Kill Alex Cross (Alex Cross 18)

That was my question exactly.

THE BACKTRACKING AND denials started in my car and continued over the next several hours.

O’Shea was taken directly into FBI custody. I drove him in myself, right through the sally port at the side entrance to the Washington field office.

From there, it’s a straight shot back to the interview rooms on the ground floor. Word was kept tight. There would be no announcement of the arrest yet. Not until we knew more from O’Shea.

A forensic unit was dispatched to his house in Riverdale. Another one went to his office at Branaff, to see what they could turn up. There was no question that O’Shea was hiding something. It was only a matter of finding out what it was.

Around seven o’clock, we got word back from the team out in Riverdale. A Dell laptop had been found in O’Shea’s master bedroom closet. It was loaded with pornographic images, most of them involving children. George O’Shea seemed to have a thing going for little girls, kids as young as three and four.

It was stomach-turning stuff, but as a piece of evidence, this was more than enough to hold him. By the time Peter Lindley arrived, straight from LX1 in Langley, adrenaline was running high in the observation room.

“What have we got here?” he said, taking a file from one of the assistant special agents in charge.

“George O’Shea,” the ASAC told him. “He’s the head of maintenance at the Branaff School —”

“I know who he is, for God’s sake. What have we got?” Lindley said. He seemed to be in his usual bad mood. Several other agents stepped out of the way to make a space for him at the one-way glass.

On the other side, O’Shea was sitting with the Bureau supervisor from the Child Abduction Unit, Ken Mugatande. They’d been talking for two hours straight now.

O’Shea was slumped forward, with his head resting on his clenched fists.

“He’s ready to admit the porn’s his,” I told Lindley. “But he swears up and down that he doesn’t know anything about Ethan and Zoe’s disappearance.”

“He’s begging for a polygraph,” the ASAC said.

Lindley turned and glared at the agent. “This is the guy whose office is twenty-five feet from that tunnel under the school?” Nobody answered. It was a rhetorical question. “So what the hell are we doing here? Let’s get him down to the polygraph room — now!”

THE FIELD OFFICE’S polygraph room looks a lot like the other interview rooms — small table, two chairs, plain white walls, and a big one-way mirror. If anything, the observation space is smaller. A dozen of us squeezed in there to watch the interview.

“What is your name?”

“George Luther O’Shea.”

“What is your address?”

“It’s 1109 Edgewood Road, Riverdale, Maryland.”

O’Shea had asked for this, but he looked even more miserable than before. He was wired up with pneumographs around his chest and abdomen, a blood pressure cuff on his arm, and two finger clips, all feeding into a laptop on the table.

The polygrapher was Sue Pilgrim, a forensic psychologist out of the Hoover Building.

Sue sat at a right angle to O’Shea and just behind him, where he couldn’t see her during the test. Her first several questions were a standard opening battery, mostly lie-proof stuff like name and address, to establish a baseline. After that, she moved on to the meat of the interview.

“Have you ever knowingly downloaded a pornographic image of a child to your own computer?” Pilgrim asked.

“Yeah,” O’Shea said, after a shaky sigh.

“Have you ever knowingly uploaded a pornographic image of a child from your computer to the Internet?”

“No,” he said.

Both times, Agent Pilgrim nodded. As far as she and her machine were concerned, he’d just told the truth.

Then she asked, “Have you ever conspired with any group or individual from another country to commit an illegal act here in the United States?”

“What?” O’Shea swiveled on his seat to look at her. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”