The People vs. Alex Cross (Alex Cross 25)

“Right?” I said, looking around and feeling upset.

I guess I’d hoped driving to this place four and a half hours away would help, and while seeing the crime scene gave us a clearer sense of where the girls and Timmy had been on the day in question, I didn’t see any new light indicating the end of the tunnel.

Sampson said, “It’s pushing noon. We should go back, get the car, and find somewhere to eat before we head home.”

“So

unds like a plan,” I said.

We crossed the clearing, bowing our heads and pulling up our coat collars against the raw wind blowing. It was calmer in the woods, but I still hustled to get back to the car and the heater.

So did Sampson, until something caught his eye. He pulled up, said, “Hold on a second. I saw something back there.”

He walked back down the trail a few steps and then went right six or seven more through the leaves and loose forest duff the turkeys had scratched and turned over.

John stopped and glanced around. He took one step and then another before halting, digging a handkerchief from his pocket, and crouching in the leaves.

When he stood up, Sampson held out a dirty white iPhone.

CHAPTER

91

THE FOLLOWING EVENING around seven, Ali dashed into the kitchen where the rest of us were cleaning up after dinner.

“Jannie!” he cried. “A cab pulled up! He’s here!”

“Oh God,” Jannie said, holding her stomach. “I shouldn’t have eaten so much. I think I’m going to be sick.”

Nana Mama squeezed her arm gently. “You’re going to do just fine. If he wasn’t already impressed, he wouldn’t be here, so just be yourself.”

“Great advice,” I said just before the doorbell rang.

“I’ll get it!” Ali cried.

“No,” I said. “Jannie and I will get it.”

“C’mon, Ali,” my dad said. “Sit down, have a piece of Nana’s shoofly pie.”

“With ice cream?” Ali said.

“He deserves ice cream,” I said as I followed Jannie.

“You’ve been saying that every night since the trial ended,” Nana Mama complained.

“And I’ll be saying that every night for a little while longer.”

Before I left the kitchen, I blew a kiss at Bree, who caught it and smiled. We’d both carved out time for each other the past few days despite our busy schedules, and all in all my personal life was starting to feel much more balanced than it had for well over a year.

Not that things couldn’t be better. Lenore Walker had said that she thought the iPhone Sampson found in the woods was her son’s, but she wasn’t sure. And when we’d taken the device to Keith Rawlins at Quantico earlier in the day, he’d noted that the water damage was going to make it exceedingly difficult for him to access the phone’s data, if he could do it at all.

Despite Rawlins’s promise to work every bit of magic he knew, we’d left the FBI’s cybercrimes lab feeling frustrated. In our minds, the phone was Timmy Walker’s, but unless we could get into it, we were once again at a dead end when it came to his murder. And even though we didn’t have a smoking gun connecting the boy’s death to the missing blondes, it felt like, without the phone, we would never find Gretchen Lindel, Ginny Krauss, Alison Dane, Delilah Franks, Patsy Mansfield, and Cathy Dupris.

But good things had happened too. Nana had taken a phone call for Jannie at home and relayed the message to me, and that had led to near pandemonium as everyone in our family tried to rearrange things in order to be home when the doorbell rang.

In the front hall now, Jannie looked over her shoulder, and I said, “Go on.”

She opened the front door, revealing a tall, lean, African American man in his early forties. He wore a blue suit with a green and gold tie, and he beamed when he saw my daughter.