The People vs. Alex Cross

Chapter 11

The next afternoon, I stood in the stands inside the field house at the University of Maryland, watching Jannie, my sixteen-year-old, jog and loosen up on the track. I clapped as she came by. She gave me the thumbs-up and smiled, but I could see something troubled in her expression, as well as something that I’d never seen on her face before a race: the fear of the unknown.

That wasn’t good. I supposed it was understandable for the first race back after a long layoff due to an injury, but it wasn’t good. In the past Jannie had always gone to the starting line confident, loose, and ready for battle.

But she’d broken one of the two sesamoid bones in the ball of her right foot during a race, and it had healed excruciatingly slowly. The sesamoids act like the kneecap of the foot, only much smaller; they protect the major tendons and ligaments coming off the big toe. Without the sesamoids, the only way you can run is in burning pain.

Jannie’s coaches and doctors had cautioned her not to run until it healed. That was like asking a cheetah to sit still, and it had depressed and frustrated her no end. But she’d endured and built her strength, and now the X-rays showed the sesamoid had solidly fused.

That was ten weeks ago. Since then her coaches had been taking her workouts up slowly, trying to get her in shape before—

“Alex?”

I turned to my right and saw a fit man in his fifties with graying hair coming at me in silver warm-up pants, a blue hoodie, and white Asics running shoes. A small pair of binoculars and a stopwatch dangled around his neck.

“Nice of you to come, Coach,” I said, shaking Ted McDonald’s hand.

“Couldn’t miss wonder girl’s return,” McDonald said. “How’s she looking?”

“A little stiff and a little scared, frankly,” I said.

The coach’s face fell. “That’s not good.”

“I know,” I said. “But let’s see how it plays out.”

“Only thing we can do. In the end, it’s up to her.”

McDonald was a private coach from Texas who’d started working with Jannie the year before the injury. At the time, he’d been talking about her track-and-field potential in Olympic-level terms. I wondered if that would be the case an hour from now, or ever again.

“This is a good test for her,” McDonald said, as if he could read my mind. “Good surface. Short track. And tight curves. No matter how Jannie runs, her sesamoid will be stressed.”

“How’s that a good thing?”

McDonald had always been straight with me, so I expected candor, and I got it.

“We’ll know quick if we’re beyond this setback,” the coach said. “And if we are, we can turn our attention to something other than the bottom of her foot.”

No wonder Jannie was feeling uncertain, I thought. No wonder she was afraid. This was like a verdict coming down.

I tried not to let my mind wander to my own upcoming trial, and I kept up an easy conversation with McDonald before the four-hundred-meter competitors were called to the line. Jannie stepped up in lane three of the stagger, as ready as she’d ever be for two laps around the indoor track.

She’d gained ten pounds of muscle since she’d last raced, but she was still built like a gazelle, with long springy legs and arms, and still fairly thin compared to the other, older competitors moving to their starting blocks.

McDonald pointed at the young lady in lane five. “That’s Claire Mason, Maryland high-school indoor record holder in this event. She just signed a national letter of intent to run at Stanford.”

“Our girl know that?”

“Nope,” McDonald said. “She’s just down there to work her plan.”

The starter called the runners to their marks. My stomach was doing flip-flops. In her last race, Jannie fell coming out of the blocks, which may have contributed to the fracture.

“Set,” the starter said, his pistol raised in the air.

Jannie coiled.

At the crack, she broke clean and I heaved a sigh of relief at the way she came out attacking, her legs churning, her torso fighting to get upright, and her arms pumping toward the first curve and the first real test of the injured bone.

She blazed through the tight turn with relative ease in no evident pain and accelerated down the backstretch. The staggering of the runners began to evaporate as they came through the second turn, Jannie in fourth.

“Be disciplined, now,” McDonald said, glancing at his stopwatch.

Jannie raced down the front stretch, picked off the girl in third, then passed the one in second. That left only Claire Mason in the lead with one lap to go.

“Damn it, Jannie,” McDonald said. “That’s not what we—”

My daughter thundered after the Maryland high-school champion, but Mason held her off through the third turn. From my daughter’s past performances, I figured that the second time down the backstretch would be Jannie’s surge, that she’d find some reserve no one had predicted and blow past the girl in the lead.

Instead, Mason pulled away from Jannie. The girl in third overtook Jannie in the fourth turn. Jannie was gritting her teeth, giving it everything she had. But forty meters from the finish, the girl in fourth passed her. The girl in fifth got by her two feet before the wire.

Jannie slowed to a stop, glanced around in bewilderment, then looked up at Coach McDonald and me.

She threw up her hands in despair and exploded into tears.

Chapter 12

I jogged along the reflecting pool between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials. The dawn was cool, almost crisp, and it felt good to be moving and breathing fresh air.

During my morning runs, I usually tried not to think about anything besides putting one foot in front of the other. But that day I couldn’t get my mind off Jannie.

Coach McDonald had told her before the race that she wasn’t there to attack the leaders and win; he wanted her to get a clean start, stay close to the leaders, and kick at the end. A training session and a test of her foot.

Instead, Jannie got full of herself and went after what she wanted instead of staying with McDonald’s program. It had caused a rift between them. The coach told me he was rethinking how much time he had to dedicate to her.

Nonetheless, her foot had held up. No pain. No discomfort.

I checked my watch and picked up the pace until I was nearly sprinting up the marble stairs toward the imposing statue of the sixteenth and greatest president our country has ever known. I’d been inside the rotunda where the figure of Lincoln presided and read his quotes dozens of times, but they always gave me a chill.

I didn’t have a chance to glance at them today because a petite, intense, Indian American woman in a blue business suit and a trench coat stepped out from behind one of the columns. She carried a briefcase and a large Starbucks coffee cup, and she tilted her head, indicating we should leave.

“I should not even be here,” FBI special agent Henna Batra said in a low voice. “I should be talking to Sampson or your wife.”

“But you’re here,” I said as we climbed down the memorial steps. “Did you look at the website link I sent you?”

Batra did not reply, just cocked her head in a way that said I was a fool to have even asked.

Men and women far smarter than me will tell you that we are on the verge of the singularity, a moment in time beyond which all human brains will be able to access all possible information through the power of the Internet. As far as I was concerned, Batra was already at one with the Internet. Plugged in, she could reach across vast digital landscapes, unlock almost any door, and peek into some of the web’s dimmest hiding places.

She was also one of the smartest people I’d ever known. Before Batra had even graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she had eight high-paying job offers with the search-engine-and-social-networking crowd. Instead of accepting any of them, she’d joined the FBI and its growing cybercrimes unit. I’d met her during the course of the investigation that led to the murder charges pending against me.

That alone explained Batra’s reluctance to meet me in a public place. She was proud of being FBI, and she was a woman of great personal integrity who cared deeply about her reputation. But she’d come, which meant she thought it was worth the risk, which meant she had looked at Killingblondechicks4-fun.org.co.

“C’mon, Batra,” I said. “Any luck unlocking those videos?”

“Can a pickpocket pick?” Batra said, heading toward the Vietnam Memorial.

“What did you find?”

“Nothing,” she said. “The videos all end a second or two past the locking point. I suspect if a user has the correct passcode, the two extra seconds are revealed and a secret onion router message is sent to the webmaster. At that point, the webmaster would send back an onion router message with the complete encrypted film attached.”

“Hold up,” I said. “Most of that went right over my head. Start with onion.”

The cybercrimes specialist took a sip of her coffee and said an onion was a digital message or order that left a computer surrounded by layers and layers of encryption and code, almost like an onion. “When you send out an e-mail or look at a website,” she said, “you’re leaving digital tracks all over the so-called clear web. But when an onion message or order is sent, the surrounding codes direct it through dozens of routers on the deep, or unorganized, web. Each router peels away layers of encryption and metadata that would identify the original sender.

“Onions guarantee anonymity,” Batra said. “We can’t look at them. The NSA can’t even look at them. Why? Because we won’t even know they exist. Done right, they leave virtually zero trace.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, disappointed.

“I’m not kidding,” Batra said, her face clouding as we entered the Vietnam Memorial. “This is serious black-net stuff you’ve gotten yourself into, Cross. Almost everything having to do with that website was done through onions, so I have no idea who built it or who maintains it.”

“Can’t you hack it?”

“What’s to hack?” Batra said. “The website is anonymously built and self-sustaining. I can shut down whatever the hosting URL is, but I’d imagine there are dozens of mirroring sites with the content on them already.”

I thought about that. “You said almost everything having to do with the website was done through onion routers.”

Batra arched an eyebrow and said, “You’re smarter than you look, Cross.”

“One of my redeeming qualities. What was not done through an onion?”

“Those posts on the hackers’ bulletin board. Those I could track. And I did.”

“All of the posters?” I said, impressed.

“Just the high-volume ones so far,” Batra said.

“What do we know about them?”

“Creeps,” the FBI agent said, taking another sip of coffee.

I was getting chilled, so I untied the hoodie around my waist and put it on as she continued.

“On the clear net, they troll porn,” Batra said. “In the darknet areas where I can track them, they’re into lots of the sicker stuff. I wrote it all down.”

“Where are they?”

“You mean physical location? All over the world, though one of the regular creeps posting is definitely local.”

“How local?” I said, stopping.

“Right here,” she said, waving her coffee cup. “DC.”

“You have a name? Address?”

Batra studied me several beats, calculating what to tell me, no doubt, and then said, “Close enough.”

Chapter 13

Leaving the Brookland-Cua Metro stop later in the day, I knew damn well I shouldn’t have been walking up John McCormack Drive. I could hear Bree in my head saying I had no authority here and that my time would be better spent working on my defense for trial.

But I was back in the game, and who was going to tell Bree or anyone?

The creep?

Not a chance. The creep would want to avoid any contact with legitimate law enforcement. And I just might learn something useful about Gretchen Lindel and the other missing blondes, which would more than justify my actions as a concerned citizen.

With that firmly in mind, I went to the security guard at the main entrance to the Catholic University of America and asked how to find the alumni office. The guard gave me a map. I thanked him and started in that direction until I was around a corner and out of sight.

Then I made my way to Flather Hall, a brick-faced dormitory for male freshmen. Classes were over that Friday. Rap and heavy-metal music pulsed and dueled from inside open dorm rooms. I spotted a few underage drinkers and smelled hemp burning as I made my way to the second floor and down a long hallway that reeked of too many young men living on their own for the first time.

The door I sought, number 278, was ajar. I stood there, listening, hearing nothing, and then knocked. No response.

I pushed open the door, saw bunk beds to my right and a single twin bed across the room. Two white males in their late teens sat on a love seat between the single bed and me, wearing Beats headphones and holding video-game controllers. They were absorbed in a violent game playing on a screen on the wall, oblivious to my presence.

Beyond them, at a desk tucked in the corner, there was a third white male, small, scrawny, oily brown hair, lots of acne. Three computer screens dominated the small desk where he sat, and he had headphones on as well, engrossed in the screens.

I reached over and flicked the dorm room light off and on twice.

As if a hypnotist had snapped his fingers, all three of them came up out of their virtual trances and looked around groggily. The closest kid, a chubby towhead named Fred Vertze, spotted me first. His double chin retreated, and he tugged off his headphones.

“Who are you?” he said. “What are you doing in here?”

I waited until the other two removed their headphones before making a show of shutting the door behind me and locking it. They were alarmed when my cold attention swept over them.

“Who are you?” Vertze demanded again.

“Who I am is irrelevant,” I said.

“Hell it is,” said Juan Cyr, the other young man who’d been playing the video game. Cyr was built like a fullback and stood up to show me he was no one to be trifled with.

Brian Stetson, the kid with the acne and the three computer screens, said, “Don’t do anything el stupid-o, Juan. I’m calling campus security.”

“Do that and I’ll have to tell campus security what I know about what goes on in this dorm room,” I said.

They glanced at one another uncertainly.

