Criss Cross Read online

  I saw Bree sitting on the porch swing with a light blanket around her. She patted the seat beside her, said, “True?”

  I nodded and took a seat. “He signed it.”

  She was quiet. Then: “You know the Edgertons are going to use this as evidence to prove that their son was framed and someone else was responsible.”

  I sat back, exasperated. “Unless we tell the press about M, and the whole mess comes out.”

  “Nothing stays a secret forever, Alex,” she said, stroking my head.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said. “Then I become the story.”

  “You are his focus.”

  “I get that,” I said. “But it’s just…”

  “What?”

  “Confusing.”

  “Mikey Edgerton was guilty.”

  “I know that,” I said, spotting something in our neighbors’ dark front yard. “M’s just playing his games. What’s going on over there?”

  “Scaffolds. Morse said they were doing it right, inside and out.”

  “More banging,” I said, irritated. “They moved away for the year just so they wouldn’t have to hear it.”

  “They’re both on sabbatical.”

  “Lucky for them,” I said, getting up. “I’m hungry.”

  “Nana’s getting dinner ready for you. I’m going to sleep. I have a feeling tomorrow could be difficult.”

  I kissed her, told her I loved her, and went inside.

  The television in the living room was streaming Terriers, currently the favorite show of my seventeen-year-old daughter, Jannie. The air in the front hall was perfumed with the scent of garlic, onions, and basil wafting from the kitchen.

  The smells and sounds calmed me. I went into the front room, where Jannie was on the couch in her running sweats, dozing. A biology textbook lay open in her lap, but she held the remote for the TV.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” I said, giving her a little shake.

  Jannie startled awake and punched the pause button. “Hi, Dad,” she said sleepily.

  “You sleeping, studying, or watching?”

  “All three,” she said, smiling through a yawn.

  “You can’t do all three.”

  “Most men can’t, but most women can.”

  “Run that one by me.”

  “So, like, in class last week? We learned that the latest research says male minds are hardwired for single tasks. They learn best and do best when everything comes at them one at a time, you know, like one project and then the next. And it probably helps if they can move around. While they’re studying, I mean.”

  “Okay. And the female mind?”

  “Women are amazing!”

  I grinned. “I’ll agree with that wholeheartedly. But why?”

  She used her index finger to draw imaginary circles around her head. “The female mind can focus on many things at once. My teacher said it’s like juggling. Where men tune out everything but the one thing they’re working on, women can hear it all, smell it all, and see it all. And get it all done!”

  “Except when they’re sleeping.”

  She laughed. “Okay, except when they’re sleeping.”

  “I’ll admit, you know your stuff. If you see your brother trying to multitask, please tell him about the male brain and stop him. Okay?”

  “You think he’ll listen?”

  “Probably not,” I said. I leaned over to hug her. “I missed you, baby.”

  “Missed you too, Dad,” she said, and she yawned. “I don’t know why I feel so tired.”

  “Get to sleep early tonight.”

  She nodded but seemed concerned about something.

  As I was leaving the room, she called after me, “My first outdoor meet’s Tuesday afternoon.”

  “Already in the calendar of absolutely must-dos,” I said, heading into the kitchen.

  My ninety-something grandmother, an avid foodie, was stirring something in a deep pan on the kitchen stove.

  “I don’t know what it is, but it smells awful good in here.”

  “New chicken recipe,” she said, tapping the spoon on the side of the pan.

  “Dad!” Ali called from the room beyond the kitchen. “Check this out.”

  Nana said, “He’s been dying to show you some mountain-bike video, and you won’t eat until he does.”

  I held up both hands in understanding. My youngest child, Ali, was ten, smart as a whip, and always into something new. And when he got into something new, he was like a terrier—he wouldn’t let go.

  Ali’s latest interest was mountain biking. It had actually begun last year when a friend had lent him one, and he’d asked for a bike for Christmas.

