Criss cross, p.18
Criss Cross, page 18
For the first time since Martin Forbes raised the idea that Kyle Craig was alive, I felt a shadow of doubt about my convictions. I tried to shake it off, tried to remember Max Siegel, the FBI agent Craig had impersonated after having his face surgically transformed in Tampa.
The face I saw on the man who died wasn’t Craig’s face. But it was Craig.
It was…wasn’t it?
I forced myself to confront a possibility I’d been denying. What if there wasn’t any facial reconstruction? What if Max Siegel, or whoever that was who blew up and burned, was just another fiction crafted by Craig? Was Kyle Craig still alive? Was he M?
I stayed up long past midnight, my brain flashing back and forth between Pseudo-Craig and my memories of the real Kyle Craig, wondering if it could be true.
Ned Mahoney had said we were at least two, maybe three, days away from being able to exhume the body that had blown up and burned on my honeymoon.
I decided I couldn’t wait, closed the file with the video stills of Pseudo-Craig, and started up my laptop.
Two minutes later, I was on the web, searching for cheap flights south.
Chapter
73
When I exited a rental car early the following afternoon in a parking lot in a slightly seedy neighborhood in North Miami Beach, the air was so hot and humid, it reminded me of Washington DC in mid-August, meaning that it was kind of like sticking your head in a panting dog’s mouth.
Sweat burst out of every pore as I walked toward a two-story, faded green office building that had seen better days. The grass and shrubs were shabbily tended. The glass front door needed cleaning.
The directory on the wall inside said the two suites on the first floor were occupied by law offices that specialized in DUI defense. One of the suites upstairs was for lease, and the other was occupied by Cana Medical Arts.
I climbed the stairs to the suite of Cana Medical Arts to find a handwritten sign on the door that said Clinic Hours 9:00 to 12:00 and 2:30 to 5:00, Monday through Friday.
It was ten minutes to two, forty minutes until the clinic reopened, but I was there, so I tried the doorknob. It turned and I stepped into an empty, dimly lit reception area.
The front desk was unmanned, and the area behind it equally dim. I was about to call out when I heard snoring from down the hallway.
I followed the sound of the snoring and reached an office lit by a single lamp sitting on a large wooden desk. Behind the desk, a heavyset man in a rumpled blue shirt and jeans was sleeping in his chair, bare feet up on the desk.
His toes were positioned right under the lamp, as if he’d put them there for warmth. Unfortunately, the light revealed toenails that were long, abnormally thick, and yellowish with dark streaks, as if they were infected with something fungal.
I curled a lip at that distasteful sight but got out my ID, walked in, sat in the chair opposite him, and knocked on his desk. He didn’t stir, so I knocked louder.
He woke mid-snort, flailed, and almost fell over backward, then he heaved his feet off the desk and lurched forward in his chair, looking befuddled. He had a jowly face, wrinkled, tobacco-colored skin, and bloodshot eyes and he appeared to be in his late sixties, though I knew for a fact he was only fifty-one.
The man’s eyes widened and focused on me. He leaned back in alarm. “What is this?” he said. “Who are you?”
“I’m a detective, and I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
Dr. Julius Bombay got angry and started sputtering. “Will this never end? I have paid my fines and endured the penalties and indignities. Enough already!”
“I’m not here about you losing your license to perform surgery, Dr. Bombay,” I said. “I’m here about an old client of yours.”
The disgraced plastic surgeon’s entire demeanor changed. He quieted and studied me closely. “Who do you work for?” he asked. “I sense you’re not real law enforcement.”
“Try me. I’m here about Kyle Craig.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he said, taking his eyes off me and opening a desk drawer.
“He knew you. He told me you gave him a whole new face. This was back when you were operating at night and under the radar to fund your gambling addiction.”
Dr. Bombay came up with a pistol and aimed it at my chest.
Chapter
74
I looked at the pistol, a stout Remington 1911, probably .45 caliber. In the right hands, it was probably deadly.
But Dr. Bombay’s gun trembled like his voice when he said, “Whoever you are, get out! This is persecution!”
I put up my hands and stood. “I’m not looking to pin another illegal cut job on you, Doctor. I’m just looking for corroboration that you did give Kyle Craig a new face.”
He leaned across the desk and shook the gun at me. “Get out!”
“Calm down,” I said, starting to pivot. “I’m going.”
The instant I saw him begin to retract the weapon, I spun back and smashed the inner wrist of his gun hand so hard, he howled in pain. The pistol went flying and disappeared behind him with a clatter.
“Asshole,” he said. He looked miserably at his wrist, then up at me in alarm, and then he dropped behind the desk.
Knowing he was after the gun, I came around behind him, grabbed him by the shirt collar, and jerked him to his feet. I spun him around and drove my right fist into his solar plexus.
Dr. Bombay doubled over, his eyes bugging out, weird choking noises erupting from his throat. I guided him around into the chair I’d been sitting in, then went back behind the desk, found the gun, and unloaded it.
By the time I was done, he’d almost regained his breath.
