Triple Cross (Alex Cross #30)(63)

We also helped canvass the neighborhood, which did us little good. The Kanes’ house sat on seven wooded acres. So did the other nine houses in the area.

It was the kind of neighborhood where people valued isolation. Several of the neighbors had not yet met the Kanes, who’d moved in two years before.

Mahoney went to the Kanes’ business to interview employees. Sampson and I took another course, trying to make some connection between the Kanes and the four other families executed in cold blood since the attacks began.

Using John’s computer in the squad room at DC Metro PD, we tried common-word searches among the files, including schools attended, employment records, current and prior residences, ethnicities, religions, socioeconomic standards, even extended family trees. Then we mapped the killings, looking for overlapping travel routes the killer might have taken to and from the attacks.

But other than proximity to the Beltway—the band of freeways that loop the nation’s capital—the attack sites appeared unrelated. Try as we might, we could not find the pattern, the motive, or the logic behind the killings. If there was a commonality among the victims, we weren’t seeing it, and neither were our computers.

“Maybe that’s the point,” I said around six that evening.

“What is?”

“The randomness of the targets, the cold-bloodedness of the executions, the meticulousness of the killer,” I said.

“Designed to throw us,” Sampson said. “So we’ll focus on his behavior instead?”

“That’s right, though I’m too burned out at the moment to see how, and I have to get to National. Bree texted that she’s coming in at seven.”

“Then I’m on my way home too,” Sampson said. “Willow and I are getting fried clams and French fries for dinner.”

“Still running in the morning?”

“Every day.” Sampson laughed and rubbed his lean belly. He headed outside to grab an Uber. I went to the garage and got the Jeep.

My cell phone rang as I exited the parking garage. I hit Answer on the Cherokee’s navigation screen, turned into traffic, and said, “This is Alex Cross.”

“Dr. Cross, it’s Ryan Malcomb. How are you?”

“Stuck in traffic. You?”

“In possession of interesting ore, fresh from the mines.”

“Already?”

“Frankly, you were lucky, Dr. Cross. As Steve may have told you, we had that first data loaded already. Your new request was merely a matter of changing filters.”

“And what did you find?”

“Your instincts were correct. There was a cellular and data blackout around Thomas Tull’s Georgetown address at roughly the same time another occurred in the Kanes’ neighborhood.”

“What about during the other family killings? Was Tull’s place blacked out then?”

“No.”

“No?” I said, disappointed because I was sure this blackout stuff was big, though I could not put my finger on why.

“Negative, correct,” Malcomb said.

Traffic started to move, and I was soon crossing the Fourteenth Street Bridge toward Virginia and the airport. “How about his phone’s GPS or his car’s? Did you find data that put him in the vicinity of any of the killings?”

He sighed. “Afraid not. At the time of the first two attacks, he was in New York. The third time he was in Maine. The last two he was in DC, but his phone and car were nowhere near the victims at the time of their murders.”

“Huh,” I said. “What about a car we don’t know about and a burner phone?”

“That’s a different story,” Malcomb said. “But we search for what we can’t identify, if that makes any sense.”

“It would help you to know more about the car or the burner going in.”

“Exactly. Uh, sorry, Dr. Cross, but I have another call coming in. My … girlfriend.”

“I make it a rule not to get between a man and his girlfriend. Thank you, Ryan, and have a nice evening.”

Malcomb was chuckling. “You as well, and your wife and the entire family.”

During the twelve minutes it took to reach the exit for Reagan National Airport, I kept thinking about the digital blackouts that had been engineered around every crime scene and, once, around Tull’s house.

But why wasn’t Tull blacked out every time? I had no answer, so I flipped the question. Why was Tull’s place blacked out just this one time?

Immediately, I thought: Because Tull sensed we were surveilling him. Then he covered himself in a cloak of cellular and data invisibility so we wouldn’t know he’d left his home in the middle of the night.

Maybe. But that didn’t feel entirely right either.

Rain started to fall as I drove to passenger pickup and spotted Bree waving. She climbed in. We kissed and I pulled out.

“Productive trip?” I asked.

“Uh, yes,” she said. “Absolutely.”

When I glanced over at her, I could see her features were tight and she was studying the dash like it held mystic secrets.

“Why do I sense a but coming?”

Bree looked over. “I know things that I didn’t this morning, but I haven’t got them all straight in my mind yet. How they fit, I mean.”