Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(13)

“Can you make mine and Alex’s to go?” Sampson asked, and he looked at Bree. “I want to tell Alex what’s going on with my end of the Willingham case, and I might have something on the Maya Parker case that should be checked out sooner rather than later.”

I smiled at Bree and said, “See? We’re already on it.”





CHAPTER 14





AS SOON AS SAMPSON AND I walked out the front door, he told me he’d spent much of the day canvassing the neighborhood around Harrison Charter High and looking for security-camera footage.

“Any luck?”

“A little,” Sampson said, getting into his car. “And that’s the problem.”

I got in on the other side. As he pulled away, he explained, “Due to lightning, we have no operating cameras on the apartment building opposite the front of the school. I got solid footage from the security cameras on the bodega on the northeast corner across from the school, but — ”

“Did you get it from Ronald Peters?”

“Yes, you know him?”

“Enough to say hello,” I said. “I used to use his laundromat. Have you looked at it?”

“Yes, and I found nothing, but that’s not the point,” Sampson said impatiently, waving his hand at me. “The point is there were nine other cameras around the perimeter of the school, including our two CTs on the west side of the campus.”

“The school faces east. So our traffic cams are behind the football field?”

“Correct. At the cross streets north and south.”

“Okay.”

“Both our cameras were shot out an hour before the crime,” Sampson said. “The other cameras facing the campus were all small, personal-surveillance types with strong lenses, and those lenses were smeared with Vaseline before our cameras were shot out.”

“This is not some junkie, then.”

“And this was not a rip-and-run deal gone bad, Alex. This was cold-blooded murder.”

I thought of my son Ali and wondered at his instincts. “By one or more professionals,” I said. “How did they miss the bodega cameras?”

“I almost missed them,” he said, smiling. “They’re painted white, like the building, everything but the lenses.” He slowed, pulled over, and parked on a street of row houses in DC a mile from my home.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“Maya Parker went to Bragg High, but she had friends all over Southeast through her community-service work. One of them lives here. Her name is Dee Nathaniel. She evidently told someone that there was a creep after Maya in the weeks before she disappeared.” He took us to a brick building badly in need of repointing and knocked on the door. A tall, strikingly attractive African-American woman in her early forties answered the door on a chain. She was wearing a navy business suit and no shoes.

We identified ourselves and said we were hoping to talk to Dee Nathaniel.

“I’m her mother, Gina,” the woman said, concerned. “What’s this about? She hasn’t done a thing wrong, not that girl. She’s a straight arrow.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “But we heard she was a friend of Maya Parker.”

Gina Nathaniel’s face fell. “She was. That hit my baby and me very hard. We helped search for her for days.”

“Would you mind if we spoke to her?” Sampson said. “It might help us.”

Mrs. Nathaniel hesitated, then said, “We don’t need an attorney, right?”

“We just want to talk,” Sampson said, holding up his hands. “If Dee’s a straight arrow, I can’t imagine she has anything to say that requires a lawyer.”

After a beat, she nodded. “But I’m listening in. Come in. You’ll have to excuse the minor mess, but I only just got home from work.”

After shutting the front door behind us, she called for Dee up a flight of stairs and got no answer. She asked us to wait in the kitchen and went up the stairs to get her.

We walked down the hall and into the kitchen, where the morning’s breakfast bowls were still in the sink. Two of them. Mother and daughter.

Dee came in a few moments later, a younger version of her mother, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. She walked with an awkward gait, her arms loose and swingy; her mother followed behind her. Dee looked at us uncertainly. “Mama said you want to talk about Maya?”

“That’s right,” I said and introduced myself and Sampson. “How did you two know each other? Through school? Bragg High?”

Dee shook her head. “I go to Stone Ridge.”

Her mother said, “It’s a Catholic school in Potomac.”

“We know it,” Sampson said. “So where’s the connection?”

“I knew Maya before, in middle school,” Dee said. “We stayed friends even though she went to Bragg and Mom made me go to Stone Ridge.”

“C’mon, Dee, do we have to go there?” her mother said.

Her daughter sighed. “No.” She looked at us. “It’s not that bad except for the zero social life. You know, the things normal kids do?”

Gina Nathaniel rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I keep her in a cage, Detectives. I let you go to the Bragg spring formal with Maya and her friends, didn’t I?”