“Who’s that?”
“Elaine Paulson,” I said and walked away, heading for my car, which was parked down the street.
The sun was getting low, but the heat had not dwindled a bit. Even so, there were at least a hundred people lined up to register to be part of the search.
As I skirted the crowd, I heard a female voice call, “Dr. Cross?”
I turned to see Tina and Rachel Christopher at the end of one line. Rachel was stone-faced, as usual. Tina reached out to shake my hand.
“You’re going to help look for Dee?” I asked.
“Yes,” Rachel said. “We went to middle school together.”
“Your grandmother know you’re here?”
“Yes,” Tina said. She looked pleadingly at me. “Dr. Cross, please prove our mom’s innocent. They won’t let us see her and… it’s just too…”
When she couldn’t go on, Rachel put her hand on her twin’s shoulder and stared at me. “Brutal. Harsh. Cruel.”
“I can’t begin to understand what you’re going through,” I said. “And I will do everything I can. In fact, I’m on my way to see your mother about some things that may work in her favor.”
“Really?” she said, her stony demeanor softening. “Right now?”
“Right now,” I said.
Tina said, “Please tell her we love her. We don’t know if our letters are getting through.”
“I’ll tell her,” I said. “And I’ll tell her how much we appreciate you searching for Dee. Please go together. Stay safe. If something feels off, back away and notify us.”
“Off?” Rachel said.
“You’ll know it when you feel it,” I said and wished them luck.
CHAPTER 95
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, I was in an interrogation room at the Alexandria detention facility as a sheriff’s deputy brought in Elaine Paulson. Even dressed in her orange jail jumpsuit, Christopher’s widow looked much better than the last time I’d seen her, in the psych ward.
“You’re the last person I expected here,” she said, taking a seat opposite me.
“Why’s that?”
She shrugged. “You save my life. You send me to prison for life. Another notch in the belt for the great Dr. Cross. Out of sight, out of mind.”
“It doesn’t work like that. Not with me. If there is any gap in a conviction story that I cannot explain, I consider the case open.”
Elaine looked at me with a glimmer of hope. “Is there a gap?”
“Maybe. Which is why I’m here. And your daughters say they love you, by the way.”
“You saw them?” she said, smiling. But then her lips twisted bitterly. “I haven’t been allowed.”
“I saw them an hour ago,” I said. “Your mother’s taking good care of them. And they’re helping to look for another girl who’s missing.”
“Dee Nathaniel,” she said. “I know her. It’s all over the news. Is that part of the gap that brought you here?”
“Maybe,” I said and then told her about the two boys who’d seen someone moving toward the football bleachers before they’d stolen the jewelry from Kay’s and Randall’s bodies.
“I told you I saw them,” she said. “And they saw me?”
“They did and identified you by name,” I said. “They were students at Harrison.”
You could tell that did not go down well but she swallowed it and said, “But that’s good for me, right?”
“It means three people, including you, have said there was another person on the campus shortly after the shooting,” I said.
That got her hopes up. She straightened and said, “That has to be good for me.”
“Unless you’re lying and you yourself circled toward the stands after shooting Randall and Kay and then you went back to make sure you’d gotten the job done.”
She stared at me and then laughed. “Why would anyone do that? Go back?”
After a moment, I shrugged, said, “Let’s say you didn’t. How do you explain the gun?”
“There’s nothing to explain,” she said. “I did not have that gun with me that night. I … I realized after taking it with me the first time what a dumb move having a pistol with me would be. I mean, I might be a little touched upstairs, but I’m not stupid.”
“When did you get the gun before you went out to the Eastern Shore?”
“You mean what time?”
“I do.”
Elaine thought a few moments. “Ten minutes to six? It was after I’d taken a shower and thrown some clothes in a bag along with some cash. By then I was already thinking that my life was over.”
I took out a notebook and wrote that down. “When did you leave the school? I’m trying to understand the timeline here.”
She nodded, thought again. “I ran out of there at maybe four twenty. More like four eighteen.”
“And you ran by the bodega and onto the campus earlier when?”
Elaine squinted. “Eight or nine minutes past four?”
“We’ve looked at the bodega’s security footage but we’ve never seen you run by.”
She looked puzzled. “I do change routes but I’m pretty sure I went that way. But maybe not?”
I let it slide for the moment. “And what time did you get home that morning? When you ran into your neighbor Barbara Taylor?”
“Quarter to five?”
That actually fit with what Taylor had told me. “So there is a gap,” I said. “Roughly a half an hour between you leaving the campus and coming home.”
She didn’t get it at first but then said, “Thirty minutes for the real killer to come to the house and put the gun back.”
“Right. Who has access to your house and might have wanted to kill your husband?”
She didn’t hesitate. “No one.”
“No one has access or no one who has access would want to kill him?”
“The second one.”
“You’re saying people besides you and your husband had access,” I said.
She nodded. “They knew where the spare key was.”
“Who?”
“My mother. My sister, but she lives in Texas now and loved Randall. The cleaners. And our contractor. We had the kitchen done in the spring. There were people in there all the time. I’d come home and there would be a new guy installing the floor and another one the countertop.”
