The People vs. Alex Cross

Chapter 75

Shortly before dark, Sampson dropped me off at the entrance to the alley that runs behind my house. With my trial starting up again in the morning, there were bound to be more journalists in front of my house.

There’d been other journalists gathered at the bottom of Carter Flint’s road when we left. After Sampson called the local sheriff to tell them we’d made a citizen’s arrest, we’d waited until Flint was in custody and the three animals mercifully euthanized before we helped in the search for the girls. We’d found enough disturbing evidence to put Flint behind bars or in a psychiatric institution for years but no trace of Gretchen Lindel or Delilah Franks or the four other missing women.

I used the back gate to our yard, happy for the darkness, and went in the side door. My dad and Jannie were watching a tape of her race at Hopkins. Bree was in the kitchen with Nana Mama.

“How was fishing?” my dad said.

Before I could answer, Bree called archly, “Yes, how was fishing?”

I gave my dad a chagrined look and walked to the kitchen. “You know?”

She crossed her arms. “I know everything. What were you thinking, going up there and just barging in like that?”

“That was John’s call on his own time. I just tagged along.”

She really wasn’t happy. “You said you’d be straight with me.”

I lowered my voice, said, “Straight with you? Okay, it was bad. The worst animal cruelty I’ve ever seen. I feel like I’ve been dipped in a jar of creepiness, but we stopped more animals from being tortured by that piece of shit.”

Bree struggled, her eyes searching mine, and then threw up her hands. “Go take a shower.”

Turning from the stove, Nana Mama said, “Dinner in half an hour.”

“Smells good. What is it?”

“It’s a secret.”

“I’ll be right back down,” I said. I leaned over Bree’s cold shoulder and kissed her on the cheek.

“There’s something on the table in the hall for you, Alex,” my grandmother called after me as I left the room.

In the front hall I spotted a small U.S. Postal Service mailer addressed to Dr. Cross. No return address. I opened it to find the same kind of flash drive that the fake Alden Lindel had shown me. It was inside a plastic sleeve.

“You might want to see this,” I said, waving the envelope at Bree.

We went down to my basement office. Bree put on latex gloves and plugged the drive in. A few moments later, a QuickTime App launched and showed a low-light video of a handcuffed, barefoot woman in a tattered white nightgown. She had a white hood over her head and was being led to a mossy stone wall by two guys dressed in black from shoes to hoods.

When they reached the wall, one of the men spun her around. The other yanked off the hood, revealing a gagged blond teen.

I felt sick, said, “Gretchen Lindel.”

They took off the gag. The camera pulled back to show three men about fifty feet from Gretchen. They were all hooded, all dressed in black, and all carrying AR rifles.

“Ready,” the cameraman said.

The three men shouldered their rifles.

I expected Gretchen to go to her knees and beg for mercy.

But instead, she stood tall against the stone wall and stuck her chin out at the firing squad.

“Go ahead!” she yelled at them. “I’m not afraid. You can do anything you want and I am not afraid of any of you!”

“Aim,” the cameraman said.

“You won’t do it!” Gretchen screamed. “You kill me, you don’t get to play your games anymore. You kill me—”

“Fire!”

The guns went off. In the low light, orange flames shot out of their muzzles. By the sparks the ricochets threw, the bullets hit stone inches around her head.

It broke Gretchen, who went to her knees, shaking in terror.

“Don’t,” she wept. “Don’t.”

Then the screen froze, and I heard the voice of the fake Alden Lindel say, “Next time, it’s for real, Dr. Cross. Next time every blond bitch, including little Gretchen, dies. And forget about finding me before then. I exist in the digital void, invisible, ten steps ahead of you and the FBI.”

The video ended with that same brilliant flash I’d seen the first time I’d plugged in one of his thumb drives.

“He’s definitely part of the Killingblondechicks conspiracy,” I said, thinking about Flint’s insistence that someone had hijacked his computer.

Then I thought about the fact that the fake Alden Lindel had mailed the flash drive to me rather than bringing it in person.

“He knew I’d figured him out,” I said.

How? That flash at the end of the videos kept playing in my mind until I formed a very strong suspicion.

“I think there’s a good chance he’s bugged my computer somehow,” I told Bree. “And maybe the FBI’s. That would keep him ten steps ahead of us, wouldn’t it?”

Chapter 76

When I finally got in the shower, I was no longer merely suspicious but convinced my computer had been compromised by the fake Alden Lindel. I’d called Rawlins and Batra at the FBI to alert them, but neither of them picked up the phone. I left them messages saying that I believed their system was at risk as well, and I hoped they’d call sooner rather than later.

Under the hot water, I felt sickened again at what Flint had done to those animals and at the fact that he claimed there were tens of thousands of subscribers to the websites he sold his footage to. Was that true? What possible pleasure could someone find in innocent animals suffering?

It was so beyond me that I got angry. That anger only deepened when I considered my inability to make headway in the hunt for the missing blondes, especially Gretchen Lindel. What a brave thing she’d done, standing up to those men like that, defying them.

When at last I turned my thoughts to the trial, I got angrier still, and then depressed.

Two eyewitnesses had testified that I’d shot three people without just cause. There were videos of the shootings and no sign of computer-generated imaging or anything to suggest I was being framed.

The weight of those cold, hard facts kept growing as I showered myself into a darker mood. A conspiracy had been hatched and directed at me. The conspiracy was working. The gears of justice were grinding, and I could see no path out.

I got dressed and went downstairs in a black cloud.

“Doesn’t it’s-a-secret smell incredible?” Bree said when I came back into the kitchen.

Distracted, I nodded.

Out in the great room, my dad chuckled. “I think I love it’sa-secret.”

“You will,” Nana Mama said. “Where’s that Ali?”

“Where he’s been the past four days,” Jannie said with a roll of her eyes. “Up in Dad’s old office in the attic with the door shut.”

“He’s still working on his Houdini paper?” I said. “I’ll go get him.”

“Let me,” my dad said, coming into the kitchen. “Give me some time to bond with my grandkiddo.”

Drummond disappeared. I helped Bree set the table, wondering how many more times we’d get to do this simple chore together. I opened a bottle of white wine and poured myself a generous glass.

Bree was watching me.

“One healthy one,” I said.

“You deserve two healthy ones.”

“Dinner’s on,” Nana Mama said, bringing a big iron skillet with a lid to the table. She set it on a lazy Susan. “Rice is coming. Where’s that Ali, now?”

Before I could reply, she left the kitchen and went to the bottom of the stairs. “Dinner, Ali! You don’t want dinner cold, you better come on down.”

“Two minutes,” my dad called. “He’s showing me something.”

My grandmother came back, muttering under her breath. She’d always been a stickler for us being at the table when she was ready to serve, and she had a sour expression on her face when she brought a big bowl of steaming jasmine rice in and sat down.

“Let’s say grace,” she said. “We don’t have to wait.”

When we were done thanking God for the meal, Nana Mama lifted the lid on the skillet. The smells that wafted up made me close my eyes and smile.

My grandmother said, “Tiger shrimp in fresh tomatoes, onions, garlic, and it’s-a-secret.”

“Mmm, Nana,” Jannie said after taking her first bite. “What is that?”

“That’s the secret,” she said, smiling. “Good, isn’t it, Alex?”

“Amazing,” I said, but my mind was elsewhere.

“You don’t sound very amazed,” Nana Mama said.

I set my fork down. “It’s delicious, Nana, really, but I think we all need to talk about what life will look like if I’m sent to prison.”

Nana Mama’s face fell. Bree grew distant. Jannie’s eyes welled with tears, and she said, “I don’t want to think about that, Dad. I—”

Ali came running into the kitchen. “Dad, you won’t believe it!”

My grandmother said, “Now is not a good time, Ali.”

My son stopped short. “But I—”

“Not now, Ali!” Jannie shouted, and she broke down in tears.

My father came in behind Ali and said to me, “You better listen to him, son.”

Chapter 77

Looking weak but determined, Judge Larch rapped her gavel and called the court to order at nine the next morning. Bree and my dad sat behind me. I’d been up until three a.m., had slept fitfully, and was feeling fuzzy and on edge from two cups of high-test Brazilian coffee.

Larch stared down through her thick lenses and said in a restrained voice, “Ms. Marley, have your analysts examined the videos?”

Looking chagrined, Anita said, “They agreed that they have not been tampered with digitally. The defense has no further objection to the videos.”

The judge seemed disappointed. Assistant U.S. attorney Nathan Wills was stone-faced but nodding his head and jiggling his knee, probably already working on his closing arguments in his mind.

“Mr. Wills?” Larch said.

“A moment, Your Honor,” the prosecutor said, then he leaned over to his assistant, Athena Carlisle, and whispered something in her ear.

Carlisle drew back with a startled expression and shook her head emphatically. Their conversation got heated, and then Wills stood up.

He glanced at his scowling assistant and threw back his shoulders, which thrust his belly forward against his starched white shirt.

“The People rest, Your Honor.”

That surprised me and it didn’t. According to the witness list Wills and Carlisle had provided, there were six or seven more people slated to appear, mostly to testify about ballistics and other basic crime scene evidence. But why bother when the videos were legitimate?

“Ms. Marley,” the judge said. “You’re up.”

Anita had evidently been half expecting the prosecution to rest as well, because without hesitation, she said, “Defense calls Kimiko Binx for cross.”

Binx came forward wearing black slacks, black pumps, a black blouse with a high collar, and costume pearls. I got the distinct feeling she was more concerned about her appearance than about facing the formidable Anita Marley.

“You’re still under oath, Ms. Binx,” Judge Larch said.

The web designer nodded and sat down with composure and poise.

Anita said, “Ms. Binx, did you alert Claude Watkins that you were on your way the day of the shootings? Call to tell him you were coming to the factory with my client?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

Naomi handed Anita a plastic evidence bag. Anita took it over to Binx.

“Recognize this?” Anita said.

Binx frowned and took the bag, saw what it was. “It’s a SPOT.”

Anita looked to the jury. “A SPOT is a satellite personal tracker, a GPS device that tracks the wearer. Runners like Ms. Binx use them to plot their workout routes, isn’t that correct?”

Binx nodded. “And in cases of emergency, you can send an SOS signal.”

“There’s also a button that allows you to send a prepared text to people you list on the SPOT website, correct?”

“Um, I guess.”

“Actually, we looked at your account with SPOT, Ms. Binx,” Anita said. “On the day of the shootings, from your apartment and twenty minutes before you arrived at the factory, you pressed that button and sent a text to Claude Watkins that read ‘Game on.’”

“I don’t remember that,” Binx said, pushing back her hair. “And what does it matter?”

Anita smiled and said, “It shows premeditation, Ms. Binx.”

Chapter 78

Binx’s face fell, but she said, “Premeditation of what? Performance art?”

Anita did not answer. Instead, she said, “As I understand it, you were taken into custody after the shootings. Is that correct?”

“They let me go after they figured out the truth.”

“But you were booked, yes? Fingerprints. Cheek swabs. Photographed for your mug shot.”

“It was humiliating,” the witness said coldly. “I’d done nothing wrong.”

Anita returned to the defense table. Naomi handed her several thin files and a large sealed plastic bag. Anita handed one of the files to Wills and then went to the bench.

“The defense would like to introduce exhibits A, B, C, and D,” she said, handing Judge Larch a file. “Exhibit A includes chain-of-evidence documentation for cheek swabs taken from Ms. Binx by DC Metro Police shortly after the shootings. Exhibit B documents the FBI’s chain of evidence following cheek swabs taken two days later from my client upon his arrest. Exhibits C and D include the results of tests of those swab samples that the defense requested from the FBI lab.”

