The People vs. Alex Cross (22 page)

“Seems strange,” I said. “When Krazy Kat Rawlins looked at that website, he couldn’t tell where most of the videos of blondes were coming from because they used onion routers. And our guys were able to track them?”

“Maybe the guys making them got lazy,” Sampson said. “It happens.”

“The woods around here do look like the woods in the videos of Gretchen Lindel and Delilah Franks,” I said. “The blondes running in the trees?”

“I remember,” Sampson said. “And the lesbian girls disappeared less than sixty miles east of here. They could all be in that house or in any of those outbuildings.”

“Wish you’d gotten the search warrant.”

“Not enough evidence yet, the judge said. Which is why you’re here and Fox isn’t. Like I said, we’re going fishing.”

We got back in the car. It felt good to be riding shotgun with Sampson again. My world seemed even better than it had leaving the Lindels the evening before.

I switched the iPad app to Google Maps and used it to navigate the labyrinth of dirt roads around the property. Somewhere on it, there was a computer belonging to a
twenty-seven-year-old named Carter Flint. In the satellite image, there were six or seven vehicles in Flint’s yard.

But driving past that line of pines into the hollow, we spotted only two: a faded red Ford Ranger pickup and an old Toyota Corolla that looked in need of springs, both with their noses toward an embankment below the ranch house.

Sampson parked sideways behind them, blocking anyone trying for a quick exit. We got out. The fog was lifting from the ridges above the hollow. A dog barked in the distance beyond the pole barn. Closer, I heard the blatting of a sheep and the squeal of a pig or two.

We went up a crumbling brick walkway and knocked on the front door. No answer. No sounds inside. Sampson knocked again, and I thought I caught a flutter of movement in a window to my right. But again there was no answer.

“Let’s take a look around,” I said. “Maybe he’s in the barn.”

As we crossed the yard and got closer to the barn, the animal sounds got louder, more frantic, the dog barking, the sheep blatting, and the pig squealing. I knocked at a side door, then tried the knob. It turned. I pushed the door open. Bells hanging on the inner knob jangled.

The pig started squealing in an even higher pitch. The sheep blatted in terror. So did the dog; it sounded desperate, crying and yelping.

We stepped inside and took in the cavernous space in one long, sweeping, and horrified glance.

“Jesus Christ,” Sampson said. “This isn’t right.”

THE PIG WAS
forty pounds or so. It was in a low wire pen and was missing a two-inch-wide strip of skin along the length of its spine; it was clearly in terrible pain.

A lamb was in a pen beside the pig. Three of its legs were broken and it was struggling piteously.

The dog, a beagle, had been beaten with a blunt object. It tried over and over to get to its feet, but it kept falling and yelping for help.

Three GoPro cameras on tripods were aimed at the cages. Beyond the pens, a long workbench stretched the length of the side wall. On it were dozens of pieces of grotesque taxidermy, animals stuffed in their tortured state.

Behind the bench, the rear sliding door of the pole barn was open to the big garden. Thirty, maybe forty more creatures—small dogs and cats, wild things like skunks and opossums, even an owl—were stuffed in positions that preserved their agony and set in the garden in neat little rows. A few were
dressed in doll clothes, which only made the situation more disturbing.

“We need to call in the locals,” Sampson said.

Before I could reply, a man wearing headphones appeared in the open doorway to the garden. Bone thin and dressed in painter’s pants and a green wife-beater, he had skin as pale as a fish belly, pinkish eyes, and wispy hair the color of snow.

Two steps into the barn, as he was smiling at the wounded animals in their pens, he spotted us over by the door. He ripped off his headphones.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

“Police,” Sampson said, holding up his badge. “You Carter Flint?”

Shock locked Flint in his tracks for a second as he looked from John’s badge to the suffering animals. Then he whirled and flew out the barn door.

I tore after him. I had no jurisdiction. I wasn’t even a cop, technically, but after what I’d seen, I wasn’t letting the sadist who’d done it get away.

Neither was Sampson; he was off my left shoulder, exiting the barn into the garden. Flint was surprisingly fast and nimble. He was already beyond the garden’s borders and racing behind two other outbuildings toward the north tree line at the base of a ridge a hundred and fifty yards away.

