Criss Cross

Chapter 72

When Bree and I got home that evening, we tried to put the brutal parts of the day behind us. But as much as I wanted to engage with my family at the dinner table, my mind kept drifting to what Detective Conrad had said.

Ron Dallas was a stand-up cop. No cut corners. No planted evidence. One hundred percent blue.

Was I a stand-up guy? I’d cut corners. I’d planted evidence. Was I one hundred percent blue? And what would it do to me if M somehow revealed my darkest secret?

It would end me, I decided. It would destroy my reputation, certainly. My life as a consulting investigator as well. And as a psychologist?

I could not help feeling as if M had me trapped no matter what he’d meant by You understand that, don’t you? He’d gotten into my head, put me in a state of confusion and growing anxiety.

“Dad?” Ali asked, shaking me from my thoughts. “Is someone killing police officers here in DC?”

“Two were killed.”

“Why?”

“We don’t know,” Bree said. “But we won’t stop until we do.”

“And that will be enough crime talk for tonight,” Nana Mama said firmly. My grandmother asked Jannie about the book she was reading for her English class.

My daughter was not ordinarily an avid reader, but she sat up, looking awed.

“Man’s Search for Meaning,” she said. “It’s about this guy in a concentration camp and how he manages to somehow see life as, I don’t know, a miracle. It’s hard to explain, but it’s really good.”

Bree’s phone buzzed. She looked and it, said, “I have to take this.”

She got up and left the room. I watched her go, barely hearing Ali ask Jannie about the book, thinking that M might have found the chink in my armor.

“Alex!” Nana Mama said.

I started. “What?”

She said she’d like a word with me, which was never a good sign, but I nodded and followed her into the front room after she’d told Jannie and Ali to begin cleaning up.

My grandmother waited until she heard pots banging before crossing her arms, also never a good sign. “I won’t always be here.”

“Really? Folks on the street say you’re immortal.”

That only seemed to annoy her.

“I’m serious. I need you to remember what I told you when your children were young. Meals are no time to talk about work.”

I held up my hands. “Ali asked.”

“And I’m asking you to shut that talk down at my dinner table and at your dinner table when I’m gone.”

Rather than argue, I went and hugged her and promised to do just that to the best of my ability. For the rest of the evening I was successful at keeping my children’s chatter away from the two dead police officers and my mental chatter away from M.

But after Nana Mama and the kids had gone to their rooms and after I found Bree in bed, snoring, with a book on her chest, I realized I was still too wound up to sleep. I slipped the book from her hands, turned off the light, and went to my attic office.

The air was stale. I opened the window behind my chair, thinking about Ron Dallas. How did M get into his house? How did he manage to kill a cop as formidable as Dallas? And why? He used a remote-control bomb to take out Petit.

My thoughts drifted to Pseudo-Craig.

I got out the file I’d started on him and opened it, seeing the stills of him from the jail security feed and remembering how strikingly he’d looked like Kyle Craig when he’d driven past me and thrown the blood balloon.

For the first time since Martin Forbes raised the idea that Kyle Craig was alive, I felt a shadow of doubt about my convictions. I tried to shake it off, tried to remember Max Siegel, the FBI agent Craig had impersonated after having his face surgically transformed in Tampa.

The face I saw on the man who died wasn’t Craig’s face. But it was Craig.

It was... wasn’t it?

I forced myself to confront a possibility I’d been denying. What if there wasn’t any facial reconstruction? What if Max Siegel, or whoever that was who blew up and burned, was just another fiction crafted by Craig? Was Kyle Craig still alive? Was he M?

I stayed up long past midnight, my brain flashing back and forth between Pseudo-Craig and my memories of the real Kyle Craig, wondering if it could be true.

Ned Mahoney had said we were at least two, maybe three, days away from being able to exhume the body that had blown up and burned on my honeymoon.

I decided I couldn’t wait, closed the file with the video stills of Pseudo-Craig, and started up my laptop.

Two minutes later, I was on the web, searching for cheap flights south.