Criss Cross (Alex Cross) - James Patterson Page 0,72

Tillis:

Going to Alexandria detention center at noon to tell Marty. See you there to deliver good news for a change?

It was ten past eleven, so I texted back: I will be there.

An innocent man freed. The thought made me smile in a way that putting the cuffs on someone guilty did not. This felt lighter, selfless, not like atoning for the dead at all.

That feeling was still building when I got out of the Uber at the appointed hour and spotted Agent Tillis beside a younger, chipper-looking woman in a navy-blue suit.

Sandra Wendover smiled and shook my hand after Tillis introduced her as an attorney with the federal public defenders’ office.

“I’m so happy, Dr. Cross,” Wendover said, still smiling. “We don’t often get to make this kind of visit to an inmate.”

I grinned back. “It does feel good.”

Tillis teared up. “It’s like we’re bringing Marty the best present ever.”

We went through the doors to the security checkpoint. I got out my identification and was ready to pass my shoes through the scanner when a woman called out, “Dr. Cross?”

I looked up to see Estella Maines, the sheriff’s deputy.

“Did you get the message I sent over your way Friday?” she asked.

“My way?”

“To Metro PD.”

“Oh, I’m only a consultant there these days.”

“Well, the fingerprints you asked us to take of Dirty Marty’s visitor? The guy in the stills from the security feed? We got a hit. He’s an ex-con. We got him cold.”

My heart raced. Finally, we were getting a break.

Before I could reply, Kim Tillis said, “Deputy, for the record, Martin Forbes is not dirty. He was unequivocally framed, and we’ve come to get him freed.”

Deputy Maines didn’t know what to make of that and she looked at me.

“It’s true. The guy in the security stills was in on the scheme to put Forbes behind bars. Who is he? What’s his name?”

CHAPTER 82

FORBES’S FORMER PARTNER AND HIS ATTORNEY went in to give him the good news. But after I’d learned the real name and most recent address of the man we called Pseudo-Craig, I’d decided not to go with them. I told them to give Marty my sincere best, and I left.

The first thing I did was call Keith Karl Rawlins to tell him to start digging. Then I called Ned Mahoney and told him to meet me in the lab beneath the FBI’s cybercrimes unit at Quantico.

Mahoney was already there when I pulled open the lab’s glass door and was met with the thudding techno dance music Rawlins listened to when he was working.

The cyber expert was sitting at his keyboard facing an array of six screens. Ned was standing behind him. I tapped Mahoney on the shoulder and he jumped.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” he said, almost shouting, and then he pointed to the silicon earplugs he’d stuffed into his ears.

Rawlins’s head was bobbing to the beat, but at that point, he stopped and shut off the music. He looked over his shoulder at me as if he’d expected to see me there and then gestured with his chin toward my phone. “It’s clean now. You can take it.”

I picked the phone up off the bench, put it in my pocket, and said, “What about Nolan?”

“Oh, I’ve got a bunch of stuff on him already.”

“Tell me,” I said, coming closer. “And let’s lose the techno soundtrack. I’ve already had a ridiculously long day.”

Rawlins didn’t like that, but he shrugged. “Your loss.”

He gave his keyboard an order and up popped a digital rap sheet on one William Nolan, age forty-six, address in Encino, California.

“Look at him!” Mahoney said. “He is an absolute dead ringer for Kyle Craig.”

“From all three angles,” I said, shaking my head.

“But I ran Nolan’s prints against Craig’s old prints. Not even close to a match.”

There it was, then, finally. Kyle Craig was still a dead man, and I wasn’t crazy.

I let that make me feel better about things and listened intently as Rawlins gave us a summary of what he’d found. Nolan had been a stuntman and a B-movie actor in Hollywood until he’d developed a taste for cocaine, which got him involved in burglary and then grand theft auto.

The latter move had gifted him with a three-year swing in the California Institution for Men at Chino. Nolan had served his term and left prison four years ago.

There was a phone number for his parole officer, whom we caught at her desk. She called Nolan a model parolee. After his release, he’d worked in a