I said nothing, just watched Jannie go back to the line and take her marks. She coiled at “Set” and sprang at the gun.
Her arms chopped. Her knees rose and stabbed down. Each foot strike was light and elastic, and her stride was near perfect as she rounded the first turn.
“She’s ahead!” Ali cried. “She’s got this!”
Jannie did have it. Coming out of the turn, with the stagger compressing, she was in front of the others by a good five body lengths.
She kept that lead down the backstretch and as she entered the far turn, but at the three-hundred-meter mark, her head rocked back out of position, and she seemed to get lazy. And her breathing cadence changed.
A senior from another school passed Jannie coming into the final stretch. You could see Jannie wanted to respond. But she had no gas.
Another girl went by her, and a third. Jannie was fourth crossing the line, the worst finish she’d had since injuring her foot.
She slowed to a walk and then to a shuffle, her head down. I expected her to be devastated, but when she finally turned around, her expression was more bewildered than anything.
Jannie groped for something that wasn’t there. Then her eyes rolled up in their sockets. She wobbled, staggered, collapsed forward onto the track.
“Jannie!” I roared. I sprinted down the stands and through the gate onto the track, where her coach and a trainer were already at her side.
They had rolled her onto her back. She had a scrape on her jaw where she’d hit the ground, but her eyes were open and searching.
“Dad?”
“Don’t move, baby,” I said. A physician, the mother of one of the other runners, came rushing up.
Dr. Ellen Roberts examined Jannie, who was becoming more alert. “Tell us what happened,” Dr. Roberts said.
Jannie said she’d felt tired all day, even worse than she’d felt the day before and the day before that. She’d fallen asleep twice in biology class and had to take a cold shower to wake up for the meet. She felt good at the start of the race and in the middle.
“But then I just lost everything,” she said. “I don’t know, I … ” She closed her eyes. “Everything aches.”
“I believe she has a fever,” the doctor said. “Which doesn’t surprise me.”
“Flu?” her coach asked.
“I’m thinking Epstein-Barr, though we’ll need to test her ASAP.”
“Epstein-Barr?” I said.
“The virus that causes mononucleosis,” Dr. Roberts said. “It’s rampant at the school. If it’s mono, I’m afraid your girl won’t be running again for a good six weeks.”
CHAPTER 11
“SIX WEEKS.” JANNIE MOANED. We were back home after a trip to an urgent-care center, where the doctor had confirmed the diagnosis of mono.
Jannie was lying on the living-room couch under a blanket and looking forlorn. “Dad, that’s almost the entire spring season. Gone. Just like last year. What am I, jinxed?”
I felt her heartache and frustration and said so, but she just started to weep.
“It’s over,” she cried. “No college coach will want me now. I’m cursed.”
“You’re sick because you’ve been burning the candle at both ends,” I told her. “And I’m sure D-One coaches have dealt with athletes with mono before.”
She stared blankly at the wall.
“I just wanted it to all be good, Dad. Like, no question I was ready.”
“I know. And I think you already are a no-question recruit to many coaches. They’ve seen your tapes and times. They know your potential.”
She looked at me hopefully. “You think?”
“I do. The best thing you can do is follow Dr. Roberts’s advice. Take those vitamins she mentioned, drink gallons of water, and get lots of sleep. You’ll be better in no time.”
Jannie seemed to surrender to the situation then. “Nana Mama’s bringing me soup.”
Bree came back from the health-food store with a buffet of vitamins, and the two of us went upstairs to change before dinner.
“So, about your meeting with Dirty Marty?” Bree called from the closet.
“He says he’s not dirty,” I said.
She stepped out of the closet, looked at me with a knitted brow. “And you believe him?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and then I told her about Forbes being contacted by M.
No one outside a very small circle in the law enforcement community knew about the notes M had sent to me, and Forbes was certainly not part of that circle. We’d decided to hold that information back right from the start all those years ago.
“Doesn’t mean Forbes couldn’t have hacked into files at the FBI to learn about M,” Bree said.
“Point taken,” I said, and then I told her everything.
Forbes claimed M had contacted him first by untraceable e-mail from a server in Panama and later by text from a burn phone.
Forbes said M seemed to know the inner workings of the sex-slave operation Forbes had been trying to break and he offered to provide evidence and the location of the three ringleaders. Shortly after, M mailed Forbes documents detailing the purchase of a yacht in Panama and the aftermarket work done on it to create the prison cells belowdecks.
M lured Forbes to Florida, saying that he’d relay the yacht’s location once it had entered U.S. waters to deliver its latest shipment of sex slaves. He also told Forbes to bring twenty-five grand with him and to take a room at a particular motel in Fort Lauderdale.
Forbes claimed that when he entered his room after dinner on the second day, there was a man hidden in the bathroom. He put a cloth over Forbes’s face doused in what Forbes believed was chloroform.
“I went down, but I wasn’t completely out,” Forbes had said. “It was like I was paralyzed and looking at him in a nightmare as he dragged me up onto the bed and put an IV in my arm. Then I really went out. For good, and for four days.”
“Four days?” I said. “No one found you in that motel room?”
“All I know is that when I woke up, I had a splitting headache, it was the afternoon four days later, and the money was gone.”
“But you didn’t report it to the police?”
He looked down and shook his head. “I should have, I know that now, but I was too embarrassed at the time. Here I’d gone off on a rogue investigation and I’d been played by a con artist.”
“One who took your money and set you up to take the fall for killing six people.”
He looked up angrily. “I didn’t know that then. I was so disgusted with myself, I decided to just get in my car and drive back to West Virginia. I got there a day later and started to work on the book again. Two days after that, agents were at my door.”
I thought about that for several minutes. “Did you have the forty-caliber pistol with you when you went to Florida?”
“No, I took my nine-millimeter, but I know what you’re thinking: How did they get the forty? The guy who knocked me out or someone working with him must have broken into the cabin and found it. That’s my only explanation.”
“Except there were no prints on the gun other than yours,” I said. “And they found hairs and skin cells matching your DNA on the yacht.”