Roses Are Red (Alex Cross 6)

“All right. Of course, Doctor. I don’t like that there was a second seizure either.”

There was a bed available on the fourth floor, and I went up there with Jannie. Hospital policy required that she be taken up on a gurney, but I got to push it. She was groggy and unusually quiet in the elevator going up; she didn’t ask me any questions until we were alone behind a curtain in the hospital room.

“Okay,” she said then. “Tell me the truth, Daddy. You have to tell me everything. The truth.”

I took a deep breath. “Well, you probably had what’s called a grand mal seizure. Two of them. Sometimes they just happen, sweetheart. Out of the blue, like tonight. Damon’s punch might have had something to do with it.”

She frowned. “He barely touched me.” Jannie stared into my eyes, trying to read me. “Okay,” she said. “That’s not so bad, is it? At least I’m still here on planet Earth for now.”

“Don’t talk like that,” I told her. “It isn’t funny.”

“Okay. I won’t scare you,” she whispered.

Jannie reached out and took my hand and we held on tight. In a few minutes she was fast asleep, still holding on to my hand.

Part Two

HATE MAIL

Chapter 22

NO ONE COULD FIGURE OUT what was happening, or why.

He just loved that. The feeling of superiority it bred. They were all such dithering fools.

On a numerical scale of 9.9999 out of 10, things were going very well. The Mastermind was certain that he hadn’t made a meaningful mistake. He took particular satisfaction in the Falls Church robbery and especially the four puzzling murders.

He relived every moment of the bloody crime as if he had been there instead of lucky Messrs. Red, White, and Blue, and Ms. Green. He visualized the scene at the manager’s house, and then the murders at the bank, with intense pleasure and satisfaction. The Mastermind re-created it in his mind again and again and never tired of the scenario, especially the killings. The artistry and symbolism of them infused him with confidence in the cleverness of his thinking — the rightness of it.

He found himself smiling at the thought of the phone call to the police: the tip that a robbery was in progress. He’d

made the call. He wanted the First Union employees killed. That was the whole goddamn point. Didn’t anybody see that yet?

He had another team to recruit now, the most important one, and the hardest to find. The final crew had to be extremely capable and self-sufficient, and, because of that self-sufficiency, they would pose a danger to him. He understood very well that clever people often had large and uncontrollable egos. He certainly did.

He brought up the names of potential candidates on his computer screen. He read lengthy profiles and even criminal records, which he thought of as their résumés. Then suddenly that dreary, rainy afternoon, he came across a crew that was as different from the others as he was from the rest of humanity.

The proof? They had no criminal record. They had never been caught, never even been suspected. It was why they’d been so hard for him to find. They seemed perfect — for his perfect job — for his masterpiece.

No one could figure out what was going to happen.

Chapter 23

AT 9:00 A.M., I met with a neurologist named Thomas Petito, who patiently explained the tests Jannie would go through that same morning. He wanted first to eliminate some possible causes of the seizures. He told me that worrying would do no good, that Jannie was in excellent hands — his — and that for the moment the best thing I could do was to go to work. “I don’t want you worrying needlessly,” Petito said. “And I don’t want you in my way.”

I drove I-95 South to Quantico that afternoon after I had lunch with Jannie. I needed to visit with the FBI’s best technicians and profilers, and they were at Quantico. I didn’t like leaving Jannie at St. Anthony’s but Nana was with her now, and there weren’t any major tests scheduled until the following morning.

Kyle Craig had called me at the hospital and asked about Jannie. He was genuinely concerned. Kyle then told me that the Justice Department, the banking industry, and the media were all over him like a cheap suit. The FBI dragnet now covered most of the East Coast, but it wasn’t delivering results. He’d even flown in one of the agents from the team that had tracked down master bank robber Joseph Dougherty in the mid-eighties.

Kyle also said that Senior Agent Cavalierre was running the task force. I wasn’t too surprised. She had struck me as one of the brightest and most energetic of the Bureau agents I’d met, other than Kyle himself.

The agent from the original Dougherty team was named Sam Withers. Kyle, Agent Cavalierre, and I met with him in Kyle’s conference room at Quantico. Withers was in his mid-sixties now; he was retired and told us he played a lot of golf in the Scottsdale area. He admitted he hadn’t given much thought to bank robbers in several years, but the horror of these robberies had caught his attention.

Betsey Cavalierre got right down to business. “Sam, did you get a chance to read our write-ups of the Citibank and First Union robberies?”

“Sure did. I read them a couple of times on my way here,” Withers said, running the palm of his hand over his buzz cut. He was a beefy man, probably two hundred forty pounds or more, and reminded me of retired baseball sluggers like Ted Klusewski and Ralph Kiner.

“First impressions?” she asked the former agent. “What do you think, Sam? Is there any connection to the current mess?”