Criss Cross (Alex Cross) - James Patterson Page 0,11

brain. All I had to do was close my eyes to see it.

“I figure Forbes was hallucinating,” I said. “The effects of the chloroform triggering some deep memory of Craig.”

“Or Dirty Marty made the whole story up,” Bree said. “He somehow got wind of M and is now playing on your obsession with Kyle Craig.”

I thought about that.

Marty Forbes had to have known how fixated I’d been on the FBI agent gone evil. Kyle Craig was a sadistic serial murderer who’d killed Betsey Cavalierre, my girlfriend at the time.

Bree came around and got into bed.

I climbed in beside her. “He could have been playing me. But for what? So I could help him get out of prison by convincing federal prosecutors that the man incinerated in front of me had risen from the dead and was now going around calling himself M?”

“Guilty men have come up with stranger stories,” she said.

I turned off the light, thinking, Then again, Craig used the alias Mastermind for a time, didn’t he? Is he now M? Could he possibly have survived that blast?

My rational mind said, No. Absolutely not.

After a few minutes, Bree was snoring gently. I started to drift off …

That dog began to bark again, and I snapped wide awake. I was about to get dressed and go have it out with the owner at last when I heard tapping against the window and realized it had started to rain. I figured that would end the barking.

I was wrong. Twenty minutes later, I was still awake, and the dog was still barking in that damn repeating pattern.

Finally, I got up and climbed the stairs to my attic office. I closed the window behind my desk, turned on the light, and looked at the boxes stacked waist-high by seven bulging upright filing cabinets. Evidence of old cases, some solved, others not.

Though I did not want to, I knew where I needed to go— back to the beginning, back to the hunt for Mikey Edgerton, long before M had come into the picture.

I found what I was looking for in a box labeled kissy at the bottom of the stack in the right corner of my office, where I thought I’d put it to rest forever. I set the box on the desk but hesitated to open it, wondering if I was wise to dig into this part of my past. A smart part of me said that it was wiser than not digging into it.

I pulled off the box cover, took out the first file, and almost immediately fell back in time.

CHAPTER 13

Twelve years before

IN A DRIVING RAIN ON a late May afternoon, John Sampson and I hurried north on Wisconsin Avenue toward La Cravate, an upscale men’s-necktie store that catered to the rich and powerful in Washington, DC.

I carried a tie in a plastic evidence bag. The tie was silk and in a blue-and-red-paisley print, the kind you might see on a high-powered lobbyist on K Street. At least, that was the impression I got seeing it, brilliantly colored, crisp along the edges, and the knot near perfect around the neck of throttled twenty-six-year-old Cassandra “Kissy” Raider.

Two homeless men looking for a place to crash for the night had found Ms. Raider’s corpse in a stolen and abandoned panel van in Southeast DC. She had been naked and spread-eagled on the floor, her wrists and ankles lashed with half-inch nylon webbing through eyebolts turned into the walls of the van, which reeked of bleach.

An autopsy found the killer had drenched Raider’s body in a diluted bleach solution, which had destroyed any DNA evidence that might have been left after she was savagely and repeatedly beaten and raped prior to her strangulation.

At first, we treated the rape and murder as a one-off, and in the crucial first forty-eight hours, we focused on Raider’s work at the Stallion Club, a strip joint in suburban Maryland, and on her ex-boyfriend, a biker from Roanoke, Virginia, who’d been convicted of some minor crimes in the past.

But when we ran the basic facts about the Raider case through the FBI’s files, we got seven hits, including one in Boca Raton, Florida, and another in Newport Beach, California.

Like Kissy Raider, both victims had been petite, buxom blondes and single moms of young children. And like Kissy Raider, both women had been raped, beaten, and then throttled with a fine silk tie.

None of the ties carried a manufacturer’s mark, which had us stymied for almost a week. But then