Vertze, who could have used a shower or two, said, “We don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

“Okay, let’s cut right to it, then, before I alert the NSA, the FBI, and six other law enforcement agencies. Gentlemen, which one of you is Lone Star Blondes Must Die?”

Chapter 14

Vertze’s eyelids drifted almost shut. Stetson frowned, as if he’d heard a foreign phrase spoken at a distance. Cyr acted like I’d punched him in the gut.

Then the burly teen’s expression shifted from shock to anger. He twisted his shoulders and hissed at Stetson, “I told you messing around with that kind of crap was mind poison.”

“Shut up, Juan,” Stetson said, studying me calmly. “Who are you?”

“The worst kind of poison, unless you come clean,” I said, feeling like I’d identified the leader of this crew. “How old are you, Brian?”

“Eighteen,” he said. “How do you know my name?”

“I know all your names. I know you get your kicks exploring the dark web. Pushing the boundaries. Looking into nasty places.”

“Free world,” Stetson said.

“Dogfights?” I said. “Explicit war clips? Hardcore S-and-M fantasy sites?”

“There some law against watching I don’t know about?” Stetson said.

“No, but there are several against abetting the kidnap and advocating the murder of five women.”

That seemed to rock the kid, who looked less certain as he said, “I know what that means, abetting, and no one in this room abetted anything.”

“Didn’t you post a comment on a bulletin board about the Killingblondechicks website? Quote: ‘I want in to that site. I can contribute. Help. Break some skulls, even.’”

He looked at me dumbly, then at his computer. “You hacked me?”

“FBI hacked you, Stetson. You screwed up. Forgot to use onion routers. Which means that I should go to the dean’s office and tell him what you’ve been up to, which means you most certainly will be expelled, which means your parents will be called, which means you’ll be escorted out of here in complete disgrace and humiliation.”

I let that sink in before saying, “Or you can talk to me.”

After several tense beats, Vertze said, “I’ll talk.”

“Fred,” Stetson said. “Don’t.”

“Brian, my old man will skin me alive if I get expelled,” Vertze said sharply.

“I’ll talk too,” Cyr said.

Stetson’s face flushed. He glared at me, caught in a fierce internal argument, and then finally said sullenly, “What do you want to know?”

Over the next twenty minutes or so, the story came out.

Stetson was a math and computer genius who should have gone to Caltech, but his father was a trustee and fervent supporter of Catholic University. His first night at the school, Stetson had introduced Cyr and Vertze to the dark web. They’d found the Killingblondechicks website and started posting about it for fun.

“Fun?” I said.

“C’mon,” Stetson said. “No one thinks those videos are real.”

“Have you unlocked the videos?”

“You can’t. I tried. The locked world, the unknown, it’s just part of the fantasy of virtual reality, man, a place to safely experience and vent frustrations without consequences.”

I reappraised the eighteen-year-old, thinking that he was entirely too smart for his own good. “You boys experience frustration with blondes?”

“Hasn’t every guy on the face of the earth?” Vertze said.

Cyr and Stetson both started laughing. I had to admit it was a funny line, and I fought not to smile.

Finally, I said, “If I look around in your pasts, am I going to find a blonde one of you disliked so much that she ended up kidnapped? Or dead?”

Cyr said, “My first girlfriend was a blonde. Caught her messing around with my best friend’s older brother. They’re married now. Not kidnapped. Not dead. Just miserable.”

Vertze said, “My anti-blondeness stems from a severe German teacher junior year who had zero sense of humor. I thought about sticking a pin in her ass but refrained — at least, long enough to get an A.”

Stetson and Cyr laughed again. I couldn’t help it and smiled.

“What about you, Brian?” I said, looking at Stetson.

Stetson sobered and said, “My blonde story is like all blonde stories. They’re all about the princess complex that’s sold to them each and every day.”

Chapter 15

After dinner, once Jannie had gone upstairs to do homework and Ali had settled in to watch Meru, an excellent documentary about extreme mountain climbers, I told Bree and Nana Mama about Brian Stetson, disguising him as a client and not revealing his name.

“The princess complex?” Bree said. “And how exactly did he define that?”

“He said it starts at birth with blond girls,” I said. “They’re dressed as princesses in the crib. Then they’re sold the princess story in movies, in advertising, all around them, until they believe that if they can just be beautiful enough, they’ll attract Prince Charming and live happily ever after.”

Nana Mama said, “An eighteen-year-old told you all that?”

“A sharp one. He had the root theory of blonde stories figured out.”

Bree said, “I knew a blonde who was just like that, treated like a princess her whole childhood. Leanne Long. She was an honest-to-God nice person, and she became a nurse and married a really nice guy, so it doesn’t always work according to that kid’s theory.”

“This old lady needs her sleep,” my grandmother said, taking her cane and getting up.

“We’re right behind you,” I promised. “We’ll make sure the place is spotless for you in the morning.”

“Bless you, dear,” she said, and she kissed my forehead.

When Nana Mama was out of earshot, Bree turned serious and said, “Alex, how long did you think you could be involved in the Gretchen Lindel investigation without me knowing?”

“The client story didn’t work?”

“Uh, no.”

I told her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

When I was done, Bree was spitting mad.

“What were you thinking, going onto campus like that?” she demanded. “Entering a dorm room without a warrant? Threatening possible witnesses without authority and while on suspension due to pending homicide charges?”

I’d known most of that was coming, but it still hurt. I’d let her down.

“I wanted to be useful, Bree,” I said. “It felt like I was back in the game.”

“Your clients and practice are your game now. Have nothing to do? Work on your defense. Help Anita and Naomi make your case ironclad. And the next time you feel the need to lie or hide things from me, Alex? Please don’t.”

I had a hollow feeling in my stomach and said, “You’re right. I just... you’re right. It will never happen again.”

I hoped she’d forgive me. I hated going to sleep when one of us was mad at the other.

After several moments, Bree sighed and said, “So you don’t think those college boys are involved?”

My shoulders relaxed. I felt like we were getting back to level ground.

“Beyond the posts, no, not as far as I could tell.”

“You don’t think we should get a warrant for their computers?”

“And get them all expelled for being smart, nosy, teenage male nerds with blonde chips on their shoulders?”

“Well, when you put it like that,” Bree said, getting up and extending her hand to me.

I took it, kissed the back of her hand, and said, “Princess?”

She started laughing, said, “Charming?”

I got up, grinning. “That’s me.”

Chapter 16

John Sampson had never heard a collective grief quite like this. The crying, wailing, and whimpering seemed to come from every room he passed.

Innocence destroyed, Sampson thought. Up until now, their lives have been one shooting star after another, and that’s gone.

Looking shell-shocked, Wally Christian, Georgetown University’s security chief, walked beside Sampson and Detective Ainsley Fox down a hall on the first floor of Village C West, a residential building for freshmen. A DCMP patrol officer stood aside so they could go through the double doors into the common area.

Sampson paused just beyond the doors and took in the carnage with one long, sweeping glance.

A young brunette in a Hoyas sweatshirt was sprawled on a couch, dead, a gunshot to her neck. A second young woman with short brown hair lay facedown and dead on the carpet. EMTs rushed out of the room with a gurney carrying a very large Samoan American male with two chest wounds.

“How many saw it?” Sampson asked.

“Seven,” Wally Christian said. “We’ve moved them to the common room upstairs. The chaplains are with them.”

“Who’s the missing girl?” Fox asked. “The blonde?”

“Patsy Mansfield,” Christian said. “A sophomore. Real star.”

“As in, people knew who she was?” Sampson said.

“On campus, you bet. She plays lacrosse, all-American as a freshman, and, well, you’ve seen the picture of her I put out with the Amber Alert. She’s quite the looker.”

As all of them took the stairs to the second floor of the dorm, Sampson thought of what Alex had told him over the phone about the three freshmen at Catholic University with bad attitudes about blondes. He wondered if they were involved here and made a note to check on their whereabouts at the time of the incident.

The seven witnesses to the homicides of the brunettes and the kidnapping of Patsy Mansfield all told much the same story. Eleven students were hanging out in the lounge around seven that Saturday evening when two men came in from outside. They wore black balaclavas and olive-green workman’s coveralls with Georgetown University written on the back. They drew pistols with silencers and ordered everyone to the floor except Patsy Mansfield.

“Wait,” Detective Fox said. “They used her name?”

“Definitely,” said Tina Hall, a freshman. “They knew who she was.”

Hall and the others said the two men told Mansfield that things would go easier if she just went with them. But then Keoni Latupa, a linebacker on the football team and a good friend of Patsy’s, grabbed one of the men and threw him to the ground so hard that his gun clattered away. Latupa scrambled for it, but the other man shot and wounded him before he could get to it.

The loose gun came to a stop at the feet of Macy Jones, the brunette in the Hoyas sweatshirt. She went for it and was shot too. At that point, Denise O’Toole, Jones’s roommate, went to help her friend. She was shot in the leg.

“Then the first guy got up and retrieved his pistol,” said Tina Hall. “He went over to Keoni and shot him again. Then he went to Denise, who pleaded with him not to shoot her, just to take her but not shoot her.”

Hall paused, tears welling in her eyes and then dripping down her cheeks. She went on, “Know what he said before he killed Denise? He said, ‘Why would we take you? Nobody pays for brunettes anymore.’”

Chapter 17

The DC police union had referred my latest client to me. She knocked on my basement door shortly after nine Monday morning.

I opened the door and found a dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties standing there, her shoulders slumped. I knew her, but she was so haggard I almost didn’t recognize her.

“Tess?” I said, holding out my hand. “It’s good to see you.”

Detective Tess Aaliyah lifted her head, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’m embarrassed and uncomfortable to be here, Dr. Cross, but my union rep said you were the only counselor available on short notice.”

“Come inside, and please don’t be embarrassed or uncomfortable. I’m not a detective now and not here to judge you in any way. You need to talk. I’m available to listen. And, of course, nothing said ever leaves the room.”

The detective hesitated and then came inside. I followed her into my office, remembering the confident, smart, and attractive woman who’d helped save my family after they were taken by a madman named Marcus Sunday.

Aaliyah was from a police family. Her father, Bernie, had been a top detective in Baltimore, and she’d lived and breathed the job when we’d worked together. I knew some of the trauma she’d been through lately, and as I shut the office door, I prayed that I was up to the task of counseling her.

I got coffee for her and gestured to a chair. She sat down, her head tilted low and her upper torso and shoulders rolled forward, as if in surrender.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“You’ve seen the news? How should I feel?”

“Forget the news,” I said. “Lift your chin, straighten your shoulders, and give me your side of it.”

Conflicting emotions flickered on the detective’s face as she made a slight alteration in her slouch before telling me the story.

She and her partner, Chris Cox, had gone to a high-rent apartment complex off Judiciary Square to serve a warrant on and arrest one Drago Kovac. Kovac had immigrated to the U.S. from Serbia when he was nine, become an American citizen at fifteen, and become a car thief shortly thereafter. He wasn’t very good at his chosen field at first. Kovac was caught and convicted of grand theft auto twice before his eighteenth birthday. After that, he wised up and got sophisticated. He formed an auto-theft ring that worked the Miami-to-Boston corridor, boosting in-demand cars, chopping them up for parts, and then selling the parts over the Internet.

Kovac was now twenty-seven and operating his illegal enterprise from his luxury flat on Third Street in DC. Aaliyah, looking for spare parts for her Ford Explorer, had happened on one of his websites, which offered “gently used” parts for a third of what other sites and stores were asking. When she learned the company and Kovac were based in DC, one thing led to another, and then to a year of additional investigative work.

“We had him,” Aaliyah said. “I mean, this was a major criminal operation. Millions of dollars, and we had him dead to rights.”

“So you go to Kovac’s apartment building to serve the warrant,” I said, pushing her toward the awful truth.

“Yes.” Aaliyah sighed. “We went in at the exact same time arrests in this case were supposed to go down all over the East Coast. Synchronized, you know?”

But unbeknownst to Aaliyah and her partner, several warrants had been served early. When police in New Jersey went through the front door of a Kovac chop shop, one of his men got off a text warning of the raid.

