Pop Goes the Weasel (16 page)

We didn’t do any better than the locals, though. No one had seen anything. We’d reached a dead end. Christine had disappeared
without a trace.

We were bone-tired. After we finished at the station house on the third night, Sampson and I went for a late swim at Elbow
Beach, just down the road from the hotel.

We had learned to swim at the municipal pool in D.C. Nana had insisted that we learn. She was fifty-four at the time, and
stubborn. She made up her mind to learn and took lessons with us from the Red Cross. The majority of people in Southeast didn’t
know how to swim back then, and she felt it was symbolic of the limiting inner-city experience.

So one summer, Sampson and I tackled swimming with Nana at the municipal pool. We went for lessons three mornings a week and
usually practiced for an extra hour after that. Nana herself was soon able to swim fifty or more laps. She had stamina, same
as now. I rarely get into the water without flashing back to those fine summer days of my youth, when I became a reasonably
good swimmer.

Now, Sampson and I floated on the calm surface, out about a hundred yards or so from shore. The sky above was the deepest
shade of evening blue, sparkling with countless stars. I could see the curving white line of the beach as it stretched several
miles in either direction. Palm and casuarina trees shimmied in the sea breeze.

I felt devastated, totally overwhelmed as I floated on the sea. I kept seeing Christine with my eyes open or closed. I couldn’t
believe she was gone. I teared up as I thought about what had happened, the unfairness of life sometimes.

“You want to talk about the investigation? My thoughts so far? Little things I learned today? Or give it a rest for the night?”
Sampson asked me as we floated peacefully on our backs. “Talk? Or quiet time?”

“Talk, I guess. I can’t think about anything else except Christine. I can’t think straight. Say whatever you’re thinking.
Something bothering you in particular?”

“Little thing, but maybe it’s important.”

I didn’t say anything. I just let him go on.

“What puzzles me is the first newspaper stories.” Sampson paused and then continued, “Busby says he didn’t talk to anybody
the first night. Not a single person, he claims. You didn’t, either. Story was in the morning edition, though.”

“It’s a small island, John. I told you that, and you’ve seen it yourself.”

But Sampson kept at it, and I began to think that maybe there was something to it.

“Listen, Alex, only you, Patrick Busby, and whoever took Christine knew.
He
called it in to the paper. The kidnapper did it himself. I talked to the girl at the paper who got the call. She wouldn’t
say anything yesterday, but she finally told me late today. She thought it was just a concerned citizen calling. I think somebody’s
playing with your head, Alex. Somebody’s running a nasty game on you.”

“
We have her.
”

A game? What kind of nasty game? Who were the nasty players? Was one of them the Weasel? Was it possible that he was still
here in Bermuda?

I COULDN’T SLEEP back at the hotel. I still couldn’t concentrate or focus, and it was incredibly frustrating. It was as if
I were losing my mind.

A
game?
No, this wasn’t a game. This was shock and horror. This was a living nightmare beyond anything I had ever experienced. Who
could have done this to Christine? Why? Who was the Weasel?

Every time I closed my eyes, tried to sleep, I could see Christine’s face, see her waving good-bye that final time on Middle
Road, see her walking through the hotel gardens with flowers in her hair.

I could hear Christine’s voice all through the night—and then it was morning again. My guilt over what had happened to her
had doubled, tripled.

Sampson and I continued to canvass Middle Road, Harbour Road, South Road. Every person we spoke to in the police and the military
believed that Christine didn’t simply disappear on the island. Sampson and I heard the same song and dance every day for a
week. No shopkeepers or taxi or bus drivers had seen her in Hamilton or St. George, so it was possible that she’d never even
arrived in either town that afternoon.

No one, not one witness, remembered seeing her moped on Middle or Harbour roads, so maybe she never even got that far.

Most disturbing of all was that there hadn’t been any further communication with me about her since the e-mail on the night
she disappeared. An agent at the FBI had investigated the e-mail address and confirmed that
it didn’t exist
. Whoever had contacted me was a skillful hacker, able to conceal his or her identity. The words I’d read that night were
always on my mind.

