Ali Cross

by James Patterson

  “Wait here,” Dad said.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Just wait,” he said.

  Bree put a hand around my shoulder and pulled me closer while I kept my eyes glued to the back door. I didn’t even know she’d called 911 until I heard her talking to the dispatcher.

  “Hello, this is MPD Chief of Detectives, Brianna Stone,” she said. Bree’s my stepmom, which is why I call her Bree, but she’s also a cop like my dad. “I’m off duty and unarmed, requesting a uniformed patrol at my house right away on a possible break-in. We’ll need two units, one in front and one in the back alley.”

  While Dad moved toward the porch, I started scanning the ground around me. It was too dark to see footprints, if there were any. My guess was that someone had come in from the alley and over the garage roof.

  I could just see it in my mind—a dark shadow of a bad guy, scaling his way up, over, and onto our property. Then across the yard, hugging the fence where the light from the alley wouldn’t give him away. A quick punch through the back door glass with a gloved hand was all it would take. Then a careful reach inside, past the sharp edges. A turn of the knob—

  And into the house.

  Our house.

  The question was—could he still be in there? And what was Dad walking into? As much as I want to be a real investigator someday, I don’t know if I’d ever have the guts to do what he was doing just then. My heartbeat had already kicked into high gear, but it doubled down again as I watched Dad slowly push open the back door and disappear inside.

  All we could do now was wait.

  ALEX CROSS STEPPED through the back door and onto the sunporch of his house. A bulb from the stovetop in the kitchen offered just enough light to see by. The porch was littered with winter boots and coats, as well as the old upright piano he sometimes played. Other than the broken back door glass, everything looked the same as it had when they’d left for church that night.

  He stopped and listened for a creak, a footstep, or any indication that someone was still inside. Everyone always thought cops knew how not to be afraid in these situations, but it wasn’t like that. He was scared, all right. He just couldn’t let the fear stop him.

  “Police!” he yelled.

  His heart thumped out a ragged rhythm as he listened again, but the old house only answered with more silence.

  Pushing on, Alex passed slowly through the kitchen and into the hall. When he reached the living room, he saw the floor around the Christmas tree was littered with crumpled paper, ribbon, and opened packages. Someone had torn through everything and almost certainly stolen the more valuable items. So much for Ali’s brand-new laptop, along with whatever else had been taken.

  Scumbags.

  When Alex’s phone vibrated, he looked down to see Bree’s name on the screen.

  “What’s up?” he answered.

  “Dispatch is sending two units,” she said. “What’s going on in there?”

  “Some kind of robbery,” he told her. “I think they’re gone, but—”

  He stopped short at the sound of an old window frame creaking open. Whoever had broken into the house was somewhere upstairs, trying to make a quick escape from the sound of it.

  “Hang on!” he told her.

  He launched up the steps, three at a time. When he got to the upstairs hallway, there was nothing more to hear, but an unmistakable cold breeze was blowing down the hall from the direction of his own bedroom.

  Three fast strides brought him into the room. Two more and he was at the open window, pushing past the blowing curtains to scan the scene outside.

  The gutter on the front porch roof had been torn off. Other than that, there was no sign of anyone. The street looked deserted, and whoever had just been here was gone now.

  “Alex?” Bree’s voice came over the phone. “Alex! What’s going on?”

  “I’m here,” he said. “We just missed them.”

  “Them?”

  “Him, her, them, I don’t know,” he said, flipping on a light. “Whoever it was, they went through all the gifts under the tree and…”

  Again, Alex stopped short. His bedroom was a disaster. Dresser drawers hung open. Clothes were everywhere. The mattress was overturned, and a lamp lay in pieces on the floor.

  But none of that was the worst news.

  “Bree, we’ve got a bigger problem here,” he said.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I’m up in our room right now. They went through everything. Including the nightstands,” he told her.

  “Oh… no,” she said.

  “Yeah. Both lockboxes are gone, and both of our police weapons along with them.”

  The whole thing had just jumped up a level. Anyone with the right tools would be able to pop those lockboxes in no time. The boxes were meant as a home safety measure, nothing more than that.

  This was no longer a simple robbery. Now there were two firearms out there on the street. Two police weapons in the wrong hands.

  “Don’t mention the guns to the kids,” he added.

  “I won’t,” she said.

  Ali, Jannie, and Damon knew exactly what was in those lockboxes, but it wouldn’t help anything to talk about it now. Their Christmas Eve was already a disaster. No sense making it worse.

  If that was even possible.

  ONCE THE POLICE got to our house, we had to wait in the kitchen for a long time. Uniformed officers came through first, then a team of crime scene techs and Detective Olayinka, who went over the whole place with Dad and Bree. This was all 100 percent serious, but it was also just like something out of an episode of Law & Order. I’ll watch old repeats of that show any chance I get. So yeah, my radar was definitely on high that night, sucking up every detail.

  The good news was, everyone was okay. The bad news was, all our presents had been stolen, including the laptop I wasn’t supposed to know I was getting for Christmas. That was a real bummer, but I didn’t have to be a detective to know that now wasn’t the time to go whining to Dad about it.

