The People vs. Alex Cross (Alex Cross #25)(54)

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.





CHAPTER


71


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.