“Genetic analysis?” Judge Larch said.

“Your Honor,” Wills said, rising. “This is the first we’ve heard of any swabs or lab analysis.”

“Not true,” Anita said. “My assistant found reference to the swabs in the materials you sent us during discovery, Mr. Wills. And no, Your Honor, we did not do genetic analysis. We had tests done on the saliva, not the cheek cells used for DNA testing.”

“I’ll admit the files,” Larch said.

“Your Honor,” Wills said.

The judge fixed the prosecutor with a withering stare, and I realized it was well past her usual time to recess for a puff or two. Wills was swimming in very dangerous waters.

“The reports are in, Mr. Wills,” Larch said. “Ms. Marley?”

Anita brought a copy over to Binx, handed it to the witness. “Can you look at page four of Dr. Cross’s saliva-test results, third line of the summary?”

Carlisle and Wills were frantically turning the pages of the report. Judge Larch was already studying her copy. Binx glanced up sharply at Anita.

“Can you read it out loud, please?” my attorney said.

Binx twisted uncomfortably, looking as if a lasso had been looped over her head and cinched snug beneath her rib cage.

In a dull monotone, she read, “‘Saliva tests detected the presence of methylenedioxymethamphetamine, MDMA, a hallucinatory drug also known as molly or ecstasy.’”

Chapter 79

Ecstasy. Molly.

I flashed back to that weird giddy state I was in when I entered the factory and how I’d screamed in an uncontrollable rage that I was going to kill every Soneji in sight. No wonder my emotions had been on a roller-coaster ride that entire day. No wonder I’d felt like hell for days afterward.

Anita pivoted from Binx to the jury and said, “MDMA. A euphoric, mind-altering drug. A drug that doctors say leaves the body at a fairly predictable rate based on dosage. Ms. Binx, what does line four of the summary say?”

Binx was clearly uncomfortable now but read, “‘Further tests indicate dosage of one hundred and forty milligrams or more of MDMA introduced to subject forty-two to forty-eight hours prior to the gathering of samples.’”

Anita said, “One hundred and forty milligrams of ecstasy taken forty-two to forty-eight hours before the saliva samples were taken. That is a six-hour time span that, if I’m not mistaken, includes the two hours prior to the shootings when you were with Dr. Cross, Ms. Binx.”

I expected Wills to object. His assistant, Athena Carlisle, obviously expected the same thing because she glanced at her boss. When she saw he wasn’t moving, she stood up.

Carlisle said, “Your Honor, is Ms. Marley honestly laying the foundation for an insanity plea? Saying Dr. Cross was out of his mind at the time of the shooting because of ecstasy?”

“We are not, Your Honor,” Anita said hotly. “Dr. Cross is one of the sanest people I’ve ever known. I’m just setting the context for what Dr. Cross did or did not see that day.”

“Objection,” Wills said, standing beside his assistant. “Who’s testifying here, Ms. Marley or Ms. Binx?”

“Ms. Binx,” Anita said, and she returned to the witness box. “Can you look to page five of the report, the results of tests done on saliva samples taken from you several hours after the shootings? Lines three and four?”

Binx lowered her head and then shook it. “That’s not true.”

“The FBI says it is indeed true,” Anita said, and she looked to her own copy of the files. “Line four, quote, ‘Further tests indicate a dosage of a hundred and nineteen milligrams introduced to bloodstream four to six hours prior to the gathering of sample.’”

Binx said nothing.

“Did you ingest ecstasy earlier on the day of the shootings?” Anita asked.

Binx looked around warily. “That would be illegal, wouldn’t it?”

“Answer the question.”

Binx hesitated for several moments before straightening up in her chair and saying, “I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me.”

That set off a hubbub in the courtroom. Larch gaveled for quiet.

Amused, Anita said, “You’re invoking the Fifth Amendment for taking ecstasy?”

“I didn’t say that,” Binx said.

“You kind of did.”

“Objection!” Carlisle cried.

“Sustained,” Larch said. “The jury will ignore that.”

Anita showed no reaction. “Ms. Binx, the morning of the shootings, after you came back from your run, do you remember tripping in your apartment and Dr. Cross catching you before you could fall?”

She hesitated, frowned. “No.”

“Yes, you tripped over an electrical cord. When Dr. Cross caught you, you put a piece of clear adhesive tape on the underside of his forearm, didn’t you?”

“Objection,” Wills said wearily. “Where is the foundation for this?”

Anita said, “Your Honor, Dr. Cross and his wife, DC chief of detectives Bree Stone, will testify that they found a piece of tape on the underside of Dr. Cross’s right forearm in the hours after the shootings. We believe that the ecstasy was on that tape in a gel or powdered form and that it was absorbed into Dr. Cross’s bloodstream transdermally, through the skin.”

“Where is this tainted tape?” the prosecutor said. “Render the body, Counselor.”

Anita ignored him, said to the judge, “Neither Dr. Cross nor Chief Stone thought much of it at the time, and they threw the tape out at GW Medical Center.”

Wills shook his head even more wearily. “Move to strike everything Ms. Marley has said about this phantom piece of tape, Your Honor.”

“So moved,” Larch said.

“Your Honor—” Anita started.

“No tape, no talk about tape,” the judge said sharply.

Anita sighed, said, “Ms. Binx, did you dose Dr. Cross with ecstasy?”

Binx blinked, chewed on her lip, glanced at Wills, and then said again, “I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me.”

Chapter 80

When Judge Larch called for lunch recess and left the courtroom slowly, the prosecutors weren’t looking quite as confident as they had earlier.

Anita had asked Binx several more questions about the ecstasy, including how it was that she had been given the perfect dose of MDMA for her weight and how it was that I was given the perfect dose for mine.

Binx had replied to every question about the drug by taking the Fifth.

“Tripping on ecstasy doesn’t get your client off,” Wills said to Anita as she packed away some files.

“No?” she said. “Fortunately, a jury gets to make that decision.”

“No tainted tape, no causality. Even you can see that.”

Anita gave him a blank expression. “Save it for your close.”

Athena Carlisle said, “Given the videos, are you open to talking plea bargain? Dr. Cross might get out in time to meet his great-grandkids.”

Anita glanced at me. I shook my head.

Carlisle puffed her cheeks, then blew out air. “We tried.”

“Suit yourself,” Wills said, and he chuckled as he left. “But I hear it’s hell for an ex-cop in prison.”

Naomi, Bree, my dad, and I ate takeout pulled-pork sandwiches in a conference room. Even though Anita had scored big points with her cross-examination, we were a somber, focused bunch.

For the first time in a week I felt jurors five and eleven leaning a bit my way, or at least developing some skepticism regarding the prosecution’s case. But Wills had been right. The ecstasy might be a mitigating factor, but it wouldn’t be enough to acquit me of two murders and an attempted murder.

We were back in court with two minutes to spare. Anita was already there.

“We good?” I asked.

She leaned over to me, murmured, “Pray for a knockout.”

“And David slew Goliath,” I said before the bailiff called, “All rise.”

Judge Larch looked considerably less agitated when she retook the bench and called the court to order.

“Ms. Marley,” Larch said, “do you wish to cross-examine Mr. Watkins now, or does the defense have its own witnesses in mind?”

“Defense witness, Your Honor,” Anita said. “We call Ali Cross to the stand.”

I twisted in my seat in time to see Ali enter the courtroom holding my dad’s hand with Jannie and Nana Mama behind them. My boy was in his Sunday best: gray pants, an ironed white shirt, and a paisley bow tie. Juror eleven smiled seeing him.

At the bar, Nana Mama whispered something in her great-grandson’s ear, and he nodded. Ali did not look at me or Anita before pushing open the gate and walking confidently to the witness stand.

Wills said, “Your Honor, the defense gave us no notice of this witness.”

“Ali is Dr. Cross’s son, Your Honor,” Anita said.

Judge Larch looked skeptical. “And he has business before this court?”

“Yes, Your Honor, he has a few things to say.”

The judge peered over at Ali, who was standing in the witness box now.

“How old are you, Ali?”

“Nine, but I’m in fifth grade already.”

“Where do you go to school?”

“Washington Latin.”

Larch smiled. “Good for you. Swear him in.”

Afterward, the bailiff had to get pads for the witness chair so Ali could sit higher and be seen easier by the jury.

Once he’d settled in, Anita said, “Ali, do you normally do what your father tells you to do? By that I mean, when he gives you a direct order, do you obey it?”

“Yes, ma’am. I try.”

“But you defied one of his direct orders recently, didn’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did.”

“Objection,” Wills said. “Your Honor, where is the relevance of this?”

Anita looked at him, said, “The Court is about to find out.”

“Get to it, Ms. Marley,” Larch said.

“What did you do that your father didn’t want you to do?” Anita said.

Ali said, “My dad told me not to look at the videos of the shootings in that factory, but I secretly looked at them on YouTube.”

“Once?”

“No, like a hundred and seventy times.”

That provoked some nervous laughter, and I could tell juror five, the retired engineer with the hunched back, did not like the idea of a nine-year-old boy looking at those videos even once, let alone one hundred and seventy times.

“Why did you watch it so many times?” Anita said.

“To figure out where the guns went so Dad wouldn’t go to prison.”

Anita glanced over at Wills and then at the jury. “Did you figure out where the guns went?”

“I think so.”

“Objection,” Athena Carlisle said. “Your Honor, we’ve been through this. Real experts have looked at the videos and found nothing wrong with them. We’re expected to believe a nine-year-old discovered something that they didn’t?”

“Ms. Marley?” Judge Larch said.

“Let the boy speak, Your Honor,” Anita said in a reasonable tone. “Echoing what you said when you allowed the videos to be introduced, the prosecution is free to rebut if Ali is wrong.”

The judge adjusted her glasses and then looked over at Ali. “Did you really figure it out?”

“I think so,” he said.

“Let’s hear it.”

Naomi put the videos up on the screen and gave Ali a remote control. Stopping the three videos in strategic places in much the same way the prosecution had made its case against me, Ali was able to show the jury how the lighting changed in the videos, how it grew slightly dimmer before each victim appeared and then brightened considerably just before I shot.

“What do you think is happening there with the lighting?” Anita said.

Ali said, “Whoever was controlling the spotlights dimmed them just before Mrs. Winslow, Mr. Watkins, and Mr. Diggs stepped into view. It’s hard to see them in that weaker light, but they’re there, and then the spotlights are boosted and you see the empty hands just as my father shoots.”

“Okay,” Anita said. “So what?”

“That’s what I kept thinking,” Ali said. “So what?”

“Until?”

“Oh, until I read the autopsy reports.”

Chapter 81

Judge Larch whirled her chair around and glared at me through those Coke-bottle lenses.

“You let a nine-year-old read autopsy reports, Dr. Cross?”

“I wasn’t supposed to, Judge,” Ali said, twisting in his chair to address her. “But I did it anyway.”

Larch looked away from me, squinted at my boy, and said, “You on the road to criminality, son?”

Ali smiled nervously. “No, ma’am. Uh, Your Honor.”

“No, I know you’re not,” Larch said, softer, and her expression eased toward amused resignation. “Go ahead.”

Ali testified that he’d defied Bree and me and dug out the autopsy reports on Virginia Winslow and Leonard Diggs, looking for something odd about the gun hands of the three victims.

“Did you find something odd?” Anita asked.

“Yes,” Ali said.

“Gunpowder residue?”

He shook his head. “They had sticky stuff on their palms.”

“Adhesive glue?”

“Yes, like from tape. And there was also, like, some silicone.”

