Triple Cross

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.”