But instead of engaging her in further conversation, he returned to the task at hand, describing the meal plans and the times of day when Commons was open. After answering several questions about lactose intolerance and the availability of gluten-free items, he ushered his group outside again, heading toward the library.
“You do this a long time?” Karla Mepps asked, sliding alongside him.
“Two years,” Damon said, feeling flushed again. “It’s fun.”
“You are very good at it,” she replied. “You make me want to tell my nephew to come to school here.”
“Nephew?”
“My sister’s son, Jack, who’s fourteen,” she explained. “They live in New Orleans, but they knew I was in the area and asked me to come have a look.”
“We have students from all over,” he said. “Sorry, I’ve got to—”
“No, no,” Karla Mepps said, smiling warmly at him. “You go ahead, finish. I’m enjoying your presentation.”
Damon got in front of the tour group and began delivering his usual spiel about the library, the number of volumes, the databases, Internet access, hours of operation, and the like. Then he led them through one of the dorms, showed them a typical room for underclassmen, before a trip through the sports complex.
Karla Mepps didn’t talk to him at all the rest of the tour, but Damon kept looking her way to find her gazing at him with a knowing little smile, as if she found him funny, amusing. He lost sight of her after he’d returned the group to the admissions office and started talking about the interview process and what they could expect on the application.
Where had she gone? Damon wondered, then shrugged it off.
Ten minutes later, after signing out with the tour coordinator, Damon went outside. It was almost four, and a chilly breeze was blowing. He’d go to the gym for an hour or so, eat, and then hit the books. He always studied better after working out and he had a tough test coming up in—
“Oh, there you are, Damon!” Karla Mepps cried.
The boy turned to see her coming toward him with that knowing little smile again. “Sorry, I had to use the ladies’ toilet, but I have some more questions. Can I buy you a cup of coffee, sugar?”
He hesitated.
“Oh,” she said, crestfallen. “You have somewhere important to go?”
“No,” Damon said. “No, nothing like that. Of course we can go get coffee. There’s a shop just off campus, across the street.”
“You are such a good tour guide,” Karla Mepps said, falling in beside him. “Tell me, how is the social life here at Kraft?”
“It’s mostly class, books, and athletics for me,” he replied. “But we have dances with our sister school, Beech Glen, outside Tanglewood.”
“You have a girlfriend there at Beech Glen?”
“Me?” Damon said, feeling his phone buzz in his pocket again. “Uh, no.”
“But you are so handsome, how is this possible?” she cried softly, while smoothly taking his arm. “Come, you must tell Karla everything.”
Chapter
37
When I found the kitchen, Bree was consoling Dr. Lancaster, who was sobbing from the depths of her soul. Her husband’s expression was one I recognized. I’d seen variations of it on the faces of the survivors fighting the zombies on that show Ali liked so much.
“Mr. Lancaster, I’m Alex Cross,” I said, reaching out to shake his hand.
A lobbyist, Lancaster shook hands for a living, but now he gave my hand the faintest of squeezes, looked at me with yearning, and said, “Can you find her?”
A familiar male voice behind me said, “We can and we will, Bill.”
I looked over my shoulder. Special Agent Ned Mahoney, an old and dear friend and colleague from my days at the FBI, was coming into the kitchen.
“Ned?”
“Bill’s my cousin, Alex,” Mahoney said, patting me on the shoulder and then going around me to hug Lancaster. “I promise you we will do everything possible to get Evan back.”
The missing boy’s father lost that yearning look. His lower lip trembled. “Ned, I’ve been so goddamned busy lately. I hardly know him.”
I glanced at his wife, who looked at the floor as if it held answers.
Gently patting Dr. Lancaster’s back, Bree said, “With the three of us working the case, it’s only a matter of time before we find him.”
“Unless she’s killed him already,” Dr. Lancaster moaned.
“That’s highly unlikely,” I said. “Young women who do this sort of thing are more often than not motivated by their inability to conceive. They are so desperate for a baby, they’ll steal one.”
“He’s right,” Mahoney said.
“Could you look at the drawing again?” Bree asked. “Tell us if that’s Kelli Adams?”
“I barely saw her on my way out to work,” Lancaster said.
But his wife wiped her eyes, picked the sketch off the counter, and studied it carefully before saying in a thick voice, “Could be. She wore a lot of makeup. The eyes are the right shape but the wrong color. The hair’s different, and her cheeks were not so full as this. My God, she had references. I spoke to them myself.”
“We’ll need those names and phone numbers,” Mahoney said.
Dr. Lancaster nodded and reached for her phone.
“Did she touch anything?” I asked.
The missing boy’s mother looked up at me with that dazed expression I’d seen only moments before on her husband’s face.
“She was only here a few minutes and yet she’s touched everything,” Dr. Lancaster replied, beginning to cry again. “That woman’s touched and ruined everything in my entire home!”
