The People vs. Alex Cross (29 page)

Feiffer pushed the door open. A filthy yellow-and-orange tabby sprang out and darted between our legs before any of us could grab it. The cat sprinted down the hall, took a sharp right, and disappeared.

“I’m getting too old for this crap,” Feiffer said with a moan, his palm to his forehead.

I saw he wasn’t talking about the cat but about the apartment. The place was empty and swept clean.

FEIFFER TRUDGED INTO
the modest one-bedroom apartment and we followed.

When he reached the living area, he gazed around in disbelief. “She never said anything about leaving.”

“We heard she’d inherited a lot of money,” I said.

“That right?” the super said, raising one bushy gray eyebrow. “She never mentioned it, but why would she? How long ago?”

“Few months.”

“Big money and she lived
here
for months?” Feiffer said, incredulous.

What could I say? The man knew his place in the market.

“Could we see your copy of her lease?” Sampson asked.

“Why?” he said, suspicious again.

“I gather you have no forwarding address since she skipped out, but there will be bank and reference information in the lease agreement that might help us figure out where she’s gone.”

Feiffer considered that and then nodded.

After confirming that Rodriguez had indeed removed all her possessions, we were on our way out when I noticed some newspapers in a brown paper bag behind the door. I picked the bag up, hoping they’d give us an idea of how long she’d been gone.

I pulled out a stack of loose newspaper sections and flipped through a few.

The sections were all from the
Washington Post,
several going back a month or more, front pages mostly, with a few Metro sections thrown in. I kept looking through the newspapers as we rode down and noticed something that quickly became a troubling pattern.

I kept it to myself until Feiffer had gone into his apartment and we were alone in the lobby.

“We’re keeping these papers,” I said, slipping them back in the bag.

“Why’s that?” Sampson asked.

“In almost every section there’s a story about Gretchen Lindel or one of the other missing girls.”

“So maybe Lourdes Rodriguez had reason to sneak out in the middle of the night.”

“Maybe she did.”

Feiffer emerged from his apartment with a file marked
APARTMENT
805—
L. RODRIGUEZ
. I flipped the file open, took a glance at the standard rental-agreement form, and then zeroed in on a photo of the tenant stapled to the contract.

“Huh,” I said, seeing Rodriguez in a whole new light. I took a picture of the rental agreement and the photo, then handed the contract back to Feiffer.

“That it? I’ve got to go find that cat.”

We thanked the super for his time and left. The second the front door clicked behind us, Sampson said, “What did you see on that lease?”

“My poker face didn’t work?”

“I have known you since we were ten.”

I pulled up the shot of the picture stapled to the contract.

“Lourdes Rodriguez?” I said. “I know her by another name.”

THE ULTRA-LUXURY UNION
Wharf apartment complex on Fell’s Point was the most expensive place to live in Baltimore, costing five times what Lourdes Rodriguez had been paying at Feiffer’s. We’d used the bank account and other information on Rodriguez’s old lease to track her to her new digs.

A small moving van was snarling traffic on South Wolfe Street. The front door to one of the apartment buildings was propped open for workmen carrying furniture wrapped in blankets. We followed them inside and up the stairs to 2E.

The door was open. Reggae music was playing. The workmen went in. So did we.

I trailed Sampson past stacks of moving boxes choking the front hallway, hearing a familiar voice saying, “Be careful with that! It was my mother’s!”

We stepped out into a living area with large glass windows that gave a sweeping and dramatic view of Baltimore Harbor. Wearing jeans and a loose-fitting pink jersey, Lourdes
Rodriguez paced by the window, watching the workmen move a table into position.

She looked puzzled when she saw Sampson standing there holding his badge. Then she noticed me.

I stepped into the room, said, “You never sent me your new e-mail, Annie.”

For a second, the love junkie was so shocked, I thought she might faint dead away.

Then she croaked, “Dr. Cross? What are you doing here?”

“I could say the same, Annie. Or is it Lourdes?”

She swallowed, looked away. “Lourdes.”

“Why’d you use the fake name when you came to see me?”

