He raised his head then and looked across at Creem with a sudden seriousness.
“I meant it about not going to jail, Elijah. I’m sorry, but I don’t need to turn fifty that badly. Nobody does.”
Bergman’s ready answers seemed to explain a few things. Maybe that was the upside of Josh’s paranoid streak—always considering the exit plan, one way or another.
“You said something the other day,” Creem reminded him. “Something about how we’ll finish this together, when the time comes. Is that what you were talking about?”
Bergman picked up the bottle between them and took a swig. “You ever see Thelma and Louise?” he asked.
“No.”
“Well, never mind,” he said. “But to answer your question—yes. That’s what I was talking about. I love you, Elijah. You can make fun all you like, but I do. Without you . . . without all of this . . . I really don’t have anything worth sticking around for. Not anymore.”
There were tears in his eyes now. The conversation had shifted in a way that Creem hadn’t anticipated. He even allowed himself to be hugged, which was not something he usually went in for.
“I feel the same way, Josh,” he said. “About all of it. I wouldn’t trade the last several weeks for anything.”
“Me either, Louise,” he said.
“I don’t know what that means,” Creem said.
“Never mind.”
CHAPTER
78
AT THE END OF THE NEXT DAY, WE FINALLY GOT TO SEE AVA. I HAD ALL KINDS OF questions for her, but I knew we couldn’t push too hard on this first visit. She’d been through a lot since we’d last seen her.
It was quiet at Howard House when we got there, and Ava herself answered the door. Whether or not she was happy to see us, we got a cool breeze of tolerance when we went to hug her—arms at her sides, and no smile at all. I found myself scanning the exposed skin on her arms, and even behind her ears, for puncture marks. It made me sad to even consider that Ava might be injecting, but I’ve seen junkies younger than her.
After that, we settled on the front porch in some old lawn chairs, with Cokes and the tin of Nana’s day-old brownies. Nana did a lot of the talking at first, and told Ava about the KIPP school she’d already scoped out for her.
Bree and I gave her a homemade “We Miss You” card from Jannie and Ali. That got the first and only smile of the day. It was all kind of stilted and awkward, but better than being kept at a distance. I was glad just to see her.
Still, after fifteen minutes of nodding and one-word answers from Ava, I decided to address the elephant in the room. We knew from Stephanie that she’d been enrolled in a mandatory drug counseling program, but not a lot more than that.
“Ava, there’s something we need to ask you about,” I said.
She went perfectly still then, and rested the toes of her sneakers against the concrete. It reminded me of a sprinter in the blocks, ready to bolt.
“We know a little about what’s been going on the past few days, and I want you to know how concerned we are about you,” I said. “Not about what you did. About you.”
Nana looked at me like I was going too fast, but Bree picked it up from there.
“Sweetheart, listen to me. It’s really important that you tell us where you’ve been getting these drugs. Which corner, or dealer, or friend—”
“I don’t gotta answer that,” Ava said. “You two are police.”
Even after months of living in our home, she saw us as a threat. That distrust of authority was in her DNA.
“We’re not here to bust anybody,” I said. “The problem is, you never know what you’re getting out there. Kids accidentally overdose every single day, especially on the kind of stuff you’ve been taking.”
“I ain’t taking any drugs!” she said suddenly.
I knew her well enough to recognize the kneejerk lying she did when she felt cornered. It wasn’t about being believable. It was about saying whatever she had to in the moment.
Before we could say anything else, the front door opened and another girl came outside. It was the loud phone talker from the other day. She was about Ava’s age, but going on thirty, with low-slung jeans and a tight denim jacket.
“W’sup, Ava?” she said. “These your people?”
“I’m Alex,” I said. “This is Bree, and Nana. We’re Ava’s foster family.”
The girl’s eye landed on the brownies, and Nana held up the tin.
“Thank you, ma’am,” she said, taking two, with a little grin. “Ava tell you what she been up to lately?”
“Shut up, Nessa!” Ava blurted out. “You mind your own business.”
“Whatever,” the girl said. I assumed she was talking about the drug counseling, but either way, she didn’t seem to take Ava too seriously. In fact, she held up her phone to snap a group shot of us, like nothing had happened. “Say cheese, y’all.”
“Cheese,” we said—except for Ava, of course. I gave the girl my number and she texted the picture right over before taking another brownie and disappearing back inside.
“She doesn’t seem so bad,” Nana said. “Is she a friend?”
“My roommate,” Ava said. “She’s a’ight.”
We offered to take both girls out to dinner, if she wanted, but Ava said they were making tacos that night, and she wanted to stick around. We all nodded and acted like we understood, but we also left frustrated when the visit was over.
I didn’t see Ava as ungrateful, or bratty. I saw her as broken, and unable to process everything she was feeling. It’s the kind of void kids try to fill up with drugs all the time. Once you add in a history of neglect, like Ava had, and the pressure of living in the foster system, meaningful change can start to be nearly impossible.
It’s all about baby steps, at best. And that’s on the good days.
Today was not one of them.
CHAPTER
79
MEANWHILE, THE HITS JUST KEPT ON COMING.
