The People vs. Alex Cross (21 page)

Lying on her filthy mattress in her plywood cell, holding her left leg so it wouldn’t be irritated any further by the manacle around her ankle, the seventeen-year-old was doing everything she could to keep her mind strong.

I am going to get out of here,
Gretchen kept telling herself.
I just have to survive long enough to get the chance. I’m going to be like Dad. Nothing they’ve done hurts me in any way. It makes me stronger. This only makes me stronger.

But it had been several days since they’d come for her. Hour upon hour of silence created all sorts of dark voices in her mind.

Doubt crept up on Gretchen and whispered that she’d die there in the box. Fear wormed its way into her stomach and
said they’d take her again before that happened. Self-pity wrapped her head and heart, told her she was defeated.

But time and time again, whenever Gretchen realized the voices of despair were taking control of her thoughts, she’d think of her father and everything he’d endured, and she’d take heart.

I will survive. They can’t hurt me. This will only make me—

The dead bolts turned. She closed her eyes, not knowing if this was a meal or another of their twisted games. If it was a game, she was done crying. She was done being scared. They seemed to feed on her fright, and as the door swung open she vowed to give them none.

The big one in black came in carrying a semiautomatic AR rifle. Her father had one just like it.

“It’s time, Gretchen,” he said from behind the paintball mask. “We’re all but done here. Cleanup time now.”

Gretchen said nothing, just stared through him as if he didn’t matter anymore, as if nothing mattered anymore.

Be like Dad,
she thought as he went to work on her ankle manacle.

For God’s sake, be like Dad.

HAD THAT BEEN
Gretchen Lindel’s father driving the Pathfinder?

I kept trying to convince myself I was wrong, but each time I closed my eyes, I saw Alden Lindel clearly. But why? And how?

When Annie Cassidy called to set up the appointment, she’d said that Father Fiore had referred her, hadn’t she? Well, now that I thought about it, she hadn’t actually used his name. She’d said she’d gotten my number from “a mutual friend, a priest with challenging problems.”

And Lindel? He’d contacted me directly. No reference that I remembered.

What were the odds of two people who knew each other coming to my office and never mentioning it to me?

I thought about Gretchen Lindel’s mother, Eliza, and how distraught she’d been in the days after her daughter’s kidnapping. Was Annie Cassidy the reason she and her husband separated? Had she used fake names for her lovers? Was Alden Lindel actually Carlos?

I went inside, told my grandmother I was going out, and got the car keys.

By the time I drove into a residential neighborhood west of the Cabin John Parkway, it was pitch-dark and the rain had stopped. I found the address I was looking for and parked the car across the street from a brick-faced Colonial with a big flower bed gone dormant, a crushed-gravel driveway, and a bronze Volvo station wagon. Lights gleamed in the narrow windows that flanked the front door.

I climbed out, smelled wet leaves, and started toward the house, wondering about the reception I’d get, a lone man at night unannounced. My cell phone buzzed. I ignored it, climbed the stoop, and rang the bell.

A dog started barking. A small Jack Russell terrier was soon bouncing and barking an alarm on the other side of the lower right window.

“Tinker!” a woman said. “Get back, girl!”

The dog kept barking and then yelped in protest when the woman grabbed her and held her in her arms. She peered blearily out the window at me. Despite the exhaustion and despair that seemed to hang off her like rags, I recognized her.

“Mrs. Lindel?” I said. “Eliza?”

The terrier in her arms showed her teeth.

She said, “If you’re a reporter, please go away, you’re not helping the situation. No one’s helping the situation here.”

“I’m not a reporter,” I said. “My name is Alex Cross. I’m a … my son Ali goes to school at Latin with Gretchen.”

Eliza studied me a long moment before opening the door. The dog growled like a little demon.

“Hush, now,” Eliza said, and the dog stilled but kept a close eye on me.

The missing girl’s mother was in her mid-thirties but looked older in baggy sweatpants, Birkenstock sandals, and a George Mason University tee. Her hair was in disarray and graying at the roots. Her eyes were bloodshot, rheumy.

“Alex Cross,” she said. “You’re that cop on trial for murder.”

