Deadly Cross

by Patterson, James

  She led us into a stunning penthouse condo with a huge living area and floor-to-ceiling windows that offered sweeping views of the Potomac River and Northern Virginia.

  We found the owner in front of the windows, but he wasn’t enjoying the scenery. Phil Peggliazo was facedown on a massage table, covered by sheets and moaning as a concierge doctor and a nurse tended to a series of monitors and IVs hooked up to him.

  “Can you boot up the drugs, Doc?” Peggliazo said.

  The doctor stopped scribbling on an e-tablet. “Can’t do that for another hour.”

  “My ass is on fire here,” the lobbyist complained.

  A polished blonde in her forties came into the room, filing her nails with an emery board.

  “Phil, you’re being a child,” she said in a soft Texas drawl. “The ER doctors told you it’s a miracle that the bullet missed all major organs. Be thankful.”

  “My ass is a major organ, Priscilla Mae,” he grumbled.

  “No, it’s not,” she said. She looked at the nurse and the doctor. “Right?”

  “Right,” the nurse said.

  The doctor nodded. “A set of gluteal muscles does not constitute an organ.”

  “I may never take a dump sitting down again,” Peggliazo whined.

  Priscilla Mae rolled her eyes. “My daddy says you should be grateful that bullet didn’t go right through your ass and into your gut.”

  She seemed to notice us just as Peggliazo said, “Your daddy can kiss my — ”

  “That’s enough, Phil,” she said sharply. “We’ve got visitors with badges. I told you Vanessa Dennison would come through.”

  A bear of a man with a blocky head, a full mane of silver hair, and two days’ growth of beard, Peggliazo propped himself up on his elbows on the massage table and twisted around to peer at us.

  “About time someone showed up. You catch him yet?”

  “No, sir,” Sampson said. “We just wanted to ask you some questions.”

  “I’m gonna spend my life facedown with a blowtorch coring out both cheeks,” he said. “That should answer most of your questions.”

  “Phil!” his wife said, then looked at us. “I’m so sorry. He’s not himself. They’ve got him on drugs.”

  “Not enough drugs!” he shouted before settling back onto the massage table, face in the ring. “You want to ask me questions, you come around here and lie on the floor so I can see you.”

  “They’re detectives, for Christ’s sake. They’re not lying on the floor. All last night you kept saying, ‘How come no one’s come to get my statement? Call Vanessa.’ I did. So here they are.”

  “And here I am, Priscilla!” he roared. “Unable to sit up for their questions!”

  I said, “It’s okay, Mrs. Peggliazo, we can lie on our backs to talk to him.”

  “See there?” Peggliazo said as we walked to the head of the massage table and started to get down on the floor. “These people are willing to cooperate.”

  “Who’s not cooperating?” his wife asked.

  “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” he said.

  “I’m glad you got shot,” she said. “But I can’t believe the bullet missed your head. I mean, it had to have been up your ass like it always is.” She stormed out.

  Peggliazo was chuckling when Sampson and I rolled over on our backs and looked up at the wounded lobbyist’s face.

  “That was a good one,” he said. “Can’t believe he missed my head, she says! She’s good. Tough but good. Like Kate, you know, in Taming of the Shrew.”

  “I’m not touching that one,” I said. “Tell us what happened.”

  “I’m seeing you upside down.”

  “It’s either that or the side,” Sampson said.

  He grimaced, then said, “I’m telling you, neither of you has ever had a pain in the ass like this pain in the ass. Unless you’ve been shot there?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I haven’t had that pleasure. Tell us what happened.”

  The lobbyist said he’d been saying goodbye to his guests outside Argento, an upscale Italian restaurant off Prospect Street, when he was hit.

  “Never heard the shot, but I went down like boom,” he said. “Felt like fire and then both of my legs were funny-boned, you know?”

  “Any idea who’d want to shoot you?”

  “Other than cigarette- and Dorito-haters, I can’t think of anyone offhand.”

  Sampson said, “So you’ve gotten threats before?”

