The People vs. Alex Cross (Alex Cross #25)(69)

Sampson knocked on the door. No answer.

He knocked harder, and the door opened. A young girl, six or maybe seven, stood there in food-stained pajamas. She had a Winnie-the-Pooh blanket around her shoulders and studied us with red eyes.

“Hi there, young lady,” I said. “We’re police officers. We’d like to talk to your mom.”

“She’s sleeping,” the girl said.

“Can you wake—”

“I’m up!” a woman said, pounding down the stairs.

Mom was in a blue terry-cloth robe and barefoot. Her hair was a mess. Her eyes were puffy, rheumy, and wild when she said, “You get him? Timmy’s killer?”

“Mrs. Walker?” I said.

She came up behind the girl, hugged her. “I’m his mom, Lenore. This is his sister, Kate.”

We identified ourselves, said we’d like to talk to her.

“So you didn’t get him?” she asked, bewildered.

“Not yet, ma’am.”

The dead boy’s mom swallowed thickly and looked off in despair. “No one tells me what’s going on. Months Deuce has been gone and no word from anyone in weeks, not the sheriff, not the state police, not the FBI … not even my coward of an ex-husband.” She broke down weeping.

Her daughter scowled at us and then turned around to hug her mother.

“It’s okay, Mommy,” the little girl said. “It’s going to be okay.”





CHAPTER


89


WHEN WE GOT Lenore Walker calmed down enough to talk, she invited us in, and we learned that she had, by her own description, led a fairly charmed life until the night Timmy disappeared. She’d grown up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and met Tim Walker her junior year at Pennsylvania State.

Walker got a good job working as an oil engineer right out of school and made enough in the fracking industry that they bought the house, restored it, and had kids. Timmy—Deuce—was his father’s favorite, and they spent many hours together early in the boy’s life.

Then Walker started moving up the corporate ladder and was gone a lot. And then he discovered “playthings,” as Lenore put it, and he was gone a lot more. After Deuce died, her husband, heartbroken and in love with a twenty-four-year-old, had left for good.

We asked her about the rumors, about the hole in the wall at the school. “Never happened,” Lenore said.

“Your son have a computer?” Sampson asked.

“Two, or one and a half, I guess, at the end. He was always buying and selling them on eBay.”

“Really?” I said. “At twelve?”

“Oh, sure. Computers, phones, iPods, anything electronic, long as it was used and cheap. It was kind of his hobby. He made pretty good money doing it.”

“Police look at his computers?”

“They took them,” she said. “I assume they looked at them.”

“And his phone?”

“They found one.”

“He had more than one?” Sampson asked.

“Sometimes three, but I only knew of two at that time. A Samsung, which they found, and a used iPhone, which they didn’t.”

“Anything else?”

“No. There’s not much left other than pictures, videos, and my memories.”

She started to cry again. Her daughter came over and hugged her until she was composed enough to tell us about the day her son disappeared.

“I wanted him to go to the store for me.” She sniffed. “He’d been in for a snack and then said he was going out to play. But when I called after him, he never answered.”

We asked her to point out the trail she believed Timmy had used to reach the forest clearing where the missing girls’ Toyota was found. As she went to the window to show us where to find the path, Lenore expressed bitterness about the investigation, saying that state and local detectives had been more interested in the lesbians than her son.

“Then again, they’re probably still alive, and my son’s dead, buried, and forgotten,” she said morosely as she led us to the door. “So thank you for thinking about him.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “We’ll let you know if we make any progress.”

“I believe you,” she said. “Even if no one else seems willing to help.”

Walking down the driveway, feeling Lenore Walker’s tortured gaze on my back, I was once again grateful for my many blessings and hyperaware of how the gifts of life can disappear in the blink of an eye.

“There but for the grace of God go I,” Sampson said in a soft voice.

“I hear you, brother,” I said. “Loud and clear.”

We found the path and went into the woods. The trail ran out across a shelf and then dropped steeply downhill to a logging road. When we came over the edge of the shelf, a black, whirling explosion went off down in the bottom.

I lurched back, ducked, and threw up my arms to protect my head.





CHAPTER


90


A BIG FLOCK of wild turkeys had been feeding in the logging road when we appeared above them. They erupted off the forest floor and roared right over our heads, causing us to duck and take cover until they were gone.

“You should have seen the look on your face when they came blowing out of there,” I said, grinning.