“If he makes those woods, we’ll lose him,” Sampson growled.

I gritted my teeth and danced through the stuffed animals until I hit the grass, then I told myself to be like Jannie—relax and run. For thirty yards I was convinced I’d catch him, but Flint was younger and, judging from the way he was gaining ground, much fitter than me.

But not fitter than Sampson, who blew by me.

When Flint was forty yards from the woods, he hit tall, tangled grass. It slowed him. But it didn’t slow John, whose long legs had him leaping after the sadist. Flint looked back in desperation and then lunged for the woods.

Sampson ran up a hummock in the weeds and dived after him.

SAMPSON’S SHOULDER AND
his two hundred and twenty pounds drove into the back of Flint’s legs, flattening him in the deep wet grass. I ran up, gasping, as John straddled the sadist and kept his shoulders pinned.

“My knee.” Flint moaned. “Something snapped. And I got broken ribs.”

Sampson dug out zip cuffs and wrenched Flint’s arms up behind him, which provoked another round of howling.

“My ribs!”

“Screw your ribs,” Sampson said. “And screw your knee. You’re lucky I don’t kick out your front teeth.”

I helped Sampson up and then pulled Flint to his feet. His left leg buckled, and he began to whimper.

“I can’t help it, man. I got a mental sickness. I tried to stop. I did, but—”

“Save it for a judge,” Sampson said.

“Where are the blond women?” I said. “Which building?”

He didn’t react at first. Then he looked confused. “What blond women?”

“The ones you made those movies of,” Sampson said. “Fake executions. Uploaded them to the Killingblondechicks site.”

“No,” he said. “I watched some free videos on that site, but that’s not me.”

“All the recent uploads have been coming from your IP,” Sampson said.

Flint shook his head. “I’ve never submitted to that site. Never. I do animals for animal sites. Not humans. I’d never do humans.”

“Try telling that to a jury after they’ve seen your barn,” I said.

“I’m telling the truth,” he said. “Maybe I deserve punishment for what I’ve done, who I am. But if those blonde videos came through my IP, man, someone frickin’ hacked and hijacked my computer! I’m being framed!”

SHORTLY BEFORE DARK
, Sampson dropped me off at the entrance to the alley that runs behind my house. With my trial starting up again in the morning, there were bound to be more journalists in front of my house.

There’d been other journalists gathered at the bottom of Carter Flint’s road when we left. After Sampson called the local sheriff to tell them we’d made a citizen’s arrest, we’d waited until Flint was in custody and the three animals mercifully euthanized before we helped in the search for the girls. We’d found enough disturbing evidence to put Flint behind bars or in a psychiatric institution for years but no trace of Gretchen Lindel or Delilah Franks or the four other missing women.

I used the back gate to our yard, happy for the darkness, and went in the side door. My dad and Jannie were watching a tape of her race at Hopkins. Bree was in the kitchen with Nana Mama.

“How was fishing?” my dad said.

Before I could answer, Bree called archly, “Yes, how
was
fishing?”

I gave my dad a chagrined look and walked to the kitchen. “You know?”

She crossed her arms. “I know everything. What were you thinking, going up there and just barging in like that?”

“That was John’s call on his own time. I just tagged along.”

She really wasn’t happy. “You said you’d be straight with me.”

I lowered my voice, said, “Straight with you? Okay, it was bad. The worst animal cruelty I’ve ever seen. I feel like I’ve been dipped in a jar of creepiness, but we stopped more animals from being tortured by that piece of shit.”

Bree struggled, her eyes searching mine, and then threw up her hands. “Go take a shower.”

Turning from the stove, Nana Mama said, “Dinner in half an hour.”

“Smells good. What is it?”

“It’s a secret.”

“I’ll be right back down,” I said. I leaned over Bree’s cold shoulder and kissed her on the cheek.

“There’s something on the table in the hall for you, Alex,” my grandmother called after me as I left the room.

In the front hall I spotted a small U.S. Postal Service mailer addressed to Dr. Cross. No return address. I opened it to find the same kind of flash drive that the fake Alden Lindel had shown me. It was inside a plastic sleeve.

