The People vs. Alex Cross (Alex Cross #25)(55)

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.”





CHAPTER


72


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.”

“Seems strange,” I said. “When Krazy Kat Rawlins looked at that website, he couldn’t tell where most of the videos of blondes were coming from because they used onion routers. And our guys were able to track them?”

“Maybe the guys making them got lazy,” Sampson said. “It happens.”

“The woods around here do look like the woods in the videos of Gretchen Lindel and Delilah Franks,” I said. “The blondes running in the trees?”

“I remember,” Sampson said. “And the lesbian girls disappeared less than sixty miles east of here. They could all be in that house or in any of those outbuildings.”

“Wish you’d gotten the search warrant.”

“Not enough evidence yet, the judge said. Which is why you’re here and Fox isn’t. Like I said, we’re going fishing.”

We got back in the car. It felt good to be riding shotgun with Sampson again. My world seemed even better than it had leaving the Lindels the evening before.

I switched the iPad app to Google Maps and used it to navigate the labyrinth of dirt roads around the property. Somewhere on it, there was a computer belonging to a twenty-seven-year-old named Carter Flint. In the satellite image, there were six or seven vehicles in Flint’s yard.