Chapter 30
Nana Mama made country-style short ribs with jasmine rice and homemade coleslaw that evening. She’d slow-cooked the ribs, and the meat was sweet and spicy, falling off the bone. It was so good that no one spoke for a full ten minutes.
Jannie pulled her robe tighter around herself and sighed. “I don’t feel any stronger after that, but I sure feel better, Nana.”
My grandmother got up and threw her arms around my daughter.
“You are getting stronger,” Nana said. “Those vitamins are in there working. They just haven’t turned the tide yet.”
That only made Jannie morose. “My friend Jeanette had it, and she said it took her six weeks before she wasn’t falling asleep all the time. And this kid, Connor Bartlett? He got it twice. Twice!”
“Stop,” I said. “Jeanette and Connor are not you. And they were not on this vitamin regimen.”
She rolled her eyes. “They make my stomach feel rude.”
Bree said, “The doctor said to take them with food, and if you take them, drink a lot of fluids, and sleep a lot, you will start feeling better next week.”
“Maybe sooner,” I said.
“Or later,” Ali said.
I glared at him.
“What?” he said. “No two people react to an illness the same way. It said so in the Washington Post the other day.”
Not wanting to belabor the point, I said, “Why don’t you start clearing the table.”
“It’s Jannie’s turn.”
“She’s sick,” I said, and I looked at my daughter. “Shouldn’t you be on a couch under a blanket drinking water?”
Jannie got up, hugged Nana, kissed me on the head, and disappeared.
Ali still wasn’t moving.
“I’ll help you,” I said.
“So will I,” Bree said, grabbing her plate and glass.
We worked as a team while Nana watched Jeopardy!
“Dad,” Ali said. “I’ve been reading about that guy M in the papers, and I Googled some stuff about the investigation.”
“You did? Why?”
“Because you’re involved.”
“You know I can’t talk about open cases.”
“I get that. But you know what I think?”
I sighed. “What’s that?”
“I think he’s a copycat. M. I mean, he leaves a beheaded lady in a car just like that guy you caught a long time ago, the Meat Man, and — is M the one killing people with neckties? Like Edgerton?”
I stared at my ten-year-old. We hadn’t mentioned the similarities between Meat Man’s murders and those committed by Mikey Edgerton. “What makes you say that?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Well, I read that, like, right after that man Edgerton was executed, someone killed a woman just like he’d done it, with a necktie. And then the head of that lady, just like the Meat Man did it. He’s a copycat, isn’t he, Dad? M?”
I glanced at Bree, who appeared concerned.
“Good theory,” I said. “And a well-thought-out one, but I can’t talk about open cases.”
Ali looked disappointed, but then he noticed the time. “That’s okay. There’s a big bike race in Italy on ESPN in, like, ten minutes.”
Quick as a blink, Ali was back to being my son, fixated on his latest obsession.
“Did Captain Abrahamsen teach you how to use the patch kit and how to change the tire?” I asked.
He brightened. “Yeah. I got it pretty quickly once he showed me how. He’s a really good teacher. Can I go riding with him one day?”
“Doesn’t he bike fifty miles a day?”
“Not always. Sometimes he and the team train on mountain bikes, so they’re climbing up and down steep single tracks but not for that long. That’s what we’d do.”
“Did he ask you to ride with him?”
“No, I asked him. He said maybe. I think I’d learn a whole lot from him fast.”
“He said maybe.”
“He’ll say yes.”
Later that night, when Bree and I were in our bedroom, Bree said, “I don’t think it’s good that Ali spends so much time reading about crime and murders on the internet. He’s ten.”
“Ten going on sixteen some days,” I said.
“Maybe intellectually, but he is still a young boy emotionally. It can’t be good for him to be thinking about killers and sadists at his age, can it?”
“Well, no. Not in the kind of detail he’s interested in.”
“So what are you going to do? Ban him from looking at those websites?”
“How? He’s got a phone, a laptop, access to computers at school. If he wants to go there, he probably will.”
I could see she was going to protest, so I held up my hands.
“I’ll talk to him, though. I promise. And we’ll keep up the bicycling. He’s really taken to it in a way I didn’t expect.”
Bree softened. “Ali’s not just a brain — he’s got one of the biggest hearts I know. As big as yours, Alex, and I don’t want his heart... I don’t know... polluted with crime? Not at this age. Not when he can still find wonder in a mountain-bike ride.”
I started laughing, and she broke into a grin. “But you see what I’m saying?”
“I do,” I said, leaning across the bed and hugging her. “And I love that you love him as much as I do.”
“How could I not?” she said, snuggling into my arms. “He’s part of you.”
Chapter 31
The dog started barking around one that morning, sharp, insistent, in that same irritating, sawing pattern.
That did it. I couldn’t take another sleepless night, so I got up, got dressed, and went out to find the dog.
But I couldn’t find the dog.
When I stepped out on the front porch, the barking sounded like it was coming from the back of the house. But when I walked around to the alley, I could have sworn I heard the dog barking to the south.
I went south, but the sound seemed to be moving away. All of a sudden, it stopped. Then it started again, and I had the animal pinpointed.
He was on the back porch of a small, unlit house a little more than a block and a half away, across the street from the Caseys, old friends of my grandmother. I could see the shape of him up there, barking, a small dog for the size of its voice, a terrier of some kind.
I was just about to go to the front and knock when a door opened to the rear porch, and the dog vanished inside.
I stood there waiting for ten or fifteen minutes to make sure the dog was not going to reappear, then I went home. As I climbed the stairs, I told myself to get some sleep.
But at the bedroom door, I realized I was wide awake. I decided to go down to the kitchen, maybe make one of those magnesium drinks that are supposed to help you sleep by working on your adrenal glands or some such nonsense.
Instead, I found myself climbing to the third floor and thinking about how perceptive Ali had been to theorize that M sometimes acted like a copycat. Would I have come up with that at his age?
I doubted it. At ten years old, I was all about sports and trying to fit in at school after Nana Mama brought me up to Washington, DC, following the death of my mother. No, there had been too much turbulence in my life at that age for me to have reasoned like Ali did.
I flipped on the light in my attic office and sat at the desk. Bree was right. It wasn’t good for a boy of ten to be fixated on dark criminal behavior.
And yet, there was a part of me that wanted to brag about him.
Here Ali was, only ten, and on his own he’d figured out something that had completely eluded the reporters who were writing about M and Diane Jenkins. They hadn’t seen the connection between her kidnapping and Arlene Duffy’s death years before or between the decapitated head and the Meat Man. But Ali had seen it.