Cross Fire (13 page)

He gave Denny two folded sheets from his inside breast pocket. Each one had a simple map printed on it, with a handwritten name and address beneath, and a single color photograph paper-clipped to the front.

“Hang on,” Denny said once he’d seen them. “We never discussed anything like this.”

“We never set any parameters at all,” Zachary said. “Isn’t that the whole point? I hope you’re not going to start quibbling
now.
”

“That’s not what I said,” Denny replied. “I just don’t like surprises, that’s all.”

Zachary’s laugh was less than convincing. “Oh, come on,
‘Denny.’
You’re the king of surprises, aren’t you? You’ve got all of Washington on tenterhooks.”

Zachary reached over the front seat and took a canvas pouch from the driver, then laid it on the padded armrest between them. This was a pay-as-you-go contract, and Denny’s price, as always, had been nonnegotiable.

Inside the pouch were six unnumbered ten-ounce gold ingots, each with a minimum millesimal fineness of 999. Nothing was more portable, and the fact that the gold was hard to come by only helped Denny weed out the wrong kind of client.

Denny took a few minutes to memorize the next assignment. Then he handed the sheets back to Zachary and picked up the pouch. Once he’d wrapped the goods in an old Safeway bag from his jacket pocket, he opened the car door to go.

“One other thing,” Zachary told him as he started to get out. “It’s a little close in here. You might think about a shower next time.”

Denny closed the door behind him and walked away, back into the night.

I clean up just fine,
he said to himself,
but you’ll always be a lackey asshole.

THE DOORBELL RANG in the middle of our dinner the next day. Usually it was the phone, and was almost always one of Jannie’s girlfriends. And she wondered why I didn’t want to get her a cell phone.

“I’ll get it!” she chirped, and jumped right up from the table.

“Five dollars says it’s Terry Ann,” I said.

Bree put her money down on the table. “I’m going with Alexis.”

Whoever it was had obviously been cleared by Rakeem.

But almost right away, Jannie was back. Her face looked totally blank, almost shell-shocked.

And then Christine Johnson walked into my kitchen.

“Mommy!”
Ali knocked over his chair getting out of it. Then he ran over to be scooped up in his mother’s arms.

“Look at you! Look at you!”

Christine hugged him tight and smiled at the rest of us
over his shoulder — that brilliant smile I remembered so well, the one that said all was right with the world, even when it wasn’t even close to that.

“My God,” she said as her eyes went around the table. “You all look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

In a way, that’s how I felt. A few years ago, at Christine’s request, we’d signed a stipulation reversing legal custody of Ali to me. She saw him at her home in Seattle for thirty days every summer and fifteen days during the school year. My only condition had been that we stick to the agreement, for everyone’s sake. So far, that’s what we’d done…
until tonight anyway.

“I can’t believe this boy!” She set Ali down and looked him over again. Her eyes were glassy with tears. “How did you get so much bigger since the last time I saw you?”

“I don’t know!” Ali squealed, and looked over at us.

I smiled for his sake. “Look who it is, bud! Can you believe it?” I stared at Christine. “What a surprise.”

“Guilty,” she said, still smiling. “Hello, Regina.”

“Christine.” Nana’s voice was tight and controlled. It sounded like a slow boil to me.

“And you must be Bree. I’m so glad to finally meet you. I’m Christine.”

Bree was fantastic, no surprise. She got right up, walked over to Christine, and gave her a hug. “You’ve got an amazing son,” she said. Typical Bree — she can always find a way to speak the truth in any situation, even one as uncomfortable as this.

“Mommy, you want to see my room?” Ali was already tugging on her hand, leading her toward the hall and stairs.

“I sure do,” she said, and looked back at me — for
permission,
I think. In fact, everyone was staring at me now.

“How about we all three go?” I said, and got up to follow them out of the kitchen.

At the bottom of the stairs, Christine stopped and turned to me. Ali ran up ahead of us.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

“Do you?”

“Honestly, it’s nothing more than it seems, Alex. Just a surprise visit. I’ve got a conference in DC this week — and I couldn’t stay away from Ali.”

I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. Christine had shown herself to be a very changeable person over the years, including the way she fought for custody so hard and then gave it up just as quickly.

“You could have called first,” I said. “You
should
have called, Christine.”

Ali practically screamed from the top of the stairs, he was so excited.
“Come on, you guys!”

“Here we come, little man!” I called to him. As we started up, I spoke low to Christine. “This is going to be a onetime thing. Nothing more than that. Okay?”

“Absolutely,” she said, and reached back to give my arm a squeeze. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

THE NEXT DAY was jam-packed for me, and I honestly didn’t give Christine much thought as my morning and most of my afternoon slipped away.

I saw both Bronson and Rebecca at their respective hospitals, performed some follow-up interviews in Woodley Park, did a consultation with the DA’s office on a separate case, and, finally, took some much-needed desk time to try and chip away at my stack of overdue reports.

Then, around three, I was picking up a late sandwich at the Firehook near the Daly Building — and I got a call from Ali’s school.

“Dr. Cross? It’s Mindy Templeton at Sojourner Truth.” Mindy was a school secretary and had been there for years, including during Christine’s tenure as principal.

“I feel a little awkward about this, but Christine Johnson’s
here to pick up Alexander, and she’s not on his caregiver list. I just wanted to get your permission before we let him go.”

“What?”

