Ali Cross Read online

  In other words, this was on me now. Not that I thought I could out-cop the cops. But if I didn’t at least try, and then if something really bad happened to Gabe, I was going to wonder for the rest of my life if there was something I could have done.

  I didn’t just want to help anymore. Now I needed to.

  Whatever it took.

  AFTER THE DETECTIVES went home and Bree took herself to bed, Alex Cross trudged up to his office in the attic. There was no sense trying to sleep that night. Might as well try to get a few things done, he thought.

  Sitting at his desktop computer, Alex surfed around for the latest coverage on his upcoming trial. A quick Google search turned up page after page of results. Most of it was accurate enough, but it was easy to find plenty of lies and misinformation, too.

  The worst of it, as usual, came from a blog called C.O.P., which stood for Call Out the Police. It was a site exclusively focused on police officers who had been accused of crimes themselves. So far, nobody had come after Alex harder than they had. There was no story about the stolen guns yet, but they’d already posted a video from outside St. Anthony’s Church that night. The headline read, “Detective Cross Has Christmas Eve Meltdown in Front of Family.”

  The story that followed was as nasty as the headline itself. Alex gripped the edge of his desk as he read through, just to keep from throwing his computer right out the window.

  His real concern, though, was the kids. Alex could take whatever the press wanted to throw at him, but there was no way to protect Ali, Jannie, and Damon from all of it. What was he going to do—erase the Internet?

  Ali, especially, would be all over this. He was probably lying awake right now, looking at the same online trash his old man was reading one floor up. It hurt Alex in his heart, just thinking about it.

  And it wasn’t just his kids getting knocked around, either. Two families had been affected by the accident, in two very different ways. If Alex’s trial didn’t go well, he could be looking at jail time. But at least the Crosses were all together under one roof for now. It was the Yangs whose holiday had truly been ruined. Stanley Yang lay in a coma at Washington VA Medical Center that night, while his son, Tyler, was being held without bail at the DC Central Detention Facility. That put the rest of the Yangs at home on Christmas Eve, wondering when—or if—they’d ever be a whole family again.

  There wasn’t much Alex could do about that, but he did have one thing in mind. In fact, it had already been set in motion. Alex didn’t really care if it got him into hot water.

  And as soon as the sun started to come up, he put his plan into action.

  IT WAS 6:25 AM when John Sampson’s text came through.

  SAMPSON: Almost there. You ready for me?

  CROSS: Be right there.

  Sampson was Alex’s best friend since way back in the day. He was also a fellow cop and, at the moment, a volunteer Christmas elf. Even if he did top out at six foot nine.

  Alex tiptoed down to the front door where he let himself out into the crisp December morning. He opened the car trunk and took out a heavy red cloth bag, stuffed with gifts, slinging it over his back, Santa-style.

  “Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas, bud,” Sampson called from his black Explorer as he pulled up to the curb.

  “You, too,” Alex answered. He dropped the red bag into Sampson’s backseat, then opened the passenger door and got in.

  “You’re coming?” Sampson asked. “I thought you were going to hang back.”

  “I need to see this through,” Alex said. “It’s been a rough night.”

  “All right then,” Sampson answered. “Let’s put this sleigh in gear.”

  As they drove the quiet city streets from the Capitol Hill section of Southeast DC toward the Yangs’ Northeast DC neighborhood, Alex filled his friend in on the break-in, the neighborhood robberies, and the stolen weapons from his house.

  Sampson gave a low whistle. “Some Christmas,” he said. “I’m really sorry, man.”

  “It’s mostly the kids I’m worried about,” Alex told him. “Damon’s confused. Jannie’s afraid of all the people coming down on me lately. And Ali’s got this friend who’s gone missing, on top of everything else.”

  “You talking about the Qualls kid?” Sampson asked.

  “That’s right. Gabriel,” Alex answered. “Ali’s pretty down about it, but he also tends to get a little obsessive.”

