Criss Cross (Alex Cross) - James Patterson Page 0,80

Nolan got the claim check, a big man, African-American, wearing a blue sweatshirt, hood up, entered the locker area and looked around. He wore dark sunglasses and seemed agitated before going to C-2, unlocking it, and reaching inside it up to his elbow.

The big man’s shoulder moved as if he were groping for something, and then he pulled out a laptop computer in a sleeve. He tucked it under his arm and left.

“He definitely could have done it, right there,” Mahoney said. “Why else put something so small in a locker that big?”

“I agree, but let’s look when he puts the computer in there,” I said.

Prince ran the feed backward until finding the same guy at 6:48 a.m. He carried a large, heavy messenger-style bag then, and he put it in C-2.

Before locking it, however, he apparently reconsidered and then reached back inside the locker for the bag. From it, he took the computer in the sleeve and put it deeper into the box. Then he locked it and left with the messenger bag under one arm.

“Both times he could have done it,” Sampson said.

“He’s our guy,” Bree agreed.

“I think so too,” Mahoney said.

My phone buzzed a second time, then a third and a fourth. Exasperated, I dug it out, and looked at the screen, seeing two texts from Jannie and three from Nana Mama. All of them said the same thing: Call! Now! It’s important!

I said, “I have to take this.”

I crossed the room and called home. My grandmother answered on the first ring.

“I just want you to tell me things will be fine,” she said in a tense, trembling voice.

“What’s going on, Nana?”

“It’s probably nothing, but Ali’s an hour late for dinner, and he told me this morning he was coming home to study for a geography test. We’ve tried his cell phone, and he won’t answer or he doesn’t have it with him or he forgot to charge it again.”

My stomach felt slightly hollow, but I said, “Did you check the shed, see if his mountain bike’s there?”

“Jannie already did. It’s there.”

I started to feel sick.

My phone buzzed in my hand, and my heart soared. “He just texted me.”

“Oh, thank God,” Nana cried.

I thumbed the icon to read the text, and felt my knees threaten to buckle.

The past is now present, Cross. Come find your son.—M

CHAPTER 90

THREE HOURS AFTER RECEIVING THAT text, Bree and I were back at home with Sampson, Mahoney, and Rawlins. Though a team of FBI agents was already working on Ali’s kidnapping from the Bureau’s headquarters downtown, we’d decided to contain knowledge of his abduction, fearing what M might do to Ali if the media’s spotlight swung his way.

Jannie’s eyes were puffy from crying. Nana Mama was shaken but trying to stay busy; she was brewing coffee for the agents. Outwardly, I was doing my best to remain stoic, professional, detached, and focused on the safe recovery of a kidnap victim.

But inside, as a father, I was deathly afraid for my little boy, afraid because, as a detective, I knew what killers like M could do. They were divorced from their souls.

In my experience, there was no other explanation for truly depraved acts. It took someone divorced from his soul, someone turned absolutely amoral, to kill with no conscience, to hack the heads off people, guilty of crimes or not. Or to kidnap an innocent mother and threaten to cut off her finger. Or to frame an FBI agent in order to toy with me in a depraved, ruthless game played out over a dozen years.

And now Ali, my baby boy, was a pawn.

As Mahoney, Bree, and Sampson attempted to put together a timeline of Ali’s day, I tried to put myself in M’s shoes, tried to anticipate what he might be thinking, how he could use my son against me.

M could torture Ali to torture me.

M could kill Ali to torture me.

M could kill Ali to destroy my family.

M could—

“Dad?” Jannie said, startling me.

“Yes?”

“They’ve got a rough timeline,” she said. “You should take a look.”

I went into the dining room and saw that a whiteboard had been set up on Nana Mama’s china hutch. Sampson, Bree, and Mahoney were studying it.

John said, “Ali is at school until three twenty p.m., when classes let out.”

Bree said, “His friends the Kent twins said the last time they saw him, he was on foot, heading for Fort Totten Metro station to go home to work on Nana Mama’s Twitter account. They said it was all