“Is there an explanation for the glue or silicone in the report?”

“No.”

“Can you explain why it was there?”

My son sat up straighter. “I think I can explain why, but not exactly how. That’s like physics, and I haven’t studied that yet. Maybe next year.”

The jury members started laughing. Anita smiled, letting the moment last, then said, “Why was the glue and silicone there?”

“Well, if you think about it, because of this,” he said, running the videos back and stopping them. “See the three spotlights in the middle feed? And to the right at the bottom of the right spotlight there’s a pinpoint blue light? That’s where I almost had it figured out. But like I said, the rest is physics that I don’t get.”

Anita smiled. “Thank you, Ali. Your Honor, if it please the Court, I’d like to call a second witness who can explain more clearly than Ali can what the pinpoint blue light, the glue, the silicone, and the dimming and brightening mean. Mr. Wills can cross-examine them both afterwards.”

“Any objection, Mr. Wills?”

Wills and Carlisle conferred. Wills looked irritated when he turned from his assistant and said, “Be my guest, Counselor. Take us on a wild-goose chase.”

“The defense calls Keith Karl Rawlins,” Anita said.

Krazy Kat came in wearing a fine blue Italian suit, black loafers buffed to a high shine, and a coral-pink shirt open at the collar. His Mohawk was down, dyed black, slicked over to the left side of his head, and tucked behind his ear.

As he walked past Ali, who was leaving the stand, Rawlins nodded and winked at him. Wills and Carlisle acted like someone had brought a jester into court, but they didn’t know what to do about it yet.

After he was sworn in, Anita said, “Dr. Rawlins, can you describe your academic training and current position?”

Rawlins said, “I have dual PhDs from Stanford, one in physics, the other in electrical engineering. I’m working on my doctorate in computer science at MIT, and I am currently employed as an independent contractor by the Cyber Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Wills and Carlisle jumped to their feet.

“Objection,” Wills said. “No one at the Bureau informed the prosecution this witness was testifying.”

Carlisle said, “Your Honor, agents are required to notify the U.S. Attorney’s Office that—”

“I am not a special agent, and I’m not even an employee,” Rawlins said. “As such, I am not obligated to notify the FBI or the U.S. Attorney’s Office. I came at the request of a very bright young man who sought me out at my home during my free time and presented his rather brilliant theory of the videos. I do not speak for the government, only for myself, as a citizen compelled to tell the truth.”

“Your Honor, we still object to—”

“Asked and answered, Mr. Wills,” Judge Larch said.

Both prosecutors looked like they’d swallowed worms, but they sat.

Anita said, “What kind of work do you do for the FBI, Dr. Rawlins?”

“It’s classified, so I can’t give you specifics. But you could say I help the Bureau on the techno side of things.”

“Physics involved?”

“Sometimes.”

“Is physics involved here — with the video, I mean?”

“Yes,” he said. “Basic physics. Wave theory.”

Chapter 82

Anita glanced at the jury. A few, including juror five, were attentive. The eyes of the rest, including juror eleven’s, the PR executive, appeared glazed over by this turn in the trial. Physics? Wave theory?

But Anita had foreseen this response. She looked to Naomi and nodded.

As my niece got up and left the courtroom, my attorney said, “Dr. Rawlins, let’s keep it very basic, shall we?”

Rawlins shrugged and looked to the jury. “All you really need to know is that light travels in waves, just like in the ocean. When the waves from different light sources collide, they’re both changed, just like waves on the ocean coming from different directions and crashing into one another.”

Naomi came back into the courtroom pushing a cart loaded with several cardboard boxes and a small spotlight.

“Keep that in mind,” Rawlins said, getting up from the witness stand. “Waves colliding on the ocean. With the Court’s permission?”

“Granted,” Larch said. “I always liked show-and-tell.”

“I was a big fan too,” Rawlins said.

He went to Naomi, took the spotlight, and set it up on a tripod.

“Judge, can I use an assistant?” Rawlins said.

Larch waved her hand, and the FBI contractor called Ali from the audience.

Rawlins got a manila envelope from the cart, drew out something he kept hidden, and put it in Ali’s palm. When my son opened his hand, you had to look closely to see what seemed to be one of those protective films people put on cell phone screens. Thin, translucent, and rectangular, it was affixed to Ali’s palm and went up to the first joints of his fingers.

“What is that, exactly?” Judge Larch asked, peering over the bench.

“A piece of medium,” Rawlins said. “A polymer that includes silicone. On the medium itself, there is an encoding of a light field captured in the form of an interference pattern. Remember the waves crashing? If you can imagine looking down at the sea crashing around rocks and then taking a three-dimensional picture of it and freezing that moment, you’re on the right track.”

“Okay?” Judge Larch said.

Rawlins had Ali stand with his left shoulder to the bench, facing the jury box. Then he positioned the spotlight at an angle to Ali.

Anita said, “Can we have the courtroom lights dimmed?”

Larch nodded, and the bailiff dimmed the lights until Rawlins, who was holding a small light meter in his hand, said, “Stop.”

You could still see Rawlins and Ali and everyone else in the windowless courtroom, but it was like looking at them in a grainy photograph. Then Naomi hit a switch. The spotlight beam found Ali, who put on sunglasses.

Every one of the jurors was sitting forward, watching intently. Juror five rested his chin on his hands, which were folded on the curve of his cane handle.

Rawlins said, “The coding on the medium, that snapshot of light waves crashing, is done with lasers, tiny intense light beams that are of a specific high-wave frequency.”

He came over in front of the jury, brushed back his strip of lank black hair, and said, “The interesting thing about this three-dimensional coding is that we can see the snapshot of the waves crashing around the rock only if it’s lit by lasers tuned to the same exact wave frequency as the ones used to encode the image in the first place.”

“That went right over my head,” Judge Larch said.

“It’s one of those things better seen anyway,” Anita said.

She moved in front of the bench and faced Ali’s left side. Rawlins stood over by the bailiff’s desk facing Ali’s left side at a forty-five-degree angle.

Naomi killed the spotlight. We were all cast back into that dim, grainy vision of the courtroom. Three hair-thin, gray-blue laser beams flipped on, one held by Anita, one by Rawlins, and the last by Naomi. The beams were easy to see at their sources, but the farther the streams got from the lasers, the harder it was to make out the beam as it passed through the gloom.

But not so the dull blue dots at the end of each laser beam. The three dots danced over Ali’s side and arm before finding his outstretched palm.

“Get it bull’s-eye, now,” Rawlins said. “Exact spot.”

The blue dots quivered and squiggled to a meeting dead center of the encoded medium affixed to Ali’s empty hand.

Gasps went up in the courtroom.

“Son of a bitch!” Wills said, standing in disbelief.

Even I couldn’t believe it. But there it was.

My nine-year-old son’s hand looked like it was wrapped around the pale blue holographic image of a nickel-plated.357 Colt Python revolver.

Chapter 83

Naomi switched on the spotlight. The gun vanished from Ali’s hand. He was grinning wildly.

Rawlins said, “The gun disappeared because the waves of the spotlight came crashing down and drowned the waves of the laser beam so they could no longer reach the code in Ali’s hand.”

Naomi killed the spotlight. The hologram of the gun reappeared in Ali’s hand, provoking another round of murmurs, and many in the jury box shook their heads in wonder. Even juror five seemed impressed.

Rawlins then showed the court what the hologram looked like through a video camera set to black-and-white and adjusted to take in a specific amount of light. In the dimmed courtroom, you could see the hologram of the pistol clearly, but through the camera lens and on the screen, there was only a gray wash in Ali’s palm. The spotlight beam came on, and even the gray wash was gone from the image on the courtroom screen.

“Your Honor,” Anita said.

“One second, Counselor,” Judge Larch said. She stood up behind the bench and gazed down at Ali. “How did you figure this out, young man?”

Ali took off the sunglasses and said, “Um, when I couldn’t see anything from just looking at the videos, I figured I had to think about it in another way.”

Ali explained that he’d stopped watching the videos and started thinking how a gun could be there and yet not be there. He thought for almost a day before he remembered the holograms he’d seen on some of the rides in Disney World, and he started reading about holograms on the Internet.

“There was stuff about the photographic medium being clear and silicone-based, and the wave frequency of the lasers being the key. And I remembered the glue and silicone on the victims’ hands from the autopsy report and thought maybe the glue could have been to hold the film in place. But Dr. Rawlins figured it all out for real.”

“Just the details, no more,” Rawlins said with a bow toward Ali. “The kid had it nailed before he rang my bell.”

“Where did the film go?” Larch said.

Ali said, “I think after the shootings, after my dad went out to call for backup, someone stripped the holographic film from the victims’ hands and left with the cameraman who shot the video.”

“Objection,” Wills said. “This entire exercise is a clever and, I must admit, very creative stunt, but there’s nothing here that’s concrete. No holographic film has been introduced into evidence, so no testimony about holographic film should be allowed. Move to strike this entire line of questioning.”

“There’s evidence,” Ali said hotly. “That tiny blue light I showed you. Someone had the laser on by mistake for four point seven seconds. And the silicone? And the glue? Were you even listening?”

Wills shot my son a contemptuous glance but didn’t answer.

Anita said, “Your Honor, the defense has given a plausible explanation for the apparent absence of the guns in the videos and for the glue residue and silicone found on the victims’ palms. Let the jury decide.”

For several long moments, the judge showed no reaction and made no response. She studied the top of the bench so long, I figured she was having some kind of fit. At last she said, “Overruled, Mr. Wills.”

“Judge Larch—”

“I said overruled, Mr. Wills. We’ll let the ladies and gentlemen of the jury decide which explanation they believe. Ms. Marley?”

“Move to dismiss.”

“Denied.”

“Move to suppress the testimony of Kimiko Binx and Claude Watkins.”

“Denied.”

Anita called Watkins back to the stand for his cross-examination, and he steadfastly maintained he’d had no holographic film on his hands at any time in his entire life.

“And yet glue and silicone were found on your hands after you were shot.”

Watkins snorted. “I’m a sculptor, and who knows what was on that factory floor to begin with.”

“But you wanted your encounter with Dr. Cross to be recorded. Were you trying to provoke him into shooting with the holograms?”

“I repeat, no holograms,” Watkins said firmly. “And, sure, I wanted to film him. I wanted to see how he’d handle himself, whether he’d revert to the mean of police behavior and go violent. But no one expected to get shot. Least of all me.”

“Do you hate Dr. Cross?”

“I hate the violence he stands for.”

“Enough to frame him?”

“Not enough to take a bullet in the guts and through the spine,” Watkins said. “That’s a fact. No one would wish this on themselves no matter how much they hated someone.”

“No further questions,” Anita said.

When Watkins had wheeled through the gate, Judge Larch said, “Ms. Marley?”

Anita glanced at me. I nodded.

She said, “The defense rests, Your Honor.”

Chapter 84

Any court buff will tell you that a quick verdict favors the prosecution. So after the jury heard closing arguments, received instructions, and were sequestered for deliberations, we treated every minute without word as a minor miracle. Hours passed. Then a day.

I tried not to think about the verdict but found that impossible. My case had dominated local news and was featured on national and cable news coverage. The talking heads babbled about Ali’s holographic demonstration, the presence of ecstasy in my blood the day of the shootings, and whether together they were enough to create reasonable doubt in the jurors’ minds.