“Seconds before we reached the tenth floor of his apartment building, Kovac and his men left his flat,” Aaliyah said. “Cox saw them at the far end of the hallway and ordered them to the ground. They ran, and when we pursued, they shot.”

“They definitely shot first?”

“No question,” Aaliyah said, a smolder of the old fire in her eyes. “Surveillance cameras back us up.”

“Okay. Kovac and his men shoot first. Then what?”

That glowing ember died in Aaliyah’s eyes. Her neck muscles went taut as piano wires before she said, “Then it all became a nightmare.”

Provoked into a gun battle, Aaliyah and her partner followed protocol and returned fire. Her first shot hit the meat of Kovac’s thigh. Her second and third shots missed the car thief, who, howling in pain, lunged into the stairwell.

“I was in pursuit when the wailing started behind the door at the end of the hall,” Aaliyah said, and she broke down sobbing.

I knew the rest. She and Cox caught and arrested Kovac and two accomplices, but at an unfathomable cost. The bullets that went wide of the car thief had gone through the door of the apartment belonging to the Phelps family — Oliver, a young, successful attorney; Patricia, a young, successful physician; and their twins, four-year-old Meagan and Alice.

Alice had been playing in the front hallway. The nanny had rushed to get her at the first shot.

“What are the odds, Dr. Cross?” Aaliyah asked, still weeping bitterly. “What are the odds of wounding the nanny and killing the girl?”

Chapter 18

After Aaliyah poured out her anguish, her grief, her guilt and despair, she pulled her feet up under her on the chair, wrapped her arms around her knees, and stared off into the distance.

“In the end, I’ll always be the cop who killed a child,” she said hollowly. “No matter who I was before or who I become after, that’s who I will be.”

“To who? You?”

“I pulled the trigger, Alex. That’s what they’ll write after I die.”

“I empathize with the pain and regret you must be feeling, but you don’t know what the future holds for you. None of us do.”

She blinked slowly, said, “There is a way to know your future for certain.”

That got my attention and concern. “Have you thought about that, Tess?”

Aaliyah took a big breath and then shook her head. “No. Not really.”

“Not really?”

“Not at all. I’m just trying to find a way to process this, you know?”

There was little conviction in the detective’s voice, and she appeared preoccupied.

“Are you sleeping?” I asked.

“Some days it’s all I do.”

“Self-medicating? Alcohol? Drugs?”

“Honestly, I wish they’d work, but they don’t, so I don’t.”

“When does the civil suit go to trial?”

Aaliyah continued to avoid eye contact. “I don’t know what they expect to get from me. This has already cost me everything.”

I continued to watch her, thinking about the flat affect in her voice and expression, the defeated way the detective was holding herself, and some of the statements she’d made, especially talking about herself in the past tense.

“Tess, I think I’d feel more comfortable if, for your own safety, we take you somewhere to get a proper, in-depth evaluation of your current condition.”

Aaliyah raised her head for the first time in many minutes, gazed dully at me, and said, “I’m nowhere near the padded room.”

“Given what you’ve been through, suicidal ideations are cause for serious concern, Tess. This could be a medical issue that—”

“No one’s putting me in a psych ward,” Aaliyah said, getting to her feet angrily. “Least of all me.”

“Tess—”

“Sorry,” she said, heading for the door. “I thought I could trust you and I was wrong. Good-bye, Dr. Cross.”

After a long look at the situation I came to a decision, grabbed my jacket, went outside, and hailed a cab.

Chapter 19

We pulled up in front of the DC Police Union building twenty minutes later. I paid the cabbie, went inside, and asked to see William Roth.

Did I have a meeting set up with Mr. Roth? the receptionist asked. No. Had I tried to call him? I’d thought it was a dire enough situation to come down to talk with Mr. Roth in person. It wasn’t until I told him it might be a matter of life and death that he called upstairs.

Mr. Roth was in an important meeting, the receptionist told me after hanging up the phone.

“You didn’t explain the gravity of the situation. Call back.”

The receptionist rolled his eyes, snatched up the phone again, and dialed. “He says break into the meeting. It’s that important,” he told someone.

The receptionist waited, waited, and then hung up and said, “Go on up, third floor, second door on the right. Roth’s not happy.”

“I don’t care,” I said, and I took the stairs up.

I knocked on the door and then entered an anteroom with a very irritated secretary at her desk. “Mr. Roth has been working for this meeting for six months,” she said.

“Would it matter if someone you cared about was in danger?”

“Well,” she said, flustered. “I suppose so.”

“Where’s Roth?”

“Roth’s right here,” said a flushed, bald man who appeared in the open doorway behind the secretary. “This better be good. I’ve got people at the table I never expected to—”

“It’s Tess Aaliyah,” I said, walking past the secretary into Roth’s office. “You’re her rep, correct?”

“Aaliyah?” Roth said with mild disdain. “Dear God, what’s she done now?”

“You sent her to me this morning for an evaluation. I believe she’s depressed and possibly suicidal.”

“No,” Roth said, taking a seat at his desk. “I saw her last week. She was bummed but knew it wasn’t her fault that the little girl was playing in the front hall before the shooting started.”

“I don’t think Aaliyah cares. About anything. Which can be chemical, and which is why I need your help getting her into a psych ward for three days so she can be evaluated by medical professionals.”

“You want me to commit Aaliyah?” Roth said incredulously. “No, absolutely not. Even if I had that authority, and I don’t, absolutely not.”

“Aren’t you supposed to look after her, represent her?”

“In the shooting, yes, but this? No.”

“The depression and suicidal thoughts followed from the shooting,” I said firmly. “She needs help. More than I can give her.”

“You tell her that?”

“I did.”

“What did she say?”

“That she was upset but fine and nowhere near the padded room.”

“There you go, then,” Roth said, getting up. “I have a meeting to run.”

I blocked the door and said, “You don’t care about Aaliyah’s well-being?”

“I care,” Roth said. “But if you want her in a psych ward, convince her doctor or someone in her family to recommend it. Or get the department to make it a stipulation of her suspension revocation. Any way you try to do it, though?”

“Yes?”

“Expect her to fight.”

Chapter 20

After several unsuccessful attempts to reach her, I spoke with Esther Dodd, an attorney for the police department. It was obvious by her curtness that Ms. Dodd was none too happy to take my call, probably due to the murder charges pending against me. She listened impatiently and dismissed out of hand my request to have Aaliyah undergo psychiatric evaluation as soon as possible as a stipulation of her rejoining the force.

“She’s on suspension with a lawsuit pending,” the attorney said. “That puts Detective Aaliyah in limbo and gives us very few options, especially since your evaluation was done on behalf of the police union. With all due respect, it holds no weight from a legal perspective. Good-bye, Dr. Cross.”

I tried to find Aaliyah’s doctor next and lucked out when a friend in the human resources department checked some old records and gave me a name, Dr. Timothy Cantrell. I looked Cantrell up and found he was not only an internist but affiliated with GW Medical Center and its famous tropical medicine division. I called Cantrell’s office but found that the physician, a member of Doctors Without Borders, was currently out of the country, working in Brazil to stem a yellow fever outbreak.

I was frustrated but refused to give up without making every effort.

At 2:12 p.m., after making the long drive, I turned down Francis Street in the small town of Arbutus, a suburb of Baltimore, and soon found a small blue-and-white bungalow with a neatly tended yard.

A raw northeast wind had picked up and caused me to shiver as I ran up the walk and knocked at the door. A tall and very put-together redheaded woman in her late fifties answered the door.

I introduced myself, and her features softened.

“I’ve seen you on the news,” she said. “Tess and Bernie say you’re innocent, wrongfully charged.”

Her name was Christine Prince. She was Aaliyah’s father’s girlfriend and was happy to tell me that Bernie had gone off surf-fishing, his passion in retirement. I asked when he’d return, and she said that he’d gone to one of his favorite spots out on Assateague Island, so he probably wouldn’t be back until around midnight.

After a few moments’ hesitation, I asked if she knew where on Assateague he went to fish.

“You’re going all the way out there?” she said after showing me on a map.

“I need his advice, and I think he’d want to give it to me sooner rather than later.”

“Tess?” she said softly.

“You’re a mind reader, Christine,” I said. “Thank you for the help.”

Two hours later, I pulled into Assateague Island State Park. The ranger station was closed, and I found Bernie Aaliyah’s Jeep Wagoneer parked right where his girlfriend said it would be.

When I got out, the wind clipped me, and the sky spat rain. I dug in the trunk of my car and came up with an old rain jacket and a pair of calf-high rubber boots I kept around for crime scene work. I put them on, and with my hood up to block the wind, I walked up the trail, through the dunes, and onto the beach.

The Atlantic was gray and roiling. But to my left, there were surfers out on the swells, clad head to toe in black neoprene, and to my right, there were six or seven anglers. I stood there, looking at the anglers one at a time, until I saw an older man limp fast toward the crashing surf and then use his powerful shoulders to whip out a heavy fishing rod with a big pink lure.

I thought the lure’s arc would die quickly in the wind, but it had just the right angle, and it punched through, landing in the water far offshore. As I started toward him, he pumped the rod tip up and down several times, paused, then did it again. When I passed his chair, his cooler, his tackle box, and two Coleman lanterns yet to be lit, he twitched it a third time.

“Bernie Aaliyah?” I said.

The old man startled and looked over his shoulder at me, huddled in my rain jacket and hood. “I know you?” he said.

I pushed back the hood. “Alex Cross, sir.”

Tess’s father’s face broke into a toothy smile. “So you are. Been a long time, Dr. Cross. I’ve been following your career from way back.”

“I followed yours when I was at Johns Hopkins, sir,” I said.

“Hold on, let’s do this proper,” Bernie said, sticking the butt end of his fishing rod into a piece of white PVC pipe buried in the sand. “There, now.”

He turned awkwardly, due to a gunshot wound to his pelvis that had ended his remarkable career in Baltimore Homicide, but he shook my hand with the vigor of a man half his age.

“To what do I owe the honor of you driving all the way to hell and gone to see me?” Bernie asked.

“It’s about Tess,” I said. “It’s serious.”

Chapter 21

After I described my concerns and the evidence to support them, Bernie Aaliyah was quiet for several moments, standing there, looking off toward the waves crashing in the falling light.

“I saw my daughter three days ago,” he said at last. “Tess was still grief-stricken, still remorseful, but I didn’t see suicidal, Dr. Cross. And I certainly will not go to court over her wishes.”

“I don’t discount your observations, Mr. Aaliyah,” I said. “And maybe you don’t want to legally compel Tess to undergo a full psych evaluation. But you could convince her to commit herself. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but I’d rather stand here with my tail between my legs than stand next to you at a grave.”

Before Aaliyah’s father could reply to that, there was a sharp popping noise. We both turned to see his surfcasting rod bending hard, the line straight and quivering.

“That’s a good one!” he cried, scrambling over to the fishing rod and grabbing it before it could come free of the PVC pipe.

Bernie held the rod tight about two feet from the bottom, the butt still in the pipe. He leaned back, testing the weight of the fish and its strength.

“Oh, Jaysus,” Bernie said. “He’s gonna go forty minimum, maybe fifty!”

The reel started to whine. Aaliyah’s father reached down and adjusted the drag to let the unseen fish run. He let it tear out a hundred yards and saw the line slacken before he snatched up the pole from the PVC pipe and reset the drag.

“Bernie,” I began.

He barked, “I’ve been waiting on this quality of fish for two years running, Cross. So you can either leave or wait until I’m done here.”

I held up my hands. “Don’t let me get in your way.”

So I stood back and watched the retired homicide detective engage in an epic battle on the beach. Every time Bernie was able to pull and crank the fish closer to shore, it would make another run that left him gasping.

“He could go sixty,” Aaliyah’s father said with a grunt twenty minutes into the struggle. “Big, big striper.”

Thirty-five minutes into the fight, he said, “Maybe seventy pounds. My God, what a pig of a fish!”