  He chuckled again. “With predictable regularity. They’ve threatened to put enough nicotine in me to stop my heart while stuffing me with enough preservatives and food additives to damage my brain.”

  “But no specific threats about shooting you?”

  “Creative haters. What can I say?”

  Before we could answer, he winced again, said, “Doc? How much more time?”

  “Fifty minutes.”

  “Aw, c’mon. I’m having a lava eruption back there.”

  I started getting up and motioned for Sampson to do the same.

  “Hey,” Peggliazo said. “Where you going?”

  “To try to find whoever shot you in the ass,” Sampson said.

  CHAPTER 20

  TRAFFIC WAS SNARLED DOWNTOWN AND I made it back with just ten minutes to spare before my noon appointment. In addition to my law enforcement consulting, I tried to maintain a small client base in my private psychotherapy practice because the work gave me much fulfillment.

  That day, however, I felt harried and on the verge of being overwhelmed by the three hot cases on my plate. But I was, if anything, a professional, and even though the client I was about to see was connected to one of the cases, I needed to shift into a completely different way of thinking. I pulled out Analisa Hernandez’s file and almost immediately felt my mindset change from detective to healer.

  A knock came at the basement door about five minutes later. I left my office, opened the door, and found a Hispanic woman in her forties who had been seeing me on and off for a while now smiling at me.

  “Dr. Cross!” she cried as she hurried in. “I miss you!”

  I grinned. I never knew what I was going to get when Analisa showed up for counseling. One day she could be bubbly like this and the next distraught, so I was happy when she walked into my office with a big smile on her face after she’d spent six months working in Guatemala.

  When I shut the door to my office, she sat down on the edge of her chair, smiling eagerly, and said, “So how are you?”

  “In demand,” I said.

  “I hear this, yes,” she said. “Tell me about Maya Parker.”

  “You heard?”

  “Even in Guatemala there is internet,” she said, her smile fading. “It’s him, yes, the same one who killed my Elizabeth?”

  I nodded. “We think so.”

  “Where did she go to school, Maya?”

  “Bragg,” I said.

  “And Elizabeth was at Anacostia. But all of them from Southeast.”

  “All eight.”

  She looked away from me, her hand going to her lips, and her right knee began to jiggle nervously, signs I’d seen before when her mood was becoming darker. “Did he make a mistake this time?”

  “If he has, we haven’t found it yet.”

  She shook her head, then pounded her fist gently on her thigh. “How can this be? I ask myself. How can he be so much like the ghost?”

  “We believe he prepares extensively,” I said.

  “Prepares,” she said and tears began to dribble down her cheeks. “What makes this kind of monster, Dr. Cross?” We’d had this discussion several times, but I indulged her. “Probably a lot of things,” I said. “One damaging incident after another, probably as a young child and in puberty, possibly involving abuse by a female about Elizabeth’s age. That abuse festered in his brain until the brain was literally changed. The chemicals, the wiring, it’s different for these kinds of men.”

  “Not human. A predator,” she said, starin
g off into space.

  I handed her a box of tissues. She took one, smiled weakly, and said, “Elizabeth would have been twenty soon. Maybe she would have given me grandchildren. And maybe I’d be happy at least some of the time.” She wiped her eyes and then blew her nose.

  “You’ve told me you are happy in the work you do in Guatemala,” I said.

  “This is true,” she said grudgingly. “I like working with girls that age, Elizabeth’s age. They never listen to their mother, but I am like their aunt.”

  “They listen to you.”

  “They do,” she said, smiling outwardly again.

  “Then the meaning you’re giving Elizabeth’s death is different than before. She’s the reason you can talk to those girls. You know that, don’t you?”

  Analisa nodded and then burst into tears again. “Every day, I feel Elizabeth with me when I am teaching those girls. Every day, she works through my heart to reach them.”

  I said nothing for a moment, then smiled and said, “I can’t imagine a more wonderful legacy and meaning for Elizabeth’s life.”

