Alex Cross 16 (22 page)

Yarrow's vague sense of the cabin sent us down a handful of wrong turns before we eventually found the right gravel road off Route 33. Several miles back through the woods, it came to a makeshift dead end, with a row of rocks blocking the way. They'd obviously been moved there by hand, and it didn't take us long to clear them. Beyond that were two dirt tracks retreating into the brush, and another half hour of slow going before we saw anything man-made. Remy Williams's nearest neighbor seemed to be Lake Anna State Park to the east. The driveway, such as it was, came up on the back of a rudimentary single-story building surrounded closely by fir trees. It looked unfinished from here, with a galvanized standing-seam roof but just warped and silvered plywood over Tyvek on the walls.

"Very nice," Sampson muttered, or maybe growled. "Unabomber east, anyone?" It was bigger than Ted Kaczynski's famous shack, which I'd been to once before, but the general feeling was about the same: madman in residence.

Around front, the two small windows under a covered porch looked dark. There was a dirt yard big enough for several cars, but no sign of any vehicle. The place seemed completely deserted, and part of me hoped it was. It wasn't until I'd driven around nearly full circle that I saw the wood chipper at the side of the house.

"Sampson?"

"I see it."

It was an old industrial unit, with two tires and a rusted trailer hitch balanced on a cinder block. Most of the paint was long gone, just a few impressionistic flecks of John Deere green and yellow on the frame. Next to it, a blue tarp was folded on the ground, weighted down with a two-gallon gas can. I kept the car running as we got out, and I pulled my Glock.

"Anyone home?" I called halfheartedly.

There was no answer. All I heard was the wind, a few birds chattering in the trees, and my idling car. Sampson and I took the porch from opposite sides to check the windows first, then the door. When I looked in, it took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust. Then I saw a man, sitting in a chair against the far wall. It was too dark for details; I couldn't even tell if he was alive or dead. Not for certain. Not yet.

"Fuck," Sampson muttered,

Exactly right. My thoughts exactly.

It was that combination of sweet and putrid that's so distinct and so hard to take. Like fruit and meat rotting for days in the same barrel.

The place was mostly empty, with just a few pieces of furniture — a metal cot, a woodstove, a long farm page 85

table.

The only chair in the place was occupied, and Remy Williams had apparently died in it. He looked graphic-novel-style slack jawed where part of his face had been blown off. A Remington shotgun was still half-clutched in his left hand, barrel pointed down at the soft pine floor. The other hand hung loose at his side, and it looked like there was some kind of writing on his forearm.
Writing?
Was that it?

"What the hell?" Sampson covered his mouth and nose with his arm and bent down for a closer look. "Oh no, he didn't."

When I put my Maglite on it, I saw that the arm had been
carved,
not written on. A six-inch hunting knife was on the ground at Williams's feet, streaked the same reddish brown as his skin. The letters were still easy enough to read:

SORRY

Everything was duly photographed, documented, and either set out to dry or put into manila envelopes for transport.

The faster job turned out to be a search of the woods. A lieutenant colonel with the state police called in two K-9 units, and within the first hours, they'd sniffed out a freshly turned patch of earth half a mile east of the cabin.

Some careful digging brought up two plastic bags of "remains" from about five feet down. Everyone on the site was carrying around a hangdog face. No one is ever ready for this kind of murder scene. The new remains looked exactly like Caroline's had, and the consensus was that they hadn't been in the ground for more than three days. Right away, I thought of Tony Nicholson and Mara Kelly, who were still officially MIA.

"It adds up, on paper anyway," I said to Sampson. "Get them out of jail, and you can make them disappear once and for all. We were supposed to think they fled the country."

"Hell of a way to cover your tracks," Sampson said. "But I have to admit, effective." We were sitting on the edge of the porch around one a.m., watching an agent tag what was left of the newly deceased as evidence, before they went into body bags. John couldn't take his eyes off it, but I'd seen enough. It depressed me to know that my own niece's case was becoming the single grisliest piece of work I'd ever investigated.

But that fact kept me moving too. For the fourth time in as many hours, I dialed Dan Cormorant's phone number.

This time the Secret Service agent actually picked up.

"Where the hell are you guys?" I asked him. "Are you even tracking this?"

"You're obviously not watching TV right now," he said. "It looks like they've got everyone but ESPN out there in those woods."

"Cormorant, listen to me. Remy Williams wasn't Zeus, any more than Tony Nicholson or Johnny Tucci was. Williams may be a stone-cold killer, but he's not the one we're looking for."

"I agree with you," Cormorant said, "and you know why? 'Cause we've got Zeus pinned down.
Right now
. You want to be part of the sideshow, you stay where you are. But if you want to be here when we finish this thing page 86

once and for all, I'd suggest you get your ass back to the city. Pronto, Detective Cross. This case is about to close. You should be there."

The mood in the briefing room was tense to say the least. They had CNN on one of a dozen flat screens arrayed on the wall, with an overhead shot of Remy Williams's cabin and the subhead
Secret Service Agent
Found Dead
.

At the front of the room, a fiftyish agent in shirtsleeves was shouting on the phone, loudly enough to be heard over everyone else.

"I don't give a shit who you need to speak to; he's not a member of the Secret Service. Now change the damn graphic!"