“She’s safe for now.”

“We have her.”

Who was “we”? And why hadn’t there been any further contact? What did they want from me? Did they know they were driving me
insane? Was that what they wanted to do? Did the Weasel represent more than one killer? Suddenly that made a lot of sense
to me.

Sampson returned to Washington on Sunday, and he took Nana and the kids with him. They didn’t want to leave without me, but
it was time for them to go. I couldn’t make myself leave Bermuda yet. It would have felt as if I were abandoning Christine.

On Sunday night, Patrick Busby showed up at the Belmont Hotel around nine. He asked me to ride with him out past Southampton,
about a six-mile drive that he said would take us twenty minutes or more. Bermudians measure distances in straight lines,
but all the roads run in wiggles and half-circles, so it always takes longer to travel than you might think.

“What is it, Patrick? What’s out in Southampton?” I asked as we rode along Middle Road. My heart was in my throat. He was
scaring me with his silence.

“We haven’t found Mrs. Johnson. However, a man may have witnessed the abduction. I want you to hear his story. You decide
for yourself. You’re the big-city detective, not me. You can ask whatever questions you like. Off the record, of course.”

The man’s name was Perri Graham, and he was staying in a room at the Port Royal Golf Club. We met him at his tiny apartment
in the staff quarters. He was tall and painfully thin, with a longish goatee. He clearly wasn’t happy to see Inspector Busby
or me on his doorstep.

Busby had already told me that Graham was originally from London and now worked as a porter and maintenance man at the semiprivate
golf club. He had also lived in New York City and Miami and had a criminal record for selling crack in New York.

“I already told him everything I saw,” Perri Graham said defensively as soon as he opened the front door of his room and saw
the two of us standing there. “Go away. Let me be. Why would I hold back anything or—”

I cut him off. “My name is Alex Cross. I’m a homicide detective from Washington. The woman you saw was my fiancée, Mr. Graham.
May we come in and talk? This will only take a few minutes.”

He shook his head back and forth in frustration.

“I’ll tell you what I know.
Again
,” he finally said, relenting. “Yeah, come in. But only because you called me Mr. Graham.”

“That’s all I want. I’m not here to bother you about anything else.”

Busby and I walked inside the room, which was little more than an alcove. The tile floors and all the furniture were strewn
with wrinkled clothes, mostly underwear.

“A woman I know lives in Hamilton,” Graham said in a weary voice. “I went to visit her this Tuesday past. We drank too much
wine. Stayed the evening—you know how it is. I got up somehow. Had to be at the club by noon, but I knew I’d be late and
get docked some of my pay. Don’t have a car or nothin’, so I hitched a ride from Hamilton, out South Shore Road. Walked along
near Paget, I suppose. Damn hot afternoon, I remember. I went down to the water, cool off if I could.

“I came back up over a knobbly hill, and I witnessed an accident on the roadway. It was maybe a quarter of a mile down the
big hill there. You know it?”

I nodded and held my breath as I listened to him. I remembered the stifling heat of that afternoon, everything about it. I
could still see Christine driving off on a shiny blue moped, waving and smiling. The memory of her smile, which had always
brought me such joy, now put a tight knot in my stomach.

“I saw a white van hit a woman riding a blue moped. I can’t be sure, but it almost looked like the van hit her on purpose.
Driver, he jumped out of the van right away and helped her up. She didn’t look like she was hurt badly. Then he helped her
inside the van. Put the moped inside, too. Then he drove off. I thought he was taking her to the hospital. Thought nothing
else of it.”

“You sure she wasn’t badly hurt?” I asked.

“Not sure. But she got right up. She was able to stand all right.”

There was a catch in my voice when I spoke again. “And you didn’t tell anybody about the accident, not even when you saw the
news stories?”

The man shook his head. “Didn’t see no stories. Don’t bother with the local news much. Just small-time shit and worthless
gossip. But then my girl, she keep talking about it. I didn’t want to go to the police, but she made me do it, made me talk
to this inspector here.”

“You know what kind of van it was?” I asked.