I didn’t mean to raise my voice so loud, but suddenly everyone in the coffee shop was turning to look at me. A second later, I was out on the sidewalk, still talking on my cell. “Mindy, the answer is no. Christine may not take Ali, do you understand?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I don’t mean to alarm you,” I said more evenly. “If you could just please ask Christine to wait, I’ll be there as soon as I can. Maybe fifteen minutes. I’m on my way right now.”

When I hung up, I was already running for the parking garage, my mind completely unsettled. What the hell was Christine thinking?

Had she been planning this all along?

And, for that matter, what
was
she planning?

As far as I was concerned, I couldn’t get to the school fast enough.

“I’M HIS MOTHER, for God’s sake! I wasn’t doing anything wrong! I’m not one of your stalkers.”

Christine was defensive from the minute I got there. We had it out in the hall while Ali waited in the school office.

“Christine, there are rules about this kind of thing — rules you used to abide by. You can’t just show up and expect to —”

“What are you saying?” she snapped. “Brianna Stone, this woman I hardly even know, can pick my son up from school and I
can’t?
Half the teachers here still know who I am!”

“You’re not listening,” I said. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to squirm out of this or if she truly believed she was in the right. “What exactly were you planning to do with him anyway?”

“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” she said dismissively. “I was going to call.”

“But you didn’t. Again.”

“When I got him out of school, I mean. We were going to go for ice cream, and he would have been home for dinner. Now he’s all confused and upset. It didn’t have to be this way, Alex.”

It was like listening to an out-of-tune piano. Everything just seemed a little off. Even her clothes. She was dressed to the nines today, in a fitted white linen suit, sling-back heels, and full makeup. In fact, she looked absolutely gorgeous. But who was she trying to impress?

I took a deep breath and tried again to get through to her.

“What happened to your conference?” I said.

For the first time, Christine looked away from me. She stared over at one of the bulletin boards in the hall. It was covered in crayon drawings of cars, planes, trains, and boats, with the word
TRANSPORTATION
in construction paper letters across the top.

“Did you see Ali’s?” she said, pointing at his sailboat.
Of course I had seen it.

“Christine, look at me. Did you even have a conference?”

She crossed her arms and blinked several times as she met my eyes again.

“Well, what if I didn’t? Is it such a crime that I missed my son? That I thought he might want to see his mommy and daddy in the same room, just for once? God, Alex, what’s happened to you?”

It seemed as if there were an answer for everything here, except my questions. The only part I really trusted was that she loved and missed Ali. But that wasn’t enough.

“Okay, here’s what’s going to happen,” I said. “We’re going
to go get some ice cream. You can say your good-byes after that, and then you’ll see him again in July, like always. Anything else, and we’re going back to mediation. That’s a promise, Christine. Please don’t test me on this.”

To my surprise, she smiled. “Make it dinner. Just the three of us, and then I’ll get on my plane to Seattle like a good little girl. How’s that?”

“I can’t,” I said.

Her mouth tightened into a hard, straight line again. “Can’t? Or won’t?”

The answer was
both,
but before I could say anything else, the office door opened and there was Ali. He looked so all alone, and scared.

“When can we go?” he wanted to know.

Christine scooped him up just as she had the night before. To her credit, there was none of the thunderstorm in her eyes that I’d seen a second ago.

“Guess what, honey? We’re going to go out for some ice cream. You, me, and Daddy, right now. What do you think of that?”

“Can I get two scoops?” he asked right away.

I couldn’t help laughing — for real. “Always the broker, aren’t you, little man?” I said. “Yeah, two scoops. Why not?”

As we left the school, Ali took each of us by the hand, one on either side, and it was smiles all around. But it still wasn’t lost on me that Christine hadn’t committed to a thing.

BY THE TIME I finally got to the Hoover Building for my five thirty meeting, it was quarter after six. I signed in and took the elevator.

The Information Sharing and Analysis Center where Agent Patel worked could have been anywhere in corporate America, with its ugly tan-and-mauve cubicle maze, low ceiling tiles, and fluorescent box lights. The only tip-off was the endless computers, at least one internal and two outside machines at every desk. The real sci-fi-looking stuff — the enormous servers and surveillance banks — was elsewhere on the floor, behind closed doors.

Patel jumped when I knocked on the half wall of her work space.

“Alex! Jesus! You scared me.”

“Sorry,” I said. “And sorry I’m so late. I don’t suppose
Agent Siegel’s still around?” I wasn’t keen to end my day with him, but in the name of collaboration, here I was.

“He got tired of waiting,” she said. “We’re supposed to meet him in the SIOC conference room.”

She called his extension and left a message that we were on our way, but when we got there — surprise, surprise — no Siegel. We waited a few more minutes and then started our meeting without him. Fine with me.

PATEL QUICKLY BROUGHT me up to speed on the
True Press
e-mails. Actually, there wasn’t that much to tell, at least not at this point in her investigation.

“Based on the header, the IP address, and what I got from the registry over at Georgetown, Jayson Wexler’s account was open and active at the time both messages were sent,” she told me.

“Which is not to say that Wexler sent them himself,” I said.

“Not at all. Just that they either originated from or somehow passed through his account.”

“Passed through?”

“It’s possible someone used an anonymous remailer from a remote location, but really they’d have no reason to. A stolen laptop that never turns up is a perfect dead end, forensically speaking. You’re better off looking for any witnesses to the theft itself.”

“We canvassed up, down, and sideways where Wexler claims the computer was taken,” I told her. “Didn’t get anywhere. And the closest surveillance cameras are DDOT’s, over on K Street. There’s nothing from the park at all. No one saw a thing — which is a little odd.”