“Always.”
There was a knock at the door.
Sampson called out, “You still dressed?”
“No, we’re buck-naked,” Bree called back. “C’mon in.”
He opened the door cautiously, saw me massaging her neck, and said, “Sorry to disturb you in the middle of things, but I had a ViCAP going on drivers who were shot like Mr. Maserati there in Rock Creek.”
I stopped kneading Bree’s neck. “You got a hit?”
“You tell me.”
Chapter
38
A few weeks before Aaron Peters was shot to death by a motorcyclist on the Rock Creek Parkway, thirty-nine-year-old Liza Crawford, a successful real estate agent in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, was found dead in her brand-new Corvette on a winding rural road lined in places with stacked stone walls.
The investigator said Crawford was traveling at a high rate of speed when she hit a stone wall. The Corvette flipped over and landed on its roof, crushing her.
The extensive damage to Crawford’s head had initially hidden the .45-caliber-bullet entry and exit wounds, but they were discovered during the autopsy. She’d been dead before the crash. The slug was retrieved from the passenger-side door and it was now being processed at Pennsylvania’s state crime lab.
Samuel Tate, twenty-three, died two months before Peters and Crawford. An auto mechanic, Tate was found dead inside his souped-up Ford Mustang, the front end of which was wrapped around an oak tree on a rural road west of Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Tate was known to be an excellent driver who never drank or got high. There were no skid marks on the road, and yet he’d been going well over one hundred miles an hour when he lost control. A medical examiner found a hole made by a .45-caliber bullet in the left side of his head. The bullet had already been processed.
“Look at that,” Sampson said now, tapping on his computer screen, which displayed the report on Tate’s bullet and the report on the bullets taken from the Rock Creek victim. “They’re a dead-on match.”
“Crawford’s will be too,” I said, studying a map. “She died about the same distance from Washington as Tate did, but she was to the north of it and he was to the south. So a ninety- to ninety-five-minute radius.”
“Which means what?”
“We’ve got a serial killer. A hunter on a motorcycle. Draw a ninety-minute circle around us. That’s his hunting ground.”
“What’s he hunting?”
“Maseratis. Corvettes. Mustangs.”
“High-performance cars,” Sampson said.
“Well, the people who drive high-performance cars.”
“And drive them very fast.”
Tapping my lip with one finger, I thought about that.
“What’s the point?” Sampson asked. “Is it a game?”
“Could be,” I said. “That video from Peters’s car shows they were playing cat and mouse, and the motorcyclist was better at being the cat.”
Sampson shook his head. “The media’s going to have a field day with this one too. Remember the Beltway Sniper attacks?”
“How could I forget?”
I was still with the FBI on the morning of October 3, 2002, when four people were randomly shot to death in suburban Maryland. That night, inside the District, a seventy-two-year-old carpenter was shot and killed while taking a walk on Georgia Avenue.
The press called them the Beltway Sniper attacks. But it soon became clear to the FBI that the shooting spree had started eight months before in Tacoma, Washington. In all, we found twelve people who’d been wounded or killed by the snipers prior to October 3, from Arizona to Texas to Atlanta to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
We eventually caught the two troubled men with a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle, but before it was over, seventeen people died. Another ten were wounded but survived.
“Malvo and Muhammad did it for sport,” Sampson said. “It could be what we’re looking at here.”
“Possibly,” I said. “A challenge to the motorcyclist, chasing the fast car down and getting off a lethal shot at the driver.”
“And escaping unharmed?”
I nodded, thinking how bad this could get. The country had been caught up in twenty-three days of fear when the Beltway Snipers were shooting and killing. Those twenty-three days had been some of the most stressful of my life.
“You going to tell Bree? She’s got a lot on her shoulders already.”
Before I could answer, my wife appeared at the door to my office, breathless.
“O’Donnell, Lincoln, and two patrolmen came under automatic-weapon fire in Northeast five minutes ago,” she said. “Lincoln was hit. So was a patrolman. O’Donnell says Thao Le was one of the shooters.”
Chapter
39
We raced through the city, blues flashing and sirens wailing. I drove. Sampson struggled into body armor in the seat beside me. Bree was in the back, fielding calls, fighting to get a full understanding of the situation, and coordinating with the other chiefs to send the right personnel to the scene.
Evidently, Detectives Lincoln and O’Donnell had been tracking Thao Le through his girlfriend Michele Bui. She had texted O’Donnell that Le was moving a load of drugs through a row house in Northeast that afternoon.
The detectives had gone to check it out and called for backup. One patrol car drove into the alley behind the house. Another patrol car came onto the block at one end, and Lincoln and O’Donnell came from the other. They saw Le and three of his men chilling on the front porch.
O’Donnell had stopped his vehicle just shy of the house. The other patrol car did the same. All four officers jumped out, guns drawn, and ordered the men on the porch to lie down. Le came up with an AK-47 and opened fire.
Lincoln and a patrolman were hit; Lincoln took a bullet through his thigh and another through his hand. O’Donnell had been able to pull him behind a car across the street. The injured patrolman, Josh Parks, had been shot through the pelvis, but he’d dragged himself up against the base of the porch, where he could not be seen or shot at from inside.