  Because something else was going on. Detective Olayinka spent an extra-long time with Dad and Bree upstairs while the crime scene techs worked in the living room. I didn’t know what they were talking about up there, but you could just tell there was some kind of secret in the air.

  Or, at least, I could tell. I wasn’t sure if Jannie and Damon had picked up on it.

  “Weirdest Christmas ever,” Jannie said. It was way past midnight by now and her chin was practically on the table. They hadn’t brought up their missing presents, either. We all knew this was serious. We just couldn’t do anything about it.

  “Do you think it was one of those people who’ve been trashing Dad so bad lately?” Damon asked.

  “Could be,” Jannie said. “I mean, it’s not like a secret where we live. And Dad’s got more than his share of people coming down on him lately.”

  “We all do,” Damon said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It’s like for some people, ‘Cross’ is a dirty word now,” Damon said. “You know. For anyone who thinks Dad’s guilty.”

  “Guilty of what, though?” I asked. “He didn’t do anything. I mean, I feel bad that Mr. Yang fell down those stairs, but it was an accident.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that,” Damon said. “Tell it to all those people who think Dad pushed him. Or assaulted him. Or both.”

  None of this was making me feel any better. But Damon was right. Those reporters outside the church weren’t the only ones giving Dad grief about his trial. Regular people were saying all kinds of messed-up stuff about him, too. I know there are a lot of valid reasons people are talking about police brutality these days. Dad knows it, too. There have been way too many problems with it in the past few years, and it brings down the whole community when a police officer abuses their power. For Dad, it’s made this case more complicated. I’d seen a ton of people accusing my dad of terrible stuff online and it was har
d to take, even though I knew my Dad would never do those things.

  I’d seen it all online, even though I wasn’t supposed to be reading it.

  Either way, I didn’t want to just sit there talking anymore. This break-in was the last thing Dad needed right now, with his trial and the real chance that he could go to jail for something that wasn’t his fault. He might not be a detective much longer, which is all I ever wanted to be. The best, like him.

  I jerked back from the table, my chair scraping loudly on the floor. I wanted to get a look at the crime scene.

  I wanted to investigate this thing.

  “Where are you going?” Nana asked when I got up from the table.

  “Just to the bathroom,” I said, and slipped out of the kitchen before she decided to stop me.

  When I got to the living room, the crime scene techs were there, wearing blue gloves and headlamps, along with black sweatshirts that said ERT on the back in big white letters. The Evidence Response Team. They find all the clues—visible and invisible—that the perpetrators leave behind at a crime scene, then figure out exactly what they mean, like solving a riddle. That’s always seemed like a cool job to me.

  “Hey, little dude, you supposed to be in here?” one of the guys asked. He was carrying a camera. The other one was working a handheld blacklight, going over every inch of the room. No wonder it was taking so long.

  “I’m good,” I said with a smile, like that answered the question. “What are you looking for, exactly?”

  “Fingerprints, mostly, and any other trace evidence,” he said.

  “Find anything?”

  The guy smiled. “I don’t think I’m supposed to talk to you about this,” he said. “Sorry about your Christmas, though.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. It really was. A lot of people had it way worse than us. Including Gabe, I was guessing. And as long as I was standing there, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try another angle with this guy.

  “Can I ask you something else?” I said.

  “Depends on what it’s about,” he told me.

  “Let’s say you were looking for a missing person,” I said. “Someone who had disappeared, like, three days ago. What would you do about it?”

  The guy nodded, and it seemed like he really thought for a second. I liked how he wasn’t treating me like a kid.

  “Well, I’m no detective. I’m just a tech,” he said. “But if it were me, I’d get it up on the MPD missing persons page. Also, any neighborhood Facebook pages where they track this stuff. Social media can be your best friend in a case like that. But you need feet on the ground, too.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “I’d comb the neighborhood, working out from wherever the missing person was last seen. Maybe get a team knocking on doors, handing out flyers, that kind of thing.”

  I had about a million more questions, but that’s as far as I got.

  “Ali?” Dad yelled from upstairs. “What are you doing down there?”

  “Just going to the bathroom,” I answered.

  The crime scene guy smiled, but he didn’t bust me. “He’s no bother!” the guy said, as Dad came down the stairs.

  “Oh, yes he is,” Dad said. “Trust me. This kid’s never seen a Sherlock Holmes story or a cop show on TV that he didn’t soak up like a sponge.”

  That was true. Like I said, I wanted to be a detective so I couldn’t get enough of anything with a mystery or a crime. I also like books by Walter Mosley, Blue Balliett, Trenton Lee Stewart, Varian Johnson, Agatha Christie, and a bunch of others.

  But I didn’t want to look like a geek in front of the investigators, so I didn’t say all that out loud.

  “In any case,” Dad told me, “you can head up to bed. We’re done up there, and it’s time to get some sleep. Tomorrow is still Christmas, after all.”

  “Well, not exactly,” I told him.

  “Excuse me?” Dad asked.

  I pointed over at the clock on the hall table. It was just after one in the morning by now.

  “It’s already Christmas,” I said.

