Criss Cross (Alex Cross #27)(65)

CHAPTER 83





Gaithersburg, Maryland



THE REGAL MOTEL WAS ANYTHING BUT.

For $22.00 an hour, $62.50 a night, and $213.00 a week, you could stay in a room that stank of stale cigarette butts and beer and featured threadbare rugs and bedcovers with suspicious-looking stains.

Hookers had used the place for tricks until the Montgomery County sheriff had cracked down a few years back. According to the desk clerk, the residents these days were homeless people, addicts, or women trying to hide from abusive spouses.

“We’ve got three or four of those, and their kids,” the clerk, Souk, told me, Sampson, Bree, and Mahoney. She was a bright young woman who was taking night classes at American University. Souk nodded over her shoulder at photographs of men thumbtacked to the wall. “Any of them come in the drive, I call the sheriff,” she told us. “They all have restraining orders against them, and I got copies.”

“Good for you,” I said. “Have you seen this man around?”

I pushed the still shot from the detention-center security feed across the counter to her.

“Sure,” the clerk said. “Short, sandy-blond hair. Five ten, one seventy. Slips in and out of thirty-nine B. Pays weeks in advance.”

“You sound like you studied him,” Mahoney said.

“I study everyone who comes in while I’m working. I want to be able to testify if something bad happens here, which is bound to happen. Just the odds, you know?”

“Well, we’re glad you’re on duty, Souk,” Bree said. “Is he here?”

She shrugged. “I just came on shift, and like I said, he kind of slips in and out. You catch glimpses of him.”

“No car?”

“If he has one, it is not here. He says he’s using the buses.

Why? What’s he done?”

“We just want to talk to him,” Mahoney said. “Is there another way out of thirty-nine B?”

“A window in the bathroom to the back roof. But it’s at least a thirty-foot drop.”

“No fire escape?”

She shook her head. We moved outside, split up, and climbed to the motel’s third floor. Bree and Sampson came at Nolan’s room from the west. Ned and I slid toward 39B from the east. All four of us drew our weapons and stood on either side of the door. Mahoney knocked sharply. No response.

Mahoney knocked harder. “William Nolan, open up. This is the FBI.”

For a moment, there was silence, and I thought Ned was going to use the key the desk clerk had given us. Then we heard the soft squeak of an old bed frame.

Mahoney shouted, “Mr. Nolan, we are—”

Inside, we heard running. A door slammed.

Ned spun the key and opened the door, which was latched with a security chain.

Sampson threw his whole weight at the door.

The chain snapped. The door fell. We swept into the room and saw fast-food wrappers, empty booze bottles, and an open duffel stuffed with clothes on the unmade bed. A cigarette burned in the ashtray.

Sampson motioned to the shut bathroom door at the rear right of the room.

He slammed on the door with his fist. “Nolan, open this door.”

There was no answer, and Sampson broke down that door too.

The bathroom window was up, revealing a narrow roof.

I went to the window, stuck my head out, and saw Nolan, looking for all the world like Kyle Craig’s twin. He wore a camo knapsack and was crouched twenty feet to my left, six steps back from a thirty-foot drop into woods.

I shouted, “Nolan! Don’t do it!”

But he did.





CHAPTER 84





THE FORMER STUNTMAN SPRANG FROM his crouch, took four strides, and drove off his right foot. He exploded off the edge of the roof, legs and arms pumping as he fell.

I didn’t want to see him die, so I averted my eyes and waited for the thud.

Instead, I heard a sound like a gunshot. I looked up, out, and down, and there he was — not on the ground but twenty feet above it, hanging on to a stout but cracked and cracking limb sticking out of a big pine in the woods behind the motel.

I spun around. “He’s in a tree!”

Bree had been at the back, and now she led the way out of the motel room.

“How in God’s name did he do that?” Mahoney said.

“Fear or lunacy,” Sampson muttered.

“I’m calling the sheriff for backup,” Bree called, scrambling down the stairs.

Mahoney took charge and shouted for me to go around the east side and for Sampson to go around the west. He and Bree would get the vehicles we came in.

Souk, the desk clerk, was by the office door. She looked worried as I raced past her and shouted, “What’s in back of this place?”

“Trees and a swamp?”

“And after that?” I called over my shoulder.

“No idea.”

Over the earbud I wore, I could hear Bree calling for backup as I ran along the side of the motel. The way was choked by weeds and vines. Thorns tore at my skin and clothes. There was trash everywhere.

I got to the rear corner of the building, gun up, and peeked around it fast. The trashy thicket went the entire length of the motel. Dead center of that space, a good twenty feet from the Regal’s rear wall and eight feet up the pine tree, Nolan was looking over his shoulder right at me.