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  “I used to be in the U.S. Army Fourth Cavalry,” Abrahamsen explained. “Tanks. But I’ve always thought that in this day and age, cavalrymen should be on bikes instead.”

  “Mountain bikes,” Ali said, smiling.

  “Exactly! They’re more like horses,” Abrahamsen said, pointing at him and winking. “Take care, now. Nice meeting you, Mr. Cross.”

  “You too, Captain,” I said.

  Abrahamsen got into his van, waved, and pulled out into the street.

  “He’s a really nice guy,” Ali said.

  “Seems like it,” I said, lifting his bike up.

  “Do you think I could be in the cavalry someday?” Ali said.

  “In a tank or on a bike?”

  “Bike.”

  I paused and then said, “You can have anything your heart desires if you work for it.”

  Chapter

  8

  For three days, I ignored the media’s reports about Edgerton’s execution and the accusations from his family that Katrina Nixon’s murder was proof of Mikey’s innocence. On Tuesday morning, I checked into the federal detention center on Mill Street in Alexandria, Virginia, not far from the Courthouse.

  The sheriff’s deputy returned my ID, said, “Dirty Marty know you’re coming?”

  “Mr. Forbes made the request for counseling himself,” I said.

  The deputy, a stout woman named Estella Maines, sniffed and said, “We’ll bring him out to you, Dr. Cross, but I don’t know why you bother.”

  “The hopeless idealist in me, Deputy.”

  Maines almost smiled as she buzzed me through.

  I went to the booth, reminding myself that these kinds of visits were important for me. Despite the fact that I had a busy life as a contract consultant to DC Metro and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, I found deeper fulfillment in my role as a therapist.

  Martin Forbes shuffled out a steel door and took a seat on the other side of a bulletproof-glass divider. In his mid-forties, balding, Forbes was an unremarkable-looking man except for a squiggly white line that ran underneath his jaw. That scar was the only reason I’d agreed to see him.

  Once upon a time, I’d worked with Forbes at the FBI when he was briefly assigned to the Behavioral Analysis Unit. He was a junior agent then and as eager to catch bad guys as I was.

  That eagerness had almost gotten Forbes killed, but it had saved the life of Ned Mahoney, my former partner at the Bureau. We’d all been investigating several violent murders in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas that had smelled of a serial killer but turned out to be a crime syndicate covering its tracks.

  Mahoney had gotten too close to a cell of the Sinaloa drug cartel and was snatched off the street one night in Tucson. Forbes witnessed the grab, followed, and fought successfully to free Ned. Before he managed that, a cartel thug tried to slit his throat.

  Forbes picked up the phone on his side of the glass. “I appreciate you coming, Alex.”

  “It’s the least I could do.”

  “I’m innocent.”

  “I saw that you pleaded not guilty.”

  “I did,” he said. “This is no legal bullshit move, Alex. I’ve been framed.”

  I sighed. “You said you wanted counseling, Marty. It’s why I came.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t come otherwise. I did not do this.”

  “You’ve got history, Marty. Your rep caught up with you.”

  Forbes flushed, but he calmed himself. “I was cleared on those shoots. Didn’t you tell me that if you want to put out the fire, you’ve got to get close enough to burn?”

  “That was Mahoney.”

  “Well, I am no vigilante. I don’t know who pulled the trigger on those scum on the yacht, but as much as they deserved it, I sure as hell wasn’t the one who did it.”

  I didn’t reply for several moments, letting my mind tick back through the case as laid out in the news articles that had dubbed the former FBI agent Dirty Marty, a riff on Dirty Harry, a cop gone rogue, taking justice into his own hands.

  Though Forbes had been cleared in those shooting incidents, the Bureau was concerned enough to rein him in; he’d been transferred from a senior investigatory position in Chicago to a desk job in crime analysis at Quantico. At the time, Forbes had been leading a probe into a sexual-slavery ring, a group of people who brought women and young girls and boys from underdeveloped countries into the United States through Canada or Mexico.