Back at work the next morning, I went to log into the case files, and the system spit back an unwelcome message.
Login ID not recognized.
I tried a few more times but kept getting back the same message. Clearly, my access to the system had been revoked sometime in the last twelve hours. My noncontact status at work was now complete.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. All it took was a routine case review for anyone up the food chain from me to see my virtual fingerprints all over the River Killer, Georgetown Ripper, and Elizabeth Reilly files. Based on the rules of my suspension, I wasn’t supposed to be poking around the system to begin with.
But that didn’t stop me from going in to complain to Sergeant Huizenga.
“Don’t start, Alex,” she said, as soon as I showed up in her door. She knew why I was there. “I’m not in the mood.”
“This isn’t about me,” I told her. “We’ve got three potentially active serials on the books right now. When was the last time we were stretched this thin?”
“Not the point,” she said. “All Commander D’Auria saw when he caught this was something I should have already taken care of. Chewed my ass out about it, too, at ten o’clock last night, thank you very much.”
“I’m not talking about getting back in the field,” I told her. “I’m talking about reading files, so I can be up to speed when I’m reinstated.”
“What don’t you understand about noncontact status?” she shouted at me. “You think I want you on the sidelines? Jesus! Why are we even having this conversation?”
It was day eighteen of the crisis, and progress wasn’t nearly what it needed to be. The longer these investigations went on, the more Huizenga was going to have management breathing down her neck, micromanaging her life and demanding results. That’s usually when the yelling starts.
And it was about to get worse.
Just then, Detective Jacobs pushed past me into Huizenga’s office. Whatever she had, it was big. I could tell just from the way she w
as moving.
“Bad news, sergeant,” she said.
“Hang on.” Huizenga put up a hand and turned her lasers back on me. “That’s it, Alex. We’re done here.”
I hadn’t been left out of a Major Case Squad conversation since I could remember. The whole thing had me steaming mad, but there wasn’t much choice.
I didn’t go far, though. Instead of heading back to my desk, I stopped right outside Huizenga’s door and listened in. It’s not a move I’m especially proud of, but like I said, it wasn’t about me. It was about the victims, and their families, and maybe most of all, the potential victims still to come. All those people deserved every resource we had to offer, and at the risk of tooting my own horn, they weren’t getting it.
“What is it, Jessica?” Huizenga asked.
“We just got word from CIC about two floaters in the Potomac. They washed up on Roosevelt Island about an hour ago. One young white male, shot in the head and stabbed all over the groin. One young white female—”
“Don’t tell me. Blond. Three carefully placed stab wounds. Bad haircut.”
“Unfortunately, yeah,” Jacobs said.
“And you’re saying they were found at the exact same time?”
“That’s the freaky little kicker to the whole thing. The two vics were handcuffed together in the water. Whatever that means.”
I took a deep breath. It meant that our two Georgetown killers were back in business together. More than ever, from the sound of it.
I heard Huizenga’s chair push back, and some jangling keys. “Does Valente already know?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“Call him. I’ll notify the chief. And tell whoever’s on the scene not to touch a damn thing.”
When Jacobs came out, she glared at me but kept moving. Ten minutes later, all off-duty Major Case Squad personnel had been called in, and the office was empty. Except for me, of course. I was left back to answer the phones and twiddle my thumbs, like some kind of lackey in a cage. Again.
I really wasn’t sure how much more of this I could stand.
CHAPTER
80
AS SOON AS I HAD THE OFFICE TO MYSELF, I PUT IN A CALL TO BREE.
I knew she was working a gang shooting over at the Garfield Terrace projects in Northwest. She’d left the house early that morning when the call came in. Hopefully, she’d be wrapping up soon and could go take a look at the scene on Roosevelt Island—or at least, get a little closer to it than my radioactive ass was ever going to get.
“I’ve still got about an hour to go here,” she told me. “But I can drive by after that, if it helps.”
“Anything helps,” I said. I was determined to track this case, one way or another. “See if you can find Errico Valente. He’ll keep you in the loop, if anyone will.”
Working the same homicide—much less several of them—was something Bree and I had set out to avoid when we got married. It only made family life that much harder, in terms of being around for the kids and keeping things running smoothly at home. But somewhere along the way, between the Ava situation, and Ron Guidice, and now my own troubles at work, the rules of the game had shifted.
And for better or worse, we make a pretty good team. I like working with her.
After that, I spent the next few hours alone on the desk, taking calls and mulling over everything I knew about these cases.
Whatever our killers were getting out of their double homicides, it was clearly working for them. Two handcuffed victims in the river was a step up from a body dump in Rock Creek Park. It was staged. They were getting into it now.
And staged seemed like the right word. It was as if they were putting on some kind of show with all of this. For us? For each other? For the world?
Who knew? It was all just questions in a vacuum, while I hung there on the desk, answering call after call.
Finally, around midafternoon, I heard back from Bree.
“I just got here,” she said. “And I’m already back at the perimeter. D’Auria tagged me out before I could even get a look at the bodies.”
