Criss Cross

Chapter 59

Eight distinct blood sources. All human.

Those facts gnawed at me on the way home. I put them aside when I found Jannie up and about and in better spirits.

“I’m feeling so good,” she said, looking brighter than she had in weeks. “I could probably go for a jog.”

“Not a chance,” I said. “I read the instructions the doctor gave us. Part of what got you in this state was burning the candle at both ends. That has to stop.”

“Dad—”

“I’m not kidding. Something’s got to give so you can get the rest you need to compete.”

To my surprise, Jannie didn’t argue. “I definitely need to sleep more and eat better if I’m going to do everything I can to get Coach Wilson to offer me a scholarship.”

I smiled. “I thought you might rise to her challenge.”

“I’m going to at least try two field events at those meets this summer. I’ll work at it, give it my best, and if it turns out I’m not a multi-discipline athlete, I’m okay with that. I’ll just run at Oregon or wherever. Either way, I’ll be fine.”

I gave her a hug. “I think that’s a good way to think about it.”

“Nana says I can go to school Monday.”

“No fever?”

“Not in five days.”

“Let’s see how you feel Sunday.”

My grandmother came into the room.

“You don’t look a day over eighty, Nana,” Jannie said.

Nana Mama laughed. “I look every bit of my age, but thank you.”

We left and drove over to her doctor’s office, which was in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of the District of Columbia. We spent an hour with Dr. Patricia Long, a gerontologist who’d been treating my grandmother for more than ten years.

“Mrs. Hope, you continue to be a wonder,” Dr. Long said, reviewing the lab work done the week before. “Your bad cholesterol is very low. Your good cholesterol is sky-high. You look like a healthy seventy-year-old!”

“So you’re saying I’ll be around for a while?”

“Barring some kind of accident, I’d put money on it.”

That was comforting to know, and as I drove my grandmother home, I thanked God once again for putting her in my life and keeping her there for so long. She was both my anchor and my wind.

We had a nice, low-key evening. Bree called to say she’d be late. Ali had a good training ride with the Wild Wheels crew.

“There’s a race in Pennsylvania in three weeks,” Ali said. “Ten kilometers through the woods, like a time trial. Can I go?”

“How would you be getting there?”

“They have a van and chaperones. The coach said they’ll have a handout about it on Thursday.”

“Let’s take a look at it Thursday.”

“Captain Abrahamsen thinks it’s a good idea,” Ali said. “You know, for a first race.”

Jannie shook her head. “What happened to your books?”

Ali frowned. “Nothing. Why?”

“You were supposed to be the family nerd.”

“You’re saying you can’t be both smart and physical?” Ali said, annoyed.

“No, I... forget I even brought it up. Go mountain bike. Make the X Games.”

Her brother grinned. “That would be awesome!”

After dinner, with Ali and Jannie studying and my grandmother watching a recording of Antiques Roadshow, I went up to my attic office, closed the door, locked it, and looked at the boxes containing the Kyle Craig files.

Part of me wanted to keep clear of the Craig files because they invariably made me upset. Craig had operated as an active serial killer right under my nose and under the noses of some of the best agents in the FBI. How many people might we have saved if we’d seen or understood evidence that could have identified him earlier?

It was those kinds of questions that usually kept me from opening his files.

And I had to go through two more boxes from the Edgerton investigation, which began in earnest a few months after Craig shot the tie-shop owner.

Just looking at the Edgerton boxes made me agitated. There might be something in those boxes that could lead me to M, but there were definitely things in them that would drag me down a mental black hole.

I chose what felt like the lesser of two evils and went to the boxes dedicated to Craig’s crimes. I chose one at random and opened it to find a picture of Craig on the day he graduated from the FBI Academy.

Craig was twenty-six, already killing by then, but in that photograph, he had the face of an avenging angel. Or at least that’s how it struck me. Even though he was young in the picture, his resemblance to Pseudo-Craig was unmistakable.

I spent the next hour studying files covering Craig’s early life, paying special attention to members of his extended family. I made note of every male cousin who was roughly his age, plus or minus three years.

There were four who fell in that category. Two were the sons of Craig’s mother’s sister. One was his father’s brother’s son. And the fourth was his father’s sister’s boy.

I found a sheet dating back to when Craig was being considered for admission to the FBI Academy. There was a brief note saying that field agents vetting Craig had talked to his cousin Ted Shaw, the older of his maternal aunt’s sons.

Shaw told the agents Craig had been cruel to animals as a kid. Stuck firecrackers in frogs’ mouths, the note read.

How had that gotten by the screeners? Cruelty to animals is a red-flag warning. Many of history’s most heinous murderers started out being sadistic to defenseless—

A sharp knock came at the door, startling me.

“Alex?” Bree called.

“Hey, babe, I’m in the middle of something. Let me wrap up, and I’ll be down.”

“I’ll be up the street, across from the Caseys’.”

“You mean the house of the people with the barking dog?”

“Double homicide,” she said. “It just got called in.”