Cross My Heart

by James Patterson

  “No, I thought of that,” Ava said. “They came in the way I went out: across the roof of your addition.”

  “Like I said, smart girl,” Sampson added.

  “Plan on leaving the same way?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Mahoney said, and tossed me a disposable cell phone. “Use that when you need to talk, and for God’s sake, keep it on you.”

  I caught the phone and swung my legs off the bed, feeling a rush of agony at the back of my head. “I’m probably going to need stitches.”

  “Ava will take you to the ER once we’re gone,” Sampson said.

  I looked at her. “You’re staying?”

  “Can’t leave you alone with a nasty concussion, can I?” Ava said.

  I smiled, said, “I suppose not.” Then I looked at my best friend, said, “When you get the chance, tell Captain Quintus to have an arrest warrant drawn up for Everett Prough, a homeless guy cum pimp and ice dealer who hangs around that abandoned factory where we found the burned Jane Doe, who now has a name: Elise…”

  I glanced at Ava, who said, “Littlefield.”

  “Elise Littlefield,” Sampson said, and wrote it down. “Okay.”

  We shook hands, and then Ava and I waited several minutes for Mahoney and Sampson to get down off the roof of the addition and leave by the back gate.

  I hugged Ava, said, “Thank you.”

  Ava was stiff at first but then softened, said, “No, thank you, Alex. I should have come to you and Bree sooner. But I was ashamed of what I’d become after everything you’d done for me.”

  “Water under the bridge,” I said, and let her go. “Right now, we’ve got other things to think about.”

  Ava made a show of helping me down the stairs, and I acted the shattered, injured, and demoralized victim while we intentionally made a tour of the dining and television room, looking for my jacket.

  A good part of me wanted to grab up one of the cameras, look into the lens, and tell Preston Elliot I was coming for him. But I kept my cool and went with Ava out onto the front porch.

  The air was clean after the previous night’s thunderstorms, and you could still smell the scent of Easter hams cooking somewhere on the block. I thought of how this holiday should have been celebrated with the ones I love all around me. It filled me with rage.

  Looking at the night sky and the glittering stars, I vowed to Nana Mama, Bree, Damon, Jannie, and Ali that I would not rest until I’d found them all and brought them home.

  Then I crossed my heart and followed Ava down onto the sidewalk.

  Author’s Note

  A university lecture takes place at the beginning of Cross My Heart. The topic is the nature of the perfect crime, and it’s given by a man who we know to be keenly concerned with such things. Professor Marcus Sunday contends that to achieve perfection as a criminal, one must believe that “life is meaningless, absurd, without absolute value.”

  Most of us have had at least some taste of tragedy in our lives. Loved ones lost, disappointments in our careers, dashed dreams. And we know how such circumstances can put us in a dark place. This is uncomfortable to experience firsthand—or even secondhand in a novel we’ve chosen to read.

  I ask that you understand that I wrote the ending this way because I am trying to be true to Alex, and to you, and to myself.

  I believe that to be true to life—and to art—one has to accept tragedy as part of it and, from there, allow for the human spirit—be it Alex’s, mine, yours—to pull us through.

  All that is to say, there will indeed be another Alex Cross novel after this one. Thank you for reading, and don’t give up on Alex—or his family—just yet. Things are about to get very interesting.

  Faithfully,

  James Patterson

  Private L.A.’s biggest case. Was Hollywood’s most famous celebrity couple kidnapped? Or murdered?

  For an excerpt, please turn the page.

  It was nearing midnight that late-October evening on a dark stretch of beach in Malibu. Five men, lifelong surfers, lost souls, sat around a fire blazing in a portable steel pit set into the sand.

  The multimillion-dollar homes up on the fragile cliffs showed no lights save security bulbs. Waves crashed in the blackness beyond the firelight. The wind was picking up, temperature dropping. A storm built offshore.

  Facing the fire, four of them with their backs to surfboards stuck in the sand, the men sipped Coronas, passed and sucked on a spliff of Humboldt County’s finest.