“Did you tell him you’ve got a prior connection to the case?”
“He wasn’t having it,” she said. “They’ve got this place tied down tight.”
“What about Valente?” I asked.
“He’s down by the water. I’m going to hang out a little and see if he comes up for air, but I’ve got to be at the ME’s office before five, and then . . .” Bree’s voice trailed off. “Oh, for crap’s sake,” she said then. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What is it?” I asked. I hated getting all of this secondhand.
“It’s Ron Guidice. He’s over on the line with the other reporters. Son of a bitch just took my picture,” she said.
My face started burning, just thinking about it. Of course he was there. He was everywhere these days.
“Don’t give him the satisfaction of a response,” I said. “That’s exactly what he wants.”
“I’d like to wrap that camera strap around his throat.”
“Believe me, I know how you feel,” I said. “But don’t do it, Bree. Ignore him.”
I heard her take a deep breath. I did the same.
“Yeah, okay,” she said. “I’ll let him live. But listen, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you if I get anything off of Valente. Love you.”
“You too,” I said, and then she was gone.
Usually, I can read Bree pretty well. Not this time. After we hung up, I sat there wondering if she’d told me what I needed to hear, or if she really was going to give Guidice some distance. She hated the guy just as much as I did.
For all I knew, she’d already punched his lights out before I’d even taken my next call.
CHAPTER
81
JOHN SAMPSON WAS IN HIS CAR WHEN HE GOT BREE’S TEXT.
Eyes on Guidice. Go now if u can.
They’d been waiting for this opportunity. Instead of continuing down Mass Ave. to the police training he was supposed to hit that day, he took a hard right on K Street and headed off to Virginia instead.
Accurint records showed Ron Guidice’s name on a house rental in Reston for the last three years. The place belonged to a developer out of Atlanta, with a management company based in DC, but none of those people had anything interesting to say about their tenant. Guidice had decent credit, paid his rent on time, and looked normal on paper.
The house itself was surprisingly suburban, for lack of a better word. It was a simple little Cape, painted an ugly light blue, in the middle of a tightly packed neighborhood, Sampson saw as he drove in. It wasn’t nearly the hole in the ground you might expect a bottom-feeder like Guidice to crawl out of.
At the front door, he rang the bell just in case. When no one answered, Sampson stepped off the low porch and did a quick half lap around to the back. There was no car in the driveway, no garage, either. Just a nonexistent scrub of fenced-in backyard.
If there was any concern at all, it was the lack of deadbolts on Guidice’s doors. There weren’t even shades or curtains on the windows. Going by first impressions, it didn’t seem like the guy had anything to hide. But there was one way to find out.
Sampson slipped the license out of his wallet and easily carded his way past the cheap lock on the back door.
From there, it didn’t take long to case out the first floor. Empty seemed to be the operative word. There wasn’t much of anything in the fridge, and just a single recliner next to a folding TV table in the living room. A stack of newspapers by the front door went back about three weeks—Post, New York Times, and Al-Sabah, for whatever that was worth.
He continued upstairs and found a simple layout of three small bedrooms. One was completely empty. One had a futon on the floor, with a few piles of folded clothes against the wall.
The third bedroom seemed to be Guidice’s makeshift office. There was a card table piled with Pendaflex files, and a cheap Lexmark printer on the floor. The files didn’t seem to
have much rhyme or reason. There were clippings about everything from police brutality to financial planning, car engine repair, and even the White House vegetable garden.
The whole place was kind of depressing, actually. It was pretty easy to imagine Guidice living out his pathetic nights here, working up his conspiracy theories, and writing his shitty little blog.
Still, Sampson had been hoping for something he could run with. He took another twenty minutes or so, checking the closets, the floorboards, and the air vents, just in case. But there was nothing.
Back outside, he was halfway to his car when he spotted one of the neighbors. He was an older man in golf pastels, wheeling his garbage out to the curb. It seemed worth a shot, anyway. Sampson stopped to take an empty interoffice envelope off his backseat, and headed over.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m looking for Ron Guidice. Can you tell me if this is where he lives?”
The old man regarded the little blue Cape house and shook his head.
“Sorry. I know he’s a tall fellow with a beard, but I don’t know his name.”
“That sounds like him,” Sampson said. He held up the envelope. “He’s got to sign for this. Any idea when he tends to be home?”
“Hard to say.” The man stopped to lean on his mini-dumpster. He had lonely bachelor written all over him—the kind who liked to talk. “Ever since the old lady and that little girl moved out, he just kind of comes and goes. Mostly goes.”
Sampson nodded, keeping a poker face. Old lady? Little girl? Why hadn’t there been any mention of that in the background checks? And why didn’t they live here anymore?
“So, I guess that’s his family, huh?” he asked.
The man shrugged. “I think she was the grandma. Big fat lady, anyway. The little girl was cute as a bug, though. Same age as my granddaughter, just about. Five, maybe six, I’d say.”
Sampson’s mind was turning it all over while the neighbor talked. It explained a thing or two—like why Guidice might choose a place like this.
Alex Cross, Run Page 18