Target: Alex Cross (Alex Cross #26) - James Patterson Page 0,93

toward the trees. More firemen maneuvered a hose across the ditch and sprayed down the struggling blaze in the woods.

I kept moving around the van, fifteen feet back, peering at the ground through the glasses. I’d taken six or seven steps counterclockwise before I spotted something that made me lower the binoculars.

I couldn’t make it out with the naked eye, so I looked again with the glasses and figured out exactly what it was. Holding my arm up to protect my face from the heat, I hurried to within six feet, squatted, and pushed aside a singed leaf that half covered a nine-millimeter shell casing.

Of course, it was a rural area. The brass could have been there from something unrelated, but I didn’t think so. Leaving it in place, I went around the smashed front end of the van to look in at the corpse from the passenger side.

At a glance, I was positive. After walking to the rear of the van and peering inside with the binoculars, I was dead certain.

“What are you seeing?” Mahoney called from the road.

I went around and climbed up to him. “This wasn’t an accident, Ned. And neither of them is Hobbs’s assassin.”

“Okay?”

I gestured south. “There are gouges in the pavement over there that I think were made by bullets, two of them. Someone very good shot out the tires, which sent the van into this curving skid and off the road. The shooter skidded to a stop right there, climbed out, went into the ditch, and shot those two.”

After that I described the position of the spent shell casing, the weird fissure between the driver’s eye sockets, and the hole the size of a fist in the back of his skull.

“The corpse in the rear has a head wound too,” I said.

Mahoney looked beyond frustrated. “But how do you know neither of them is Hobbs’s assassin?”

“The one in the rear’s too small in stature to match Bree’s description of him,” I said. “I’m guessing a woman. And the driver had all his teeth. The president’s killer had knocked out or broken several. Remember?”

“Now that you reminded me. But I’m still confused. Did Hobbs’s assassin go off with this shooter of his own free will? Or was he forced out of here?”

“One or the other. Unless he took off into the woods. We should check, but I don’t think so.”

“Son of a bitch,” Ned said, furious. “Now we have no idea what kind of car we’re looking for. We had him, Alex. We had him, and we let him slip away again!”

Part Five

STOP ME, PLEASE

CHAPTER

91

ON SUNDAY, AS the sun was setting, Pablo Cruz plunged a thick knitting needle that he held with vise grips into the flames of a gas stove burner. He watched the metal tip turn a glowing red.

Cruz had given Kristina Varjan no chance to try to overpower him once they were in her car. He’d disarmed her right away. Then, at every stoplight or stop sign, he’d pressed the muzzle of her Glock into her side and given her directions that took them across one arm of the Chesapeake Bay and onto Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

According to the satellite radio, they’d gotten across the bridge just in time. News reports said the president’s assassin had been hiding in a veterinary hospital west of there and had managed to elude federal agents once again.

Cruz smiled. He liked elusion. He took pride in staying ahead of the dogs. It was an art form, as far as he was concerned, and he was the master of it.

Like his choice of safe house. He’d spotted the shuttered beach cottage from the road and had Varjan park the car behind an outbuilding. After looking for signs of an alarm system and finding none, he had her crowbar the back door open.

Cruz turned from the stove in the cottage’s kitchen with the glowing knitting needle before him and looked at Varjan, who was tied to a chair and eyeing him like she wanted to rip his throat out.

“I’m going to ask you again,” Cruz said. “Who hired you to kill me?”

She sneered. “I’m going to tell you again: I don’t know. He calls himself Piotr.”

“A Russian?”

“Who knows.”

“I don’t believe you,” Cruz said, bringing the still-glowing knitting needle by her cheek. “There is more you are not telling me.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

Cruz dropped the nose of the needle to her collar and pushed it aside. Fabric burned before he touched her skin, right above the