Criss Cross (Alex Cross #27)(51)

Before I knew exactly what I was doing, I pulled out a small plastic bag. In it was a single strand of Kissy Raider’s hair. I was drawing it out of the bag when Sampson came into the bathroom. He looked at the bag and the strand of hair.

“He’s hidden the trophies somewhere else,” I said, and I let the hair fall.

John didn’t say anything for several long moments. Then he said, “I’ll have forensics work in here next.”





CHAPTER 63





Present day



IN MY ATTIC OFFICE THAT morning, I stared without emotion at an old copy of the lab report stating that the hair I’d dropped matched Kissy Raider’s. I closed the file and opened another that contained a copy of that same lab report as supporting evidence for search warrants at all homes and businesses owned by Mikey Edgerton’s family.

I found an evidence log noting various items discovered beneath the floorboards of Mikey’s room in a vacation home the Edgerton family maintained at a lake in western Maryland. I scanned the list until I saw: Eight (8) locks of blond hair in specimen bags.

Eight photographs, Polaroid, of eight women, all blond.

The actual photographs weren’t in my files, but I remembered them as clearly as if I’d seen them yesterday. In every one, including the picture that showed Kissy Raider, each doomed woman was alive, bound, gagged, and terrified.

I shut the file and then the box, not needing to look further, not needing to see the DNA results that linked the eight locks of hair to Edgerton’s eight victims.

And the strand of hair I dropped? I had not lost a wink of sleep over it. Ever.

Mikey Edgerton raped and killed those women. Of that there was no doubt.

You might ask if I believed the ends justified the means, and I’d answer that in this case, yes. The families of Kissy Raider and Edgerton’s other victims got justice when he was convicted, and they got more justice when he opted for the electric chair. And the world, in my opinion, was made a safer place.

I’d picked up a burn phone the day before. A text came in over it from Sampson.

Wake the chief. She’s not answering. Bring her and meet me at Seventeenth and R Southeast. She’s going to want to see this.





CHAPTER 64





TWENTY MINUTES LATER, BREE AND I left her car and walked toward two patrol cars and barriers set up at Seventeenth and R in Southeast DC.

Sampson hurried over to us.

“How many victims?” Bree asked. The sidewalks were empty, but people, many still in their pajamas and robes, were looking out their windows at us.

“Six,” Sampson said. “And we haven’t brought in the dogs yet to look for more.”

I saw Bree’s shoulders adjust to the weight of that. Six victims. Sampson led us to a brick building midway down the block, once a small job-printing facility but now abandoned and condemned, with a chain-link fence around it. The windows were all gone, replaced by plywood that had been spray-painted with graffiti.

Two-by-fours had been pried off the double front doors, which sagged open. We went inside and were hit by the smell of stale urine, feces, and body odor.

The place was trashed. John seemed uninterested in anything inside. He went straight through the building and out the back onto a parking lot of cracked pavement.

On the far side of the lot, three-foot concrete posts were anchored in the ground every fifteen feet or so; lengths of heavy chain were slung between them.

A decapitated head sat atop each of the six nearest posts, eyes open, blankly gaping at us. Blood seeped from the necks and dribbled down the posts, looking like the tentacles of red jellyfish.

Bree said, “We’re going to need an army in here.”

She tugged her radio from its holster and went back into the abandoned building. I could hear her barking orders, summoning crime scene personnel, as Sampson and I crossed the lot toward the severed heads.

“Equal-opportunity killer,” Sampson said, and I understood.

The six victims were an African-American male, an Asian male, a Hispanic male, a Hispanic female, a Caucasian female, and a Caucasian male.

The Hispanic male and the Caucasian female appeared to be in their late thirties, early forties, and the rest looked to be in their twenties.

Noting the deep gray pallor of the Caucasian male, I put a gloved hand on his cheek and found the skin near ice-cold to the touch.

“The heads were frozen,” I said. “That’s why we’re seeing the blood leaking.”

“Pretty bold to move six frozen heads in the middle of the night. What kind of person does that?”

“The Meat Man would have,” I said, feeling toyed with again. “Freezing heads was Tanner Oates’s post-homicide fetish.”

“Oates is dead. You saw him die.”

“I saw Mikey Edgerton die too,” I said. “And Kyle Craig.”

Before Sampson could reply, I heard a dull thudding sound somewhere behind me, and then a huge explosion ripped through the abandoned print shop and blew out the plywood over the windows. The blast knocked me off balance and had my ears ringing, so it took me a moment to remember who had just gone into the building.

“Bree!” I roared and ran straight at the back door.





CHAPTER 65