“How are you, Parks?” Bree asked over the radio.
“Feel like I got a drill bit through my groin to my spine, but otherwise peachy,” the officer said.
“O’Donnell?”
“We need to get Lincoln and Parks to the hospital without getting shot.”
“I hear you,” she said. “Cavalry’s on its way. ETA four minutes.”
“I heard a lot of screaming inside. I’m thinking he’s got hostages.”
We heard shouting and automatic gunfire, and then the connection died.
“Shit!” Bree shouted.
She tried to redial, but her phone rang before she could.
“O’Donnell?” Bree said, and listened. “Where are you?”
Bree punched the speaker button, and out came the terrified voice of Michele Bui.
“I’m hiding inside a closet upstairs,” Thao Le’s girlfriend said, clearly on the verge of tears. “Thao and his friends have been snorting coke and meth for days, and they’re out of their minds and paranoid. He’s got them convinced they’re next.”
“Next for what?”
“Next to be killed,” she said. “They were so whacked, they thought the cops were those vigilantes killing meth cookers.”
“Who else is in the house with you?” Bree asked.
“I don’t know exactly,” she said. “I was upstairs sleeping, but I heard a few of the cutters and packagers come in and work through the night. After the shots, I heard screams and—”
“What?”
“Thao’s yelling for me,” she said. “I gotta go.”
The line went dead.
Chapter
40
Metro patrol cars were parked in V formations blocking the street at both ends of the road. Other officers were moving through the alleys to evacuate residents closest to the row house Le was in.
A pair of ambulances had already arrived. We left our squad car down
the street and got our first look at the situation through binoculars.
Halfway down the block on the east side, Officer Joshua Parks was on his side by the stoop to the row house, contorted in agony.
“We’re here, Parks, with more on the way,” Bree said over her radio.
“Good,” he said. “I’m getting one hell of a leg cramp lying on the cement like this.”
Bree couldn’t help but smile. “We’ll have that cramp looked into. Talk to me, O’Donnell.”
Detective O’Donnell was across the street from Parks on the sidewalk behind a white Ford Explorer. He was holding Lincoln, who looked weak.
“O’Donnell, talk to me,” Bree said again.
“Lincoln’s conscious, but hurting bad. What’s the plan?”
“Working on it,” Bree said.
She looked at me, said quietly, “I’ve never handled anything remotely like this, Alex. You have, so I’m all ears.”
I scanned the scene again and then said, “We need to be inside the house directly across the street from Le’s and also in the house directly behind it. And we need Le’s cell phone number.”
“I’ll try Michele Bui again,” Bree said.
The SWAT van pulled up. Captain Matt Fuller, dressed head to toe in black body armor, climbed out and hurried toward us.
“Shit,” I muttered.
“What?”
“I’d hoped Captain Reagan was on duty,” I said. “Fuller’s good at what he does, but he wants to do it as often as he can, if you know what I mean.”
A burly man with soft, almost saggy facial features, Fuller said, “Dr. Cross. Chief Stone. Sampson. How’s the officer down?”
“Two are down, Captain,” Bree said. “Lincoln, who’s one of my men, and Officer Parks. Both are in critical need of medical attention, especially Parks.”
Fuller looked at the scene through binoculars. When he put them down, he said, “We’re going to want to be in the house opposite and the one behind.”
“You took the words right out of my mouth,” I said, and then I looked to Bree again. “Call Michele. Get that number.”
Captain Fuller, four of his men, Sampson, and I used an alley to reach the row house directly in front of Detectives O’Donnell and Lincoln and across the street from Parks. A frail older woman had been evacuated from the house. She’d given her key to one of the patrolmen who’d helped her, and we used it to go through the back door into her kitchen.
We passed a steep staircase on our way into the living area, barely taking in the dated furniture, the photos of a lifetime, and a baby grand piano.
“Maxwell and Keith, you’re upstairs,” Captain Fuller said behind me. “Stay back from the windows, keep it dark.”
While the two SWAT officers climbed the stairs, Bree pushed aside the window curtains just enough for us to see O’Donnell and Lincoln right there on the sidewalk, backs to the Explorer, no more than fifty feet away. O’Donnell had his belt around Lincoln’s thigh, but Lincoln looked wan, like he’d lost a lot of blood.
“Lincoln needs medical help now,” Bree said.
“Both of them do,” I said, watching Parks go through some kind of pain spasm that made him arch in agony.
The SWAT commander was quiet for several moments and then said, “We’re going to handle this one at a time. Easiest first, which means Lincoln.”
Fuller looked at his two other men. “How fast can you get out the door, go down those steps, grab Lincoln, and get your asses back inside?”
“Twenty seconds,” Sergeant Daniel Kiniry said.
“Maybe less,” Officer Brent Remer said. “Unless we come under fire.”
“O’Donnell? How long since the last shots?” Fuller asked.
“Ten, maybe twelve minutes,” the detective came back.
The captain thought a moment and then spoke into his radio. “Wilkerson?”
“Go ahead, Captain.”
“Break me out a couple of grenades.”