  She sighed and looked at the ceiling before taking another tissue. “I know you are right, Dr. Cross. But I still have anger in my heart. And I still want you to catch him before he can do this to any more girls.”

  “Maybe you can help with that,” I said. “Randall Christopher?”

  Analisa’s face fell and she made the sign of the cross. “That poor man. I know he cheated on his wife, but I believe he was a good man.”

  “He organized the searches for Elizabeth and Maya Parker.”

  “Yes. I did not know about Maya. Her parents?”

  “Her parents are devastated. They moved to Florida to get away from here.”

  “I don’t blame them.”

  “But refresh my memory,” I said. “How did it work? The search for Elizabeth?”

  Analisa thought about that. “Well, the police, Metro, they searched first. But Randall thought it was not enough and he knew how to get everyone involved.”

  “He was a great organizer,” I said. “But why Christopher’s interest?”

  “Well, I suppose because he’d known Elizabeth since she was a girl.”

  “Really? How’s that?”

  “When he started the charter school, it was in a building I used to clean at night. After my husband left, I used to bring Elizabeth there to study while I got my work done. Like I said, a good man.”

  Analisa left soon after and I was back in my office writing up my notes on our session when my cell phone rang, a call from a number I recognized. “Rawlins?”

  “She made a mistake,” said Keith Karl Rawlins, who employed his formidable skills as a computer scientist consultant to the cybercrimes division of the FBI. He had the odd habit of assuming you’d already heard the story he’d been telling himself in his head.

  “Who made a mistake?” I said.

  “Elaine Paulson,” he said. “Randall Christopher’s missing wife.”

  CHAPTER 21

  THREE HOURS LATER, AS DARK clouds were rolling in and the breeze was stiffening, Sampson, Mahoney, and I stood at the front door of a little bungalow on Chincoteague Island in eastern Maryland. Mahoney rapped hard.

  Keith Rawlins had tracked Elaine Paulson, Christopher’s wife, to this bungalow through the IP address assigned to the router here. She’d signed on for barely ten minutes, but Rawlins had picked her up and traced her in less than seven.

  No one answered the door. Mahoney had a search warrant with him and he was starting to pick the lock when a locomotive of a woman in pink Bermuda shorts and a sleeveless white blouse shouted at us from across the street that she was calling the police.

  When we told her we were the police, she relaxed and became cooperative. Her name was Adele Penny, and it turned out she was the bungalow’s owner.

  “What’s she done?” she asked when we told her who we were looking for.

  “We just want to talk to her,” Mahoney said.

  “What about? Her marriage?”

  “What about her marriage?” I said.

  “She said it was over. Ended badly. That’s why she’s out here, taking time to figure things out.”

  “You don’t know anything about her?”

  “No. And I didn’t ask.”

  “Why is that?”

  “She said her husband beat her, and she paid cash.”

  Showing her the search warrant, Mahoney said, “We need you to open the door. When did you last see her?”

  “An hour ago. What is this about?” Mrs. Penny said, rattled. She unlocked the door and pushed it open.

  “A murder investigation,” Sampson said, stepping past her.

  “No,” she gasped. “My God. She’s so … murder?”

  “Any idea where she might have gone?” I asked her as Mahoney went inside.

  “I don’t know for sure. But she’s been going to the spit off Toms Cove in the afternoon, sitting on the dunes, watching the waves. She said it’s been calming.”

  “Alex!” Sampson called.

  “Excuse me,” I said and I went inside to a tiny and tidy living area with a wicker love seat and a chair. Sampson and Mahoney were putting on latex gloves at the counter that separated the living area from the little kitchen.

  “There’s a sealed envelope here,” Sampson said. “Addressed to the daughters.”

  “Open it,” I said, already feeling queasy at what it might contain.

  Mahoney slit it open with a knife, pulled out a single piece of paper, and unfolded it. I looked over his shoulder and read Dear Tina and Rachel, I love you more than life itself. I’m sorry that it has come to this. I’m sorry about all of it …

  I didn’t need to see the rest. “She’s going to kill herself.”

