James Patterson - Kill Alex Cross

Around seven o’clock, we got word back from the team out in Riverdale. A Dell laptop had been found in O’Shea’s master bedroom closet. It was loaded with pornographic images, most of them involving children. George O’Shea seemed to have a thing going for little girls, kids as young as three and four.

It was stomach-turning stuff, but as a piece of evidence, this was more than enough to hold him. By the time Peter Lindley arrived, straight from LX1 in Langley, adrenaline was running high in the observation room.

“What have we got here?” he said, taking a file from one of the assistant special agents in charge.

“George O’Shea,” the ASAC told him. “He’s the head of maintenance at the Branaff School—”

“I know who he is, for God’s sake. What have we got? ” Lindley said. He seemed to be in his usual bad mood. Several other agents stepped out of the way to make a space for him at the one-way glass.

On the other side, O’Shea was sitting with the Bureau supervisor from the Child Abduction Unit, Ken Mugatande. They’d been talking for two hours straight now.

O’Shea was slumped forward, with his head resting on his clenched fists.

“He’s ready to admit the porn’s his,” I told Lindley. “But he swears up and down that he doesn’t know anything about Ethan and Zoe’s disappearance.”

“He’s begging for a polygraph,” the ASAC said.

Lindley turned and glared at the agent. “This is the guy whose office is twenty-five feet from that tunnel under the school?” Nobody answered. It was a rhetorical question. “So what the hell are we doing here? Let’s get him down to the polygraph room — now! ”

The field office’s polygraph room looks a lot like the other interview rooms — small table, two chairs, plain white walls, and a big one-way mirror. If anything, the observation space is smaller. A dozen of us squeezed in there to watch the interview.

“What is your name?”

“George Luther O’Shea.”

“What is your address?”

“It’s 1109 Edgewood Road, Riverdale, Maryland.”

O’Shea had asked for this, but he looked even more miserable than before. He was wired up with pneumographs around his chest and abdomen, a blood pressure cuff on his arm, and two finger clips, all feeding into a laptop on the table.

The polygrapher was Sue Pilgrim, a forensic psychologist out of the Hoover Building.

Sue sat at a right angle to O’Shea and just behind him, where he couldn’t see her during the test. Her first several questions were a standard opening battery, mostly lie-proof stuff like name and address, to establish a baseline. After that, she moved on to the meat of the interview.

“Have you ever knowingly downloaded a pornographic image of a child to your own computer?” Pilgrim asked.

“Yeah,” O’Shea said, after a shaky sigh.

“Have you ever knowingly uploaded a pornographic image of a child from your computer to the Internet?”

“No,” he said.

Both times, Agent Pilgrim nodded. As far as she and her machine were concerned, he’d just told the truth.

Then she asked, “Have you ever conspired with any group or individual from another country to commit an illegal act here in the United States?”

“ What? ” O’Shea swiveled on his seat to look at her. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

She was talking about Al Ayla. This was the other possibility we had to confront. O’Shea could have had some tie to The Family, if they were in fact behind the kidnapping. Maybe he was their contact at the school. Maybe they had paid him off to be their “inside” person.

Agent Pilgrim responded to the outburst with quiet professionalism. “George, I just need you to answer the questions as simply as possible. Do you want to take a break before we go on?”

“No,” he said, turning back around to face front. “I just... I don’t understand where you’re going with this. What do you mean... contact with other countries?”

“I’ll ask again,” she said, and repeated her question verbatim. This time, O’Shea answered with a simple no, and again, Pilgrim nodded.

Next, she opened a file and set an eight-by-ten photo on the table in front of him.

It was a mug shot of Ray Pinkney, the drugged-out van driver from the morning of the kidnapping.

“Do you recognize this man?” Pilgrim asked.

I watched O’Shea’s face as he looked at the photo. There was no lateral movement in his eyes, no physical signs of evasion or lying that I could see at all.

“I’ve never seen him before in my life,” he said.

“Do you know where Zoe Coyle is right now?” Pilgrim asked.

“No,” he said.

“Do you know where Ethan Coyle is right now?”

“ No! ”

Every one of his answers got a nod from Agent Pilgrim. It was starting to add up.

It’s not that polygraphs are foolproof. They’re a guide, and nothing more than that. But even so, we seemed to be heading toward an unwanted conclusion here. You could feel it in the room.

George O’Shea wasn’t our guy. He didn’t have anything to do with the kidnapping.

They were just finishing up with the polygraph when I got an unexpected phone call. There weren’t many people who could have pulled me out of that room just then, but here was one of them.

“Detective Cross, it’s Nina Friedman from the White House. Could you please hold for the First Lady?”

Just like that — a direct call from Regina Coyle. Sure. Happens every day. Of course I could hold for the First Lady.

I stepped out and into one of the empty interview rooms. Just as I was pulling the door closed behind me, Mrs. Coyle came on the line.

“What can I do for you, ma’am?” I asked.

“I’m wondering what you can tell me about this George O’Shea person,” she said.

The question caught me off guard. I wasn’t completely surprised that she’d already gotten word on O’Shea, but still, this put me in a tight spot.

“Excuse me for asking, Mrs. Coyle, but how much do you already know?” I said.

“I know who he is. I know that he’s been arrested. And I know the reason why. What I’d like to know is what you think of him.”

“I can tell you he just passed a polygraph test,” I told her. “But that’s not impossible to fake. I’ve seen it happen before.”

“Yes, but what do you think , Alex? You’re my eyes and ears on this. I’m not looking for absolutes,” she said. “Just... anything to give us hope.”

The more I knew Mrs. Coyle, the more I found myself relating to her, parent to parent. I probably said more than I should have.

“I don’t think he knows where Ethan and Zoe are. I’m sorry.”

“I see,” she said.

There was a long, silent moment on the phone. I could hear people out in the hall, leaving the observation room. Presumably O’Shea would be transferred to the U.S. marshals’ custody and taken to the arraignment courts from here. Then over to the central cell block after that. The pornography charge alone would put him in jail.

“Mrs. Coyle?” I said.

“I’m still here.”

“As long as I have you, I’d like to ask a question about the morning of the kidnapping. If it’s all right.”

“Of course,” she said. I think any distraction from the disappointing news was welcome at this point.

“Do you know if Zoe brought her phone to school that morning?” I asked.

“Her phone?”

“There’s been some talk among the kids about a texting incident last year. Involving Zoe. I just wondered if—”

“Zoe doesn’t have a phone,” Mrs. Coyle said. “Not as far as I know. Even if Secret Service would allow it, her father and I wouldn’t. And believe me, we’ve had our battles about this one.”