Alex Cross, Run (Alex Cross 20)

Valente was going to work IDs on both victims. Jacobs would run the 6 a.m. briefing at headquarters. Chief Perkins was going to be with the mayor’s people for the next few hours, and then D’Auria would be the face of the department for our press conference, while the rest of us stood behind him in a show of force. Sometimes, it is about appearances, and Washington was going to need some reassurance that MPD was on this.

Huizenga and I were both going to start pulling teams together, to go back through every report and witness account, and reinterview every first responder on all four of these murders. We’d also need to start from scratch on our victims’ profiles. Maybe there was some connection, some cross-reference we’d missed. There had to be.

Something was attaching these cases to each other. We just had to figure out what it was.

CHAPTER

33

JUST AFTER THE SUN CAME UP, I STOLE AN HOUR I DIDN’T HAVE AND SWUNG back by the house before Ava left for school. Jannie and Ali were already gone when I got there, but Bree had told Ava she’d write her a note for being late. We had to talk.

There were plenty of reasons to be concerned. The smiling, happy Ava from Kinkead’s the other night had turned out to be a momentary bit of sunshine. Most of the time these days she was sullen, withdrawn, and almost impossible for me to get through to. What I’d just seen the night before only added another layer.

“I wasn’t high,” she insisted, almost as soon as we sat her down in the living room. “I wasn’t! Serious.”

“You were pretty out of it, Ava,” I said.

“Whatcha want me to say? Swear to God, okay?”

I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. I wanted to, desperately, if only to establish some kind of mutual trust. But Ava was also an easy liar, and that wasn’t a pattern I wanted to reinforce. I wanted her to use those smarts of hers for something more than a quick lie and squirming out of trouble.

“Why were you still dressed, in the middle of the night? Did you sneak out?” Nana asked.

For the first time, some of the fire went out of Ava’s eyes. She jutted out her jaw and looked at the floor, answering and not answering at the same time.

“We can’t have that, Ava,” Bree told her. “Not even a little.”

“I know,” Ava said. “But I wasn’t on anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Either way,” Nana said, “things are going to change around here. No more running out to the store, or whatever it is you’re doing with your friends around Seward Square. No more dawdling on the way home from school like you’ve been doing. And absolutely no leaving the house by yourself at night. Don’t test me on that, Miss Ava.”

“Whatever,” she said, and started up. “Can I go now?”

“No, you can’t go,” Bree told her. “Sit down.”

Ava sat back again and folded her long arms over her chest. She was two years younger than Damon but just as tall and lanky.

“Ava, do you understand where all this is coming from?” Bree said. “We love you. We don’t want anything bad to happen to you. If it did, that would be like something bad happening to us. Does that make any sense?”

Ava tossed off another shrug, but I could see her getting smaller, the longer this went on. She was breathing through her nose, and if I wasn’t mistaken, trying not to cry.

So far, I’d been holding back. The truth was, Ava responded better to Nana and Bree than she did to me. But I didn’t want to stay silent anymore. I pulled the hassock around and sat down right in front of her. She was going to hear me.

“Do you want to be part of this family?” I asked her.

“Huh?”

“I’m not saying you have a choice about where you live right now. You’re kind of stuck with us for the time being,” I went on. “But what I am saying is that there’s a family in this house, if you want one. Do you?”

Nana, Bree, and I had all agreed that we’d wait until the end of the school year to think seriously about adoption, either way. The foster system was still overseeing Ava’s case, and maybe I shouldn’t have said anything yet. But then again, I was the one who’d been dragging his feet.

Ava seemed to fold in on herself a little more, pulling her arms tight around her own thin frame. When I saw the first tear start down her cheek, I didn’t think about it. I just wrapped her up in a hug and held on tight.

At first, she stiffened up. But then, all at once, she broke. It was like she’d turned into a rag doll in my arms, and she started sobbing like I’d never heard her before. Nana reached over and put a hand on Ava’s back. Bree did the same from the other side, and none of us said anything for a long time.

In fact, Ava was the first one to speak.

“I miss my mom,” she said against my chest. That was all she got out before she started crying, even harder, as if just saying it was its own kind of pain.