Triple Cross (Alex Cross #30)(93)

“Because Tull is killer, like me. But he is different. Tull, he likes to kill.”

Across the table in the interrogation room, Tull snarled, “This is bullshit. I’ve—”

I said, “Wait for it.”

“How do you know that?” Ellis said.

Volkov cleared his throat. “Because he kills two of my girls, one last year, one the year before, and pays me to keep quiet.”

Bree asked, “Why do you think Tull needed an alibi from you that night?”

“Not difficult to see. He was killing someone that night, taking pleasure in it.”

“An entire family,” Bree said.

“I say it again. Thomas Tull, he likes to kill people.”





CHAPTER 105


I SHUT THE RECORDING off and gazed at Tull.

The smug smile was gone. “You put Volkov up to saying that. And I’ve never killed any of his girls.”

I leaned across the table. “He says you did and we believe him, you cold, evil bastard. Did you kill every one of the victims in your books?”

“Never.”

“We think you did. We think you murdered most if not all of them. We think you framed the men in prison just so you could lay down the stories of your homicidal fantasies the way you wanted them told and make sure you never faced justice.”

“This is all nonsense and hearsay and you know it,” Tull snarled. “Show me one concrete thing that ties me to the Family Man murders that isn’t linked to Lisa Moore. Just one thing.”

Sampson smiled. So did Mahoney. And so did I.

Ned held up his cell phone. “We have agents out in Gaithersburg inside Haps Premium Meats and Cold Cold Storage. They’ve opened the meat locker you rent there, the one Lisa Moore figured out you had.”

The writer blinked, frowned, and stared into the distance as if trying to revise a sentence or a plot point in his mind.

Before he could spin the story another way, I said, “But there wasn’t meat inside your locker, Thomas, was there?”

Mahoney turned his cell phone to show Tull a picture of two anodized black boxes, each about the size of a small microwave oven. “These were in your locker, Thomas.”

Sampson said, “State-of-the-art jamming equipment stolen from the U.S. military and repackaged like this.”

“Funny thing about these jammers,” I said. “They eat a lot of power and they like to be kept cold. The colder the better, especially if you’re trying to jam the entire area around one of your kill sites. Or keep your home in a total blackout.”

Tull said nothing although his lips were moving, as if he were mouthing words, trying to put them in the correct order.

“Why did you have to kill whole families?” I said.

The writer did not reply.

“I know why. It’s because no one cares about yet another series of people dying in some gruesome manner anymore. Every book has to be bigger, more lurid, more sensational or it won’t make the bestseller list. Isn’t that true, Thomas?”

Tull finally focused on me. He snorted. “Of course it’s true, Dr. Cross. That’s the way publishing works these days.”





CHAPTER 106


ON THE AMTRAK TRAIN bound for Washington, DC, Bree drifted in and out of sleep. In that buzzy state between consciousness and dreaming, she relived Volkov’s destruction of Tull’s alibi and his earlier insistence that M and Maestro were behind the assassinations of Frances Duchaine and the others involved in the sex-trafficking ring.

In the odd way of dreams, those memories were soon replaced by others. She relived two evenings before when she and Phillip Henry Luster had been in his kitchen, hovering over his phone, listening to Nellie Ray, Duchaine’s former marketing director:

“Ryan Malcomb’s supposed to be the big genius, spotter of trends, right?”

“You’ve met him?” Bree heard herself say.

“Five or six times. He, uh, em, uh … well, I think he uses the whole muscular dystrophy thing to his advantage.”

Bree woke up then, her conscious mind straining to know why that was interesting enough to bubble up from her subconscious. Then, as the train approached Baltimore, she understood. She grabbed her phone and listened once again to the recording she’d made of Theresa May Alcott in the library when the billionaire got the call from Paladin.

“This is Terri … Give me a minute, will you, Emma, dear? I’m with someone and I’ll need to pick up in another room … I am sorry, Chief Stone. This won’t take long, but it can’t wait.”

Bree began to breathe faster. She rewound it and listened again, and this time she heard it slightly differently.

Was that right?

She played it a third time and heard it the same way. Then she searched her phone for Nellie Ray’s number and called it.

She got the woman’s voice mail and was starting to leave a message when her phone buzzed. Ray was calling her back. “Hi, this is Bree Stone.”

“I saw you called. How are you?”

“Good, Nellie. Listen, when we were on the phone the other night, you were saying that you thought Ryan Malcomb played up his muscular dystrophy.”

“Well, I’d be canceled if I said that on social media,” Ray said. “But yes, I think he takes advantage of it.”