I slid my notebook across the table at her. “I need names and numbers if you’ve got them.”
CHAPTER 96
MY ALARM WENT OFF AT six fifteen the following morning. On any other day, after sleeping less than five hours, I would have hit snooze. But I bolted upright immediately. More than thirty hours had passed since Dee Nathaniel was taken. If the serial killer’s signature style held, she had only around eighteen hours before he killed and dumped her.
I got up quietly because Bree had been up even later than me and dressed for a jog to try and clear out the cobwebs. Outside, the heat was just starting to build again.
As I ran, I went over the idea I’d had the night before, that the Southeast serial rapist and killer who probably had Dee might also have murdered Kay and Christopher. One person — that figure who’d lurked in the shadows near the football stand that night — might have done it all.
But why shoot them? Killing a couple was not his usual modus operandi. He snatched single young women, raped them, and killed them. He didn’t gun down random people in school parking lots. So why now?
As I slowed to a walk and climbed onto the porch, the only answer I could come up with was that either Kay or Christopher had gotten suspicious about him. Maybe the killer realized it and cold-bloodedly executed them?
In the foyer, I grabbed a towel, wiped off my face and head, and put it around my neck before going into the kitchen. Nana Mama had already brewed a pot of coffee and was making omelets for Ali and Bree. Jannie was still upstairs sleeping, which was not unusual for a seventeen-year-old.
“Where to first?” I asked Bree as I poured a mug
of coffee.
“Back to the Nathaniels’ house,” she said. “You?”
Before I could answer, my cell phone buzzed and rang on the counter. Another unfamiliar DC number. “Alex Cross,” I said.
I got no reply, only a choking noise.
“Hello?” I said. “Who is this, please?”
“It’s Elinore Paulson,” she finally said in a voice shot through with anxiety and loss. “Elaine Paulson’s mother. My grand-daughters are missing, Dr. Cross. They never came home last night and they’re not answering their phones.”
CHAPTER 97
AFTER I GOT OFF THE phone with Elinore Paulson, I informed Bree of what had happened and called Ned Mahoney. I thought that with three young women missing, two of them the daughters of a victim in a federal murder investigation, the FBI should take over the entire probe.
Ned agreed and said he’d pick me up in half an hour. Bree was on the phone with Commissioner Dennison, keeping him abreast of the situation and asking for help in getting all data from the twins’ cell phones.
I called the detectives who’d helped organize the civilian searches the night before and got Maria Newton, who was shocked when I told her.
“So he was right there in the streets with us?”
“It appears that way. When was the last time you heard from Tina and Rachel?”
“Hold on,” Detective Newton said. “Christopher, Tina and Rachel. Here’s the list of addresses they contacted and times. Last one, eleven ten p.m., they talked to a Marian Rodgers on Sixth Street in Southeast. Then they texted me at eleven twelve p.m. to say they’d found nothing and were going home for the night. They wanted to come back and help this morning.”
I was taking notes furiously on a pad on the counter. “Can you send that text to me with Marian Rodgers’s address?”
“Absolutely,” she said, then cleared her throat. “Dr. Cross, given what’s happened, I … I don’t know if I feel comfortable asking civilians to do more canvassing.”
“I’m with you,” I said. “We don’t want four missing girls on our hands. Besides, the FBI’s taking over now. They’ll want special agents going door to door. But, seriously, Detective, thanks for your efforts.”
“Well, you’re welcome,” she said sadly. “I just wish it had worked.”
I hung up to find Bree still on her phone. She gave me the thumbs-up, a good sign. With the GPS data, we’d soon know where all three were when they vanished. Upstairs, as I took a quick shower, I thought, One and then two more right away. That’s another break in his pattern. All the other girls were taken one at a time at long intervals. Why change now? And why take the chance of being caught grabbing two girls in the middle of a canvass, when there were all sorts of eyeballs on the streets? It’s such a brazen act.
Maybe he was showing us how clever and invincible he is. Or maybe he felt threatened with discovery and wanted to make a statement: He killed the girls’ father and their father’s lover, and now he has the dead man’s girls.
I couldn’t help but think of Jannie and what this was going to do to her. She knew Dee Nathaniel, Maya Parker, and Elizabeth Hernandez as acquaintances. But she was friends with Tina and Rachel Christopher. She was …
It hit me so hard then, I almost doubled over.
Jannie’s a possible target. She has to be.
I panicked at the thought that my daughter might also have been grabbed during the night. I turned off the water, jumped out of the shower, grabbed a towel, wrapped it around my waist, and charged out of the bathroom.
I threw our bedroom door open, ran across the little landing, and raced down the short hall to Jannie’s room. I opened the door without knocking and felt queasy almost immediately.
Jannie’s bed looked like it hadn’t been slept in.
“Jannie?” I shouted. “Jannie!”
The bathroom door across the hall opened a crack, and Jannie looked out, saw me in the open doorway to her bedroom, and frowned.
“No need to shout, Dad,” she said. “I’m right here and I’m on time. Weight training’s not for an hour. What’s with the towel?”
