“Wish I could go with you,” she said, sitting behind her desk with a stack of papers before her. “But between fielding calls from the brass and making decisions on overtime, I’m going to be here for a while.”
“I feel for you. Take my dad’s advice: delegate the worst of it.”
“I can’t delegate anything until I understand the job.”
“True,” I said. “You’re doing great, by the way.”
“You think?”
“Not just me. Keep trusting your instincts.”
Bree laughed. “They’re all I’ve had so far. Where are you going?”
I told her I was going to look for an American University law student named JohnnyBoy5.
Chapter
25
Sampson and I made a trip to the administrative offices of American University’s law school. We explained we were working on Edita Kravic’s murder case, and that got us fifteen minutes with the dean, who told us Kravic had been a star student, a role model for foreign students and women entering school at a relatively late age.
“We could use some help, then,” I said, and I told him about JohnnyBoy5. “That’s his online name, but he’s a student here, and we want to talk with him. Can you figure out who he is?”
“May I ask why?” the dean said.
“He was obsessed with Ms. Kravic,” Sampson said. “Maybe enough to kill her and Chief McGrath.”
The dean cringed at the idea that one of his students might have murdered another as well as the police chief. He hesitated, said, “There are privacy issues.”
“More important than bringing a double murderer to justice?” I said flatly. “Do we have to go to the press and tell them that the dean of a law school is being obstructive in the hunt for a cop killer?”
Five minutes later, we had a bead on one John Boynton, aka JohnnyBoy5, a second-year law student from Indiana who was attending a summer class on torts in the school amphitheater. The dean texted us his photo.
We waited in the hallway on the second floor of the law school for the lecture to end. A crowd of students began exiting the amphitheater, and I soon had eyes on JohnnyBoy5, who was still inside the room, about ten feet back from the door.
“Check out the hairdo,” I said.
“I see it,” Sampson said. “Flashy.”
I don’t know what about us tipped Boynton. Maybe it was his Spider-Man instincts. Or maybe just the memory of a big guy threatening to break his face. Whatever triggered it, the guy with the spiked blond hair took one look at us and shoved several students forward hard, causing people in the crowd to stagger and fall like dominoes. Then he spun and took off deeper into the lecture hall.
“Sonofabitch, he’s running!” Sampson roared. He drew his service weapon and sped after him, throwing students out of his way and yelling, “Police! Get down!”
I went another route, running down the hall toward an exit sign. I shouldered the door open and took the stairs four at a time. When I hit the bottom I threw open a second door, saw students fleeing the amphitheater through an exit at the end of the hall.
A girl looked over her shoulder and screamed. I stepped into a janitor’s closet next to the stairwell, leaving the door open.
Boynton came out of the amphitheater, smashing people out of his way, then sprinted down the hall right at me. I waited until he was just past me and then hit him hard across his back with the head of a heavy, wet industrial mop.
JohnnyBoy5 smashed into the stairway door and fell in a heap, groaning.
Chapter
26
Boynton sat on the floor, held his nose, which was gushing blood, and moaned. “I’m suing. Whoever you are, I’m suing.”
“No, you’re not,” I said as Sampson came up behind me. “We’re homicide detectives investigating Edita Kravic’s murder. We saw the e-mails you sent her.”
That rocked him. He wiped at his nose, groaned, muttered, “I had a bad reaction to a generic version of Singulair, an asthma drug. Talk to my allergist. He said in rare cases, it could make you manic. It definitely made me that way.”
“Some of the things you wrote sounded threatening and psychotic,” I said. “She was going to file a restraining order against you.”
His shoulders slumped. “I swear to you, Detective, that wasn’t the real John Boynton writing those things. It was a hopped-up, crazed version of me. Two days after getting off that goddamned drug, I was fine.”
The way he said it, exposed and defeated, made me believe it was possible that some of the messages had been fueled by a bad reaction to a drug.
“Okay, let’s put those particular e-mails aside,” I said. “The fact is, you seem to have had an escalating obsession with Edita Kravic from the first day of law school. Did you love her?”
Boynton looked ready to deny it but then surrendered and nodded. “I thought she was perfect.”
“But she didn’t feel that way about you?”
“She liked me at first, then I got all weird with the medicine.”
“You wrote to her once accusing her of hiring muscle to threaten you.”
“Said he’d take a baseball bat to my face if I didn’t end all contact with Edita.”
“Who was it?”
Boynton shrugged. “The cop she was sleeping with, and died with.” Something about the way he moved just then made me recognize him—this was the guy with the knapsack who’d run out of McGrath’s apartment.
“Can I go to a hospital, please?” he whined.
“When we’re done talking,” I said. “You’re not going to die from a nosebleed. Why did you break into Chief McGrath’s place?”
He hesitated. Then he said, “She asked me to.”
“Bullshit,” Sampson said.
“She did,” he insisted.
Boynton claimed that Edita had called him and said that she’d done some research and now believed him about the medicine. She’d also said she was in trouble and needed his help. They met, and she asked him to steal McGrath’s laptop.