Chapter
41
Bree and I looked at Captain Fuller like he’d lost his mind.
“Grenades?” Bree said. “Isn’t that a little extreme?”
“No,” Fuller said, and then he explained what he wanted to do.
I considered it, decided once again that Captain Fuller was good at his job, and admitted, “That could work.”
“It could,” Bree said. “Your move, Captain.”
Three minutes later, on Fuller’s command, two flash-bang grenades went off behind the row house where Le and his fellow gangbangers were holed up.
I had my binoculars trained on the windows across the street and saw movement inside, figures running to investigate the explosions. Then Bree threw up the window sash, and we stuck our service weapons out the window.
“Go,” Fuller said, and he yanked open the front door to the old lady’s home.
Kiniry and Remer bolted across the porch, leaped off the stairs, and landed beside Lincoln. O’Donnell let go of his partner.
The SWAT guys got their hands under Lincoln and came up fast. O’Donnell jumped up, his gun, like ours, aimed at the row house as he backed up, covering Kiniry, Remer, and Lincoln.
They got Lincoln inside, and O’Donnell was almost there when Le or one of his men opened up with an automatic weapon. Bullets blew out the windows of the Explorer and pinged and cracked off the cement stairs while Sampson, Bree, and I emptied our weapons at the house.
O’Donnell sprinted and dove inside. Fuller slammed shut the heavy oak door as bullets strafed the side of the house and then stopped.
“Fuck!” O’Donnell screamed, crawling and clutching at his shoe. “He shot me through the foot!”
“Get this man medical attention!” Bree yelled back into the house.
Two EMTs came running from the kitchen.
While they started to work, I reloaded. Over our headsets, a voice said, “Cap, this is Maxwell.”
“Go, Maxwell,” Fuller said.
“I’ve got the shooter. Full chest exposed.”
“Identity?”
“Unclear, but subject is armed with an AK.”
“Take him,” Fuller said without a moment’s hesitation.
“What? Wait!” Bree said.
There was a rifle crack overhead, followed by a death scream across the street.
“Slow down, Captain!” I shouted.
“You’re not giving them any options!” Bree said.
“Options?” Fuller looked at us like we were addled. “That shooter, Le or not, just tried to kill four—count them, four—of my fellow officers. In my mind, that makes that person a potential cop killer with active intent, so I ordered him shot. End of story.”
Bree started to argue but her phone buzzed. Angry, she looked at the screen, rocked her head back, and said, “Oh Jesus.”
“What?”
“It’s Michele Bui. She says we just shot and killed one of the female hostages.”
Chapter
42
Fuller didn’t hear. He was barking orders into his radio while EMTs rolled a morphine-happy Detective O’Donnell through the kitchen toward the back door. The siren of the ambulance bearing Lincoln was already wailing away.
“Captain!” I shouted at Fuller.
The SWAT commander put his radio on his shoulder, peered at me angrily. “Detective Cross, stand down.”
“I won’t stand down, Captain,” I said.
“Nor will I,” Bree said. “One of your men upstairs, Officer Maxwell, just shot an innocent hostage on your orders.”
Fuller lost color. “No.”
“Le’s girlfriend, who is in there, says yes.”
The captain pulled himself together and clicked his radio. “Maxwell?”
“Right here, Cap.”
“How did you identify the shooter?”
“White T-shirt and weapon.”
“No head?”
“Negative.”
“How long did you have the shooter in your scope?”
“From right before he started shooting at O’Donnell,” Maxwell replied. “When he stopped, he ducked out of sight for maybe three seconds and then returned, like he’d reloaded.”
“That was not a reload,” Bree said into her radio. “Officer Maxwell, you shot a hostage.”
There was a long, terrible silence before Maxwell said, “Cap?”
“Maxwell?”
“Permission to stand down, sir.”
Fuller glared at Bree, said, “Permission denied. I need you up there.”
Bree said, “Captain, for the time being, you are going to stand down and let me try to save Officer Parks and avoid more bloodshed. Or do I call Chief Michaels to have you relieved of command?”
Fuller blinked slowly at Bree, said, “I guess it’s your show, Chief.”
“No, it’s Dr. Cross’s show,” she said, looking at me. “I’ve got Le’s phone number. Try to talk to him.”
I took a moment to mentally adjust, to become less a police detective and more a criminal psychologist. Then I entered the phone number and hit Send.
The phone rang three times before Le answered in a jittery, cocaine-fueled voice. “Who the hell’s this?”
“The only chance you have of not dying today, Mr. Le,” I said. “My name is Alex Cross.”
Chapter
43
Le’s breathing was rapid and shallow in my ear.
“Do you understand, Mr. Le?” I asked. “There are SWAT officers preparing to storm in and kill you. I’m offering you a way out.”
After a long, long pause, he said, “How’s that?”
“Start by not making it worse for yourself,” I said. “Two police officers have been wounded and a hostage killed.”
“That’s not on me,” Le said. “Some cop shot her.”
I wasn’t going to quibble and point out that he’d shoved her into the line of fire with a weapon in her hand; I needed to keep him talking, establish rapport.
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