Fifty-two minutes into the battle, Bernie had the striper in the surf thirty yards right in front of him. We saw the leader and a flash of a big fin before the pig of a fish rolled over and started to shake its head against the pressure of the line and the hook.

Then the fish ran, leaped up out of the water, head still shaking, and crashed sideways into the surf. I was shocked at the size of it. So was Bernie.

“Jaysus H,” he said in awe. “He has to be pushing the world rec—”

The striper thrashed once more. There was a twanging noise as the line snapped in two. Bernie staggered and fell back into the sand.

I felt bad and expected him to be mad, curse his luck, or at least cry out in dismay. But Aaliyah’s father just sat there in the sand, holding his fishing rod, staring at the surf and what could have been.

After several minutes, he said, “You get a chance at some things only once in this life, and sometimes they slip right through your hands. I’ll support you, Dr. Cross. One way or the other, I’ll see to it that Tess gets the help you say she needs.”

Chapter 22

John Sampson knocked on the door frame of Bree Stone’s office.

“Chief, we’ve got her in interrogation,” he said.

Bree looked up from a stack of papers, put her pen down, and got up.

She and Sampson went to a booth with a one-way mirror overlooking an interrogation room. A young woman with elaborate parrot tattoos on both arms, multiple face piercings, and half her jet-black hair shaved off sat at the table, staring at the mirror.

In an accent that sounded straight out of Appalachia, she said, “Sally Sweet doesn’t have all day. You either want to know or you don’t.”

Detective Ainsley Fox was also in the observation booth. She said, “Let me talk to her alone, Chief. Get her to relate to me.”

Sampson wondered whether that was possible, given that Fox was one of the most abrasive, obnoxious people he’d ever worked with.

Bree was skeptical too, and shook her head. “Detective Sampson will take the lead. He has years of experience at this kind of thing.”

Fox scowled but offered no argument as she trailed Sampson out into the hallway. Sampson stopped and said, “You listen. You study. You learn.”

His partner did not like that, but she nodded. She and Sampson entered the interrogation room and sat down in front of the woman.

“Sally Sweet?” he said after introducing himself.

“It’s what my driver’s license says,” she said, smiling. “For real. Approved by the court, even.”

“Taken in on charges of soliciting prostitution,” Fox said. “And possession of a controlled narcotic.”

Sampson had to fight not to ask Fox to leave right then.

Sweet shrugged. “Like I told the vice cop, the Oxy I got legit, cause of a herniated disk in my lumbar, and anyway, I got a get-out-of-jail-free card, and I want to use it.”

“Describe the card,” Sampson said.

“It’s a big one.”

Fox leaned across the table as if to speak. Sampson put his hand on his partner’s thigh and squeezed it hard. Fox sat back and looked at his hand and then at him in outrage.

Sampson squeezed harder, and then let go. He looked at Fox, then turned his head to Sweet, who couldn’t figure out what was going on.

“I can’t promise you a thing until I hear what you have,” Sampson said, ignoring the fact that Fox’s normally pale skin had gone beet red. “If it’s strong evidence, we’ll inform the prosecutor who draws your case. In return for testimony, you’ll get some kind of deal.”

Sweet’s lips curled as if she’d sniffed something foul. “I didn’t say nothing ’bout testifying. This is a tip. I give the tip to you. You let me go.”

Fox was about to open her mouth, but Sampson pushed back from the table, stood up, and said, “I guess we’re done, then. You’ll be taken back to central holding. Detective Fox?”

Fox didn’t move for a beat but then stood up stiffly.

“Wait, what?” the hooker said. “Shit, okay, then. I’ll talk, but Sweet Sal’s got to get some good out of this.”

Still ignoring Fox, Sampson sat back down and said, “So talk.”

Sweet told him to check with the Kansas State Police for a missing-persons report on a seventeen-year-old blonde, Emily McCabe of Wichita, who’d run away and came east after her uncle allegedly abused her.

McCabe lived on the streets until she met a man named Neal Parks; he introduced her to coke, meth, and heroin and turned her into a call girl. Sally Sweet also worked for Parks, who set up meets with his girls and johns via smartphone, like a cyberpimp.

“Emily was good people,” Sweet said. “I liked her, even when she became Neal’s favorite for a while.”

Parks evidently lavished attention on the new girls so they’d do anything he asked. Sweet had once been favored like that. In fact, she still had a key to the pimp’s apartment.

“Neal was holding cash back on me, and I knew where he kept it,” Sweet said. “Lemme back up a second. Right around then? I hadn’t been seeing Emily regular like I used to, and Neal said she’d gone up to New York to work for a friend of his for a few weeks. I waited until Neal went out to eat one night with another of the girls, and I got into his place.”

Sweet said she retrieved a lockbox hidden in the ductwork above Parks’s computer desk, got the key for it from his dresser, opened it, and took out fifteen hundred in cash.

“Just what he owed me,” she said. “I put the rest back.”

“What does this have to do with Emily?” Fox said impatiently.

Smug, the hooker said, “When I climbed up there to put the box back, I accidentally kicked Neal’s computer mouse. The screen lit up on his desktop. There was a picture of Emily on the monitor.”

Sweet realized the image was part of a video, so she played the clip.

“It looked like Neal shot it with his GoPro,” she said. “From his — what do you call it — point of view?”

Sampson remembered the GoPro videos on the Killingblondechicks4fun website, and he nodded, thinking that Sweet’s story might have legs after all.

“What did you see?” Fox said.

“Neal in full dominance mode,” Sweet said, sounding shaken. “He was hitting Emily, saying and doing nasty things to her. And she’s all submissive. And then, like, he’s got a rope in his hand, and he flips it around Emily’s neck.”

She stopped, her lip quivering at the memory.

“Neal started to strangle her,” Sweet said at last. “He put the camera in her face. You could see how terrified she was before the screen went black.”

Chapter 23

At home around ten thirty that evening, Bree said she was exhausted and going to bed.

“You coming?”

I said, “I’m going to type up some notes downstairs, catch the eleven o’clock news, and then I’ll be up.”

“Don’t fall asleep in front of the TV again,” she said, and she kissed me.

“I’ll try not to,” I said, and I kissed her back.

“You promised Jannie and Ali you’d go for an early run with them.”

“I remember. Love you.”

“Love you too,” she said and waved her hand wearily as she left the room.

I waited until Bree had climbed the stairs and shut our bedroom door before going to my basement office and putting on a dark jacket and baseball cap. Then I hit Send on a text I’d written an hour before.

I opened the outside door as quietly as I could, slipped out into the night, and went along the side of my house, creeping under our bedroom window. The light went out up there, and I trotted down the sidewalk to a waiting car.

I climbed into the passenger seat. John Sampson was at the wheel.

“Glad you could make it,” he said, and then he smiled and put the car in gear.

“You going to explain why we have to sneak around?” I said.

“I am,” Sampson said, and he told me about Emily McCabe, Sally Sweet, the video Sweet saw on Neal Parks’s computer, and how the clip had ended before the strangulation was complete.

“You believe her?” I said.

“We’re here, aren’t we?”

“Warrant?”

“We got blowback on the ask,” Sampson said. “Can’t get a search authorization based solely on the hearsay of a prostitute eager to avoid jail time. But I figure blonde lives matter, and think we should have a chat with old Neal Parks sooner rather than later.”

“Why me?” I asked. “What about Fox?”

Sampson shook his head wearily. “She’s threatening to file a complaint against me for squeezing her leg hard when she refused to follow my lead during my interrogation. She has total disregard for rank. Even dissed Bree on the deal.”

“So things are going well between you?”

“Oh, yeah, just peachy,” he said. “Which is why you’re here.”

“For a talk?”

“I figure we rattle Parks’s cage a little. See if we can shake anything loose.”

I knew I should ask him to pull over and get a taxi home. Bree would have a fit if she found out I was out with one of her detectives and both of us were defying her direct orders. But still, it felt so good and achingly familiar to be rolling with Sampson late at night that I blocked out my promise to Bree.

We cruised through the city, heading for a saloon Neal Parks liked to frequent after eleven o’clock at night. The Parrot was a serious dive bar by DC standards; it occupied the first floor of a shabby six-story building near the Maryland state line. Parks lived on the fourth floor.

“Convenient if you’re an alcoholic,” Sampson said.

“Is he?” I said.

“No idea,” he said, parking down the street. “Sally says he sits in a booth and handles business there until the Parrot shuts down. Runs the whole thing off his phone. Cyberpimp.”

“How are we going to see the video clip of Emily McCabe?”

“I thought about just going up there to watch it for ourselves,” Sampson admitted, climbing out of the squad car. “But we risk fruit of the poisonous tree. If we can get a warrant, we don’t want that clip excluded at trial.”

Trial, I thought, getting out the other side. My own day in court was fast approaching, and yet I seemed to be doing everything I could to avoid facing the issue head-on. What was that about?

“There’s an alley exit, and the front door,” Sampson said, gesturing down the block at the neon-blue macaw flickering above the bar’s entrance.

“I’d take the back,” I said, “but I’m unarmed.”

John stopped, stooped into the car, and retrieved a small Ruger nine-millimeter, which he handed to me. “I’m coming in the back,” he said. “You go in, make him, and wait.”

I looked down at the pistol a moment, knowing this was the worst idea I’d had in weeks, but I stuck it in my waistband at the small of the back and pulled my shirt down over it.

We split up. I strolled up the street and entered the Parrot. The place was a pleasant dive doing a healthy business, considering the hour. On the jukebox beyond the two pool tables, Lenny Kravitz was singing “Are You Gonna Go My Way?” The bar itself was to my left; a row of booths lined the opposite wall.

Photos, paintings, and posters featuring parrots were everywhere, and two live African gray parrots croaked and fluttered in a large wire cage near the center of the saloon. One of the parrots climbed the cage wall using its talons and beak. As I passed it on the way to the bar, the parrot cocked its head and goggle-eyed me a moment before squawking, “Five-O! Five-O!”

How the bird knew baffles me to this day, but it just kept squawking, “Five-O!” Many eyes were on me as I stepped up to the bar. The bartender ignored me, so I looked over my shoulder. On the other side of the parrot cage, a lanky guy with short orange hair was slipping out of the third booth from the front door.

Neal Parks glanced my way.

Our eyes met.

Parks bolted.

Chapter 24

For a split second I thought he was headed straight for the back door, the alley, and Sampson. Instead, the pimp dodged right in front of me and vaulted over the bar before I could grab him.

John stormed into the room with his gun drawn and his badge up.

“Parks!” he yelled. “Stop! Police!”

Parks disappeared through the curtains to the back. Patrons began to scream and yell, and pool players dived for safety. I jumped onto and over the bar, then barreled at the bartender who’d ignored me. He looked like he was thinking of blocking my way, but I yelled, “Five-O!” and he stood aside.

Sampson came around the bar and reached the curtains first. Remembering the day he was shot, I said, “Be cool now, brother.”

He hesitated and then tore back the curtains, revealing a room with empty kegs, a walk-in freezer, and a staircase that climbed up into darkness. We went to the stairs and heard Parks running above us.

Sampson charged after him, and I charged after Sampson. We ran up a utility stairwell with cleated steel treads and steel fire doors on every floor. As we passed the third floor, a door above us opened and then slammed shut.

“Stop,” Sampson whispered.

We did. Nothing.

“He’s going for his apartment, for the computer and that video clip,” Sampson said softly, and he started to climb again.

We reached the fourth floor and opened the stairwell door. Several quick looks revealed no one in the hallway. I grabbed the sleeve of Sampson’s coat and said loudly, “His place.”

Then I let the door shut and held my finger to my lips. Sampson nodded. We stood there in the stairwell, listening. Ten seconds went by. Then twenty. I was about to concede that Parks had indeed gone to his apartment when I heard a squeak above me, and then another.

“Neal Parks?” Sampson yelled. “This is DC Metro. We’ve got you surrounded.”

