Criss Cross (Alex Cross #27)(61)

“How do you know all this?” Bree said.

Ali said that he’d texted the captain to tell him he was going to the race and wanted to know if they could ride before then. Abrahamsen said he was sorry, but he was flying to Texas in the morning after a doctor looked at his shoulder.

“He said it’s going to be at least two weeks before he can think about a bike.”

“That’s too bad,” I said. The light turned, and Ali took off ahead of us as we jogged across Maine and then Independence. “But when’s the race?”

Ali called over his shoulder, “Four weeks?”

“There you go,” Bree said. “Plenty of time for him to heal up.”

The rest of the weekend, it felt like we did have plenty of time. All of us. It rained on Sunday, and we stayed inside, watching the NCAA basketball tournament and eating Nana’s food.

Bree was reading in our room after I put Ali to bed. I sighed, said, “I needed this weekend. Space to be us.”

“I did too,” she said, putting her book on the table, clicking off the light, and coming over to snuggle.

“Good night, baby,” I said, kissing her.

“Who said the weekend has to be over?” she said and kissed me back.





CHAPTER 78





IT FELT LIKE THE SUN was coming in through the window and shining right on my eyelids.

I squinted and saw it was still dark in the room. But someone outside was shining a powerful, narrow spotlight beam on me.

I threw myself over and onto the floor, yelling, “Bree!”

No answer.

The light vanished.

“Bree!”

Our bedroom door opened, and in her bathrobe, she looked out at me crouched on the floor.

“Shhh!” she said. “It’s only five thirty. Everyone’s still sleeping.”

I hissed, “There was someone outside just now, shining a light in on me.”

That changed everything. We scrambled into clothes, got our service weapons, and went outside.

Judging from the angle, we figured the light had come from the roof of the Morses’ house, next door, and well above the scaffolding that workers were erecting to sandblast the exterior walls.

We knew their lockbox combo, so we got the keys and went inside, guns drawn.

The house was empty. The interior windows, walls, and floors were covered with plastic sheeting coated with sawdust. There were small piles of construction debris here and there, swept up but not removed.

We found plenty of footprints of different sizes both downstairs and upstairs and definitely in the bedrooms that had dormers overlooking the roof. The plastic sheeting over one of the dormers had been cut away. From the window, we couldn’t see anyone out on the roof or any dusty footprints.

Still, the only window in the house that wasn’t covered with plastic was this one.

I climbed out on the roof and moved to where I judged the flashlight had been held. I found traces of sawdust being blown away on the breeze.

“Someone was out there,” I said when I climbed back into the house. “But the evidence is disappearing fast.”

We went back to our own house, and Bree said, “It was him, M, wasn’t it?”

“We have to assume so.”

“I hate that he’s watching us.”

“When I think about it, I want to punch a wall.”

“What about the cameras you were talking about?”

“Ordering them today. And for this place too. I’ll bill the owners.”

“Do we move Nana Mama and the kids? Send them to your dad’s in Florida?”

It wasn’t a bad idea, though I knew it would drive all three of them nuts for various reasons. “Let me think about that.”

My phone rang. Keith Karl Rollins.

“You’re up early,” I said.

“I need only five hours a night,” the FBI cybercrime consultant sniffed. “And I thought you should be the first to know.”

He left me hanging. I said, “First to know what?”

“The Ethereum cryptocurrency used to pay the ransom on Diane Jenkins started to move late last night from all those accounts. I tracked the transfers through twenty-four different stops, most of them designed to strip metadata. A few of my bugs got through, though, and you won’t believe where the funny money finally ended up.”





CHAPTER 79





McLean, Virginia



THE NEXT MORNING, NED MAHONEY and I drove toward a gate in a six-foot wrought-iron fence that surrounded an estate in horse country. Set well back off the road, the sprawling Colonial home was white with green shutters and trim.

“I’m still not thinking it’s a good idea for you to be here, Alex,” Mahoney said when the pickup truck in front of us turned and rolled up to the gate. We came in behind it.

“I disagree,” I said. “I’ll be the rattler of cages.”

“We have a search warrant.”

“Who says we have to show our cards so soon?”

“What are you hoping for?” Mahoney asked as a hand came out of the window of the pickup and pressed a button on an intercom. “A confession? ‘I’m M, and I organized all the mayhem because of you, Alex Cross’?”