I looked at her, my heart beating with relief and joy. “Sorry, I’m just being a dad making sure his daughter’s safe.”
“Why?” she said, opening the door all the way. “What’s happened? Did they find Dee?”
I didn’t want to, but I told her about her friends.
CHAPTER 98
BREE AND I HAD DRESSED and were wolfing breakfast down when Jannie came into the kitchen, still upset.
“Does Tina and Rachel’s mother know?” she said.
“Not yet.”
“How do you live through something like this?”
I swallowed a chunk of egg and said, “Faith. You, me, Bree, Ned, John — we all have to have faith that we will find them. That’s how we get through and take smart action to locate them as fast as possible.”
“You’ll find them, Dad. I have faith in you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “But for now, other than training, I want you to stay close to home. And don’t go anywhere without telling me or Bree or John. Okay?”
“Now I am scared,” she said.
Bree said, “Being scared is good sometimes. Again, keep a low profile. If you have to go out, we’d prefer you to travel in threes and with a male if you’re with friends.”
Jannie crossed her arms but nodded.
Nana Mama said, “Hungry?”
“Not really,” she said.
“If you’re going to train, you need to eat,” my grandmother said.
“Okay,” Jannie said with little enthusiasm. “I guess I’ll take an omelet too, Nana.”
Bree’s phone rang. She answered, listened, and said, “Thank you, Commissioner. We’ll download it as soon as it gets here.” She hung up and opened her laptop on the counter. “Dennison got us the twins’ data.”
“That was fast,” I said.
“He’s handy at times,” Bree said, logging into her Metro e-mail account. “Here are the files. One for Tina, one for Rachel.”
She opened the files, which gave us not only the twins’ GPS locations over the last twenty-four hours but their texts, social media, and internet searches. Mahoney arrived while Bree was working with the GPS coordinates on Google Maps.
“Here they are at Mrs. Rodgers’s house at Sixth and L at eleven ten last night,” she said.
“Jibes with what Newton told us,” I said.
She nodded and gave her computer a few more commands. The map now showed the route they took heading home to Eleventh and E. But they made it only four blocks, to Ellen Wilson Place and Seventh, before they left the direct route, got on the Southeast Freeway, and started covering ground.
“They’re in a vehicle and going by CCTV cameras on that on-ramp,” Bree said, typing again.
Ned said, “I’ll get agents there ASAP.”
We had GPS coordinates every few minutes for the twins’ phones for almost two hours after they got in that vehicle, which traveled down I-295 and then took I-95 south to Virginia Route 54 and a street in Ashland, Virginia, where their phones had stopped moving. On Google Earth it looked like the phones were in a mixed neighborhood of light industrial and residential apartment buildings. Forty minutes later, Rachel’s phone died. Eighteen minutes after that, Tina’s phone stopped transmitting its position.
“Okay, we’re heading to Ashland,” Mahoney said.
We heard the front door open and shut, and Sampson rushed in, breathing hard. “I got her. Dee Nathaniel.”
“What?” Bree said.
“Where?” Mahoney said.
“Three blocks from her house at eleven forty-five p.m.,” he said and put still shots in front of us showing Dee climbing into the passenger side of a black panel van with tinted windows and a Virginia license plate.
“I’m already running it,” Bree said, calling up the Virginia DMV on her computer and entering the plate. Up popped a 2011 Toyota Camry belonging to a forty-five-
year-old woman in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
“Stolen,” Mahoney said. “On the way to or from Ashland. Do me a favor, Bree?”
“Anything.”
“Look at Virginia’s registered sex offenders list and see if any of them live within a six-block radius of where the phones stopped signaling.”
“Great idea,” I said.
Sure enough, two minutes later, Bree located a level 2 sex offender living in an apartment complex three blocks away.
“Eric Boone, fifty-four,” she said, throwing up her fist in victory. “Convicted of statutory rape in Kentucky in 1998. Goes to Kentucky state penitentiary and … released in 2004! Moves to Ashland in 2005.”
“The year the first girl disappears here,” I said.
“We’ve got him,” Ned said. “And if we have him, we have the girls.”
CHAPTER 99
BREE TOOK SCREENSHOTS OF THE maps and satellite views while Mahoney got on the phone to arrange for an FBI helicopter to fly to Ashland. Alex went upstairs to retrieve his service weapon and sunglasses.
Bree was about to log off her computer when she saw another e-mail from Verizon. Subject line: New data.
She clicked on it as Alex returned to the room and Mahoney hung up.
Ned said, “Chopper will pick us up on the roof of Bureau headquarters in twenty. I assume you all want to be there when we cuff him?”
“I do,” Sampson said.
“Yes,” Alex said.
“Bree?” Mahoney said.
Bree barely heard him. She was staring at the screen of her laptop, frowning and biting on a nail. “According to this e-mail I just got from Verizon, Dee Nathaniel’s phone turned on briefly about three hours ago and transmitted a 911 signal before dying.”
The three men came up behind her.
“GPS coordinates?” Alex asked.
“I’m trying to see,” she said, clicking on various links. “Says the signal went through to Morgan County, West Virginia, sheriff’s dispatch. There’s the coordinates!”
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