She stared at me a little but then stepped back to let us in. We followed her through the house to a kitchen and family room at the back, with a glass-walled breakfast nook looking out to a brambly garden. A teenaged boy on the couch was playing Mortal something or other with headphones on, and he never even looked over at us.
Ms. Morris went straight to the stove, turned down the flame under a steaming double boiler, and then started chopping a pile of red peppers on the butcher-block counter. When I realized she was playing ball’s-in-your-court with me, I jumped in.
“Ms. Morris —”
“Isabelle,” she said.
“I know you don’t want us here right now, can’t blame you, but you can at least understand why the Bureau and the police might be interested in you?”
She stopped chopping and looked up at the ceiling.
“Hmm, let’s see here. Because I’m on MSNBC more than Fox? Because I worked for the Fulani campaign in the nineties? Or maybe because I dared to criticize the Coyle administration for egregious mistakes they themselves have admitted making in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Is that the kind of thing you mean??
??
“Yes, actually,” I said. “All of which is irrelevant to why I’m here. I need to get a statement from you about the night before, morning of, and afternoon following Zoe and Ethan’s disappearance.”
“So you can look for inconsistencies,” she said.
“Not me,” I said. “But someone, yes. That’s the general idea.”
“Unbelievable,” she said. “The FBI and the DC police have no clue where those poor kids are, so they keep up the witch-hunt with people like me, just to be able to say they’re doing something. And you’re comfortable with this?”
“I didn’t say that,” I told her. “I think you satisfy certain criteria as a person of interest, and I think that’s as far as anybody’s gone in an analysis of you. The Bureau has an amazing machine over there, but emphasis is definitely on the ‘machine.’ Sometimes, anyway. Meanwhile, two kids are missing. Can we please focus on that?”
She was squinting at me now, almost like I’d gone out of focus. I don’t think she expected any of that to come out of a cop’s mouth.
“Haven’t I seen you on the news before?” she said then. “I think I have.”
“Probably,” Sampson told her. “He’s about half famous.”
Isabelle Morris smiled, sort of. “Just like me,” she said, then went back to chopping vegetables.
“So where should I start? You want to hear about what I had for dinner Thursday night? What book I’m reading? A Life of Montaigne, okay? Because I’m sure that’ll bring those kids home faster.”
THERE WASN’T A single note about Isabelle Morris’s earlier interviews in the thin unclassified file I had gotten from the Bureau, so I couldn’t compare her stories with what I was hearing now. She told us she’d been home the evening before the kidnapping, left the house around seven thirty the next morning for the Branaff campus, and then went right back home again after she’d been released. None of it ruled out a connection to the case, but I thought we were probably wasting our time with her as much as she did.
On the way back in, Sampson and I stopped at an empanada place he likes on Sixteenth. We ate our turnovers in the car with a couple of Yoo-hoos. God save our digestive systems. Mine anyway. Sampson eats like he’s part goat. It’s been that way since we were ten years old.
“So what are you thinking?” Sampson said. “Those kids still alive? Any chance at all?”
I stared over at him. “If no one’s made any demands yet, that’s a terrible sign. On the other hand, the FBI or Secret Service could be sitting on something. Let’s face it, Ethan and Zoe Coyle are two of the highest-value targets in the world.”
John demolished half an empanada in a single bite. “You thinking this could be international?” Sampson said. “Terrorism?”
I shrugged. “For the moment, I’m throwing darts, John. But I’ll tell you one thing. I keep coming back to the Gary Soneji case.” Prior to this, the Soneji mess had been the biggest kidnap investigation — and in some ways, the biggest debacle — I’d ever been attached to.
“Soneji worked at the school he took those kids from,” Sampson said. “I remember they had to drag you kicking and screaming onto that case. And now here you are, kicking and screaming to get onto this one.”
“Yeah.” I looked down at the pile of busywork files on the seat between us. “I just hope those kids are alive. John, I still remember the day we found Michael Goldberg in that grave. I don’t want to relive it. I don’t want to find another dead child.”
“BE READY TO die at any time. Be ready to sacrifice everything. Your life, your family.” That had never been more true than right now.
At eight o’clock Monday night, the Al Dossaris arrived at the Harmony Suites Business Hotel on Twenty-second Street. Neither of them carried anything with them — no weapons, no ID.
They took the rear stairs to the third floor where they knocked twice at the door of Room 345. It was all exactly as specified on the disk they’d received at the Natural History Museum.
A smiling, round-bellied Saudi promptly answered the door. He was clean shaven, with a Washington Nationals ball cap perched on his head. A Family member. Finally.