Criss Cross (Alex Cross #27)(29)

Mahoney saw no activity inside the property and turned the drone around. I scanned the rest of the dossier. A few facts caught my attention.

Rivers had been divorced twice. The records of those proceedings were sealed, but FBI agents had contacted his ex-wives. They said he had a violent streak and that he liked to read about and pontificate on big murder cases, especially those involving serial killers.

His ex-wives said that he often made fun of police, said most of them were idiots who could be manipulated and fooled by a clever criminal.

Rivers had come to the attention of law enforcement prior to the weapons investigation only twice, both times for accusations of sexual assault. The victims said Rivers had drugged and raped them. But tests were inconclusive, and the multimillionaire denied everything, even provided alibis for his whereabouts during the alleged assaults.

Rivers was in his late forties when he bought the estate, and he had spent much of his time there with a steady string of younger girlfriends. One of them, Cora James, twenty-seven, had spoken to an FBI agent.

She said Rivers was a manic-depressive who could be charming and brilliant one moment and vicious and paranoid the next. He was also ultra-secretive, especially about the anthill.

“It gave me the creeps how he’d go out there from the house,” she’d said. “Like, okay, it could have been just like Dwight said, a place to be safe if things got out of control. But I couldn’t help thinking that it could have been a prison, you know?”

When asked why she would say that, Cora James said she had gone down by the anthill one night when Rivers was inside. There were air vents in the side of the bunker.

“I thought I heard a woman crying in there,” she said.

James said she became frightened and confronted Rivers about it. He’d laughed and said she’d heard the squealing of a dumbwaiter he’d installed.

He’d even volunteered to take her on a tour of the bunker, but something about his body language had made her uneasy, and she’d declined. Rivers tried to monitor and restrict her movements after that.

“I waited until he went to town for groceries a couple of days later, and then I got the heck out of there on foot,” she’d told her interviewer.

The drone landed and Mahoney picked it up and took it back to his vehicle.

I closed the file and stared off into the distance.

“What are you thinking, Alex?” Sampson asked.

I struggled a moment, then said, “If Rawlins’s algorithm is right, if Dwight Rivers is M, then I would love to see exactly what he’s got going on inside of his anthill.”





CHAPTER 36





MAHONEY QUASHED THAT IDEA the second he heard it.

“I tried to get search and wiretap warrants through two federal judges this morning,” Mahoney said, putting the drone in his car. “Both turned me down. Having an anthill filled with legally bought guns is evidently not enough to warrant a search.”

“Someone’s got to go in there,” I insisted.

“Not without cause, Alex,” he shot back. “If Rivers is your M, we want to get him clean, fair and square, no fruit of the poisonous tree, no giving him a way out of a prison cell or a death chamber.”

I stewed on that after Mahoney got in his car and headed back toward Quantico in the waning light.

“We done?” Sampson said, sliding into the driver’s seat. “Gonna be dark soon, and we are a ways from home.”

“Not yet,” I said, looking through binoculars across the field toward the gravel road that led past Rivers’s driveway.

“C’mon, Alex,” Sampson said. “Without a drone in the sky full-time, we’re not surveilling this guy. We’re just looking at trees.”

“Unless we go into the trees.”

“Jesus, you heard Ned.”

“What if Rivers has a woman in there, John? What if he is M, and he’s got Diane Jenkins in there?”

“What if he does?”

For a long moment, I felt conflicted, but then I didn’t.

“I’m going in there,” I said and yanked the door handle.

“If you’re going, I’m going.”

“No, you stay here. You’re still on the job. I’m a contract employee who’s not under contract at the moment.”

“Which means what?”

“I’m a civilian. The rules are different for me than they are for someone who’s full-time law enforcement.”

“Yeah, try that one in court. You’ll just be some burglar looking at ten years.”

“Hopefully, it won’t come to that. If I’m not back in an hour, use the Find My Friends app and come get me.”

I shut the door before he could protest and set off across the road to Rivers’s property with just enough light to see. Mahoney’s drone had sailed over the woods in seconds, but it took me ten minutes to reach the north edge of the meadow.

I could make out the solar panels, the anthill, and, beyond them, Rivers’s house. There were lights on.

I trained my binoculars on the windows that overlooked the pond and the meadow but I saw no movement. Was he even in there? Or was he inside his bunker?

I didn’t give myself time to think about answers to those questions; instead, I broke out of the woods and ran toward the anthill as fast as I could.