  “That kid’s gonna run the world one of these days,” Sampson said with a dark smile. “I get tired just thinking about how fast his brain runs.”

  It was true, Alex thought. For better or worse, Ali’s mind was always running, always firing on every cylinder. He was an intelligent, creative kid, but he also tended to fixate on whatever was in front of him, at which point he was more pit bull than wise old owl. That came with a tendency to make overconfident and sometimes rash decisions, which was the part that worried Alex the most.

  “Here we are,” Sampson said, coming to a stop on North Capitol Street. As per the plan, he’d parked several doors down from the Yang family’s home. “You want me to ring the bell? Or just drop the goodies and run?”

  “See if you can hear anyone inside first,” Alex said. “Then do whatever makes sense.”

  Sampson hopped out and pulled the Santa sack from the backseat. Inside the bag were toys, clothes, a huge box of Christmas candy, and gift cards for Walmart and Safeway. It wasn’t going to change anyone’s life, but it was something, anyway.

  As Alex watched, Sampson carried the bag up to the Yangs’ front porch. He paused there for a second, listening, then rang the bell and hurried back down toward the car.

  Alex slouched a little deeper in his seat. He didn’t want to be seen here. He just wanted to see.

  A second later, eight-year-old Leighanne Yang opened the front door. She was adorable in pale-yellow pajamas and a pair of red and gold bunny ears. When she saw the bag waiting on the porch, her eyebrows knit together in confusion. But as soon as she’d yanked it open to look inside, her face lit up like a Christmas tree.

  “Mama! Grandma!” the girl shouted. “Santa came!”

  And for the first time that Christmas, Alex Cross smiled.

  ON CHRISTMAS NIGHT, Nana and I had leftover turkey and cranberry sandwiches and stayed up late watching the Wizards–Knicks game. We’re both Wizards fanatics—and Knicks haters—so it bummed us out when the New Yorkers won.

  “I hate to say it,” Nana complained, “but that sucked. Now, Ali, you forget I ever said that.”

  I forced myself not to laugh out loud. “Said what?”

  The next morning, my dad woke me up before 7:00 a.m. I groaned, “Seriously? Seven o’clock? On my vacation? Why?”

  “Seriously. Seven o’clock. Because I can. Besides, you’re too young to need a vacation,” Dad told me.

  Anyway, it turned out great. We had breakfast at Armando’s. It’s a huge, special deal for me to eat out with Dad, just the two of us. Armando’s has the best pancakes with strawberries and peaches and that’s what I had. Dad had a big platter of huevos rancheros.

  When we finished and I was groaning from happiness and an overfull belly, Dad dropped a little bomb on me. “We’re going to go meet with Detective Sutter about Gabe. Ali, I want you to do a whole lot of listening and not much talking. She’s the detective, not you. We clear?”

  I sat up right away. “We’re clear. We’re good. We’re great. And thank you for this,” I said. This was exactly what I’d been hoping for, and I couldn’t wait to get there.

  The Youth Services Division of the Metro Police Department was in an old converted high school on Hayes Street in Northeast DC. Inside, it was exciting to walk through the bull pen where all the detectives had their desks. I wanted to know what every single one of them was working on, even though I was there for just one reason—to find out as much as I could about Gabe’s case.

  “Hey, Cross!” one guy said as we passed through. “How you hanging in there?”

  “
I’m hanging,” Dad said.

  “Keep the faith, man. We’re behind you,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Dad told him, but that was all he said. I knew that didn’t mean the whole department was behind him, but at least a lot of these detectives were. Either way, I could tell Dad didn’t want to talk about his upcoming trial. Maybe because I was there. Or maybe because we had other business to get to.

  We kept moving and came to a little meeting room where Detective Sutter was already waiting for us. She got up and shook my hand when we walked in. “Thanks for coming, Ali,” she said. “We have a lot to talk about.”

  I thought so, too, and even though I didn’t mean to jump right in with a question, it was kind of like the question jumped out of me. They do that sometimes.