  We made sure he got one because, unlike his older sister, Ali had never been known to exert himself physically if he didn’t have to. But something about the bike had captured his imagination, and he rode it all the time now, even in the cold and snow.

  Ali was on the floor, stretched out in front of his laptop, when I walked in.

  “You’re late,” he said, sounding put out.

  I held up my hands. “Beyond my control. You ride today?”

  He nodded. “The usual way by the Tidal Basin.”

  Bree and I often ran that route. It was safe and well traveled. I’d okayed him to use it if he wanted to go out for a ride on his own as long as he got permission first and it wasn’t too early or too late. “You wanted to show me something?”

  He hit a key on his laptop. The screen came to life, showing the helmet-camera feed of a mountain biker poised high above a sprawling city.

  “Where is this?” I asked.

  “Lima, Peru,” he said. “You won’t believe it.”

  The guy riding the bike took off and immediately went down an impossibly steep, covered staircase. Then he shot out into sunlight and he was on a wall about two feet wide with a big drop on either side.

  Crowds of people watched the rider skim along the wall to the end and launch into the air. He dropped a good twenty feet and landed on a dirt path on a hill so steep, I thought he was going to go over the handlebars and tumble to his death. But he punched the landing, cut left, crossed a narrow wooden bridge, hit another bump, soared again, and landed on another staircase. The insanity went on for a good four minutes before the rider pulled over and started laughing. The video stopped.

  “Wasn’t that amazing?” Ali asked.

  “What was that?”

  “Urban-downhill mountain biking!”

  “Wow,” I said. “A new sport every day.”

  “I’m going to do that someday,” he vowed.

  “Not if I have anything to do with it,” Nana said from the kitchen. “Alex, your dinner’s ready.”

  Chapter

  5

  Instead of focusing on Edgerton’s execution, the strangulation of Mrs. Nixon, or the latest message from M, I savored Nana’s fantastic pesto and chicken on black-bean pasta, a dish that I told her had to be a multiple repeat.

  Ali wandered through, his laptop under his arm.

  “Bed?” I asked.

  He yawned and nodded. “Dad, do you have Wickr?”

  “Uhh, I don’t think so.”

  “It’s this cool messaging app for, like, spies.”

  “Okay?”

  “It has military-grade encryption,” he said earnestly. “We could text each other and no one would know because it has this self-destruct feature.”

  “The phone self-destructs?”

  “No,” he said, his nose wrinkling. “The message. Or telegram, they call it. They vanish after a couple of minutes. Real good for spying, right?”

  “If you’re on your phone when you’re spying, I would think so.”

  “You want me to put it on your phone? It’s easy, and we could, you know—”

  “Talk like spies?”

  He grinned and nodded.

  “Let me think about it,” I said, and I kissed him good night.

  “Dad? If urban-downhill became an Olympic
sport, I think I’d be good at it.”

  I smiled at the way his mind swung from one obsession to the next. “I think you’ll be good at whatever you love to do.”

  After Nana went to bed, I cleaned up and went into the front room. Jannie was long gone. I tried to watch a basketball game. When I went upstairs, it was almost midnight.

  Bree was already dead asleep when I slipped between the sheets. Despite everything that had happened that day, sleep came for me.

  But just as I was dozing off, I heard a dog barking in an irritating pattern: three deep barks, a pause, and then two or four barks of higher pitch. The window was open. I got up, closed it, and latched it, but that only muffled the barking.

  This had been going on for almost a month now, but I hadn’t had the time to find the owners and complain. And I was in no mood to do it that night either. I put in earplugs and turned on a white-noise app on my phone.

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t want it to, but my mind swung toward M and what I knew of him, all of it scanty and contradictory.

  There was only one indisputable fact about M, I thought as I fell asleep—the note he’d left with the strangled corpse of Mrs. Nixon was not the first time he had directly taunted me.

  It was the fourth time.

  In twelve years.

