Page 89 of Alex Cross Must Die

As her colleagues filtered in, exchanging mumbled greetings and corny jokes, Grey ruffled through the paperwork that had accumulated on her desk over the last twelve hours. Crime stats. New regulations. Personnel announcements. The usual crap. She glanced quickly through the pile and tossed most of it into the wastebasket.

At the bottom of the stack was a white envelope, crisp and elegant. No markings. No address. Just her name and title, handwritten. Grey shook the envelope and held it up to her desk lamp to make sure it wasn’t stuffed with some kind of suspicious powder. But all she could see and feel inside was paper. She sliced the end of the envelope with her penknife and pulled out a neat packet. It was a stack of financial spreadsheets, dense with account numbers,dates, and transfers. But it was the name at the top of the forms that caught her attention.

Bain Enterprises.

Grey sat up straight in her chair, now fully awake. She flipped slowly through the documents, page by page. She’d taken only one forensic accounting seminar at Quantico, but she knew enough to understand that what she was looking at was pure dynamite. Evidence of extensive corruption, tax evasion, and illegal campaign contributions. She wondered how it had landed on her desk instead of in the Financial Crimes unit. Routing mistake? Wherever it came from, she knew it was enough evidence for a spectacular, career-boosting takedown.

A gift from the gods.

CHAPTER 101

AFTER THE LONGprevious evening of celebration and chat at the restaurant, Marple was taking some recovery time in the second-floor library, searching the shelves for something soothing. As usual, she found herself in the mystery section and, in particular, in the world of English villages and country gardens.

When it came to Agatha Christie, it was hard for Marple to find a work she didn’t already know by heart. That morning, something pulled her to a volume titledMiss Marple’s Final Cases.She thumbed through the contents to a story called “The Case of the Perfect Maid.” She recalled starting it years earlier, but she’d never actually finished it.

Book in hand, Marple walked out of the library and closed the door. As she walked back down the hall toward her apartment, she looked over the balcony and sensed a commotion below. She placed the book on a hall table and walked downstairs to investigate.

As she reached the first floor, Marple saw Holmes on his knees in a corner, with the top half of his body stretched behind theshredding machine. Poe and Virginia were crouched behind him. Virginia’s new dog, Baskerville, hung close to her side. The two were now inseparable.

“Did somebody lose a contact lens?” asked Marple.

No response from Holmes or Poe. They were both too focused on the task at hand. Virginia stood up and gently pulled Marple aside. She spoke in a whisper. “Remember how I told you about the night when I …?” She pointed toward the back of the room. “When I felt the …”

Marple nodded. “The night you smelled the bread.” The two women exchanged a meaningful look. Marple had told Virginia about the building’s history as a bakery and the fate of young Mary McShane. Only later did Marple realize that Virginia’s experience had occurred on the anniversary of Mary’s murder.

“This morning,” said Virginia now, “I dropped a page behind the shredder. When I reached underneath to get it, I cut myself.” She held up her right index finger, tightly wrapped in gauze. “I feel like this building is trying to tell me something.”

“Can you see anything?” asked Poe, crouched on the floor beside Holmes.

“Something’s stuck between the bricks,” Holmes called out from behind the shredder. Marple heard a sharp grunt, then, “Got it!”

She watched as Holmes slid back and stood up, a small headlamp strapped around his forehead. He held a sturdy set of pliers in his hand. Gripped tightly in the jaws was a serrated eight-inch blade, oxidized along its entire length.

Poe leaned in close. “Bread knife,” he said.

“Well preserved,” said Holmes, turning the blade from side to side. “Hidden from light for decades.” He pulled out his magnifying glass and held it a few inches from the relic. “Edge blackened and pitted,” he mumbled.

Marple grabbed Virginia by the arm as Holmes walked over and waved the blade slowly in front of them.

“This is not just oxidation,” he pronounced. “It’s blood rust.”

Marple felt her heart pounding. She realized exactly what she was looking at.

“Put that in a bag,” she said softly. “It’s the murder weapon.”

CHAPTER 102

“SNOOOOOOZE-VILLE!YOU’RE BORINGthe livingshitout of me.”

Huntley Bain leaned back in his chair at the head of his teak conference table and mimed an elaborate yawn. Naomi Gild, his director of overseas operations, stood frozen at the other end of the table, her finger hovering over the space bar of her laptop. The slide on the screen showed a chart of quarterly returns from one of Bain’s Turkish cable services. Slide two of a ninety-slide deck.

“Speed it up,” barked Bain. “I’ve got a flight to Saint Lucia.”

The other twelve executives around the table squirmed and coughed awkwardly into clenched fists. Naomi felt the sweat seeping through her blouse. Suddenly, the heavy doors burst open. It sounded like a gunshot.

“FBI! Hands on the table! Nobody move!”

Two men in boxy suits took positions in front of the screen. Naomi closed her laptop lid and stood with her hands folded in front of her skirt.

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