Criss Cross (Alex Cross #27)(5)

Bree was already dead asleep when I slipped between the sheets. Despite everything that had happened that day, sleep came for me.

But just as I was dozing off, I heard a dog barking in an irritating pattern: three deep barks, a pause, and then two or four barks of higher pitch. The window was open. I got up, closed it, and latched it, but that only muffled the barking.

This had been going on for almost a month now, but I hadn’t had the time to find the owners and complain. And I was in no mood to do it that night either. I put in earplugs and turned on a white-noise app on my phone.

I closed my eyes. I didn’t want it to, but my mind swung toward M and what I knew of him, all of it scanty and contradictory.

There was only one indisputable fact about M, I thought as I fell asleep — the note he’d left with the strangled corpse of Mrs. Nixon was not the first time he had directly taunted me.

It was the fourth time.

In twelve years.





CHAPTER 6





ALI CROSS SLIPPED INTO HIS father’s bedroom around seven the next morning, a Saturday. Bree was already up and downstairs.

Ali went over to where his father lay snoring and shook his shoulder lightly. Alex startled and sat up, confused.

“Want to go for a run?” Ali asked. “I’ll ride my mountain bike.”

His father lay back on his pillow and groaned. “I hardly slept, pal. I don’t think my body’s going to be up for that this morning.”

Ali was disappointed, but he kissed his dad on the cheek and said, “Get some sleep. We’ll go next Saturday.”

Alex smiled, and his eyes drifted shut.

Ali found Bree downstairs, drinking a coffee and dressed for work.

“You don’t want to run either?” he asked.

“Not today,” she said. “I have a desk to clear.”

“I’m going to ride the usual route, okay? And I’ll take my cell phone.”

“Did you ask your dad?”

“He’s in a coma.”

Bree smiled in spite of herself. “I’ll tell Nana where you are when she gets up.”

Ali grinned. He hadn’t expected to get approval so easily.

But then again, he was ten, almost eleven, wasn’t he? And in the sixth grade, a full grade ahead of most kids his age. He knew how to take care of himself.

He got his mountain bike from the shed out back and set off. Although Alex Cross’s younger son felt most at home with his head in a book or on the internet learning something new, he adored his bike, especially when he could launch off something. The front and rear shocks on the thing were amazing.

By the time Ali was past the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, heading south along the west side of the Tidal Basin, he’d found at least ten great jumps and had landed them all. He had the main path almost to himself.

As Ali was pedaling hard toward the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, he saw a man kneeling beside his bike to the right of the path. The man spun around and waved his arms, telling him to stop.

But it was too late. With his attention on the man, Ali had taken his eyes off the path. His front tire rolled over the shards of a broken bottle and blew out.

Ali veered off the path and crash-landed hard on the ground. It dazed him and knocked the wind out of him.

The man who’d waved at him rushed over. “Are you all right?”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Darn it, by the time I heard you coming, I couldn’t warn you off the glass,” the man said in an easy Southern drawl. “Got both my tires. Lucky I didn’t bend a rim.”

He was tall and very fit in biking shorts and a tight jersey that read u.s. armed forces cycling team. He wore wraparound Oakley glasses and a Bell racing helmet over short, sandy-blond hair.

He helped Ali up, said, “I’m Captain Arthur Abrahamsen.”

“Ali Cross.”

“Nice to meet you, Ali Cross. Can I check the damage to your tire?”

“No, sir, I’ll just walk it home. It’s okay.”

“You might ride it home,” Captain Abrahamsen said, smiling, “if the tire’s fixable. Do you mind if I take a look? I know a bit about this.”

Ali hesitated, but then shrugged and nodded, thinking that it would be a lot easier to ride home than walk the three and a half miles pushing a bike with a flat tire.

“Can you kick the glass off the path while I see if it’s salvageable?” the captain asked. “We don’t want any more people getting flats or we’ll have a convention.”

“Sure,” Ali said.

Abrahamsen lifted his bike’s front fork and spun the tire.

Ali kicked the big pieces of glass into the grass with the sides of his sneakers. “You in the military?”

“I am, the U.S. Army,” Abrahamsen said, still looking at the tire.

“Do you, like, race for them?”

“Sort of,” he said. “I’m good enough to train with the team but not quite good enough to fly all over the world to ride for my country. Yet.”

He said this with such conviction and enthusiasm that Ali couldn’t help but smile. “That’s awesome.”

“Totally, as my nephew says,” Abrahamsen said. “Here’s your puncture.”

He held the wheel in place and showed Ali where the glass had penetrated it.