Criss Cross

Chapter 102

For almost fourteen maddening hours, we could not talk to M, much less ask him where he’d taken my son. He underwent immediate surgery for the chest wound and spent a long time in recovery after having an adverse reaction to the anesthesia.

CT scans of his spine found that the bullet had glanced off the right side of his fourth thoracic vertebra, then passed through three inches of his right lung before exiting the rib cage. The energy of the bullet’s passing had broken ribs, cracked vertebrae, and severely bruised the spinal cord.

“He told me he couldn’t feel a thing,” I told the surgeon.

“With that kind of swelling, he probably won’t feel from mid-sternum down for a long time, if ever,” the doctor said.

“When can I see him?”

We got the go-ahead to interview him around ten that night, shortly after M was brought into the ICU and shortly after an evidence tech reported that the suspect had no fingerprints. It looked like they’d been burned off with chemicals decades ago.

“I want to go in alone,” I told Bree, Mahoney, and Sampson in the hallway outside his guarded room. “I think he’ll try to play us if there’s more than one of us there.”

“I had a camera put in before he was transferred,” Mahoney said. “We’ll watch from down the hall.”

Sampson said, “Good luck.”

“Thanks, brother.”

The two of them walked away.

I took a deep breath and gazed at Bree. “This feels daunting.”

Her eyes were glassy as she squeezed my hand and smiled. “You were born for this, Alex Cross. Go get your boy.”

She kissed me and then followed Ned and John. Nodding at the officer standing guard, I prayed for the right words to come and then went through the door.

M, or whatever his real name was, lay semi-upright in his hospital bed, a bank of monitors and medical devices cheeping and whirring around him.

He opened red, watery eyes. He tracked me as I came to the foot of his bed.

“Can you tell me where you took my son now?”

“Told you,” he said, his voice thick and his words slurred due to the pain meds. “I buried him deep underground.”

“Then tell me where I can dig him up and give him a proper burial.”

“You’re bright. You’ll find him eventually.”

“Look — you win. I concede. You outplayed me. You’re still outplaying me.” I said that last with as much sincerity as I could muster.

“And yet I’m the one who might never walk again and will spend my life behind bars.”

Maybe the drugs had loosened his tongue, because that felt like an honest comment, and an open one, and I decided to radically change tactics.

“So when did you stop listening to your heart?” I asked.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. There had to be a time in your long-ago past when you knew right from wrong instinctively. Do you remember that time?”

He swallowed, shrugged. “One set of foster parents brought me to church when I was a kid. Read scripture and other such nonsense.”

“But apart from that, there was a time when you felt in your heart what was right and wrong. Do you remember that time?”

M’s eyes narrowed. “What does this have to do with your son?”

“Do you remember?”

He closed his eyes. “Yeah, sure, I guess.”

“Of course you remember. Of course you do. It was there when you were born. It was there before you were born. Did you know that the heart has its own nervous system? It’s true. The heart is alive and alert long before the brain develops. It’s a deeper organ of thinking, another way of knowing.”

M’s eyes opened. “So?”

“When did you stop listening to your heart?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re—”

“Yes, you do,” I said. “You stopped listening to your heart because you thought it was broken. And that’s when you started listening to the angry voices in your head. Were you thirteen? Fourteen?”