With every breath and every cough, I felt a little better, less strangled inside by the taste of the smoke. And even though my eyes felt like I’d stared at the sun, my vision had improved by the time they brought the blaze under control.
“I still think you should go to the emergency room and have your eyes and lungs checked,” Bree said. “Please?”
She said it with such concern and love, that I nodded.
“Just so you know?” I said.
“Yes?”
“I think those heads were bait. Someone wanted to get us here and then detonate that bomb.”
Before Bree could reply, I felt my burn phone buzz. I pulled it out and looked at the screen, but my vision was still too blurry for me to read the words. I held it out to her. “What does it say?”
Bree took the phone from me, paused, and then replied, “It says, ‘You and your family need to be more careful, Cross.’ It’s signed ‘M.’ ”
Chapter 66
Keith Karl Rawlins called that evening to tell me that my personal phone had indeed been hacked and compromised by an insidious piece of code that had most likely been written in China. The code evidently caused my phone to send a record of everything I did on it to an address on the dark web.
So M has been listening, watching, reading, I thought as I climbed into bed. For how long? And how had he learned of my burn phone number? I’d given it only to my family and close colleagues; were they bugged as well?
That last thought was the most upsetting. M had been listening to me through my phone, shadowing me electronically. And maybe he was doing the same thing to everyone else trying to catch him.
What else had he heard in the past week? Month? Year?
I barely slept. Despite an ophthalmic ointment given to me in the emergency room, my eyes still stung. And every hour or so, I had coughing fits.
But I was up before anyone else the next morning, padding around the house, checking windows and doors. I considered putting security cameras outside my home and wondered whether every electronic device we had should be checked.
My commitment to keeping my family safe and sound deepened after Ali and Jannie got up. I questioned them about their plans for the day.
Even though she felt even better than she had the day before, Jannie was staying home and working so she could get all caught up with her studies. Ali was going on a field trip to the Smithsonian and then on a Wild Wheels ride.
“I’ll drive you to school today,” I told him.
“I can take the Metro.”
“I have to go in that direction anyway.”
My son was remarkably perceptive for his age. Even though he didn’t reply, I could tell he was suspicious. Bree came rushing down a few moments later, looking grim.
“You okay?” Ali asked.
“No,” she said sadly. “Nancy Petit, one of our patrol officers, died last night from injuries sustained on the job.”
My heart sank. Officer Petit was the woman I’d dragged out of the smoke. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“The chief wants a task force, so I’m heading in now to organize.”
“You want me there?”
“Yes,” she said. “First meeting is at ten.”
She had coffee and a piece of toast, and then I walked her out to her car.
“Stay alert. He was threatening all of us in that text.”
“I know,” she said. “Which is why I’m asking the chief to put officers here.”
“Thanks. I’m hoping M made a mistake sending that text, that Rawlins can backtrack it.”
“Let me know,” Bree said. She kissed me, told me she loved me, and drove off. Twenty minutes later, Ali and I headed out too.
“So why are you really taking me to school?” he asked almost as soon as we got in the car.
I knew better than to skirt the question. Sometimes my youngest child is too smart for his own good. “A bad guy bugged my phone and threatened us,” I said. “So I’m driving you to school to be prudent, and I want you to be prudent too. You know that word, right?”
“Like, level-headed?”
“More like cautiously smart.”
“I can do that.”
“I know you can, and that’s the way I want you to be for the time being. If you’re going somewhere, I want to know where, why, and with whom.”
“I always do that.”
“Good. Keep it up. If you see anything or anyone who strikes you as strange, you tell me immediately. Okay?”
“I can send you a Wickr message!”
I winced. “No more Wickr. I don’t even have it on my new phone.”
Ali seemed disappointed and was quiet the rest of the way to school.
But when I pulled up in front of the building, he looked at me with an expression that shouldn’t be on the face of a ten-year-old.
“Are we going to be okay, Dad?”
Chapter 67
Chief of detectives Bree Stone checked the black tape across her badge before striding to the lectern in the muster room in DC Metro’s headquarters downtown.
The seats were filled with her hand-picked team of detectives, including Alex Cross and John Sampson. There were also liaison agents present from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and from the FBI, one of whom was Ned Mahoney.
Bree scanned the room a moment while she organized her thoughts, and she did not allow herself to dwell on the fact that her boss, Metro chief of police Bryan Michaels, was standing at the back of the room with his arms crossed. Ever since he’d given her the job, Chief Michaels had put pressure on her to perform.
Early on, she’d thought his expectations had been unrealistic, but she’d learned to accept his tight scrutiny as part of her job. If she was going to oversee the city’s biggest cases, then Michaels was going to oversee her.
“Good morning,” Bree said, quieting the room. “I appreciate you all coming here on such short notice.”
She spotted an empty chair. “Does anyone know where Ron Dallas is?”
“I’ve called three times but he hasn’t answered,” his partner, Elaine Conrad, replied.
“We’ll move on without him, then,” she said, and she pressed a button on her laptop. A recent photograph of Officer Nancy Petit in uniform came up on a screen to her left.
“As you know, Nancy Petit was one of our finest patrol officers. You’ve read her file, you’ve read the multiple letters of commendation she received in a few short years, and you understand the loss. Not only to her family and to her fiancé, Bill, but to this department. We truly have lost one of our finest.”
Bree paused, then she leaned into the microphone and, in her command voice, she said, “This will not stand. I want to be clear. This will not stand. We will do everything in our power to bring to justice whoever was responsible for those frozen heads and the bomb that took Nancy Petit’s life.”
She paused again, sensing the room shift from anger to resolve, which was what she wanted. Bree locked eyes with Chief Michaels and nodded before continuing.
“We have a target suspect,” she said. “As you know, he calls himself M.”
Bree brought the entire task force up to speed on the long history of M, from the first letter to Alex to the text that came in the wake of the bomb explosion that had taken Officer Petit’s life.
Sampson said, “So we’re operating on the assumption that M is responsible for the heads and the bomb?”
“Given the timing of the text, I think it’s a reasonable place to start.”
Alex said, “More than reasonable. It’s him or people working for him.”
Mahoney raised his hand. “Any IDs on the heads?”