  Chapter

  6

  Ali Cross slipped into his father’s bedroom around seven the next morning, a Saturday. Bree was already up and downstairs.

  Ali went over to where his father lay snoring and shook his shoulder lightly. Alex startled and sat up, confused.

  “Want to go for a run?” Ali asked. “I’ll ride my mountain bike.”

  His father lay back on his pillow and groaned. “I hardly slept, pal. I don’t think my body’s going to be up for that this morning.”

  Ali was disappointed, but he kissed his dad on the cheek and said, “Get some sleep. We’ll go next Saturday.”

  Alex smiled, and his eyes drifted shut.

  Ali found Bree downstairs, drinking a coffee and dressed for work.

  “You don’t want to run either?” he asked.

  “Not today,” she said. “I have a desk to clear.”

  “I’m going to ride the usual route, okay? And I’ll take my cell phone.”

  “Did you ask your dad?”

  “He’s in a coma.”

  Bree smiled in spite of herself. “I’ll tell Nana where you are when she gets up.”

  Ali grinned. He hadn’t expected to get approval so easily.

  But then again, he was ten, almost eleven, wasn’t he? And in the sixth grade, a full grade ahead of most kids his age. He knew how to take care of himself.

  He got his mountain bike from the shed out back and set off. Although Alex Cross’s younger son felt most at home with his head in a book or on the internet learning something new, he adored his bike, especially when he could launch off something. The front and rear shocks on the thing were amazing.

  By the time Ali was past the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, heading south along the west side of the Tidal Basin, he’d found at least ten great jumps and had landed them all. He had the main path almost to himself.

  As Ali was pedaling hard toward the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, he saw a man kneeling beside his bike to the right of the path. The man spun around and waved his arms, telling him to stop.

  But it was too late. With his attention on the man, Ali had taken his eyes off the path. His front tire rolled over the shards of a broken bottle and blew out.

  Ali veered off the path and crash-landed hard on the ground. It dazed him and knocked the wind out of him.

  The man who’d waved at him rushed over. “Are you all right?”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “Darn it, by the time I heard you coming, I couldn’t warn you off the glass,” the man said in an easy Southern drawl. “Got both my tires. Lucky I didn’t bend a rim.”

  He was tall and very fit in biking shorts and a tight jersey that read U.S. ARMED FORCES CYCLING TEAM. He wore wraparound Oakley glasses and a Bell racing helmet over short, sandy-blond hair.

  He helped Ali up, said, “I’m Captain Arthur Abrahamsen.”

  “Ali Cross.”

  “Nice to meet you, Ali Cross. Can I check the damage to your tire?”

  “No, sir, I’ll just walk it home. It’s okay.”

  “You might ride it home,” Captain Abrahamsen said, smiling, “if the tire’s fixable. Do you mind if I take a look? I know a bit about this.”

  Ali hesitated, but then shrugged and nodded, thinking that it would be a lot easier to ride home than walk the three and a half miles pushing a bike with a flat tire.

  “Can you kick the glass off the path while I see if it’s salvageable?” the captain asked. “We don’t want any more people getting flats or we’ll have a convention.”

  “Sure,” Ali said.

  Abrahamsen lifted his bike’s front fork and spun the tire.

  Ali kicked the big pieces of glass into the grass with the sides of his sneakers. “You in the military?”

  “I am, the U.S. Army,” Abrahamsen said, still looking at the tire.

  “Do you, like, race for them?”

  “Sort of,” he said. “I’m good enough to train with the team but not quite good enough to fly all over the world to ride for my country. Yet.”

  He said this with such conviction and enthusiasm that Ali couldn’t help but smile. “That’s awesome.”

  “Totally, as my nephew says,” Abrahamsen said. “Here’s your puncture.”

  He held the wheel in place and showed Ali where the glass had penetrated it.

  “Is it fixable?” Ali asked.

  “I might be able to patch it up so that it’ll get you home. After that, you’ll want a new tire and tube.”

