James PATTERSON: Cross Country

“You sleep at all?” she asked.

That wasn’t really what she wanted to know.

“I knew the mother, Bree. We went to Georgetown together. This couldn’t have happened to her. Shouldn’t have, anyway.”

She breathed in sharply at my revelation. “I’m so sorry, Alex. Why didn’t you say so?”

I shrugged, then sighed. “I’m not even sure if I can talk about it now,” I said.

She hugged me. “It’s okay. No need to talk. Unless you want to, Alex. I’m here.”

“We were best friends, Bree. We were a couple for a year. I know it was a long time ago, but…” I trailed off. But what? But it hadn’t just been kid stuff, either. “I loved her for a while, Bree. I’m blown away right now.”

“You want to get off the case?”

“No.” I’d already asked myself the same question, and the answer had come just as quickly.

“I can get Sampson or somebody else from Violent Crimes to cover. We’ll keep you up to the second–”

“Bree, I can’t let go of this one.”

“This one?” She ran a hand softly up and down my arm. “As compared to… what, Alex?”

I took a deep breath. I knew where Bree was going with this. “It’s not about Maria, if that’s what you mean.” My wife, Maria, had been gunned down when our kids were small.

I’d managed to close the case only recently. There had been years of torture and guilt before that. But Maria had been my wife, the love of my life at the time. Ellie was something else. I wasn’t confusing the two. I didn’t think so anyway.

“Okay,” she said, stroking my back, soothing me. “Tell me what I can do.”

I folded us both under the covers. “Just lie here with me,” I said. “That’s all I need for now.”

“You got it.”

And soon, wrapped in Bree’s arms, I went off to sleep – for a whole two hours.

“I SPY, WITH my little eye, a pink newspaper,” said Bree.

“Over there!” Ali was quick to spot it. “I see it! It is pink. What kind of crazy newspaper is that?”

To my family’s surprise and delight, I hadn’t left for work at some obscene hour the morning after I found Ellie and her family dead in their home. Today, I wanted to walk the kids to school. Actually, I wanted to do it most every day, but sometimes I couldn’t, and sometimes I didn’t. But today I needed lots of fresh air in my life. And smiles. And Ali’s giggles.

Jannie was in her last year at Sojourner Truth, all ready for high school, while Ali was just starting out in the school world. It seemed very circle-of-life to me that morning, with Ellie’s family gone in a blink, and my own kids coming up strong.

I put on my best cheerful dad face and tried to set aside the gruesome images of last night. “Who’s next?”

“I’ve got one,” Jannie said. She turned a canary-eating grin on Bree and me. “I spy, with my little eye, a POSSLQ.”

“What’s a possel-cue?” Ali wanted to know. He was already looking around, moving his head like a bobblehead doll’s, trying to spot it, whatever it was.

Jannie practically sang out the answer. “P, O, S, S, L, Q. Person of the opposite sex, sharing living quarters.” She whispered the word sex in our direction, presumably to safeguard her little brother’s innocence. No matter, I could feel myself blushing slightly.

Bree tagged Jannie’s shoulder. “Where exactly did you pick that one up?”

“Cherise J. She says her mom says you two are, you know, living in sin.”

I exchanged a look with Bree over the top of Jannie’s head. I guessed this was bound to come up in some way or another sooner or later. Bree and I had been together for more than a year now, and she spent a good amount of time at the house on Fifth Street. Part of the reason was that the kids loved having her around. Part was that I did.

“I think maybe you and Cherise J. need to find something else to talk about,” I told her. “You think?”

“Oh, it’s okay, Daddy. I told Cherise her mom needs to get over herself. I mean, even Nana Mama’s down with it, and her picture’s in the dictionary under ‘old-fashioned,’ right?”

“You wouldn’t have any idea what’s in a dictionary,” I said.

But Bree and I had stopped trying to be politically correct with Jannie, and we just let ourselves laugh. Jannie had that “crossroads” thing going on these days; she was right at the Intersection of girl and woman.

“What’s so funny?” Ali asked. “Somebody tell me. What is it?”

I scooped him up off the sidewalk and onto my shoulders for the last half block of our walk to school. “I’ll tell you in about five years.”

“I know anyway,” he said. “You and Bree love each other. Everybody knows. No big deal. It’s a good thing.”

“Yes it is,” I said and kissed his cheek.

We dropped him at the school’s east entrance, where the rest of his class of minicuties were lining up outside. Jannie called to him through the fence. “See you later, alligator! Love you.”

“In a while, crocodile! Love you back.”

With their older brother, Damon, off at prep school in Massachusetts, these two had grown closer than ever lately. On weekend nights, Ali often slept on an air mattress at the foot of his sister’s bed, in what he called his “nest.”

We left Jannie at the opposite side of the school building, where all the older kids were streaming in. She gave us both hugs good-bye, and I held on a little longer than usual. “I love you, sweetie. There’s nothing more special to me than you and your brothers.”

Jannie couldn’t help but look around to make sure no one had heard. “Me too, Daddy,” she said. Then, almost in the same breath, “Cherise! Wait up!”

As soon as Jannie was gone, Bree took my arm in hers. “So what was that?” she said. “‘Everybody knows you and Bree love each other’?”

I shrugged and smiled. “What do I know? That’s the big rumor going around, anyway.”

I gave her a kiss.

And because that worked out so well, I gave her another.

BY NINE A.M. I was all kissed out and getting ready to enter a most unpleasant multiple-homicide briefing at the Daly Building. It was being held in the large conference room right across from my office. Handy, anyway. Every available D-1 and D-2, and a contingent from Second District, which covered most of Georgetown, would be there.

I still couldn’t get it in my head that Ellie was the victim. One of the victims.

The ME’s Office had sent over a representative in the person of Dr. Paula Cook, a bright investigator who had the personality of tapioca pudding. The corners of Dr. Cook’s mouth actually twitched when we shook hands. I think it was an attempted smile, so I smiled back. “Thanks for coming, Paula. We need you on this one.”

“Worst I’ve seen,” she said, “in fourteen years. All those kids, the parents. Turns my stomach. Senseless.”

We had picked up a stack of crime scene photos on the way in, and now Paula and I pinned some of them up in the situation room. I made sure they were all 11 x 14s. I wanted everyone to feel some of what had happened last night in Georgetown, the way I still did.

“This might be an isolated incident,” I stood in front and told the assembled group a few minutes later. “But I’m not going to assume it is. The more we understand, the more prepared we’ll be if this happens again. It might not be an isolated incident.” I figured some of the more jaded homicide detectives wouldn’t agree; they’d be thinking I’d worked one too many serial cases. I didn’t much care what they thought at that point.

For the first fifteen minutes or so, I ran through the primary facts of the case for those who hadn’t been there the night before. Then I turned it over to Paula. She bounced up and talked us through the photos on the wall.