The People vs. Alex Cross (28 page)

Jannie looked relieved that she didn’t have to decide on the spot, glanced at me, and nodded. “I’d like that, Coach.”

“Excellent,” Johnson said. “When could you bring her out?” he asked me.

I glanced at Bree, who said, “Winter vacation?”

“Perfect,” he said. “Oh, and those plane tickets will be on the Ducks.”

“Can I come?” Ali asked.

“Absolutely not,” Jannie said.

Coach Johnson stayed a few more minutes, answering our questions, and charming Nana Mama no end.

“I’ll be back for more of that pie,” he told her as he was leaving.

“You’re always welcome, Coach Johnson.”

When the door shut, we were all grinning like fools. Bree kissed Jannie, who said, “Did that really just happen?”

“Best track program in the country,” I said, feeling my eyes water.

“Long way from home,” Nana Mama said in a way that made me realize she probably wouldn’t get to see Jannie run in person if she went to Oregon.

“It is a really long way,” Jannie said. “I don’t know about that.”

“You don’t have to know right now,” I said. “We’ll listen to everyone, and you’ll make the decision when
you
are ready. Okay?”

Jannie hugged me. “Thanks, Dad. I’m so glad you were here for that. It could have been different. You know?”

I closed my eyes, kissed the top of her head, and said, “I do, baby girl. I really do.”

WHEN THE ELEVATOR
door opened onto the second subbasement below the FBI’s Cyber Division, Keith Rawlins had the tunes cranked inside his lab. The thudding, infectious bass line of Flo Rida’s “My House” came right through the glass window and seemed to vibrate in my chest.

It was a few minutes past seven in the morning, and Rawlins had evidently been in the lab all night. But you wouldn’t have known it. The digital wizard was stripped to his denim shorts, covered in sweat, and bouncing up and down on a mini-trampoline while punching the air in time to the beat.

“I still can’t believe this guy works for us,” said Special Agent in Charge Mahoney, my old partner at the FBI, who had taken over the missing-blondes case for the Bureau.

“I suffer the indignity of it every day,” Special Agent Batra said.

“This could have waited a few hours,” Sampson said, and he yawned.

I said, “He was excited enough about it to call us at five a.m.”

“This better be good,” Sampson said. “All I’m saying.”

Batra rolled her eyes and shouldered open the lab door. The music was blasting. Rawlins had Flo Rida’s music video playing on all screens. He spotted us and high-stepped our way, slinging his limp black Mohawk back and forth while singing, “‘Welcome to my house!’”

Mahoney and Batra looked like they’d spent the night sleeping on coarse sandpaper. I smiled and drew my finger across my throat.

Rawlins stopped dancing, pouted, picked up a remote, and froze the video. The lab got quiet.

“The best part was just coming,” he said. “Clay Pritchard lays down the best saxophone licks since—”

“You woke us up, called us in here,” Batra grumbled. “It wasn’t to dance, was it? Because if it was, I’m gonna be pissed.”

“Beyond pissed,” Mahoney said.

Rawlins sighed, said, “Sometimes I wonder if the academy’s training just squeezes the soul and celebration out of every agent who graduates Quantico.”

“Let’s see what you’ve got, Krazy Kat,” I said.

Rawlins fashioned his hair into a bun like a samurai’s top-knot, a style that appeared to give Mahoney and Batra indigestion. The computer scientist waved a finger at me with one hand and snatched up a towel with the other.

“Took me almost three days straight, but I was able to raise the dead.”

“You calling yourself the Messiah now?” Batra said.

“Just a miracle worker,” Rawlins said as he toweled his upper body dry.

He put on an FBI sweatshirt and a pair of black-and-white
checkered sneakers before strolling over to the keyboard for the main screen array.

“A lot of the data was corrupted,” he said, typing. “But I was able to salvage a few things from the day Timmy Walker was killed.”

Rawlins hit Enter, and Flo Rida and his house disappeared on the screens, replaced by shaky video showing a wooded scene. The cameraman was sneaking through thick foliage.

I had no idea where it was shot until a boy’s hand came forward and pushed aside leafy vines and saplings to reveal the lip of a dirt bank. The camera tilted down the bank and out twenty feet toward a blue Toyota Camry in a familiar clearing. The windows of the car were down.

