The People vs. Alex Cross (27 page)

Walker got a good job working as an oil engineer right out of school and made enough in the fracking industry that they bought the house, restored it, and had kids. Timmy—Deuce—was his father’s favorite, and they spent many hours together early in the boy’s life.

Then Walker started moving up the corporate ladder and was gone a lot. And then he discovered “playthings,” as Lenore put it, and he was gone a lot more. After Deuce died, her husband, heartbroken and in love with a twenty-four-year-old, had left for good.

We asked her about the rumors, about the hole in the wall at the school. “Never happened,” Lenore said.

“Your son have a computer?” Sampson asked.

“Two, or one and a half, I guess, at the end. He was always buying and selling them on eBay.”

“Really?” I said. “At twelve?”

“Oh, sure. Computers, phones, iPods, anything electronic, long as it was used and cheap. It was kind of his hobby. He made pretty good money doing it.”

“Police look at his computers?”

“They took them,” she said. “I assume they looked at them.”

“And his phone?”

“They found one.”

“He had more than one?” Sampson asked.

“Sometimes three, but I only knew of two at that time. A Samsung, which they found, and a used iPhone, which they didn’t.”

“Anything else?”

“No. There’s not much left other than pictures, videos, and my memories.”

She started to cry again. Her daughter came over and hugged her until she was composed enough to tell us about the day her son disappeared.

“I wanted him to go to the store for me.” She sniffed. “He’d been in for a snack and then said he was going out to play. But when I called after him, he never answered.”

We asked her to point out the trail she believed Timmy had used to reach the forest clearing where the missing girls’ Toyota was found. As she went to the window to show us where to find the path, Lenore expressed bitterness about the investigation, saying that state and local detectives had been more interested in the lesbians than her son.

“Then again, they’re probably still alive, and my son’s dead,
buried, and forgotten,” she said morosely as she led us to the door. “So thank you for thinking about him.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “We’ll let you know if we make any progress.”

“I believe you,” she said. “Even if no one else seems willing to help.”

Walking down the driveway, feeling Lenore Walker’s tortured gaze on my back, I was once again grateful for my many blessings and hyperaware of how the gifts of life can disappear in the blink of an eye.

“There but for the grace of God go I,” Sampson said in a soft voice.

“I hear you, brother,” I said. “Loud and clear.”

We found the path and went into the woods. The trail ran out across a shelf and then dropped steeply downhill to a logging road. When we came over the edge of the shelf, a black, whirling explosion went off down in the bottom.

I lurched back, ducked, and threw up my arms to protect my head.

A BIG FLOCK
of wild turkeys had been feeding in the logging road when we appeared above them. They erupted off the forest floor and roared right over our heads, causing us to duck and take cover until they were gone.

“You should have seen the look on your face when they came blowing out of there,” I said, grinning.

“I almost had a heart attack.” Sampson laughed. “You did too.”

“I’m a city boy, not used to getting attacked by wild critters.”

“Critters?”

“I’m trying to channel my inner country.”

“Yee-haw,” Sampson said and dropped down the bank onto the logging road. “Boy, those damn birds really tear up the place, don’t they?”

I saw what he meant. For a good fifty yards in every direction, the leaves were all fluffed and piled up where the turkeys had scratched and overturned them looking for food.

“There had to have been forty of them,” I said.

“At least,” Sampson said, heading down the trail to where it met a creek.

We paralleled the creek for almost a mile to a fork in the two-track road. We went left and found the creek crossing Lenore Walker had described and continued on up a short hill.

At the top of the rise, we could see through the bare trees some ninety yards across a wide flat to the clearing where Alison Dane’s Toyota Camry had been found, abandoned. The flock of turkeys had been there before us, tearing up the forest floor on both sides of the trail all the way to the clearing.

I had a picture on my phone of the Toyota Camry as it was found, and we were able to use it to figure out roughly where the car must have been. We crossed the clearing to the spot.

Looking back to where the logging road met the opening, I said, “So Timmy comes to the edge of the woods over there, and sees what?”

“The car, the girls,” Sampson said. “And maybe whoever grabbed them.”

“Sure, it’s not far. Sixty yards? Seventy?”

