Cross Fire (7 page)

Bronson “Pop-Pop” James pimp-walked into my dank little office with the same too-cool-for-school attitude as always. I’d met him when he was eleven; now he was a little older, and more confident in his cynical assessment of the world than ever.

Two of his friends had died since I’d started seeing him, and most of his heroes — street thugs barely older than he was — were already dead, too.

Sometimes I felt as if I were the only one in the world who cared about Bronson, which is not to say he was easy to work with, because he wasn’t.

He sat on the vinyl couch across from me, with his jaw pointed at the ceiling, looking at something up there, or probably just ignoring me.

“Anything new since the last time?” I asked.

“Nothin’ I can talk about,” he said. “Man, why you always bringin’ that Starbucks in here?”

I looked at the cup of Tall in my hand. “Why? Do you like coffee?”

“Nah, never touch the stuff. It’s nasty. I like them Frappuccino shits they sell, though.”

I could see him angling now, like maybe I’d pick him up a treat next time. Get him all sugared up. It was one of those rare flashes where the actual kid showed through the armor he seemed to wear day and night.

“Bronson, when you said it’s nothing you can talk about, does that mean there’s something going on?”

“You
deaf?
I said,
Nothin’. I can. Talk about!
”

His leg jerked out, and he punctuated his words with kicks at the little table between us.

Bronson was the type of boy people write psych papers about all the time — the debatably untreatable kind. As far as I’d been able to tell, he had no empathy for other people whatsoever. It’s a basic building block of what could become antisocial personality disorder — Kyle had it, too, in fact — and it made acting out his violent impulses very easy to do. Put another way, it made it very hard for him not to act on them.

But I also knew Bronson’s little secret. Inside that street-ready shell of his and behind the mental-health issues was a scared little kid who didn’t understand why he felt the way he did most of the time. Pop-Pop had been bouncing around the system since he was a baby, and I thought he deserved a better shake than life had ever given him. That was why I came to see him twice a week.

I tried again. “Bronson, you know these talks of ours are private, right?”

“ ’Less I’m a danger to myself,” he recited. “Or someone else.” The second point seemed to make him smile. I think he liked the power this conversation gave him.

“
Are
you a danger to someone else?” I asked. My main concern was gangs. He hadn’t shown any tats or noticeable injuries — no burns, bruises, or anything else that looked like an initiation to me. But I also knew that his new foster home was near Valley Avenue, where the Ninth Street and Yuma crews ran, pretty much right on top of each other.

“There’s nothin’ happenin’,” he said with conviction. “Just talkin’.”

“And which crew are you ‘just talking’ with these days? Ninth Street? Yuma?”

He was starting to lose patience now and trying to stare me down. I let the silence hang, to see if he might answer. Instead, he jumped up and pushed the table aside to get in my face. The change in him was almost instantaneous.

“Don’t be grittin’ on me in here, man. Get your fuckin’ eyes off me!”

Then he took a swing.

It was as if he didn’t even know how small he was. I had
to block him and sit him back down by the shoulders. Even then, he tried for me again.

I pushed him onto the couch a second time. “No way, Bronson. Don’t even think about that with me.” I absolutely hated getting physical with him, given his history, but he’d crossed the line. In fact, it didn’t seem to matter to Bronson where the line was. That’s what scared me the most.

This boy was headed over a cliff, and I wasn’t sure I could do anything to stop him.

“COME ON, BRONSON,” I said, and stood up. “Let’s blow this joint.”

“Where we goin’?” he wanted to know. “Juvie Hall? I didn’t hit you, man.”

“No, we’re not going to Juvie,” I said. “Not even close. Let’s go.”

I looked at my watch. We still had about thirty minutes left in the session. Bronson followed me into the hall, probably more out of curiosity than anything else. Usually when we left the room together, I escorted him out to his social worker.

When we got outside and I clicked open the doors to my car, he stopped short again.

“You a perv, Cross? You takin’ me somewhere private or something?”

“Yeah, I’m a perv, Pop-Pop,” I said. “Just get in the car.”

He shrugged and got in. I noticed him running his hand over the leather seat, and his eyes checking out the stereo, but he kept any compliments, or any digs, to himself.

“So what’s the big secret, then?” he said as I pulled out into traffic. “Where the hell we goin’?”

“No secret,” I said. “There’s a Starbucks not far from here. I’m going to buy you one of those Frappuccinos.”

Bronson turned to look out his window, but I caught a little flash of a grin before he did. It wasn’t much, but at least for a few minutes that day, he just might have thought we were on the same side.

“Venti,” he said.

“Yeah, Venti.”

THE IMBECILES WERE still in charge of the Bureau, or so it seemed. As far as Kyle Craig could tell, no one had even blinked when the freshly debriefed and newly reactivated Agent Siegel got himself assigned to the sniper case in DC. Siegel’s earlier stint in Medellín, Colombia, during their “murder capital of the world” days, was a matter of record, and an impressive calling card at that. They were lucky to have him on this one.

Luckier than they knew — two agents for the price of one! He sat at his new desk in the field office, staring down at the photo ID he’d been issued that very morning. Max Siegel’s mug stared back. He still got a rise just looking at it — still half expected to see the old Kyle whenever he passed by a mirror.

“Must be strange.”

Kyle looked up to see one of the other agents standing
over the cubicle wall. It was Agent What’shisname, the one everyone called Scooter, of all absurd things — Scooter, with the eager eyes and constant snacking on sugared carbs.

Kyle slid the ID back into his pocket. “Strange?”

“Returning to fieldwork, I mean. After all that time.”

“Miami
was
fieldwork,” Kyle said, salting his speech with a dash of Siegel’s
New Yawk
attitude and patois.

