James Patterson - I, Alex Cross

Blake's addiction had done a lot of the talking for him near the end. He'd cut me out when I got aggressive about rehab, but that was obviously not what he told Michelle, who was using heroin at the time too, even while she was pregnant with Caroline.

"It was actually the other way around," I said to her as gently as I could.

For the first time, her voice rose. "I can't, Alex! I can't go back to that house, so don't ask me to."

"Of course you can."

We both turned around. It was Nana who'd spoken. Bree, Jannie, and Ali were there too, coming up on either side of Nana, her honor guard, her protectors.

Then she walked right up to Michelle and put her arms around her.

"We lost sight of you and Caroline a long time ago, and now we've lost her for good. But you are still a part of our family. You always will be."

Nana stepped back and put a hand on Jannie's shoulder. "Janelle, Ali, this is your aunt Michelle."

"I'm very sorry for your loss," Jannie said.

Nana went on. "Whatever happened before today, or whatever happens tomorrow, doesn't mean a thing right now." Her voice was filling with emotion, and I could hear shades of the southern Baptist heritage coming through. "We're here to remember Caroline with all the love we have in our hearts. When those good-byes are over, then we'll worry about what comes next."

Michelle seemed conflicted. She looked around at each of us, not speaking a word.

"So all right, then," Nana said. She patted her chest a few times. "Lord, all this grief has given me an awful feeling. Michelle, take my arm, would you?"

I knew Nana's heart was breaking too. Caroline was her granddaughter, though she never really got to know her, and gone forever now. Meanwhile, there was someone else here who needed her help. Maybe that's where I get it, I thought. Sometimes the best, or only, way to take care of the dead is to take care of the living.

MICHELE DID GO back to her home in Rhode Island that night. I put her on a plane to Providence myself, but I made sure she had my numbers and told her that I hoped we'd hear from her – when she was ready.

The next morning, I was right back at it, the investigation of her daughter's awful murder, and possibly the murders of others.

The first thing I tackled at the office were the phone numbers we'd found at Caroline's apartment and in Timothy O'Neill's bedroom.

My backup plan was to hit up the Bureau for help, but I had a feeling about these numbers. If there was a key to unlocking them, it was probably something that Caroline or Timothy O'Neill could use on a regular basis. I was betting I could do this myself.

I started by writing out all the lettered strings I had on a piece of paper, just to get them rolling around in my head.

A simple A-to-Z, one-through-twenty-six substitution didn't seem right, since anything above J, or 10, wouldn't apply to a phone keypad.

But what if it came off the keypad itself?

I opened my cell on the desk and wrote down what I saw.

ABC – 2

DEF – 3

GHI – 4 (I = 1?)

JKL – 5

MNO – 6 (O = 0?)

PQRS – 7

TUV – 8

WXYZ – 9

The one and the zero keys didn't have any letters of their own, of course, but the I and O seemed like intuitive substitutions.

That still left G and H for number four, and M and N for number six.

When I used that logic to translate the first string, BGEOGZAPMO, it gave me 2430492760. Then I took the first three digits and Googled them as an area code. But 243 came up invalid.

It felt too soon to abandon the idea, so I kept going with it. I translated the rest of my list into numbers and lined them all up in a column on the page to see if anything jumped out at me.

It sure did. Nearly half the numbers started with a two .

It didn't take long from there to see that all of those numbers had a zero in the fourth position and another two in the seventh.

202 is Washington 's area code.

I went back to the first number and underlined.

2430492760

Things were starting to come together. When I looked at the same positions in the non-202 numbers, all but three gave me either 703 or 301, which are for areas of Virginia and Maryland close to DC.

The final three codes turned out to be from Florida, South Carolina, and Illinois – out-of-town customers, presumably.

Again, I went back to the first string. If positions one, four, and seven were an area code, didn't it make sense to look at positions two, five, and eight for the exchange? I started scribbling again.

2430492760 = 202

2430492760 = 447

2430492760 = 3960

202-447-3960

Next question – was 447 an actual DC exchange? I grabbed the phone book and found out that it was.

This was starting to feel like the first good day of my investigation. A very good day.

Once I'd deciphered everything I had so far, I called a good friend at the phone company, Esperanza Cruz. I knew that the reverse directories we used at work were only good for listed numbers. It took Esperanza maybe fifteen seconds to find the first listing.

"Okay, now you've got me curious," she said. "This one is for Ryan Willoughby, unlisted. What's he done? Other than being a walking, talking stiff."

I was surprised but not shocked. Ryan Willoughby was the six o'clock anchor for a network TV affiliate here in the Washington area.

"Esperanza, if you and I were actually having this conversation, I could tell you, but given as how we never spoke today -"

"Yeah, yeah, story of my life, Alex. What's the next number?"

In a few minutes, I had a list of fifteen names. Six of them were familiar to me, including a sitting congressman, a professional football player, and the CEO of a high-profile energy-consulting firm in town. This thing was starting to bubble over, and not in a good way. When I thought about how these men knew Caroline, it made me sick, physically ill.

My next call was to Bree. She recognized two more of the names. One was a partner at Brainard & Truss, a political PR firm on the Hill; and it turned out that Randy Varrick, who was the mayor's press secretary, was a woman.

"Things are about to get real nasty around here," Bree said. "These are high-resource people, and I'm afraid they're going to push back hard."

"Let them push," I said. "We'll be ready for them. In fact, I'm going to make my first call right now. In person."

HIGH-RESOURCE PEOPLE , and apparently a lot of them were involved. What was this about, and how had it led to the death of Caroline Cross? Where else would it lead?

It took me less than fifteen minutes to get from the Daly Building on Indiana up to Channel Nine's offices on Wisconsin. By the time I got there, I hadn't cooled down one bit. My badge got me past the guard in the lobby, then up to a receptionist on the third floor. A big number 9 hung on the wall behind her, along with poster-sized head shots of their news team.

I showed my badge and pointed at the wall. "I'm looking for him ."

She pushed a button without taking her eyes off me. "Judy? I've got a police officer out here for Ryan?"

She covered the receiver and spoke to me. "What is this regarding?"

"Tell him I'll be happy to share that information with anyone who wants to listen if he and I aren't face-to-face in the next two minutes."

"About ninety seconds later, I was ushered past reception, past the news studio entrance, and into a hall of windowed offices someplace in the back. Ryan Willoughby was waiting for me, looking like his tie was a little too tight. I'd seen him dozens of times delivering the news, but now all that polished blond congeniality of his was nowhere in sight.