  “Do you know if Gabe ran away?” I asked. “Or do you think maybe someone snatched him up?”

  For me, that was the core of it right now. Five days missing was one thing if Gabe made himself disappear. But if someone had taken him and hadn’t sent back any word in all that time about a ransom or anything? That was a whole lot closer to a worst-case scenario.

  Detective Sutter didn’t answer right away. She looked at Dad first, and he nodded at the detective to go ahead.

  “Kidnapping is very rare,” she said. “It’s much more likely Gabe took off for whatever reasons of his own. We think he’s in the general area based on his phone pinging off the cell towers, but we haven’t been able to track it to a specific location because it’s turned off most of the time. And we don’t know if it’s still in his possession. So he could be anywhere.”

  That was somewhere around a five on a scale of ten for reassurance, but I guess it was as much as she could tell me. Which of course made me wonder—what wasn’t she telling? Not that I could ask that one.

  Dad and I sat in metal chairs on one side of a big table, across from the detective. The only other thing in the room was a camera up in the corner, but I noticed the little red light wasn’t on. I guess that meant they weren’t recording. Probably because I wasn’t a suspect.

  “Let’s start with the day Gabe disappeared,” Detective Sutter said. “Did you notice anything out of the ordinary that afternoon? Anything unusual in the way Gabe was acting?”

  “Not in a bad way,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I mean, Gabe just kind of is unusual. My great-grandma says he marches to his own drummer, but I think he’s just quiet. Or shy. Both, I guess. I always thought if Gabe had a superpower, it would be invisibility, if you know what I mean.”

  “Not really,” Sutter told me. “Can you say some more about that?”

  “Well…” I didn’t really want to talk about Gabe behind his back, but it was important to tell the truth. “It’s like he spends a lot of energy just working on not being noticed. He doesn’t even eat lunch with me and my friends at school.”

  “Where does he eat lunch?”

  I shrugged because I didn’t know. It had bothered me at first when we’d ask him to eat with us and he’d shake his head, but I figured after a while it wasn’t anything against us. “That’s kind of the point. He mostly keeps to himself. I think he’s like some kind of genius, if you ask me. It’s like his brain runs harder than anyone I know.”

  “Except maybe yours,” Dad said, which was kind of embarrassing. I’d never call myself a genius. But at the same time, Gabe and I were kind of alike that way, always thinking hard about something or another. I’d see him in school sometimes, staring into space, and I could just tell he was working on some new invention, or idea, or whatever else. Only because I was the same way.

  “Was I the last one to see him before he disappeared?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Detective Sutter told me, and then kept going. “So, you said he was supposed to meet you online that night. Where was that going to happen?”

  “In Outpost,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  Dad stepped in for that one. “It’s a video game. Ali and his friends play it constantly.”

  Detective Sutter wrote a note in her file. “And he never showed up for the game?” she asked.

  “Nope. And he hasn’t been online since then, at least not at the same time as me. He hasn’t answered any of my messages or texts, either,” I said. “Do you know if his phone is still working?”

  “We’ve submitted a subpoena to his carrier,” she told me. “There should be some word soon. But if he took out the SIM card, or if someone destroyed it, then that’s going to be a dead end.”

  I knew that much myself. Once you take the SIM card out of a phone, it stops pinging off cell towers, and then there’s no way to track it. Gabe would have known it, too. He was plenty smart enough to make sure nobody was spying on him, if that’s what he wanted.

  “Why does it take so long to get that info—” I started to ask, but Detective Sutter cut me off right there.

  “Ali?” she said. “I know you’re eager to get as much information as you can, but I really need you to focus on my questions right now. Do you think you can do that for me?”

  It was kind of embarrassing. Dad was looking at me like I’d forgotten the instructions he’d given me back at the restaurant, which I basically had. Obviously, I was going to help the investigation however I could. It was just hard keeping my own questions to myself.

  After that, Detective Sutter asked if Gabe was having any problems at home (I didn’t know), if he had a second phone (not that I knew about), and if he’d ever had a girlfriend or boyfriend (not even close).