We could hear him pounding up the stairs again, and we chased him and saw him climb up a ladder bolted into the wall. It gave access to a hatch, which was open. John went first, climbing up and onto the gravel roof. The bluish light cast by the Parrot’s neon sign made the shadows strange.

Sampson gestured to me to take the left flank while he went right. We flipped on Maglites and cast the beams about. There were air-conditioner compressors on the roof, eight of them. Parks was either hiding behind one of them or going for a fire escape.

We crept forward, staying parallel to each other, about eighty feet apart, using the flashlights to pierce the shadows and the darkness. We’d gone by the fifth and sixth compressors when Sampson flushed him out.

Parks exploded from behind one of the two remaining compressors and ran at a diagonal across the roof. I flipped off my light and tried to cut him off.

He was running out of roof and I was running out of time when I realized he meant to jump to the roof of the next building.

The pimp was three steps from doing just that when I managed to snag him by the collar of his jacket and shirt. I meant to haul him back and down. Instead, his momentum yanked me forward two steps.

My lower legs hit the raised roof edge hard, so hard I started to topple over, along with Parks, into the seventy feet of air that separated us from the pavement in the alleyway below.

Chapter 25

My head whipped forward and smashed into Parks’s head as my body jerked backward. Sampson had somehow gotten two handfuls of my shirt, and he pulled both me and Parks to safety.

My heart was racing, my stomach had turned sour, and I gasped for air. I’d almost fallen six stories to certain death. The pimp was equally shaken and offered no resistance when Sampson cuffed and searched him.

Parks was unarmed and without his cell phone, which was suspicious, given that Sally Sweet told Sampson that Parks operated his entire cyber-prostitution ring with it.

“Where’s your phone?” I asked, shining my flashlight in his face.

“Lost it the other day,” Parks said, blinking and lowering his head. “I was going to get a new one tomorrow.”

“Uh-huh,” Sampson said. “Why’d you run?”

“I like to run,” Parks said.

“You mean you like to run prostitutes,” I said.

“No, like, for fitness,” he said, calm and collected now.

“No, like, for hookers,” Sampson said. “You’ve got a whole stable of them.”

“Not true,” Parks said, and he laughed. “Now, who says that?”

“Vice.”

He looked up then, squinting, and said, “You’re not vice?”

“We’re homicide,” Sampson said. “You know Emily McCabe?”

Parks acted puzzled. “No, I don’t know an Emily McCabe.”

“Don’t be cute,” I said. “We can prove you know her.”

The pimp said nothing.

“We’re investigating her murder,” Sampson said.

“Her murder?” he said, seeming genuinely surprised. “She’s dead?”

“She’s dead, and you killed her,” I said. “Strangled her on-camera.”

Parks seemed thrown. His mouth hung slightly open, and he stared down at the ground, his mind whirling with questions, no doubt. How had we gotten hold of the video? How should he respond?

Sampson said, “We know you made a snuff film, Neal. We’re gonna see you fry for it.”

“No way,” he said. “I didn’t kill no one.”

“You put a rope around Emily’s neck while you were having S-and-M sex with her,” I said. “And then you strangled her to death.”

“No,” he said. “I—”

“Killed her,” Sampson said.

“No,” Parks said, struggling, and then he apparently resigned himself to the situation. “Look, okay, I know Emily, but I did not kill her, because she is not dead. That video was just a fantasy. She made it for me as a kind of going-away present.”

“Give us a break,” I said.

“It’s true,” Parks said. He went on to claim that Emily McCabe had told him she’d saved enough money to quit the business and was going to school in Florida somewhere.

“Florida somewhere?” Sampson said. “That’s the best you can do?”

Parks lost his cool then and snapped, “It’s the only thing I have. Look, I liked Emily. A lot. I would never kill her.”

“So tell us how to reach her,” I said.

“I don’t know how to reach her,” he said. “She didn’t want me to know. She wanted a clean break and an entirely new life. I respected that.”

“No phone number?” I asked.

“Lost my phone, remember?”

“I’m not buying it,” Sampson said, marching him back toward the roof hatch. “We’re taking you in, and we’ll be searching your apartment. That snuff film you made is going to send you to prison for the rest of your life.”

“No, wait,” Parks said. “I’m not lying. Emily’s alive. Somewhere.”

“Hell of a defense,” I said.

He said nothing this time. After I’d climbed down through the hatch, Sampson removed Parks’s handcuffs and ordered him at gunpoint onto the ladder. The pimp dropped down and offered no resistance when Sampson put the cuffs back on.

When we led him down the staircase, Parks said, “How about I help you and you help me here?”

Sampson grunted. “How can you help us, Neal?”

Parks licked his lips and said, “I want you to know that I could be killed for saying this, but I can tell you about real snuff films and the crazy, sick bastards that make them.”

“Uh-huh, and what good does that do us?” I asked.

Parks hesitated again but then said, “Maybe you’ll figure out what happened to those blondes that have been disappearing.”

“Like Emily McCabe?” Sampson said.

“No,” Parks said. “Like two blond lesbian bitches from Pennsylvania.”

Chapter 26

Two girls crying.

Those were the last clear sounds Gretchen Lindel had heard, and that had been hours ago.

Two girls crying, Gretchen thought, and she strained to hear more.

But through the plywood walls, the seventeen-year-old heard nothing. No voices. No floorboards creaking. Not even a jangle of chain. Or a desperate sob.

The silence made Gretchen mad beyond reason. She kicked and shook the chain that ran from her left ankle to the wall, and she glared at the little camera mounted high in the far corner, where she couldn’t reach.

“Who are you?” she screamed. “Why am I here? What do you want?”

Gretchen collapsed into sobs as she had too many times since she’d woken up in a plywood box about the size of a prison cell dressed in a cheap white flannel nightgown, lying on a new mattress still in its wrapper, and covered with thick wool army blankets.

There’d been food. A big tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken and bottles of Gatorade. A metal bucket to relieve herself in the corner where her chain would reach. And the single LED light overhead that never went off.

The constant light had made Gretchen lose track of time. As her crying subsided and she pulled the blankets up around her, she realized she had no idea how long she’d been in the box. Three days? Five? A week? Longer?

The kidnapping itself had felt like a nightmare, like something that she’d wake up from. But no matter how many times she slept in the box or how hard she tried to forget, she kept seeing the men grabbing her, kept seeing Ms. Petracek murdered.

They shot her like she was nothing.

What will they do to me?

Gretchen felt panic surge and tried to turn her thoughts to something else. She’d heard her father talk about doing that many times as a way out of pain.

She breathed deep into her stomach, held it, then exhaled slowly, seeing her father and mother in her mind, so in love and yet so apart now.

What is this doing to Dad? To Mom?

Gretchen felt sick at these questions and wanted to cry again.

He doesn’t deserve this. Neither does she. Haven’t they suffered enough, God? Haven’t they suffered enough?

She thought of her best friend forever, Susan, and her sometime boyfriend Nick. What are they thinking? Are they trying to find me? Is anyone?

Curling up into a fetal position, Gretchen tried to find strength in prayer and in her belief in the good. But the questions kept circling and elbowing their way back into her thoughts.

Why am I here? Why is this being done to me? What did I do, God, to deserve this? What if I never see Dad or Mom again?

The soft squeal of metal on metal stopped her thoughts, made her sit up and stare in fear at the crude door with the two dead bolts. It had never opened before.

The door swung inward.

The teenager’s hand flew to her mouth, and she stifled a scream.

He was football-player big and dressed in black, from his motorcycle boots to his wool cap and tinted paintball visor. There was a blinking GoPro camera mounted in a harness on his chest. But she was focused in terror on his right gloved hand, which held an ornate knife with a curved and wicked-looking blade.

“Hello, Gretchen,” he said in a strange electronic voice. “Are you ready to play a game for us?”

Chapter 27

I slipped into bed shortly after one thirty in the morning, unsure of how much of Neal Parks’s story I believed and too tired to think about it anymore.

It felt like only minutes passed between my head hitting the pillow and someone shaking my shoulder.

I came to consciousness thickly and cracked open a groggy eye to see Jannie and Ali standing by my bed, dressed for the morning jog I’d promised them. I could feel the heat of Bree’s body behind me, and not wanting to wake her, I held a finger to my lips.

They nodded and crept out of the room. I got up, feeling a little dizzy and wanting three, maybe four more hours of sleep. But these days a promise to my kids was a promise I tried to keep.

I got dressed in the closet and eased out of the room, smelling coffee brewing downstairs. I went to the kitchen, where Nana Mama, in her navy-blue nightgown and robe, was already pouring me a small cup of coffee. Jannie and Ali were tying their shoelaces.

“Bless you,” I said when she handed the cup to me.

“You fall asleep in front of the TV again?” Nana Mama asked.

I nodded and took several reviving sips of the coffee.

“I think that TV should have an automatic shutoff,” my grandmother said.

“It does,” Ali said. “Or the cable box does.”

“Let’s go,” I said, wanting to end the conversation. I set the empty cup down. “I have a new client coming this morning, and I don’t want to be late.”

We went outside. The first light of day showed in the sky, and the air was cool when we started to run. We took a route that led to Lincoln Park and back, about four miles round trip.

When I ran alone, I rarely thought, and yet I often got home to find I’d figured out one problem or another. The subconscious at work and all that. But a mindless run was impossible with Ali, especially once Jannie picked up her pace after a mile and left us in the dust.

“Dad?” Ali said, jogging beside me. “Did you know that running for more than thirty minutes promotes brain-cell regeneration?”

I glanced down at him, in wonder again that a nine-year-old, my nine-year-old, could know about brain-cell regeneration.

“Can’t say that I did,” I said, puffing along. “I mean, I know it’s good for your heart.”

“And good for your brain,” he said. “I saw a thing about it online. That’s why I told Jannie I wanted to start running with her.”

“So you could regenerate your brain cells?” I said. “C’mon, bud, you’re nine. You’re still growing brain cells and will be for a long time.”

Ali looked at me with mild indignation. “I’ll grow more by running.”

I raised my hands in surrender. “I’ll trust you on this.”

He smiled and said, “But not too much running, otherwise my brain will get too big, and my head will explode, won’t it, Dad?”

There was my nine-year-old boy.

“Dad?”

“No, your brain won’t explode from running too much.”

“You’re sure?”

“You think Jannie’s head’s going to explode?”

I glanced over and saw he was alarmed by that idea. “No one’s head is exploding from being fit,” I said as we neared the arboretum. “Next subject.”

Ali didn’t say anything until we’d reached the park, reversed direction toward home, and were jogging down South Carolina Avenue.

Then he said, “Dad, do some police in our country hate some people so much they’ll just shoot them for no reason?”

Chapter 28

That one shocked me, and I slowed to a stop, hands on my hips and sweat dripping down my nose. “Why would you say that, son?”

Ali heard the tone of my voice, looked uncertain, and said, “I saw some people on TV say that black kids get shot just ’cause they’re black and that you shot those Soneji people just because you hated that dead guy they worship.”

My stomach felt hollow. A caustic taste came up my throat and made the back of my tongue burn.

At last, I said, “Let’s start with the first part. Are you scared a police officer might shoot you because of the color of your skin?”

“Should I be scared?” Ali asked, crossing his arms. “They said it happens all the time.”

“First off, being a police officer is a very difficult job. You understand that, right?”

“I guess. Yes.”

“Second, too many black men are getting shot,” I said. “And some of them by racists. But, on the whole, I think it’s more a question of police officers who aren’t trained correctly, who don’t follow the rules and the most up-to-date methods of law enforcement.”

Rather than getting calmer, Ali became more upset and started to run away. I ran after him, stopped him, and saw he was in tears.

Before I could ask him what the matter was, he blubbered, “You don’t follow the rules, Dad. That’s what the people on TV said. They said you were out of control and represented everything wrong with the police in America today.”

That felt like a kick to the head. “Do you think that?”

Wiping at his tears, Ali sniffled. “But that’s what people are saying, Dad. Even at school.”

I put one knee down on the sidewalk and looked up at my son, who was searching my face for answers.