“Innocent as charged.”

“I read you’ve killed eleven people.”

“In the course of duty I have, that’s true.”

“I also read you’ve found kidnapped girls before.”

“That’s also true. Including my niece, who today is part of my defense team. Life
can
go on after an abduction, Mrs. Lindel.”

“That why you’re here?”

“In part. Can I come in?”

She hesitated, then stuck her face in her dog’s face. “You be good now, Tinker, hear?”

Tinker licked her cheek. Eliza set the dog down. The Jack Russell eyed me when Eliza stood aside and I entered. I smelled gin and cigarettes as I walked past her into a center hall lined with hooks where pictures had once hung.

“Is there somewhere we can sit and talk?” I asked.

“The kitchen. Straight ahead.”

She followed me down the hallway through an open doorway into a dingy white kitchen where dirty dishes were piled high in the sink, newspapers and unopened mail covered the table, and prescription bottles took up two entire shelves of a bookcase. I caught a whiff of something antiseptic and thought I heard muffled voices.

“How are you holding up?” I said.

Eliza pushed back a strand of hair. “How does it look like I’m holding up?”

“I can’t help asking—the pictures in the hall?”

She stared at me. Her lower lip quivered. “I couldn’t take looking at Gretchen anymore. She was ripping me up every time I walked through there.”

“The stress must feel unbearable.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“Your husband?”

She stiffened. “Alden? Alden’s Alden. A trouper. Never gives up hope. Never says die.”

“I’m a clinical psychologist by training. I don’t know if he’s told you, but he’s been seeing me for therapy.”

She crossed her arms and studied me skeptically. “No, he didn’t say anything.”

“Two sessions.”

“Really? You’d think he would have told me. Why don’t we go ask him why he didn’t?”

My pulse quickened. “He’s here? I just saw him heading toward Capitol Hill. He looked like he was out for a night on the town. With another woman.”

“Another woman?” She laughed sarcastically. “I bet he smelled of cheap perfume, didn’t he?”

“I didn’t get close enough.”

“Well, you can now,” she said, gesturing at a door at the far end of the kitchen. “Alden’s right through there, watching
Game of Thrones.
Let’s go talk to him. Get things out in the open.”

“Let’s do that,” I said. I crossed the kitchen and went through the door.

A WAVE OF
antiseptic smells hit me as I stepped down into a space set up as a hospital room.

To my right, shelves bulged with medical equipment, supplies, and clean linens. To my immediate left there was a tall green oxygen tank with a hose that ran over to a hospital bed with its back raised.

Beyond the tank, an array of electronic monitors cheeped and beeped over the sounds coming from a speaker system linked to the big screen mounted on the opposite wall. According to a tag in the lower right corner of the screen, season 3, episode 4, of
Game of Thrones
was showing.

I took a few more steps into the room and saw a man in the bed. He reminded me of the physicist Stephen Hawking, gaunt, bent, and curled up by disease. Breathing oxygen through a nasal cannula, he lay on his right side, wore glasses, and watched the screen intently, seeming to have no idea we were there.

“That’s not the Alden Lindel who came to see me,” I said.

“I didn’t think so,” Eliza said.

“I don’t know why I didn’t check.”

“Why would you? We’re private about Al’s challenges because that’s the way he wants it. How could you have known he has end-stage ALS?”

“I suppose,” I said, and I felt baffled until I realized that the man who’d posed as Alden Lindel brought me the flash drives that showed the mock executions of Gretchen Lindel.

No one had sent those drives to him. He was part of Killingblondechicks4fun. And so was the love junkie.

Tinker darted by us and jumped up on the bed, wagging her tail.

“E-liza,” an electronic voice said.

She smiled at me before going to his side. “Right here, Al.”

“N-ext?”

“You’re not even through that one yet, and the next is in the queue,” she said with a glance at me. “He loves this show.”

“S-mart dwarf,” he said. “B-oobs.”

“Yes, Tyrion and lots of boobs,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’d like you to meet someone, Al. He’s trying to find Gretchen for us.”

I came over to her husband’s bedside. Laboring for breath, the real father of the missing blond girl rolled his eyes up to me.

