Triple Cross (Alex Cross #30)(44)

The detective stopped her car across the street from the house and said the killer had been meticulous in the Jameson case. Parks had been the first detective on the scene after a housekeeper discovered the surgeon dead on his kitchen table, his throat cut with a razor.

“Blood all over,” she said. “Which was amazing because there was no sign of the killer walking away through it and very little forensic evidence other than the body and the box cutter.”

The early investigation had focused on Jameson’s ex-wife, Claudia, and their tempestuous marriage and acrimonious divorce. Claudia had recently petitioned the court to increase her alimony payments, which the surgeon had opposed.

“She seemed like the obvious choice,” Parks said. “Or her live-in boyfriend, the top tennis pro on Kiawah. But both Claudia and the pro had ironclad alibis for the evening of Jameson’s murder.”

Parks started driving again. The second killing, she told me, came five weeks later, when Dr. Sandra Handle, an ob-gyn, was strangled in her home across the street from the seventh tee in another golf-course community on Johns Island. Her husband found her corpse upon his return from a fishing trip.

We pulled up in front of the Handles’ former home.

“Different method but the same attention to detail,” the detective said. “Even though it was a violent death, we found no DNA under Dr. Handle’s fingernails or on her body or anywhere, for that matter.”

“Enter Thomas Tull,” I said.

Parks’s jaw shifted a little. She put the car in drive and headed for Daniel Island. “That’s right. Within a week of Handle’s murder, he showed up, said he felt in his bones that this was going to be his next book.”

“You just let him into the investigation?”

She did that thing with her jaw again. “Thomas sort of slid in after sweet-talking the police chief and the mayor. I mean, he was kind of a celebrity. Everybody I knew read his books, including me.”

I waited until we were on Daniel Island and approaching the third murder scene before I said, “When did you start sleeping with the writer?”





CHAPTER 47


DETECTIVE PARKS’S JAW STAYED set as she pulled over onto the shoulder of a road.

“Suzanne Liu tell you that?” she demanded.

“She told me she called you the other day and you hung up on her,” I said.

“Damn straight I hung up on her. She all but called me a whore. I mean, talk about the pot calling the kettle black. She slept with the guy all the time!”

I held up both hands. “I didn’t know that and I’m not making any judgments here.”

“Well, I hope the hell you do, Dr. Cross! My reputation is at stake!”

“I’m just running down leads, same as you would do in this situation. Did you sleep with him?”

Parks took a deep breath. “For almost two years. Thomas has … he has a way of making you fall in love with him and not think too badly of him when he dumps you.”

“You called Tull after Liu called you.”

“First time in two years. But I thought he should know what his former editor was saying about him.”

“He threatened her,” I said. “I heard the recording.”

“I certainly had nothing to do with it if he did.”

“Tull never mentioned the affair in the book.”

“Thank God. My mother would have been mortified.”

“I’m sorry, but did you know Tull also had affairs with the female detectives in Electric and Noon in Berlin?”

Parks swallowed hard. “No, but it doesn’t surprise me. Like I said, he has a way of making women fall in love with him.”

After that, she took me to the site where the third Charleston doctor had been murdered, an area of big homes, all with docks that reached far out across the tidal flats to the Wando River.

“Peter Mason—an ear, nose, and throat specialist—died out there,” Parks said, pointing to the T at the end of the nearest dock. “Beaten to death with an oar. The last two murder scenes are a few miles north. We believe the killer came in off the river via the docks.”

“And Tull was here for all three of those investigations?”

“He was.”

“In the book, Tull says it was your idea to change the course of the investigation and start looking into the doctors’ medical-malpractice suits. Is that right? Or did he suggest it?”

Detective Parks stared into the middle distance for a long time before replying. “He did. It was his idea.” Tull, she said, reasoned that the killings could all be revenge for shoddy medical work. Sure enough, they found that all five victims had been accused of medical malpractice on multiple occasions.

“How did you get from there to Walter Stevenson? Was that also Tull?”

Parks’s face looked pained as she struggled internally. “I guess you could say it was Thomas who first brought Dr. Stevenson to our attention. But we were all instantly suspicious once we saw his depositions.”

Dr. Walter Stevenson, also of Charleston, was in his late sixties, a retired physician who made extra money as an expert witness in medical-malpractice suits. In fact, Dr. Stevenson had testified against each of the five doctors, all of whom had been deemed justified in their actions at the end of court proceedings and suffered little or no penalties.