Criss Cross

Chapter 83

Gaithersburg, Maryland

The Regal Motel was anything but.

For $22.00 an hour, $62.50 a night, and $213.00 a week, you could stay in a room that stank of stale cigarette butts and beer and featured threadbare rugs and bedcovers with suspicious-looking stains.

Hookers had used the place for tricks until the Montgomery County sheriff had cracked down a few years back. According to the desk clerk, the residents these days were homeless people, addicts, or women trying to hide from abusive spouses.

“We’ve got three or four of those, and their kids,” the clerk, Souk, told me, Sampson, Bree, and Mahoney. She was a bright young woman who was taking night classes at American University. Souk nodded over her shoulder at photographs of men thumbtacked to the wall. “Any of them come in the drive, I call the sheriff,” she told us. “They all have restraining orders against them, and I got copies.”

“Good for you,” I said. “Have you seen this man around?”

I pushed the still shot from the detention-center security feed across the counter to her.

“Sure,” the clerk said. “Short, sandy-blond hair. Five ten, one seventy. Slips in and out of thirty-nine B. Pays weeks in advance.”

“You sound like you studied him,” Mahoney said.

“I study everyone who comes in while I’m working. I want to be able to testify if something bad happens here, which is bound to happen. Just the odds, you know?”

“Well, we’re glad you’re on duty, Souk,” Bree said. “Is he here?”

She shrugged. “I just came on shift, and like I said, he kind of slips in and out. You catch glimpses of him.”

“No car?”

“If he has one, it is not here. He says he’s using the buses.

Why? What’s he done?”

“We just want to talk to him,” Mahoney said. “Is there another way out of thirty-nine B?”

“A window in the bathroom to the back roof. But it’s at least a thirty-foot drop.”

“No fire escape?”

She shook her head. We moved outside, split up, and climbed to the motel’s third floor. Bree and Sampson came at Nolan’s room from the west. Ned and I slid toward 39B from the east. All four of us drew our weapons and stood on either side of the door. Mahoney knocked sharply. No response.

Mahoney knocked harder. “William Nolan, open up. This is the FBI.”

For a moment, there was silence, and I thought Ned was going to use the key the desk clerk had given us. Then we heard the soft squeak of an old bed frame.

Mahoney shouted, “Mr. Nolan, we are—”

Inside, we heard running. A door slammed.

Ned spun the key and opened the door, which was latched with a security chain.

Sampson threw his whole weight at the door.

The chain snapped. The door fell. We swept into the room and saw fast-food wrappers, empty booze bottles, and an open duffel stuffed with clothes on the unmade bed. A cigarette burned in the ashtray.

Sampson motioned to the shut bathroom door at the rear right of the room.

He slammed on the door with his fist. “Nolan, open this door.”

There was no answer, and Sampson broke down that door too.

The bathroom window was up, revealing a narrow roof.

I went to the window, stuck my head out, and saw Nolan, looking for all the world like Kyle Craig’s twin. He wore a camo knapsack and was crouched twenty feet to my left, six steps back from a thirty-foot drop into woods.

I shouted, “Nolan! Don’t do it!”

But he did.