Kill Alex Cross (Alex Cross 18)

“Ethan? Zoe?” Mrs. Coyle said. “Can you turn that off, please? This is the detective I told you about. This is Alex Cross.”

THE KIDS BOTH looked over their shoulders at me. Interested, but not too much.

“Hi,” they said together quietly.

“Come in. Please.” Mrs. Coyle motioned me farther inside and we came around the couch to sit down.

I started the interview slowly, asking closed-ended questions at first, then opening it up to whatever they might remember or want to tell me.

Zoe was as quiet as her mother thought she might be. She pulled her feet up under her and drew little circles with her finger on the arm of the couch, mostly with her eyes down.

Ethan was nearly the opposite. He watched me closely, and always answered first, with the kind of quiet clarity you get from kids sometimes after a crisis.

“We just kept talking to each other,” he told me at one point. “I knew we had a chance since we were still … you know. Alive.”

The blessing, if there was one, was that neither of them remembered a whole lot about their time in that cellar. Given the levels of Rohypnol in their systems after the rescue, that was no surprise.

Neither of them could say much about their captor, either. Everything they’d been given to eat or drink came through a sliding panel in the door. There had been no conversation at all.

“He just ignored us the whole time,” Ethan said. “Like we weren’t even there.”

“You knew it was a man, though?” I asked. They hadn’t been told a word about Rodney Glass, particularly the fact that he’d been released from custody for a lack of evidence.

“I saw his hands a couple of times. Man’s hands. And sometimes, I could hear him talking on the other side of the door,” Ethan said.

“Talking?”

He nodded. “I think he thought we were asleep, and sometimes we were. But sometimes I’d only pretend.”

“Did you ever hear what he said? Or recognize the voice?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I tried, but it was too soft.”

Ethan seemed to stop short then. His chest sunk in a little and he looked up, like he was remembering something.

“There were these clicking noises, too,” he said.

Zoe looked over at him.

“What kind of clicking?” I asked.

“It was like —” He held up his hand and bent his thumb back and forth. “Like Dad used to use.”

“The tape recorder?” Mrs. Coyle said suddenly.

“Yeah. Back in Madison.”

“Ed used to dictate briefs from home when he was practicing law,” the First Lady told me. “All the time.”

“I heard it, too,” Zoe said quietly, and we all looked at her. She was mimicking the same hand gesture that Ethan had just been making. “It was like … click on, click off.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Ethan said, nodding enthusiastically. “Like he was always recording himself.”

RECORD.

“I’ve been a good boy for a week now. Not that there’s much choice, is there? The only way I could have more cops watching me these days would be if I was actually in jail. Now it just feels that way.

“At least I can get out here, stretch my legs, and get my thoughts down.