“You’re killing me.” Tull chuckled. “Why in God’s name would I ever do that?”

  Sampson said, “You discovered that Lisa had joined forces with Suzanne and that they were trying to gin up the case for you being the killer. The fact that you are the killer, Thomas, left you with only one recourse. You had to frame them instead.”

  Before he could reply, I said, “It’s quite a bold move. I mean, incriminating yourself in the short run to be free in the long run. And it’s deft too. You could have overplayed your hand and left Lisa’s hair at the Kanes’. Instead, you played their game against them, subtly depicting them as framers and killers, planting your own hair at their apartment. And then your master stroke: Lisa’s smudged partial fingerprints, one on the clip, the other on one of the bullets, suggesting that she’d tried to rub down the gun but had botched it, a killer who up to that point had been flawless.”

  Tull’s smile never wavered. “Nice theory, Dr. Cross. Except fingerprints don’t lie. I’ve never seen that gun before in my life.”

  “Except you have. Lisa remembers you having a Glock when you both went shooting up in Pennsylvania.”

  “A nine-millimeter,” he said.

  “That’s what she said you’d say. But it wasn’t the nine-millimeter that day, was it? You had the forty that day and called it a nine-millimeter.”

  He chuckled again. “Why would I do that?”

  “So you could take one of her forty-caliber clips and replace it with your own when she was off in the woods taking a pee.”

  “Ridiculous,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Except that some serial killer you are, Mr. Tull. You forgot to wipe your own prints off the clip you put in her pistol.”

  He said nothing for several seconds, as if searching his memory. “Nonsense,” he said finally. “You’re bluffing, fishing.”

  Now I chuckled. “You got me. It’s just a theory. By the way, we caught up to your alibi, Volkov.”

  The tension fell from Tull’s shoulders. His smile broadened. “I knew you would. He put me in that condo with his girls, right?”

  I put my phone on the desk and hit Play. Bree had told me where to start it.

  “Thomas Tull?” Volkov said on the recording. I hit Pause.

  The writer looked at me, puzzled.

  I said, “Oh, did I tell you that Volkov is under arrest for the murder of Frances Duchaine and her bodyguards? And he’s trying to get life imprisonment off the table.”

  Before Tull could answer, I hit Play again.

  Volkov said, “I know Tull. He has nasty habits that I feed from time to time.”

  Tull smiled smugly. “Told you.”

  “What about that night?” Bree asked on the recording. “Did you set him up with three hookers, a condo, and cocaine?”

  “This is important to you, yes?”

  “Very,” Bree said.

  Another man with a Russian accent said, “Get the ADA back in here, then.”

  After a moment, a woman said, “This is Manhattan assistant district attorney Connie Ellis witnessing. Go ahead, Mr. Volkov. Answer the question.”

  “Tull is very bad man. He knows things about me and my business,” Volkov said.

  “Answer,” Ellis said.

  “He asks me to give him alibi for that night in return for two hundred grand,” Volkov said. “There were no girls. No coke. Nothing.”

  Bree said, “Why would he do that?”

  “Because Tull is killer, like me. But he is different. Tull, he likes to kill.”

  Across the table in the interrogation room, Tull snarled, “This is bullshit. I’ve—”

  I said, “Wait for it.”

  “How do you know that?” Ellis said.

  Volkov cleared his throat. “Because he kills two of my girls, one last year, one the year before, and pays me to keep quiet.”

  Bree asked, “Why do you think Tull needed an alibi from you that night?”

  “Not difficult to see. He was killing someone that night, taking pleasure in it.”

  “An entire family,” Bree said.

  “I say it again. Thomas Tull, he likes to kill people.”

  Chapter

  105

  I shut the recording off and gazed at Tull.

  The smug smile was gone. “You put Volkov up to saying that. And I’ve never killed any of his girls.”

  I leaned across the table. “He says you did and we believe him, you cold, evil bastard. Did you kill every one of the victims in your books?”

  “Never.”

  “We think you did. We think you murdered most if not all of them. We think you framed the men in prison just so you could lay down the stories of your homicidal fantasies the way you wanted them told and make sure you never faced justice.”

  “This is all nonsense and hearsay and you know it,” Tull snarled. “Show me one concrete thing that ties me to the Family Man murders that isn’t linked to Lisa Moore. Just one thing.”

  Sampson smiled. So did Mahoney. And so did I.