“It’s an easy question, so I want an easy answer,” I said. “Did you give Kyle Craig a new face? The face of an FBI agent named Max Siegel?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe? Jesus, man, whoever you are, we didn’t use names. I didn’t want to know names. If I knew names, I could give them to people like you, so no names. Ever. Get it?”
I showed him the still shot from the jail-security footage. “You ever see him?”
Dr. Bombay leaned forward to look and then shook his head. “No. I mean, maybe, but I don’t remember much about their faces beforehand. It’s the after shot I always treasured.”
“What about an after shot? Is there one in your old files? I know the approximate date you would have operated on him.”
His eyebrows raised. “Well, that might have worked, actually. But all my old records were in a storage unit in Tampa until the last hurricane tore the place apart.”
“Dr. Bombay?”
A young woman with purple hair was standing in the doorway. She looked from me to the pistol and bullets on the desk to the doctor.
“Yes, Emma,” he said.
“Your patient is here.”
He shifted his gaze to me. “As you’ve heard, duty calls.”
The doctor said this with such an air of resignation that I nodded.
He sighed, getting to his swollen bare feet. “Emma, where are my sandals?”
Emma glanced at his feet. Her nostrils flared in revulsion, but then she pointed at a corner and moved aside to let me leave.
Chapter
75
I’m sure I’ve been to worse airports than Miami International, but I can’t remember when.
I didn’t notice the problems as much when I flew in, but trying to depart, I waited for almost an hour to clear security, and I found most of the toilets broken and the floors filthy. There weren’t enough benches or chairs, and the service people were deeply unhappy; some were downright rude. It put me in an even fouler mood than I’d been in when I left Dr. Bombay’s office. I still had no answers to any of my questions, including whether Kyle Craig had indeed had his face surgically altered to match that of a missing FBI agent.
I’d hoped Dr. Bombay could prove that my idea that Craig might still be alive was wrong. But getting off my flight home, I felt no closer to doing that.
I grabbed a cab, gave an address a block from my house, and waited until I was on the Fourteenth Street Bridge before putting the battery back in my burn phone. When I turned it on, I found eight phone messages and eight texts waiting for me.
My phone rang before I could listen to or read any of them. John Sampson.
“Where the hell are you, Alex?” he asked after I’d said hello. “You haven’t been answering your phone.”
“I needed to disconnect for a few hours.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Okay, well, whatever. Can you receive text pics wherever you are?”
“I’m almost home, and yes.”
“It’ll take only a minute. I’ll send them and call you back.”
Stuck in traffic ten minutes later, I felt the phone buzz. I dug it out and glanced at the two pictures. I felt a blinding headache coming on.
Pseudo-Craig had been caught on-camera, in color, both in profile and straight on. He wore jeans, a tan leather jacket, no sunglasses, tooled cowboy boots, and a white baseball cap on backward.
My phone rang.
“You see him?”
“Couldn’t miss him. Where was he?”
“Union Station. Four o’clock yesterday afternoon. Those are only two taken from the security footage, but I’ve looked at all of it, and…it’s like he wants to be seen, Alex.”
“Okay?”
“He deliberately walked in front of at least four cameras.”
“Where’d he go after that?”
“We lost him when he dropped down the escalators to the Metro station. The cameras there were being repaired.”
Of course they were. I groaned inwardly.
“What’s he up to, Alex?”
“Let me think on it,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”
The phone buzzed the moment I hung up. A text from Ned Mahoney:
We’ve got the federal court order to exhume Craig’s remains tonight. I figure you’ll want to be there.
Chapter
76
Quantico, Virginia
Drizzling rain and fog swept over small black gravestones engraved with alphanumeric codes set flush in the forest floor.
Darkness had long fallen on that remote and piney part of the Marine Corps base, an area not specifically denoted on any map of the vast federal property, an anonymous graveyard in the trees created for criminals whose pasts were so evil, their families had declined to claim their bodies for proper burial.
Mahoney, two other FBI agents, three cemetery workers, and I were there, all of us dressed in rain slickers and rubber boots and waving flashlights, looking for B157, the code on the marker above the supposed remains of Kyle Craig.
“Why aren’t they in order?” I asked.
One of the workers, an older man named Cecil who walked with a slight stoop, said, “The Marine commandant who authorized this burial ground after the Civil War wanted to make sure there would be no shrines to the dead here. Make them as difficult as possible to locate. Especially A-one.”
I took my eyes off gravestone C42. “Who’s under A-one?”
He hesitated, then said quietly, “John Wilkes Booth.”
I frowned. “Lincoln’s assassin? I thought he was buried in some cemetery in Baltimore under a blank gravestone that people cover with Lincoln pennies.”
Cecil shook his head. “Family didn’t want nothing of him. That headstone in Baltimore is over his sister’s grave. Booth’s here. He’s the reason for this unholy place.”
“Who else?”
“Can’t say, but a bunch. People think they’re buried somewhere else, and there are headstones and all, but the truth is, most cemeteries don’t want someone notorious or wicked defiling sacred ground. They send the real remains here. No one’s the wiser.”