Chapter
38
“So, no girls?” Karla Mepps asked, setting a coffee in front of Damon. “I’m sorry, but the former LSU cheerleader in me is saying, ‘How is that possible?’ ”
Damon smiled, glanced over at some other boys from the school who were staring at him dumbly, and squirmed a little. He’d never had a girl, much less a beautiful woman, talk to him like this. “I dunno,” he said. “Just too busy, I guess.”
Karla Mepps took off her leather jacket, revealing just how tightly the long-sleeved white turtleneck clung to her breasts. She cocked her head coyly, as if she’d caught him looking, and said, “But you like girls, right?”
“Well, yeah. Sure,” he said, feeling his cheeks burn and happening to glance at the back of her left hand where the sleeve had pulled back. She had some kind of tattoo there, like the tail of some animal.
“Well, yeah, sure,” she said, and laughed. “Good. The other way would have been such a tragic waste to womanhood.”
Damon didn’t understand at first, but then did, and his ears burned, too. He couldn’t look at her and instead turned his gaze back to that tattoo of a tail slinking out from under her sleeve. What kind of tail? He wondered what the rest of the tattoo looked like.
“You wanted to ask more about the school?” he said finally.
“I do,” Karla Mepps said.
And for the next half hour, she kept the conversation squarely on school life, asking first about housing. He explained that the annual housing lottery was at the end of the school year, with seniors having first draw. He’d picked tenth and gotten one of the nicest rooms on campus, a single with a fireplace on the first floor of North Dorm, looking toward the woods, where he often saw deer in the morning.
“Can you show me this North Dorm on the map?” she asked, getting the school’s brochure out of her jacket pocket.
Damon did and then said, “We didn’t get over there on the tour. Here’s a picture of North, though.”
He pushed the brochure back to her and tapped a photograph of a granite-faced building that looked more than a hundred years old. “That’s my room there on the far left corner.”
“Yes?” she said, and studied it carefully. “Very lucky.”
“I was. Yes.”
When Karla Mepps asked about the quality of the tea
ching at the school, Damon replied that every teacher he’d had at Kraft was tough but seemed to care about him, and that the teachers were almost always available.
“Your parents?” she asked. “They’re happy, too?”
Damon hadn’t really thought about it before, but he nodded. “I think they would say so. My dad says I’ve grown up a lot the past couple of years.”
“You see them often?”
“Every six or seven weeks,” Damon replied. “Either they come up here for a long weekend, or I go home on vacations. And summers, of course.”
“How many vacations do students get?”
Damon had to think about that. “Four—three long, one short at Thanksgiving. Then three weeks at Christmas, and like ten days at Easter.”
Karla Mepps found that interesting. “So you have a vacation soon?”
“I leave a week from Friday morning,” he replied, nodding.
“And how will you get home to…?”
“Washington?” Damon said. “I usually get a jitney in town that takes me over to Albany to catch the train.”
“Amtrak?”
He nodded. “Takes five or six hours.”
“That’s not bad,” she allowed. “But I wonder if my sister will want my nephew to fly all that way alone back to Louisiana on breaks.”
“They have, like, escorts and stuff for that,” Damon offered. “Some of the younger kids get them.”
She smiled again as she stood. “Well, thank you, Damon Cross. I must go. It’s getting dark and I have a long way to drive.”
“Oh, sure,” he said, struggling to get up. “Hope I’ve helped.”
“More than you know,” Karla Mepps replied, gazing at him, making a show of putting on her jacket. “C’mon. You walk me to my car? I’d feel safer.”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, sure.”
Ignoring the gapes of the other boys in the coffee shop, Damon led her outside. The wind had picked up. Twice during the short walk to the visitors’ lot, she seemed to stumble against him and he had to hold her up.
“So strong,” she said the first time.
“So fast,” she said the second time.
When they reached the car, a blue Honda sedan, Karla Mepps pressed the unlock button, turned to him. “I very much liked meeting you, Damon.”
“Uh, yeah, me, too, Ms. Mepps.”
She reached out to shake his hand and held on to it a second too long, whispering, “Here’s a little something to keep you awake. Some night—who knows when?—Karla just might come out of the woods behind your dorm and climb in your window. So leave it unlocked and open.”
Damon blinked, pulled back his hand. She chuckled like a cat purring, climbed into the car, and started it.
Then Karla Mepps drove off into the gathering night.
Chapter
39
I watched a crime scene tech dusting the Lancasters’ doorbell for fingerprints. Little Evan aside, it was the only thing we knew for sure that the kidnapper had touched. Other techs were inside the foyer, working. Ned Mahoney was triggering an AMBER alert across Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Bree was with the Lancasters, going through the house, trying to determine whether the nanny had taken anything of note besides their only child.
I was about to join them when my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. Tugging it out, I saw the caller ID: Damon.
“Your phone does work,” I answered, walking away from the front stoop. Television camera trucks were already camped out beyond the police tape, no doubt having come from outside the apartment building of Joss Branson’s parents. The only thing that will draw the media off a missing child case these days is another missing child.
“Well, sure my phone works,” Damon said.
“You don’t answer it much.”
