Triple Cross

Huge stainless-steel Coldspot fridge and freezer. Six-burner Aga stove. Double sink on the prep island. Copper pots hanging from the ceiling. Italian espresso machine.

These details counted, didn’t they? Of course they did. They were the essence of it all.

Satisfied that things were going according to plan, Family Man shrugged off a small pack, retrieved a pistol, and began the evening’s real work.

CHAPTER 2

THE PISTOL, A GLOCK, was chambered in .40 caliber and fitted with a sound suppressor. Family Man liked the balance it gave the weapon.

The master suite, which lay beyond the kitchen and the great room, was so neat it looked like a crew of maids had just finished cleaning. The leather furniture was showroom new. The rows of books on the shelves appeared unread.

It could be a stage set, the killer thought, easing open another door to reveal an anteroom and a huge walk-in closet.

To the right of the anteroom lay the bathroom. Beyond a pocket door to the left, Family Man knew, Roger and Sue Carpenter were deep asleep, aided by the hissing of a white-noise app.

The couple didn’t hear the pocket door sliding back or the Family Man slipping across the carpet to the right side of a four-poster bed. Mr. Carpenter, an attorney with boyish good looks, lay on his back with his forearm across his eyes, which made things easier.

Once, long ago, the killer had heard a Navy SEAL commander describe the perfect up-close execution with the word canoe. It meant shooting someone high in the head so that the bullet left the shape of a canoe bottom as it passed through the top of the skull.

Family Man canoed Carpenter through the forehead. His wife stirred at the thud of the silenced shot.

By the time the killer got around the bed to a WASPish-looking blonde in her thirties, she was half awake, her eyes open but puzzled.

“Roger?” she asked sleepily.

“Shhh,” Family Man said and shot her from two feet away.

She died instantly, but blood splashed off the headboard and spattered the upper chest and arms of the killer’s hazmat suit. A few drops hit the night-vision goggles.

Family Man plucked a tissue from the box beside the dead housewife and dabbed at the goggles until the view was clear again. The tissue fell on the bloody pillow next to Mrs. Carpenter.

The killer slid the pocket door back into place, walked through the great room and kitchen, stepped over the snoring Mike, and found the door to the mother-in-law apartment.

Pearl Naylor, Mrs. Carpenter’s mother, was a light sleeper and spry for seventy-eight. She rolled in bed and almost got her bony finger on the light switch, which would have sent blinding light through the goggles and might have changed the course of the night.

But before the old woman could flip the switch, Family Man shot her through the upper left side of her skull. She sagged off the bed, her legs caught in the sheets and blankets.

A few moments later, the killer exited Mrs. Naylor’s apartment and paused a moment before climbing the stairs.

Despite the Family Man’s training and experience, children were always the hardest.

CHAPTER 3

MY NAME IS ALEX CROSS. I am an investigative consultant for the Washington, DC, Metro Police, where I was a homicide detective for many years, and for the FBI, where I was once a member of the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit, the team that hunts serial killers and other bringers of doom and mayhem.

I felt like I was tracking one of those dark beings when I got out of my car in a swank neighborhood in Chevy Chase, Maryland, not far from the nation’s capital. Blue lights flashed on two state police cruisers blocking the road.

John Sampson pulled in behind me in an unmarked squad car. A first-rate detective in Metro PD homicide, Sampson was also my oldest friend.

“I thought this was over,” he said.

“Dreams dashed,” I replied.

An FBI forensics van arrived before we even got to the yellow tape and the cruisers. A hundred yards ahead, two more cruisers were parked, lights flashing, cutting off traffic from that direction. Beyond them, the first satellite-news van was pulling in.

“And the games begin again,” Sampson said.

“This is the sickest game I’ve ever heard of,” I said angrily, showing my identification to the troopers.

Once we were beyond the police barrier, Sampson said, “We know numbers?”

I shook my head. “The maid saw the grandmother and backed out.”

A short man in his mid-forties with sandy hair and wearing a blue FBI windbreaker came down the driveway toward us.

“You been inside?” Sampson asked.

“Waiting for you,” said Ned Mahoney, FBI special agent in charge. “You’re the only ones who’ve been to all the earlier crime scenes, and I wanted your eyes on the place first. See if Family Man has finally made a mistake.”

“Hope springs eternal,” I said. We walked up the driveway and saw a white Porsche Cayenne in one bay of the carriage house and a red Corvette in another.

“Big money?” Sampson said.

“The whole neighborhood is big money,” Mahoney said.

“What’s the maid’s story?” I asked.