“She said McGrath had stuff on the computer that could get her in big trouble, prevent her from becoming a lawyer,” Boynton said.
“Like what kind of stuff?”
“She wouldn’t tell me, but she was convincing,” Boynton said. “You could hear it in her voice and see it in her body language. She was scared by whatever he had on the laptop.”
Recalling the e-mails I’d seen in Edita’s computer, I said, “You were supposed to meet at ten the night before she was killed?”
He nodded and said she’d come over later than that, around eleven, to give him McGrath’s apartment key and to have sex.
“Edita was sleeping with you both?” Sampson asked, eyebrows raised.
“She was going to break up with McGrath after I gave her the laptop,” he said, looking crestfallen. “She was finally going to be mine.”
Before she’d left Boynton’s apartment that night, Edita had told him she was taking McGrath to an early-morning yoga class and then to breakfast at her place. Boynton would have plenty of time to use the key and get the laptop. I thought about it, remembered Boynton running with the backpack from McGrath’s place. It all fit in a strange way.
Boynton said he had the laptop at his apartment. We got him to his feet, handcuffed him, and told him we’d swing by his place on the way to the hospital.
“Am I under arrest? They’ll throw me out of school.”
“You’re in custody for now,” I said.
In the car on the way to his apartment, I turned around in the front seat and looked at him.
“In one of your e-mails during your manic phase, you wrote something like ‘I know what you do, Edita, and I’ll tell everyone.’ What was that all about?”
Fear flickered across Boynton’s swollen face. “I was just bluffing, you know? Everyone has a secret, so I figured—”
“You’re lying to me, Mr. Boynton,” I said with a sigh. “Every time you lie, you get closer to an arrest and the end o
f law school. So what do you know?”
“I…I followed her a few times.”
“You stalked her?” Sampson said.
“Just followed her. I wanted to see what she did when she wasn’t at school. That’s all.”
“Get to it,” Sampson said. “Where did she go?”
“This place in Vienna, Virginia, called the Phoenix Club.”
Edita went there three or four days a week, he told us. She’d often stay until after midnight. Boynton tried to get inside once but was told it was a private club. He said he stopped following her once he realized someone else was following her.
“Who?” Sampson said.
“Another cop,” Boynton said. “At least, he talked like a cop.”
“He caught you following Edita?”
“Twice. The second time he told me he had her under surveillance and I had to stop or he’d have me arrested for obstructing justice.”
“Name?”
“He never said.”
“Never showed you a badge?”
Boynton shook his head. “But like I said, he acted like a cop.”
“What did he look like?” I said.
“Tall, big, but he didn’t look too good, like he was sick or something. He coughed a lot. And he wore a red Redskins cap.”
Chapter
27
Bree managed to get away from all her paperwork, and three hours later, Kurt Muller, Bree, and I pulled up in front of Terry Howard’s depressing apartment building in Northeast DC.
We’d retrieved McGrath’s laptop and taken it and Boynton downtown. The laptop went to Detectives Lincoln and O’Donnell, along with marching orders to look for anything related to Edita or the Phoenix Club. Sampson stayed behind to take Boynton’s full statement.
We stood in the foyer and buzzed Howard’s apartment three times but got no answer. We buzzed the other five apartments, but it was a weekday and everyone was out. No response.
“Call him,” I said.
Bree looked up Howard’s number and punched it into her cell phone. No answer. Straight to voice mail.
We were turning to leave when Muller noticed a beater Dodge four-door parked across the street. “That’s Howard’s. He’s here, just not answering.”
“He could have walked somewhere,” Bree said. “Taken the Metro.”
“Not the way he was coughing and wheezing the last time I saw him,” I said.
“Where’s his apartment?”
“The third floor, back.”
We walked around into the alley and located Howard’s apartment and the fire escape. I picked Bree up; she grabbed the ladder and pulled it down. We climbed up the three flights and stopped outside the kitchen window.
The sink overflowed with dishes. Liquor and beer bottles crowded the small table and just about every other surface. A second window was raised slightly and looked into a small dining area and part of the living room where Sampson and I had spoken with Howard. We could see the television was on, tuned to ESPN.
“Call his number again,” I said.
Bree did, and almost immediately I heard the jangle of an old-fashioned rotary phone coming from the apartment. The ringing stopped.
“Voice mail,” Bree said.
“That’s probable cause to do a well-being check, don’t you think, Chief?”
She hesitated, and then said, “No fruit of the poisonous tree.”
Nodding, I pushed up the sash and climbed in, calling, “Terry Howard? It’s Alex Cross. We’re just checking on your well-being.”
No voice replied, but almost immediately I heard a bird squawking.
“That’s Sylvia Plath,” I said, helping Bree and Muller inside. “His neurotic parakeet.”
“Howard always had a twisted sense of humor,” Muller said.
We moved deeper into the apartment, past a dining table buried in stacks of old newspapers to the parakeet that was pacing back and forth on its perch, screeching, bobbing its head, and pecking viciously at its featherless skin, clearly agitated.
We stepped into the living area and saw why.