“I wasn’t out of control that night, Ali,” I said. “I shot those people because they were trying to shoot me.”

“But they said—”

“I know what they’ve said,” I said, trying to keep my voice from breaking. “All I can say is it’s not true, son. Your dad is not a cold-blooded killer. It was self-defense. You have to believe me. You do believe me, don’t you?”

Ali studied my face for so long I thought I’d lost him, but then he nodded and hugged me so tight that tears welled up in my eyes and love choked my throat.

“Thank you, little buddy,” I said hoarsely. “I don’t think I can do this without you watching my back.”

Chapter 29

Two hours later and sitting in my basement office, I was feeling depressed by my conversation with Ali. I suppose it’s always a blue day when your nine-year-old questions your personal and professional integrity.

I tried to get my mind off it by thinking about the things Neal Parks had told us the night before. The pimp said he’d seen a fully downloaded video from—

There was a sharp knock at the outer door to the basement. I glanced at my watch. My new client was five minutes early.

When I opened the outer door, I found a wrung-out, sandy-haired man with sad, sunken blue eyes and weathered looks that made it hard to judge his age. He was dressed in pressed jeans, a starched white shirt, and polished boat moccasins with no socks, and he wore a hammered-gold wedding ring, a Rolex watch, and a tiny gold crucifix on a chain around his neck.

“Mr. Lindel?” I said, holding out my hand.

“Alden Lindel,” he said, shaking my hand and training those sunken eyes on me. “So glad you could make time to see me, Dr. Cross.”

“Glad I could find an opening,” I said, even though he was my only appointment for the day.

I steered him toward my office. “Lindel. That’s an unusual name.”

“Not in Norway,” Lindel said.

“No, it’s just that I’ve heard it twice recently and—”

“Gretchen is my daughter, Dr. Cross,” Lindel choked out. “She goes to the same school as your son, yes?”

“Yes,” I said, seeing him new all over again. “Yes, of course she does. Ali and I and my entire family, we’ve all been praying for her safe return.”

“Thank you, Dr. Cross,” he said as his eyes reddened and he gazed toward the ground. “We need... I need...”

I’ve always found that if you ask a direct question, you get a direct answer, so I said, “How can I help, Mr. Lindel? Why are you here?”

Lindel hesitated and then looked at me while turning his palms upward. “To be honest, I’m here to see Dr. Cross the shrink because of my guilt and anxiety, and Dr. Cross the detective because of my dwindling faith in my daughter’s survival.”

I took a seat. “You do know that I’m suspended pending trial?”

“I read that,” Lindel said. “I also read that before your recent troubles, you were one of the best detectives in the country.”

“Whoever wrote that was being too kind,” I said. “And I know the FBI agents in charge of your daughter’s case. They’re top-notch.”

“When my mom bakes a cake, she says you can always use more frosting,” Lindel said. “Please say you’ll help me find Gretchen before it’s too late and...”

Tears dripped down his cheeks. “She, our daughter, our Gretchen, she’s everything to us, and now they’re torturing us with these unspeakable images.”

“I’m confused,” I said. “Who’s torturing you?”

Lindel took a tissue and wiped away his tears before reaching into his jeans pocket and coming up with a small blue flash drive in a plastic baggie.

“This was in the mailbox when I checked this morning before breakfast,” he said. “Go on, plug it in.”

Chapter 30

I took the baggie and looked at the flash drive, a Toshiba with 128 GB printed on the face.

“You didn’t give this to the FBI?” I asked, putting the baggie down and finding latex gloves.

“I was on my way here and wanted you to see it first. I... I don’t think the FBI can get to the bottom of this without you. Can you make a copy and give the original to them for me? I have to catch a plane to New York right after I leave here. On top of everything else, my mother’s in the hospital.”

Reluctantly, but curious to see what was on the drive, I nodded. With latex gloves on, I took out the drive and plugged it into my laptop. The screen flashed brightly before a video came up that I found sickeningly familiar.

A blond girl in a white nightgown ran through a dim, leafless forest with the camera operator in full pursuit. It was dusk, and when he caught her and knocked her down, you could not make out the girl’s features for the graininess.

“Please don’t,” she begged when the gloved cameraman pulled her up to her knees by her hair.

“No?” the computer-altered voice said. “Then you want it to be the last time? No more cat-and-mouse? No more fun?”

“I just want this to be over,” she whimpered, a vague shadow now in the gathering darkness on my screen.

“Okay, then,” the voice said. “You’ll get your wish.”

I saw a dark slashing motion across her neck. I heard a slick, slicing sound and a disturbing pah noise before the screen froze and that icon of the lock appeared above a link that read www.Itsoverblondie.org.co. “Tell me if it’s a fake or not,” Lindel said, crying again. “That’s all I want you to do. Stop this torture before it drives my wife and me mad.”

I didn’t have a private investigator’s license. I was suspended pending trial. I should have expressed my sympathy and turned him down flat.

But I was a father too, and I could see the turmoil the kidnapping and now this possible snuff film were churning up in him.

“You’re sure that’s Gretchen?” I asked.

“I’d know her voice anywhere,” he said, looking at me like I was his last best chance.

“I’ll do what I can,” I said.

His fists clenched, Lindel smiled through his tears and said, “Bless you, Dr. Cross. From the bottom of my heart, bless you.”

Chapter 31

FBI agent Henna Batra crossed her arms and stared furiously at me from behind the main security station at Quantico.

When I cleared security, I said, “I’m sorry, but you weren’t picking up your phone, and I needed to talk to you.”

Agent Batra didn’t answer, just pivoted on her black high-heeled pumps and marched down the hallway. I hurried to keep up. When I was abreast of her, she hissed, “Coming here like this? Are you trying to get me fired, Cross?”

“I said it was critical. And I’m obviously not on a watch list. Sidney let me right through the front gate.”

“Sidney’s known you eighteen years.”

“Well, exactly. We’re on the same team.”

“You don’t get it, Cross. You’re being tried for murder in DC. That puts your case within the Bureau’s purview.”

“Believe me, I get it. But what if analyzing this video can save Gretchen Lindel’s life? Or at least put her parents’ fears to rest?”

She squinted at me. “I’m confused. Why didn’t Lindel give this drive to the agents investigating his daughter’s disappearance?”

“He was in rough shape, hadn’t slept in days when I saw him, and he was on his way to New York. His mother’s been hospitalized.”

Batra walked a few more steps without comment and then stopped. She bit her lip, looked at the ceiling for a moment.

“Video analysis isn’t exactly my thing,” she said at last. “For that we have to go to the basement. And Dr. Cross?”

“Agent Batra?”

She studied me with cold eyes and said, “Before we go downstairs, you need to swear, in writing and in the presence of two witnesses, that you’ll never tell a soul what you see down there.”

Ten minutes later, I got in a secure elevator outside the cybercrimes unit feeling like I’d just signed a little bit of my life away. Agent Batra stepped in beside me, put a digital keycard in the lock, and hit sb2.

“That made me feel quite the criminal,” I said as the doors closed.

“Close enough these days,” Batra said.

“Want to clue me in to the reason for all the secrecy?”

“You’re a bright guy, you’ll figure it out,” Batra said as the elevator passed the first subbasement and began to slow.

I noticed a throbbing and thumping sound that got louder and more distinct when we reached the second subbasement. The elevator doors opened and we were blasted with electronic techno-pop music. It was loud. It was pulsating. It oddly made me want to dance.

The music obviously had the same effect on the guy with the flaming-red Mohawk twerking and gyrating inside the glass-walled lab directly in front of us. He wore denim shorts, a denim vest over a sleeveless black tee, and nothing else. Barefoot, and in time with the beat, he was shaking his booty, pumping both fists, and slashing the air with his Mohawk.

I broke into a smile. Batra didn’t.

She exited the elevator and crossed the hall to the lab door. I followed her, saying, “Okay, who the hell is that?”

“Keith Karl Rawlins,” she said, sounding pained. “He calls himself KK or Krazy Kat, depending on the occasion.”

Chapter 32

Special agent Batra stopped at the lab door and looked back at me in real discomfort.

I said, “He works for the Bureau? That’s why the no-disclosure?”

Batra glared at me. “Rawlins is as brilliant as they come if you want to analyze anything digital. Far better than me, as a matter of fact.”

That surprised me. I’d always thought Batra was one with the Internet. Then I realized the reason for Rawlins’s banishment to subbasement two.

“He doesn’t fit the conservative J. Edgar G-man image, does he?”

“No,” Batra said, twisting the doorknob. “KK definitely does not.”

The music was even louder inside the lab. Past benches clogged with electronic test equipment, on the far side of the room, Rawlins danced before an arced array of eight large computer screens. The screens all showed the same video: people dancing in urban streets, shaking their rear ends to the addictive beat of the music.

Batra got around in front of Rawlins and waved wildly at him.

Rawlins made his hands into pretend guns that he pointed at Batra, and then he punched a key on a control board that looked like it belonged in a recording studio. The lab went quiet. Rawlins stopped dancing.

He waved his fingers playfully at Batra and in a soft voice that reeked of New Orleans, he said, “I’ll forgive you this time for interrupting my daily Diplo fix. I was just about done regenerating my brain cells anyway.”

“My son told me about that,” I said before Batra could reply. “Exercising for brain regeneration.”

Rawlins saw me, studied me, and then smiled. He picked up a hand towel from the chair and came over to us, still smiling and patting his sweating skull on either side of the Mohawk. He had a gold hoop through his left nostril, and his earlobes featured stretched piercings. In shiny sequins across the chest of his T-shirt were the words GODDESS DANCES.

“You’re bigger in person, I must say,” Rawlins said coyly. “And your son must have read the same article. What are the odds of that, Dr. Cross?”

“I don’t know.”

“I do,” Rawlins said. “Two in one-point-six-four billion, unless you look at it from a string-theory perspective, in which case the chance of brain waves vibrating out and crossing others rises exponentially with every person who reads that article.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

“That’s a pity,” Rawlins said with a pout. “I so enjoy fiery brains and rippling brawn in a single package.”

Chapter 33

I chuckled. “You’re out of luck on both counts, Special Agent Rawlins, which is why I came to see you.”

Rawlins glanced at Batra and laughed. “No special this or agent that, Dr. Cross. It’s just KK or Krazy Kat. I’m a contractor. The Federal Bureau of Investigation could never make me a sworn agent. Am I right, Big Baby B.?”

Batra rolled her eyes, said, “We’re here to work, Kat, not wallow.”

“I think I’d be quite a badass crime fighter.” Rawlins sniffed. “Despite appearances, I’m honest to a fault and expect the same from those with whom I work. Tell me, Dr. Cross, did you murder those Soneji followers for sport?”

“No.”

“Or to right some wrong?”

“It was self-defense.”

He studied me for tics and tells but saw none. “How can I help you?”

“First, a little context.”

I gave him a synopsis of the story the cyberpimp Neal Parks had told Sampson and me. Parks claimed he had been in Newport News, Virginia, several weeks before, scoping out the military town for an expansion of his business. Partying in a strip club there, the pimp met two men in their early thirties who went by Billy Ray and Carver.

The three men hit it off and drank and snorted too much late into the night. Billy Ray, who was more a talker than Carver, told Neal Parks they were trolling for blondes to use in movies they produced for several profitable sites on the dark web. One of the most recent, and most successful, Billy Ray said, featured two young blond lesbians from Pennsylvania. He gave Parks the URL of one of the websites: www.Itsoverblondie.org.co. I dug in my pocket and came up with the Ziploc containing the Toshiba flash drive. “The same URL is featured on the video on this drive. I want to know if the video’s real or not.”

Rawlins became all business at that point. He took the bag and asked where I’d gotten the drive, and I told him about Gretchen Lindel’s father.

“He should have brought this directly to the agents on his daughter’s case,” Rawlins said, moving toward one of his workbenches.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“You’ve watched what’s on the drive?”

“If it’s real, it’s the first actual snuff film I’ve ever seen.”

“You just want to know if it’s fake?”