A few were confident it would. But more sided with the prosecution, noting as Wills had in his closing argument that for the hologram theory to be true, the three victims had to have knowingly put themselves in harm’s way in order to frame me. He’d argued that it ran counter to self-preservation, pointed at Claude Watkins in his wheelchair, and asked if anyone could believe he’d risk paralysis to see me in prison. Other commentators continued to hammer the fact that I’d been at the center of nine other officer-involved shootings in the course of my career, and they championed the idea that I should go to jail to set an example for police conduct across the nation.

At noon on Friday, I couldn’t take it anymore. I snuck out of the house and down the alley with my laptop. Sampson picked me up on Pennsylvania Avenue and we went to Quantico. Special Agent Batra met us at the gate, and before long we were in Rawlins’s underground lab.

“I don’t know if we are bugged or not,” Rawlins said, taking my computer. “Based on the fact we both uploaded the contents of that flash drive from the man posing as Alden Lindel, I’ve been digging in our system, but I haven’t come up with anything definitive yet.”

“This is a smaller universe,” I said.

Rawlins winked. “I see that.”

He’d kept his Mohawk down and black, but he’d added dark eye shadow, which made him look somewhat demonic as he plugged my laptop into a closed network. Rawlins ran a number of tests and still didn’t find anything. He decided to search uploads my computer had made recently over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

“There you are, you bugger,” he said, highlighting a file with a nonsense name and extension.

The date stamp said the upload from my laptop had taken place from 4:33 p.m. to 5:29 p.m. the prior Monday.

I thought about that and realized the time frame coincided with my hour with Annie Cassidy. The beginning and the end of the session, when she’d been fooling around with her smartphone.

“That file was probably sent to her phone,” I said. “She must have been downloading it the entire time I was in session with her.”

“What’s in the file?” Batra said.

Rawlins clicked on the file, and it was quickly apparent that it contained a record of everything done on my computer for the previous fourteen days.

“Spying on us, the little roaches,” Rawlins said.

He analyzed the file further and discovered that it had been generated after an order from a piece of “elegant and ingeniously coded” malware Krazy Kat found buried deep inside my operating system and made to look like innocuous support code.

Once he had the malware identified, Rawlins searched for it on the FBI system and was shocked to find a copy sitting dormant on his own server.

“This is impressive,” he said, rubbing his chin. “I actively monitor for intrusions, and I never saw this. A deep, deep, deep Trojan horse, created by a master coder.”

“Can you figure out the coder’s identity?” I asked.

“I might. Give me that flash drive you got in the mail. We’ll launch it, see what happens.”

Before he did, Rawlins wrote tracking code designed to attach itself to any file the malware created. Then he plugged the drive into his server and launched it.

The mock firing-squad execution of Gretchen Lindel played, followed by the warning to me that the next time all the blondes would die. There was a screen flash before the video closed, just as there’d been when I uploaded it.

Rawlins stood there, drumming his fingers on his workstation, head swiveling as he studied the array of screens around him.

“C’mon,” he said. “Something happened there. Where are you?”

My cell phone buzzed. I took it out, saw Naomi was calling.

I answered. “Any news?”

My niece’s voice was strained. “The jury has contacted Larch.”

I closed my eyes, thinking, Hung jury, wondering whether my family could take another trial.

But then Naomi said, “They’ve reached a verdict, Uncle Alex. You need to come to the courthouse.”

Chapter 85

I tightened the knot on my tie in the car as Sampson turned the corner toward the courthouse. From two blocks away, we could see the media mob waiting, anxious, no doubt, because it was pushing four that Friday afternoon and they were right up against deadline for the East Coast evening news broadcasts.

“The offer’s still there to go in through the prisoner-transfer door,” Sampson said. “Chief okayed it.”

“No,” I said. “I want them to see me.”

I glanced over and saw Sampson rubbing at the scar on his forehead.

“You okay?”

“I will be when I take my meds,” he said, pulling up across the street from the courthouse and putting his hand on my forearm. “We’ll all be right behind you, no matter what happens.”

But instead of being encouraged by his support, I climbed from the squad car with my mind reeling through all the counterattacks the assistant U.S. attorneys had made in their closing arguments, especially at our theory of the holographic gun images.

The glue could have come from their makeup, they said. The silicone came from something they’d all touched, probably the masks they wore or, as Watkins had suggested, the grime on the old factory floor. Wills had also hammered home how absurd it was to believe that two people would willingly die and another would willingly be wounded and crippled in order to frame me.

“Alex!”

Anita and Naomi were climbing out of a cab behind us.

“Let’s be as disciplined as we were on day one,” Anita said. “No one talks on the way into court.”

As we’d done the first day of the trial, we walked together toward the crush of cameras and klieg lights that flared and trained on us. The reporters’ shouting canceled out the protesters’ shouting, so all I really heard as we pushed on through the mob was a garbled roar of desperation and hatred.

Reaching the courthouse was a relief, but I felt distant going through security. I tried to focus on the officers wishing me luck, but I was thinking that my life as I knew it might be over in a matter of minutes and I’d be condemned to an eight-by-twelve, a target for every con who had it in for a cop.

My phone buzzed, alerting me to a text from Bree: ETA five minutes! Love you! Believe in you!

But on the way up the elevator and walking toward Judge Larch’s courtroom, I felt hollow, separate, and alone.

Nana Mama was already there in the front row with Ali, Jannie, and my dad. I ignored everyone else gathered in the court and went to them. My grandmother took my hand and squeezed it.

There was so much fear and anxiety in my children’s faces that I had to fight to smile and say, “Be strong, now.”

“You too,” my father said. “We’ve been praying.”

I went to the defense table as nervous as I’d ever been in my entire life. I glanced past Anita and saw the prosecutor Nathan Wills fiddling with his phone. His assistant was looking down, studying a document.

Behind them sat Soneji’s son, Dylan Winslow, who had a smirk on his face. Kimiko Binx was perched beside him, dressed in black and shooting me dark glances. Claude Watkins was rolling his wheelchair down the aisle.

Before he parked beside Binx, he looked at me with open loathing, and in a voice loud enough for the reporters and other spectators to hear, he said, “You’re not getting away with this, Cross. If there’s any justice left in the world, you’re going down for a long time.”

Anita put her hand on mine. I didn’t need it. I wouldn’t give Watkins the satisfaction of reacting or replying.

“All rise,” the bailiff said. “Judge Priscilla Larch presiding.”

The judge looked better, far less pale than she’d been at closing arguments. Larch was wearing a new pair of glasses too, ones that made her seem less, well, birdy. She banged her gavel, called the court to order, and asked the bailiff to bring in the jury.

In the course of my career, I’ve sat in the cheap seats watching juries come back with verdicts at least fifty times. In every case, I’ve searched the faces of the jury members for clues to their decision, but I have been surprised by the outcome almost as often as I’ve been right in my predictions.

Juror five hobbled in. He looked tired and grim, as did several other jurors who filled the seats around him. The remaining members of the panel appeared upset but resigned to the verdict.

Juror eleven, the PR executive, had been voted foreperson. She came in last, wearing a sharp blue suit with a pink blouse. She gave me a glance as she climbed into her seat in the jury box, swallowed hard, and looked away with such uncertainty that I was shaken inside.

“Madam Foreperson, have you reached a verdict?” Larch said.

Juror eleven stood. “We have, Your Honor.”

The judge accepted a copy of the verdict from the bailiff, opened it, and showed no reaction before saying, “Dr. Cross, please rise.”

As Anita, Naomi, and I got to our feet, I heard the courtroom doors open behind me. I glanced back and saw Bree and Damon rush to seats beside Sampson and his wife, Billie.

Everything felt surreal as I heard Larch say, “On count one, in the death of Virginia Winslow, murder in the first degree, how do you find?”

Chapter 86

Juror eleven would not look at me. No one in the jury would look at me.

“We find the defendant, Alex Cross,” she said as she finally turned her hard gaze my way, “not guilty.”

There were gasps, cheers, and a war whoop behind me. My knees went rubbery, and I almost started to cry when Nana Mama said, “I knew it!”

Naomi grabbed my left arm, Anita my right.

“What?” Dylan Winslow yelled angrily, jumping to his feet. “He shot my mom in cold blood!”

“Not guilty!” Ali shouted at him, standing up. “Not guilty!”

Judge Larch pounded her gavel and then shook it at Ali and Soneji’s kid. “One more outburst out of either of you, and you’ll be banned from my court. Clear?”

Dylan was fuming and red-faced, but he slammed his butt back down on the bench beside Binx. Ali grinned with satisfaction and sat more slowly.

Turning back to the jury, Judge Larch said, “On count two, in the death of Leonard Diggs, the charge is murder in the first degree. How do you find?”

“We find the defendant not guilty, Your Honor.”

“This is bullshit!” Binx shouted. “I saw it with my own two eyes!”

“One more word and it’ll be contempt of court, Ms. Binx,” Larch said, standing and glaring at her.

Binx shook her head in a rage, but she said nothing else.

“On count three of the indictment,” the judge said, “attempted murder of Claude Watkins, how do you find?”

“There was reasonable doubt. Not guilty, Your Honor.”

The courtroom erupted. I let out my breath long and slow and hung my head in deep gratitude, thanking God for my deliverance, before spinning around and reaching across the bar to kiss Bree, who was grinning through tears.

“Welcome back from the edge, baby,” she said.

“This is a travesty of justice!” Claude Watkins shouted. “I’ve got a piss bag and he’s frickin’ not guilty? He guns down three and he’s not guilty?”

Larch banged her gavel, said, “That’s enough, Mr. Watkins.”

“I reject this!” Watkins roared, and he spun his wheelchair around and headed out. “I do not recognize this jury or this court!”

“Neither do I!” shouted Binx, and she stormed after him.

The judge called to the officer at the door to the hallway, “Fuller, arrest them both. I want them held on suspicion of conspiracy, murder, and perjury.”

Binx whirled around and shouted, “You can’t be serious! This is insanity!”

“It’s government persecution, that’s what it is,” Watkins said. “They cooked up that whole pack of lies to bury us. It’s what the police state does! Shoots you down, then makes up a goddamn excuse for shooting you down!”

As Binx struggled against the zip cuffs around her wrists and a second officer restrained Watkins in his wheelchair, my gaze snagged on Soneji’s son. Dylan Winslow was on his feet, looking back at Binx and Watkins as they were taken from the courtroom. The fingers of the troubled teen’s left hand trembled as he tried to grip the bench in front of him.

He was part of it, I thought. He’s got something to hide.

The prosecutor was on his feet and furious as well.

“Your Honor,” Wills said. “The verdict is the verdict, but I echo Ms. Binx and Mr. Watkins. This is a travesty of justice, one you can undo by vacating this verdict and demanding a retrial.”

“What? And undo double jeopardy?” Anita cried. “On what constitutional grounds, Counselor?”

Larch held up her hand to stop further argument. Then she tugged her glasses down the bridge of her nose and gave the prosecutor a withering stare.

“Mr. Wills,” she said. “As far as the Court is concerned, this entire trial has been a travesty of justice. Because of the naked ambitions of yourself and Ms. Carlisle, as well as the government’s need for a scapegoat for the country’s rash of police-involved shootings, the two of you and your bosses not only bought into a sophisticated framing of the defendant, but fully participated in a rush to justice. I anticipate someone investigating both of you very soon.”

For once, the federal prosecutors were speechless.

“Dr. Cross?” Larch said.

“Your Honor.”

“I am sorry this happened to you.”

“Thank you, Judge Larch. I am too.”

“Go and enjoy your freedom. Take care of that son of yours.” She banged her gavel. “The jury is released. Case closed.”

I threw my hands up and whirled around to see Bree, Jannie, Damon, Nana Mama, and my dad cheering behind me.

