“Negative,” I said. “Get all the exits covered. And shut down the block if it’s not too late.”
We all fanned out, checking the adjacent rooftops, throwing open doors, looking under cars with any kind of clearance. But it was no good. They were gone. Somehow, they’d gotten past us. The woman was a professional. She didn’t panic and she could really handle a gun.
There was still a chance someone could pick them up on the street. Their faces were a matter of record now, and every unit in the city would go into high alert.
Homeland Security could even shut down the bridges and put checkpoints on the highway if they wanted to, but that wasn’t my call.
By the time Ned and I got back up to the top level, everything on that end had been contained. One of the SWAT sergeants, Enrique Vaillos, was sitting on the bumper of the same Audi where we’d taken cover. The back of his hand was up against his mouth. It looked like he’d gotten a nasty pop in the face during the takedown.
“What’s our status up here?” Ned asked.
“Five in custody, one dead,” he said, “and two —?”
“Still missing,” I said.
Farther up the row of cars, a tall Saudi man in a gray suit was laid out flat on the ground. His head was turned our way so you could see the open, glassy eyes — also, the perfectly round black hole in his forehead. Even now, it sent a chill rolling down my back.
“What happened?” I asked.
Vaillos shook his head. “It was the damndest thing. That chick? The one who got away? Just before she ran, she turned and put a fast one in the guy’s head, point-blank. I don’t know why she did it, but I’ll tell you what. It’s all she had time for. Probably saved one of my guys’ lives.”
He turned away and spit a mouthful of red on the cement.
“Whatever. I ain’t going to lose sleep over it. These people want to act like a bunch of cannibals, I say let ’em. Just makes our job easier.”
I was thinking about the woman again, and how she wasn’t going to make our job easier.
THE “AL AYLA FIVE” were transferred to a. U.S. Marshals holding facility at the DC Jail on Massachusetts Avenue. A wing of eight-by-ten soundproof interview rooms was cleared, and the suspects were brought in one by one. Above all, there would be no exchange of information between them.
We worked in teams, rotating from suspect to suspect. I was with Mahoney, along with a forensic psychiatrist from the CIA, a ranking rep from Homeland Security, and an FBI field office supervisor, Corey Sneed, who took the lead. That was fine with me. I kept my focus where I needed it — on the Coyle kids.
Presumably, these people were Saudi nationals, but none of them was carrying any identification, and none of them would talk to us. Nothing. Not even to ask for a lawyer, though we suspected they spoke English.
Our strong assumption was that the whole eight-member group had been composed of four couples, given Al Ayla’s m.o. up to this point. If that was true, then one of these women had just lost a husband. Maybe that was something we could use.
After two hours of getting nowhere, I took my best guess and asked to speak privately with the one woman who had seemed most on edge.
“Go for it,” Sneed told me. It almost seemed like a dare.
I stopped at the vending machines on my way back in and bought a bottle of water. It wasn’t much, but I wanted to bring something in with me besides files and questions.
When I opened the interview room door, the woman’s head jerked up as if I’d caught her off guard. Her dark hair was pulled back in a French braid, and her magenta silk blouse and gray pinstriped skirt looked wrong on her somehow, like someone else’s idea of American dress.
I came around and unlocked the cuff securing her to an eyebolt on the metal table.
She rubbed at the red mark around her wrist as I sat down but ignored the bottle of water I’d left for her.
“I’ve got something I want to show you,” I said. “You should look, at least. Just look.”
I opened one of my files and took out a screen capture from the night’s surveillance video at the parking garage. The image was grainy, but the eight of them were easy enough to make out, huddled next to a couple of SUVs.
When I slid the picture around to show her, my finger was on the woman at the center of their group.
“This is the one who shot and killed your husband,” I said, watching her face.
I wasn’t positive about the husband part — not until her eye twitched, and her lips tightened over her teeth, like she was holding in a scream, or maybe a curse.
“Do you want to tell me who she is?” I asked.
To my surprise, the woman answered.
“I don’t know,” she said in a thick Saudi accent. “Her, I would help you find, if I could. Evil bitch. Controlling. Hard.”
“Is she running Al Ayla’s Washington cell?” I asked, but already, she’d retreated back into silence.
“Let me ask you something else,” I said. “It’s about the kidnapping of the president’s children. Do you know if Al Ayla’s responsible?”
All I got there was more of the same. Silence, and she wouldn’t look at me.
“You know, it’s not too late to cut a deal here,” I said. That got her attention. It even got me some minimal eye contact. “The first one of you to talk is going to be on a plane back to Riyadh when this is all said and done. The rest are going to be here for a long, long time.”
“A deal?” she said then. “Do you think I am absolutely stupid?”
The question spoke for itself. If she wasn’t interested, she wouldn’t have asked.
I shrugged. “Believe what you want. This offer stands only as long as nobody else comes forward. If I get a knock on that door” — I thumbed over my shoulder — “then you and I are done here.”
I didn’t want to give her too much room to think, so I leaned in and kept talking, a little faster now, whatever came into my head.