“He wants to know everything and anything,” Batra said. “So do I.”

Rawlins said, “You make a copy?”

“On my laptop at home,” I said.

“No crashes?”

“Worked fine.”

“I’ll check it anyway,” he said, sitting down at a computer. He donned latex gloves, got out the drive, and inserted it into a USB port.

A few moments later, I watched a scanning icon count down the minute and forty-five seconds it took to do a full inspection of the flash drive. At the end of the scan, a message appeared: No known anomaly detected.

“Well, all righty, then,” Rawlins said.

He disconnected the flash, took it to the larger control board below the eight big screens, and plugged it into a server linked to the internal FBI network.

A digital index of the drive popped up on the large center screen; it showed the icon of the single MPEG movie file. Rawlins clicked on it. There was a brilliant flash, and then the clip played — the grainy video of the hysterical blonde running through the forest with the cameraman in hot pursuit.

“What was that?” Batra asked. “That flash at the beginning there?”

“I don’t know,” Rawlins said, freezing the video.

I said, “You know, come to think of it, when I hit the icon on my laptop, it did the same thing, only my screen’s much smaller and older, so it wasn’t as bright as that.”

Rawlins grunted and gave his computer orders to list all running processes and applications. The directory opened and showed them in a stack sorted by the time each was launched, beginning with the most recent app.

“That’s what just flashed there?” Batra said with an arched eyebrow. “Porngrinder?”

Chapter 34

Rawlins laughed and said blithely, “Oh, no, Porngrinder is on me. What can I say? It’s a lonely life in the basement at times.”

“My God,” Batra said, disgusted. “The Bureau frowns on that kind of thing.”

“Have them sue me, won’t you?” Rawlins said.

“What was the flash?” Batra said.

“I don’t know. A blip, a screen hiccup. They happen, you know.”

“Or a bug in the plug-in that drives the video player?” Batra said.

Rawlins held up a finger. “A momentous occasion. Special Agent Henna B. and I might agree.”

Batra rolled her eyes. “Tell us about the video.”

I won’t bore anyone with the details of Rawlins’s technological savvy and instincts, but they were shrewd and his results conclusive. At first, he used ordinary software to try to access the video file’s so-called dark data. No luck. The video had been run through an onion system similar to the one used to create the Killingblondechicks4fun website. The dark data had been stripped away.

“Not surprising.” Rawlins sniffed. “But I’ve still got the dust rag.”

The “dust rag” was software Rawlins had designed and coded himself to raise the faintest trace of old dark and metadata. He compared the software to the Hubble Space Telescope looking for cosmic debris a thousand miles behind a comet’s long tail.

Sure enough, his screen was soon filled with fragments of code that played out in sync with the video. By focusing on the moments where the lighting was dimmest and the noise of the alleged killing most pronounced, Rawlins found evidence in the data dust that suggested an audio splice in the sound track roughly six seconds long. Those six seconds included the knife-across-the-throat slitting noise and the pah that sounded like air bursting out of a frightened and dying chest.

“She’s alive,” Rawlins said barely fifteen minutes after starting his examination. “Or at least, those weren’t the sounds of her murder.”

I sighed with relief. I wouldn’t have to give Alden Lindel or his wife more heartbreaking news. “Explain how you know. The parents will ask.”

Rawlins said, “The sound patch itself is fairly sophisticated CGA. Computer-generated audio. So someone’s had advanced training in sound effects. You’re looking for a film-school grad or someone who worked in a special-effects company out in Hollywood, not a coder.”

“Why’s that?” Batra asked.

Rawlins gave his computer a command, and the video on the center screen rewound to the beginning of the six-second splice. A second screen showed the remnants of the dark data. He pointed out a jagged line of data that almost connected top to bottom.

“That’s your digital splice,” Rawlins said. “A more adept coder would have hidden it better, sewn it up as clean as a plastic surgeon. There wouldn’t have been even a hint of a scar.”

“So this is basic sound-editing work?” I said.

Rawlins touched his Mohawk as if it were a high-fashion hairdo and said, “Three steps above butchery. And that’s all I can manage now. I have a lot to do before Goddess opens.”

I was puzzled.

“His favorite dance club,” Batra explained.

“Do you dance, Dr. Cross?” Rawlins said.

Before I could reply, my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out, saw the number.

“My son’s school,” I said. “I have to take this.”

Chapter 35

Ali Cross believed he was smarter than the average kid at Washington Latin but not brilliant, not a genius. The kids he considered supersmart were also the shyest and the most awkward. He decided within a month of starting at the charter school that brilliance was overrated. He’d take very bright, very hardworking, and very curious any day of the week.

Ali was the youngest kid in fifth grade at Latin by at least a year. With his attitude and sense of humor, he fit in with most of his older classmates. But, as his father always said, there were jerks in every crowd.

Ali met two of them shortly after the school bell rang to announce the end of classes. He had fifteen minutes before debate practice and decided to go sit outside. It was a nice sunny afternoon, not too cold.

Ali stopped on the front steps and looked toward the plaza, remembering the hooded men who’d grabbed Gretchen Lindel and shot Ms. Petracek. Rather than dwell on those violent events, he sat up on the wall at the top of the stairs and started playing a game on his phone.

He was aware of knots of kids walking past him, and he caught snatches of their conversation. Suddenly, someone grabbed him by the collar, right below his chin, and pushed as if to shove him backward off the wall. Then whoever it was yanked him forward again.

Shocked, surprised, Ali felt his stomach go sick with adrenaline and fear before he’d fully realized what had happened. George Putnam, a burly sixth-grader, still held Ali so tight by the collar, he was having trouble getting his breath. The older boy laughed at his reaction.

“Saved your life,” Putnam said. “You little turd, Cross.”

“Let go!” Ali said. “You’re choking me!”

Putnam’s buddy Coulter Tate was taller and already fighting acne. Tate leaned over, got right in Ali’s face, and gave him a crazed, zitty look.

“How’s it feel to be a killer’s son, Cross?” Tate said. “How’s it feel to have murder in the genes?”

Putnam tightened his hold, making Ali’s eyes feel like they were swelling. There was no thought, no consideration on Ali’s part after that. He just pulled back his head and then slammed it forward. His forehead connected with Tate’s nose, and he heard a distinct crunching noise.

Tate screamed and stumbled back, holding his hand to his nose, which was gushing blood.

“He broke it!” He sobbed in disbelief. “He broke my nose!”

Putnam was still holding on, looking shocked as he stared at his bleeding buddy, and Ali punched him in the throat. Putnam let go of Ali’s collar and went down on the stairs, bug-eyed and coughing, his hands to his neck.

Ali was still in a fighting stance and trembling head to toe when Mrs. Dalton, the headmistress at Washington Latin, came running out of the school.

“My God, what’s happening?” she cried.

Ali didn’t reply or move. He kept his attention on the two sixth-graders, as if daring them to get up.

“He broke my nose, Mrs. D.!” Tate said, the blood dripping between his fingers. “And the little frickin’ insane-o hit George in the throat!”

“Ali?” Mrs. Dalton said. “Why did you—”

“I’m not talking until my dad’s here,” Ali said, trying to stay calm.

“You will tell me now, young man,” she said, sounding angry and full of authority. “Right now.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Dalton,” Ali said, feeling weak as he dropped his fists and turned to face her. “Please get my dad here, or a lawyer, and then I’ll tell you exactly what happened.”

Chapter 36

Traffic was snarled as I crossed back into the district, and I wondered what Ali had gotten himself into that was so bad it deserved an immediate meeting. The headmistress wouldn’t tell me a thing.

Inching over the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, I decided to call Alden Lindel. He answered on the third ring.

“This is Alex Cross, Mr. Lindel. I’m happy to tell you that Gretchen did not die in that video. It was a fake.”

Her father made a noise partway between a cough and a cry.

“Oh, good!” He gasped. “Oh, thank God! Are you sure? How do you know?”

“Because a very talented FBI computer wizard said that the video’s audio was altered. The sounds weren’t real.”

“But it was Gretchen’s voice,” he said.“ I’d swear it.”

“I believe you, Mr. Lindel. But that wasn’t the sound of her dying. I wanted you to know. Please tell your wife.”

“Yes. Yes, right away.”

“I’ll be in touch if I hear more.”

“Well, I could still use someone to talk to, Dr. Cross,” he said. “Eliza, Gretchen’s mother, and I... we were separated before Gretchen was taken, and this has been even more of a strain. And my mother’s not well, and we’re thinking about endings.”

“I’m sorry to hear all that, Mr. Lindel. Give my office a call tomorrow. We’ll make an appointment.”

“Thank you, Dr. Cross.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, and I clicked the phone off.

Traffic was moving, finally. Fifteen minutes later I parked close to Washington Latin and hurried inside toward the waiting area outside the offices of the headmistress and the other school administrators.

From well down the hallway I could see Coulter Tate sitting on the right side of the waiting room. He held an ice pack to his face. A woman I took to be his mother had her arm around his shoulders and was whispering in his ear.

Two or three chairs away, George Putnam pressed a bag of ice to his throat. Sitting beside him was a man I figured was his father, a big dude with a wrestler’s build stuffed into a five-thousand-dollar suit. He was staring bullets across the room at Ali, who sat with his eyes closed.

“Dr. Cross?”

I looked behind me and spotted Mrs. Dalton hurrying over.

“Dr. Cross,” the headmistress said with an exasperated sigh. “Before we get to the fight, I must speak to you first about your son’s insubordinate behavior. A school like Latin—”

“Please, I’d like to speak to my son in private, right now.”

“Dr. Cross,” she said, raising her chin. “I don’t think you—”

“As far as I’m concerned, and with all due respect, I think Ali did the right thing by not talking, Mrs. Dalton. He’s a minor, but he has certain rights. Among those is his right to have a parent present during questioning.”

“That’s with the police,” she said. “I run a school, and I wish to be present when he first tells his side of things.”

“You really want to fight me on parental rights? Because you’ll waste a bunch of money on lawyers and you’ll lose.”

Mrs. Dalton was a smart woman used to getting her way, a woman who hated losing. I could see it in her eyes.

But she said, “Very well, Dr. Cross. You can use my office. Ten minutes. There are other parents and students to consider.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Dalton. I know you’re in a difficult situation, and I appreciate your handling it with such grace.”

She hesitated, but then tilted her head and gestured toward the waiting room. I walked in. When I did, Coulter Tate, the kid with the broken nose, shrank away, curled up, and whined fearfully.

“What’s gotten into you, honey?” his mother said, craning her head over her shoulder to look at me.

“He kills people, Mom,” Tate said. “He teaches his kid to kill too.”

“Shut up, Coulter,” Ali said, opening his eyes. “You are such an ass.”

“Language,” I said.

Ali looked relieved, got up, and hugged me. I looked at Mrs. Dalton and ignored the others. She led us down a hall to her office and closed the door after we went inside.

“You okay, bud?”

“My forehead hurts,” he said, and he hugged me again.

“Mrs. Dalton’s not happy,” I said. “So give me the truth, everything.”

Chapter 37

I opened the door ten minutes later and found Mrs. Dalton standing there looking flustered.

“I was about to knock,” she said.

Or you were trying to listen in, I thought, but I said, “Call in the others. They’ll want to hear Ali’s side of things.”

“Why?”

“Because those boys are lying to you. And Ali can prove it.”

Five minutes later, three kids and three parents were crammed into Mrs. Dalton’s office. None of us looked happy.

“Expect a suit for damages, bucko,” George Putnam’s father said, shaking a big finger at me. “I’m a lawyer.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “I never would have guessed.”

“Let’s be respectful, shall we?” Mrs. Dalton said. “Hear Ali’s version?”

“He’s a liar,” George Putnam said in a hoarse voice.

Ali shook his head. “You dolt, Putnam, I haven’t said anything yet.”

I put my hand on Ali’s shoulder and squeezed.

“Stick to the facts,” I said. “No name-calling. Address Mrs. Dalton.”

