By the time I’d spoken with Porter, who was caught in traffic on the Eisenhower Freeway, John was waving me back over to see something.
“I don’t know, Alex. This is pretty random.” He turned the screen around to show me the map he’d pulled up.
“It’s an address in Overland Park, Kansas. This thing’s just getting weirder and weirder. Maybe it’s some kind of math formula after all.”
“What about a reverse search on the address?” I asked.
“Working on it.” It was slow going, though, with his man paws and that tiny keyboard. This is why Sampson almost never texts anyone.
“Here we go, I got it. It’s a restaurant,” he said. “KC Masterpiece Barbecue and Grill?”
Sampson was shaking his head as if it couldn’t be right, but the name hit me like cold water. It must have shown on my face, too, because Sampson waved his hand in front of my eyes.
“Alex? Where’d you go?”
My own hands had tightened into fists. I wanted to hit something. Bad. “Of course,” I said. “This is exactly how the son of a bitch works.”
“How who works?” John said. “What are you —?”
But then he got it.
“Oh Jesus.”
It all made sense now, in the worst possible way. There was the Alex Rifle reference from the night before, and now this — KC Masterpiece.
Kyle Craig’s masterpiece.
He’d done this before, leaving tokens behind at crime scenes, always aimed at getting him credit where credit was due. Both of these murders were references to my own open cases — the sniper-style hit on Tambour, and the numbers so brutally etched into Anjali Patel’s skin.
Obviously Kyle had killed them both. Or had someone do it for him.
Then, with a horrible kind of aftershock, I remembered something else: Bronson “Pop-Pop” James, my young client. He’d been shot trying to rob a store — a place called Cross Country Liquors. Of course. Why hadn’t I come back to that fact until now?
It all added up — another ton of bricks dropped onto my shoulders. Kyle was circling me and closing in as he did it, wreaking as much havoc as possible in the process. This wasn’t just blind savagery either. It was much more specific than that and, unless I was mistaken, much more personal.
It was all part of my punishment for catching him the first time.
Chapter 70
IN ONE PHONE CALL, I re-upped with Rakeem Powell for additional twenty-four-hour security coverage at the house. I’d take out a loan if I had to; cost was not my concern right now. I couldn’t be sure what Kyle’s endgame was, but I wasn’t going to wait for him to come at me again.
I spent most of the day at the Hoover Building. With Anjali’s sudden death, it was like a wake over there, except in the SIOC, which was buzzing like an air traffic control tower.
The Bureau director himself, Ron Burns, made his designated operations room available to us, and the manhunt for Kyle Craig was back on full steam. This wasn’t personal for just me. Craig was already the biggest inside scandal in the Bureau’s hundred-year history. And now he’d killed another agent, maybe to get back at the FBI, too.
Every seat in the operation center’s double horseshoe of desks was filled. The five main screens at the head of the room showed alternating pictures and old video of Kyle, plus national and world maps with electronic markers for his known victims and associations, and past movements.
We were on the line all day with Denver, New York, Chicago, Paris — everywhere Kyle had been known to live since his escape from ADX Florence. And every field office in the country was put on high alert.
Even so, with all this flurry of activity, we had to accept the fact that nobody had any idea where Kyle was.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Alex,” Burns said, pacing. We’d just hung up after a marathon conference call. “We’ve got nothing useful here, no physical proof that Kyle killed Tambour or Patel, or even that he’s been in Washington. And nothing on that Beretta you pulled out of evidence either, by the way.”
The Beretta he was referring to was the one Bronson James had used in the armed-robbery attempt. My original idea had been that Pop-Pop had gotten it from a gang member off the street, but Kyle Craig could have just as easily put that gun in his hand. I knew that Kyle favored Berettas, and he knew that I knew.
“I’m the proof,” I said. “He’s called me on the phone. He’s made threats. The man is obsessed with me, Ron. In his mind, I’m the only one who’s ever beaten him, and Kyle Craig is nothing if not highly competitive.”
“What about these disciples of his? Just for the sake of argument.” Burns was talking to me but also to a dozen other agents who took notes and banged away on laptops as he spoke. “The man’s got followers, some of them apparently ready to die on his command. It’s happened before. How do we know he didn’t commission one of them for these hits?”