The People vs. Alex Cross (Alex Cross #25)(16)

“Come inside, and please don’t be embarrassed or uncomfortable. I’m not a detective now and not here to judge you in any way. You need to talk. I’m available to listen. And, of course, nothing said ever leaves the room.”

The detective hesitated and then came inside. I followed her into my office, remembering the confident, smart, and attractive woman who’d helped save my family after they were taken by a madman named Marcus Sunday.

Aaliyah was from a police family. Her father, Bernie, had been a top detective in Baltimore, and she’d lived and breathed the job when we’d worked together. I knew some of the trauma she’d been through lately, and as I shut the office door, I prayed that I was up to the task of counseling her.

I got coffee for her and gestured to a chair. She sat down, her head tilted low and her upper torso and shoulders rolled forward, as if in surrender.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“You’ve seen the news? How should I feel?”

“Forget the news,” I said. “Lift your chin, straighten your shoulders, and give me your side of it.”

Conflicting emotions flickered on the detective’s face as she made a slight alteration in her slouch before telling me the story.

She and her partner, Chris Cox, had gone to a high-rent apartment complex off Judiciary Square to serve a warrant on and arrest one Drago Kovac. Kovac had immigrated to the U.S. from Serbia when he was nine, become an American citizen at fifteen, and become a car thief shortly thereafter. He wasn’t very good at his chosen field at first. Kovac was caught and convicted of grand theft auto twice before his eighteenth birthday. After that, he wised up and got sophisticated. He formed an auto-theft ring that worked the Miami-to-Boston corridor, boosting in-demand cars, chopping them up for parts, and then selling the parts over the Internet.

Kovac was now twenty-seven and operating his illegal enterprise from his luxury flat on Third Street in DC. Aaliyah, looking for spare parts for her Ford Explorer, had happened on one of his websites, which offered “gently used” parts for a third of what other sites and stores were asking. When she learned the company and Kovac were based in DC, one thing led to another, and then to a year of additional investigative work.

“We had him,” Aaliyah said. “I mean, this was a major criminal operation. Millions of dollars, and we had him dead to rights.”

“So you go to Kovac’s apartment building to serve the warrant,” I said, pushing her toward the awful truth.

“Yes.” Aaliyah sighed. “We went in at the exact same time arrests in this case were supposed to go down all over the East Coast. Synchronized, you know?”

But unbeknownst to Aaliyah and her partner, several warrants had been served early. When police in New Jersey went through the front door of a Kovac chop shop, one of his men got off a text warning of the raid.

“Seconds before we reached the tenth floor of his apartment building, Kovac and his men left his flat,” Aaliyah said. “Cox saw them at the far end of the hallway and ordered them to the ground. They ran, and when we pursued, they shot.”

“They definitely shot first?”

“No question,” Aaliyah said, a smolder of the old fire in her eyes. “Surveillance cameras back us up.”

“Okay. Kovac and his men shoot first. Then what?”

That glowing ember died in Aaliyah’s eyes. Her neck muscles went taut as piano wires before she said, “Then it all became a nightmare.”

Provoked into a gun battle, Aaliyah and her partner followed protocol and returned fire. Her first shot hit the meat of Kovac’s thigh. Her second and third shots missed the car thief, who, howling in pain, lunged into the stairwell.

“I was in pursuit when the wailing started behind the door at the end of the hall,” Aaliyah said, and she broke down sobbing.

I knew the rest. She and Cox caught and arrested Kovac and two accomplices, but at an unfathomable cost. The bullets that went wide of the car thief had gone through the door of the apartment belonging to the Phelps family—Oliver, a young, successful attorney; Patricia, a young, successful physician; and their twins, four-year-old Meagan and Alice.

Alice had been playing in the front hallway. The nanny had rushed to get her at the first shot.

“What are the odds, Dr. Cross?” Aaliyah asked, still weeping bitterly. “What are the odds of wounding the nanny and killing the girl?”





CHAPTER


18


AFTER AALIYAH POURED out her anguish, her grief, her guilt and despair, she pulled her feet up under her on the chair, wrapped her arms around her knees, and stared off into the distance.

“In the end, I’ll always be the cop who killed a child,” she said hollowly. “No matter who I was before or who I become after, that’s who I will be.”

“To who? You?”

“I pulled the trigger, Alex. That’s what they’ll write after I die.”

“I empathize with the pain and regret you must be feeling, but you don’t know what the future holds for you. None of us do.”

She blinked slowly, said, “There is a way to know your future for certain.”

That got my attention and concern. “Have you thought about that, Tess?”

Aaliyah took a big breath and then shook her head. “No. Not really.”