Page 1 of The House of Cross

Prologue

Potomac, Maryland

MARGARET BLEVINS LOVED HERmorning runs. They allowed her time alone, which kept her even-keeled in a beyond-hectic life.

That mid-December morning, the fifty-two-year-old mother of three teenagers followed her normal three-and-a-half-mile route as she ran by headlamp light in the predawn, trying to keep her mind free of thoughts, lost in the delicious feeling of her leg and back muscles warming and firing at the fastest pace in weeks.

For a moment, she regretted slipping out to run without informing her security team. But they always slowed her down, were always fussing, and, my God, she’d been running this route for more than fourteen years, a full thirteen and a half years before she became a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

Justice Blevins felt good enough to pick up the pace a little. And for the first time in a long while, she felt loose and good doing it.

Where’s this coming from?Blevins wondered as she approached the entrance to a trail through Watts Branch Park off LloydRoad. She checked her watch and saw she was three minutes ahead of her usual time.

She glanced up at the sky, already lightening, and felt great, at one with the run.

Still, at the trailhead, she slowed and adjusted the beam of her headlamp so she could better see the bridle path that wound off into the trees.

Blevins bounced into the park on the balls of her feet, amazed again at how good she felt, and trotted into the dawn thinking that there was a particular beauty to the woods in winter, especially this piece of woods. It was a mix of pine and oak and birch, her favorite. There was a stand of birch trees down by the creek that ran through the park.

She realized she was a little early and took a loop that added a few minutes to her run. She could see well enough that she shut off the headlamp, casting the woods in grays and shadows at first. But as Blevins’s eyes adjusted, the scene grew lighter, filled with deeper contrasts—the tree trunks against the barest skift of snow on the leaves, the barren crowns against a sky turning rose.

As she’d hoped, the first rays of sunshine were hitting those white birches in the creek bottom when she turned off the loop trail. The air was crisp as she puffed her way toward a tight stand of young hemlock trees growing amid the birches and marking the entrance to a little footbridge that spanned the creek and led to a park bench on the far side. She liked to stretch there before she walked home, part of her cooldown routine.

Blevins could see her breath in the chill air and the sparkle of frost on the birches, and she felt as if all were right in the world as she grabbed the handrails and took two steps up onto the footbridge. She heard an odd noise, a soft thud, coming from that tight group of hemlocks and felt like the side of her head had been slapped.

She felt it most in her ear, hard and painful. She immediately got dizzy and lost her balance.

For a moment, she thought she was going to black out and go down but she held tight to the footbridge railing and did not. After several seconds, the pain in her ear disappeared, the dizziness faded, and her eyes could focus again.

She got her balance back and was able to walk the rest of the way across the little bridge to the bench, although she felt nauseated from the effort. But then the wave of nausea passed too.

Blevins decided not to stretch and, feeling slightly disoriented, started walking home. She knew the trails by heart but got puzzled at two places where side paths met her route.

Once she had them straightened out, however, she found herself thinking more clearly and wondering what had just happened to her.

Was that really a noise back there? Or did I just suffer some kind of attack like Dad? Transient ischemic attacks, that’s what Dad’s doctor called them. Is that what just happened to me? Aren’t I too young?

By the time she left the woods and reached the cul-de-sac where she lived in a large Colonial home set back from the road, she felt absolutely fine and decided not to tell her husband, Phillip. She had a lot on her plate the next few days and could not afford the time to listen to all the mumbo-jumbo from the doctors and undergo all the tests they’d want to do.

I’m fine,she told herself as she went through the door.Margaret Blevins is just fine.

CHAPTER 1

Independence Mountains, Northern Nevada

COMING DOWN THE ALPINEroad in a wheelchair-adapted van with Massachusetts handicap plates, Malcomb felt groggy, still heavy-headed from the drugs, but also anxious and sweaty.

He glanced in his rearview and caught a glimpse of big sections of the dirt road winding along the rim of a canyon that fell away to his left.

Not back there yet,Malcomb thought hazily.But he’s coming for you. Expect nothing less now.

He was afraid then and checked the van’s large operating screen. He saw on the active navigator that he was on a U.S. Forest Service road, heading north and downhill toward a flat ribbon of highway far in the distance. He glanced right at the little metal wallet and the iPhone on the passenger seat and cursed when he saw no bars on the screen.

Then he checked the gas gauge and was shocked to see he hadless than a quarter tank.That son of a bitch! He wants to limit how far I can go. But screw him. I can make that highway wherever I am. I know I can.

The road got very steep and twisty just ahead. Unsure of the controls, Malcomb squeezed the handbrake on the steering wheel, glanced in the rearview again, and headed into the first curve. Still nothing behind him.

He made it down through back-to-back S-curves just as snowflakes began to fall from the leaden sky. He hit a short straight, squeezed the gas control, and didn’t look at the rearview again until he had to use the brakes to enter another corkscrew.

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