  The twenty-four-month probe had penetrated the ring at low levels, enough to free more than fifty women enslaved as prostitutes traveling the country, guarded by violent pimps. Those freed women had identified two men and a woman as the likely masterminds of the ring.

  Carlos Octavio, a Panamanian national fluent in eight languages, was said to work in tandem with Ji Su Rhee, a Korean woman who spoke nine languages. Octavio and Rhee bought girls, boys, and young women in lawless, impoverished countries. Gor Bedrossian, an Armenian with ties to U.S. and Russian crime syndicates, was believed to be the one who put the smuggling and distribution system together and enforced it all with an iron fist.

  The problem for Forbes had been twofold. First, there had been no concrete evidence tying any of the three alleged masterminds to the enslaved women who’d been freed in various raids around the country. And second, the trio rarely, if ever, stepped foot on U.S. soil.

  Before his transfer out of the field, Forbes had followed money trails, attempting, unsuccessfully, to trace them back to the ringleaders. A year after his transfer, Forbes took a two-month leave of absence to write a book about sexual slavery in the twenty-first century.

  Prosecutors believed the real reason he took the leave of absence was to murder the suspects.

  Six weeks after Forbes left to write his book, the U.S. Coast Guard boarded an adrift yacht called the Harén—Spanish for “harem”—off the coast of Florida. The bloated, headless bodies of six people, including Bedrossian, Octavio, and Rhee, were found aboard, all of them shot dead.

  In compartments belowdecks, Coast Guard officers found sixteen teenage girls from Brazil, Cambodia, and India. They were all starving and dehydrated.

  The girls later said the shootings had occurred four nights before. They’d heard a boat come alongside the yacht, which was not an uncommon occurrence. Usually that meant there was a buyer or a seller coming aboard.

  Then the shooting started, at first slow and methodical, then more frenzied. They heard the other boat leave, and then there was nothing but silence for days. Because the yacht had been found adrift close to international waters, the FBI had been called in. The condition of the bodies had hampered the investigation but not thwarted it.

  Each of the six victims had been shot at point-blank range from behind, right between the shoulder blades. Their heads had been removed with surgical precision.

  The bullets were later matched to a gun Forbes had used when he’d been a field agent. The .40-caliber pistol was found in a closet at the West Virginia cabin where he’d gone to write his book. The FBI also found DNA evidence putting Forbes on the yacht.

  “Alex?” Forbes said now, pressing his hand against the bulletproof window. “Please, you’ve got to listen to me. I didn’t do this. I was framed.”

  “By who?”

  He hesitated. “I…don’t know…I can’t say for sure. He calls himself M.”

  Chapter

  9

  At three that afternoon, I climbed up into the grandstands above the track at Coolidge High School, still feeling like I’d entered some kind of twilight zone during my discussion with Martin Forbes.

  M?

  Again?

  How is that even possible?

  But those six bodies were…just like…

  “Alex?”

  I glanced over to see Nana Mama waving at me. My grandmother wore a wool hat and jacket and had a heavy blanket across her lap. The drizzle had stopped, but the air was still chill and dank. Ali, next to her, was engrossed with something on his phone.

  “How’s our girl looking?” I said, sitting down next to them.

  “Haven’t seen her yet,” Ali said without raising his head.

  “Really?” I said, gazing at the track and field where athletes from three different high schools were warming up. “That’s not like her.”

  “You notice she’s been dragging?” Nana said. “She’s not getting enough sleep.”

  “She’s a seventeen-year-old girl. It’s impossible for her to get enough sleep.”

  “Dad,” Ali said, “can I borrow your phone? Mine died.”

  “To play a game?”

  He looked insulted. “No, to read a book.”

  I handed it to him, said, “What are you reading?”

  His thumbs flew over the screen of my phone as he said, “Criminal Investigation: An Introduction to Principles and Practice, by Peter Stelfox.”

