Criss Cross (Alex Cross) - James Patterson Page 0,30

Or at least, the money was part of what made him stand out for us. Or what helped us sift him out from the others.

Not long ago, it had felt like our investigation had ground to a halt. Then I’d gotten that call from Keith Karl Rawlins.

When I got to Quantico, the FBI contractor asked me if I’d done a behavioral profile of M. The question surprised me because, strangely, I had not, even though creating those kinds of profiles was what I had done at the FBI.

Why hadn’t I considered doing a profile before?

Before I could come up with an answer, Rawlins proposed writing an algorithm designed to sift for the kind of person M most likely was, based on my behavioral assessment. But he added that he didn’t want me to do the assessment the way I normally did.

Instead, the computer wizard asked me, John, and Ned to create a string of search words that described our suspect in as much detail as possible. We did, starting with wealthy.

Given the scope of what we believed M had been involved in, including tracking down and killing the human traffickers, the three of us agreed that he had to be rich. But why would he ask for ransom for Mrs. Jenkins? We couldn’t answer that but left the wealthy filter in there nonetheless. Cold-blooded was another term we wrote down, along with forward-thinking and amoral.

We came up with a total of thirty-seven distinctive traits that summed up our understanding of M. I have to admit that much of what Rawlins did with those words afterward went right over my head. But his digital sieves began to sift, and eight hours later he had a list of fourteen possible candidates.

We’d narrowed it down to the five who lived within a day’s drive of one of the murder scenes. Two of those we discarded almost immediately; they were old men and in jail for prior heinous crimes. The third and fourth men were only mildly interesting.

But the fifth man? The more we dug into his past, the more he looked like the jackpot suspect we’d been searching for.

CHAPTER 34

JOHN AND I PARKED AT the pull-off into a field that was roughly two hundred yards from the northwest corner of the sprawling property. Mahoney parked behind us and got a drone and a laptop from his trunk.

“This legal without a warrant?” Sampson asked.

“Long as the drone’s high enough,” the agent said. “We’re just having us a look-see.”

He gave the remote an order. The little helicopter blades started spinning, and soon the drone lifted off.

I said, “If Dwight Rivers sees it, he’ll probably get his shotgun and blow it out of the sky.”

“I hope he does,” Mahoney said. “Then we’d have probable cause to enter.”

“A person can’t just shoot a gizmo that’s spying on him?” Sampson said.

“Not if it’s high enough,” Mahoney said.

“Which means you wouldn’t want to take it to court,” I said.

“No comment,” Mahoney said, watching the drone soar over the treetops, heading southwest.

My cell phone buzzed with a Wickr text from Ali. I read it in a glance.

Going riding with Captain W and the Wild Wheels!

I grinned and texted back, Have fun! Text me when you’re home!

A thumbs-up emoji appeared and vanished. I put my phone back in my pocket. We crowded around Ned’s laptop on the hood and saw what the drone was seeing: the woods, several logging roads, then a fast-running creek and a meadow with at least fifty big solar panels in it.

Mahoney had the drone climb to four hundred feet as it flew over the solar array and then over a lone pine tree in the meadow that looked scorched; maybe it had been hit by lightning, because its crown was gone. A nest big enough for an eagle had been built in the remaining branches at the top, but it looked abandoned.

Then Ned altered the camera angle, and we saw what looked for all the world like a giant, squat anthill rising out of the meadow several hundred feet beyond that pine.

Nearly sixty feet tall and covered in green vegetation, the anthill had to have been two hundred feet wide. At the top, it was less than fifty feet across and it had waist-high defensive walls around the perimeter and concertina wire above.

“Heck of a high ground,” I said.

“Rivers evidently planned it that way,” Mahoney said as the drone took us high above the anthill.

We could see over the defensive walls now. Three satellite dishes were