, that changes things.”

“Damn sure does,” Sampson said, looking into the right drawer, which was filled with hard-core S&M equipment.

I was more interested in the drawer on the left, the deeper one, the one filled with stacks and stacks of banded fifty-dollar bills.





CHAPTER


9


SAMPSON AND I left Edita Kravic’s apartment shortly after seven that evening. We’d found the sex equipment and the cash, which we estimated at forty thousand dollars, but little to explain how a second-year law student had come to have that kind of money stuck away in a clothes drawer.

When you see that much dough and the sex gear, your investigative instincts tend to drift toward hooking or drugs or smuggling or organized crime. But we’d found no direct evidence of anything illegal, not even in the locked file cabinet, which we’d opened after we’d located the key.