  “Where’d you find that?” I asked.

  “Online.”

  “You should be reading books that are more age-appropriate,” Nana said.

  “Age-appropriate things bore me,” Ali said as he stared at my phone’s screen.

  My grandmother looked at me sharply, apparently waiting for me to say something. “I could use a little backup at times,” she said.

  Before I could reply, Jannie came out and started jogging around the track; she wore sweatpants and a hoodie, which was up. Normally, my daughter ran with a noticeable springiness in her gait, a bounce every time her foot hit the ground. It was almost like she was bounding. That natural stride had attracted the serious attention of several NCAA Division I coaches, all of them waving scholarships.

  But as Jannie increased the pace of her warm-up run, I could see she was not striking the ground with the balls of her feet but farther back, towar
d her heels. It made her look awkward, and that was one thing Jannie never was on a track.

  “She injure her foot again?” Nana Mama asked, concerned.

  “I sure hope not,” I said, standing and raising my binoculars to get a better look.

  Jannie had gone through a difficult year after breaking one of the sesamoid bones in her foot. She’d had an operation, and it was touch and go for a time whether she’d recover fully. But she had, and she’d run some very impressive times during the indoor-track season.

  Now, however, something was definitely off, though I didn’t think it was her foot. Her shoulders were level, and her face showed no evidence of pain on the footfall.

  But there just wasn’t the spark you normally saw in her.

  “She mention anything bothering her in school?” I asked Nana Mama after Jannie slowed to a walk, hands on her hips, head down.

  “Straight As so far.”

  “Boys?”

  Ali sniggered. “Jannie scares them away.”

  Bree arrived and sat down. “Did I miss her?”

  “No,” I said, watching my daughter again through the binoculars. She seemed distracted, almost listless, as she crossed the field toward her team.

  I lowered the glasses and gave Bree a hug and a kiss. “Glad you made it.”

  “Me too,” she said, and she smiled. “You texted that you had something bizarre to tell me?”

  Chapter

  10

  I did have something to tell her, something almost unbelievable that Forbes had said, something with implications and ramifications far beyond the mystery of M.

  “It’s bizarre, and it’s complicated,” I said.

  “What is?” Ali said.

  “None of your business, young man,” my grandmother said. “Why don’t you read up on mountain bikes and how to fix them? Like Captain Abrahamsen said.”

  Ali cocked his head and smiled. “That’s a good idea, Nana.”

  “We’ll talk about it later?” Bree said to me.

  “Yes. Most definitely.”

  I pushed my conversation with Forbes to the back of my mind and refocused on Jannie, who was scheduled to run the four-hundred and then the two-hundred.

  In the last of her preparations for the start, Jannie seemed to shake off whatever had been bothering her. She went to her line in lane three, stutter-stepped, and then broke into a few loping bounds.

  “That looked good,” Bree said.

  “Right there,” Nana Mama said.

  I said nothing, just watched Jannie go back to the line and take her marks. She coiled at “Set” and sprang at the gun.

  Her arms chopped. Her knees rose and stabbed down. Each foot strike was light and elastic, and her stride was near perfect as she rounded the first turn.

  “She’s ahead!” Ali cried. “She’s got this!”

  Jannie did have it. Coming out of the turn, with the stagger compressing, she was in front of the others by a good five body lengths.

  She kept that lead down the backstretch and as she entered the far turn, but at the three-hundred-meter mark, her head rocked back out of position, and she seemed to get lazy. And her breathing cadence changed.

  A senior from another school passed Jannie coming into the final stretch. You could see Jannie wanted to respond. But she had no gas.

  Another girl went by her, and a third. Jannie was fourth crossing the line, the worst finish she’d had since injuring her foot.

  She slowed to a walk and then to a shuffle, her head down. I expected her to be devastated, but when she finally turned around, her expression was more bewildered than anything.