“You might want to see this,” I said, waving the envelope at Bree.

We went down to my basement office. Bree put on latex gloves and plugged the drive in. A few moments later, a
QuickTime App launched and showed a low-light video of a handcuffed, barefoot woman in a tattered white nightgown. She had a white hood over her head and was being led to a mossy stone wall by two guys dressed in black from shoes to hoods.

When they reached the wall, one of the men spun her around. The other yanked off the hood, revealing a gagged blond teen.

I felt sick, said, “Gretchen Lindel.”

They took off the gag. The camera pulled back to show three men about fifty feet from Gretchen. They were all hooded, all dressed in black, and all carrying AR rifles.

“Ready,” the cameraman said.

The three men shouldered their rifles.

I expected Gretchen to go to her knees and beg for mercy.

But instead, she stood tall against the stone wall and stuck her chin out at the firing squad.

“Go ahead!” she yelled at them. “I’m not afraid. You can do anything you want and I am not afraid of any of you!”

“Aim,” the cameraman said.

“You won’t do it!” Gretchen screamed. “You kill me, you don’t get to play your games anymore. You kill me—”

“Fire!”

The guns went off. In the low light, orange flames shot out of their muzzles. By the sparks the ricochets threw, the bullets hit stone inches around her head.

It broke Gretchen, who went to her knees, shaking in terror.

“Don’t,” she wept. “Don’t.”

Then the screen froze, and I heard the voice of the fake Alden Lindel say, “Next time, it’s for real, Dr. Cross. Next time every blond bitch, including little Gretchen, dies. And forget
about finding me before then. I exist in the digital void, invisible, ten steps ahead of you and the FBI.”

The video ended with that same brilliant flash I’d seen the first time I’d plugged in one of his thumb drives.

“He’s definitely part of the Killingblondechicks conspiracy,” I said, thinking about Flint’s insistence that someone had hijacked his computer.

Then I thought about the fact that the fake Alden Lindel had mailed the flash drive to me rather than bringing it in person.

“He knew I’d figured him out,” I said.

How? That flash at the end of the videos kept playing in my mind until I formed a very strong suspicion.

“I think there’s a good chance he’s bugged my computer somehow,” I told Bree. “And maybe the FBI’s. That would keep him ten steps ahead of us, wouldn’t it?”

WHEN I FINALLY
got in the shower, I was no longer merely suspicious but convinced my computer had been compromised by the fake Alden Lindel. I’d called Rawlins and Batra at the FBI to alert them, but neither of them picked up the phone. I left them messages saying that I believed their system was at risk as well, and I hoped they’d call sooner rather than later.

Under the hot water, I felt sickened again at what Flint had done to those animals and at the fact that he claimed there were tens of thousands of subscribers to the websites he sold his footage to. Was that true? What possible pleasure could someone find in innocent animals suffering?

It was so beyond me that I got angry. That anger only deepened when I considered my inability to make headway in the hunt for the missing blondes, especially Gretchen Lindel. What a brave thing she’d done, standing up to those men like that, defying them.

When at last I turned my thoughts to the trial, I got angrier still, and then depressed.

Two eyewitnesses had testified that I’d shot three people without just cause. There were videos of the shootings and no sign of computer-generated imaging or anything to suggest I was being framed.

The weight of those cold, hard facts kept growing as I showered myself into a darker mood. A conspiracy had been hatched and directed at me. The conspiracy was working. The gears of justice were grinding, and I could see no path out.

I got dressed and went downstairs in a black cloud.

“Doesn’t it’s-a-secret smell incredible?” Bree said when I came back into the kitchen.

Distracted, I nodded.

Out in the great room, my dad chuckled. “I think I love it’sa-secret.”

“You will,” Nana Mama said. “Where’s that Ali?”

“Where he’s been the past four days,” Jannie said with a roll of her eyes. “Up in Dad’s old office in the attic with the door shut.”

“He’s still working on his Houdini paper?” I said. “I’ll go get him.”

“Let me,” my dad said, coming into the kitchen. “Give me some time to bond with my grandkiddo.”