I closed my eyes. I didn’t want it to, but my mind swung toward M and what I knew of him, all of it scanty and contradictory.
There was only one indisputable fact about M, I thought as I fell asleep — the note he’d left with the strangled corpse of Mrs. Nixon was not the first time he had directly taunted me.
It was the fourth time.
In twelve years.
CHAPTER 6
ALI CROSS SLIPPED INTO HIS father’s bedroom around seven the next morning, a Saturday. Bree was already up and downstairs.
Ali went over to where his father lay snoring and shook his shoulder lightly. Alex startled and sat up, confused.
“Want to go for a run?” Ali asked. “I’ll ride my mountain bike.”
His father lay back on his pillow and groaned. “I hardly slept, pal. I don’t think my body’s going to be up for that this morning.”
Ali was disappointed, but he kissed his dad on the cheek and said, “Get some sleep. We’ll go next Saturday.”
Alex smiled, and his eyes drifted shut.
Ali found Bree downstairs, drinking a coffee and dressed for work.
“You don’t want to run either?” he asked.
“Not today,” she said. “I have a desk to clear.”
“I’m going to ride the usual route, okay? And I’ll take my cell phone.”
“Did you ask your dad?”
“He’s in a coma.”
Bree smiled in spite of herself. “I’ll tell Nana where you are when she gets up.”
Ali grinned. He hadn’t expected to get approval so easily.
But then again, he was ten, almost eleven, wasn’t he? And in the sixth grade, a full grade ahead of most kids his age. He knew how to take care of himself.
He got his mountain bike from the shed out back and set off. Although Alex Cross’s younger son felt most at home with his head in a book or on the internet learning something new, he adored his bike, especially when he could launch off something. The front and rear shocks on the thing were amazing.
By the time Ali was past the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, heading south along the west side of the Tidal Basin, he’d found at least ten great jumps and had landed them all. He had the main path almost to himself.
As Ali was pedaling hard toward the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, he saw a man kneeling beside his bike to the right of the path. The man spun around and waved his arms, telling him to stop.
But it was too late. With his attention on the man, Ali had taken his eyes off the path. His front tire rolled over the shards of a broken bottle and blew out.
Ali veered off the path and crash-landed hard on the ground. It dazed him and knocked the wind out of him.
The man who’d waved at him rushed over. “Are you all right?”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Darn it, by the time I heard you coming, I couldn’t warn you off the glass,” the man said in an easy Southern drawl. “Got both my tires. Lucky I didn’t bend a rim.”
He was tall and very fit in biking shorts and a tight jersey that read u.s. armed forces cycling team. He wore wraparound Oakley glasses and a Bell racing helmet over short, sandy-blond hair.
He helped Ali up, said, “I’m Captain Arthur Abrahamsen.”
“Ali Cross.”
“Nice to meet you, Ali Cross. Can I check the damage to your tire?”
“No, sir, I’ll just walk it home. It’s okay.”
“You might ride it home,” Captain Abrahamsen said, smiling, “if the tire’s fixable. Do you mind if I take a look? I know a bit about this.”
Ali hesitated, but then shrugged and nodded, thinking that it would be a lot easier to ride home than walk the three and a half miles pushing a bike with a flat tire.
“Can you kick the glass off the path while I see if it’s salvageable?” the captain asked. “We don’t want any more people getting flats or we’ll have a convention.”
“Sure,” Ali said.
Abrahamsen lifted his bike’s front fork and spun the tire.
Ali kicked the big pieces of glass into the grass with the sides of his sneakers. “You in the military?”
“I am, the U.S. Army,” Abrahamsen said, still looking at the tire.
“Do you, like, race for them?”
“Sort of,” he said. “I’m good enough to train with the team but not quite good enough to fly all over the world to ride for my country. Yet.”
He said this with such conviction and enthusiasm that Ali couldn’t help but smile. “That’s awesome.”
“Totally, as my nephew says,” Abrahamsen said. “Here’s your puncture.”
He held the wheel in place and showed Ali where the glass had penetrated it.
“Is it fixable?” Ali asked.
“I might be able to patch it up so that it’ll get you home. After that, you’ll want a new tire and tube.”
Abrahamsen went over to his own bike. “Can you carry your bike like this?” He picked up his bike and put his right arm through the frame and got it up onto his shoulder.
Ali nodded. He’d seen mountain-bike racers doing that when they had to cross impassable stuff.
“But where are we going? Don’t you have tools and a patch kit with you?”
“Enough for one tire,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ve got everything we need in the team van. It’s parked down by the marina. You want a team sticker for your bike?”
Ali liked that idea. “I’ve never known a professional bike rider.”
“And you still don’t. Yet. C’mon, let’s pick up the pace. I have to be at a meeting at noon. And I imagine your mother will be looking for you.”
“Nana Mama, my great-grandmother,” Ali said, lifting his smaller bike onto his shoulder and very much wanting Captain Arthur Abrahamsen to think he was strong enough to carry it the whole way to the marina.
The captain smiled. “Great-grandmother? Do you want to give her a call? Tell her where you are and who you’re with? Wouldn’t want her to get worried.”
Ali frowned, set his bike down, and slapped his pockets, looking for his phone. “I know I had it leaving the house.”
“Here,” Captain Abrahamsen said, handing him his own phone. “Call her and I’ll look around back there, see if it fell out when you went down.”
Ali took the phone and punched in the number while Abrahamsen went back to where they’d both crashed.
The phone rang and Nana picked up. “Hello?”
“Nana? It’s Ali. I had a flat, and Captain Arthur Abrahamsen, he’s a bike racer in the army, he’s going to help me fix it. I’m on his phone.”
“Well, that’s nice of him.”
“I’ll be home soon,” Ali said and hung up.
He turned around to see Abrahamsen crouched near some deeper grass. The captain stood and held up a black phone. “This it?”
Ali breathed a sigh of relief. His father would have had a cow if he’d lost his phone. “Yes. Thank you.”
They exchanged phones. Abrahamsen said, “Did you get your great-grandmother?”
“Yes.”
“It’s better that she doesn’t worry, don’t you think?”