Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(83)

CHAPTER 95





FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, I was in an interrogation room at the Alexandria detention facility as a sheriff’s deputy brought in Elaine Paulson. Even dressed in her orange jail jumpsuit, Christopher’s widow looked much better than the last time I’d seen her, in the psych ward.

“You’re the last person I expected here,” she said, taking a seat opposite me.

“Why’s that?”

She shrugged. “You save my life. You send me to prison for life. Another notch in the belt for the great Dr. Cross. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“It doesn’t work like that. Not with me. If there is any gap in a conviction story that I cannot explain, I consider the case open.”

Elaine looked at me with a glimmer of hope. “Is there a gap?”

“Maybe. Which is why I’m here. And your daughters say they love you, by the way.”

“You saw them?” she said, smiling. But then her lips twisted bitterly. “I haven’t been allowed.”

“I saw them an hour ago,” I said. “Your mother’s taking good care of them. And they’re helping to look for another girl who’s missing.”

“Dee Nathaniel,” she said. “I know her. It’s all over the news. Is that part of the gap that brought you here?”

“Maybe,” I said and then told her about the two boys who’d seen someone moving toward the football bleachers before they’d stolen the jewelry from Kay’s and Randall’s bodies.

“I told you I saw them,” she said. “And they saw me?”

“They did and identified you by name,” I said. “They were students at Harrison.”

You could tell that did not go down well but she swallowed it and said, “But that’s good for me, right?”

“It means three people, including you, have said there was another person on the campus shortly after the shooting,” I said.

That got her hopes up. She straightened and said, “That has to be good for me.”

“Unless you’re lying and you yourself circled toward the stands after shooting Randall and Kay and then you went back to make sure you’d gotten the job done.”

She stared at me and then laughed. “Why would anyone do that? Go back?”

After a moment, I shrugged, said, “Let’s say you didn’t. How do you explain the gun?”

“There’s nothing to explain,” she said. “I did not have that gun with me that night. I … I realized after taking it with me the first time what a dumb move having a pistol with me would be. I mean, I might be a little touched upstairs, but I’m not stupid.”

“When did you get the gun before you went out to the Eastern Shore?”

“You mean what time?”

“I do.”

Elaine thought a few moments. “Ten minutes to six? It was after I’d taken a shower and thrown some clothes in a bag along with some cash. By then I was already thinking that my life was over.”

I took out a notebook and wrote that down. “When did you leave the school? I’m trying to understand the timeline here.”

She nodded, thought again. “I ran out of there at maybe four twenty. More like four eighteen.”

“And you ran by the bodega and onto the campus earlier when?”

Elaine squinted. “Eight or nine minutes past four?”

“We’ve looked at the bodega’s security footage but we’ve never seen you run by.”

She looked puzzled. “I do change routes but I’m pretty sure I went that way. But maybe not?”

I let it slide for the moment. “And what time did you get home that morning? When you ran into your neighbor Barbara Taylor?”

“Quarter to five?”

That actually fit with what Taylor had told me. “So there is a gap,” I said. “Roughly a half an hour between you leaving the campus and coming home.”

She didn’t get it at first but then said, “Thirty minutes for the real killer to come to the house and put the gun back.”

“Right. Who has access to your house and might have wanted to kill your husband?”

She didn’t hesitate. “No one.”

“No one has access or no one who has access would want to kill him?”

“The second one.”

“You’re saying people besides you and your husband had access,” I said.

She nodded. “They knew where the spare key was.”

“Who?”

“My mother. My sister, but she lives in Texas now and loved Randall. The cleaners. And our contractor. We had the kitchen done in the spring. There were people in there all the time. I’d come home and there would be a new guy installing the floor and another one the countertop.”

I slid my notebook across the table at her. “I need names and numbers if you’ve got them.”





CHAPTER 96





MY ALARM WENT OFF AT six fifteen the following morning. On any other day, after sleeping less than five hours, I would have hit snooze. But I bolted upright immediately. More than thirty hours had passed since Dee Nathaniel was taken. If the serial killer’s signature style held, she had only around eighteen hours before he killed and dumped her.