Criss Cross

Chapter 90

Three hours after receiving that text, Bree and I were back at home with Sampson, Mahoney, and Rawlins. Though a team of FBI agents was already working on Ali’s kidnapping from the Bureau’s headquarters downtown, we’d decided to contain knowledge of his abduction, fearing what M might do to Ali if the media’s spotlight swung his way.

Jannie’s eyes were puffy from crying. Nana Mama was shaken but trying to stay busy; she was brewing coffee for the agents. Outwardly, I was doing my best to remain stoic, professional, detached, and focused on the safe recovery of a kidnap victim.

But inside, as a father, I was deathly afraid for my little boy, afraid because, as a detective, I knew what killers like M could do. They were divorced from their souls.

In my experience, there was no other explanation for truly depraved acts. It took someone divorced from his soul, someone turned absolutely amoral, to kill with no conscience, to hack the heads off people, guilty of crimes or not. Or to kidnap an innocent mother and threaten to cut off her finger. Or to frame an FBI agent in order to toy with me in a depraved, ruthless game played out over a dozen years.

And now Ali, my baby boy, was a pawn.

As Mahoney, Bree, and Sampson attempted to put together a timeline of Ali’s day, I tried to put myself in M’s shoes, tried to anticipate what he might be thinking, how he could use my son against me.

M could torture Ali to torture me.

M could kill Ali to torture me.

M could kill Ali to destroy my family.

M could—

“Dad?” Jannie said, startling me.

“Yes?”

“They’ve got a rough timeline,” she said. “You should take a look.”

I went into the dining room and saw that a whiteboard had been set up on Nana Mama’s china hutch. Sampson, Bree, and Mahoney were studying it.

John said, “Ali is at school until three twenty p.m., when classes let out.”

Bree said, “His friends the Kent twins said the last time they saw him, he was on foot, heading for Fort Totten Metro station to go home to work on Nana Mama’s Twitter account. They said it was all he talked about all day.”

“Cell phone?” I said.

Rawlins turned from his computer and said, “His cell phone was on after school. We picked up his location a block from Fort Totten Metro at three thirty-seven p.m. and then nothing until it surfaced again briefly south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at seven twenty p.m.”

“Which is about the time M texted me,” I said.

“Correct,” Sampson said. “Signal dies completely after that.”

“And nothing since,” Bree said. “Just over three hours since last contact.”

Mahoney said, “I think he’s going to let you hang on the hook a bit, Alex.”

I nodded. I’d anticipated that at a bare minimum.

“How are you holding up?” Bree said.

“You’re all here,” I said. “This isn’t all riding on my shoulders. Have we gotten access to his texts?”

Rawlins said, “Working on it. And that hat.”

“What hat?”

“The one the cowboy was wearing at Union Station.”

“Dad!” Jannie screamed in the kitchen.

I spun and bolted around the table, past the two agents setting up computer equipment, and into the kitchen. Jannie was on the floor, cradling Nana Mama’s head in her lap and crying.

“She had trouble breathing, Dad,” she said, sobbing. “And then she just kind of sagged into me!”