Alex Cross, Run

“She’s gone, Nana,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

Bree was crying now, too, and I could see the kids standing behind her, moon-eyed and watching. It was like waves of heartbreak, just seeing their faces and knowing what I had to tell them.

My mind went somewhere else, in a way. Without a word, we all moved back inside as a family. Sampson didn’t even come in. There was no good-bye. He left us to grieve, and to try to explain to Ja

How it could possibly be true.

CHAPTER

104

I DON’T BELIEVE IN A VENGEFUL GOD, BUT I WILL SAY THAT I FELT CONFUSED as much as anything in those first few hours. How could something like this happen? And why? Most of all—why?

Had I done something to bring all of this down on my head? On my family’s heads?

And Ava’s?

It’s not the kind of question I ask too frequently—or lightly. But I had to confront the fact that whatever choices I’d made had brought me to this point, in some small or large way. I’d never know now if I could have done something else to stop it.

Ja

Ali stuck close. I think he was just old enough to understand what had happened, but too young to have ever felt anything like this before. I read to him in bed for a long time that night, and held his hand after I turned out the light, like he asked me to.

“All the way to asleep,” he said. “Okay, Dad?”

“You got it, bud,” I said, and I stayed right there while he slowly drifted off.

I wasn’t sure which of my kids my heart was breaking for more. All of them, I suppose. Ava, too.

When we spoke to Damon on the phone, he asked to come home the next morning, on the first bus. I told him he didn’t have to if he didn’t want to, but I was glad when he insisted. It felt like the right thing, having all of us together now.

Nana went to bed early, but Bree and I sat up late in the attic, talking for hours. Part of me would like to say that I wasn’t already thinking about the investigation on this, but I was. Bree, too. We’d been so engaged in looking for Ava, it felt like we already had a blueprint for where to start asking questions.

“Whoever sold to her, or whoever did this…we’re going to find them,” Bree said. “And they’re going to pay, Alex. You can be sure about that.”

Bree was the strongest one of all of us that night. In a way, she’d become this linchpin in our family that we didn’t even know had been missing until she was there. I love her more every time I think about it.

“Thank you,” I told her. “Thank you for being my wife. And for coming into my life exactly when I needed you most. I don’t know if I could have—”

“Of course you could,” Bree said. “You already did, for years. But I’m glad I’m here now, too. I love you, Alex. And I love this family. That’s never going to change.”

When we finally went to bed, we made love, and even cried some more in each other’s arms before we finally drifted off ourselves, holding each other close.

All the way to asleep, just like Ali.

CHAPTER

105

BREE AND I TOOK SHIFTS THE NEXT DAY. I STAYED HOME WITH NANA AND THE kids through the morning while she went out and spoke with as many people at Ava’s school as she could.

When she got back, we all had lunch together, though nobody was too hungry. Then I went out for the afternoon. Technically I was on bereavement, and off duty. I left my gun at home but took my badge.

One of my first stops was Howard House. I’d been in touch with Sunita, the manager, and she’d agreed to call a full house meeting, first thing after school that day. By the time I got there, all eleven girls were already waiting with the staff in the living room.

They knew Ava had died, and I could see there had been some tears, but it was all reined in by the time I was standing in front of them. It actually reminded me of Ava, the way they seemed so intent on showing as little emotion as possible.

“I know you’ve already answered some of these questions,” I told the group. “But I want you all to think hard. Has anyone remembered anything else about the day Ava disappeared? Anything you hadn’t thought about before, or since then?”

What I got back was a room full of silence. Part of it had to do with the fact that we’d been over this before, but that wasn’t all. There’s an unwritten rule out there on the streets, where a lot of these girls came from. The line between helping and snitching is gray, at best. The safest bet is to just keep your mouth shut, especially if anyone else is listening. It can come off as apathy, but I knew it was more complicated than that.

I asked a few more open-ended questions, but didn’t really get anywhere until I moved on to individual interviews. Sunita let me use her office for privacy, and she brought the girls in, one by one.

Ava’s roommate, Nessa, was the fifth girl I saw. I could tell she’d been crying again, although she tried to hide it.

I could also tell she was sitting on something the second she walked in the door.

We sat on the same side of Sunita’s desk, in two folding chairs. Nessa kept her feet pushed out in the space between us and looked at her phone more than at me, while she flipped it around and around in her hand.

“You seem nervous,” I said.

She didn’t look up when she started talking. “Just so you know, I wasn’t trying to hide nothin’ before, okay?” she said. “I even kind of asked you about it, when you was here the first time.”

I tried pulling up whatever memory I had of the day we’d met, outside on the porch. She’d taken our picture—I remembered that much.

“Asked me about what?” I said.

“Well, not asked you, exactly,” Nessa said.

“Come on, Nessa. Spit it out. What are we talking about here?”

“Ava’s boyfriend, okay? She always sayin’ how he wasn’t nothing to her, but if you ask me, I think she was just embarrassed. This boy was old.”

“Who is he?” I said. “How did she know him?”

Nessa gave a shrug and pushed her lips out. “She just said his name was Russell. That’s where she gettin’ her junk.”

That name, Russell, hit me like an electric shock all at once. Could this be the Russell? The same phantom boyfriend we were looking for in the Elizabeth Reilly case? Rebecca Reilly’s kidnapper?

Or was this just some horrible coincidence?

I tried to stay cool as I pushed on, but it wasn’t easy. My mind was racing.

“Nessa, what can you tell me about him?” I asked. “Do you know what he looked like? Or maybe what kind of car he drove?”

“It was a jeep,” she said right away. “He was white, too, but Ava didn’t care. I think she liked that jeep—and whatever else he was givin’ her, if you know what I mean. No disrespect.”

I felt sick to my stomach. I still couldn’t know if this was the same man, but the similarities were there—to Elizabeth Reilly, and to Amanda Simms as well. All these girls were disco

Young. Vulnerable. Alone.

The idea of this monster plying Ava with drugs, promises, sex—whatever it had been—made me want to excuse myself and puke my guts out in the bathroom.

“You said he was white,” I went on. “What else?”

She sat up a little straighter then and started thumbing at her phone. “I got a picture, yo,” she said. I think she was just relieved that I wasn’t giving her a hard time for holding back this long.

She swiped past several dozen images before she came to the one she was looking for, and then held it up to show me.