I had already spotted several people I knew, including Emma Cornish, who was MPD's liaison to the Service's High Intensity Violent Crimes Task Force; and Barry Farmer, one of two Secret Service agents assigned to Metro's Homicide Unit. It was as if the two departments had suddenly been knitted together, right there in the middle of the night.

For show, maybe?

I wasn't ready to say yet.

We all gathered around a long oval table for the first briefing. The man with the big voice in front turned out to be Silo Ridge, deputy special agent in charge. He was the whip on this one, and he stood up with Agent Cormorant.

"I'm sending around a fact sheet," Ridge said, handing half a stack in each direction. "The subject's name is Constantine Bowie, aka Connie Bowie, aka
Zeus
. Most of you know this already, but Bowie was an agent with the Service from 1988 to 2002."

Nobody flinched but me — and maybe Sampson. It was like a whole new map of this thing had just been unfolded in front of us.

I put up my hand. "Alex Cross, MPD. I'm just catching up here, but what's the known relationship, if any, with Remy Williams? Other than the fact that they're both supposed to be former agents."

"Detective Cross, glad to have you here," Ridge said, and a few more heads turned my way. "The focus of this operation is former agent Bowie. Everything else is on a need-to-know basis for the time being."

"I'm only asking because —"

"We appreciate MPD's participation, as always. This is all obviously a little sensitive, but we're not going to start unpacking it here. Moving on."

I gave Ridge the benefit of the doubt, for the moment at least. It wasn't a bridge I had to cross yet. Or burn. An image of Bowie's 2002 credentials came up on one of the screens. He looked like a million other agents to me — Waspy, square jaw, brown hair combed back. Everything but the dark shades.

"Bowie's been implicated in the murder of at least three women," Ridge went on, "all of them known employees of the so-called gentlemen's club in Culpeper County. Those women are Caroline Cross, Katherine Tennancour, Renata Cruz . . ." Surveillance photos that I'd seen before went by in a slide show. "And this is Sally Anne Perry."

A video started up, and right away I recognized the recording I'd handed over to Cormorant just the other day. Like Ridge had said,
the Secret Service appreciated MPD's
participation
.

"There's nothing pleasant about having to watch this," Ridge said, "but you should know who we're going after. The man about to come into the bedroom is Constantine Bowie. And he is about to commit murder."

"A little history here. Bowie was recruited from Philadelphia PD into the Service in 1988. For thirteen years, there's not much to tell, but shortly after 9/11, his perform-ance started to slip.

"Then in February of 2002, after an improper firearm discharge, which I'm not going to detail this morning, Bowie was removed from the Service without benefits."

Cormorant took it from there and brought up a slide of a generic-looking office building.

"In 2005, he opened Galveston Security here in DC —"

"Galveston?" someone asked.

"His hometown," Cormorant said. "Today, he's got satellite offices in Philadelphia and Dallas, with a personal net worth of seven million, give or take. The Philly ties don't prove anything, but it's worth noting that at least some contract work with the Martino crime family out of Philadelphia has been part of this whole picture as well."

Cormorant's eyes traveled over to me before he went on. "One other thing we can tell you is that phone records show two calls from Bowie's cell phone to the one found in Remy Williams's cabin today. One of those calls was made two months ago, and the other was four days ago."

"Where's Bowie now?" one of the agents asked.

"Surveillance puts him at home, as of twenty-three hundred hours last night. We have half a dozen agents watching his house."

"How soon can we move on this?" someone else asked. You could feel the impatience in the room. No one wanted to tackle the operation, I think, so much as they wanted to get it over with. Agent Ridge looked at his watch. "We go as soon as you're ready," he said, and everyone started to stand up.

Once Ridge gave the go, an entry team of five men in ballistic gear exited the van and snaked up the front steps of Bowie's town house in a line. It was a silent operation; they pried the door and then disappeared inside. After that, it was ten long minutes of waiting while they leapfrogged through the house, clearing one space after another. Ridge kept his head down and a hand over his earpiece as the SWAT commander whispered their progress to him. He held up two fingers to indicate they'd reached the second floor, and a few minutes later, three fingers.

Then he straightened up suddenly. I could hear shouting coming from the house.

"They've got him!" Ridge said — but then, "Wait."

There was some fast back-and-forth now, with Ridge blurting communications. "Yes? I hear you. Do not stand down." Eventually he said, "Okay, give me one second," and turned to address the rest of us.

"We've got a standoff situation inside," he said. "Bowie's armed and belligerent. Says he won't talk to Secret Service."

I didn't have to think about this. "Let me talk to him," I said. Ridge held up a finger and went back to the mic in his cuff. "Peters, I'm going to send in a throw phone —"

"No," I said. "Face-to-face. All he's looking at in there is five armed officers. We're not window dressing, Ridge. You brought us here for a reason, and now we know what it is." There was another long stretch of back-and-forth after that, relayed between Ridge, SWAT, and Constantine Bowie inside. Eventually, an agreement was reached. Bowie would let them check the rest of the house to make sure no one else was there, and then I'd go in. All of a sudden, some one was handing me a vest and Ridge was giving me the rundown.

"Keep SWAT between you and Bowie at all times. If you can get him to stand down, do it, and if not, leave. Don't drag it out." He checked his watch again. "Fifteen minutes. That's it. Then I'm going to pull you out myself."

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