The camera trembled, and you could hear Timmy Walker breathing hard while Ginny Krauss and Alison Dane made love naked in the backseat.

“The little Peeping Tom creep,” Batra said.

“It is creepy,” Rawlins said. “But I think you’re going to like little peeping Timmy, God rest his soul, before it’s over.”

The camera settled and zoomed in. Alison Dane’s hand slid from her lover’s breast and trailed down over her belly, and then she seemed to hear something. The cameraman did too.

The focus went haywire for a moment before settling back on the girls, who were scrambling for their clothes. Then Ginny Krauss happened to look out the window and up the bank, straight at the camera.

She screamed, “There’s some pervo kid in camo out there! He’s filming us!”

Timmy apparently whirled around and took off back into the forest. The next twenty-seven seconds were herky-jerky, mostly flashes of green in a dim forest.

Then, over the croaking of tree frogs and the thrumming of crickets, you could hear a vehicle roar into the clearing and skid to a stop. One of the girls screamed.

The camera turned back and began moving again, going closer to the clearing, zooming in on a white Ford utility van idling in front of the Camry.

One of the girls started screaming again. “Please! Don’t do this! Help! Kid! Help us, kid!”

The screen went black.

Rawlins said, “Unfortunately, that’s all the video I could recover.”

“Shit,” Sampson said. “Can you give us a blown-up look at that van?”

“I don’t need to,” Rawlins said. “Timmy did.”

He gave the keyboard several more orders and the biggest screen was filled with a digital photograph showing a grainy zoomed-in view of the van. The windows were tinted, so we couldn’t get a look at the interior, but the signage on the side was clearly visible.

“Dish Network?” Mahoney said.

“And those are Maryland plates,” I said. “Five, seven, E, one … can’t make out the—”

“It’s a six,” Rawlins said. “You see it better in the other photographs.”

“How many other photographs?” Sampson said.

“Five. Timmy could have just kept running after the girls spotted him. But he heard them screaming and decided to take these pictures. I think he was going to go to the police with them. Otherwise, why take the risk? Why not do the natural thing for a twelve-year-old boy caught with his hand in the pervert cookie jar and just run?”

Judging from her body language, Batra seemed to have some issue with the theory, but Mahoney said, “I think you’re right.”

“I do too,” I said. “I also think those pictures got Timmy Walker killed.”

“Oh, I know they did,” Rawlins said. “The phone died less than twenty-five seconds after the last picture was taken.”

JUST AFTER DARK
that same day, Sampson, Mahoney, and I were watching FBI crime scene techs getting ready to tear apart a white Ford utility van with Dish Network signage on both sides. It was in the parking lot at the Dish authorized-seller store in Rockville, Maryland, and roped off with police tape.

The store manager, a small, cranelike man named Lester Potter, was rubbing his hands together and watching nervously.

“You know that van was stolen, right?” Potter said.

“When was that?” Sampson asked.

“Five, six months ago? One of my techs was out doing a residential satellite install in Gaithersburg. She’s in the house not ten minutes, comes out, and the van’s gone. Boosted in broad daylight. They disabled the tracking device. Six weeks go by, and the company’s written it off, figured it was looted and chopped up for parts. But then we get a call. Pennsylvania state troopers found it abandoned in long-term parking at the Harrisburg airport. It’s crazy, but they didn’t take a thing. That
van was as clean and shipshape as it was when it was stolen. Someone just took it for a joyride.”

“No,” Sampson said. “Someone took it to kidnap two teenage girls who are still being held captive and terrorized to satisfy the twisted fantasies of Internet trolls.”

“Oh,” Potter said, his face turning pale. “I had no idea.”

“Who was the driver the day it was stolen?” I said.

“Lourdes Rodriguez,” he said. “One of my best employees ever.”

“Can we talk with Ms. Rodriguez?”

“She doesn’t work here anymore,” Potter said. “Lucky gal inherited a pile of money from a great-uncle and took this job and shoved it a few months ago.”

Sampson said, “I guess the glamour of being a satellite installer wasn’t enough to keep her on the Dish Network career path.”

The store manager gave him an odd look, said, “Who could blame her?”