I had never heard of this graveyard, not even during my days working on the base with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. I was fascinated. “C’mon,” I said, glancing around. “Who else is in these woods?”
Cecil looked away.
“I promise it will be between us.”
He hesitated but then said in a low voice, “You’re within about thirty yards of all that remains of Oswald and of Ruby.”
I gaped at him. “Lee Harvey Oswald? JFK’s killer? Here? And Jack Ruby, Oswald’s assassin?”
“John Wayne Gacy’s not far either. Real hall of shame.”
Before I could reply, Mahoney called out, “Here it is. I’ve got him.”
Ned was three rows away, crouched down and shining the beam of his Maglite at the ground. “Bring the big lights and the digger over.”
An FBI agent fired up a pickup truck carrying a bank of construction lights. Cecil crawled into a Bobcat earthmover with a backhoe arm.
I didn’t watch Cecil drive. I was looking all around as the fog swirled off on a stiffening breeze and the true rain came on.
Booth. Oswald. Ruby. Gacy.
And only God and Cecil knew who else was in the ground there.
As I walked to Mahoney, I admit it was disturbing—okay, downright eerie—to know that I was stepping over the bones of psychopaths, assassins, and other cold-blooded murderers.
A worker used a pinch bar to pry up the headstone and then set it aside. Cecil was a master of the Bobcat and soon had the blade and teeth of the bucket digging down through last year’s pine needles and into the wet red clay below.
It was pouring rain when the bucket hit metal, the heavy clank echoing up out of the hole. The other workers used a wooden ladder to climb down into the hole with a spade and two lengths of chain. In short order, they had the chains around a simple steel coffin and linked to the head of the bucket. Cecil toggled the controls. The box rose effortlessly, then swung and dangled above the hole.
“Small enough for a kid,” Mahoney said, shaking his head.
I flashed back to the last time I’d seen the man I believed to be Kyle Craig alive, just before his miserable life exploded and burned.
“There wasn’t much left of him,” I said. “Two charred arms and a leg.”
Chapter
77
I got home just before midnight, chilled and desperate for a hot shower and bed. Bree was up waiting in our room. She said nothing when I walked in, but her expression spoke volumes.
“I know I should have called,” I said. “But I texted you that I had to go to Quantico.”
Bree, stone-faced, didn’t answer.
I went over and sat on the edge of the bed. “Look, I had to go somewhere today, talk to someone, and I had to do it in somewhat of a strong-arm manner. I did not want you involved in any way whatsoever, so I did not tell you where I was going, and I kept my phone off. I did not tell anyone where I was going. And when I got back, Ned called me to Quantico and took me to a place that isn’t even supposed to exist.”
She didn’t reply for several moments, then said, “So there is a part of Alex Cross that his beloved wife is not allowed to know about.”
I could see there was no good way out of this situation. I surrendered and told her about Dr. Bombay and then about the graveyard at Quantico.
“John Wilkes Booth?”
“I had the same reaction,” I said.
Her hard expression was gone, replaced by genuine interest.
“What about Ted Bundy? Is he there?”
“We’d have to track down a groundskeeper named Cecil to know for sure, but I’d give it better than even odds that he is.”
Bree shook her head. “That’s incredible. And no one knows about this?”
“A select few.”
“Do you think Craig’s remains are in the box?”
“I’m so cold and tired, I don’t know what to think.”
“Poor baby,” she said. “Take a hot shower and come to bed.”
I kissed her and said, “Thanks for understanding.”
Some of the soberness returned to her face as I stood.
“Don’t think for a minute I agreed with your reasons for staying silent about Miami. We’re supposed to be life partners, soul mates. Much more than a team.”
“I apologize, and it won’t happen again.”
“Then consider it forgotten,” she said, and she turned out her light.
The shower was wonderful. It not only warmed my bones but washed everything from repulsive toenails to coffins off my skin and down the drain.
I climbed into bed, the day far behind me, and drifted into dreamless sleep.
When Bree and I woke up, we decided we needed a family weekend.
We took Ali to the Tidal Basin, and he rode his bike while Bree and I went for our normal Saturday-morning run. You could tell almost immediately that the training rides he’d taken with the Wild Wheels group had improved his strength and technique.
I told him so when he circled back to us.
“So I can go to that race in Pennsylvania?” he asked.
“I read the flyer you brought home, and it looks good. I’ll talk to the coach, but I think you can go.”
He hooted with joy and rode off as Bree and I passed under the first of the Japanese cherry trees that line the basin.
“You seeing this?” Bree said, breathing hard and pointing up at the cherry trees. “The buds look ready to burst.”
“You’re right. Almost a week earlier than last year.”
We puffed by the Jefferson Memorial and found Ali waiting for us at the traffic light on Maine Avenue. He held up his phone, upset.
“Captain Abrahamsen crashed his bike!” he said.
“What?”
“He hit gravel on a ride yesterday on the eastern shore and went over the handlebars with his shoes clipped in to his pedals. Says his shoulder got banged up. Plus he has to go to some army base in San Antonio to work for the week.”
