The People vs. Alex Cross Read Online Free PDF

her door. “We’ve got something.”
    Before Bree could reply, Detective Fox barged in front of Sampson and said, “I think we should be reporting this to the FBI. They’re the higher authority now.”
    Bree’s expression hardened. Ainsley Fox had never met a regulation or rule she didn’t worship as gospel.
    “Detective Fox,” Bree said. “Last time I looked, your badge said DCMP, and you report to me. Anything you have, I want to hear.”
    “For Christ’s sake, Fox,” Sampson said when the detective hesitated. “I’ll tell her if you won’t.”
    Sampson took a seat, opened a file, and began by noting that all DC Metro patrol cars carried GPS trackers that transmitted their locations to databanks. A check of those banks showed no Metro cruisers in the vicinity of Washington Latin at the time of the kidnapping and murder.
    “But Ali Cross’s video clearly shows a patrol car with all the right markings and decals of a Metro rig,” Sampson said. “Someone detailed that car to perfection, even configured the sirens and blues exactly the way we do.”
    “Where does that take us?” Bree asked. “To body shops? Places that rent stunt vehicles to the movies?”
    Sampson glanced at his new partner and said in a grudging tone, “At some point, maybe, but Detective Fox
has
turned up a more promising lead.”
    Fox almost smiled. She pushed back her lank hair, got out her laptop, typed something, then spun the screen around.Bree saw a picture of a blond woman, late twenties or early thirties, earth-mama sort, no makeup but very attractive in a wholesome way. She was vaguely familiar.
    “Cathy Dupris,” Fox said. “She disappeared from her home in small-town southern Pennsylvania ten weeks ago.”
    Bree remembered, then said, “The neighbors claimed an ambulance came, and men dressed in EMT uniforms rushed into her house and took her out on a stretcher. But there was no record of a 911 call or a private ambulance request.”
    “And no ransom note,” Fox said, nodding.
    “What’s the connection?” Bree asked.
    Fox called up another photograph of another pretty blonde, Delilah Franks, a bank teller in Richmond, Virginia, who’d vanished six months before.
    Bree said, “Don’t they think the boyfriend’s responsible?”
    “She was having an affair behind his back,” Fox said. “But maybe that’s just a coincidence. Maybe Delilah was taken for some other reason.”
    “You think you know that reason?” Bree said.
    “Show her the pair first,” Sampson said.
    Fox typed a third time and showed Bree a split screen featuring school portraits of two teenage girls, both blond, both very cute.
    “That’s seventeen-year-old Ginny Krauss on the left,” Fox said. “Alison Dane, sixteen, is on the right. Both girls disappeared nearly seven months ago from rural Hillsgrove, Pennsylvania.”
    Bree frowned. “I haven’t heard anything about this.”
    “Because the families and police up there have kept it mostly quiet,” Fox said. “The parents of both girls are devout Christians. They and the sheriff’s investigators believe the girlsran away because of their parents’ extreme views about the evils of lesbianism.”
    “The girls are gay?” Bree said.
    “And in love, evidently,” Fox said, and she typed again.
    She pulled up a photograph of a blue Toyota Camry in a muddy clearing in the woods. The rear and front windows were blown out, and the driver’s door was ajar, revealing shattered glass on the seats.
    “The day after the girls failed to come home, sheriff’s investigators found Alison’s car at a popular party and make-out spot in a clearing way out in the state forest,” Fox said, typing some more. “Now here’s the change in pattern.”
    Bree sat forward when she saw a handsome little boy.
    “Timmy ‘Deuce’ Walker,” Fox said. “Twelve years old. The same day the girls go missing, Deuce vanishes from his neighborhood, which is less than a mile from where the car was found. A