Criss Cross

Chapter 110

Eleven weeks later

Jannie looked like her old self when she came bouncing out of the players’ tunnel and onto the track at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

We were all there, even my older son, Damon, who was out on summer break from college. We all jumped to our feet and clapped and whistled for her.

Ali still had a long, livid scar on his scalp, but other than a problem staying asleep and a few harsh mood swings, he seemed back to himself. The stands in the shade were crowded, but we didn’t care. We were all together and giving our girl love on the second day of a USATF invitational meet for high-schoolers.

Ted McDonald, the independent coach who’d first taken an interest in Jannie, described the series of four meets as similar to football combines, where scouts are looking for pros. In this case, the scouts were NCAA Division I coaches, at least fifteen of them, by my count.

Several of the coaches had visited our home already, and we’d heard from most of the rest by telephone or letter sometime in the past year. Though the coaches were there to watch all of the nearly two hundred athletes attending the meet, it was no secret there were lots of eyes on Jannie.

So far, she’d handled the pressure with relative ease. It helped that Coach McDonald had flown out from Texas for the event.

McDonald was there when she qualified for the finals in the four-hundred, her best event, and just missed a slot in the eight-hundred. She’d also competed in javelin for the first time and took eighteenth of twenty-five in the field, which was not bad, considering.

Jannie ignored the college coaches as she jogged past them, then blew kisses at us and grinned like she was having the most fun ever.

“It’s good to see her so relaxed again,” Nana Mama said. “And strong.”

“Thanks to sleep, vitamins, your good food, and the weight training.”

“And Coach McDonald,” I said, seeing him out on the infield, sandy hair, long and lean, talking with one of the officials. “I don’t know how we would have handled all this without him.”

“I like him too,” Bree said, standing. “A lot. He keeps her grounded.”

She went to get us drinks. Damon and Ali walked down by the fence to talk with Jannie before the long jump.

My grandmother started reading her paperback, and I was left with my thoughts.

Despite a massive regional manhunt and a nationwide alert with multiple photographs and video clips of him, the man we knew as M had not surfaced.

But we knew a whole lot more about him now. When we ran his DNA samples through the FBI’s and Europol’s vast databases, we were stunned to get twenty-six different matches to DNA gathered at homicide scenes around the world.

M had definitely been in that broken-down cabin at the fishing camp. His skin cells were on the dead preschool director. They were on Katrina Nixon as well.

His DNA was also found aboard the sex traffickers’ yacht and in the apartment of Detective Ron Dallas.

But with no fingerprints and no other solid information about him, it was as if the man did not exist.

Ali could have easily let the experience traumatize him. But other than enduring confusion as to why M had targeted him, he’d gone right on to new obsessions, the Galápagos Islands and computer coding. And he continued to mountain bike and carry on his friendship with Captain Abrahamsen, who was thrilled Ali was okay.

Another positive was I got to see Martin Forbes walk out of court a free man, determined to spend the rest of his days wisely.

“You saved my life, Cross,” he’d said before hugging me. “I’ll never forget it.”

And Bree and I could not forget that M remained a threat to our family. We installed our own cameras inside and outside the house and insisted that Jannie, Nana Mama, and Ali never travel alone.

Bree and I were constantly swiveling our heads at large public gatherings, like the track meet. So far, we’d seen no one who resembled M anywhere in the stands.

The long-jump event started. Jannie’s early attempts were middle of the pack but enough to qualify for the finals, where she finished seventh of eight and twenty inches off the winner. She came out of her last jump shaking her head, shoulders slumped.

“I can do better,” she said to me afterward.

“I know you can.”

“I just wanted to show Coach Mac something.”

“So show him in the four-hundred.”

That brought back the bounce in her step. It didn’t leave her the rest of the day.

In the four-hundred finals, Jannie broke clean in the fifth lane, ran easy off the outside shoulders of the three leaders through the backstretch and into the final turn.

With a hundred and twenty yards to go, and despite all the injuries and illnesses she’d fought in the past two years, my daughter seemed to find a gear we’d thought she’d lost and began bounding more than running.

We went crazy when she chewed up the gap, caught the leaders with fifty meters to go, and won the race by three-quarters of a second.

“She’s back!” Ali shouted, jumping up and down. “Jannie’s back!”

“Did you see that?” Damon crowed. “It was like those other girls were standing still at the end!”

“We all saw it,” Nana Mama cried. “So did all those coaches.” She was right. Most of the coaches were on their feet and looking at their stopwatches, some grinning, some shaking their heads in wonder. Coach McDonald was looking at us from the infield, smiling and pumping his fists.

Down on the track, Jannie had slowed to a stop, her head thrown back, a delirious smile on her face, and her palms raised to the sky.