  “Bomber weed, N.P.,” choked Wilson, who’d done two tours in Iraq and had come home at twenty-six incapable of love and responsibility, good only for getting high, riding big waves, and thinking profound thoughts. “With that hit I most assuredly have achieved total clarity of mind. I can see it all, dog. The whole cosmic thing.”

  Sitting in the sand across the fire from Wilson, hands stuffed in the pouch pocket of his red LA Lakers hoodie, N.P. wore reflector sunglasses despite the late hour. He smiled at Wilson from behind his glasses and scruffy beard, his nostrils flaring, his longish, straw-blond hair fluttering in the wind.

  “I second that emotion, Wilson,” N.P. said, and flicked the underside of his cap so it made a snapping sound. His voice was hoarse and hinted of a southern accent.

  “Wish I coulda scored weed that righteous in the go-go days before the crash,” said Sandy dreamily as he passed along the joint. “I would have seen all, slayed the markets, and lived a life of wine, women, song, and that beautiful herb you so graciously brought into our lives, N.P.”

  Sandy had lost it all in the Great Recession, Brentwood house, trophy wife, big job running money. These days he tended day bar at the Malibu Beach Inn.

  “Those days are frickin’ long gone,” said Grinder, barrel-chested, dark tan, dreads. “Like ancient history, bro. No amount of pissin’ and moanin’ ’bout it gonna bring back your stack of Benny Franklins, or my board shop.”

  Hunter, the fifth man, was stubble haired and swarthy. He scowled, hit the spliff, said, “Ass-backward wrong as usual, Grinder. You wanna bring back that stack a Benjamins, Sandy?”

  Sandy stared into the fire. “Who doesn’t?”

  Hunter nodded toward N.P. before handing him the roach. “Like Wilson was saying, N.P., this weed brings perfect vision.”

  N.P. smiled again, took the roach and ate it, said, “What do you see?”

  Hunter said, “Okay, so like we rise up and storm Congress, take ’em all hostage, and hole up in there, you know, the House chamber. We do it the night of the State of the Union Address so they’re all in there to begin with, president, generals, frickin’ Supreme Court too. Then we make the whole sorry bunch of ’em hit this weed hard enough and long enough they start talking to each other. Getting stuff done. Tending to business ’stead of bitchin’ and cryin’ and blamin’ about who spent the biggest stack and for what.”

  “Speaker of the House hitting it?” Wilson said, laughed.

  Grinder chuckled, “Yeah, on the bong with that sourpuss senator’s always trying to shove his morals up your ass. That man would be in touch with his inner freak straight up then.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Sandy said, brightening a bit. “A stoned Congress just might get the country going again.”

  “See there, total clarity,” Wilson said, pointing at N.P. before getting a puzzled expression on his face. “Hey, dog, where you come from, anyway?”

  N.P. had showed up about an hour ago, said he’d take a beer or two if they wanted to partake of the best in the state, Cannabis Cup winner for sure.

  Smiling now, N.P. turned his sunglasses at Wilson, said, “I walked down here from the Malibu Shores Sober Living facility.”

  They all looked at him a long moment and then started to laugh so hard they cried. “Frickin’ sober living!” Wilson chortled. “Oh, dog, you got your priorities straight.”

  Joining in their laughter, N.P. glanced around beyond and behind the fire, saw that the beach remained deserted, and still no lights in the h
ouses above. He took his chance.

  He got to his feet. His new friends were still howling.

  Nice guys. Harmless, actually.

  But N.P. felt not a lick of pity for them.

  “N.P.?” Sandy said, wiping his eyes. “Whazzat stand for, anyway? N.P.?”

  “No Prisoners,” N.P. said, hands back in the hoodie’s pouch again.

  “No Prisoners?” Grinder snorted. “That some kind of M.C. rap star tag? You famous or what behind them glasses?”

  N.P. smiled again. “It’s my war name. Sorry, dogs and bros, but a few people have to take it the hard way for people to start listening to us.”

  He drew two suppressed Glock 9mms from the pouch of his hoodie.

  Wilson saw them first. Soldier instinct took over. The Iraq vet rolled, scrambled, tried to get out of Dodge.