“Sounds right, but then what? Someone sees Timmy?”

I nodded. “Chases him down, crushes his throat.”

Sampson took a big breath and let it go. “Poor kid.”

“Right?” I said, looking around and feeling upset.

I guess I’d hoped driving to this place four and a half hours away would help, and while seeing the crime scene gave us a clearer sense of where the girls and Timmy had been on the day in question, I didn’t see any new light indicating the end of the tunnel.

Sampson said, “It’s pushing noon. We should go back, get the car, and find somewhere to eat before we head home.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

We crossed the clearing, bowing our heads and pulling up our coat collars against the raw wind blowing. It was calmer in the woods, but I still hustled to get back to the car and the heater.

So did Sampson, until something caught his eye. He pulled up, said, “Hold on a second. I saw something back there.”

He walked back down the trail a few steps and then went right six or seven more through the leaves and loose forest duff the turkeys had scratched and turned over.

John stopped and glanced around. He took one step and then another before halting, digging a handkerchief from his pocket, and crouching in the leaves.

When he stood up, Sampson held out a dirty white iPhone.

THE FOLLOWING EVENING
around seven, Ali dashed into the kitchen where the rest of us were cleaning up after dinner.

“Jannie!” he cried. “A cab pulled up! He’s here!”

“Oh God,” Jannie said, holding her stomach. “I shouldn’t have eaten so much. I think I’m going to be sick.”

Nana Mama squeezed her arm gently. “You’re going to do just fine. If he wasn’t already impressed, he wouldn’t be here, so just be yourself.”

“Great advice,” I said just before the doorbell rang.

“I’ll get it!” Ali cried.

“No,” I said. “Jannie and I will get it.”

“C’mon, Ali,” my dad said. “Sit down, have a piece of Nana’s shoofly pie.”

“With ice cream?” Ali said.

“He deserves ice cream,” I said as I followed Jannie.

“You’ve been saying that every night since the trial ended,” Nana Mama complained.

“And I’ll be saying that every night for a little while longer.”

Before I left the kitchen, I blew a kiss at Bree, who caught it and smiled. We’d both carved out time for each other the past few days despite our busy schedules, and all in all my personal life was starting to feel much more balanced than it had for well over a year.

Not that things couldn’t be better. Lenore Walker had said that she thought the iPhone Sampson found in the woods was her son’s, but she wasn’t sure. And when we’d taken the device to Keith Rawlins at Quantico earlier in the day, he’d noted that the water damage was going to make it exceedingly difficult for him to access the phone’s data, if he could do it at all.

Despite Rawlins’s promise to work every bit of magic he knew, we’d left the FBI’s cybercrimes lab feeling frustrated. In our minds, the phone
was
Timmy Walker’s, but unless we could get into it, we were once again at a dead end when it came to his murder. And even though we didn’t have a smoking gun connecting the boy’s death to the missing blondes, it felt like, without the phone, we would never find Gretchen Lindel, Ginny Krauss, Alison Dane, Delilah Franks, Patsy Mansfield, and Cathy Dupris.

But good things had happened too. Nana had taken a phone call for Jannie at home and relayed the message to me, and that had led to near pandemonium as everyone in our family tried to rearrange things in order to be home when the doorbell rang.

In the front hall now, Jannie looked over her shoulder, and I said, “Go on.”

She opened the front door, revealing a tall, lean, African American man in his early forties. He wore a blue suit with a green and gold tie, and he beamed when he saw my daughter.

“Jannie Cross,” he said, smiling as he shook her hand. “I’m so glad we could work out a time to meet.”

Jannie was dumbstruck but managed to say, “I am too, sir, uh, Coach.”

I said, “She’s thrilled you’re here. We all are.”

“Dr. Cross?” he said, turning his hundred-watt smile on me and reaching to shake my hand. “I’m Robert Johnson.”

“Please, come in, Coach,” I said. “My grandmother makes a mean pie if you’re interested.”

“I’m always interested in pie,” he said. “What kind?”

“Shoofly pie without the sugar bomb,” Jannie said. “She got the recipe from an Amish cookbook and altered it with maple syrup.”

“I would love some of that,” he said.

