Ten minutes later, I was drinking coffee from a vending machine, wondering if I dared call John Sampson while waiting for the record of my children’s activities to load. Was it possible that Mulch had bugged Sampson’s place, too? Mulch had mentioned specifically that I was not to contact my partner. Was that a bluff? Or something he could know?

Confused on that issue, I focused on the PhoneSniffer site, which now showed Jannie’s position every fifteen minutes since four a.m. on Good Friday. Ali’s doings were there as well.

My daughter’s movements had been entirely predictable, based on what I already knew. She’d left the house at seven forty, gone to school, and moved to the track in the early afternoon. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon that things got disturbing.

PhoneSniffer had Jannie leaving Banneker High, heading toward the Howard University Metro station, about forty minutes after I’d left her to pick up Damon at Union Station. Two blocks shy of the Metro stop, my daughter got into a vehicle. By the time her phone had transmitted her position again, she was crossing the Fourteenth Street Bridge, heading into Virginia.

That was the last signal for almost two hours until Mulch sent the photographs of my family. PhoneSniffer pegged the phone’s position on Baron Cameron Avenue, heading into Reston, Virginia. There had been no more transmissions since then.

Ali’s last known location was two blocks from school, heading in the direction of the church shortly after school let out. Then he simply vanished from the tracking system. Mulch had to have taken their phones and disabled them. This was a dead end.

I was about to call a number at Verizon that would put me in touch with a police liaison so I could get a last fix on Bree, Damon, and Nana Mama, when I suddenly remembered my wife saying something about downloading the PhoneSniffer app onto my grandmother’s phone soon after she’d had heart problems the year before.

I went to the account page, and sure enough, there was a tracker app on Nana Mama’s phone. Calling up the page, I was surprised and happy to see that it was still on and had been sending out her position all day and night. The last transmission had been sent only three minutes before.

I clicked on the location, saw it magnified on the screen against Google Maps, and felt terrified for her.

Chapter

102

In the ground fog and the first dawn light, the tens of thousands of simple white gravestones looked like row after row of broken teeth, stretching in every direction as I ran along a path through Arlington National Cemetery.

When I’d pulled up at the gate at 5:30 a.m., an armed member of the US Army’s Old Guard had come out of a booth shaking his head, said, “We don’t open until eight, sir.”

I’d showed him my badge and identification and told him I was searching for my grandmother. But he’d refused me entry until I explained that she was ninety-some years old and suffered from dementia.

A little stretching of the truth often works wonders.

“My granddad’s got the same sorry thing, Detective, and he’s only seventy-eight,” the sentry said. “Can’t let you drive in, but you can go search on foot.”

I showed the soldier Nana Mama’s position on my cell phone screen. According to PhoneSniffer, she’d been there since six thirty the evening before. The guard studied the location and told me that she was in section 60, an unfortunately popular place in Arlington these days. Section 60 was where they buried soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines who had died in the global war on terror. The day before, the sentry said, ten men had been laid to rest there.

That thought only added to my worry as I began to weave my way through the gravestones of section 60, using the map to guide me. When I got to the location of all the transmissions from Nana Mama’s phone in the prior eleven hours, I found three fresh graves.

For a sickening few moments, my mind reeled with the idea that my grandmother might be dead and buried there. But then I remembered that funerals at Arlington are highly orchestrated affairs attended by members of the Old Guard, who often give the dead a twenty-one-gun salute. There was no way Nana Mama was here.

Her cell phone, however, had to be. Gravestones had not been erected, but all three burial sites were covered with fake grass, flower memorials, and small American flags stuck upright in loose soil at the heads of the graves.

Feeling like a ghoul, and asking forgiveness from the spirits of the fallen soldiers, I put on latex gloves and began to carefully search among the flowers. I found the phone twenty minutes later, but not in any of the bouquets or vases.

When I lifted the fake grass at the foot of the middle grave, the phone was just lying there inside a sandwich-size Ziploc bag. I crouched, took a picture with my camera phone, and then picked the bag up, studying the phone, which was dark. I turned the bag over. There was a small envelope in there, too. It was addressed to “Dr. Alex.”

I felt angry. Some sick freak was playing me, and I hated it.

But I set those feelings aside and fished out the envelope. It had not been sealed and contained a child’s birthday-party invitation with little bunches of balloons in the corners. There was no date, time, or place entered on the dotted lines, just these words scrawled in an odd script: “You disappoint me, Cross. I told you to stay at home and await further instructions, and here I find you out looking for your family. Go home, or suffer the consequences. Look at the picture on the phone and go home.”

Grinding my teeth, not wanting to look at the photograph, I nevertheless thumbed the button that activated the screen.

Nana Mama was lashed to a chair. Her head was slumped forward on her chest. A person—head and body outside the photograph—stood next to her, holding a bolt-action hunting rifle, pressing the muzzle to the side of her neck.

Chapter

103

I did as the man said. I went home and spent most of the day there, but not before taking a chance and making a short stop at DC’s new state-of-the-art crime lab on E Street in Southwest.

The MPD was in the process of moving from having sworn officers running the lab to employing skilled and degreed civilians who were increasingly taking over the forensics end of investigation in the nation’s capital. But I still knew people in the lab, and when I asked after the manager on duty I got lucky.

Tags: James Patterson Alex Cross Mystery
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