Criss Cross

Chapter 12

In our bedroom, after I’d recounted the entire interview, Bree stared at me.

“Craig? That’s impossible. Craig’s been dead for years, Alex. You saw him die.”

I nodded. “I did. Right in front of me. On our honeymoon.”

Kyle Craig was dead. My nastiest opponent was long gone.

I’d wounded him, and rather than go back to prison, Craig had shot an oxygen tank, which blew up and burned him to bone and ash.

Sitting there on our bed, I tried not to see Craig die, but it was almost tattooed on my brain. All I had to do was close my eyes to see it.

“I figure Forbes was hallucinating,” I said. “The effects of the chloroform triggering some deep memory of Craig.”

“Or Dirty Marty made the whole story up,” Bree said. “He somehow got wind of M and is now playing on your obsession with Kyle Craig.”

I thought about that.

Marty Forbes had to have known how fixated I’d been on the FBI agent gone evil. Kyle Craig was a sadistic serial murderer who’d killed Betsey Cavalierre, my girlfriend at the time.

Bree came around and got into bed.

I climbed in beside her. “He could have been playing me. But for what? So I could help him get out of prison by convincing federal prosecutors that the man incinerated in front of me had risen from the dead and was now going around calling himself M?”

“Guilty men have come up with stranger stories,” she said.

I turned off the light, thinking, Then again, Craig used the alias Mastermind for a time, didn’t he? Is he now M? Could he possibly have survived that blast?

My rational mind said, No. Absolutely not.

After a few minutes, Bree was snoring gently. I started to drift off...

That dog began to bark again, and I snapped wide awake. I was about to get dressed and go have it out with the owner at last when I heard tapping against the window and realized it had started to rain. I figured that would end the barking.

I was wrong. Twenty minutes later, I was still awake, and the dog was still barking in that damn repeating pattern.

Finally, I got up and climbed the stairs to my attic office. I closed the window behind my desk, turned on the light, and looked at the boxes stacked waist-high by seven bulging upright filing cabinets. Evidence of old cases, some solved, others not.

Though I did not want to, I knew where I needed to go — back to the beginning, back to the hunt for Mikey Edgerton, long before M had come into the picture.

I found what I was looking for in a box labeled kissy at the bottom of the stack in the right corner of my office, where I thought I’d put it to rest forever. I set the box on the desk but hesitated to open it, wondering if I was wise to dig into this part of my past. A smart part of me said that it was wiser than not digging into it.

I pulled off the box cover, took out the first file, and almost immediately fell back in time.