  It was supposed to be one of the happiest days of the year. It goes to show how distracted we were that none of us noticed until now. Like Jannie said…

  Weirdest Christmas ever.

  I DIDN’T STAY in bed for long. First, someone had been in our house, in this very room, looking through all my things. Maybe even sat on the bed I’m lying in now. It shook me up more than I wanted to admit, and even living with two cops didn’t make me feel completely safe anymore.

  Then there was the investigation. How was I going to sleep with about eight hundred different things running around inside my head?

  Basically, I had three ideas about why someone might have done this.

  One: It was one of those people who had already decided Dad was a dirty cop.

  Two: It was just some random burglary, the kind that happens all the time, everywhere.

  Three: It had something to do with Gabe. I know that sounds crazy, and I didn’t even know what the connection might be, but it just seemed like a pretty big coincidence that this happened three days after he disappeared without a trace. Maybe he was kidnapped by the same people who robbed our house. Or maybe Gabe was even involved somehow. Dad always told me never to rule out possible connections.

  I shook my head. The Gabe I knew was a good kid. He’d never so much as lied about anything, so the idea of him doing this was a definite long shot. If it was true, it’d have to be for a really desperate reason. Meanwhile, it was coming up on two in the morning, but Dad and Bree were still downstairs. A second detective had shown up and they were all talking in low voices. Whatever their secret was, it had to be something big, and the longer it went on, the more I wanted to know what it was. I got out of bed and snuck into the hall to see what I could find out.

  In my house, there are a few secrets only I know. Like, for instance, if you stick to the left side of our stairs and put your weight on the banister, you can keep them from creaking the whole way down. And then, if you sit on the fifth step from the bottom, you can hear what people are saying in the living room without anyone knowing you’re there.

  And what I heard next blew my mind.

  “Did you already call this in to the desk sergeant?” Detective Olayinka asked.

  “Yeah,” Dad said. “Reported and registered.”

  “You said it was a Glock 19 and a Glock 22, is that right?” the new detective asked.

  “That’s right,” Bree answered. “Alex still carries a .19. The .22 is mine. They were both secured, but it wouldn’t take much to get inside those lockboxes with the right tools.”

  Now my head was spinning. Whoever had robbed us hadn’t just gotten away with a few electronics. They’d stolen two guns, too. Police weapons. Which was even less like Gabe than ever. I could barely imagine him breaking into a house, much less carrying around a couple of real Glocks.

  “And now they’re out on the street somewhere,” Dad said. “God only knows what’ll happen to them next.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up about it,” Detective Olayinka told him. “It’s not like you were going to bring your duty weapons to church.”

  “Even so, this will be public information by tomorrow,” Dad went on. “Somebody’s bound to pick up on it. I’ve got more reporters on my butt these days than a dog has fleas.”

  I didn’t mean to laugh at that, but Dad caught me off guard. It was just a little laugh, but enough to bust me if I wasn’t careful. So I stayed low and started back up the stairs as stealthily as I could go. Then, when I heard Dad get up and start coming my way, I turned around like I was just headed down for the first time. Smooth, I know.

  “Dude!” he said when he saw me. “You’re supposed to be in bed.”

  “I can’t sleep,” I told him.

  “It’s Christmas.”

  “Exactly, Dad.”

  He just smiled at that. I think maybe he was taking it easy on me, with the robbery
and everything that had happened.

  “Just tell me what’s going on,” I said.

  “Don’t you worry about it.”

  “Come on, Dad. There must be something you can tell me.” I didn’t mention the guns, because I didn’t want him to know how much I’d heard.

  Dad took a deep breath. Then he came halfway up the stairs, met me in the middle, and we sat down right there.

  “Here’s as much as I’ll say,” he told me. “Our house wasn’t the only one that got hit tonight. There were four other break-ins around the neighborhood.”

  I don’t know what I was expecting to hear, but it wasn’t that. Again, my mind went right back to Gabe. Could he have done all this? Not likely, but not impossible. Some part of me hoped there was a chance, anyway. At least then it would mean he was still around and that something even worse hadn’t happened to him.

  At the same time, it also meant this probably wasn’t done by one of those random people who hated Dad so much for what happened with Mr. Yang. Otherwise, it would have just been our house that got robbed and not a whole string of them. That was worth something, anyway.

  “Is there any kind of pattern to the break-ins?” I asked. The first thing they do with this kind of case is look for patterns, like if the robber had gone in through the back at every house, or stolen the same kind of stuff each time.

  “That’s all you’re getting,” Dad said. “Now scoot.”

  “Where were the other houses?” I asked. “Was it anyone we know?”

  “Good night, Ali.”

  “Dad—” I tried again.

  “Ali!” he said. He’d just switched over to his enough voice, which is basically like the sound of a big red stop sign. I knew I wasn’t getting any more after that, so I said good night and took myself back to bed. Not that I expected to get any sleep.

  I opened my copy of The Parker Inheritance to read for a while, but I just stared at the pages instead. I was too caught up putting all these different pieces together.

  And I was starting to realize something. Between Dad’s trial, and the break-in at our house, and the stolen police weapons, he was going to have less time to think about Gabe’s case than ever before. Bree, too.