“If your husband had been martyred, I might understand all this silence. Or even if he’d been allowed to take his own life. But that’s not what happened, is it? He was killed by one of your own. By Al Ayla. The Family. I can’t imagine that’s what either of you signed up for,” I said. “What do you owe them now? What do you owe your husband’s murderer?”
She was seething but still watching me. I took it as a green light.
And then slowly, without even the slightest change of expression, she said, “There have been rumors.”
“What kind of rumors?” I said.
“Talk. Among some of the others. They say Al Ayla kidnapped those children. That your president got what he deserved.”
“Do you know if the children are still alive?” I asked. “Just tell me that.”
“I don’t know.” She slumped in her chair, maybe hating herself for doing this, for even talking to me. This was against all her beliefs, wasn’t it?
“Do you know where they were taken?” I pressed her.
This time she only shook her head. I was starting to wonder where this was going, if anywhere. Did she know more than she was telling me? Probably.
“How about this?” I said. “Do you believe those rumors are true? Do you think Al Ayla has those kids?”
Her expression muddied. It was like I could see the gears turning. Her defenses were down now, clearly weakened, and she was easier to read.
“Of course I believe them,” she said — about two seconds too late.
She’d just put herself in a corner, and we both knew it. She wanted to believe those rumors, even needed to believe them. But she didn’t. Now she had nothing left to give me. No currency to buy her freedom.
“I think we’re done,” I said. Then I counted to ten in my head. When she didn’t say anything, I stood up to go.
“And just so you know,” I told her, “the secretary of the interior wasn’t going to be anywhere near that expo tonight. Your mission failed before it even started. The plan you were given was a bad one.
Your husband died for nothing.”
I left the room with a clear conscience. The fact was, we’d both lied to each other. There was no deal. Never had been, never would be. I hadn’t even cleared the idea with my team.
Some days are just like that. You do whatever you need to do to get the job done. Anything at all. By tomorrow, maybe my conscience wouldn’t be so clear.
THE MAJOR CASE squad office was a twelve-cubicle circus that morning. Staff were coming and going, phones were ringing off the hook, detectives were swapping information across the room — all the usual, but it was nonstop chaos these days. A thousand clues and rumors were being chased down. At least that many leaks. Way too many.
I barely noticed any of it. I was hunched over my desk with a stack of Branaff personnel files spread out around me.
Whatever had or hadn’t been achieved the night before, it remained true that we had seventeen Branaff faculty and staff unaccounted for during that homeroom period when someone used Emma Allison’s phone to set a trap for Zoe Coyle.
I’d also started to wonder if Ethan had been an unintended second victim in this kidnap plot. Had Zoe’s fight with Ryan Townsend thrown a monkey wrench into the plan? Was she the sole target to begin with?
I was up to my eyeballs with all of it when I got a knock on my cubicle wall.
“Uh, Detective?”
It was Dennis Porter, one of the research team members. Porter was fresh out of the academy, and still green, but eager and fairly bright, I thought. The bags under his eyes and day-old ginger fuzz on his face were a testament to his hard work.
“What’s up, Denny?”
“Well, maybe nothing, but I just found this,” he said, and laid a copy of a death certificate on my desk.
It was from the Department of Vital Records in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, dated November 10, 2006. The name on the certificate was Zachary Levi Johnson-Glass.
“Glass?” I said. “As in —”
“I think so,” Porter said. “There’s no obit that I can find, but I did pull the birth certificate. The parents are listed as Rodney Glass and Molly Johnson, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The poor kid was eight years old when he died.
“And I found a 1998 lease agreement from Harrisburg with the same Social Security number as Glass’s file at Branaff. Like I said, maybe it’s nothing, but I thought you should know.”
Glass, the school nurse, was one of those seventeen names on the list. I was already pulling his file to the top of the mess on my desk.
“I want you to start from scratch on this guy,” I said. “LexisNexis the hell out of him. Check NCIC again, and Interpol while you’re at it. I want to know where he’s lived, every job he’s ever had, every parking ticket, every itch he’s ever scratched. Pull in whoever you need, I’ll sign off on it. Don’t take any crap from anybody on this. Just get it done.”
Porter still looked a little tentative. “Don’t you already have all that on file, sir?”
I picked up the death certificate and waved it at him. “You would have thought so, right?”
He smiled for half a second before he seemed to remember how serious this was. “I’ll get right on it,” he said, and went off at a trot.
I wasn’t going to get too excited … yet. It’s easy to be blinded by circumstantial evidence. But that didn’t stop me from putting a whole new lens on Rodney Glass.
One thing I kept coming back to over and over on this case was how personal the kidnapping felt. There had been no indication that Ethan and Zoe might be returned to their parents under any circumstances. Just like Rodney Glass had lost his own child forever? There wasn’t anything more personal than that, was there?
I also thought about the last time we’d spoken. “Ethan’s my little lunch buddy,” he’d told me. There would have been plenty of opportunities to gain Ethan’s confidence. Maybe enough to have learned about Zoe’s secret cell phone while he was at it.
