Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(86)

Ned said, “Chopper will pick us up on the roof of Bureau headquarters in twenty. I assume you all want to be there when we cuff him?”

“I do,” Sampson said.

“Yes,” Alex said.

“Bree?” Mahoney said.

Bree barely heard him. She was staring at the screen of her laptop, frowning and biting on a nail. “According to this e-mail I just got from Verizon, Dee Nathaniel’s phone turned on briefly about three hours ago and transmitted a 911 signal before dying.”

The three men came up behind her.

“GPS coordinates?” Alex asked.

“I’m trying to see,” she said, clicking on various links. “Says the signal went through to Morgan County, West Virginia, sheriff’s dispatch. There’s the coordinates!”

She copied the GPS data and plugged it into Google Maps. The app immediately lifted off Ashland and went northwest to what looked like an old industrial factory on the east bank of the Potomac River, several miles north of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.

Alex said, “Can you get two helicopters? That’s a four-hour drive.”

Mahoney said, “We’ve got a man convicted of raping an underage girl six blocks from the twins’ last known location. Call the sheriff’s office first. See if they responded.”

Bree did and talked to a Deputy Janet Cafaro, who said that after getting the 911 call, she ran out to the location, an old silica-processing plant south of the current modern facility, but found the place buttoned up tight.

“It’s been condemned for two years now,” the deputy said. “They’re going to raze the place this fall to make way for an expansion.”

“How big is it?”

“Oh, covers forty acres, easy.”

“Buildings?”

“Four. But like I said, I checked the locks on the main gate and on every one of those buildings and I talked to security at the new plant. They haven’t seen any suspicious activity down there, and they go through the area twice a day.”

After she thanked the deputy, Bree hung up.

Mahoney said, “I’m leaving for Ashland.”

“I’m with you,” Sampson said.

“I think we should split up,” Bree said. “Alex and I will use a Metro helicopter to fly to Berkeley Springs while you go to Ashland.”

“You’re sure?”

“Do you want to tell Dee’s mother we ignored it?”

“Point taken,” Mahoney said. “Let’s stay in close touch.”





CHAPTER 100





TWO HOURS LATER, BREE AND I landed in a field outside Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, a rural, heavily wooded, unincorpo-rated area no more than a mile and a half from the Potomac and two miles from the silica-processing plant. Mahoney and Sampson had already arrived in Ashland, and with FBI agents from the Richmond office, they were on their way to the last known location of the Christopher twins’ phones.

Morgan County Sheriff’s Deputy Janet Cafaro was waiting for us outside her Chevy Suburban patrol vehicle. Beside it was a Chevy Tahoe rental Bree had arranged to have delivered from Hancock, about twenty miles north.

Deputy Cafaro was a big woman who’d played basketball at Pitt University. It was beastly hot, and she was in her body armor, sweating, so she was unhappy with us at first.

“I checked that old plant,” she said briskly after shaking our hands. “I think this was a waste of a trip for you.”

“Probably,” Bree said. “But we have two mothers with missing girls back in DC and I’d like to be able to tell them we did everything we could to find their daughters before he tires of them and decides to kill and dump them.”

That softened the deputy. “Not much time left for the first one, Dee?”

I shook my head. “Twelve to twenty-four hours if he sticks to his MO.”

“Okay,” Deputy Cafaro said, holding her palms up. “I get it now and I’m sorry for the attitude. Let’s go.”

“No worries on the attitude,” Bree said. “No one likes being second-guessed.”

The helicopter lifted off to refuel in Roanoke; the pilot would be back in an hour and wait for us. Bree and I got in the rental, listened to the country station the radio was tuned to, and followed Deputy Cafaro in her cruiser north on the road to Hancock. After a few miles, a high chain-link fence appeared on our left. Beyond it, to the west, the trees gave way to open ground and then a hill that had been cleaved by a pale white open-pit mine running north for almost a mile. At the other end of the pit, machines were boring and extracting tons of raw silica.

The old processing plant on the east side of the street was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence with razor wire on top. The gate was barred, chained, and locked with three padlocks. A condemnation and demolition notice hung on the gate beside a No Trespassing sign.

Before we arrived, Deputy Cafaro had gone to get keys from the plant security manager, who wanted to be there but had to leave to see his mother in a hospital in Pittsburgh. Cafaro fiddled with the keys and finally got the gate unlocked and opened it.

We drove in and parked, then walked across cracked and busted pavement toward railroad tracks that ran by a large complex of old, abandoned factory buildings. A pair of them were two-story, steel-sided, steel-roofed, and rusting badly.