Rodriguez blinked, puffed out her cheeks, and glanced at the workmen, who were leaving the room. “Isn’t this privileged?”

“Not when it comes to murder, kidnapping, and torture,” Sampson said.

That threw her. “What are you talking …” She looked at me. “Dr. Cross, I came to you under an alias because of the addiction I told you about. I don’t know anything about any torture or murder or kidnapping.”

“The van that was stolen from you when you were working for Dish,” Sampson said. “We ran tests on the interior. Whole lot of blood spatter.”

She looked down. “Blood spatter? I don’t … it was stolen. I had nothing to do with that.”

“Didn’t you?” I said. “The same van was caught on film when two blond girls from Pennsylvania were taken.”

Her jaw dropped, and she took a step backward.

“Seemed a big coincidence,” Sampson said. “Given that you left behind all those articles about the same missing girls at your old apartment at Mr. Feiffer’s.”

“And given that I saw you leaving my office in a car driven by a man posing as Alden Lindel, the father of one of the missing girls,” I said.

She shook her head as if trying to clear it. “Wait. What? The father of one of the missing girls?”

“A man who’s been claiming to be him. You got into his Nissan Pathfinder right after our one and only session. I saw you. What is going on, Annie, Lourdes, whatever your real name is?”

She threw up her hands in exasperation. “Last time I left your office? I called Uber. They sent some Uber guy. You can check. I’m sure there’s a record.”

Uber? Was that possible? The fake Alden was an Uber driver. You call for an Uber car and usually the one that’s closest responds. Which meant what? That the impostor, whoever he was, had been close by, watching my house?

“We will check Uber,” Sampson said. “What about the news articles?”

Rodriguez rubbed her neck, didn’t look at us, and didn’t reply.

“It’s going to come out sooner or later,” I said. “Courts go easier on the first person in a conspiracy to flip.”

“Conspiracy?” she said sharply. “No, it’s nothing like that. Not really.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Looking flustered now, Rodriguez wrung her hands and then held them up in surrender.

“Okay, okay, I got caught up in something a long time ago, Dr. Cross, and … I’ll tell you everything I know. Everything. The honest-to-God truth.”

TWO HOURS AND
forty-five minutes later, Sampson had gotten off I-95 and was driving us north on Front Street, which parallels the freeway and the Delaware River as they pass through Philadelphia. The weather was changing. Dark clouds boiled on the western horizon.

“Chalabi sounds like a first-class creep,” Sampson said.

“He won’t be the first to achieve film success that way,” I said. We went over the high points of Rodriguez’s confession for the fourth or fifth time.

A childhood friend of Lourdes Rodriguez, Casey Chalabi, had always wanted to be a movie director.

“He ended up making porn films under the name Dirk Wallace,” Rodriguez told us. “It’s all S-and-M, bondage, the hard stuff.”

She said Chalabi put aside money from the porn shoots to fund production of a horror film he’d written.

“Horror’s cheap to film,” she’d said. “Casey said you can
do them for under a million. James Wan did
Saw
for a little over five hundred thousand, and it made, like, fifty-five million. Casey’s trying to model himself on Wan.”

Rodriguez claimed that even with the porn money, Casey’s horror flick was being shot on a shoestring. When he learned she was going to inherit her great-uncle’s fortune, he was immediately after Rodriguez to help fund his film.

“I gave him some, and I didn’t even have the inheritance yet,” she said. “I took it from my savings. Five thousand. And then another five. Then Casey wanted the van, my van at Dish. He said even with the money I’d given him, he couldn’t afford to buy or rent one, and mine was perfect. He wanted me to just lend it to him for the night.”

“What’d you say?”

“I said no. No way. But Casey can be a vindictive a-hole.”

Sampson raised his eyebrows. “You saying Chalabi stole your van?”

“I’d put money on it. And that blood you found inside? Was it human?”

“We don’t know yet,” I said.

“It’s probably pig’s blood. He uses lots of pig’s blood in the big slasher scenes in
Blade.
”

I thought about that for several moments. “So he steals your van, uses it in a killing scene in his movie. I’m still having trouble seeing how this connects to those newspaper articles we found at Feiffer’s.”