Tears welled in my eyes as I kissed Anita and Naomi. Then I went around, picked up Ali, and hugged my boy like he was life itself.

Chapter 87

To be honest, despite the verdict, I was feeling mixed emotions sitting in a chair outside Chief Michaels’s office the following Monday.

My arrest, the trial, and even the verdict had forced me to do a lot of reevaluating about my priorities and my purpose in life.

I had always seen homicide investigation as a way to represent the slain and help the friends and family of the victims find not only closure, but justice. I think of it as an honorable profession, one that, until I was arrested, gave me a great degree of fulfillment.

But turning back to clinical psychology and counseling, my first loves, had reminded me why I enjoyed that work so much. Ultimately, my job was to help people trying to understand and improve themselves and their lives. Being a psychotherapist was as noble a calling as being a homicide detective, and fulfilling in an entirely different way. And yet here I was, ready to put an end to the counselor part of me again.

“Dr. Cross?” Michaels’s secretary said. “He’ll see you now.”

I went into the chief ’s office. Crossing the room to his desk, I watched Metro’s leader closely, trying to read his body language. The chief had played it political during the months I’d spent on suspension pending trial. In private, he’d expressed support. In public, he’d covered his ass.

So it was a bittersweet experience when Michaels summoned his politician’s smile, reached out his hand, and said, “I knew you’d be back, Alex. What would Metro do without you?”

I swallowed whatever uncomfortable feelings I’d had and thanked him for reinstating me on the Major Case Unit. In the squad room, Bree ended Sampson’s suffering by reassigning Detective Ainsley Fox to another partner and putting the two of us back together. That was good, really good, maybe even better than the verdict. No bittersweet feelings at all.

I spent the rest of that first day filling out forms that sought back pay in light of the verdict and doing a pile of other administrative nonsense. But on Tuesday, Sampson and I were back on the job, with the missing blondes the first order of business. We started early, leaving DC long before dawn and driving north.

Four and a half hours later, we left Interstate 180 for State Route 220 toward Muncy Valley, Sonestown, and Laporte, Pennsylvania. It was timber country. The road was narrow, winding, and flanked on both sides by state game lands and big leafless forest tracts.

We got coffee in Laporte before stopping in at the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office to talk with Detective Everett Morse, who was working with the Pennsylvania State Police on the murder of twelve-year-old Timmy Walker Jr. and the disappearance of Ginny Krauss and Alison Dane.

Morse was collegial enough and showed us the murder book, but it had been months since Ginny and Alison had disappeared and Timmy’s body had been found. The trail had gone cold. Morse told us not to bother trying to talk to the girls’ parents. They’d barely spoken with Morse or the state police.

When we stopped at the Pennsylvania State Police barracks on the north side of Laporte, Investigator Nina Ford largely confirmed Morse’s take on the case. She allowed us to look through her files as well, and, like Morse, discouraged us from trying to talk to the missing girls’ parents.

“What about Timmy’s parents?” Sampson asked.

“Big T’s out of the picture,” Detective Ford said. “Lenore’s at the house. You could stop at Worlds End State Park, where Timmy’s body was found. By the time you have a look around and get to Hillsgrove, Lenore should be up and almost coherent.”

From GPS coordinates Ford gave us, we were able to pinpoint the exact location where Timmy Walker’s corpse had been discovered — roughly a mile east of the parking lot at Worlds End State Park and several miles from where the missing girls’ car was found.

But for an older model white Chevy pickup truck with a toolbox in the back and decals on the window from the National Wild Turkey Federation, the park’s lot was deserted when we pulled in twenty minutes later.

A cold, raw wind blew while we hiked the trail and followed the GPS navigator to the rugged ground where a hiker had come across Timmy’s arm sticking out from under a pile of branches and leaves.

“That’s a workout, getting up here,” Sampson said, chest heaving. “Trail was steep.”

I nodded, my heart still hammering. “Timmy weighed ninety-two pounds, so it was someone very strong.”

“And someone who knew how to get to this particular stretch of nowhere,” Sampson said about two seconds before the shooting started.

Chapter 88

Boom! Ca-ching. Boom!

Sampson and I whipped around and dived for cover behind a downed log.

Boom!

“Where the hell is he?” Sampson hissed.

Hearing popping noises, clucking, and branches snapping, I peeked up over the log and saw a flock of wild turkeys racing through the woods. Up the hill, I spotted movement. I grabbed my binoculars, focused them, and saw a teenage girl in camouflage scrambling down the steep hillside, a man carrying two shotguns right behind her.

“I got him, Dad!” I heard her yell and she threw her hands up in the air. “We both did!”

We stood and waved at the hunters as they got busy with the two dead turkeys. It wasn’t until we were close that they noticed us.

The father stood, glanced at the shotguns propped up against a tree. I guess it wasn’t often he saw two men wearing coats and ties in the turkey woods.

We both showed our badges. He got stiffer. “This was a clean hunt.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said. “We’re here looking into the death of Timmy Walker.”

He softened. “That’s a tragedy. My Ellie here went to school with him. I’m Howard Young, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Young,” I said. I shook his hand and then looked at his daughter. “Tell us about Timmy.”

Ellie played with a camouflage scarf around her neck and her expression soured. “TW-Two was nice growing up, but then he kind of became a creep.”

“More like a little pervert,” her father said.

“How’s that?” Sampson said.

Ellie looked around and then said, “I don’t know if it’s true, but he supposedly put a hole in the wall at school so he could look into the girls’ locker room. The rumor was he took pictures and showed them to his friends.”

Sampson grimaced.

I said, “Was that investigated?”

“The principal said so,” Ellie said. “The school even had police look at Timmy’s phone, but there was nothing on it.”

Her father said, “Doesn’t mean there wasn’t another phone or a camera. I wanted that boy thrown out of school, but they didn’t do a thing. And then he died, so we’ll never know, will we?”

“We’re hoping to help figure out why he died,” Sampson said.

Young nodded uncertainly. “Well, we’ve got birds to clean, and Ellie’s got classes this afternoon.”

We thanked them for their time and hiked back down the steep hillside to the parking lot. Had Timmy been killed for taking pictures he shouldn’t have? Had the killer brought Timmy up that trail in the dark? His mother had reported him missing well after sunset, so there was a good chance. That meant the killer had a headlamp or a helper. Did that matter?

I set that thinking aside and went back to the iPad, looking at an aerial view of the area with pins that marked the locations of the girls’ abandoned car, Timmy’s botched burial site, and his home. The car and the house looked about a mile apart, but the killer had dumped his body miles away.

Why? To try to separate the two cases in the minds of police?

I supposed that was likely, though any detective worth his or her salt would have known the two cases were related. Same day. Same general time frame. The proximity of Timmy’s home to where the girls’ car was found.

So what happened? Did Timmy see the kidnapping, blunder into it somehow, and get killed for it?

That was our working theory when we pulled into the driveway of Timmy Walker’s house, a restored Colonial with fresh paint and a new, seamless metal roof. It was by far the nicest home in this small mountain hamlet where most of the structures looked like hunting camps. Brown leaves covered the modest front yard. A tricycle lay tipped over by the birdbath.

Sampson knocked on the door. No answer.

He knocked harder, and the door opened. A young girl, six or maybe seven, stood there in food-stained pajamas. She had a Winnie-the-Pooh blanket around her shoulders and studied us with red eyes.

“Hi there, young lady,” I said. “We’re police officers. We’d like to talk to your mom.”

“She’s sleeping,” the girl said.

“Can you wake—”

“I’m up!” a woman said, pounding down the stairs.

Mom was in a blue terry-cloth robe and barefoot. Her hair was a mess. Her eyes were puffy, rheumy, and wild when she said, “You get him? Timmy’s killer?”

“Mrs. Walker?” I said.

She came up behind the girl, hugged her. “I’m his mom, Lenore. This is his sister, Kate.”

We identified ourselves, said we’d like to talk to her.

“So you didn’t get him?” she asked, bewildered.

“Not yet, ma’am.”

The dead boy’s mom swallowed thickly and looked off in despair. “No one tells me what’s going on. Months Deuce has been gone and no word from anyone in weeks, not the sheriff, not the state police, not the FBI... not even my coward of an ex-husband.” She broke down weeping.

Her daughter scowled at us and then turned around to hug her mother.

“It’s okay, Mommy,” the little girl said. “It’s going to be okay.”

Chapter 89

When we got Lenore Walker calmed down enough to talk, she invited us in, and we learned that she had, by her own description, led a fairly charmed life until the night Timmy disappeared. She’d grown up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and met Tim Walker her junior year at Pennsylvania State.

Walker got a good job working as an oil engineer right out of school and made enough in the fracking industry that they bought the house, restored it, and had kids. Timmy — Deuce — was his father’s favorite, and they spent many hours together early in the boy’s life.

Then Walker started moving up the corporate ladder and was gone a lot. And then he discovered “playthings,” as Lenore put it, and he was gone a lot more. After Deuce died, her husband, heartbroken and in love with a twenty-four-year-old, had left for good.

We asked her about the rumors, about the hole in the wall at the school. “Never happened,” Lenore said.

“Your son have a computer?” Sampson asked.

“Two, or one and a half, I guess, at the end. He was always buying and selling them on eBay.”

“Really?” I said. “At twelve?”

“Oh, sure. Computers, phones, iPods, anything electronic, long as it was used and cheap. It was kind of his hobby. He made pretty good money doing it.”

“Police look at his computers?”

“They took them,” she said. “I assume they looked at them.”

“And his phone?”

“They found one.”

“He had more than one?” Sampson asked.

“Sometimes three, but I only knew of two at that time. A Samsung, which they found, and a used iPhone, which they didn’t.”

“Anything else?”

“No. There’s not much left other than pictures, videos, and my memories.”

She started to cry again. Her daughter came over and hugged her until she was composed enough to tell us about the day her son disappeared.

“I wanted him to go to the store for me.” She sniffed. “He’d been in for a snack and then said he was going out to play. But when I called after him, he never answered.”

We asked her to point out the trail she believed Timmy had used to reach the forest clearing where the missing girls’ Toyota was found. As she went to the window to show us where to find the path, Lenore expressed bitterness about the investigation, saying that state and local detectives had been more interested in the lesbians than her son.

“Then again, they’re probably still alive, and my son’s dead, buried, and forgotten,” she said morosely as she led us to the door. “So thank you for thinking about him.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “We’ll let you know if we make any progress.”

“I believe you,” she said. “Even if no one else seems willing to help.”

Walking down the driveway, feeling Lenore Walker’s tortured gaze on my back, I was once again grateful for my many blessings and hyperaware of how the gifts of life can disappear in the blink of an eye.

“There but for the grace of God go I,” Sampson said in a soft voice.

“I hear you, brother,” I said. “Loud and clear.”

We found the path and went into the woods. The trail ran out across a shelf and then dropped steeply downhill to a logging road. When we came over the edge of the shelf, a black, whirling explosion went off down in the bottom.

I lurched back, ducked, and threw up my arms to protect my head.

Chapter 90

A big flock of wild turkeys had been feeding in the logging road when we appeared above them. They erupted off the forest floor and roared right over our heads, causing us to duck and take cover until they were gone.

“You should have seen the look on your face when they came blowing out of there,” I said, grinning.

“I almost had a heart attack.” Sampson laughed. “You did too.”

“I’m a city boy, not used to getting attacked by wild critters.”

“Critters?”

“I’m trying to channel my inner country.”

“Yee-haw,” Sampson said and dropped down the bank onto the logging road. “Boy, those damn birds really tear up the place, don’t they?”

