Criss Cross

Chapter 50

If I’d learned anything from Nana Mama, it was this: If you’ve screwed up, admit it and face the consequences. If you’ve crossed the line, admit it and face the consequences. If you’ve had lapses in judgment or viewed something with eyes full of prejudice, admit it and face the consequences.

“Any other course of action is deception and cover-up, which only makes the consequences worse for you in the long run,” my grandmother told me when I was a boy. “Deal with the mess you’ve made, Alex, and move on.”

Nana Mama’s advice had been proven true time and again, so I followed it once more in Rivers’s hospital room. Over the next twenty minutes, I laid out the bones of the story, from the earliest contact by M to the Wickr message I’d gotten moments before Rivers discovered the severed head in his subbasement to following him and rescuing him from the wreck of his sports car.

“We still thought you were M. Luckily, we got to you before your car exploded.”

“Lucky?” Rivers’s attorney said. “My client would not have crashed if you hadn’t chased him. He would not have run in the first place if he hadn’t heard you and Detective Sampson coming down the staircase. And my client’s rights would not have been violated if you hadn’t broken into his private bunker — twice — Dr. Cross.”

I held up my hands. “All true. In my defense, I was hoping against hope that I’d find Diane Jenkins or evidence of her in Mr. Rivers’s bunker.”

“No, you were hoping you’d find evidence that my client was M.”

“That too, no doubt about it,” I said, and I looked at Rivers, who was studying me. “I have been chasing M for years, Mr. Rivers. M has taunted me, threatened me, and generally run circles around me, Detective Sampson, and Special Agent Mahoney. Please forgive me for being obsessive, but my heart was in the right place. I did not want anyone to be strangled or decapitated or held against her will by M ever again.”

Cowles made a snort of derision and said, “Nice try. Look what happened to my client after you let your obsessions get the better of you. I’m smelling lawsuit.”

“So much for coming clean,” Mahoney said, looking disgusted. “I guess we’re done here.”

“No,” Rivers said. “And there will be no lawsuit.”

“Dwight—” his attorney began.

“No lawsuit, Sheila,” he insisted. “Even if they hadn’t been behind me, I would have been going way too fast for the road conditions. If they hadn’t been chasing me, I might be dead.”

“Well, that is absolutely not the way I see it.”

Rivers fixed his eyes on me. “He’s your Professor Moriarty, isn’t he, Cross? This M?”

I got the reference to Sherlock Holmes’s ultimate nemesis and shrugged. “You could say that,” I said.

“Holmes became too obsessed with Moriarty. Because of that, he almost died.”

“I remember.”

Rivers watched me closely. “I don’t know whether to be flattered or disgusted by the fact that you thought I could be M — or, rather, your computers did.”

“I apologize for the computers’ and my actions.”

He laughed. “One thing I learned in the tech world is that you never apologize for a computer’s performance. It did what its programmer told it to do. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

“Dwight,” his attorney said. “I think that—”

His eyes brightened. “You’ve got him now, don’t you, Dr. Cross? M? He has to be on the security tapes. You’re close, aren’t you?”

“If M was the deliveryman, we are. I hope so.”

Cowles chewed her lip.

“But how did M know you were watching me? How did he know to put the heads in my workshop and car and then alert you?”

“I don’t know.”

Rivers beckoned to his attorney. He whispered so softly, she had to bend closer as he repeated his words. She listened, then glanced at me and nodded.

Cowles came over to me, whispered, “Take your phone out of the room and shut it off.”