Triple Cross (Alex Cross #30)(66)

“I know that feeling.”

“I had this same feeling about Tull. From the beginning, he made me feel this way, even after we cleared him.”

“He had an alibi?”

“Cell phone records that showed him in another part of the city at noon,” the retired police commissioner said. “And timestamped credit card receipts.”

I thought about the fact that Tull had used his cell phone data to prove he was nowhere near the Kane house the night that family was murdered. Was it a coincidence? Or was Tull gaming the system somehow?

Get away with it once, you’ll definitely try again.

“So you let him into the investigation?” I asked.

A little bitterly, Martel said, “I was against it because we could not find CCTV footage of him to absolutely corroborate his whereabouts at the time of the killings. But my superiors said he was in a park having a beer, not many cameras, and they knew of his previous book and thought it might reflect well on the Berlin police department to have someone of Herr Tull’s, uh, reputation to tell the story.”

“Did Tull eventually solve the killings?”

He snorted. “Thomas Tull? No.”

“The way he writes it, Ava Firsching decides on her own to go back to the zoo to look at vendors.”

“You will have to ask her, but we were going back and looking at a lot of the evidence by then. The zoo would have been studied again by someone.”

“What about the guy you ended up catching?”

“Dietrich Frommer.”

“Any doubt it’s him?”

“None.”

“Could he have been framed?”

The retired police inspector made a dismissive noise in his throat. “Frommer believes so, but the evidence says it is him. Frommer had supplies of the tranquilizer. He knew the first woman to die from the gym where he exercised, Gerta Waldemar.”

“Didn’t you find the dart gun?” I asked.

“In a crawl space under his home, wiped clean. He claimed he had never seen the weapon before in his life.”

“You said the evidence says it is Frommer. What does the sick feeling in your stomach say?”

Martel paused for several moments. “That if Frommer is telling the truth, Tull was somehow involved. At the very least, I feel Tull was pushing the investigation in directions he wanted it to go from very early on.”

“Through his relationship with Inspector Firsching.”

“Ja, ja,” he said and chuckled. “Tull left Ava the day after Frommer was convicted, and still she defends him every chance she gets. Tull will do the same with you this time. Has he become sleeping partners with anyone on the case yet?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“This is surprising,” the retired commissioner said. “But give him time and—”

I could hear a woman talking in the background.

“Ja, ja,” he said. “I am sorry, Dr. Cross, but my wife reminds me I must go to the dentist. Can I give you my e-mail? You’ll tell me what you find out about Tull?”

“I will,” I said.





CHAPTER 73


AFTER MY LATE-NIGHT conversation with retired Hauptkommissar Martel, I tried to read more of Noon in Berlin, but I soon got drowsy and stumbled over to the old couch to shut my eyes.

Less than two hours later, when I was dead asleep, my cell phone started ringing and buzzing. It startled me awake; I had no idea where I was for several seconds, then I stumbled to my phone on the desk.

“Cross,” I said.

“Sampson’s on the line as well,” Mahoney said. “I’m in Baltimore and can’t get there fast. But Family Man has made a mistake. We got a report from a residential security company that a silent alarm has gone off in the home of the Allison family in Falls Church, near Lake Barcroft. There is an intruder in the house as we speak. He is armed and wearing night-vision goggles.”

“How do you know that? Where’s the family?”

“In a safe room,” Mahoney said. “They’re watching the son of a bitch on a closed-circuit system.”

“Get police there. And a chopper overhead. Surround the place. I’m on my way.”

“Already gone,” Sampson said.

I bolted out of the attic and down the stairs; grabbed my coat, service weapon, and the keys to the car. I put the address into my Waze app. Metro had given me a bubble that I could use in rare circumstances. This felt like one of those times, so I rolled down the window and slapped it on the roof.

It was two thirty-five in the morning when I squealed away from my house. With the early hour and the bubble, which let me run the red lights, I set some kind of land-speed record between Southeast DC and the wooded Lake Barcroft area, where I spotted a Fairfax County sheriff’s cruiser parked sideways across the mouth of Dockser Terrace, its lights dark.

I pulled over behind him and got out, holding up my IDs and credentials. “FBI and DC Metro,” I said. “When did you arrive, Deputy …”

“Conrad, and not five minutes ago, sir.”

“Are we in contact with the family?”

“Yes, sir. I mean, I think so, sir.”

“Let me talk to your dispatch.”

He handed me a walkie-talkie. I took it and called for dispatch. A woman named Helena Rodriguez came on. I identified myself and asked about communications with the family.