Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(77)

“That’s convenient,” Special Agent Breit said.

“Right?” Special Agent Price said and sat back, unimpressed.

Barnes’s phone buzzed. She looked at it, closed her eyes, said, “Great. That’s the White House counsel wondering where we are.”

“Tell him we are attending to a personal issue that’s just come up.”

“Sir, I — ”

“Do it, please,” Willingham said. He looked at us. “If you don’t know who the assassin was, how do you know he was hired? That’s what you said, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Mahoney said. “We know he was hired because we know who hired him.”

The vice president, his chief of staff, and his security detail all leaned forward.

“Who?” Willingham said.

“Roy Sutter,” I said. “Kay’s father.”





CHAPTER 88





AT THE SAME TIME OVER in Southeast DC, not far from Dempsey’s All-Night Diner, Bree and Sampson pounded on the apartment door of Angela Monroe, mother of Devon Monroe, a seventeen-year-old junior at the late Randall Christopher’s Harrison Charter School.

Devon Monroe had no prior history of criminal activity, a minor miracle for the neighborhood, but Mary Jo Nevis, aka Waffles, had told Bree and Sampson that Monroe and a friend of his named Lever Ashford came to her two days after the murders.

Several weeks before, the boys, who washed dishes part-time at Dempsey’s, had asked her about being a fence. Waffles told them being a fence had landed her in a penitentiary and that’s all they needed to know.

She’d meant it as a warning, so when they showed up at the diner looking for her to fence some jewelry that had “come their way,” she refused. Which meant either they’d sold the stolen goods elsewhere or they still had them.

Sampson knocked again on Monroe’s door.

Devon’s mother, Angela Monroe, who worked nights as an EMT, answered the door in a robe looking exhausted and confused. “Devon?” she said when Sampson showed her the search and arrest warrants. “No, my boy has never been in trouble a day in his life.”

“I’m sorry to say that day has come,” Sampson said. “Where is he?”

“No, no, Devon’s a good boy, a good student,” she said, her anxiety rising. “He’s going to go to college someday. He — ”

“Stole jewelry off two dead people,” Bree said. “One of them his high-school principal.”

“Mr. Christopher?” she said, appalled. “No, that’s — ”

“Ma’am, please,” Sampson said. “Can we make this easy? For his sake?”

Mrs. Monroe nodded. With tears welling in her eyes, she pointed to a hallway. “Third door on the right.”

Sampson didn’t bother to knock, just went in and turned on the lights. Bree followed him and almost gagged at the smell of a seventeen-year-old boy’s bedroom, a mix of body odor, sneaker toe punk, and dirty-clothes stink. And the tiny space looked like a bomb had hit it.

Across the wreckage, on the lower of the bunk beds, something moved. Clothes fell to the floor, and then schoolbooks, then Devon Monroe’s head appeared, eyes shut, grimacing.

“Not again, Ma.” He moaned. “Shut the light off. I said I’d pick up in the morning.”

“Metro Police!” Bree said. “Get up. Now!”

The kid’s eyes flew open and his face registered shock at seeing Bree and Sampson standing there in their bulletproof vests. “What? Wait! What is this?”

“You’re under arrest, Devon,” Sampson said, going to him and throwing aside the small mountain of clothes and blankets he’d been burrowed under. He was naked.

“Dude!” he yelled, covering himself. “Not cool!”

Bree looked around, saw a pair of jeans, threw them at him, and listened as Sampson read him his rights.

“Do you understand, Devon?” Bree asked.

He nodded morosely.

“I sacrificed everything for you!” his mother yelled from the doorway. “Your father left, and I lived for you, boy!”

“Ma!” he said. “Please!”

“Please, nothing,” she said, weeping. “You’ve thrown it all away. Everything I worked for.”

“Maybe not,” Sampson said, looking at the kid. “We have a search warrant, but honestly, Devon, we’d rather not dig around in here. Show us what we want, now, and just maybe the judge will cut you some slack.”

His gaze shifted from Sampson to Bree to his mother, who shouted, “Show them! Tell them, Devon! Whatever they want, you do it!”

The teen’s shoulders drooped in surrender, and he sullenly pointed to a pile of debris in the corner. “I tried telling Lever it was too good to be true, but he just wouldn’t listen.”

Sampson put on latex gloves, went to the corner, and started digging.

Bree said, “Was that before or after you shot Mr. Christopher and Mrs. Willingham?”

“What?” his mother shouted. “No! Do not answer that, Devon.”

“Ma,” he said angrily. “We didn’t shoot anyone. We — ”

“I don’t care,” she said, sounding on the verge of hysteria. “I know where this is going now. Not another word until we’ve talked to a lawyer, you hear me, young man?”