“You were part of a frame job that put Forbes behind bars for murders he did not commit,” Bree said.
“I didn’t commit them either!” Nolan said. “And I didn’t know about Forbes being in jail until ten days ago, when I was told to go see him but say nothing.”
Nolan claimed M had contacted him again back in February and offered him a month of work that would pay two hundred grand. For that he was supposed to stay at the Regal Motel and wait until he was told what to do.
“Still via this Panamanian e-mail account?”
“No,” Nolan said. “He made me switch to this phone application called Wickr.”
That’s when I believed everything Nolan said. I’d already been inclined to believe him when he said M had made contact with him through a Panamanian e-mail account, just like he had with Marty Forbes. But Wickr, the anonymous, disappearing digital-telegram system, was how M had contacted me, goaded me to—
“Stop!” Bree said, startling me from my thoughts.
The feed froze on the screen inside the Homeland Security offices. It showed a young Caucasian woman wearing a peasant dress and a woolen cap over blond dreadlocks. She was standing in front of locker C-2.
Chapter 89
Lieutenant Prince started the feed in slow motion. At 2:29 p.m. on the same day that Nolan retrieved the claim check, a young woman went to the locker, pulled out a backpack and a woven purse. She put the purse over her shoulder and across her chest, bandolier-style, took the backpack, and left.
We could see the young woman from all angles, and she never seemed to reach up toward the top of the locker. Prince rewound the footage and found the same young woman earlier, at 12:40 p.m., when she first deposited her gear in C-2 and locked it.
Sampson said, “She could have put the claim check in there when she loaded the locker. You can’t see her hands for a good eight seconds there.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Keep going backward and speed it up.”
Prince gave her computer an order. The footage went in reverse again, this time at sixteen times normal speed. We had to concentrate, had to stare right at locker C-2 and nothing else. My iPhone buzzed, alerting me to a text. I ignored it.
“There,” Bree said, pointing at the screen.
“Got it,” Prince said and slowed the pace to normal speed. At 10:22 a.m., a man in a long, dark raincoat wearing a black cowboy hat with a clear plastic rain cover over it unlocked C-2. He retrieved a valise and left. The hat brim made it impossible for us to see his face. When he turned, I noticed the hat had some kind of band around the crown, but it was obscured by the rain cover.
I couldn’t see it earlier, at 9:54 a.m., when the cowboy entered the locker area the first time. He put the valise inside C-2, locked the door, and departed, never giving us a single view of his face.
“I don’t see when he could have planted the claim,” Bree said. “It’s all business. He puts the valise in and takes it out.”
“I think you’re right,” I said. “But mark that place, Lieutenant Prince, and then keep going back in time.”
At 8:12 a.m. on the day Nolan got the claim check, a big man, African-American, wearing a blue sweatshirt, hood up, entered the locker area and looked around. He wore dark sunglasses and seemed agitated before going to C-2, unlocking it, and reaching inside it up to his elbow.
The big man’s shoulder moved as if he were groping for something, and then he pulled out a laptop computer in a sleeve. He tucked it under his arm and left.
“He definitely could have done it, right there,” Mahoney said. “Why else put something so small in a locker that big?”
“I agree, but let’s look when he puts the computer in there,” I said.
Prince ran the feed backward until finding the same guy at 6:48 a.m. He carried a large, heavy messenger-style bag then, and he put it in C-2.
Before locking it, however, he apparently reconsidered and then reached back inside the locker for the bag. From it, he took the computer in the sleeve and put it deeper into the box. Then he locked it and left with the messenger bag under one arm.
“Both times he could have done it,” Sampson said.
“He’s our guy,” Bree agreed.
“I think so too,” Mahoney said.
My phone buzzed a second time, then a third and a fourth. Exasperated, I dug it out, and looked at the screen, seeing two texts from Jannie and three from Nana Mama. All of them said the same thing: Call! Now! It’s important!
I said, “I have to take this.”
I crossed the room and called home. My grandmother answered on the first ring.
“I just want you to tell me things will be fine,” she said in a tense, trembling voice.
“What’s going on, Nana?”
“It’s probably nothing, but Ali’s an hour late for dinner, and he told me this morning he was coming home to study for a geography test. We’ve tried his cell phone, and he won’t answer or he doesn’t have it with him or he forgot to charge it again.”
My stomach felt slightly hollow, but I said, “Did you check the shed, see if his mountain bike’s there?”
“Jannie already did. It’s there.”
I started to feel sick.
My phone buzzed in my hand, and my heart soared. “He just texted me.”
“Oh, thank God,” Nana cried.
I thumbed the icon to read the text, and felt my knees threaten to buckle.
The past is now present, Cross. Come find your son.—M
Chapter 90
Three hours after receiving that text, Bree and I were back at home with Sampson, Mahoney, and Rawlins. Though a team of FBI agents was already working on Ali’s kidnapping from the Bureau’s headquarters downtown, we’d decided to contain knowledge of his abduction, fearing what M might do to Ali if the media’s spotlight swung his way.
Jannie’s eyes were puffy from crying. Nana Mama was shaken but trying to stay busy; she was brewing coffee for the agents. Outwardly, I was doing my best to remain stoic, professional, detached, and focused on the safe recovery of a kidnap victim.
But inside, as a father, I was deathly afraid for my little boy, afraid because, as a detective, I knew what killers like M could do. They were divorced from their souls.
In my experience, there was no other explanation for truly depraved acts. It took someone divorced from his soul, someone turned absolutely amoral, to kill with no conscience, to hack the heads off people, guilty of crimes or not. Or to kidnap an innocent mother and threaten to cut off her finger. Or to frame an FBI agent in order to toy with me in a depraved, ruthless game played out over a dozen years.
And now Ali, my baby boy, was a pawn.
As Mahoney, Bree, and Sampson attempted to put together a timeline of Ali’s day, I tried to put myself in M’s shoes, tried to anticipate what he might be thinking, how he could use my son against me.
M could torture Ali to torture me.
M could kill Ali to torture me.
M could kill Ali to destroy my family.
M could—
“Dad?” Jannie said, startling me.
“Yes?”
“They’ve got a rough timeline,” she said. “You should take a look.”
I went into the dining room and saw that a whiteboard had been set up on Nana Mama’s china hutch. Sampson, Bree, and Mahoney were studying it.
John said, “Ali is at school until three twenty p.m., when classes let out.”
Bree said, “His friends the Kent twins said the last time they saw him, he was on foot, heading for Fort Totten Metro station to go home to work on Nana Mama’s Twitter account. They said it was all he talked about all day.”
“Cell phone?” I said.
Rawlins turned from his computer and said, “His cell phone was on after school. We picked up his location a block from Fort Totten Metro at three thirty-seven p.m. and then nothing until it surfaced again briefly south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at seven twenty p.m.”