“I hear you. Didn’t mean to imply anything,” What’shisname said. Kyle just stared and let the awkwardness hang like a sheet of glass between them. “All right, well… you need anything before I head out?”

“From you?” Kyle said.

“Well, yeah.”

“No thanks, Scooter. I’m all set.”

Max Siegel was going to be antisocial. Kyle had decided that before he’d arrived. Let the other agents coo over baby pictures and share microwave popcorn in the break room. The wider the berth they gave him around here, the more he could get done, and the more secure his masquerade.

That’s why he liked after hours so much. He’d already spent most of the previous night right there at the office, sucking up everything there was to know about the Eighteenth Street shooting. Tonight, he focused on crime-scene photos and anything to do with the shooter’s methods. His profile was shaping up nicely.

Certain words kept coming to mind as he worked. “Clean.” “Detached.” “Professional.” There had been no specific calling card from this killer, and none of the “come and get me” gamesmanship you so often saw with these things. It was almost sterile — homicide from 262 yards, which was an
absolute yawn from Kyle’s perspective, even if the shock and awe of it, to borrow a phrase from the newspapers, were rather elegantly rendered.

He worked for several hours, even lost track of time, until a ringing phone somewhere broke the silence in the office. Kyle didn’t think too much about it, but then his own line went off a minute later.

“Agent Siegel,” he answered, with a smile in his voice, though not on his face.

“This is Jamieson, over in Communications. We just got a homicide report from MPD. Looks like there’s been another sniper attack. Up in the Woodley Park area this time.”

Kyle didn’t hesitate. He stood up and shrugged on his jacket. “Where am I going?” he said. “Exactly where?”

A few minutes later, he was pulling out of the parking garage and driving on Mass Avenue at around sixty. The sooner he got up there, the sooner he could head off Metro Police, who were no doubt fouling up his crime scene at that very moment.

And more important —
Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines
— this was the moment he’d been waiting for. With any luck, it was time for Alex Cross and Max Siegel to meet.

I WAS AT home when I got the call about the latest sniper murder near Woodley Park.

“Detective Cross? It’s Sergeant Ed Fleischman from Two D. We’ve got a nasty homicide up here, very possible sniper fire.”

“Who’s the deceased?” I asked.

“Mel Dlouhy, sir. That’s why I called you. He fits right into the mold on your case.”

Dlouhy was currently out on bail but still at the center of what looked to be one of the biggest insider tax scandals in U.S. history. The allegations were that he’d used his position in the District’s IRS office to funnel tens of millions in taxpayer dollars to himself, his family, and his friends, usually through nonprofit children’s charities that didn’t actually exist.

Another sniper incident, and another bad guy right out of the headlines — we had a pattern.

The case had just jumped to a new level, too. I was determined we’d get this right from the very start. If it had to be a circus, I could at least try to make sure it was
my
circus.

“Where are you?” I asked the sergeant.

“Thirty-second, just off of Cleveland Avenue, sir. You know the area?”

“I do.”

Second District was the only one in the city with
zero homicides
in the last calendar year. So much for that statistic. I could already feel the neighborhood panic going up.

“Did the fire board get there?”

“Yes, sir. The victim’s confirmed dead.”

“And the house is clear?” I asked.

“We ran a protective sweep, and Mrs. Dlouhy’s with us now. I can ask for consent to search if you want.”

“No. If anyone’s inside, I want them out. Call DC Mobile Crime. They can start photographing, but nobody touches anything until I get there,” I told Sergeant Fleischman. “Do you have any idea where the shots came from yet?”

“Either the backyard, or the neighbor’s place behind that. Nobody’s home over there,” Fleischman told me.

“Okay. Set up a command post on the street — not in the yard, Sergeant. I want officers at the front and back doors, and another at the neighbor’s house. Anyone wants to get into either place,
they go through you first
— and then the answer is
no.
Not until I’m on-site. This is an MPD crime scene, and I’m ranking Homicide. You’re going to see FBI, ATF, maybe the chief, too. He lives a lot closer than I do. Tell him to call me in the car if he wants.”

“Anything else, Detective?” Fleischman sounded just a
little overwhelmed. Not that I blamed him. Most 2D officers aren’t used to this kind of thing.

“Yeah, talk to your first responders. I don’t want any jaw jacking with the press or the neighbors —
no one.
As far as your guys are concerned, they haven’t seen a thing, they don’t know a thing. Just keep the whole place locked down tight until I’m there.”

“I’ll try,” he said.

“No, Sergeant. You’ll just do it. Trust me — we have to keep this thing locked down tight.”

UNFORTUNATELY THE PRESS was going berserk when I got there. Dozens of cameras were jockeying for an angle on Mel and Nina Dlouhy’s white stone house, either out front at the barriers that Sergeant Ed Fleischman had established, or over on Thirty-first, where a separate detail had been dispatched just to keep people from coming in through the back, which they certainly would do.

Most of the looky-loos on the street, if they weren’t press, were probably wandering up from Cleveland Avenue. The neighbors seemed to have stayed home. I could see silhouettes in the windows up and down the block as I drove in. I signed up with crime-scene attendance and immediately ordered a canvassing detail to start knocking on doors.

Sampson met me at the scene, straight from a faculty thing at Georgetown, where his wife, Billie, taught nursing. “Can’t
say I’m glad this happened,” he told me, “but, shit, how much wine and cheese can a man eat in one lifetime?”

We started in the living room, where the Dlouhys had reportedly been watching an episode of
The Closer
. The TV was still on, ironically with a live news shot of the house now. “That’s creepy,” said Sampson. “The press like to talk about invasion of privacy — except when they’re doing the invading.”