Criss Cross (Alex Cross) - James Patterson Page 0,63
ring and a wedding band found with the Asian woman’s head, Dr. Abbott,” I said. “Did it belong to Diane Jenkins?”
Dr. Abbott pulled up a file on the computer. “The rings were Mrs. Jenkins’s, but no, the DNA of the finger didn’t match hers. We still don’t know whose finger it was.”
Bree’s phone buzzed. She turned away and answered.
“So who are those others?” Sampson asked. “The six heads?”
I said, “I’m betting DNA from three of them will match the three unidentified bodies found with the bodies of these three aboard that slave ship. The others? I don’t know. But there have to be open cases of headless bodies out there.”
Bree turned around, upset. “That was BATF. The bomb that killed Officer Petit was radio-controlled.”
It took a moment for me to digest that and consider the implications. “He was watching us,” I said. “M.”
“I know,” Bree said, puffing her lips. “Which means he could have targeted all of us when we went through that abandoned building. But he didn’t. And he didn’t when I went back through the structure alone. And he didn’t wait for you to be in there, Alex. M chose to detonate the bomb when Nancy Petit was in that building. Why?”
Before any of us could reply, four different telephones started chirping, buzzing, and ringing, all of it echoing through the morgue.
CHAPTER 71
WHEN SAMPSON, DETECTIVE ELAINE CONRAD, Bree, and I reached the brick-faced home in Northwest DC where Ron Dallas lived, his partner was as shaken as I’d ever seen her.
“I’m sorry, Elaine,” Bree said.
“Thanks, Chief,” Conrad said, and then she broke down. “Jesus …”
Bree went and put her arms around her. “I know you were partners a long time.”
“Five years,” the detective said, wiping at tears.
“Tell us what happened,” Sampson said.
Conrad said that after her partner missed the task-force meeting that morning, she kept calling him and kept getting no answer. She’d phoned Ron Dallas’s ex-wife, his daughter, and his sometime girlfriend, but they hadn’t heard from him either.
“Ron and I have keys to each other’s place,” Conrad said, her voice quavering. “So if we ever had to … check in and … well, he’s upstairs. The little room on the left.”
We donned blue booties and gloves and entered a house not unlike my own, with a center hallway and a steep staircase. Bree led the way up the stairs onto a carpeted landing.
A bathroom door was ajar in front of us. To our right, I could see through an open door into Dallas’s bedroom, which was military-neat. He had spent eight years as an army MP before joining DC Metro.
Bree stepped through the doorway on our left and stopped, stricken.
“Nobody goes in until forensics has a clean shot at it,” she said, looking over her shoulder at us. “M has made a major mistake.”
Bree moved aside to let us peer into the shambles of Detective Dallas’s home office. The mementos of a lifetime lay shattered beneath overturned bookcases, filing cabinets, and boxes.
Sprawled diagonally across the debris of what had to have been an epic brawl was the body of Dallas, who had been a burly, skilled fighter. His face was badly battered, and he’d been strangled by a silver-and-blue silk tie cinched up tight beneath his jaw.
A note was pinned to his torn work shirt. It read: Detective Dallas is a disgrace, a cop on the take, cutting corners, playing fast and loose with evidence, Cross. You understand that, don’t you?—M
I stared at the note and felt slightly ill. Was he saying You understand that offhandedly, or was he playing with me?
What did M know? How did he know it?
“One hell of a man to take out Ron Dallas in his own home,” Sampson said.
“Which is why Bree’s right,” I said, pushing aside my concerns and gesturing inside. “M has made a mistake. This kind of fight means there’s blood or skin or hair in there that’s not Ron’s—”
“He wasn’t on the take,” Elaine Conrad said from the first floor.
We looked down the staircase.
“Ron was clean,” the dead detective’s partner said. “I promise you that.”
“Because if he wasn’t clean, then you aren’t clean, Elaine?” Bree said.
“That’s right, Chief,” Conrad said. “And I won’t have you or anyone think that of me or of my partner. We talked about that kind of thing first day I rode with him. Dallas believed in playing by the book. It’s how we rolled. No cut corners. No planted evidence. None of that.”