I saw what he meant. For a good fifty yards in every direction, the leaves were all fluffed and piled up where the turkeys had scratched and overturned them looking for food.

“There had to have been forty of them,” I said.

“At least,” Sampson said, heading down the trail to where it met a creek.

We paralleled the creek for almost a mile to a fork in the two-track road. We went left and found the creek crossing Lenore Walker had described and continued on up a short hill.

At the top of the rise, we could see through the bare trees some ninety yards across a wide flat to the clearing where Alison Dane’s Toyota Camry had been found, abandoned. The flock of turkeys had been there before us, tearing up the forest floor on both sides of the trail all the way to the clearing.

I had a picture on my phone of the Toyota Camry as it was found, and we were able to use it to figure out roughly where the car must have been. We crossed the clearing to the spot.

Looking back to where the logging road met the opening, I said, “So Timmy comes to the edge of the woods over there, and sees what?”

“The car, the girls,” Sampson said. “And maybe whoever grabbed them.”

“Sure, it’s not far. Sixty yards? Seventy?”

“Sounds right, but then what? Someone sees Timmy?”

I nodded. “Chases him down, crushes his throat.”

Sampson took a big breath and let it go. “Poor kid.”

“Right?” I said, looking around and feeling upset.

I guess I’d hoped driving to this place four and a half hours away would help, and while seeing the crime scene gave us a clearer sense of where the girls and Timmy had been on the day in question, I didn’t see any new light indicating the end of the tunnel.

Sampson said, “It’s pushing noon. We should go back, get the car, and find somewhere to eat before we head home.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

We crossed the clearing, bowing our heads and pulling up our coat collars against the raw wind blowing. It was calmer in the woods, but I still hustled to get back to the car and the heater.

So did Sampson, until something caught his eye. He pulled up, said, “Hold on a second. I saw something back there.”

He walked back down the trail a few steps and then went right six or seven more through the leaves and loose forest duff the turkeys had scratched and turned over.

John stopped and glanced around. He took one step and then another before halting, digging a handkerchief from his pocket, and crouching in the leaves.

When he stood up, Sampson held out a dirty white iPhone.

Chapter 91

The following evening around seven, Ali dashed into the kitchen where the rest of us were cleaning up after dinner.

“Jannie!” he cried. “A cab pulled up! He’s here!”

“Oh God,” Jannie said, holding her stomach. “I shouldn’t have eaten so much. I think I’m going to be sick.”

Nana Mama squeezed her arm gently. “You’re going to do just fine. If he wasn’t already impressed, he wouldn’t be here, so just be yourself.”

“Great advice,” I said just before the doorbell rang.

“I’ll get it!” Ali cried.

“No,” I said. “Jannie and I will get it.”

“C’mon, Ali,” my dad said. “Sit down, have a piece of Nana’s shoofly pie.”

“With ice cream?” Ali said.

“He deserves ice cream,” I said as I followed Jannie.

“You’ve been saying that every night since the trial ended,” Nana Mama complained.

“And I’ll be saying that every night for a little while longer.”

Before I left the kitchen, I blew a kiss at Bree, who caught it and smiled. We’d both carved out time for each other the past few days despite our busy schedules, and all in all my personal life was starting to feel much more balanced than it had for well over a year.

Not that things couldn’t be better. Lenore Walker had said that she thought the iPhone Sampson found in the woods was her son’s, but she wasn’t sure. And when we’d taken the device to Keith Rawlins at Quantico earlier in the day, he’d noted that the water damage was going to make it exceedingly difficult for him to access the phone’s data, if he could do it at all.

Despite Rawlins’s promise to work every bit of magic he knew, we’d left the FBI’s cybercrimes lab feeling frustrated. In our minds, the phone was Timmy Walker’s, but unless we could get into it, we were once again at a dead end when it came to his murder. And even though we didn’t have a smoking gun connecting the boy’s death to the missing blondes, it felt like, without the phone, we would never find Gretchen Lindel, Ginny Krauss, Alison Dane, Delilah Franks, Patsy Mansfield, and Cathy Dupris.

But good things had happened too. Nana had taken a phone call for Jannie at home and relayed the message to me, and that had led to near pandemonium as everyone in our family tried to rearrange things in order to be home when the doorbell rang.

In the front hall now, Jannie looked over her shoulder, and I said, “Go on.”

She opened the front door, revealing a tall, lean, African American man in his early forties. He wore a blue suit with a green and gold tie, and he beamed when he saw my daughter.

“Jannie Cross,” he said, smiling as he shook her hand. “I’m so glad we could work out a time to meet.”

Jannie was dumbstruck but managed to say, “I am too, sir, uh, Coach.”

I said, “She’s thrilled you’re here. We all are.”

“Dr. Cross?” he said, turning his hundred-watt smile on me and reaching to shake my hand. “I’m Robert Johnson.”

“Please, come in, Coach,” I said. “My grandmother makes a mean pie if you’re interested.”

“I’m always interested in pie,” he said. “What kind?”

“Shoofly pie without the sugar bomb,” Jannie said. “She got the recipe from an Amish cookbook and altered it with maple syrup.”

“I would love some of that,” he said.

I led the way back to the kitchen, where Coach Johnson introduced himself to everyone and good-naturedly submitted to Nana Mama when she ordered him to sit down and have some pie and a cup of green tea.

“Jannie,” Johnson said after finishing his dessert, “I’m not going to lie to you. The food at the University of Oregon is not as good as you’re used to at home.”

My grandmother loved that.

“Unless you could convince Nana to move to Eugene with you,” he said. “Then the entire Ducks track team could benefit.”

That pleased Nana even more. “You’re scoring brownie points, Coach.”

“I was hoping so,” Coach Johnson said, and he winked at her. “Can I tell you all about our program?”

“Please,” Bree said.

Johnson said, “Since I took over as head track coach at the University of Oregon three years ago, we have won eight national championships: men’s indoor and outdoor track, women’s indoor and outdoor track, and women’s cross-country. Oregon has been honored as the national Men’s and Women’s Programs of the Year in each of the past two years. The women won it the year before that as well.”

Once Coach Johnson started his recruiting pitch, his attention rarely left Jannie, who was listening raptly.

“Twenty-eight Duck athletes have won NCAA individual championships under my watch,” Johnson went on. “Including Phyllis Francis.”

Jannie sat up straighter. “She set the American record in the indoor four-hundred.”

“She did,” Johnson said, and he paused to look around at us all. “And I think you can beat that record, Jannie.”

Chapter 92

Jannie looked as stunned as I felt. The American record?

“I really do believe that,” Johnson said to me. “I’ve watched Jannie’s films. I’ve reviewed her training times, her program, and her progress with Coach McDonald. We both feel that record is within the range of possibility if she chooses and applies herself in the right program.”

“Your program,” my father said.

“There’s none better,” the coach replied. “Oregon’s track-and-field tradition is deep and wide. We have the finest facility in the country at Hayward Field. The weather is near perfect for year-round training. And we have the best coaches and trainers. Period.”

“What about the academics?” Bree asked.

“Amen,” Nana Mama said.

“The university offers two hundred and seventy different majors, from the sciences to engineering to education and the arts. Our program in sports marketing is ranked number one in the country. The Clark Honors College is the oldest of its kind in the country and attracts many gifted students such as yourself, Jannie.

“Academics and sports aside, the campus is stunningly beautiful. Eugene is one of the most vibrant places I’ve ever lived. And we offer all of our athletes tutors to make sure they stay eligible to compete and, most important, to graduate.”

“Are you offering my sister a scholarship?” Ali asked.

Coach Johnson laughed. “You don’t fool around, do you?”

Ali grinned and shook his head.

“Maybe you should go into sports marketing, young man,” Johnson said. “Be your sister’s agent someday.”

Ali smiled and said, “You didn’t answer the question.”

The coach laughed again, looked at me. “He’s a little tiger.”

“Every day,” I said.

Coach Johnson turned to Jannie. “You know how I first heard of you?”

My daughter shook her head.

“When you were on ESPN.”

Imitating the ESPN announcer, Ali said, “That girl ran so fast she broke her foot!”

The coach nodded. “That’s the one. How’s the foot doing?”

“Really good,” Jannie said.

“No pain?”

“Not for a long time.”

“You’re a lucky, lucky young lady,” Johnson said. “That injury could have been a career ender. But it wasn’t, and so, Jannie Cross, I am here to offer you a scholarship, a full ride — tuition, room, and board — at the University of Oregon in exchange for a signed national letter of intent to run for the Ducks.”

I don’t think Jannie expected that. I know I didn’t. She hadn’t even competed in her junior year of spring outdoor track. I’d figured if she ran well from now on, she might start getting real offers in the fall of her senior year.

“I’m thrilled, but do I have to answer right now, Coach?” she said, smiling and biting her lip.

“Of course not,” he said. “It would make my life easier if you did, but my life isn’t what’s at stake. Yours is. So I’m going to give you some advice, because I think you’re a rare talent whether or not you come to Eugene to run for me. Jannie, you are going to get multiple scholarship offers. You should visit every school that you’re interested in and really explore the people and the places and the track programs before you make a decision. I know Eugene is far from Washington, DC, but would you be interested in paying us a visit?”

Jannie looked relieved that she didn’t have to decide on the spot, glanced at me, and nodded. “I’d like that, Coach.”

“Excellent,” Johnson said. “When could you bring her out?” he asked me.

I glanced at Bree, who said, “Winter vacation?”

“Perfect,” he said. “Oh, and those plane tickets will be on the Ducks.”

“Can I come?” Ali asked.

“Absolutely not,” Jannie said.

Coach Johnson stayed a few more minutes, answering our questions, and charming Nana Mama no end.

“I’ll be back for more of that pie,” he told her as he was leaving.

“You’re always welcome, Coach Johnson.”

When the door shut, we were all grinning like fools. Bree kissed Jannie, who said, “Did that really just happen?”

“Best track program in the country,” I said, feeling my eyes water.

“Long way from home,” Nana Mama said in a way that made me realize she probably wouldn’t get to see Jannie run in person if she went to Oregon.

“It is a really long way,” Jannie said. “I don’t know about that.”

“You don’t have to know right now,” I said. “We’ll listen to everyone, and you’ll make the decision when you are ready. Okay?”

Jannie hugged me. “Thanks, Dad. I’m so glad you were here for that. It could have been different. You know?”

I closed my eyes, kissed the top of her head, and said, “I do, baby girl. I really do.”

Chapter 93

When the elevator door opened onto the second subbasement below the FBI’s Cyber Division, Keith Rawlins had the tunes cranked inside his lab. The thudding, infectious bass line of Flo Rida’s “My House” came right through the glass window and seemed to vibrate in my chest.

It was a few minutes past seven in the morning, and Rawlins had evidently been in the lab all night. But you wouldn’t have known it. The digital wizard was stripped to his denim shorts, covered in sweat, and bouncing up and down on a mini-trampoline while punching the air in time to the beat.

“I still can’t believe this guy works for us,” said Special Agent in Charge Mahoney, my old partner at the FBI, who had taken over the missing-blondes case for the Bureau.

“I suffer the indignity of it every day,” Special Agent Batra said.

“This could have waited a few hours,” Sampson said, and he yawned.

I said, “He was excited enough about it to call us at five a.m.”

“This better be good,” Sampson said. “All I’m saying.”

Batra rolled her eyes and shouldered open the lab door. The music was blasting. Rawlins had Flo Rida’s music video playing on all screens. He spotted us and high-stepped our way, slinging his limp black Mohawk back and forth while singing, “‘Welcome to my house!’”

