Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(4)

I skirted the trucks and pushed my way through the onlookers, hearing but trying to ignore the vicious gossip and speculation already spreading about the victims and the heinous crime.

In the past I had been both an FBI agent and a DC Metro Homicide detective, and now I was a consultant for both agencies. I showed my identification to the uniformed officer restricting entry to the crime scene, and he let me duck under the tape.

I made it fifteen yards before an FBI agent asked me for my ID. I gave him my FBI contractor’s badge, and he waved me through. John Sampson, my best friend and former partner at DC Homicide, came around the corner.

“FBI?” I said.

“Given the victims, not surprising.”

“Right, but who’s in charge?”

“Mahoney. He wants you to look at the bodies before they’re moved.”

“How bad?”

“They weren’t shot in the face. You’ll recognize both.”

We walked around to the lot in the rear of the school, and I saw an FBI forensics van and a DC medical examiner’s vehicle parked by the football field and track where my daughter had run some of her finest races. There were at least twenty agents prowling the lot, looking for any and all evidence. I could see a team of them on the field.

“Who found them?” I asked.

“School security guard,” he said, gesturing toward dumpsters with yellow police tape around them. “They’re out back.”

I said, “Time of death?”

“ME says four a.m.”

We went over to the dumpsters to find the familiar powder-blue Bentley convertible cordoned off by more police tape, and agents, criminologists, and police detectives milling around the area.

FBI Special Agent in Charge Ned Mahoney, my old partner at the Bureau, separated himself from the pack, came over, and shook my hand. “We’ve been waiting on you, Alex. It’s been photographed but not scoured by forensics yet.”

“Okay,” I said. “Can I get some breathing room?”

Mahoney clapped and yelled, “All right, now, everyone back off, we need the scene to ourselves for a moment.”

We got odd glances, but they walked off.

I took in the Bentley convertible and the victims in the back seat, and part of me wanted to sit down and cry. But I’d spent the majority of my adult life confronting murder, and there was only one way to do it well: divorce yourself emotionally from the victims. In this case, that was going to be difficult.

Mahoney, seeming to read my thoughts, said, “You sure you’re up to this?”

“I’ll deal with it,” I said as I walked around the car toward the female victim.

I wanted to treat her as an object to be studied and evaluated, but I was having a hard time taking my eyes off Kay Willingham’s face. She was one of the most striking, most interesting women I’d ever known, and here she was dead, sprawled next to a man who had apparently been her lover, unlikely as that seemed.

I had to force myself not to look at her blank expression and instead focus on the two bullet wounds about four inches apart and two inches above her bare left breast. Her rose-lace bra was on her lap; her black dinner dress was tugged down around her waist.

“No sign she had her hands up in a defensive posture,” I said. “I’m thinking she never saw her killer.”

“Neither did he,” Sampson said from the other side of the car. “I think they had other things on their minds.”

Only then did I look at the male victim. He was turned slightly toward Kay, his head slumped on his right arm, which was extended over the compartment that held the convertible’s retracted roof. His pants and boxers were around his ankles. Blood from two chest wounds had drained across his left thigh and pooled between his legs.

“The press is going to have a field day with this,” Sampson said.

“For way too many reasons,” Mahoney said.

I didn’t reply, but Ned and John were right; there were so many reasons for this to blow up, and in ways we couldn’t predict.

Kay Willingham was a vivacious Georgetown socialite, a Southern heiress and power broker who had, until two years ago, been married to J. Walter Willingham, the current vice president of the United States.

The man with her, Randall Christopher, was the founder and principal of Harrison Charter High, a charismatic man rumored to have his eye on the mayor’s office and, if that went well, higher political aspirations. Christopher was African-American and married with twin girls who were sophomores at his school and friends of my daughter.

“Look at that,” I said, shaking my head.

“What?” Sampson and Mahoney said.

“We might be witnessing the birth of a perfect shitstorm.”





CHAPTER 6





BEFORE EITHER OF THEM COULD respond, two men in dark suits and shades ducked under the tape.

“Spin around, whoever you are,” Mahoney barked. “And get off my crime scene.”

They both held up badges. The taller of them, the one with the buzz cut, said, “Donald Breit, U.S. Secret Service.”

“Lloyd Price, U.S. Secret Service,” said the other, who was built like a brick with powerful legs and arms. “You are?”

“FBI Special Agent in Charge Mahoney,” Ned snapped. “Now get off my crime scene.”