Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(69)
“Tax the rich!” shouted one young man with shaggy, sandy-blond hair near the back of the protesters. “Tax the rich, not the poor, damn it!”
He was fervent about that message, shaking and pumping a sign with the same slogan and wearing a T-shirt that read FREEDOM AND JUSTICE FOR ALL!
Then he changed his spiel and started bellowing, “Life’s a bitch! Tax the rich!”
Others in the crowd picked up his chant while I studied person after person, hoping to spot the bandanna or the sign again.
“Life is a bitch!” the crowd chanted, and marchers walking past joined in. “Tax the rich!”
I triggered my mic. “I’m still not seeing him. I think he’s getting out of Dodge. Have officers photograph the IDs of anyone acting suspiciously.”
“These people are not going to like that,” Bree said, her radio voice crackling.
“They will when we catch the guy who shot Dawson in the ass,” I said, moving northeast around the crowd toward Eleventh Street. “He’ll be a legend. Most of these people will probably put him up for sainthood.”
I looked diagonally northwest through the crowd but could no longer see the guy with the shaggy, sandy hair who’d started the chant that was still echoing through the protesters. And his sign wasn’t there anymore. The only TAX THE RICH sign I could make out was held by a woman in her seventies wearing a broad-brimmed beach hat. I walked north on Eleventh scanning the flow of people leaving the march. Police officers were standing at the north end of the block checking IDs.
A man who held a sign that said THE BANKERS DID IT was giving one of the officers a bit of a hard time.
“This is the kind of police-state stuff we’re protesting, man,” he said as I showed the cops my FBI credentials and glanced his way.
Mid-twenties, rust-orange wool cap despite the heat, he was carrying a bookbag bandolier-style and wearing khaki shorts, sandals, and a yellow tank top with the Corona beer logo across the chest.
“It really is a depressing state of affairs, Officer, and with all due respect,” he said, “you should be pissed about the economic tyranny growing around us.”
“I hear you, Mr. Edmunds, but it’s already been a long day for me,” the officer said wearily. “And you’ve got a line behind you. You want to protest it, go back down there. You want to go home, keep moving.”
Edmunds sighed and trudged by her, heading north.
I continued around the perimeter and was almost back to Pennsylvania Avenue on Twelfth when Sampson came over my earbud.
“Dr. Cross? Chief Stone? You need to return to the International. We’ve got the whole shooting on tape.”
CHAPTER 79
SAMPSON, BREE, AND I STOOD behind Carlos Montoya, head of security at the International Hotel. He sat before a large screen featuring the frozen feeds of two cameras that looked down on the intersection of Eleventh and Pennsylvania Avenue.
Sampson took a pencil and tapped it on the screen where a man in a black ballcap, dark sunglasses, and a garish red Hawaiian shirt stood at the curb on the northwest corner of Pennsylvania Avenue.
“That’s Rex Dawson,” he said. He tapped on another man farther west on the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue wearing a broad-brimmed khaki-green hat that hid his face, a long-sleeved olive-green shirt, and matching olive-green pants.
“Watch him too,” Sampson said.
Montoya, the security chief, started the recording. The billionaire stepped off the curb and moved south across Pennsylvania Avenue, weaving in and out of the flow.
The guy in olive green did too, angling toward Dawson.
Sampson narrated. “Boom, the guy in the green hat shoves someone, and that guy knocks into Dawson. Billionaire’s hat and glasses go flying as he falls down. People start to recognize Dawson. See them all pointing?”
I saw them and Dawson getting up. People began to shout at him, and he shouted right back. But the guy in green was moving south ahead of Dawson when the billionaire threw up his arms in disgust at the people heckling him and started toward the hotel.
“Watch green guy slant toward Dawson again,” Sampson said.
The two men were separated by no more than eight feet when they reached the traffic island. Sampson had the security chief slow the feed.
A gap opened up in the crowd with Dawson facing the hotel. The guy in green’s right arm rose above his hip. The sleeves on the shirt he wore were overly long, covering his hand.
Dawson jerked sideways to his left, stumbled, grabbed at his flank, and screamed in pain. Then he got his balance and flung a few wild punches and kicks at the people nearest him while Green Hat moved away against the throng of protesters and out of the frame.
“I want to see that again,” Bree said. “I’m not seeing the gun. There’s something off about it.”
“I want to see it again too, but humor me a second,” I said. “Fast-forward, find the guy in the crowd opposite the hotel holding a sign that says Shoot the Rich. Just a few minutes after we arrived.”
Montoya gave his computer an order and the feed blurred to 3:42 p.m. Our vehicle came to the driveway three minutes later.
We were visible in the lower part of the frame of the feed from the east side of Eleventh at 3:54 p.m. Two minutes passed and there it was: a placard with the SHOOT THE RICH graffiti on it held by a guy in an LA Dodgers cap, dark sunglasses, a khaki-green shirt, and a black bandanna around his neck.