James Patterson - Kill Alex Cross

I came around and unlocked the cuff securing her to an eyebolt on the metal table.

She rubbed at the red mark around her wrist as I sat down but ignored the bottle of water I’d left for her.

“I’ve got something I want to show you,” I said. “You should look, at least. Just look.”

I opened one of my files and took out a screen capture from the night’s surveillance video at the parking garage. The image was grainy, but the eight of them were easy enough to make out, huddled next to a couple of SUVs.

When I slid the picture around to show her, my finger was on the woman at the center of their group.

“This is the one who shot and killed your husband,” I said, watching her face.

I wasn’t positive about the husband part — not until her eye twitched, and her lips tightened over her teeth, like she was holding in a scream, or maybe a curse.

“Do you want to tell me who she is?” I asked.

To my surprise, the woman answered.

“I don’t know,” she said in a thick Saudi accent. “Her, I would help you find, if I could. Evil bitch. Controlling. Hard.”

“Is she running Al Ayla’s Washington cell?” I asked, but already, she’d retreated back into silence.

“Let me ask you something else,” I said. “It’s about the kidnapping of the president’s children. Do you know if Al Ayla’s responsible?”

All I got there was more of the same. Silence, and she wouldn’t look at me.

“You know, it’s not too late to cut a deal here,” I said. That got her attention. It even got me some minimal eye contact. “The first one of you to talk is going to be on a plane back to Riyadh when this is all said and done. The rest are going to be here for a long, long time.”

“A deal? ” she said then. “Do you think I am absolutely stupid?”

The question spoke for itself. If she wasn’t interested, she wouldn’t have asked.

I shrugged. “Believe what you want. This offer stands only as long as nobody else comes forward. If I get a knock on that door” — I thumbed over my shoulder — “then you and I are done here.”

I didn’t want to give her too much room to think, so I leaned in and kept talking, a little faster now, whatever came into my head.

“If your husband had been martyred, I might understand all this silence. Or even if he’d been allowed to take his own life. But that’s not what happened, is it? He was killed by one of your own. By Al Ayla. The Family . I can’t imagine that’s what either of you signed up for,” I said. “What do you owe them now? What do you owe your husband’s murderer?”

She was seething but still watching me. I took it as a green light.

And then slowly, without even the slightest change of expression, she said, “There have been rumors.”

“What kind of rumors?” I said.

“Talk. Among some of the others. They say Al Ayla kidnapped those children. That your president got what he deserved.”

“Do you know if the children are still alive?” I asked. “Just tell me that.”

“I don’t know.” She slumped in her chair, maybe hating herself for doing this, for even talking to me. This was against all her beliefs, wasn’t it?

“Do you know where they were taken?” I pressed her.

This time she only shook her head. I was starting to wonder where this was going, if anywhere. Did she know more than she was telling me? Probably.

“How about this?” I said. “Do you believe those rumors are true? Do you think Al Ayla has those kids?”

Her expression muddied. It was like I could see the gears turning. Her defenses were down now, clearly weakened, and she was easier to read.

“Of course I believe them,” she said — about two seconds too late.

She’d just put herself in a corner, and we both knew it. She wanted to believe those rumors, even needed to believe them. But she didn’t. Now she had nothing left to give me. No currency to buy her freedom.

“I think we’re done,” I said. Then I counted to ten in my head. When she didn’t say anything, I stood up to go.

“And just so you know,” I told her, “the secretary of the interior wasn’t going to be anywhere near that expo tonight. Your mission failed before it even started. The plan you were given was a bad one. Your husband died for nothing.”

I left the room with a clear conscience. The fact was, we’d both lied to each other. There was no deal. Never had been, never would be. I hadn’t even cleared the idea with my team.

Some days are just like that. You do whatever you need to do to get the job done. Anything at all. By tomorrow, maybe my conscience wouldn’t be so clear.

The Major Case Squad office was a twelve-cubicle circus that morning. Staff were coming and going, phones were ringing off the hook, detectives were swapping information across the room — all the usual, but it was nonstop chaos these days. A thousand clues and rumors were being chased down. At least that many leaks. Way too many.

I barely noticed any of it. I was hunched over my desk with a stack of Branaff personnel files spread out around me.

Whatever had or hadn’t been achieved the night before, it remained true that we had seventeen Branaff faculty and staff unaccounted for during that homeroom period when someone used Emma Allison’s phone to set a trap for Zoe Coyle.

I’d also started to wonder if Ethan had been an unintended second victim in this kidnap plot. Had Zoe’s fight with Ryan Townsend thrown a monkey wrench into the plan? Was she the sole target to begin with?

I was up to my eyeballs with all of it when I got a knock on my cubicle wall.

“Uh, Detective?”

It was Dennis Porter, one of the research team members. Porter was fresh out of the academy, and still green, but eager and fairly bright, I thought. The bags under his eyes and day-old ginger fuzz on his face were a testament to his hard work.

“What’s up, Denny?”

“Well, maybe nothing, but I just found this,” he said, and laid a copy of a death certificate on my desk.

It was from the Department of Vital Records in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, dated November 10, 2006. The name on the certificate was Zachary Levi Johnson-Glass.

“Glass?” I said. “As in—”

“I think so,” Porter said. “There’s no obit that I can find, but I did pull the birth certificate. The parents are listed as Rodney Glass and Molly Johnson, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The poor kid was eight years old when he died.

“And I found a 1998 lease agreement from Harrisburg with the same Social Security number as Glass’s file at Branaff. Like I said, maybe it’s nothing, but I thought you should know.”

Glass, the school nurse, was one of those seventeen names on the list. I was already pulling his file to the top of the mess on my desk.

“I want you to start from scratch on this guy,” I said. “LexisNexis the hell out of him. Check NCIC again, and Interpol while you’re at it. I want to know where he’s lived, every job he’s ever had, every parking ticket, every itch he’s ever scratched. Pull in whoever you need, I’ll sign off on it. Don’t take any crap from anybody on this. Just get it done.”

Porter still looked a little tentative. “Don’t you already have all that on file, sir?”

I picked up the death certificate and waved it at him. “You would have thought so, right?”

He smiled for half a second before he seemed to remember how serious this was. “I’ll get right on it,” he said, and went off at a trot.

I wasn’t going to get too excited... yet. It’s easy to be blinded by circumstantial evidence. But that didn’t stop me from putting a whole new lens on Rodney Glass.