Not to mention that someone had gotten Ray Pinkney high as a kite on the morning of the kidnapping. And someone had also very likely drugged Ethan and Zoe into unconsciousness before pulling them off campus. The fastest way to do that is by injection. Not that you have to be a nurse to know how, but it doesn’t hurt.
By the time I’d run through it all in my mind, I was ready to move on this, pronto.
MOLLY JOHNSON WAS THE closest thing to immediate family I could find for Rodney Glass. She’d never taken his name when they were married, and the two had been divorced for over four years now — since about six months after the death of their son. She agreed to meet me at the end of her lunch shift, hostessing at the Fire House Restaurant in Harrisburg. I left DC right away and was waiting for her in the parking lot by the time she came out. We spoke right there in my car.
“I don’t know how much help I can be,” she said. “I didn’t even know Rod was back in the States. A friend told me he’d gone into the Peace Corps.”
“He’s been living in Washington for three years now,” I told her.
“Gosh, really? Time flies.”
She stared out the window and absently fingered the gold crucifix around her neck. I could tell she was nervous. All she knew so far was that I wanted to ask about her ex-husband. So why was she so jittery?
“So I’m guessing you two didn’t part on very good terms,” I said.
“No. After our son died — Zachary — it got … pretty bad between us.”
“Can I ask how he died?” I said.
She smiled, the way people do when they’re trying not to cry. “The actual cause of death was severe malnutrition,” she said. “But in terms of why his organs started shutting down, we never did get an answer. They just kept passing us from specialist to specialist.”
“That must have been a nightmare for you, for both of you. I’m sorry,” I said.
Without any prompting, she took a red leather wallet out of her purse and opened it to show me a school picture of a very cute little boy. He had Rodney Glass’s same dark hair and pale blue eyes. I felt a pang of hurt for the parents.
“He wanted to be a doctor, like his dad,” she said. “Or at least, like his dad was going to be. Rod was in med school when Zach got sick. The nursing thing was supposed to be temporary. Funny how life turns out.”
“And you said things were difficult between you afterward?” I asked.
She nodded as she put away the picture. “Rod changed. I mean — to be fair, we both changed. But he just got so … paranoid. And so angry, angry, angry. I think on some level, he blamed himself. Like he never got to be the doctor who could save his own son, you know? But on the outside, he blamed everyone else.”
“And when you say everyone —”
“I mean everyone,” she answered. “The doctors, the hospital, the whole messed-up healthcare system. We didn’t have any insurance at the time, so you can imagine. If you’d asked him then, he probably would have said it was the system’s fault that Zach got sick in the first place.”
Molly stopped suddenly and turned to me, as if something had just occurred to her. “What’s he done, anyway? Is Rod in some kind of trouble?” she asked.
I’d been gauging her carefully the whole time, trying to figure out how much was too much to say here. I didn’t want to leave without getting everything I could, so I went ahead and took a calculated risk.
“Molly, I told you before that Rodney’s been in Washington for the last three years. But what I didn’t say was that he’s been working at the Branaff School for most of that time.”
She looked at me blankly. Apparently, the name didn’t mean anything to her.
“It’s where Zoe and Ethan Coyle are enrolled. It’s where the kidnapping occurred.”
“Wait,” she said. “Are you saying Rod’s a suspect in that kidnapping?”
“Technically, anyone who works at the school is on our list,” I said. It was the kind of answer I had to give, but she understood perfectly.
Now her whole demeanor changed. Suddenly s
he seemed twice as shaky and nervous as before. Her hand treaded back up to the crucifix and her eyebrows knitted together.
“I just can’t believe that. No. I mean … he couldn’t possibly … could he?”
“I don’t know, Molly,” I said quietly. “Could he?”
It took her a long time to answer. She bowed her head and closed her eyes for several seconds. Her fingers were all over the cross and I wondered if she was saying a prayer. And also if she was involved herself.
When she looked up again, she was trembling all over.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” she said. “Maybe something important.”
“IT WAS A few months after Zachary died,” Molly Johnson started in. “Things had gotten pretty awful between me and Rod. But then one night, out of the blue, he came home and said he wanted us to go for a drive.”
She was still staring off into the distance, not really focusing on anything — except maybe the memory of that night. We’d obviously opened some kind of Pandora’s box. I kept my mouth shut for the time being and just listened to her.
“Honestly, Detective, the last thing I wanted at that point was to go anywhere with him, but we’d been fighting so much, it just seemed easier to say yes. So I got in the car and he started driving.
“After a while, Rod took out this thermos he used for work. He told me he’d filled it on the way home, at this place where I always liked the hot chocolate. It seemed like he was trying really hard to be nice, so I went ahead and drank some. I didn’t even think about it until later, but he never had any of the cocoa. Just me.”
It seemed pretty clear where this was headed now. I could feel the dread climbing up my neck, thinking about Molly, but also about Ethan and Zoe.
“Pretty soon, I started feeling sleepy,” she went on. “Like weirdly sleepy. It came on so fast, I didn’t even get to wonder what was happening.
“The next thing I knew, I was waking up in this … place. Like a basement, or a cellar. I don’t even know what it was. I remember it smelled like dirt, if that makes any sense.”
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