Mahoney and Batra looked like they’d spent the night sleeping on coarse sandpaper. I smiled and drew my finger across my throat.

Rawlins stopped dancing, pouted, picked up a remote, and froze the video. The lab got quiet.

“The best part was just coming,” he said. “Clay Pritchard lays down the best saxophone licks since—”

“You woke us up, called us in here,” Batra grumbled. “It wasn’t to dance, was it? Because if it was, I’m gonna be pissed.”

“Beyond pissed,” Mahoney said.

Rawlins sighed, said, “Sometimes I wonder if the academy’s training just squeezes the soul and celebration out of every agent who graduates Quantico.”

“Let’s see what you’ve got, Krazy Kat,” I said.

Rawlins fashioned his hair into a bun like a samurai’s top-knot, a style that appeared to give Mahoney and Batra indigestion. The computer scientist waved a finger at me with one hand and snatched up a towel with the other.

“Took me almost three days straight, but I was able to raise the dead.”

“You calling yourself the Messiah now?” Batra said.

“Just a miracle worker,” Rawlins said as he toweled his upper body dry.

He put on an FBI sweatshirt and a pair of black-and-white checkered sneakers before strolling over to the keyboard for the main screen array.

“A lot of the data was corrupted,” he said, typing. “But I was able to salvage a few things from the day Timmy Walker was killed.”

Rawlins hit Enter, and Flo Rida and his house disappeared on the screens, replaced by shaky video showing a wooded scene. The cameraman was sneaking through thick foliage.

I had no idea where it was shot until a boy’s hand came forward and pushed aside leafy vines and saplings to reveal the lip of a dirt bank. The camera tilted down the bank and out twenty feet toward a blue Toyota Camry in a familiar clearing. The windows of the car were down.

The camera trembled, and you could hear Timmy Walker breathing hard while Ginny Krauss and Alison Dane made love naked in the backseat.

“The little Peeping Tom creep,” Batra said.

“It is creepy,” Rawlins said. “But I think you’re going to like little peeping Timmy, God rest his soul, before it’s over.”

The camera settled and zoomed in. Alison Dane’s hand slid from her lover’s breast and trailed down over her belly, and then she seemed to hear something. The cameraman did too.

The focus went haywire for a moment before settling back on the girls, who were scrambling for their clothes. Then Ginny Krauss happened to look out the window and up the bank, straight at the camera.

She screamed, “There’s some pervo kid in camo out there! He’s filming us!”

Timmy apparently whirled around and took off back into the forest. The next twenty-seven seconds were herky-jerky, mostly flashes of green in a dim forest.

Then, over the croaking of tree frogs and the thrumming of crickets, you could hear a vehicle roar into the clearing and skid to a stop. One of the girls screamed.

The camera turned back and began moving again, going closer to the clearing, zooming in on a white Ford utility van idling in front of the Camry.

One of the girls started screaming again. “Please! Don’t do this! Help! Kid! Help us, kid!”

The screen went black.

Rawlins said, “Unfortunately, that’s all the video I could recover.”

“Shit,” Sampson said. “Can you give us a blown-up look at that van?”

“I don’t need to,” Rawlins said. “Timmy did.”

He gave the keyboard several more orders and the biggest screen was filled with a digital photograph showing a grainy zoomed-in view of the van. The windows were tinted, so we couldn’t get a look at the interior, but the signage on the side was clearly visible.

“Dish Network?” Mahoney said.

“And those are Maryland plates,” I said. “Five, seven, E, one... can’t make out the—”

“It’s a six,” Rawlins said. “You see it better in the other photographs.”

“How many other photographs?” Sampson said.

“Five. Timmy could have just kept running after the girls spotted him. But he heard them screaming and decided to take these pictures. I think he was going to go to the police with them. Otherwise, why take the risk? Why not do the natural thing for a twelve-year-old boy caught with his hand in the pervert cookie jar and just run?”

Judging from her body language, Batra seemed to have some issue with the theory, but Mahoney said, “I think you’re right.”

“I do too,” I said. “I also think those pictures got Timmy Walker killed.”

“Oh, I know they did,” Rawlins said. “The phone died less than twenty-five seconds after the last picture was taken.”

Chapter 94

Just after dark that same day, Sampson, Mahoney, and I were watching FBI crime scene techs getting ready to tear apart a white Ford utility van with Dish Network signage on both sides. It was in the parking lot at the Dish authorized-seller store in Rockville, Maryland, and roped off with police tape.

The store manager, a small, cranelike man named Lester Potter, was rubbing his hands together and watching nervously.

“You know that van was stolen, right?” Potter said.

“When was that?” Sampson asked.

“Five, six months ago? One of my techs was out doing a residential satellite install in Gaithersburg. She’s in the house not ten minutes, comes out, and the van’s gone. Boosted in broad daylight. They disabled the tracking device. Six weeks go by, and the company’s written it off, figured it was looted and chopped up for parts. But then we get a call. Pennsylvania state troopers found it abandoned in long-term parking at the Harrisburg airport. It’s crazy, but they didn’t take a thing. That van was as clean and shipshape as it was when it was stolen. Someone just took it for a joyride.”

“No,” Sampson said. “Someone took it to kidnap two teenage girls who are still being held captive and terrorized to satisfy the twisted fantasies of Internet trolls.”

“Oh,” Potter said, his face turning pale. “I had no idea.”

“Who was the driver the day it was stolen?” I said.

“Lourdes Rodriguez,” he said. “One of my best employees ever.”

“Can we talk with Ms. Rodriguez?”

“She doesn’t work here anymore,” Potter said. “Lucky gal inherited a pile of money from a great-uncle and took this job and shoved it a few months ago.”

Sampson said, “I guess the glamour of being a satellite installer wasn’t enough to keep her on the Dish Network career path.”

The store manager gave him an odd look, said, “Who could blame her?”

“No one,” I said. “You have contact information for Ms. Rodriguez?”

“I’m sure I do somewhere.”

“Could you do us a solid and dig it up?”

Potter’s nose twitched as if he thought the task beneath him, but he went inside.

“Why take nothing?” I said.

“How many people without training know how to install satellites?” Sampson said. “And I can’t imagine they’re easy to sell on the black market. They say Dish all over—”

“Agent Mahoney?” Karen Getty, an FBI crime scene tech, called out.

Getty was standing at the rear of the van wearing disposable white coveralls, latex gloves, and blue booties over her shoes. The two rear doors of the van were open, revealing shelves, boxes of supplies, six satellite dishes, and stacked rolls of cable.

“You’re going to want to see this,” Getty said.

We all went to the rear of the van, which looked spotless.

“Kill the lights,” she said.

The interior lights died. So did the spots brought in to illuminate the search. She picked up a bottle marked LUMINOL and started spraying it around.

Luminol is a compound that glows when it’s exposed to certain substances, like the iron in hemoglobin. When someone tries to clean up blood, traces of it are left behind; spray that area with luminol, and the chemical glows blue for a brief period.

There were a few blood spatters immediately visible on the van floor close to the doors. The more Getty sprayed, the more spatters appeared, until it looked like a starry night had been superimposed on the van’s floor, ceiling, and walls.

“What the hell is that?” Potter said. The manager had come up behind us.

Sampson looked at him and said, “Evidence of a slaughter.”

Chapter 95

The next morning, Sampson and I drove to the address of the woman who’d been driving the van the night it was stolen. Lourdes Rodriguez lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, on the eighth floor of a large, midpriced, brick-faced apartment building.

At the locked front door, we buzzed Rodriguez’s apartment number, 805, and got no answer. We figured that with an apartment building that big, there might be a live-in superintendent, and we lucked out when Arnie Feiffer answered our ring and soon buzzed us in.

Sampson and I entered a foyer featuring 1970s decor that showed the dings and scratches of time and neglect.

“Not where I’d be living if I’d inherited a boatload,” Sampson said.

I agreed, thinking that I’d expect a woman in her early thirties with newfound wealth to choose to live in one of the newer, more luxurious apartment buildings in downtown Silver Spring or...

A door to our right opened. A television blared the patter of an announcer for American Ninja Warrior. A nebbishy man in his sixties shuffled out of the apartment wearing a maroon bathrobe over his clothes, slippers, and a blue-and-white yarmulke on his head.

He squinted through round glasses. “You the cops?”

“You the super?” Sampson asked as we showed him our identifications.

“Lord of the castle,” he said. “Arnie Feiffer. How can I help, Detectives?”

“We’d like to go knock on Lourdes Rodriguez’s door,” I said.

“Why? What’s she done?”

“We just want to ask her a few questions about her prior workplace.”

Feiffer hesitated, then said, “I’ll go with you, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” I said.

“C’mon, then,” he said, and he shuffled by us, heading to the elevators. Posted on one of the two was a handwritten sign that read Out of Service.

We rode the creaking, shuddering lift to the eighth floor. The doors squealed open, and we stepped out into a musty hallway with dingy rugs.

We walked down the hall to apartment 805 and rang the bell. There was no answer. We knocked, but no one came to the door. I was about to suggest we leave business cards with a note asking her to call us when from inside we heard the high-pitched mewing and cries of a cat that sounded very upset.

“A cat?” Feiffer said furiously. “No cats. No dogs. The lease is clear.”

After a glance at me, Sampson said, “It’s within your rights to remove the cat from your property. We’ll help. It’s the least we can do for you.”

The superintendent studied us suspiciously. “You’re not looking to get around a warrant, are you?”

Sampson said, “If we wanted to do that, we’d tell you we smelled gas.”

“I run electric,” Feiffer said as the cat’s cries turned frantic.

“Sounds like it’s hungry,” I said. “We could always call in Animal Control for suspicion of neglect on Ms. Rodriguez’s part. They could get us in.”

The super didn’t like that and grudgingly dug under his robe for a key ring. He found the master key and used it to turn the dead bolt and unlock the door.

Feiffer pushed the door open. A filthy yellow-and-orange tabby sprang out and darted between our legs before any of us could grab it. The cat sprinted down the hall, took a sharp right, and disappeared.

“I’m getting too old for this crap,” Feiffer said with a moan, his palm to his forehead.

I saw he wasn’t talking about the cat but about the apartment. The place was empty and swept clean.

Chapter 96

Feiffer trudged into the modest one-bedroom apartment and we followed.

When he reached the living area, he gazed around in disbelief. “She never said anything about leaving.”

“We heard she’d inherited a lot of money,” I said.

“That right?” the super said, raising one bushy gray eyebrow. “She never mentioned it, but why would she? How long ago?”

“Few months.”

“Big money and she lived here for months?” Feiffer said, incredulous.

What could I say? The man knew his place in the market.

“Could we see your copy of her lease?” Sampson asked.

“Why?” he said, suspicious again.

“I gather you have no forwarding address since she skipped out, but there will be bank and reference information in the lease agreement that might help us figure out where she’s gone.”

Feiffer considered that and then nodded.

After confirming that Rodriguez had indeed removed all her possessions, we were on our way out when I noticed some newspapers in a brown paper bag behind the door. I picked the bag up, hoping they’d give us an idea of how long she’d been gone.

I pulled out a stack of loose newspaper sections and flipped through a few.

The sections were all from the Washington Post, several going back a month or more, front pages mostly, with a few Metro sections thrown in. I kept looking through the newspapers as we rode down and noticed something that quickly became a troubling pattern.

I kept it to myself until Feiffer had gone into his apartment and we were alone in the lobby.

“We’re keeping these papers,” I said, slipping them back in the bag.

“Why’s that?” Sampson asked.

“In almost every section there’s a story about Gretchen Lindel or one of the other missing girls.”