“No one,” I said. “You have contact information for Ms. Rodriguez?”

“I’m sure I do somewhere.”

“Could you do us a solid and dig it up?”

Potter’s nose twitched as if he thought the task beneath him, but he went inside.

“Why take nothing?” I said.

“How many people without training know how to install satellites?” Sampson said. “And I can’t imagine they’re easy to sell on the black market. They say
Dish
all over—”

“Agent Mahoney?” Karen Getty, an FBI crime scene tech, called out.

Getty was standing at the rear of the van wearing disposable
white coveralls, latex gloves, and blue booties over her shoes. The two rear doors of the van were open, revealing shelves, boxes of supplies, six satellite dishes, and stacked rolls of cable.

“You’re going to want to see this,” Getty said.

We all went to the rear of the van, which looked spotless.

“Kill the lights,” she said.

The interior lights died. So did the spots brought in to illuminate the search. She picked up a bottle marked
LUMINOL
and started spraying it around.

Luminol is a compound that glows when it’s exposed to certain substances, like the iron in hemoglobin. When someone tries to clean up blood, traces of it are left behind; spray that area with luminol, and the chemical glows blue for a brief period.

There were a few blood spatters immediately visible on the van floor close to the doors. The more Getty sprayed, the more spatters appeared, until it looked like a starry night had been superimposed on the van’s floor, ceiling, and walls.

“What the hell is that?” Potter said. The manager had come up behind us.

Sampson looked at him and said, “Evidence of a slaughter.”

THE NEXT MORNING
, Sampson and I drove to the address of the woman who’d been driving the van the night it was stolen. Lourdes Rodriguez lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, on the eighth floor of a large, midpriced, brick-faced apartment building.

At the locked front door, we buzzed Rodriguez’s apartment number, 805, and got no answer. We figured that with an apartment building that big, there might be a live-in superintendent, and we lucked out when Arnie Feiffer answered our ring and soon buzzed us in.

Sampson and I entered a foyer featuring 1970s decor that showed the dings and scratches of time and neglect.

“Not where I’d be living if I’d inherited a boatload,” Sampson said.

I agreed, thinking that I’d expect a woman in her early thirties with newfound wealth to choose to live in one of the newer, more luxurious apartment buildings in downtown Silver Spring or …

A door to our right opened. A television blared the patter of an announcer for
American Ninja Warrior
. A nebbishy man in his sixties shuffled out of the apartment wearing a maroon bathrobe over his clothes, slippers, and a blue-and-white yarmulke on his head.

He squinted through round glasses. “You the cops?”

“You the super?” Sampson asked as we showed him our identifications.

“Lord of the castle,” he said. “Arnie Feiffer. How can I help, Detectives?”

“We’d like to go knock on Lourdes Rodriguez’s door,” I said.

“Why? What’s she done?”

“We just want to ask her a few questions about her prior workplace.”

Feiffer hesitated, then said, “I’ll go with you, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” I said.

“C’mon, then,” he said, and he shuffled by us, heading to the elevators. Posted on one of the two was a handwritten sign that read
Out of Service.

We rode the creaking, shuddering lift to the eighth floor. The doors squealed open, and we stepped out into a musty hallway with dingy rugs.

We walked down the hall to apartment 805 and rang the bell. There was no answer. We knocked, but no one came to the door. I was about to suggest we leave business cards with a note asking her to call us when from inside we heard the high-pitched mewing and cries of a cat that sounded very upset.

“A cat?” Feiffer said furiously. “No cats. No dogs. The lease is clear.”

After a glance at me, Sampson said, “It’s within your rights
to remove the cat from your property. We’ll help. It’s the least we can do for you.”

The superintendent studied us suspiciously. “You’re not looking to get around a warrant, are you?”

Sampson said, “If we wanted to do that, we’d tell you we smelled gas.”

“I run electric,” Feiffer said as the cat’s cries turned frantic.

“Sounds like it’s hungry,” I said. “We could always call in Animal Control for suspicion of neglect on Ms. Rodriguez’s part. They could get us in.”

The super didn’t like that and grudgingly dug under his robe for a key ring. He found the master key and used it to turn the dead bolt and unlock the door.