Criss Cross (Alex Cross #27)(26)

But at the bedroom door, I realized I was wide awake. I decided to go down to the kitchen, maybe make one of those magnesium drinks that are supposed to help you sleep by working on your adrenal glands or some such nonsense.

Instead, I found myself climbing to the third floor and thinking about how perceptive Ali had been to theorize that M sometimes acted like a copycat. Would I have come up with that at his age?

I doubted it. At ten years old, I was all about sports and trying to fit in at school after Nana Mama brought me up to Washington, DC, following the death of my mother. No, there had been too much turbulence in my life at that age for me to have reasoned like Ali did.

I flipped on the light in my attic office and sat at the desk. Bree was right. It wasn’t good for a boy of ten to be fixated on dark criminal behavior.

And yet, there was a part of me that wanted to brag about him.

Here Ali was, only ten, and on his own he’d figured out something that had completely eluded the reporters who were writing about M and Diane Jenkins. They hadn’t seen the connection between her kidnapping and Arlene Duffy’s death years before or between the decapitated head and the Meat Man. But Ali had seen it.

How did that happen? Where was the insight?

After a few moments of pondering, I grew concerned, thinking about the possibility of Ali digging further and deeper, especially into the case of Mikey Edgerton.

Who knew what he’d find if he was given the chance?

My attention swung to another corner of my office and other stacks of boxes containing my old investigative files. Where were they, the Edgerton files?

I wasn’t sure, and for some reason that made me a little flustered. I got up from behind the desk and went over to look. They weren’t where I expected them to be, with Kissy’s old files, and I started to panic.

What if Ali came up here and looked around in the files? What if he took them to his room and is studying them? How perceptive can a ten-year-old be?

But then I lifted up an old army blanket and found them, four boxes, each marked m.e.

Part of me wanted to lower the army blanket back over the Mikey Edgerton files and leave them alone, just as I had for years. But the idea of Ali finding the files forced me to put the blanket aside and grab the boxes.

When they were restacked next to my desk, I considered what to do with them. Why did I even still have them? I should have burned them all years ago, turned the secrets in those files to smoke and ash.

But I had not.

John Sampson had done that with his. He told me so two months after Edgerton’s conviction, said he took them to a friend’s cabin in the Poconos and fed the files one by one into a roaring fire. Put it all behind him.

Try as I might, I couldn’t do it, although I couldn’t have said exactly why.

Something had stopped me from destroying the evidence of guilt as well as the evidence of innocence in those boxes. It wasn’t shame or contrition on my part, because I felt none whatsoever when it came to Mikey Edgerton.

So what was it?

I stared at the boxes and told myself to go back to sleep. But deep inside, another voice was telling me there might be answers in the boxes, clues that could lead me to M.

Or doom me.

Once I’d thought that, there was no pushing ahead. I threw the blanket over the boxes and left.





CHAPTER 32





MY CELL PHONE BUZZED, SNAPPING me awake. I picked it up and saw a Northern Virginia area code and an unfamiliar number. I thought about letting the call go to voice mail, but then I answered. “Alex Cross.”

“Mr. Cross, this is Captain Arthur Abrahamsen. I hope you don’t mind that Ali shared your number with me.”

“Not at all,” I said, sitting up. “How can I help, Captain?”

“Ali has been asking to go on rides with me, but honestly, sir, the training runs scheduled over the next few weeks will be tough on me, let alone on a ten-year-old.”

“I pretty much told him that,” I said.

“Sure, and thank you, sir. But, anyway, I mentioned Ali to a friend of mine, and he pointed me to a kids’ riding group called Wild Wheels. You can look them up on the web. There are several chapters locally, one of them geared toward mountain bikers. I was thinking, with your permission, I could go to one of their evening rides with Ali. That way we could kill two birds with one stone—he gets to go for a ride with me, and he gets introduced to more age-appropriate friends and training partners for the future.”

“I appreciate that. Let me take a look at the website and show it to him,” I said. “But it sounds as if he’d like it. Especially riding with you.”

Abrahamsen laughed. “He’s a ball of fire.”

“He is that,” I said. “And thank you for taking an interest in him.”

“It’s the least I can do for someone with as much passion for the sport as Ali has. Next Wild Wheels ride is Thursday, seventeen hundred hours, in Rock Creek, which works for me. I’m on recovery that day, training-wise.”

“Okay, we’ll get back to you.”

“Look forward to it,” he said, and he said goodbye and hung up.

I looked at the phone for a moment, then looked over and saw Bree’s side of the bed was empty. I glanced at the clock and groaned. It was almost nine.

But before I got up myself, I called Ned Mahoney. “Do me a favor?” I asked.