The People vs. Alex Cross (Alex Cross #25)(88)

“Please,” she cried softly to me when she drew away from Bree. “You’ll have to come with me to tell Alden.”

I glanced at Bree, who nodded.

“Of course,” I said.

Gretchen Lindel’s mother wiped at her tears, then reached up and kissed my face. “I want you to know that you’re a good man, Dr. Cross.”

My eyes started to water. “Thank you.”

Bree held her hand. I followed them through the door at the far end of the kitchen into Alden Lindel’s small world. The shriveled man in the bed took his eyes off the latest Game of Thrones episode.

Eliza Lindel came around me and shut it off. “Dr. Cross has news, Alden.”

His eyes went to the tablet. The synthetic voice said, “Gretch?”

I smiled. “She’s safe, Mr. Lindel. They’re all safe. She’s on her way here. We tried to convince her to stay in the hospital, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”

Lindel shut his eyes tight, and then he looked to his tablet. “Thank God,” his mechanical voice said. “Thank God.”

Tinker, the Jack Russell terrier, started barking and yipping with excitement in the kitchen.

“Mom? Dad?” Gretchen cried weakly.

An EMT was pushing her in a wheelchair. She’d been washed clean of pig’s blood and wore a pair of hospital scrubs. An IV in her arm was connected to a bag mounted on a pole attached to the chair.

Her mother ran to her and hugged her, and they sobbed with joy, the little dog dancing on her hind legs and barking madly. They all went to Alden’s side. The dog jumped on his bed. Gretchen got up on wobbly legs, threw her arms around her dad, and kissed him.

“I never gave up, Dad,” she said, weeping. “They tried to reach inside and destroy me, but they couldn’t. Because of you, and what you taught me, they couldn’t.”

He broke down, made choking sounds of love, which Bree and I took as our cue to slip out, our job done. Outside, we smiled like happy idiots. It was a crisp late-fall afternoon, and I felt damn lucky to be alive.

“That Find My iPhone app is something, isn’t it?” I said, putting the crutches in the backseat and then hopping to the front, grimacing as I gingerly drew my splinted lower leg inside. “It can track the phone even if the phone’s not signed in.”

“Definitely helped find you faster,” Bree said, starting the engine. “That and Batra and the Life Flight pilot hearing your radio call.”

We drove toward GW Medical Center, where Ned Mahoney was in surgery. While Bree called Chief Michaels and filled him in, I prayed for Ned, and for Delilah Franks, Cathy Dupris, Ginny Krauss, Alison Dane, and Patsy Mansfield, hoping to God that they’d come to find peace with what had happened to them. Somehow, I knew Gretchen Lindel was going to be all right.

I thought about the four mannequins the HRT team had found in the shed, all lying on electric heating pads that made them look like real people on the infrared scopes. I thought about the FBI agent who’d been closest to the first thaa-wumph! in the basement of Edgars’s house, which he’d said held computers and large editing screens.

He said a fireball had gone off in there, fueled by an accelerant, and that, together with the explosion upstairs, had burned the mansion to the ground. Edgars had thought of almost everything; it was as if he’d been certain we’d find him at some point and had planned for it.

Bree ended her call with the chief.

“Michaels says, ‘Well done,’ and you’re on paid leave pending an investigation again.”

“Is it possible to be double-suspended?”

“You’re going to be cleared, Alex. Pratt was going to kill Gretchen Lindel. There are multiple witnesses. You had to shoot him. And Edgars effectively shot himself.”

“I know.”

“Then why the long face?”

I hesitated, wondering if I was still suffering from the effects of the gas, but then I said, “I’ve decided not to go back even if I am cleared.”

She was quiet for a while. “What would you do? Just counseling?”

“No, I’ve got some big ideas. And the best part about them? They all include you.”

When I glanced over at her, she was smiling. “That makes me happy.”

I reached over and squeezed her hand. “Me too.”





CHAPTER


112


TEN DAYS AFTER we reunited his daughter with her family, Alden Lindel passed away in his sleep, a happy man.

I heard the news from his wife on a chill, windy Saturday afternoon as I crutched after my family on the east side of Capitol Hill. Mrs. Lindel was grief-stricken, of course, but also relieved. With Gretchen at his side constantly since she’d returned home, Lindel had found grace, and he’d passed holding his daughter’s hand and his wife’s. I promised Eliza that I would be at the funeral, and I pocketed my phone.

Ali was dancing around. “C’mon, Dad. I’m going to be late.”

“Go on in, then,” Nana Mama said, shooing him toward the door of Elephants and Donkeys, a relatively new pub with a poster in the window advertising the District Open Darts Championship.

Ali yanked open the door like he owned the place and went in.

Bree started laughing.

“What’s so funny, young lady?” my grandmother demanded.