“I’m Alex Cross, sir,” I said.

He had a digital tablet next to him on the mattress. He rolled his eyes down and blinked eleven or twelve times, maybe more.

“I know you,” the tablet said a few seconds later.

“Wow,” I said. “How does that work?”

Eliza said, “The tablet’s built with three camera lenses that triangulate to pick up where he’s looking on the screen, which shows a keyboard layout. He looks at a letter on the keyboard and blinks. When he blinks twice, he’s done with the word. Blinks three times and the voice comes on.”

“That’s amazing.”

“I think so.”

The tablet voice said, “B-lows, you ask me.”

Lindel was peering at me again, and I nodded in sympathy.

He looked at the tablet. A few seconds later, the voice said, “Where’s my Gretch?”

Thinking about the fake Alden Lindel and Annie Cassidy coming to my office, I said, “She could be closer than we think. Within driving distance.”

The missing girl’s father looked down at the tablet. His synthesized voice said, “Can’t even cry for her.”

Eliza’s hand shot to her lips. “It’s true. His tear ducts are shutting down. We have to put drops in every two hours.”

Her husband rolled his attention to the tablet for the longest time yet before the voice said, “My time is near, Cross. My last wish is to see my Gretch again. One last time.”

He peered up at me. Even though his body and face were virtually frozen, I could see the desperate hope in his eyes.

“I’ll do my best, Al,” I said. “Just hang on.”

I gave Eliza Lindel my cell phone number, said good-bye to her and her husband, and left the house feeling humbled.

The day before, with the weight of the evidence in my murder trial so stacked against me, I’d been thinking that life was treating me pretty damn unfairly. But here the real Alden Lindel’s life was being squeezed from him by a disease that was killing him one paralyzed muscle at a time. And there was his
courageous wife, caring for him and worried sick about their missing daughter.

All in all, I had nothing to bitch about.

I got in the car thanking God and the universe for the blessings in my life: my wife, my family, my home, my health, my friends, my—

My cell phone rang. It was Anita Marley.

“Judge Larch had a transient ischemic attack,” she said. “No stroke.”

“Hey, that’s good news.”

“It is,” she said. “I like Judge Larch. A lot. Her clerk’s saying we’re back in session the day after tomorrow.”

“Even better.”

“You still sticking with your story about the guns?”

“Yes. I’m telling you I saw them.”

“My analysts agree with the FBI. There’s no evidence of doctoring. But we’ll try to raise some reasonable doubt based on the fact that the phones were supposedly in the factory for months.”

I wasn’t convinced it would do any good. Later, as I was turning onto Fifth, my phone rang again.

Sampson said, “Are you busy tomorrow?”

“No trial until Wednesday.”

“Tell Bree I’m taking you fishing in Pennsylvania to get your mind off things. I’ll pick you up at five.”

IN THE CHILL
gray light of an autumn dawn, I watched fog swirling around the trunks and through the branches of leafless oak trees. Clusters of acorns still clung to some, but many more littered the forest floor. It was quiet but for the distant sound of a creek and the irregular patter of oak mast falling.

“Alex?” Sampson said behind me. “I got it to work finally.”

I turned to find him looking at an iPad on the hood of his Grand Cherokee. Still clutching my second big cup of fast-food coffee, I walked over and looked at the iPad, which had a satellite connection.

Sampson had the Google Earth app launched. It gave us a bird’s-eye view of a rural area forty miles northwest of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where several creeks met and formed a trout stream roughly three miles from where we were standing. The stream ran by a fifty-acre property adjoining an un-paved country road. A long two-track driveway wound from the road past meadows to a line of mature pines that shielded a large hollow between two ridges.

A modest ranch house sat in a clearing in the bottom of the hollow. There was a barn larger than the house and five other sheds and smaller structures. A substantial garden flanked the back of the barn. Beside the garden stood a big satellite dish.

I tapped on the dish. “That what they’re keying on?”

Sampson nodded. “Big bandwidth coming and going. Lots of electricity being used on the property. And many of the recent uploads to Killingblondechicks have evidently come through that satellite dish. We’ve got the IP address.”