Criss Cross

Chapter 89

Lieutenant Prince started the feed in slow motion. At 2:29 p.m. on the same day that Nolan retrieved the claim check, a young woman went to the locker, pulled out a backpack and a woven purse. She put the purse over her shoulder and across her chest, bandolier-style, took the backpack, and left.

We could see the young woman from all angles, and she never seemed to reach up toward the top of the locker. Prince rewound the footage and found the same young woman earlier, at 12:40 p.m., when she first deposited her gear in C-2 and locked it.

Sampson said, “She could have put the claim check in there when she loaded the locker. You can’t see her hands for a good eight seconds there.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Keep going backward and speed it up.”

Prince gave her computer an order. The footage went in reverse again, this time at sixteen times normal speed. We had to concentrate, had to stare right at locker C-2 and nothing else. My iPhone buzzed, alerting me to a text. I ignored it.

“There,” Bree said, pointing at the screen.

“Got it,” Prince said and slowed the pace to normal speed. At 10:22 a.m., a man in a long, dark raincoat wearing a black cowboy hat with a clear plastic rain cover over it unlocked C-2. He retrieved a valise and left. The hat brim made it impossible for us to see his face. When he turned, I noticed the hat had some kind of band around the crown, but it was obscured by the rain cover.

I couldn’t see it earlier, at 9:54 a.m., when the cowboy entered the locker area the first time. He put the valise inside C-2, locked the door, and departed, never giving us a single view of his face.

“I don’t see when he could have planted the claim,” Bree said. “It’s all business. He puts the valise in and takes it out.”

“I think you’re right,” I said. “But mark that place, Lieutenant Prince, and then keep going back in time.”

At 8:12 a.m. on the day Nolan got the claim check, a big man, African-American, wearing a blue sweatshirt, hood up, entered the locker area and looked around. He wore dark sunglasses and seemed agitated before going to C-2, unlocking it, and reaching inside it up to his elbow.

The big man’s shoulder moved as if he were groping for something, and then he pulled out a laptop computer in a sleeve. He tucked it under his arm and left.

“He definitely could have done it, right there,” Mahoney said. “Why else put something so small in a locker that big?”

“I agree, but let’s look when he puts the computer in there,” I said.

Prince ran the feed backward until finding the same guy at 6:48 a.m. He carried a large, heavy messenger-style bag then, and he put it in C-2.

Before locking it, however, he apparently reconsidered and then reached back inside the locker for the bag. From it, he took the computer in the sleeve and put it deeper into the box. Then he locked it and left with the messenger bag under one arm.

“Both times he could have done it,” Sampson said.

“He’s our guy,” Bree agreed.

“I think so too,” Mahoney said.

My phone buzzed a second time, then a third and a fourth. Exasperated, I dug it out, and looked at the screen, seeing two texts from Jannie and three from Nana Mama. All of them said the same thing: Call! Now! It’s important!

I said, “I have to take this.”

I crossed the room and called home. My grandmother answered on the first ring.

“I just want you to tell me things will be fine,” she said in a tense, trembling voice.

“What’s going on, Nana?”

“It’s probably nothing, but Ali’s an hour late for dinner, and he told me this morning he was coming home to study for a geography test. We’ve tried his cell phone, and he won’t answer or he doesn’t have it with him or he forgot to charge it again.”

My stomach felt slightly hollow, but I said, “Did you check the shed, see if his mountain bike’s there?”

“Jannie already did. It’s there.”

I started to feel sick.

My phone buzzed in my hand, and my heart soared. “He just texted me.”

“Oh, thank God,” Nana cried.

I thumbed the icon to read the text, and felt my knees threaten to buckle.