Triple Cross

SAMPSON FOUND LISA MOORE right where Thomas Tull said he’d find her—in an Airbnb she’d rented in the Kalorama neighborhood. When John brought in the writer’s assistant later that afternoon, I recognized Moore as the woman we’d seen putting an envelope in Tull’s mail slot the same night he’d raced the Porsche up Rock Creek Parkway and the Kane family had been killed.

She almost smiled when she saw me. “Alex Cross. I know a lot about you.”

“Probably more than I know about you,” I said.

She smiled. “There’s not a lot to know, honestly.”

“That’s not how Thomas Tull tells it,” Mahoney said. He looked at Sampson. “Has she been read her Miranda rights?”

“At her front door,” Sampson said.

The smile on Moore’s face vanished. “I don’t know what Thomas has been saying about me, but—”

I cut her off. “What were you before you worked for Tull? CIA? DIA?”

Moore raised her eyebrows and canted her head to the right. “I cannot answer those questions for too many reasons to count.”

“You just did. Where did you go after you left Tull’s house the night of April twenty-second?”

“The twenty-second?” she said and thought for a few moments. “Home. To my Airbnb.”

“You were there all night?” Mahoney asked.

“All night.”

“Can anyone corroborate that?”

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “my lover was with me from around nine p.m. until ten the next morning. What’s this about?”

Sampson said, “Who’s your lover? Name, address, telephone number.”

Moore took a deep breath. “I don’t think she’s ready to be out of the closet.”

Mahoney said, “But you think you’re ready for an eight-byten cell?”

Her eyes widened. “A cell? No.”

I said, “Then give us her name.”

“Keep her out of this, okay?” she said. “She’s a good person and this coming out in the media would be—”

“The name,” Sampson growled.

“Suzanne,” Moore said finally. “Suzanne Liu. She lives in—”

“I know where she lives,” I said, my mind spinning a little. “And I have her phone number. She will say that she was with you that night?”

“She will,” the researcher said without hesitation.

“What about the nights the other families were murdered?” Sampson asked.

“I was in New York all those times,” Moore said. “Also with Suzanne.”

I asked, “How do you know that off the top of your head? The dates, I mean.”

The researcher gave me a look. “Uh, I’m working on a book about the murders? I know all sorts of dates. It’s kind of the job.”

Sampson said, “You have access to the Family Man laptop in Tull’s office?”

“I know the password and I have e-mailed things to Thomas, but I haven’t been on it in at least a week.”

“Convenient,” Mahoney said. “Tull believes you’re trying to frame him.”

“Frame him?” she said. She threw back her head and laughed caustically. “I don’t need to frame him. He can do that himself. Play with the truth. You do know he makes stuff up, right?”

“He admitted that he gins things up in his books,” I said. “Well, he admits that he pays you to gin things up, make them more dramatic than they really are. Is that true?”

“If it is, it’s not a crime.”

Sampson said, “How about taking the lives of an innocent mother and daughter in the Middle East? Was that a crime?”

Moore swallowed hard. “That was investigated. I was totally exonerated.”

“You can prove that?”

“It would be a challenge, given certain national secrecy laws, but yes.”

“You do know Thomas Tull is in custody and has been arraigned,” Sampson said.

“I’d heard that.”

“But you didn’t think to reach out and contact us?”

“No,” she said. “I was in shock. I … I didn’t know what to think or believe at first.”

I said, “So what do you think now? Is Thomas Tull the Family Man killer?”

For a long time, she said nothing, just stared at the table.

“Ms. Moore?” Mahoney said.

“Little things in all the cases we worked together, you know?” she said, lifting her eyes to gaze at each of us in turn. “Little things Thomas would say or do. And the times he’d disappear for days. The facts he’d ignore or gloss over. In my heart I don’t want to believe it, but I guess it’s possible, Dr. Cross. Maybe more than possible.”

CHAPTER 87

AFTER SEVERAL MORE QUESTIONS, Mahoney, Sampson, and I left the interrogation room and walked down the hall.

“You believe her?” Sampson asked.

“I want to,” Mahoney said. “But Tull told us she’s polished, a gifted liar.”

“I think eventually she’ll be an excellent witness for us. Not that we need it, with all the evidence against him.”

I said, “I don’t buy that she hasn’t accessed Tull’s laptop in more than a week.”

“We won’t know if that’s true until Quantico gets a look at his hard drive and tells us what has been accessed on that laptop and when.”

Sampson said, “And what do we do with Moore in the meantime?”

Mahoney said, “Release her for now. We’ll follow up with a request for her cellular data. Just to make sure she was with Liu when she says she was.”