Double Cross - James Patterson [65]
At the top, the stairs doubled around to an open hallway that overlooked the first floor. A door was closed on the left, with an open one, closer to me, showing off an empty bathroom. It looked empty from this angle, anyway.
Still no people, though, dead or alive.
I could hear more police arriving downstairs, quite the crowd on hand already. Nervous whispers and radio chatter. The high-pitched voice of Officer DiLallo—somebody called him Richard, as in Richard, calm down.
Bree reappeared in the hallway below me. She gave an all-clear sign, and I motioned for her to come up.
“You lonely?” she asked.
“For you . . . always.”
When she joined me upstairs, I pointed to the bedroom door. “Only one that’s closed,” I said.
I steeled myself for what we might find, then burst in through the door. I trained my Glock on the far corner, swept left, swept right.
I didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved. There was nothing in the room. Nothing there that shouldn’t be. A platform bed was neatly made in one corner. The open closet held women’s clothes.
What the hell were we missing? We were at Nineteenth and Independence, right?
Just then, we both heard the first faint chop of a helicopter, approaching fast. A moment later, it was hovering right over the house.
Other sounds filtered in from the street. One loud shout cut through. It reached us at the top of the stairs.
“It’s on the roof!”
I looked up, and that’s when I realized the domed skylight was also a hatch.
Chapter 85
“WE NEED A LADDER UP HERE!” Bree yelled to the cops below. “We need it in a hurry.”
I could see black scrape marks on the wall where there normally was a ladder of some kind for roof access. Not anymore, though. Somebody had taken it away.
The skylight was out of reach without it, even if I got on someone’s shoulders.
Bree and I hurried outside—there was no hiding the situation from the media now. Two other helicopters had joined the first one, circling the house like scavengers overhead. Neighbors, passersby, and more press than I could count were clogging the front walk and the street beyond. What a pain-in-the-ass mess this was turning out to be, and we hadn’t even gotten to the punch line yet.
“Clear this whole area,” I said to the nearest officer. “I’m not fooling around. DCAK has been here!”
Bree and I split up then, and I pushed my way through to get to the first news van I could find with a broadcast tower. It turned out to be Channel Four, parked in front of the armory across the street.
A reporter was already giving her rapid-fire spiel to the camera as I approached on the run. I interrupted her midsentence.
“Do any of those choppers belong to you?” I shouted, and pointed an arm up at the sky.
She was attractive, ash-blond, twentysomething, and immediately indignant. “And who are you?” she asked. Whoever I was, her cameraman swung around to get me in the shot.
I didn’t wait for the answer that I needed from the reporter. I stepped right past her and slid open the panel door on the Channel Four van.
“MPD!” I showed my badge to the wide-eyed tech sipping a “vente” Starbucks at his console. “I need to see exactly what your chopper is seeing.”
Midsip, and without a word, he pointed at one of the screens. A piece of electric-blue tape underneath it said LIVE FEED.
Here was the audience, I realized suddenly.
I’d been wondering how DCAK’s next plan would come into play. Now I knew. Anyone watching television would see this. That sonofabitch had planned everything just so.
I looked at my watch—just past six o’clock, the evening-news hour. That’s why the killer had waited to send out the second e-mail, wasn’t it?
The helicopter shot wasn’t close enough to capture every detail, but there definitely was a body up there. I was fairly sure it was a male, but not 100 percent. Dark pants, light shirt, and what seemed to be blood coming from the neck. The face looked strange, though, distorted in some way that I couldn’t make any sense out of yet.
A collapsible ladder lay on the roof nearby. “Tell your man up there to