Bree said.
“And for the rest of my life, I will never drink another drop of whiskey.”
CHAPTER 101
Soon the rest of the family will be like him and Granny, gasping and clawing for air.
That text had been M’s undoing.
The week before, in the moments after I got that text, I’d had a strange reaction that I couldn’t explain at first.
Granny, gasping and clawing for air.
Then I realized that M had to have known about Nana Mama’s attack.
Except that was impossible. Only six people had known: Me, Bree, Nana, Jannie, Sampson, and Mahoney. That was it.
We hadn’t called for an ambulance. We hadn’t called anyone.
There was only one explanation: M had bugged our house.
Two hours after Bree left with Nana and Jannie for Ned’s beach house, there was a knock at my front door. Keith Karl Rawlins, the FBI cybercrimes contractor, was there, posing as a fumigation specialist. He said the construction next door had turned up signs of termites, and he offered me a free check.
Soon after, we knew that M had not only been listening to us via bugs in four different rooms but also watching us on two separate fiber-optic cameras, one in the kitchen and one in my attic office.
How and when he’d placed them was a complete mystery to us, but there was no doubt the cameras and bugs were feeding wirelessly to a small transponder mounted high on a telephone pole across the street; the transponder sent it to the internet by satellite.
When Rawlins and I met with Mahoney away from my house later that day, Rawlins wanted to take down the transponder and analyze it, but I overruled him.
“He doesn’t know we know he’s watching,” I said. “We can use that, draw him out.”
“How?” Mahoney said.
“By setting me up as bait,” I said. “Ultimately, he wants me in some kind of showdown, I think, lured by the promise of rescuing Ali.”
We decided I had to start acting as if Ali’s abduction had been a crushing blow that left me a weak, despondent, self-destructive loser, incapable of playing any game, much less a life-or-death one. M would fear that he’d never get that final conflict.
With plainclothes agents watching my house from every angle and a pin mike inside my collar, I’d started drinking that night.
Every evening afterward, I escalated, some of it acting drunk, but most of it real as I tapped into every fear I had about the situation and threw it out there in long drunken monologues.
It had taken six nights of personal humiliation and liver damage before one of Mahoney’s men picked up the infrared image of an individual entering the Morses’ house at three a.m. and crawling across the scaffolding into my attic office an hour later.
That same agent put up the pink surveyor’s tape as a signal that I had a visitor waiting.
When I entered my office, Rawlins tapped into the wireless feed. He, Mahoney, and Bree were watching in a surveillance van around the block. With M’s focus on me, Sampson was able to slide out on the porch roof and get a clear shot.
He came onto the front porch as the EMTs were taking M out.
“Where’s my son?” I demanded as he went by on a stretcher.
“Deep,” he said.
I could tell that, even shot and paralyzed, he was enjoying my misery.
CHAPTER 102
FOR ALMOST FOURTEEN MADDENING HOURS, we could not talk to M, much less ask him where he’d taken my son. He underwent immediate surgery for the chest wound and spent a long time in recovery after having an adverse reaction to the anesthesia.
CT scans of his spine found that the bullet had glanced off the right side of his fourth thoracic vertebra, then passed through three inches of his right lung before exiting the rib cage. The energy of the bullet’s passing had broken ribs, cracked vertebrae, and severely bruised the spinal cord.
“He told me he couldn’t feel a thing,” I told the surgeon.
“With that kind of swelling, he probably won’t feel from mid-sternum down for a long time, if ever,” the doctor said.
“When can I see him?”
We got the go-ahead to interview him around ten that night, shortly after M was brought into the ICU and shortly after an evidence tech reported that the suspect had no fingerprints. It looked like they’d been burned off with chemicals decades ago.
“I want to go in alone,” I told Bree, Mahoney, and Sampson in the hallway outside his guarded room. “I think he’ll try to play us if there’s more