I led the way back to the kitchen, where Coach Johnson introduced himself to everyone and good-naturedly submitted to Nana Mama when she ordered him to sit down and have some pie and a cup of green tea.

“Jannie,” Johnson said after finishing his dessert, “I’m not going to lie to you. The food at the University of Oregon is not as good as you’re used to at home.”

My grandmother loved that.

“Unless you could convince Nana to move to Eugene with you,” he said. “Then the entire Ducks track team could benefit.”

That pleased Nana even more. “You’re scoring brownie points, Coach.”

“I was hoping so,” Coach Johnson said, and he winked at her. “Can I tell you all about our program?”

“Please,” Bree said.

Johnson said, “Since I took over as head track coach at the University of Oregon three years ago, we have won eight
national championships: men’s indoor and outdoor track, women’s indoor and outdoor track, and women’s cross-country. Oregon has been honored as the national Men’s and Women’s Programs of the Year in each of the past two years. The women won it the year before that as well.”

Once Coach Johnson started his recruiting pitch, his attention rarely left Jannie, who was listening raptly.

“Twenty-eight Duck athletes have won NCAA individual championships under my watch,” Johnson went on. “Including Phyllis Francis.”

Jannie sat up straighter. “She set the American record in the indoor four-hundred.”

“She did,” Johnson said, and he paused to look around at us all. “And I think you can beat that record, Jannie.”

JANNIE LOOKED AS
stunned as I felt. The American record?

“I really do believe that,” Johnson said to me. “I’ve watched Jannie’s films. I’ve reviewed her training times, her program, and her progress with Coach McDonald. We both feel that record is within the range of possibility
if
she chooses and applies herself in the right program.”

“Your program,” my father said.

“There’s none better,” the coach replied. “Oregon’s track-and-field tradition is deep and wide. We have the finest facility in the country at Hayward Field. The weather is near perfect for year-round training. And we have the best coaches and trainers. Period.”

“What about the academics?” Bree asked.

“Amen,” Nana Mama said.

“The university offers two hundred and seventy different majors, from the sciences to engineering to education and the arts. Our program in sports marketing is ranked number one
in the country. The Clark Honors College is the oldest of its kind in the country and attracts many gifted students such as yourself, Jannie.

“Academics and sports aside, the campus is stunningly beautiful. Eugene is one of the most vibrant places I’ve ever lived. And we offer all of our athletes tutors to make sure they stay eligible to compete and, most important, to graduate.”

“Are you offering my sister a scholarship?” Ali asked.

Coach Johnson laughed. “You don’t fool around, do you?”

Ali grinned and shook his head.

“Maybe
you
should go into sports marketing, young man,” Johnson said. “Be your sister’s agent someday.”

Ali smiled and said, “You didn’t answer the question.”

The coach laughed again, looked at me. “He’s a little tiger.”

“Every day,” I said.

Coach Johnson turned to Jannie. “You know how I first heard of you?”

My daughter shook her head.

“When you were on ESPN.”

Imitating the ESPN announcer, Ali said, “That girl ran so fast she broke her foot!”

The coach nodded. “That’s the one. How’s the foot doing?”

“Really good,” Jannie said.

“No pain?”

“Not for a long time.”

“You’re a lucky, lucky young lady,” Johnson said. “That injury could have been a career ender. But it wasn’t, and so, Jannie Cross, I
am
here to offer you a scholarship, a full ride—tuition, room, and board—at the University of Oregon in exchange for a signed national letter of intent to run for the Ducks.”

I don’t think Jannie expected that. I know I didn’t. She hadn’t even competed in her junior year of spring outdoor track. I’d figured if she ran well from now on, she might start getting real offers in the fall of her senior year.

“I’m thrilled, but do I have to answer right now, Coach?” she said, smiling and biting her lip.

“Of course not,” he said. “It would make my life easier if you did, but my life isn’t what’s at stake. Yours is. So I’m going to give you some advice, because I think you’re a rare talent whether or not you come to Eugene to run for me. Jannie, you are going to get multiple scholarship offers. You should visit every school that you’re interested in and really explore the people and the places and the track programs before you make a decision. I know Eugene is far from Washington, DC, but would you be interested in paying us a visit?”