Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(85)

I looked at her, my heart beating with relief and joy. “Sorry, I’m just being a dad making sure his daughter’s safe.”

“Why?” she said, opening the door all the way. “What’s happened? Did they find Dee?”

I didn’t want to, but I told her about her friends.





CHAPTER 98





BREE AND I HAD DRESSED and were wolfing breakfast down when Jannie came into the kitchen, still upset.

“Does Tina and Rachel’s mother know?” she said.

“Not yet.”

“How do you live through something like this?”

I swallowed a chunk of egg and said, “Faith. You, me, Bree, Ned, John — we all have to have faith that we will find them. That’s how we get through and take smart action to locate them as fast as possible.”

“You’ll find them, Dad. I have faith in you.”

“Thank you,” I said. “But for now, other than training, I want you to stay close to home. And don’t go anywhere without telling me or Bree or John. Okay?”

“Now I am scared,” she said.

Bree said, “Being scared is good sometimes. Again, keep a low profile. If you have to go out, we’d prefer you to travel in threes and with a male if you’re with friends.”

Jannie crossed her arms but nodded.

Nana Mama said, “Hungry?”

“Not really,” she said.

“If you’re going to train, you need to eat,” my grandmother said.

“Okay,” Jannie said with little enthusiasm. “I guess I’ll take an omelet too, Nana.”

Bree’s phone rang. She answered, listened, and said, “Thank you, Commissioner. We’ll download it as soon as it gets here.” She hung up and opened her laptop on the counter. “Dennison got us the twins’ data.”

“That was fast,” I said.

“He’s handy at times,” Bree said, logging into her Metro e-mail account. “Here are the files. One for Tina, one for Rachel.”

She opened the files, which gave us not only the twins’ GPS locations over the last twenty-four hours but their texts, social media, and internet searches. Mahoney arrived while Bree was working with the GPS coordinates on Google Maps.

“Here they are at Mrs. Rodgers’s house at Sixth and L at eleven ten last night,” she said.

“Jibes with what Newton told us,” I said.

She nodded and gave her computer a few more commands. The map now showed the route they took heading home to Eleventh and E. But they made it only four blocks, to Ellen Wilson Place and Seventh, before they left the direct route, got on the Southeast Freeway, and started covering ground.

“They’re in a vehicle and going by CCTV cameras on that on-ramp,” Bree said, typing again.

Ned said, “I’ll get agents there ASAP.”

We had GPS coordinates every few minutes for the twins’ phones for almost two hours after they got in that vehicle, which traveled down I-295 and then took I-95 south to Virginia Route 54 and a street in Ashland, Virginia, where their phones had stopped moving. On Google Earth it looked like the phones were in a mixed neighborhood of light industrial and residential apartment buildings. Forty minutes later, Rachel’s phone died. Eighteen minutes after that, Tina’s phone stopped transmitting its position.

“Okay, we’re heading to Ashland,” Mahoney said.

We heard the front door open and shut, and Sampson rushed in, breathing hard. “I got her. Dee Nathaniel.”

“What?” Bree said.

“Where?” Mahoney said.

“Three blocks from her house at eleven forty-five p.m.,” he said and put still shots in front of us showing Dee climbing into the passenger side of a black panel van with tinted windows and a Virginia license plate.

“I’m already running it,” Bree said, calling up the Virginia DMV on her computer and entering the plate. Up popped a 2011 Toyota Camry belonging to a forty-five-year-old woman in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

“Stolen,” Mahoney said. “On the way to or from Ashland. Do me a favor, Bree?”

“Anything.”

“Look at Virginia’s registered sex offenders list and see if any of them live within a six-block radius of where the phones stopped signaling.”

“Great idea,” I said.

Sure enough, two minutes later, Bree located a level 2 sex offender living in an apartment complex three blocks away.

“Eric Boone, fifty-four,” she said, throwing up her fist in victory. “Convicted of statutory rape in Kentucky in 1998. Goes to Kentucky state penitentiary and … released in 2004! Moves to Ashland in 2005.”

“The year the first girl disappears here,” I said.

“We’ve got him,” Ned said. “And if we have him, we have the girls.”





CHAPTER 99





BREE TOOK SCREENSHOTS OF THE maps and satellite views while Mahoney got on the phone to arrange for an FBI helicopter to fly to Ashland. Alex went upstairs to retrieve his service weapon and sunglasses.

Bree was about to log off her computer when she saw another e-mail from Verizon. Subject line: New data.

She clicked on it as Alex returned to the room and Mahoney hung up.