Terry Howard sat in his easy chair facing the television; a film of blood and gore spattered the ceiling and walls around him. He had apparently put a gun in his mouth and shot himself. A sizable chunk of his skull was gone. A bloody, red Redskins cap was on the floor beside him.
An empty bottle of Smirnoff and a Remington 1911 .45-caliber pistol, the same kind of gun that had killed Tom McGrath, lay in his old partner’s lap.
On the floor beside him, there was a note scrawled in ink.
Rot in hell, Tommy McG, it read. You and your lying bitch of a girlfriend.
Chapter
28
“Case closed?” Sampson asked as we drove past the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in Northern Virginia.
“Bree thinks so,” I said. “So does Michaels. Tough one to swallow, but there it is.”
“You’re not sold?”
“Just trying to understand the entire situation before we declare it a revenge killing and a suicide. Take a right.”
Sampson did, and then he made a left, and we were into big-money properties, sprawling estates, some with high walls and security gates. It was dusk and lights were blinking on.
“Coming up on your right,” I said.
Sampson slowed, put on a blinker. We drove up a narrow road maybe a hundred feet long with gardens on both sides. At the end of it was a guardhouse, a turnaround, and a steel security gate set in a high wall.
The polished brass sign on the guardhouse read THE PHOENIX CLUB. PRIVATE. MEMBERS ONLY.
We’d no sooner reached the turnaround than a big, muscular dude stepped out in a blue polo shirt with the Phoenix Club logo on the chest and a Glock pistol holstered at his waist.
He held up his hand and came to the driver-side window.
“Are you members?” he said in a thick Eastern European accent.
“No,” Sampson said, and he showed his police badge and ID. “We need to talk to someone about Edita Kravic.”
“I don’t know her,” the man said, seeming unimpressed that we were cops.
“She worked here, and now she’s dead,” Sampson said. “So go inside and call whoever would know and tell them we’re not leaving until we speak with someone about her.”
The guard stared at Sampson. Sampson glared back. Then the security guy bit his lip and went into the guardhouse.
Twenty minutes later, the gates opened and out came a golf cart driven by a bald man in a finely tailored blue suit. He stopped the cart and got out. He was in his thirties, with slightly cauliflower ears, pale blue eyes, and extraordinarily large hands with knuckles that had been broken a few times.
“I am Sergei Bogrov,” he said, taking my hand and then laying his other mitt-like hand on top of mine, swallowing it. “I help manage the club. How may I help?”
“Edita Kravic,” I said. “She worked here.”
Bogrov’s face fell and he let go of my hand. “Yes, we hear this. Very sad. She was well liked by the staff and members.”
“What did she do?”
“She taught a hybrid of yoga and Feldenkrais therapy.”
“Level Two Certified Coach?” I asked.
“That’s right,” Bogrov said. “She also worked in the spa as a masseuse. She was an excellent one.”
“Good money in that?” Sampson asked.
“If the member is a generous tipper, it can be,” he said.
“So, what is the Phoenix Club?” I asked. “Health spa and…”
“Pools, tennis courts, fitness center, an excellent private restaurant, an extensive wine cellar, the best bar in Virginia, and the company of others who have achieved much in life and deserve more,” Bogrov said.
“You sound like you’re doing a marketing pitch,” Sampson said.
Bogrov smiled. “You caught me.”
“Can we get a tour?” I asked.
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,”
Bogrov said. “Our members belong to the club as much for its strict privacy as for its amenities.”
“We could get a warrant,” Sampson said.
Bogrov dropped the facade of friendliness and said, “On what basis, Detective?”
“The murder of a DC police chief and his confidential informant.”
Bogrov’s eyes narrowed. “I ask again, on what basis? Yes, I know who Edita was killed with, but where do you connect this to my club?”
“At the moment, I’m not at liberty to say.”
“This means you have nothing,” Bogrov said with a dismissive flap of a giant hand. “And since you are from the District of Columbia and not the Commonwealth of Virginia, you have no jurisdiction here. So I ask you politely but firmly to leave the property.”
Chapter
29
I woke out of a dead sleep to find Jannie standing by the bed holding her running shoes.
Dazed, I glanced at the clock. Ten minutes to six. Then I remembered I’d told her to wake me and we’d run together. I’d been working so much I wasn’t getting in my normal workouts and had put on five pounds I didn’t need.
So I nodded and got up, leaving Bree blissfully snoozing. I dressed in the bathroom, went into the kitchen, and made a cup of instant coffee. As I sat there drinking it, I tried to muster up the will to tie my shoelaces. This wasn’t going to be a fun run. More like torture.
“Dad?”
Stifling a yawn, I looked up and saw Ali standing there, rubbing his eyes.
“What are you doing up so early, kiddo?” I asked.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said, coming over to snuggle with me, which didn’t help my workout plans. I could have drifted off right then and there with my little boy in my arms.
But I said, “You couldn’t fall asleep? Or you couldn’t stay asleep?”
“Both,” he said. “I had too much to think about.”
“Really?” I said, closing my eyes. “Like what?”
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