  N.P. had figured Wilson would be the one. So he shot him first, at ten yards, a double whack to the base of the head where it met the spine. The vet buckled to the sand, quivered in his own blood.

  “What the…?” Sandy screamed before the next round caught him in the throat, flattening him.

  “Frick, bro,” Grinder moaned as N.P. turned the guns on him. The surfer’s hands turned to prayer. “Don’t blaze me, bro.”

  The killer’s expression revealed nothing as he pulled the trigger of each gun once, punching holes in Grinder’s chest.

  “You mother-loving son of a…!”

  Hunter lunged to tackle him. N.P. stepped off the line of his attack, shot him in the left temple from less than eight inches away. Hunter crashed into the fire, began to burn.

  The killer glanced up at the closest homes. Still dark. He pocketed the guns. The wind blew northwest, hard off the Pacific, swirled the beach sand, stung his cheeks as he dragged the other three corpses to the fire and threw them in, facedown. The smell was like when you singe hair, only much, much worse. But that would do it, a nice touch, increase the panic.

  N.P. got a plastic sandwich bag from his pocket. He crouched, opened it, and shook out what looked like a business card. It landed facedown in the sand. He kicked it under Sandy’s leg, picked up six empty 9mm shells, and pocketed them. His beer bottle he took to the ocean, wiped it down, and hurled it out into the water.

  Satisfied, he snapped the underside of his Lakers cap, waded into the surf up to his knees. He walked parallel to the beach, heading toward Pacific Coast Highway, head down into the wind, the salt spray, and the gathering storm.

  Shortly after midnight, as the first real storm of the season intensified outside, the lovely Guin Scott-Evans and I were sitting on the couch at my place, watching a gas fire, into a first-class bottle of Cabernet, and good-naturedly bantering over our nominees for sexiest movie scene ever.

  For the record, Guin brought the subject up.

  “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” she announced. “Remake.”

  “Of all the movies ever made?” I asked.

  “Certainly,” she said, all seriousness. “Hands down.”

  “Care to defend your nomination?”

  She crossed her arms, nodded, smiled. “With great pleasure, Mr. Morgan.”

  I liked Guin. The last time I’d seen her, back in January, the actress had been in trouble, and I had served as her escort and guard at the Golden Globes the night she won Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role. Despite the danger she was in, or perhaps because of it, a nice chemistry had developed between us. But at the time, relationships were not clear-cut in her life or mine, and nothing beyond mutual admiration had developed.

  Earlier that evening, however, I had run into her leaving Patina, a first-class restaurant inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex, where she’d been attending a birthday party for her agent. We had a glass of wine at the bar and laughed as if the Golden Globes had been just last week, not ten months before.

  She was leaving the next day, going on location in London, with much too much to do. But somehow we ended up back at my place, with a new bottle of wine open, and debating the sexiest movie scene ever.

  “The Postman Always Rings Twice?” I said skeptically.

  “I’m serious, it’s amazing, Jack,” Guin insisted. “It’s that scene where they’re in the kitchen alone, Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson, the old Greek’s young wife and the drifter. At first you think Nicholson’s forcing himself on her. They wrestle. He throws her up on the butcher block covered with flour and all her baking things. And she’s saying, ‘No! No!’

  “But then Nicholson comes to his senses, figures he misread her, backs off. And Lange’s lying there panting, flour on her flushed cheeks. There’s this moment when your understanding of the situation seems certain.

  “Then Lange says, ‘Wait. Just wait a second,’ before she pushes the baking stuff off the butcher block, giving herself enough room to give in to all her pent-up desires.”

  “Okay,” I allowed, remembering it. “That was sexy, really sexy, but I don’t know if it’s the best of all time.”

  “Oh, no?” Guin replied. “Beat it. Be honest, now. Give me a window into your soul, Jack Morgan.”

  I gave a mock shiver. “What? Trying to expose me already?”

  “In due time,” she said, grinned, poured herself another glass. “Go ahead. Spill it. Name that scene.”

  “I don’t think I can pick just one,” I replied honestly.