  Ned held up his cell phone. “We have agents out in Gaithersburg inside Haps Premium Meats and Cold Cold Storage. They’ve opened the meat locker you rent there, the one Lisa Moore figured out you had.”

  The writer blinked, frowned, and stared into the distance as if trying to revise a sentence or a plot point in his mind.

  Before he could spin the story another way, I said, “But there wasn’t meat inside your locker, Thomas, was there?”

  Mahoney turned his cell phone to show Tull a picture of two anodized black boxes, each about the size of a small microwave oven. “These were in your locker, Thomas.”

  Sampson said, “State-of-the-art jamming equipment stolen from the U.S. military and repackaged like this.”

  “Funny thing about these jammers,” I said. “They eat a lot of power and they like to be kept cold. The colder the better, especially if you’re trying to jam the entire area around one of your kill sites. Or keep your home in a total blackout.”

  Tull said nothing although his lips were moving, as if he were mouthing words, trying to put them in the correct order.

  “Why did you have to kill whole families?” I said.

  The writer did not reply.

  “I know why. It’s because no one cares about yet another series of people dying in some gruesome manner anymore. Every book has to be bigger, more lurid, more sensational or it won’t make the bestseller list. Isn’t that true, Thomas?”

  Tull finally focused on me. He snorted. “Of course it’s true, Dr. Cross. That’s the way publishing works these days.”

  Chapter

  106

  On the Amtrak train bound for Washington, DC, Bree drifted in and out of sleep. In that buzzy state between consciousness and dreaming, she relived Volkov’s destruction of Tull’s alibi and his earlier insistence that M and Maestro were behind the assassinations of Frances Duchaine and the others involved in the sex-trafficking ring.

  In the odd way of dreams, those memories were soon replaced by others. She relived two evenings before when she and Phillip Henry Luster had been in his kitchen, hovering over his phone, listening to Nellie Ray, Duchaine’s former marketing director:

  “Ryan Malcomb’s supposed to be the big genius, spotter of trends, right?”

  “You’ve met him?” Bree heard herself say.

  “Five or six times. He, uh, em, uh…well, I think he uses the whole muscular dystrophy thing to his advantage.”

  Bree woke up then, her conscious mind straining to know why that was interesting enough to bubble up from her subconscious. Then, as the train approached Baltimore, she understood. She grabbed her phone and listened once again to the recording she’d made of Theresa May Alcott in the library when the billionaire got the call from Paladin.

  “This is Terri…Give me a minute, will you, Emma, dear? I’m with someone and I’ll need to pick up in another room…I am sorry, Chief Stone. This won’t take long, but it can’t wait.”

  Bree began to breathe faster. She rewound it and listened again, and this time she heard it slightly differently.

  Was that right?

  She played it a third time and heard it the same way. Then she searched her phone for Nellie Ray’s number and called it.

  She got the woman’s voice mail and was starting to leave a message when her phone buzzed. Ray was calling her back. “Hi, this is Bree Stone.”

  “I saw you called. How are you?”

  “Good, Nellie. Listen, when we were on the phone the other night, you were saying that you thought Ryan Malcomb played up his muscular dystrophy.”

  “Well, I’d be canceled if I said that on social media,” Ray said. “But yes, I think he takes advantage of it.”

  “Okay. On another note, does he have a nickname, by any chance?”

  “A nickname? Uh, yeah, I guess. Why?”

  Chapter

  107

  At seven thirty that evening I stood in the grand hall of Union Station watching travelers exit the tunnel from the Acela tracks. I spotted Bree, her arm in a sling.

  We hadn’t seen each other in four days, and I grinned until I realized she wasn’t smiling back at me. My poor wife looked dazed and confused.

  “Are you all right?” I said, giving her a hug. I took her bag.

  “I don’t know, Alex,” she said in a quiet voice. “I just…”

  “Just what?” I said, growing concerned. This was not like Bree at all.

  “Nothing physical. It’s complicated. Hard to explain. And I don’t know if I’m right.”

  “Give it a try.”

  We started walking to the Massachusetts Avenue exit. When we got outside, dusk was falling and the air was thicker, the first hint of the summer heat and humidity to come.

  “Get an Uber?”

  “Let’s walk,” Bree said, still pensive. “Remember Volkov said M hired him to kill Frances Duchaine?”

  “How could I forget?” I said as we crossed Massachusetts and began to climb toward the Senate side of Capitol Hill.