Ali wasn’t happy, but he nodded and told Mrs. Dalton that Putnam had grabbed him while he sat on the wall and pushed him back, hard. If he’d let go, Ali would have dropped close to six feet to the concrete and probably would have been gravely injured.

“But I didn’t let go,” Putnam said. “I pulled you back. It was a joke. Saved your life. Jeez.”

Ali said, “He did pull me back, and he did say, ‘Saved your life.’ But then Coulter stuck his face in mine and started talking trash about my dad.”

“So you head-butted him?” Tate’s mom said bitterly. “You can’t do that. They were fooling around, but you took it as a chance to really hurt someone.”

“Like father, like son,” Tate said.

“It’s true,” Putnam’s father said. “Ali didn’t have to punch George in the throat. The game was over, and he suckered my boy.”

“George was still choking me after I head-butted Coulter,” Ali said, looking Mrs. Dalton right in the eye. “I feared for my life. I swung for his face, but I hit him in the throat.”

“Feared for your life?” Putnam rasped. “Are you kidding?”

“Did you have hold of my collar when I hit you, George?” Ali said. “All the other kids have gone home, but I know someone must have seen it. They’ll back me up eventually, so tell the truth now.”

Putnam opened his mouth angrily, painfully. He hesitated, swallowed hard, and said, “I might have been holding your collar, but I never choked you.”

“Never?”

“No.”

Ali unbuttoned several buttons on his shirt and then spread the lapels. There were raised welts around his neck.

“Clear sign of attempted strangulation,” I said.

“What?” Putnam’s father cried. “That’s BS. You could have done that when you were in talking to him!”

Ali held out his phone, said, “I may be nine, but I’m not stupid. I took pictures in the bathroom an hour ago. A bunch, all time-stamped. So case closed. This was self-defense, or should we take you all to court and sue for batteries?”

I hid my smile and said, “That’s multiple counts of battery.”

“Oh,” Ali said, grinning. “Right.”

There was a long silence in the room. Finally Mrs. Dalton said, “George? Coulter? A five-day suspension.”

“Are you serious?” Coulter’s mother whined.

“No,” Putnam’s father said.

“Yes,” Mrs. Dalton said. “And if they’re ever involved with something like this again, they will be expelled from Washington Latin.”

“I’m writing the board of overseers about this,” Putnam’s father said. “Five days for them and nothing for the kid who did the damage? I don’t think so.”

“I didn’t say that,” Mrs. Dalton said, and she looked at me and then my son. “Ali, a three-day suspension.”

“What?” he cried. “It was self-defense.”

The headmistress was unmoved. “You signed a code of conduct when you enrolled in Washington Latin. That code says, among other things, ‘No fighting will be tolerated under any circumstances. None.’ Remember?”

“Yes, but—”

“No buts,” she said, looking at me. “He signed the contract. So did you, Dr. Cross, and your wife.”

“Yes, we did,” I said. “And we will abide by it.”

“Dad?”

“Case closed,” I said.

Chapter 38

The next morning, after a long jog with Jannie and an excellent shower, I went down to the kitchen with Nana Mama and poured a mug of coffee for Bree. She shuffled to the table, yawning and running on fumes. There’d been a gang fight the evening before, three dead on top of a homicide caseload that was already bulging with backlog. She hadn’t gotten home until two and now she had to turn around and go back in for a meeting with the chief at nine.

I put the coffee in front of her.

“Bless you, baby,” Bree said, smiling weakly. She sipped the coffee.

“I’ll be your barista anytime,” I said.

“So tell me about Ali.”

“Humph,” Nana Mama said, and she went back to stirring eggs for a scramble.

I took a seat across from my wife. “Well, he was like a little pro arguing his defense in there. Very logical. And it was his idea to lay a trap for them by not mentioning the neck welts to Mrs. Dalton before then.”

“A regular Perry Mason,” Nana Mama said, and she didn’t mean it in a good way. “Fighting on the school steps. That would not have happened back when I was a vice principal. Never.”

My grandmother, dressed in her quilted blue robe, still had her back to us and was whipping the eggs furiously. Bree shaped an O with her lips and tried not to smile.

“Nana,” I said, “what was Ali supposed to do? Let himself be choked to death?”

“I didn’t say that,” she said sharply, and she turned to face me. “I’m just concerned for your son’s reputation, which takes a long time to build.”

Hearing echoes of similar things she’d said to me over the years, I said, “Yes, ma’am. That’s a fact.”

“Long as it takes to build, a reputation can die in two seconds, Alex,” she said, and she made a shh sound of disgust.

“I know that, and honestly, Nana, I think Ali did the right thing, considering the circumstances, and he’s getting punished for it, so he’s learning the world can be unfair sometimes.”

“I agree,” Bree said. “In a lot of ways, Ali’s reputation will only be stronger after this. I mean, he’s nine years old, and he stood up to bullies who were twelve. Be proud of him, Nana. He did good even if it meant getting suspended.”

My grandmother looked perplexed. I got up and hugged her. “Sometimes you have to break the rules. Sometimes you have to protect yourself.”

Nana Mama held herself rigid at first, but then she melted and hugged me back. “You know I don’t like fighting.”

“I do.”

“Where’d he learn to fight like that?”

“He says from YouTube videos on Krav Maga, the Israeli fighting system.”

“Maybe his time on the Internet should be limited?”

“I agree,” I said and kissed her sweet old head.

My cell phone rang. I let go of my grandmother and answered. “Alex Cross.”

“Bernie Aaliyah, Dr. Cross,” he said gruffly. “It’s Tess. She’s barricaded herself in her bedroom. She’s got a gun, and I’m afraid she’s going to kill herself if you don’t come talk to her.”

Chapter 39

Suspended DC Metro Detective Tess Aaliyah lived in a duplex row-house walk-up near downtown on a street heading from renovation toward gentrification. Dumpsters squatted in front of three or four other row houses on the block; hammers and saws popped and whined inside them.

A circular saw squealed nearby, masking the sound of me climbing up to Tess’s front porch. Her father opened the door before I could ring the bell, and he limped out to shake my hand. Bernie Aaliyah was pale, and his face was scratched and bruised. I could see everything from fright to anger in his eyes.

“I told you I’d get Tess the help she needed, Dr. Cross,” Bernie said in a low, agitated voice. “And I tried in the best way I knew how. But she got real defensive when I suggested the evaluation. When I told her it was for her own good, just to know what’s what, she went out of her mind. She attacked me, scratched me, and hit me with something that knocked me on my ass.”

He shook his head in disbelief and sorrow. “Tess was always like her mother, always levelheaded, even as a little girl.”

“She’s still your little girl,” I said. “But she’s been wounded.”

“Talk to her. Make her see it wasn’t her fault.”

Feeling his desperation, I took a deep breath and said, “I can try. Where’s her bedroom?”

“Top of the stairs, to the right.”

“The gun?”

“Her backup. She surrendered her service pistol.”

“You know what prescriptions she’s taking?”

“What isn’t she taking? The kitchen counter’s covered with them.”

“Then I want to take a look there first.”

He led me inside, past a steep staircase and into a small modern kitchen. The counter held a blooming array of prescription drugs.

I picked up the canisters one by one and studied them. Some names I recognized. I got out my smartphone and typed names of the medicines I didn’t know into Drugs.com. I scanned all the drugs’ therapeutic effects, scribbled a few notes, and then used the site to look for possible interactions.

When I finished, I was upset, and I whispered, “Bernie? Is Tess taking all of these? Or just some?”

“She won’t tell me, and I can’t get her damn doctors on the phone.”

I grabbed the bottles and looked for the prescribers’ names. In all, five physicians had prescribed twelve different meds for Tess Aaliyah in the past six weeks.

Her father said, “What do you think?”

“If she’s taking half these drugs at the same time, it’s a wonder she hasn’t been committed for psychotic behavior already.”

“Jesus H. Christ.” Bernie moaned. “I knew it. I told my girlfriend something was wrong. But, Jesus, I... I just didn’t push it.”

“Tess is a grown woman,” I said, and I patted him on the arm. “You coming? She’ll want you at some point, but please don’t say anything unless I give you the nod. Okay?”

He didn’t like that. “I’ve done my share of talking people off ledges.”

“I bet you have, Bernie. But it’s like a surgeon operating on a close relative or a man acting as his own lawyer in court. Never a good move.”

Tess’s dad gave me a sour expression but said, “I won’t speak unless you give me the green light.”

“Let’s go upstairs, then.”

Chapter 40

The carpeted stairs made no noise as I climbed to a narrow landing. I turned right and went around the banister to Tess Aaliyah’s bedroom door. Before I could knock, I heard her in there talking.

“Rats,” Tess said in a soft voice that sounded bewildered. “I saw rats. Here? Believe it. I saw... I heard... them scratching in the walls... and her screaming. Mom screaming. Mom’s always screaming.” Tess cried quietly. “Always screaming.”

She sounded so close, I squatted down and saw a shadow that suggested she was sitting on the floor with her back to the door.

I got up, took a deep breath, knocked, and said softly, “Tess?”

“Go ’way,” she said in a whisper that I had to strain to hear.

“It’s Alex Cross,” I said, a little louder. “I wanted to see if we could talk.”

“Quiet!” she snarled. “I know my... my rights. I’m not seeing another shrink. No more rats chattering in my closets, no way.”

Before I could reply, Tess said, “Alex, you’re the big rat. One chitchat, and you start all this drama... put nasty thoughts in my dad’s head. ‘Poor Tess. She’s crazy enough now. Stick her in a hole.’”

“I’m not here to stick you in a hole.”

Tess sniggered. “Course you are.”

“I’m not. I just want to talk things over.”

For several seconds, there was no reply. The door creaked as she leaned against it. I heard her shift position on the floor.

I glanced over at her father, who stood at the head of the stairs looking like he was listening to someone drown.

“Tess?” I said. “Can I just talk, then? Would that be okay?”

“Whatever you want,” she said, returning to that bewildered voice. “Just do it nice and quiet. I hear you fine.”

I paused, trying to think ahead, trying to figure out the best way to get her to come out and turn over the—

Saa-chunk.

Chapter 41

The sound froze my thoughts. I’d heard it a thousand times in my life, maybe more, the particular noise a double-action revolver makes when a thumb cocks the hammer into firing position.

“Tess,” I said, stepping quietly to the side of the door and out of the potential line of fire. “Do you have a gun in there?”

In that off voice, she said, “Hate rats in my closets.”

I glanced at her father, motioned for him to be patient, and said, “A lot of people care about you, Tess. They’d like to help you. I’d like to come in and help you. Your dad would too.”

“No need,” Tess said wearily, sounding as if she might be falling asleep. “Ask my dad. Tessie’s an impatient girl, can’t wait for pest control to do its thing.”

“Will you do me a favor? Will you put the gun down beside you, at least?”

“No, Alex,” she whispered. “What would be the point of that?”

I decided to shake her a bit. “I asked you before if you were self-medicating. You said no. But your dad just showed me twelve different meds in your kitchen.”

After a pause, she said, “Legitimate prescriptions from licensed docs.”

“Except I don’t think the other doctors knew everything you’d been prescribed, Tess,” I said. “There are several drugs down there — antidepressants and antipsychotics — that pose a significant risk when combined. You could have a very serious drug interaction, one that could stop your heart, trigger a stroke, potentially damage your brain, wipe out your long-term memory.”

In a slow, modulated whisper, Tess said, “Hasn’t. Worked. Yet.”

The gun barked.

It startled me so badly I jumped back before feeling the horror and disbelief well in me. Tess had shot herself. She was dead, right there on the other side of that door. My knees went to rubber and I grabbed at the banister, feeling like I was going to be sick. Bernie Aaliyah roared in panic and despair, “No!”

He limped fast to her door and pounded on it. “Tess! Answer me! Tess, you answer me right now!”

In the short silence that followed, I said, “Bernie?”

Tess’s father twisted his head to look at me, enraged. “Shut up, you. I never should have called you, Cross. You’ve killed her, that’s what you’ve done!”