“White van. I think it was maybe a rented one. Clean and new.”

“License plate?”

Graham shook his head. “Don’t have no idea.”

“What did the man in the van look like?” I asked him. “Any little thing you remember is helpful, Mr. Graham. You’ve already
helped a lot.”

He shrugged, but I could tell that he was trying to think back to that afternoon. “Nothing special about him. Not as tall
as you, but tall. Look like anybody else. Just a black man, like any other.”

IN A SMALL APARTMENT in a suburb of Washington called Mount Rainier, Detective Patsy Hampton lay in bed, restlessly flipping
through the pages of the
Post
. She couldn’t sleep, but there was nothing unusual about that. She often had trouble sleeping, ever since she was a little
girl in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Her mother said she must have a guilty conscience about something.

She watched a rerun episode of
ER
, then fetched herself a Stonyfield yogurt with blueberries and logged on to America Online. She had an e-mail from her father,
now relocated in Delray Beach, Florida, and one from an old college roommate from the University of Richmond, whom she had
never been that close to anyway.

The roommate had just heard from a mutual friend that Patsy was a hotshot police detective in Washington, and what an exciting
life she must lead. The roommate wrote that she had four children and lived in a suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina, but
added that she was bored with everything in her life. Patsy Hampton would have given anything to have just one child.

She wandered back to the kitchen and got a cold bottle of Evian mineral water. She was aware that her life had become ridiculous.
She spent too much time on her job, but also too much time by herself in her apartment, especially on weekends. It wasn’t
that she couldn’t get dates; she was just turned off by men in general lately.

She still fantasized about finding someone compatible, having children. But she was increasingly tired of the depressing and
maddening cycle of trying to meet someone interesting. She usually ended up with guys who were either hopelessly boring
or
thirty-something jackasses who still acted like teenagers, though without the charm of youth.
Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless
, she thought as she sent off a cheery lie to her dad in Florida.

The phone rang, and she glanced at her wristwatch—it was twenty past twelve.

She snatched up the receiver. “Hampton speaking.”

“It’s Chuck, Patsy. Really sorry to call so late. Is it okay? You awake?”

“Sure, no problem, Chucky Cheese. I’m up with the other vampires—yourself included, I guess.”

It was kind of late, but she was glad to hear from Chuck Hufstedler, who was a computer geek at the FBI in Washington. The
two of them helped each other out sometimes, and she’d recently talked to him about the unsolved D.C. murders, especially
the Jane Does. Chuck had told her that he was also in contact with Alex Cross, but Cross had trouble of his own right now.
His fiancée had been kidnapped, and Patsy Hampton wondered if it had anything to do with the killings in Southeast.

“I’m wide awake, Chuck. What’s up? What’s on your big mind?”

He started with a disclaimer that said volumes about his incredibly low self-esteem: “Maybe nothing, but maybe something a
little interesting on those killings in Southeast, and particularly the two young girls in Shaw. This really comes out of
left field, though.”

The FBI computer expert had her attention. “That’s where this killer lives, Chuck, in
deep
left field. Tell me what you have. I’m wide awake and listening. Talk to me, Chucky Cheese.”

Chuck hemmed and hawed. He was always like that, which was too bad because he was basically a really nice guy. “You know anything
about RPGs, Patsy?” he asked.

“I know it stands for role-playing games, and let’s see, there’s a popular one called Dragons and Dungeons, or Dungeons and
Dragons—whatever the order.”

“It’s Dungeons and Dragons, or Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Confession time, kiddo: I occasionally play an RPG myself, it’s
called Millennium’s End. I play a couple of hours a day, usually. More on weekends.”

“New to me. Go on, Chuck.”
God
, she thought,
cyberspace confessions in the middle of the night
.

“Very popular game, even with so-called adults. The characters in Millennium’s End work for Black Eagle Security. It’s a private
organization of troubleshooters who hire out for investigative services around the world. The characters are all good guys,
crusaders for good.”

“Uh-huh, Chuck. Say six Hail Marys, now make an Act of Contrition, then get to the damn point. It
is
around twelve-thirty, pal.”