Criss Cross (Alex Cross #27)(59)

CHAPTER 75





I’M SURE I’VE BEEN TO worse airports than Miami International, but I can’t remember when.

I didn’t notice the problems as much when I flew in, but trying to depart, I waited for almost an hour to clear security, and I found most of the toilets broken and the floors filthy. There weren’t enough benches or chairs, and the service people were deeply unhappy; some were downright rude. It put me in an even fouler mood than I’d been in when I left Dr. Bombay’s office. I still had no answers to any of my questions, including whether Kyle Craig had indeed had his face surgically altered to match that of a missing FBI agent.

I’d hoped Dr. Bombay could prove that my idea that Craig might still be alive was wrong. But getting off my flight home, I felt no closer to doing that.

I grabbed a cab, gave an address a block from my house, and waited until I was on the Fourteenth Street Bridge before putting the battery back in my burn phone. When I turned it on, I found eight phone messages and eight texts waiting for me.

My phone rang before I could listen to or read any of them. John Sampson.

“Where the hell are you, Alex?” he asked after I’d said hello. “You haven’t been answering your phone.”

“I needed to disconnect for a few hours.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Okay, well, whatever. Can you receive text pics wherever you are?”

“I’m almost home, and yes.”

“It’ll take only a minute. I’ll send them and call you back.” Stuck in traffic ten minutes later, I felt the phone buzz. I dug it out and glanced at the two pictures. I felt a blinding headache coming on.

Pseudo-Craig had been caught on-camera, in color, both in profile and straight on. He wore jeans, a tan leather jacket, no sunglasses, tooled cowboy boots, and a white baseball cap on backward.

My phone rang.

“You see him?”

“Couldn’t miss him. Where was he?”

“Union Station. Four o’clock yesterday afternoon. Those are only two taken from the security footage, but I’ve looked at all of it, and … it’s like he wants to be seen, Alex.”

“Okay?”

“He deliberately walked in front of at least four cameras.”

“Where’d he go after that?”

“We lost him when he dropped down the escalators to the Metro station. The cameras there were being repaired.”

Of course they were. I groaned inwardly.

“What’s he up to, Alex?”

“Let me think on it,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”

The phone buzzed the moment I hung up. A text from Ned Mahoney: We’ve got the federal court order to exhume Craig’s remains tonight. I figure you’ll want to be there.





CHAPTER 76





Quantico, Virginia



DRIZZLING RAIN AND FOG SWEPT over small black gravestones engraved with alphanumeric codes set flush in the forest floor.

Darkness had long fallen on that remote and piney part of the Marine Corps base, an area not specifically denoted on any map of the vast federal property, an anonymous graveyard in the trees created for criminals whose pasts were so evil, their families had declined to claim their bodies for proper burial.

Mahoney, two other FBI agents, three cemetery workers, and I were there, all of us dressed in rain slickers and rubber boots and waving flashlights, looking for B157, the code on the marker above the supposed remains of Kyle Craig.

“Why aren’t they in order?” I asked.

One of the workers, an older man named Cecil who walked with a slight stoop, said, “The Marine commandant who authorized this burial ground after the Civil War wanted to make sure there would be no shrines to the dead here. Make them as difficult as possible to locate. Especially A-one.”

I took my eyes off gravestone C42. “Who’s under A-one?”

He hesitated, then said quietly, “John Wilkes Booth.”

I frowned. “Lincoln’s assassin? I thought he was buried in some cemetery in Baltimore under a blank gravestone that people cover with Lincoln pennies.”

Cecil shook his head. “Family didn’t want nothing of him. That headstone in Baltimore is over his sister’s grave. Booth’s here. He’s the reason for this unholy place.”

“Who else?”

“Can’t say, but a bunch. People think they’re buried somewhere else, and there are headstones and all, but the truth is, most cemeteries don’t want someone notorious or wicked defiling sacred ground. They send the real remains here. No one’s the wiser.”

I had never heard of this graveyard, not even during my days working on the base with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. I was fascinated. “C’mon,” I said, glancing around. “Who else is in these woods?”

Cecil looked away.

“I promise it will be between us.”

He hesitated but then said in a low voice, “You’re within about thirty yards of all that remains of Oswald and of Ruby.”

I gaped at him. “Lee Harvey Oswald? JFK’s killer? Here? And Jack Ruby, Oswald’s assassin?”

“John Wayne Gacy’s not far either. Real hall of shame.”