  Jannie groped for something that wasn’t there. Then her eyes rolled up in their sockets. She wobbled, staggered, collapsed forward onto the track.

  “Jannie!” I roared. I sprinted down the stands and through the gate onto the track, where her coach and a trainer were already at her side.

  They had rolled her onto her back. She had a scrape on her jaw where she’d hit the ground, but her eyes were open and searching.

  “Dad?”

  “Don’t move, baby,” I said. A physician, the mother of one of the other runners, came rushing up.

  Dr. Ellen Roberts examined Jannie, who was becoming more alert. “Tell us what happened,” Dr. Roberts said.

  Jannie said she’d felt tired all day, even worse than she’d felt the day before and the day before that. She’d fallen asleep twice in biology class and had to take a cold shower to wake up for the meet. She felt good at the start of the race and in the middle.

  “But then I just lost everything,” she said. “I don’t know, I…” She closed her eyes. “Everything aches.”

  “I believe she has a fever,” the doctor said. “Which doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Flu?” her coach asked.

  “I’m thinking Epstein-Barr, though we’ll need to test her ASAP.”

  “Epstein-Barr?” I said.

  “The virus that causes mononucleosis,” Dr. Roberts said. “It’s rampant at the school. If it’s mono, I’m afraid your girl won’t be running again for a good six weeks.”

  Chapter

  11

  “Six weeks.” Jannie moaned. We were back home after a trip to an urgent-care center, where the doctor had confirmed the diagnosis of mono.

  Jannie was lying on the living-room couch under a blanket and looking forlorn. “Dad, that’s almost the entire spring season. Gone. Just like last year. What am I, jinxed?”

  I felt her heartache and frustration and said so, but she just started to weep.

  “It’s over,” she cried. “No college coach will want me now. I’m cursed.”

  “You’re sick because you’ve been burning the candle at both ends,” I told her. “And I’m sure D-One coaches have dealt with athletes with mono before.”

  She stared blankly at the wall.

  “I just wanted it to all be good, Dad. Like, no question I was ready.”

  “I know. And I think you already are a no-question recruit to many coaches. They’ve seen your tapes and times. They know your potential.”

  She looked at me hopefully. “You think?”

  “I do. The best thing you can do is follow Dr. Roberts’s advice. Take those vitamins she mentioned, drink gallons of water, and get lots of sleep. You’ll be better in no time.”

  Jannie seemed to surrender to the situation then. “Nana Mama’s bringing me soup.”

  Bree came back from the health-food store with a buffet of vitamins, and the two of us went upstairs to change before dinner.

  “So, about your meeting with Dirty Marty?” Bree called from the closet.

  “He says he’s not dirty,” I said.

  She stepped out of the closet, looked at me with a knitted brow. “And you believe him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and then I told her about Forbes being contacted by M.

  No one outside a very small circle in the law enforcement community knew about the notes M had sent to me, and Forbes was certainly not part of that circle. We’d decided to hold that information back right from the start all those years ago.

  “Doesn’t mean Forbes couldn’t have hacked into files at the FBI to learn about M,” Bree said.

  “Point taken,” I said, and then I told her everything.

  Forbes claimed M had contacted him first by untraceable e-mail from a server in Panama and later by text from a burn phone.

  Forbes said M seemed to know the inner workings of the sex-slave operation Forbes had been trying to break and he offered to provide evidence and the location of the three ringleaders. Shortly after, M mailed Forbes documents detailing the purchase of a yacht in Panama and the aftermarket work done on it to create the prison cells belowdecks.

  M lured Forbes to Florida, saying that he’d relay the yacht’s location once it had entered U.S. waters to deliver its latest shipment of sex slaves. He also told Forbes to bring twenty-five grand with him and to take a room at a particular motel in Fort Lauderdale.

  Forbes claimed that when he entered his room after dinner on the second day, there was a man hidden in the bathroom. He put a cloth over Forbes’s face doused in what Forbes believed was chloroform.