  It was all I could think of as we raced in Mahoney’s car down the narrow road toward Toms Cove, ignoring the traffic trying to leave the area ahead of the coming storm.

  The cove itself was west of the dunes that separated it from the National Seashore. We pulled into a parking area at the visitors’ center and spotted the blue Nissan Sentra with Pennsylvania plates that Mrs. Penny said Elaine Paulson was driving.

  Against a stream of people heading the other way, we walked toward the dunes and the ocean, the wind building and thunder rumbling behind us.

  Big waves were crashing up and down the beach. To the north, the shore was wider, with extensive dunes behind it. To the south, the sand narrowed to a long spit with barely a necklace of dunes separating it from the cove.

  While the beach was largely devoid of swimmers and vacationers now, there was still a smattering of hard-core fishermen and surfers. We split up; Sampson and Mahoney headed for the spit, which seemed the more deserted place, and I ran toward a cluster of fishermen, older men with an elaborate array of surfcasting rods and pails of bait. I showed them a picture of Elaine Paulson and asked if they’d seen her, but they shook their heads and said they’d only just arrived.

  I went up the beach several hundred yards, seeing fewer and fewer people ahead of me; the dunes appeared empty. When the wind started to throw grains of sand that stung my cheeks, I turned my back to it and debated whether to leave.

  That’s when I realized that, looking south, I had a much different perspective on the beach. A few seconds later I spotted Elaine Paulson sitting in the seagrass about three-quarters of the way up the flank of a dune back toward the parking lot. I had walked right by her because it looked like she’d sat down and tucked herself into the dune.

  Or she died in that position, I thought as I cut hard and fast due west into the dunes and then hooked south. Creeping up the north side of the dune where I’d last seen her, I kept peering ahead through the waving seagrass.

  I was almost to the crest before I spotted her through the grass around the front of the dune, about thirty feet ahead. She was turned slightly away from me, directly facing the water. She had a green windbreaker on, hood up, and was sitting in a kind of depression
in the dune, her spine to the wall of sand and grass behind her.

  No wonder I missed her on my first pass, I thought, watching her as I crouched and moved closer. She blends right in.

  My attention was fixed on her hood, which hadn’t moved. Was she sitting there or was she slumped there?

  I’d no sooner had that thought than her shoulders began to tremble. She pulled back the hood with her right hand and, with her left, pressed a nickel-plated revolver tight to her temple.

  CHAPTER 22

  I TOOK TWO LONG STRIDES toward her, threw myself to my knees well within her line of sight, hands up, and shouted over the wind, “Think of Tina and Rachel!”

  Whether it was my sudden appearance or my bellowed reference to her daughters, the late Randall Christopher’s wife startled and pulled the gun two inches away from her temple. I could see she’d been sobbing and was not seeing me well; she was still clearly in the waking trance that people intent on killing themselves get into.

  “Please put the gun down, Elaine,” I said. “Please. My daughter knows Tina and Rachel. They’re schoolmates.”

  That further interrupted her suicidal spell. She squinted at me as her hand relaxed. The angle of the revolver’s muzzle shifted clear of her skull, but it lingered about four inches above her left shoulder.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Jannie Cross’s father,” I said. “My name is Alex.”

  Her jaw quivered as the handgun’s muzzle angled back toward her head. “I know who you are, Dr. Cross. I know why you’re here.”

  “Right now I’m just a father to a young lady who adores your daughters. And I don’t want to see Tina and Rachel exposed to any more pain than they’re already feeling at the death of their father.”

  “And his older whore,” she said bitterly. “His older socialite whore.”

  Christopher’s widow had the gun pressed back against her temple again. She gazed my way with watery, bloodshot, and soft-focused eyes.

  “No matter what I do or say now, I’ve seen how this machine works,” she said, a quiver in her voice. “They won’t see me as a victim. They’ll crucify me, sacrifice me because of who she was. They’ll throw me in a hole and I’ll rot, and my babies will have to suffer every day for as long as I’m alive. It’s better to save them the longer-term pain.”