Джеймс Паттерсон - Target - Alex Cross

The next morning, February 2, around seven, Damon and Jannie were ferrying plates of steaming scrambled eggs, maple-smoked bacon, and hash-brown potatoes with hot sauce, a Cross family favorite breakfast, to the table.

“You’re sure you won’t have coffee?” Nana Mama asked Bree, who had walked in the door only twenty minutes before.

“I’m going to sleep once Damon and Song leave,” she said, and she yawned.

“Orange juice, then?”

Bree smiled. “That sounds wonderful, Nana.”

As we dished breakfast onto our plates, I said, “We’re proud of you, by the way. All of us, Bree.”

Ali and Song started clapping and whistling, and we all joined in.

“Stop!” Bree said, holding up her hands in mild protest but smiling softly. “I was just doing my job.”

“Just doing your job?” Song said in disbelief. “You caught Senator Walker’s killer less than twenty-four hours after she was shot. You did it before the FBI was even on the scene, and all four hostages survived!” SWAT team members had entered the Sheridans’ bungalow, found Mr. Sheridan wounded but alive, and rushed him, his wife, and their daughters to the hospital.

I wanted to say that Bree had also handled the pressure from Chief Michaels admirably, but I kept that to myself. She’d called me the night before shortly after talking to Michaels, who’d been forced to eat crow, and said that he was recommending her for citations.

“I got lucky,” Bree told Song. “And, for the record, I think Damon did too.”

Song grinned, glanced shyly my older son’s way, then gazed at each of us in turn. “Thank you. All of you. You’ve been so kind, and I want to say how very much I appreciate it.”

“You’re more than welcome here,” Nana said. “Anytime.”

We ate our fill. Bree’s eyes were fluttering shut before she agreed to my offer to help her to bed. She sleepily said her good-byes, and we disappeared upstairs. I tucked her in with a promise to wake her at three so she could participate in the FBI interrogation of Romero’s female accomplice.

Downstairs, I found Damon and Song already in their coats and carrying their small travel bags.

“Sure you don’t want me to drive you to the airport?”

“I have a per diem from school, Dad,” Damon said. “It will cover the Uber.”

“Okay, then,” I said, and I gave him a big hug. “You did great last night.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“The first of many more great games,” I said.

“Definitely,” Song said, and she hugged me. “Again, Dr. Cross, it was an honor to meet you and Chief Stone. My father will be most, most pleased.”

“Give your dad my best,” I said. “All our best.”

Song and Damon hugged Nana and Jannie. Song and Ali said their good-byes in Chinese, which delighted them both. And then my oldest and his girlfriend waved and went out to the Uber car to return to their lives too many miles away.

I felt sad for myself and excited for them all in the same moment.

“C’mon, Ali,” Jannie said. “Or we’ll be late for school.”

“And don’t forget you’ve got an early patient, Alex,” my grandmother said.

I glanced at my watch. It was twelve minutes to eight.

“Thanks for the reminder,” I said, and I gave Nana a kiss and my kids high-fives and then went back through the kitchen.

Taking the stairs down to my basement office, I realized once again how lucky I was and how grateful I was to have good kids and a wife who was damn near a superhero. I laughed at that and at the fact that she’d be embarrassed to hear me say anything remotely like—

At the bottom of the staircase, I saw an envelope had been pushed through the mail slot. I went over and picked it up off the carpet. My name was printed in block letters on the front. No address. No return address.

Tearing the envelope open, I walked to my office, then I pulled out a folded sheet of unlined paper. Spelled out in letters cut from magazines, the note read:

I read the message twice more, feeling inexplicably angered.

Stop who from doing what? Why not just tell me?

I started to ball up the paper, intending to toss it, but then stopped.

Who’s sending them? And why?

Taking a deep breath after these questions popped in my head, I realized the message was a form of manipulation, a way of toying with me.

It was in my nature to help people whenever I could, either through my practice or through my investigative skills.

The message asked me to help but didn’t say how. I sensed that was deliberate and designed to irritate me, to get me asking myself unanswerable questions like Who’s sending these messages? And why?

The mind is an ancient contraption controlled by questions, which is both a positive and a negative. Ask yourself a good, definable question, and your mind will do everything in its power to answer it, and it probably will be able to if given enough time.

But if the question is unanswerable, the brain spins, hearing the question over and over and over and getting no response. Why does this always happen to me? Or Why can’t I get over this tragedy? Or Who’s sending these messages?

Like twisting the key in the ignition of an engine that won’t turn over, the brain whirls on these unsolvable or as-yet-unsolved queries. Eventually, without answers, the brain gets agitated, angered, and then ground down. Eventually, it burns its way into a crisis or stalls entirely.

Is that what these messages are meant to do? Get me wondering and then fixated on who is sending them and why? Get me—

I heard a knock at my outer basement door. After putting the message in the top drawer of my desk, I went to answer the door and found Nina Davis, the Justice Department attorney, waiting.

“I’m glad you decided to come back,” I said.

She smiled weakly. “I didn’t know if I would until just a few minutes ago.”

Nina made her way to my office and took the same seat she’d occupied during our first appointment.

I sat opposite her. “How are things?”

“Oh, you know, busy, busy, busy.”

“Did you have the chance to do that exercise we discussed yesterday? Where you looked for good memories of your mother?”

Her face fell. “You know, Dr. Cross, work’s been so crazy, I... no, actually, I didn’t go there.”

I noted that, said, “Because those memories don’t exist?”

Nina shrugged. “Because it’s a waste of time. If they did exist, they were blotted out by other memories, but really, that’s not what I’m here for.”

“Okay.”

She struggled, said, “I told you I can’t feel love, but that’s not totally true. I...”

She looked at her lap.

“As I’ve said, Nina, this is a safe place. You’ll get no judgment from me, and nothing you tell me ever leaves here. And honestly, I’ve heard so much and seen so much over the years, very little shocks me. I’ve found that most behaviors and problems, they aren’t all that unique once you talk them out, get to the root of things.”

She crossed her arms and seemed offended, which didn’t surprise me.

“You have no idea the things I’ve done, Dr. Cross,” she said. “The things I do when I’m not at work.”

I kept quiet and gazed at her expectantly. I’d intentionally broken her pattern of thinking by intimating that her story, whatever it was, was not unique.

Why? People in mental crisis are often convinced that they’re the only ones in the world suffering like this, which simply isn’t true. Once they abandon that notion, after realizing that most people have thoughts just like theirs, it’s often easier to get them to open up fully.