  She asked a bunch of questions about gaming, too, like what else Gabe played, when he was online, and what his screen name was.

  I knew what she was getting at with the gaming stuff. Dad gave me the “online safety” lecture all the time, about how predators come after kids that way, and how easy it is to pose as someone else on the internet. I didn’t know if Gabe was careful with that stuff, but I did know he basically lived for Outpost. He spent more time in that game than anyone I knew.

  Finally, Detective Sutter closed her file and looked me right in the eye.

  “I want you to know we’re doing everything we can to find your friend,” she said. “I mean it, Ali. This case is important to me.”

  I believed her, too. I know how seriously Dad takes his own job, but I also know that he doesn’t get a win every time. That’s just not how it works.

  Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. Every day Gabe stayed missing, the trail was going to get a little colder. Maybe I wasn’t going to get all the answers I was hoping for from Detective Sutter, but that didn’t mean I was out of questions.

  Just the opposite. I still had about a million of them. And as far as I was concerned, I was going to keep on looking for some answers of my own.

  AFTER DAD DROPPED me off at home and went back to work, I got busy. First, I went up to his office in the attic and pulled out one of the big bulletin boards he uses for his investigations. That’s where he gathers everything together like puzzle pieces when he’s launching a new case. And since he was stuck on desk duty until his trial, he wouldn’t be needing those boards anytime soon.

  I brought one down to my room and leaned it against the wall. Then I grabbed a map of Washington DC from our kitchen junk drawer and tacked it onto the board. I stuck in two more thumbtacks, one for Washington Latin Middle School and one for Gabe’s house on 17th Street. After that, I used a yellow highlighter to mark the way he usually walked home. I didn’t know how far Gabe got that day before he disappeared, but if there was a crime scene, it was probably somewhere along that yellow line.

  I knew what Dad would do with that part, too. He’d pull the footage from all the city traffic cameras along Gabe’s route for the afternoon he disappeared. Detective Sutter had probably already done that herself, to see if she could tell how far Gabe got. But I hadn’t—not yet. I wrote TRAFFIC CAMERAS on an index card, and tacked that up on the board, too.

  Next, I jumped o
nline to missing.dc.gov. That’s where the police department listed all its missing persons cases. You can filter the page for juveniles, which is anyone under eighteen, and when I did that, it gave me thirty-one results. That meant thirty-one missing kids in DC. And right there at the top was the newest entry: Gabriel Qualls.

  It was weirder than weird to see Gabe’s school picture like that, with the words CRITICAL MISSING in a red bar above his head. They also had his description, where he was last seen, what he’d been wearing, and a phone number to call with any leads. The whole thing was a printable PDF, and I made two copies. One went on my board and the other went into my backpack, so I’d always have it with me.

  After that, I just started brainstorming. I took some more index cards and filled them up with all the different things I wanted to know about—one idea for every card. Those went onto the board, too.

  TRAFFIC CAMERAS

  ANY WITNESSES?

  CANVASSING THE NEIGHBORHOOD

  SCHOOL

  GABE’S PHONE WORKING?

  HOSPITALS

  SOCIAL MEDIA

  MR. AND MRS. QUALLS

  OUTPOST

  When I stepped back and looked at everything I had, two things jumped out at me.

  First, I texted Bree at work to ask about the traffic cameras. She was chief of detectives at MPD now. If anyone in our family could help with this, it would be her. Couldn’t hurt to try, anyway.

  ME: Hey Bree, I have a huge favor to ask. Any chance I could see the traffic cameras on E Street between Wash-Latin and 17th Street for December 21st, from 3:30pm to 5:00pm? It’s about Gabe. Thanks if you can help!!!

  The other thing that seemed worth looking into right away was Mr. and Mrs. Qualls. My guess was, they’d have at least some kind of information I could use, and maybe one or two things Detective Sutter hadn’t told me, if I asked the right questions.