“So maybe Lourdes Rodriguez had reason to sneak out in the middle of the night.”

“Maybe she did.”

Feiffer emerged from his apartment with a file marked APARTMENT 805 — L. RODRIGUEZ. I flipped the file open, took a glance at the standard rental-agreement form, and then zeroed in on a photo of the tenant stapled to the contract.

“Huh,” I said, seeing Rodriguez in a whole new light. I took a picture of the rental agreement and the photo, then handed the contract back to Feiffer.

“That it? I’ve got to go find that cat.”

We thanked the super for his time and left. The second the front door clicked behind us, Sampson said, “What did you see on that lease?”

“My poker face didn’t work?”

“I have known you since we were ten.”

I pulled up the shot of the picture stapled to the contract.

“Lourdes Rodriguez?” I said. “I know her by another name.”

Chapter 97

The ultra-luxury union Wharf apartment complex on Fell’s Point was the most expensive place to live in Baltimore, costing five times what Lourdes Rodriguez had been paying at Feiffer’s. We’d used the bank account and other information on Rodriguez’s old lease to track her to her new digs.

A small moving van was snarling traffic on South Wolfe Street. The front door to one of the apartment buildings was propped open for workmen carrying furniture wrapped in blankets. We followed them inside and up the stairs to 2E.

The door was open. Reggae music was playing. The workmen went in. So did we.

I trailed Sampson past stacks of moving boxes choking the front hallway, hearing a familiar voice saying, “Be careful with that! It was my mother’s!”

We stepped out into a living area with large glass windows that gave a sweeping and dramatic view of Baltimore Harbor. Wearing jeans and a loose-fitting pink jersey, Lourdes Rodriguez paced by the window, watching the workmen move a table into position.

She looked puzzled when she saw Sampson standing there holding his badge. Then she noticed me.

I stepped into the room, said, “You never sent me your new e-mail, Annie.”

For a second, the love junkie was so shocked, I thought she might faint dead away.

Then she croaked, “Dr. Cross? What are you doing here?”

“I could say the same, Annie. Or is it Lourdes?”

She swallowed, looked away. “Lourdes.”

“Why’d you use the fake name when you came to see me?”

Rodriguez blinked, puffed out her cheeks, and glanced at the workmen, who were leaving the room. “Isn’t this privileged?”

“Not when it comes to murder, kidnapping, and torture,” Sampson said.

That threw her. “What are you talking...” She looked at me. “Dr. Cross, I came to you under an alias because of the addiction I told you about. I don’t know anything about any torture or murder or kidnapping.”

“The van that was stolen from you when you were working for Dish,” Sampson said. “We ran tests on the interior. Whole lot of blood spatter.”

She looked down. “Blood spatter? I don’t... it was stolen. I had nothing to do with that.”

“Didn’t you?” I said. “The same van was caught on film when two blond girls from Pennsylvania were taken.”

Her jaw dropped, and she took a step backward.

“Seemed a big coincidence,” Sampson said. “Given that you left behind all those articles about the same missing girls at your old apartment at Mr. Feiffer’s.”

“And given that I saw you leaving my office in a car driven by a man posing as Alden Lindel, the father of one of the missing girls,” I said.

She shook her head as if trying to clear it. “Wait. What? The father of one of the missing girls?”

“A man who’s been claiming to be him. You got into his Nissan Pathfinder right after our one and only session. I saw you. What is going on, Annie, Lourdes, whatever your real name is?”

She threw up her hands in exasperation. “Last time I left your office? I called Uber. They sent some Uber guy. You can check. I’m sure there’s a record.”

Uber? Was that possible? The fake Alden was an Uber driver. You call for an Uber car and usually the one that’s closest responds. Which meant what? That the impostor, whoever he was, had been close by, watching my house?

“We will check Uber,” Sampson said. “What about the news articles?”

Rodriguez rubbed her neck, didn’t look at us, and didn’t reply.

“It’s going to come out sooner or later,” I said. “Courts go easier on the first person in a conspiracy to flip.”

“Conspiracy?” she said sharply. “No, it’s nothing like that. Not really.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Looking flustered now, Rodriguez wrung her hands and then held them up in surrender.

“Okay, okay, I got caught up in something a long time ago, Dr. Cross, and... I’ll tell you everything I know. Everything. The honest-to-God truth.”

Chapter 98

Two hours and forty-five minutes later, Sampson had gotten off I-95 and was driving us north on Front Street, which parallels the freeway and the Delaware River as they pass through Philadelphia. The weather was changing. Dark clouds boiled on the western horizon.

“Chalabi sounds like a first-class creep,” Sampson said.

“He won’t be the first to achieve film success that way,” I said. We went over the high points of Rodriguez’s confession for the fourth or fifth time.

A childhood friend of Lourdes Rodriguez, Casey Chalabi, had always wanted to be a movie director.

“He ended up making porn films under the name Dirk Wallace,” Rodriguez told us. “It’s all S-and-M, bondage, the hard stuff.”

She said Chalabi put aside money from the porn shoots to fund production of a horror film he’d written.

“Horror’s cheap to film,” she’d said. “Casey said you can do them for under a million. James Wan did Saw for a little over five hundred thousand, and it made, like, fifty-five million. Casey’s trying to model himself on Wan.”

Rodriguez claimed that even with the porn money, Casey’s horror flick was being shot on a shoestring. When he learned she was going to inherit her great-uncle’s fortune, he was immediately after Rodriguez to help fund his film.

“I gave him some, and I didn’t even have the inheritance yet,” she said. “I took it from my savings. Five thousand. And then another five. Then Casey wanted the van, my van at Dish. He said even with the money I’d given him, he couldn’t afford to buy or rent one, and mine was perfect. He wanted me to just lend it to him for the night.”

“What’d you say?”

“I said no. No way. But Casey can be a vindictive a-hole.”

Sampson raised his eyebrows. “You saying Chalabi stole your van?”

“I’d put money on it. And that blood you found inside? Was it human?”

“We don’t know yet,” I said.

“It’s probably pig’s blood. He uses lots of pig’s blood in the big slasher scenes in Blade.”

I thought about that for several moments. “So he steals your van, uses it in a killing scene in his movie. I’m still having trouble seeing how this connects to those newspaper articles we found at Feiffer’s.”

Rodriguez swallowed hard. “I haven’t spoken with Casey since my van was stolen, but I read his script a long time ago. It’s about these four sisters who inherit an abandoned factory and this old Victorian house. Then it’s pretty much like every other horror flick you see. Except the sisters. They’re all ethereal and blond. Every one of them. And they get killed, one by one.”

Which was enough for us to drive to Philadelphia to talk to Mr. Chalabi face-to-face.

Rodriguez had given us the last address she had for Chalabi. She said she thought it was where he shot the porn movies. We found the address, a rehabbed old school called the Emerson that had been turned into lofts and work spaces down the street from the Theatre of Living Arts.

Rodriguez couldn’t remember the exact name of Chalabi’s company, but we found C. C. PRODUCTIONS listed on a board at the entrance to the Emerson. It was on the second floor, unit 2, the address Rodriguez had given us.

We took the staircase and walked down a long hallway past the open doors of artists’ studios and the closed doors of others in the arts and entertainment fields. The place smelled nice. There was music playing.

It had a good vibe, all in all, and that bothered me as we walked up to the closed door of C. C. Productions. I couldn’t see the management letting him shoot porn or slasher flicks on the premises.

Sampson knocked, turned the knob, and opened the door. I took one look inside and swore to myself.

C. C. Productions was an animation company. There were framed cartoon stills on the wall above the workstation of an Indian American woman in her twenties who looked up and smiled.

“Can I help you?” she said.

Sampson said, “We’re looking for Casey Chalabi.”

“I’m Cassandra Chalabi,” she said.

“Of course you are,” I said, furious. “Sorry to bother you.”

We shut the door. Sampson said, “Con artist.”

“Total pro. Pathological liar.”

“How much you wanna bet she’s started making a third move since we left?”

“Not a nickel. Lourdes Rodriguez, Annie Cassidy, whatever she calls herself, is in the wind.”

Chapter 99

When Sampson and I returned to the front door of the arts building, gloom had set in outside, and a chill rain fell on hurried pedestrians bent to the storm.

“We’re gonna get soaked,” Sampson said.

“Run for it,” I said. I jerked open the door and hopped out. Rain driven by a strong north wind pelted my face and eyes, forcing me to duck my head and throw my forearm across my brow as I ran toward the car, virtually blind.

As I was crossing Seventh Street, I stepped in a pothole. My right foot and shoe were submerged, my ankle and lower shin hit the edge of the depression, and I stumbled and sprawled in front of a Chrysler Sebring waiting at the light.

But that probably saved my life, because as soon as I tripped, I heard a thumping noise and the Sebring’s right headlight exploded.

“Shooter!” Sampson shouted; he grabbed me by the back of the jacket, hauled me behind the Sebring, and threw me to the ground just before a second bullet smacked into the grille and penetrated the radiator, which threw steam.

The Sebring’s driver started screaming in a language I didn’t recognize. My shin was screaming in a language I didn’t recognize. But I forced myself to dig for my service weapon and badge.

“Where is he?” I said.

Sampson said, “I caught a flash of the first shot, elevated slightly, northwest corner of the intersection and back. Sounded suppressed too.”

I ignored the pain in my leg and got up enough to look over the hood through the teeming rain. The traffic light on one-way South Street had gone yellow. Two cars passed. Their headlights threw glare that dazzled me until the third shot.

I saw the flare of it, and then the Sebring’s windshield and passenger-side window fragmented as the bullet passed through both. I ducked down, hearing the frightened screams from the driver turn petrified.

“Pickup parked on the north side of South Street,” I said.

The light turned green on Seventh. The hysterical Sebring driver stomped on the gas, but the car bucked, stalled, and belched steam and smoke before dying ten feet into the intersection. The drivers of several cars behind us spun their tires, trying to get around the Sebring.

Other cars began honking frantically.

Sampson said, “Pickup’s running the red.”

In one motion I stood and had my pistol in my shooting hand over the Sebring’s passenger-side mirror. I was aiming at the pickup, which was trying to avoid the skidding cars in the intersection. For a moment I had nothing to shoot at.

Then I picked up a shadow, someone dressed in black standing in profile against the back of the truck cab. He shifted, exposing the sound suppressor on the muzzle of his rifle.

“Gun,” I said; I fired, and missed.

The gunman returned fire, but the shot went wide. Sampson’s shot went wide as well, two feet to the gunman’s right, shattering the truck’s driver-side window. The brakes went on. A Volvo station wagon turning the corner onto South smashed into the truck’s rear corner panel, throwing the gunman off his feet. He fell behind the walls of the truck bed.

I hobbled after a charging Sampson, his gun and badge up to oncoming traffic, and my gut feeling was that something terrible was going to happen unless I kept up with my partner.

Trying to back up, the Volvo almost ran us over. We dodged around it as the pickup’s brake lights went off and the truck started to roll again, passing beneath street lamps as it slowly gained speed.

We ran with it, and I caught a glimpse of the driver, a scruffy-faced guy with a tangle of dark hair and bleeding cheeks. The pickup pulled away. The gunman rose to his knees in the bed and looked at us, grinning.

The truck sped up and was gone into a mash of red taillights long before the police sirens started to wail.

“No light on the license plate,” Sampson said in disgust as we walked through the still-pouring rain back to the smoking Sebring. “Probably smashed when it got rear-ended.”

“There was enough light on the shooter, though,” I said, limping and feeling twisted and toyed with. “He likes to call himself Alden Lindel.”