Джеймс Паттерсон - Criss Cross

I felt her heartache and frustration and said so, but she just started to weep.

“It’s over,” she cried. “No college coach will want me now. I’m cursed.”

“You’re sick because you’ve been burning the candle at both ends,” I told her. “And I’m sure D-One coaches have dealt with athletes with mono before.”

She stared blankly at the wall.

“I just wanted it to all be good, Dad. Like, no question I was ready.”

“I know. And I think you already are a no-question recruit to many coaches. They’ve seen your tapes and times. They know your potential.”

She looked at me hopefully. “You think?”

“I do. The best thing you can do is follow Dr. Roberts’s advice. Take those vitamins she mentioned, drink gallons of water, and get lots of sleep. You’ll be better in no time.”

Jannie seemed to surrender to the situation then. “Nana Mama’s bringing me soup.”

Bree came back from the health-food store with a buffet of vitamins, and the two of us went upstairs to change before dinner.

“So, about your meeting with Dirty Marty?” Bree called from the closet.

“He says he’s not dirty,” I said.

She stepped out of the closet, looked at me with a knitted brow. “And you believe him?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and then I told her about Forbes being contacted by M.

No one outside a very small circle in the law enforcement community knew about the notes M had sent to me, and Forbes was certainly not part of that circle. We’d decided to hold that information back right from the start all those years ago.

“Doesn’t mean Forbes couldn’t have hacked into files at the FBI to learn about M,” Bree said.

“Point taken,” I said, and then I told her everything.

Forbes claimed M had contacted him first by untraceable e-mail from a server in Panama and later by text from a burn phone.

Forbes said M seemed to know the inner workings of the sex-slave operation Forbes had been trying to break and he offered to provide evidence and the location of the three ringleaders. Shortly after, M mailed Forbes documents detailing the purchase of a yacht in Panama and the aftermarket work done on it to create the prison cells belowdecks.

M lured Forbes to Florida, saying that he’d relay the yacht’s location once it had entered U.S. waters to deliver its latest shipment of sex slaves. He also told Forbes to bring twenty-five grand with him and to take a room at a particular motel in Fort Lauderdale.

Forbes claimed that when he entered his room after dinner on the second day, there was a man hidden in the bathroom. He put a cloth over Forbes’s face doused in what Forbes believed was chloroform.

“I went down, but I wasn’t completely out,” Forbes had said. “It was like I was paralyzed and looking at him in a nightmare as he dragged me up onto the bed and put an IV in my arm. Then I really went out. For good, and for four days.”

“Four days?” I said. “No one found you in that motel room?”

“All I know is that when I woke up, I had a splitting headache, it was the afternoon four days later, and the money was gone.”

“But you didn’t report it to the police?”

He looked down and shook his head. “I should have, I know that now, but I was too embarrassed at the time. Here I’d gone off on a rogue investigation and I’d been played by a con artist.”

“One who took your money and set you up to take the fall for killing six people.”

He looked up angrily. “I didn’t know that then. I was so disgusted with myself, I decided to just get in my car and drive back to West Virginia. I got there a day later and started to work on the book again. Two days after that, agents were at my door.”

I thought about that for several minutes. “Did you have the forty-caliber pistol with you when you went to Florida?”

“No, I took my nine-millimeter, but I know what you’re thinking: How did they get the forty? The guy who knocked me out or someone working with him must have broken into the cabin and found it. That’s my only explanation.”

“Except there were no prints on the gun other than yours,” I said. “And they found hairs and skin cells matching your DNA on the yacht.”

“He put that there to frame me!” Forbes said. “M or whoever he was.”

“You told the Bureau all this?”

“Every bit of it, but they don’t believe a word.”

“Why’s that?”

“The overwhelming evidence against me,” he said in a bitter voice. “And who I said I thought M was.”

“Okay?”

“You won’t believe it either, Alex. I know I still don’t. But I saw his face when I was in that cloudy nightmare state after the chloroform while he was working to get the IV in me.”

I saw where this was going. “Are you saying you recognized him?”

Forbes chewed his lip, looked away, and nodded so slightly that I knew he was doubting his own thoughts.

“Who was it?” I asked.

He took a deep breath and gave me an even gaze.

“An old friend of yours,” he said. “Kyle Craig.”

CHAPTER 12

IN OUR BEDROOM, AFTER I’Drecounted the entire interview, Bree stared at me.

“Craig? That’s impossible. Craig’s been dead for years, Alex. You saw him die.”

I nodded. “I did. Right in front of me. On our honeymoon.”

Kyle Craig was dead. My nastiest opponent was long gone.

I’d wounded him, and rather than go back to prison, Craig had shot an oxygen tank, which blew up and burned him to bone and ash.

Sitting there on our bed, I tried not to see Craig die, but it was almost tattooed on my brain. All I had to do was close my eyes to see it.

“I figure Forbes was hallucinating,” I said. “The effects of the chloroform triggering some deep memory of Craig.”

“Or Dirty Marty made the whole story up,” Bree said. “He somehow got wind of M and is now playing on your obsession with Kyle Craig.”

I thought about that.

Marty Forbes had to have known how fixated I’d been on the FBI agent gone evil. Kyle Craig was a sadistic serial murderer who’d killed Betsey Cavalierre, my girlfriend at the time.

Bree came around and got into bed.

I climbed in beside her. “He could have been playing me. But for what? So I could help him get out of prison by convincing federal prosecutors that the man incinerated in front of me had risen from the dead and was now going around calling himself M?”

“Guilty men have come up with stranger stories,” she said.

I turned off the light, thinking, Then again, Craig used the alias Mastermind for a time, didn’t he? Is he now M? Could he possibly have survived that blast?

My rational mind said, No. Absolutely not .

After a few minutes, Bree was snoring gently. I started to drift off …

That dog began to bark again, and I snapped wide awake. I was about to get dressed and go have it out with the owner at last when I heard tapping against the window and realized it had started to rain. I figured that would end the barking.

I was wrong. Twenty minutes later, I was still awake, and the dog was still barking in that damn repeating pattern.

Finally, I got up and climbed the stairs to my attic office. I closed the window behind my desk, turned on the light, and looked at the boxes stacked waist-high by seven bulging upright filing cabinets. Evidence of old cases, some solved, others not.

Though I did not want to, I knew where I needed to go— back to the beginning, back to the hunt for Mikey Edgerton, long before M had come into the picture.

I found what I was looking for in a box labeled kissy at the bottom of the stack in the right corner of my office, where I thought I’d put it to rest forever. I set the box on the desk but hesitated to open it, wondering if I was wise to dig into this part of my past. A smart part of me said that it was wiser than not digging into it.