I, Alex Cross

Chapter 48

IT WAS ANOTHER nightmare – the EMTs in the house, the blur of the ambulance ride, questions at the emergency room. Then the terrible waiting.

I stayed with Nana all day and all night at St. Anthony's. She'd survived the heart attack, which was about as much as anyone would say for now.

They had her on a ventilator to help her breathe, with a tube taped over her mouth. There was a clip on her finger to measure her oxygen level, and an IV to keep the medications coming. More wires ran from Nana's chest to a heart monitor by the bed, its pulsing lines like some kind of electronic vigil. I hated that screen and relied on it at the same time.

Friends and relatives came and went all day and into the evening. Aunt Tia was there with some of my cousins, and then Sampson and Billie. Bree brought the kids, but they weren't allowed in, which was just as well. They'd seen more than enough at home when the ambulance had come and taken Nana away again.

And then there were the "necessary" conversations. Different staff members wanted to talk to me about the DNR order in her file, about options regarding hospice, about religious affiliation, all just in case. Just in case what – Nana never woke up?

No one tried to chase me out after visiting hours, as if they could, but I appreciated the consideration. I sat with my forearms on the edge of the bed, sometimes to rest my head, other times to pray for Nana.

Then, sometime in the middle of the night, she finally stirred. Her hand moved under the blanket, and it was like all those prayers of ours were answered in that one small motion.

And then another tiny motion – and her eyes slowly opened.

The nurses had said that I should stay calm and speak quietly if that happened. For the record, it was no easy feat.

I reached up and put a hand on her cheek until she seemed to know I was there.

"Nana, don't try to say anything right now. Don't try to argue either. There's a tube in your throat to help you breathe."

Her eyes started moving around, taking it all in, staring at my face.

"You collapsed at home. Remember?"

She nodded, but just barely. I think she smiled too, which felt huge.

"I'm going to ring for the nurse and see how soon we can get you off this machine," I said. "Okay?" I reached for the call button, but when I looked back, her eyes had closed again. I had to check the monitor just to reassure myself she was only sleeping.

All the yellow, blue, and green lines were doing their thing, just fine.

"Okay, tomorrow morning, then," I said, not because she could hear me but because I needed to say something.

I only hoped there would be a tomorrow morning.

Chapter 49

NANA WAS WIDE awake and off the ventilator by noon the following day. Her heart was enlarged and she was too weak to leave intensive care, but there was good reason to believe she'd be coming home again. I celebrated by sneaking the kids into the room for the quickest, quietest Cross family party ever.

The other hopeful news was on the work front. An FBI lawyer named Lynda Cole had established probable cause and gotten the Bureau back onto the property out in Virginia. By the time I reached Ned Mahoney on his cell, the FBI had a full Evidence Response Team on site.

Bree spelled me at the hospital – Aunt Tia would spell Bree later – and I drove out to Virginia in the afternoon to have another look around Blacksmith Farms.

Ned met me out front so he could walk me through with his creds. The primary area of interest was a small apartment out back. The access was an interior staircase from a three-bay parking garage underneath.

Inside, the place looked like a suite at the Hay-Adams. The furniture was all soft linens and upholstery, mostly in lighter tones. There was a decorative dropped ceiling over the dining area, and a highly polished walnut-manteld fireplace.

If you subtracted the techs in their tan cargos and blue ERT polo shirts, the place was pristine.

"It's the bedroom that's the puzzle," Ned said. I followed him in through a set of curtained French doors. "No carpet, no knickknacks, no bedding, nothing," he said, stating the obvious. Other than a bare bed, dresser, and two nightstands, it looked like someone had recently moved out.

"Prints and fibers came up with nothing. So we went to luminol."

That explained the portable UV lamps set up in the room. Mahoney turned off the ceiling light and closed the door. "Go ahead, guys."

Once they powered up, the whole room seemed to go radioactive. The walls, the floor, the furniture, all fluoresced bright blue. It was one of those occasions when my life actually did feel like an episode of CSI.

"Someone cleaned in here professionally," Mahoney said. "And I don't mean Merry Maids of Washington."

One of the limitations with luminol is that although it can bring out traces of blood, it also responds to some of the things people use to get rid of blood, like household bleach. That's what we were looking at. It was as if the room had been painted with Clorox.

This looked like a crime scene for sure. And maybe a murder scene.

Chapter 50

THE NEXT THING that happened, nobody saw coming. It was maybe half an hour later, and I was still on the case at Blacksmith Farms.

A rumble of conversation came from the apartment's living room, and Ned and I went out to see what was going on. Several techies were gathered around a bearded guy on a short ladder near the door. He had the plastic cover of a smoke detector in one hand, with the exposed unit on the ceiling above him. That's what everybody was staring at.

The tech reached up with a pencil and pointed at an i

Talk about grinding the gears.

Immediately, Ned ordered a second sweep of both buildings. Everyone turned off their cell phones, and all the televisions and computers we could find were disco

Once the search got going, it was fast work. Ninety minutes later, most of the on-site perso

I was surprised the case hadn't been graded major yet, just based on the firepower in the room.

The special agent in charge of ERT was Shoa

"Basically, there's nowhere in the house that isn't covered. We found cameras in every room, including the bathrooms and the apartments out back."

"How do we find out what all those cameras have been filming?" Hamel asked the question percolating in everyone's brains.

"Hard to say. These are wireless units; they can transmit to any base station within a thousand feet, maybe more than that. We did find a hard drive on the third floor with the right software, but no archived files. That means either that all the surveillance was done live or, more likely, that somebody took the files off site."

"In which case we'd be looking for what?" Mahoney spoke up from the back of the room. "Disks? A laptop? E-mails?"

Agent Spears nodded. "Keep going," she said. "There's nothing terribly sophisticated about those files. They can pretty much be stored anywhere."

You could feel the energy in the room dip. We were all ready for some good news. And then we got it.