  “Stop a sec. I want you to listen to something I recorded at Theresa May Alcott’s the other day.”

  Bree played the section of the recording she’d made in the billionaire’s library: “This is Terri…Give me a minute, will you, Emma, dear?”

  “Who’s Emma?”

  “She’s not saying ‘Emma,’” Bree said. “Listen again. She’s saying ‘em, uh.’”

  She played it once more.

  “I hear it now,” I said. “But I don’t get the significance.”

  “She’s on the phone with Paladin,” Bree said. “She’s talking to Ryan Malcomb.”

  “Malcomb? Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” Bree said. “Theresa May Alcott’s his aunt, and she was guardian to him and his twin brother after their parents’ death.”

  “Still,” I said. “I’m not getting where this is—”

  My wife cut me off, insistent. “Malcomb has a nickname, Alex. People close to him call him M.”

  I stared at her in the gloaming. “Is that true?”

  “A woman who used to work for Frances Duchaine and has been to Paladin’s headquarters many times says it’s absolutely true. Think about it, Alex. You always said M had to be incredibly wealthy. Malcomb is rich in his own right and might have his aunt’s billions at his disposal. And think about this: Sampson has always said that M had to be someone affiliated with the NSA, someone who could listen in on devices.”

  I said, “But Malcomb can’t. Paladin only has authorization to mine the data it is given by law enforcement or intelligence groups.”

  Bree raised an eyebrow. “Who told you that?”

  I thought about it. “Ryan Malcomb.”

  “And M was sure as hell listening in on you and John last year before you went to Montana. He was anticipating your moves. Remember?”

  I nodded and looked at our phones, which we changed constantly because of our concern about being hacked. Now, once again, I felt weirdly violated.

  “You don’t think Malcomb’s listening to us right now, do you?”

  Chapter

  108

  Haverhill, Massachusetts

  In the secret deep operations center below Paladin’s headquarters, Ryan Malcomb stared at the huge screen in the front of the amphitheater where a fuzzy feed from a Washington, DC, CCTV camera showed Alex Cross and Bree Stone standing on a sidewalk in Lower Senate Park at the base of Capitol Hill.

  Malcomb and everyone else in the room heard Cross say, “You don’t think Malcomb’s listening to us right now, do you?”

  Stone said, “He sure could be, Alex.”

  Cross tapped his phone and said, “Well, if he is…if you are M, Mr. Malcomb, and you are listening, here’s a heads-up: We are going to come for you and everyone else in Maestro. You will face justice for what you’ve done.”

  Malcomb’s features hardened. He felt the attention of everyone in the room on him and knew he was now facing the biggest threat of his life and theirs.

  He smiled at his comrades and said, “No worries, Maestro. We’ve prepared for this moment, haven’t we?”

  Edith Walton, Malcomb’s longtime deep ops director, nodded. “We have, M,” she said. “In fine detail.”

  Malcomb looked over at his partner, Steve Vance, who’d gone ashen and grim.

  “Your call,” Vance said.

  The founder of Paladin took a long, deep breath, let it out, and said, “Initiate bugout procedures, Maestro. Erase everything. Take this op to the ground where no one can find it.”

  Without hesitation, Vance, Walton, and the other people in the deep ops center turned to their consoles and keyboards and began typing.

  Malcomb waited until the feed on the big screen died and turned his wheelchair toward the door. “I have things to attend to in my office, Edith.”

  “Go to it, M,” Walton said.

  Malcomb wheeled himself through the door and let it shut behind him before stopping to lock the chair in place. Then he pushed himself to his feet and strode confidently toward the elevator and a new and more dangerous life.

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  About the Author

  James Patterson is the world’s bestselling author. His enduring fictional characters and series include Alex Cross, the Women’s Murder Club, Michael Bennett, Maximum Ride, Middle School, and Ali Cross, along with such acclaimed works of narrative nonfiction as Walk in My Combat Boots, E.R. Nurses, and his autobiography, James Patterson by James Patterson. Bill Clinton (The President Is Missing) and Dolly Parton (Run, Rose, Run) are among his notable literary collaborators. For his prodigious imagination and championship of literacy in America, Patterson was awarded the 2019 National Humanities Medal. The National Book Foundation presented him with the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, and he is also the recipient of an Edgar Award and nine Emmy Awards. He lives in Florida with his family.

 

 

  James Patterson, Triple Cross

 

 

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