Criss Cross (Alex Cross) - James Patterson Page 0,56
saint, Cross, but the damn dog would not stop barking, and these scum were selling to kids. Glad to be of service.
—M
CHAPTER 61
IT WAS LONG PAST two a.m. when Bree and I returned home. We’d had to wait for a hazmat team to come deal with the chemicals in the kitchen before any more of the scene could be processed.
These scum were selling to kids. Glad to be of service.
Bree said, “How did he know the Richardsons were moving meth?”
“I don’t know, but somewhere, I swear, he’s made a mistake.”
“Not so far,” she said, yawning. “I have to sleep.”
I did too, but sleep did not come easy. Every time I started to drift off, I’d flash on the stills of Pseudo-Craig, the blood of eight people bursting on my windshield, and the silk ties around the meth dealers’ necks.
The dead dog was in my restless dreams as well, as were the remaining boxes of the Edgerton files, everything spilled along a path through the forest that I followed as I chased M, a dark figure, smaller than I’d expected.
Strangling someone is no easy feat. It takes strength and size. So does cutting off someone’s head. And yet, my dream M was slight with narrow shoulders, and he could run and run and …
I woke with a start around five a.m. and heard birds chirping outside the window. Feeling dazed, I nevertheless remembered that slight, fast M who’d haunted my dreams and run past the Mikey Edgerton files in the forest.
The Edgerton files. I’ve heard it said that if fear is stopping you from doing something, you must take courage and do it anyway or be forever ruled by doubt and anxiety.
I got out of bed quietly and crept up to the attic.
After locking the door, I opened the final boxes of files concerning the serial rapist and killer I’d seen electrocuted a few weeks before. My tongue tasted sour when I began to read. Long-buried images of my past rose up, blurry at first, then gradually coming into focus, all of them deeply disturbing.
CHAPTER 62
Eleven years before
JOHN SAMPSON LOOKED OVER AT me and shook his head. My stomach lurched. My throat burned with reflux.
“There has to be something here besides the neckties,” I said. “A guy like this? He has trophies somewhere.”
We’d been searching a three-bedroom apartment in Arlington, Virginia, that had an expansive view of the Potomac River and the Jefferson Memorial. The apartment belonged to Michael “Mikey” Edgerton.
After Kyle Craig killed Gerald St. Michel, the necktie salesman with a history of predatory sexual behavior, most people believed that St. Michel was responsible for the murders of the other young women, including Kissy Raider. But I had my doubts.
Evidently, so did M, because I heard from him for the first time about three weeks after Kyle Craig killed St. Michel.
The two-sentence message came typed on plain white paper in a plain white envelope with no return address: It’s not St. Michel. Thank me later.—M
I happened to agree with M, whoever he was, and set the message aside.
But then a man grabbed Gladys Craft, a young blond woman running late at night in Falls Church, Virginia. He used a necktie to bind her hands and then threw her in a van.
Craft managed to escape the van when he stopped at a light, and she was able to give police a rough description of her assailant and the last two digits of the van’s Virginia license plate.
When we heard about the necktie, Sampson and I got involved again. We used computers to sift for possible matches between owners of cars with plates that had those last two digits and criminals who had histories of sexual assault.
We got a resounding match on Michael Edgerton, who lived in Arlington, ran an office of his family’s import/export business, and had been a suspect in three assaults while he was in school at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
Those cases had all been dropped at the request of the victims. Edgerton’s parents had bought them off. When we contacted the women, all buxom young blondes, they were reluctant to talk until we described the women who’d died.
The second we mentioned that the women were strangled with ties, each of them started crying because Edgerton had used silk ties to control them all.
We became convinced that Edgerton, not the dead tie-shop owner, was responsible for the rapes and murders of Kissy Raider and the other dead women. We put him under surveillance and kept