Alex Cross 16 Read Free Page B

arranged. Probably the way her mother had taught her to organize her clothing as a kid. The bottom drawers held a collection of restraints, insertive objects, toys, and contraptions, some of which I could only guess about and shake my head over.
    Separately, everything I'd found was no more than circumstantial. All together, it got me very depressed, very quickly.
    Was this why Caroline had moved to DC? And was it the reason she'd died the way she did? page 15
    I came out to the living room in a fog, not even sure I could talk yet. Bree was down on the floor with an open box and several photos spread in front of her.
    She held one up for me to see. "I'd recognize you anywhere," she said. It was a snapshot of Nana, Blake, and me. I even knew the date — July 4, 1976, the summer of the Bicentennial. In the picture, my brother and I were wearing plastic boaters with red, white, and blue bands around them. Nana looked impossibly young and so pretty.
    Bree stood up next to me, still looking at the photo. "She didn't forget you, Alex. One way or another, Caroline knew who you were. It makes me wonder why she didn't try to contact you after she came to DC." The picture of Nana, my brother, and me wasn't mine to take, but I put it in my jacket pocket anyway. "I don't think she wanted to be found," I said. "Not by me. Not by anybody she knew. She was an escort, Bree. Highend. Anything goes."

Chapter 8
    BACK AT THE office, which was buzzing with activity and noise, I got word from Detective Trumbull down in Virginia. Prints on the stolen car matched up to a John Tucci of Philadelphia, now at large. I played some fast connect-the-dots — from Trumbull in Virginia, to a friend at the FBI in Washington, to their field office in Philly and an agent, Cass Murdoch, who threw down another piece of the puzzle for me: Tucci was a known but small-time cog in the Martino crime family organization. That information cut both ways. It was a specific lead early in the case. But it also suggested that the driver and the killer might not be the same person. Tucci was probably part of something bigger than himself.
    "Any guesses what Tucci was doing all the way down here?" I asked Agent Murdoch. Bree and I had her on speakerphone.
    "I'd say he was either reassigned or else moving up in the organization. Taking on bigger jobs, more responsibility. He'd been arrested but never served time."
    "The car was stolen in Philadelphia," Bree said.
    "So then, yeah, he was working from home, emphasis on the was . My guess is he's probably dead by now, after a screwup like that, whatever the hell happened out there on I-95."
    "How about possible clients in Washington?" I asked. "Does the Martino family have any regular business down here?"
    "Nothing I know of," Murdoch said. "But there's obviously someone. John Tucci was too small-time to have drummed this up on his own. He probably thought he was lucky to get the assignment. What an asshole."
    "I hung up with Murdoch and took a few minutes to scribble some notes and synthesize what she'd told us. Unfortunately, every new answer suggested a new question.
    One thing seemed pretty clear to me, though. This wasn't just a homicide anymore, and it was no individual act. Maybe it involved a sex-and-violence creep — but maybe it was a cover-up? Or both?

Chapter 9
    THERE WAS MORE, of course, lots more, the kind of upsetting detail that keeps certain stories in the news for months, and some of it came right away for a change. Dr. Carbondale reached me in my car on the way home. Bree was driving her own car. "Toxicology shows no known poisons in Caroline's system," Carbondale told me.
    "No drugs of any kind, other than a .07 blood alcohol level. She couldn't have been more than tipsy at the time of death."
    "So Caroline hadn't been on drugs, and she hadn't been poisoned. That wasn't much of a surprise to me. "What about other causes?" I asked Carbondale.
    "I'm more and more certain that's going to be an unanswerable