Criss Cross

Chapter 5

Instead of focusing on Edgerton’s execution, the strangulation of Mrs. Nixon, or the latest message from M, I savored Nana’s fantastic pesto and chicken on black-bean pasta, a dish that I told her had to be a multiple repeat.

Ali wandered through, his laptop under his arm.

“Bed?” I asked.

He yawned and nodded. “Dad, do you have Wickr?”

“Uhh, I don’t think so.”

“It’s this cool messaging app for, like, spies.”

“Okay?”

“It has military-grade encryption,” he said earnestly. “We could text each other and no one would know because it has this self-destruct feature.”

“The phone self-destructs?”

“No,” he said, his nose wrinkling. “The message. Or telegram, they call it. They vanish after a couple of minutes. Real good for spying, right?”

“If you’re on your phone when you’re spying, I would think so.”

“You want me to put it on your phone? It’s easy, and we could, you know—”

“Talk like spies?”

He grinned and nodded.

“Let me think about it,” I said, and I kissed him good night.

“Dad? If urban-downhill became an Olympic sport, I think I’d be good at it.”

I smiled at the way his mind swung from one obsession to the next. “I think you’ll be good at whatever you love to do.”

After Nana went to bed, I cleaned up and went into the front room. Jannie was long gone. I tried to watch a basketball game. When I went upstairs, it was almost midnight.

Bree was already dead asleep when I slipped between the sheets. Despite everything that had happened that day, sleep came for me.

But just as I was dozing off, I heard a dog barking in an irritating pattern: three deep barks, a pause, and then two or four barks of higher pitch. The window was open. I got up, closed it, and latched it, but that only muffled the barking.

This had been going on for almost a month now, but I hadn’t had the time to find the owners and complain. And I was in no mood to do it that night either. I put in earplugs and turned on a white-noise app on my phone.

I closed my eyes. I didn’t want it to, but my mind swung toward M and what I knew of him, all of it scanty and contradictory.

There was only one indisputable fact about M, I thought as I fell asleep — the note he’d left with the strangled corpse of Mrs. Nixon was not the first time he had directly taunted me.

It was the fourth time.

In twelve years.