  “Name several, then.”

  “How about Body Heat, the entire movie? I saw it over in Afghanistan. As I remember it, William Hurt and Kathleen Turner are, well, scorching, but maybe that was because I’d been in the desert far too long by that point.”

  Guin laughed, deep, unabashed. “You’re right. They were scorching, and humid too. Remember how their skin was always damp and shiny?”

  Nodding, I poured the rest of the wine into my glass, said, “The English Patient would be up there too. That scene where Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas are in that room in the heat with the slats of light, and they’re bathing together?”

  She raised her glass. “Certainly a contender. How about Shampoo?”

  I shot her a look of arch amusement, said, “Warren Beatty in his prime.”

  “So was Julie Christie.”

  There was a moment between us. Then my cell phone rang.

  Guin shook her head. I glanced at the ID: Sherman Wilkerson.

  “Damn,” I said. “Big client. Big, big client. I…I’ve got to take this, Guin.”

  She protested, “But I was just going to nominate the masquerade ball in Eyes Wide Shut.”

  Shooting Guin an expression of genuine shared sympathy and remorse, I clicked ANSWER, turned from her, said, “Sherman. How are you?”

  “Not very damned well, Jack,” Wilkerson shot back. “There are sheriff’s deputies crawling the beach in front of my house, and at least four dead bodies that I can see.”

  I looked at Guin, flashed ruefully on what might have been, said, “I’m on my way right now, Sherman. Ten minutes tops.”

  Speeding north into Malibu on Pacific Coast Highway, driving the VW Touareg I use when the weather turns sloppy, I could still smell Guin, still hear her words to me before the cab took her away: “No more dress rehearsals, Jack.”

  Pulling up to Sherman Wilkerson’s gate, I felt like the village idiot for leaving Guin, wanted to spin around and head for her place in Westwood.

  Wilkerson, however, had recently hired my firm, Private Investigations, to help reorganize security at Wilkerson Data Systems offices around the world. I parked in an empty spot in front of the screen of bougainvillea that covered the wall above the dream home Wilkerson had bought the year before for his wife, Elaine. Tragically, she’d died in a car wreck a month after they moved in.

  Head ducked to the driving rain, I rang the bell at the gate, heard it buzz, went down steep wet stairs onto a terrace that overlooked the turbulent beach. Waves thundered against the squalling wind that buffeted various LA Sheriff’s vehicles converged on a crime scene lit
by spotlights.

  “They’re in the fire, four dead men, Jack,” said Wilkerson, who’d come out a sliding glass door in a raincoat, hood up. “You can’t see them now because of the tarps, but they’re there. I saw them through my binoculars when the first cop showed up with a flashlight.”

  “Anyone come talk to you?”

  “They will,” he said, close enough that I could see his bushy gray brows beneath the hood. “Crime scene abuts my property.”

  “But you have nothing to worry about, right?”

  “You mean did I kill them?”

  “Crime scene abuts your property.”

  “I was at work with several people on my management team until after midnight, got here around one, looked down on the beach, saw the flashlight, used the binoculars, called you,” Wilkerson said.

  “I’ll take a look,” I said.

  “Unless it’s dire, tell me about it all in the morning, would you? I’m exhausted.”

  “Absolutely, Sherman,” I said, shook his hand. “And one of my people is coming in behind me, in case you have the driveway alert on.”

  He nodded. I headed to the staircase to the beach, watched Wilkerson go into his house and turn on a light, saw moving boxes piled everywhere.

  Either poor Sherman was leaving soon, or he’d never really arrived.

  About the Author

  JAMES PATTERSON has created more enduring fictional characters than any other novelist writing today. He is the author of the Alex Cross novels, the most popular detective series of the past twenty-five years, including Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider. Mr. Patterson also writes the bestselling Women’s Murder Club novels, set in San Francisco, and the top-selling New York detective series of all time, featuring Detective Michael Bennett. James Patterson has had more New York Times bestsellers than any other writer, ever, according to Guinness World Records. Since his first novel won the Edgar Award in 1977, James Patterson’s books have sold more than 280 million copies.