“I’m sorry, Dad, I was leading a late tour and there was someone—a woman, the aunt of some kid from Louisiana who’s interested in applying. She stayed behind and, I don’t know, asked a lot of questions.”
I’d forgotten he was working as a campus tour guide.
“No problem,” I said.
“What did you call about? You didn’t leave a message.”
“Hate leaving messages,” I said.
“You could have sent a text.”
“I like hearing the sound of your voice in real time, is that okay?”
“Is that why you called six times?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“Oh,” he said, and paused. “Well, what do you want me to say?”
“The alphabet.”
“Really?”
“No, I just…how was your day, kiddo?”
“Good. Real good.”
“Anything exciting or new happen?”
There was a pause longer than I expected before he said, “No, not really. Just that lady on the tour.” He hesitated. “And a lot of studying to do. I’ve got a big physics test tomorrow. First midterm.”
“Okay,” I sighed. “I won’t keep you. Just want to say I love you.”
“Love you, too,” Damon said. “Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Have you ever—”
“Alex!” Bree called to me. “They’ve found a few things.”
“Sorry, son,” I said. “Got to go. We’ll talk later, okay?”
I hung up before Damon could answer.
Chapter
40
As I headed toward my wife where she stood on the stoop of the Lancasters’ town house, my cell phone rang again. It was the medical examiner’s office. Exasperated, I held up a finger to Bree and answered, “Cross.”
It was Cynthia Wu from the ME’s office. She said, “Alex, that coffee from the Jackson crime scene you asked to have analyzed?”
“Yes?”
“Someone dumped nearly pure liquid nicotine into it, enough to give a horse a heart attack.”
“Liquid nicotine?” I said, puzzled. “Wait, wouldn’t you taste something like that? Wet cigarettes aren’t exactly appetizing. Smell gross, too.”
“Because they’re made from tobacco,” Wu replied. “This is extracted nicotine, the kind that people use in those electronic cigarettes, though that stuff is a hundred times more diluted than this was.”
“Any idea where you’d get something that pure?” I asked.
“Gotta be brokers somewhere,” Wu said.
“Anything else?”
“Preliminary report on that smear on the attorney’s suit pants,” she said. “Vaginal secretions. Some semen, too.”
I thought about that, came up with the most likely conclusion. “Order tests on the female DNA against the samples we got from Mandy Bell Lee and confirm the semen is Jackson’s.”
“Might take a while.”
“A while I’ve got,” I said. “And thanks, Cynthia, I owe you one.”
“Anytime, Alex,” she said, and hung up.
As soon as I entered the Lancasters’ foyer again, Bree pointed at the stairs. “They found synthetic hair on that second step. Cheap wig, I figure, which means Kelli’s changing her look, which means that sketch we put out of her had to have been close.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe it’s just part of a disguise. What else?”
“She took a diaper bag and a stack of diapers with her,” Bree replied.
“So she’s caring for Evan.”
My wife squinted. “You mean, the way a barren woman might?”
“Could be. Or maybe she just wants to care for him long enough to sell him to some couple desperate to have a—”
I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, looked at the top of the staircase, and saw Dr. Lancaster staring at us with a horrified expression. “Sell?” she said. “Sell my baby?”
Chapter
41
It took us almost an hour to get the Lancasters to calm down after they’d overheard my frankly stupid remark. There was a chance that Kelli Adams had stolen the babies in order to sell them, but I should have had t
he good sense not to say so inside their house.
“The first scenario is much more likely,” I kept telling them. “This is probably a woman who has a history of psychiatric problems and infertility.”
“That’s right,” Mahoney said, and Bree nodded.
But the damage had been done. When my wife and I left around seven thirty that evening, I could see that both parents were still chewing on the idea that their baby boy was about to be sold to the highest bidder.
Mahoney stayed behind, repairing the damage.
I followed Bree back to police headquarters. I thought about going upstairs to get some more work done, letting her have my car and taking a cab home, but after parking, Bree climbed in the passenger side with me and said, “Let’s go find Ava.”
My wife had that look about her that indicated this was not a negotiable idea, so I nodded and said, “I’m going to need something to eat first.”
“Henry’s?” she said.
“That’ll do it,” I replied, and set off.
Ten minutes later we pulled up outside Henry’s Soul Café at Seventeenth and U Street. All the food’s good at Henry’s, but the fried chicken and sweet potato pie are the best in DC. And there’s something about the smell of the place and the good vibe of the people who work there that reminds me of a similar joint back in Winston-Salem, where I spent the first nine years of my life.
Bree covered my shirt in paper napkins and handed me pieces of fried chicken and an ice-cold Coke as we headed toward Anacostia. We were crossing the bridge when my phone rang.
“Are you purposely avoiding me, Alex?” Nana Mama said in greeting.
“Me? Never.”
“I haven’t seen you in days.”
“Late nights,” I said.
“Tonight?”
I glanced at Bree and replied, “About an hour or so.”
“I’ll wait up for you,” Nana Mama said. “I want you to see what they’ve done to the kitchen floor.”