  Abrahamsen went over to his own bike. “Can you carry your bike like this?” He picked up his bike and put his right arm through the frame and got it up onto his shoulder.

  Ali nodded. He’d seen mountain-bike racers doing that when they had to cross impassable stuff.

  “But where are we going? Don’t you have tools and a patch kit with you?”

  “Enough for one tire,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ve got everything we need in the team van. It’s parked down by the marina. You want a team sticker for your bike?”

  Ali liked that idea. “I’ve never known a professional bike rider.”

  “And you still don’t. Yet. C’mon, let’s pick up the pace. I have to be at a meeting at noon. And I imagine your mother will be looking for you.”

  “Nana Mama, my great-grandmother,” Ali said, lifting his smaller bike onto his shoulder and very much wanting Captain Arthur Abrahamsen to think he was strong enough to carry it the whole way to the marina.

  The captain smiled. “Great-grandmother? Do you want to give her a call? Tell her where you are and who you’re with? Wouldn’t want her to get worried.”

  Ali frowned, set his bike down, and slapped his pockets, looking for his phone. “I know I had it leaving the house.”

  “Here,” Captain Abrahamsen said, handing him his own phone. “Call her and I’ll look around back there, see if it fell out when you went down.”

  Ali took the phone and punched in the number while Abrahamsen went back to where they’d both crashed.

  The phone rang and Nana picked up. “Hello?”

  “Nana? It’s Ali. I had a flat, and Captain Arthur Abrahamsen, he’s a bike racer in the army, he’s going to help me fix it. I’m on his phone.”

  “Well, that’s nice of him.”

  “I’ll be home soon,” Ali said and hung up.

  He turned around to see Abrahamsen crouched near some deeper grass. The captain stood and held up a black phone. “This it?”

  Ali breathed a sigh of relief. His father would have had a cow if he’d lost his phone. “Yes. Thank you.”

  They exchanged phones. Abrahamsen said, “Did you get your great-grandmother?”

 
“Yes.”

  “It’s better that she doesn’t worry, don’t you think?”

  Ali nodded, already getting his bike up on his shoulder again. “Much better, sir.”

  Chapter

  7

  I finally woke up around nine on Saturday morning. After showering and dressing, I went downstairs and out onto the porch, looking for the morning paper. A van emblazoned with decals of men and women bicycling and the insignia of the U.S. Armed Forces pulled up in front of the house.

  To my surprise, Ali jumped out. “Dad!”

  A man in his early thirties climbed out the driver’s side. He was wearing a sweatshirt that said U.S. ARMY over bike pants.

  He and Ali climbed up the front steps as Ali said, “Captain Abrahamsen is almost on the U.S. Armed Forces bicycle-racing team! I got a flat. We couldn’t fix it, so he offered to drive me home.”

  The captain smiled and stuck out his hand. “Arthur Abrahamsen, sir. You’ve got quite a boy there.”

  I shook his hand and smiled. “He is that. Thanks for helping him out.”

  “My pleasure,” Abrahamsen said, and he chuckled. “He taught me a lot about a lot of different subjects.”

  “I hope he didn’t talk your ear off.”

  “No, sir,” Abrahamsen said. “Both ears intact. Well, let me get his bike out. He’s going to need a new tire and tube, I’m afraid.”

  “We both hit broken glass and got flats,” Ali said as Abrahamsen went over and opened up the rear of the van.

  The van was filled with wheels, tires, and other equipment hanging off the walls.

  “So, do you race full-time for the military?” I asked as he took out the bike.

  “He trains with the team,” Ali said.

  “And even that’s hardly full-time,” Abrahamsen said, closing the van doors. “I’m busy over at the Pentagon and up on the Hill, so I try to squeeze in my training rides when I can.” He brought the bike over.

  “Well, thank you again,” I said, and we shook hands once more.

  The captain smiled at Ali. “It’s always good to meet a fellow cavalryman.”

  Ali looked at him, puzzled.