The People vs. Alex Cross (Alex Cross 25)

Hearing popping noises, clucking, and branches snapping, I peeked up over the log and saw a flock of wild turkeys racing through the woods. Up the hill, I spotted movement. I grabbed my binoculars, focused them, and saw a teenage girl in camouflage scrambling down the steep hillside, a man carrying two shotguns right behind her.

“I got him, Dad!” I heard her yell and she threw her hands up in the air. “We both did!”

We stood and waved at the hunters as they got busy with the two dead turkeys. It wasn’t until we were close that they noticed us.

The father stood, glanced at the shotguns propped up against a tree. I guess it wasn’t often he saw two men wearing coats and ties in the turkey woods.

We both showed our badges. He got stiffer. “This was a clean hunt.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said. “We’re here looking into the death of Timmy Walker.”

He softened. “That’s a tragedy. My Ellie here went to school with him. I’m Howard Young, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Young,” I said. I shook his hand and then looked at his daughter. “Tell us about Timmy.”

Ellie played with a camouflage scarf around her neck and her expression soured. “TW-Two was nice growing up, but then he kind of became a creep.”

“More like a little pervert,” her father said.

“How’s that?” Sampson said.

Ellie looked around and then said, “I don’t know if it’s true, but he supposedly put a hole in the wall at school so he could look into the girls’ locker room. The rumor was he took pictures and showed them to his friends.”

Sampson grimaced.

I said, “Was that investigated?”

“The principal said so,” Ellie said. “The school even had police look at Timmy’s phone, but there was nothing on it.”

Her father said, “Doesn’t mean there wasn’t another phone or a camera. I wanted that boy thrown out of school, but they didn’t do a thing. And then he died, so we’ll never know, will we?”

“We’re hoping to help figure out why he died,” Sampson said.

Young nodded uncertainly. “Well, we’ve got birds to clean, and Ellie’s got classes this afternoon.”

We thanked them for their time and hiked back down the steep hillside to the parking lot. Had Timmy been killed for taking pictures he shouldn’t have? Had the killer brought Timmy up that trail in the dark? His mother had reported him missing well after sunset, so there was a good chance. That meant the killer had a headlamp or a helper. Did that matter?

I set that thinking aside and went back to the iPad, looking at an aerial view of the area with pins that marked the locations of the girls’ abandoned car, Timmy’s botched burial site, and his home. The car and the house looked about a mile apart, but the killer had dumped his body miles away.

Why? To try to separate the two cases in the minds of police?

I supposed that was likely, though any detective worth his or her salt would have known the two cases were related. Same day. Same general time frame. The proximity of Timmy’s home to where the girls

’ car was found.

So what happened? Did Timmy see the kidnapping, blunder into it somehow, and get killed for it?

That was our working theory when we pulled into the driveway of Timmy Walker’s house, a restored Colonial with fresh paint and a new, seamless metal roof. It was by far the nicest home in this small mountain hamlet where most of the structures looked like hunting camps. Brown leaves covered the modest front yard. A tricycle lay tipped over by the birdbath.

Sampson knocked on the door. No answer.

He knocked harder, and the door opened. A young girl, six or maybe seven, stood there in food-stained pajamas. She had a Winnie-the-Pooh blanket around her shoulders and studied us with red eyes.

“Hi there, young lady,” I said. “We’re police officers. We’d like to talk to your mom.”

“She’s sleeping,” the girl said.

“Can you wake—”