The People vs. Alex Cross (Alex Cross #25)(45)

But as the hours ticked by I grew more anxious. What if Anita’s analysts weren’t good enough? What if we couldn’t prove the video had been doctored?

Around nine that evening, I was feeling claustrophobic. Ali found me pacing around in the kitchen.

“Dad?” he asked. “Can I see those videos everyone’s talking about?”

“Why would you want to see things like that?”

He shrugged. “Your attorney Ms. Marley thinks something’s wrong with them. I wanted to see if I could see it.”

I thought about that for several moments and then said, “I don’t think I’d be the best father if I let a nine-year-old see a recording of people dying needlessly.”

“Oh,” my son said, sounding taken aback. “I just wanted to help.”

“I know you did, bud,” I said, and I hugged him.

Ali left me looking disappointed, which made me feel even more claustrophobic. I went upstairs and got changed into sweatpants, an old FBI hoodie, and running shoes. I found Bree in the front room watching The Voice and said I was going out for a jog.

“You want company?”

“Not this time,” I said. “I need to get some things straight or I won’t sleep.”

Bree gave me an even gaze. “Just for the record, Alex, I think it sucks you’re going through this. It guts me.”

“It does suck,” I said. “But like Nana Mama said, the truth will out.”

“I don’t want you spending a day in prison before that happens.”

“Me neither,” I said.

“Don’t forget Jannie’s racing in the morning.”

“I won’t be longer than I have to be,” I said, then kissed her and went out the door. I ran down the block well out of sight before slowing and hailing a cab.

I got in the back and gave the driver an address. Twenty minutes later I was climbing out into a crowded parking lot in a light industrial area off I-95 not far from Dumfries, Virginia. I’d probably driven by the steel building there several thousand times while I was based at Quantico and never noticed it.

Then again, ten years before there had been no big glittering sign on the side facing the road that said GODDESS!

Throbbing electronic music pulsed from the building. For a moment I thought the two shaved-head bouncers weren’t going to let me in because of what I was wearing, but the manager happened by and said, “The FBI is always welcome. More and more of you brave ones every day.”

I paid the twenty-five-dollar cover fee and went inside the club, an homage to 1970s disco, with black walls, lots of mirrors, and flashing balls spinning and flickering above the dance floor, which was packed with gyrating gay men in all manner of dress, from tuxes to leather bondage outfits.

As I moved around, I turned down two offers to dance myself before spotting the man I’d come to see. Krazy Kat Rawlins was right in the middle of the mob of sweating dancers, shaking his booty, tossing his red Mohawk around, and waving his tattooed arms overhead as if he were at a revival for some of that old-time religion.

When the song changed, Rawlins came off the dance floor sweating, gasping, grinning, and flirting with several pals before he spotted me. Suddenly, the FBI’s top digital analyst wasn’t so exhilarated anymore.

“Unless you drive on my side of the highway, what are you doing here?”

“You haven’t been returning my calls.”

Rawlins patted his Mohawk, gauging its stiffness, before saying, “I don’t believe you deserve to talk to me or to Batra anymore.”

“Excuse me?”

He squared off, crossing his arms. “I’ve looked at the videos, Dr. Cross. Metadata’s all there and I don’t see any evidence that the sections that show the victims’ hands have been altered in any way.”

The words took a moment to sink in, and then I felt detached from my body. I looked around the dance club as if it were part of some weird dream.

“I saw guns, pistols,” I said.

“The data doesn’t lie,” Rawlins said.

“No, that’s not right. I’m telling you, Krazy Kat, that—”

“I can’t help you.”

I put my hands to my head. “I feel like I’m in some alternate universe, like I’m losing my mind.”

He knit his brow. “Then you should go talk to someone, like a therapist, someone who can help you understand what you’ve done.”

“But I didn’t—”

“The videos say you did,” Rawlins said. “The videos say Winslow and Diggs were unarmed. You killed them in cold blood, not self-defense.”

“I saw guns!”

“Then your brain invented the guns so you could deal with what you’d done. You’d gotten off before. You’d do it again.”

The FBI tech guru walked away and disappeared into the mass of writhing bodies on the dance floor with me staring dumbly after him.





CHAPTER


60


I HAVE NEVER been a quitter in my entire life, never tried to do anything but face my responsibilities and duties head-on. But sitting in another cab twenty minutes after Rawlins vanished back onto the dance floor at the club, I felt like telling the driver to take me to National Airport or Union Station instead of home.