Kill Alex Cross (Alex Cross 18)

“I think so,” Porter said. “There’s no obit that I can find, but I did pull the birth certificate. The parents are listed as Rodney Glass and Molly Johnson, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The poor kid was eight years old when he died.

“And I found a 1998 lease agreement from Harrisburg with the same Social Security number as Glass’s file at Branaff. Like I said, maybe it’s nothing, but I thought you should know.”

Glass, the school nurse, was one of those seventeen names on the list. I was already pulling his file to the top of the mess on my desk.

“I want you to start from scratch on this guy,” I said. “LexisNexis the hell out of him. Check NCIC again, and Interpol while you’re at it. I want to know where he’s lived, every job he’s ever had, every parking ticket, every itch he’s ever scratched. Pull in whoever you need, I’ll sign off on it. Don’t take any crap from anybody on this. Just get it done.”

Porter still looked a little tentative. “Don’t you already have all that on file, sir?”

I picked up the death certificate and waved it at him. “You would have thought so, right?”

He smiled for half a second before he seemed to remember how serious this was. “I’ll get right on it,” he said, and went off at a trot.

I wasn’t going to get too excited … yet. It’s easy to be blinded by circumstantial evidence. But that didn’t stop me from putting a whole new lens on Rodney Glass.

One thing I kept coming back to over and over on this case was how personal the kidnapping felt. There had been no indication that Ethan and Zoe might be returned to their parents under any circumstances. Just like Rodney Glass had lost his own child forever? There wasn’t anything more personal than that, was there?

I also thought about the last time we’d spoken. “Ethan’s my little lunch buddy,” he’d told me. There would have been plenty of opportunities to gain Ethan’s confidence. Maybe enough to have learned about Zoe’s secret cell phone while he was at it.

Not to mention that someone had gotten Ray Pinkney high as a kite on the morning of the kidnapping. And someone had also very likely drugged Ethan and Zoe into unconsciousness before pulling them off campus. The fastest way to do that is by injection. Not that you have to be a nurse to know how, but it doesn’t hurt.

By the time I’d run through it all in my mind, I was ready to move on this, pronto.

MOLLY JOHNSON WAS THE closest thing to immediate family I could find for Rodney Glass. She’d never taken his name when they were married, and the two had been divorced for over four years now — since about six months after the death of their son. She agreed to meet me at the end of her lunch shift, hostessing at the Fire House Restaurant in Harrisburg. I left DC right away and was waiting for her in the parking lot by the time she came out. We spoke right there in my car.

“I don’t know how much help I can be,” she said. “I didn’t even know Rod was back in the States. A friend told me he’d gone into the Peace Corps.”

“He’s been living in Washington for three years now,” I told her.

“Gosh, really? Time flies.”

She stared out the window and absently fingered the gold crucifix around her neck. I could tell she was nervous. All she knew so far was that I wanted to ask about her ex-husband. So why was she so jittery?

“So I’m guessing you two didn’t part on very good terms,” I said.

“No. After our son died — Zachary — it got … pretty bad between us.”

“Can I ask how he died?” I said.

She smiled, the way people do when they’re trying not to cry. “The actual cause of death was severe malnutrition,” she said. “But in terms of why his organs started shutting down, we never did get an answer. They just kept passing us from specialist to specialist.”

“That must have been a nightmare for you, for both of you. I’m sorry,” I said.

Without any prompting, she took a red leather wallet out of her purse and opened it to show me a school picture of a very cute little boy. He had Rodney Glass’s same dark hair and pale blue eyes. I felt a pang of hurt for the parents.

“He wanted to be a doctor, like his dad,” she said. “Or at least, like his dad was going to be. Rod was in med school when Zach got sick. The nursing thing was supposed to be temporary. Funny how life turns out.”

“And you said things were difficult between you afterward?” I asked.

She nodded as she put away the picture. “Rod changed. I mean — to be fair, we both changed. But he just got so … paranoid. And so angry, angry, angry. I think on some level, he blamed himself. Like he never got to be the doctor who could save his own son, you know? But on the outside, he blamed everyone else.”

“And when you say everyone —”

“I mean everyone,” she answered. “The doctors, the hospital, the whole messed-up healthcare system. We didn’t have any insurance at the time, so you can imagine. If you’d asked him then, he probably would have said it was the system’s fault that Zach got sick in the first place.”

Molly stopped suddenly and turned to me, as if something had just occurred to her. “What’s he done, anyway? Is Rod in some kind of trouble?” she asked.

I’d been gauging her carefully the whole time, trying to figure out how much was too much to say here. I didn’t want to leave without getting everything I could, so I went ahead and took a calculated risk.