Rodriguez swallowed hard. “I haven’t spoken with Casey since my van was stolen, but I read his script a long time ago. It’s about these four sisters who inherit an abandoned factory and this old Victorian house. Then it’s pretty much like every other horror flick you see. Except the sisters. They’re all
ethereal and blond. Every one of them. And they get killed, one by one.”

Which was enough for us to drive to Philadelphia to talk to Mr. Chalabi face-to-face.

Rodriguez had given us the last address she had for Chalabi. She said she thought it was where he shot the porn movies. We found the address, a rehabbed old school called the Emerson that had been turned into lofts and work spaces down the street from the Theatre of Living Arts.

Rodriguez couldn’t remember the exact name of Chalabi’s company, but we found
C. C. PRODUCTIONS
listed on a board at the entrance to the Emerson. It was on the second floor, unit 2, the address Rodriguez had given us.

We took the staircase and walked down a long hallway past the open doors of artists’ studios and the closed doors of others in the arts and entertainment fields. The place smelled nice. There was music playing.

It had a good vibe, all in all, and that bothered me as we walked up to the closed door of C. C. Productions. I couldn’t see the management letting him shoot porn or slasher flicks on the premises.

Sampson knocked, turned the knob, and opened the door. I took one look inside and swore to myself.

C. C. Productions was an animation company. There were framed cartoon stills on the wall above the workstation of an Indian American woman in her twenties who looked up and smiled.

“Can I help you?” she said.

Sampson said, “We’re looking for Casey Chalabi.”

“I’m Cassandra Chalabi,” she said.

“Of course you are,” I said, furious. “Sorry to bother you.”

We shut the door. Sampson said, “Con artist.”

“Total pro. Pathological liar.”

“How much you wanna bet she’s started making a third move since we left?”

“Not a nickel. Lourdes Rodriguez, Annie Cassidy, whatever she calls herself, is in the wind.”

WHEN SAMPSON AND
I returned to the front door of the arts building, gloom had set in outside, and a chill rain fell on hurried pedestrians bent to the storm.

“We’re gonna get soaked,” Sampson said.

“Run for it,” I said. I jerked open the door and hopped out. Rain driven by a strong north wind pelted my face and eyes, forcing me to duck my head and throw my forearm across my brow as I ran toward the car, virtually blind.

As I was crossing Seventh Street, I stepped in a pothole. My right foot and shoe were submerged, my ankle and lower shin hit the edge of the depression, and I stumbled and sprawled in front of a Chrysler Sebring waiting at the light.

But that probably saved my life, because as soon as I tripped, I heard a thumping noise and the Sebring’s right headlight exploded.

“Shooter!” Sampson shouted; he grabbed me by the back of the jacket, hauled me behind the Sebring, and threw me to the
ground just before a second bullet smacked into the grille and penetrated the radiator, which threw steam.

The Sebring’s driver started screaming in a language I didn’t recognize. My shin was screaming in a language I didn’t recognize. But I forced myself to dig for my service weapon and badge.

“Where is he?” I said.

Sampson said, “I caught a flash of the first shot, elevated slightly, northwest corner of the intersection and back. Sounded suppressed too.”

I ignored the pain in my leg and got up enough to look over the hood through the teeming rain. The traffic light on one-way South Street had gone yellow. Two cars passed. Their headlights threw glare that dazzled me until the third shot.

I saw the flare of it, and then the Sebring’s windshield and passenger-side window fragmented as the bullet passed through both. I ducked down, hearing the frightened screams from the driver turn petrified.

“Pickup parked on the north side of South Street,” I said.

The light turned green on Seventh. The hysterical Sebring driver stomped on the gas, but the car bucked, stalled, and belched steam and smoke before dying ten feet into the intersection. The drivers of several cars behind us spun their tires, trying to get around the Sebring.

Other cars began honking frantically.

Sampson said, “Pickup’s running the red.”

In one motion I stood and had my pistol in my shooting hand over the Sebring’s passenger-side mirror. I was aiming at the pickup, which was trying to avoid the skidding cars in the intersection. For a moment I had nothing to shoot at.