Cross - James Patterson [54]
It was an important part of the profile for us to pin down though. Attractive attackers had an edge that made them even more dangerous. My hope was that with a little time and the promise of a lot of protection, Mena would be willing to keep talking to us. What we had so far wasn’t enough for a useful police sketch. As soon as we had a likeness that didn’t match about twelve thousand other faces on the streets of Georgetown, Sampson and I wanted to go wide with it.
Sampson tilted his chair back and stretched his long legs. “What do you think about getting some sleep and starting in on the rest of these in the morning? I’m cooked.”
Just then, Betsey Hall came whizzing in, looking a lot more awake than either of us did. Betsey was a newbie detective, eager, but the kind who knew how to be helpful without getting underfoot.
“You only looked at female victims in your cross-refs?” she said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Why?” Sampson asked.
“Ever heard of Benny Fontana?”
Neither of us had.
“Midlevel mob soldier, underboss, I guess is the term. Was, anyway,” Betsey said. “He was killed two weeks ago. In an apartment in Kalorama Park. Actually, on the night that Lisa Brandt was raped in Georgetown.”
“And?” Sampson asked. I could hear the same tired impatience in his voice that I felt. “So?”
“And so, this.”
Betsey flipped open a file and spread half a dozen black-and-white photographs out on the table. They showed a white man, maybe fifty years old, dead on his back in a living room somewhere. Both of his feet were completely—and freshly—severed at the ankle.
All of a sudden, I wasn’t so tired anymore. Adrenaline was pumping through my system.
“Jesus,” Sampson muttered. We were both on our feet now, scanning from one grisly photo to the other, repeating the process a couple of times.
“The ME’s report says all the cutting on Mr. Fontana was done antemortem,” Betsey added. “Possibly with surgical tools. Maybe a scalpel and saw.” Her expression was hopeful, kind of sweetly naive. “So you think this is the same perp?”
I answered, “I think I want to know more. Can we get the keys to that apartment?”
She fished a set out of her pocket, jangling them proudly. “Thought you might ask me that.”
Chapter 72
“SHIT, ALEX. MULTIPLE RAPES, multiple murders. Now a mob connection?” Sampson punched the roof of the car. “It can’t all be coincidental. Can’t be! Cannot!”
“Could definitely be something—if it’s the same guy,” I reminded him. “Let’s see what happens here. Try not to get too far ahead of ourselves.”
Not that John was off base. Our suspect was looking more and more like a sadistic monster with a very bad, very distinctive habit. It wasn’t that we’d been looking in the wrong place for him, just maybe not in enough places.
“But if this does pan out,” Sampson went on, “no phone calls to your old pals tonight. All right? I want a little time with this before the Feds come on board.”
The FBI would already know about the Fontana murder, assuming it was mob related. But the rapes were still DCPD. Local stuff.
“You don’t know that they’ll necessarily take over the case,” I said.
“Oh, yeah.” Sampson snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “I forgot. You had your memory wiped when you left the Bureau, like they do it in Men in Black. Well, let me remind you—they’ll take over this case. They love cases like this one. We do all the work; the Feebies take all the credit.”
I stole a glance at him. “When I was at the Bureau, you ever resent me coming in on a case? Did I do that?”
“If it happened, don’t worry about it,” he said. “If it was worth talking about then, I would have brought it up. Hell no, you never moved in on one of my cases!”
I pulled over in front of a tan brick apartment house across from Kalorama Park. It was a nice location;