Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(27)

You could see her visibly reliving the horror of the moment, her hand covering her mouth. She had wanted to scream at the sight of her husband and the woman who’d stolen him from her, both of them half naked and dead.

“At first, I was in shock, sensory overload, like it wasn’t really happening, and yet it was happening, and I just knew my entire life was shattered. Mine. The girls’. All of it was gone.”

“Why did you run?” Mahoney asked. “Why didn’t you call the police?”

“Because I knew how it would look. Jilted wife who just happens to be there in the middle of the night, just happens to hear the shots and sees the killers leaving? My mind said, Look at Randall’s face one last time, Elaine, and then get as far away as you can as fast as you can.”

“Did you have the pistol with you at that time?” I asked. “The one you had in the sand dunes?”

Elaine looked confused. “The gun? That night? No.”

“But you had it with you another night at the school?”

Elaine peered into the distance, frowning. “I wasn’t going to shoot them with it. I swear. Scare them. It’s all I wanted to — ”

Bergson, her attorney, threw his arm in front of her. “And that will be all for today, thank you, Detectives. We’re done here and anxiously await the results of the ballistics report on Ms. Paulson’s pistol.”





CHAPTER 29





MAHONEY AND I BOTH LEFT the hospital with Elaine Paulson’s final words about her pistol and her confusion as to whether she’d had it at the scene the night of the crime echoing in our heads: I wasn’t going to shoot them with it. I swear. Scare them. It’s all I wanted to—

“She certainly had the gun with her on another night,” Mahoney said out on the sidewalk. “And she meant to threaten her husband and Kay with it.”

“Definitely,” I said. “And Sampson says she wasn’t on the bodega security footage, so she didn’t enter the campus the way she says she did. Can you make some calls to Quantico to get the ballistics report speeded up?”

“They were swamped and irritated when I called there yesterday,” he said, then he cocked his head as if he had an idea. “We’re supposed to sit down with the vice president tomorrow morning. I’ll call his office, see if they can get things moving.”

“I’d try Breit or Price first,” I said. “You’ll get straight to Willingham.”

Mahoney did, talking to Agent Price and giving him the pertinent numbers to call.

At that point, Ned had to return to FBI headquarters to brief his bosses on the case and I decided to check in with Sampson to see if he needed help or a friendly ear. But my calls just kept going to voice mail.

“Call me, brother,” I said after leaving three earlier messages. “Love you and I have your back one hundred percent and always.”

I decided to return to Harrison Charter School and the crime scene to see if the layout jibed with Elaine Paulson’s description of the night of the murders. I found a parking space south of the main school entrance and across the street from the apartment building where workers in respirators were sandblasting the brick face.

I got out and tasted dust on the breeze. Burying my nose and mouth in the crook of my elbow, I squinted as I hurried north out of the dust plume, then brushed it off my shirt. I gazed around, reorienting myself, imagining Elaine with a pistol in her fanny pack coming here.

She said she’d run by the bodega but we knew that wasn’t true from the security footage. So how had she come here? Did it matter?

Elaine Paulson claimed she’d gotten to the northeast corner of the school building, looked up at her husband’s formal office, and saw the light off. From that point forward, I walked the path Elaine Paulson had described to us that morning.

At the northwest corner of the school building, I stopped. The rear of the stands about fifty yards across the parking lot blocked my view of the football field beyond. But I could see how someone could have been moving there along the back of the stands in the shadows heading north. And the three dumpsters across the parking to the south would certainly have blocked Elaine’s view of Kay’s Bentley.

My eyes followed the route Elaine said the two hooded males had taken, going south from behind the dumpsters to that hole in the fence. So who had gone north in a crouch? And who were the two hooded males running south? Were the three people she said were on the campus grounds working together? Were they part of a conspiracy?

Given that someone had tampered with most of the security cameras in the area, I decided the whole thing absolutely reeked of a conspiracy to assassinate Kay and Christopher. The fact that their jewelry and money had been taken could easily be explained as a diversion to suggest a robbery gone lethal.

But when I stood outside the police tape looking at where the Bentley with Kay’s lifeless corpse and her lover’s had been, I recalled the position of their bodies. Her right leg had been crossed over her left, toward Christopher. Her shoulders were turned slightly from him and down, but that could have been from the bullet impacts turning her. Christopher’s body position in death suggested his torso had been turned toward Kay when he was shot. What about it?

I stood there for a long time, trying to see what it all suggested, before I realized we had it wrong. Given the position of the shooter, fifteen feet back from the center of the front bumper, and given their body positions in death, I decided that the killer had not put two successive rounds in Kay and then Christopher. Or vice versa.