Cross Country

heard the phone ring again. Bree picked it up.
    She said, very quietly, “Fuck you.”
    And she hung up on whoever it was this time.

Chapter 132
    I WAS GOING to get my family back. I had to believe that. But was it true? What were the real odds that I would? They were definitely getting worse
.
    From six-thirty until close to seven that morning, I sat out on the front porch and tried not to go completely crazy. I thought about taking a drive, to see if it would relax me.
    But I was afraid to be away from the house for any length of time.
    At a little past seven, the phone hang-ups stopped and I got about an hour of sleep.
    Then I showered and dressed and called in one of the patrolmen from the street. I told him to take any calls for me and gave him a cell number where I could be reached.
    At nine, Bree and I attended an emergency meeting at the Daly Building.
    I was surprised to find about a dozen officers inside the conference room. These were top people too, the best in Washington. I understood that it was a show of support and concern for me. Most of the detectives were people I’d worked with on other cases. Chief of Detectives Davies, Bree, and Sampson had reached out to officers with street connections who might help locate my family.
    If anyone could
.

Chapter 133
    FROM THERE, THE day got stranger and stranger for me.
    At eleven o’clock, I faced a smaller group inside a windowless conference room at CIA headquarters out at Langley. The atmosphere in the room couldn’t have been more different from the one at Daly. Everyone except me wore a suit and tie. The body language was stiff and uncomfortable. No one wanted to be there except me — I needed their help.
    A case officer from the National Clandestine Service named Merrill Snyder greeted me with a firm handshake and the unpromising line “Thanks for coming to see us, Dr. Cross.”
    “Can we start?” I asked him.
    “We’re just waiting for one more,” Snyder said. “There’s coffee, soft drinks.”
    “Where’s Eric Dana?” I asked, remembering the leader’s name from the last time I’d been out to Langley.
    “He’s on vacation. The man we’re waiting on is his superior. Sure you don’t want some coffee?”
    “No, I’m fine. I don’t need any more caffeine this morning, trust me.”
    “I understand. You still haven’t heard from whoever abducted your family?” Snyder asked. “No communication?”
    Before I could answer him, the door to the conference room swung wide open. A tall, dark-haired man in his early forties, wearing a gray suit and silver-and-red-striped tie, entered. He carried himself like someone important, which he probably was.
    And right behind him came . . . Ian Flaherty.

Chapter 134
    THE MAN EVERYONE had been waiting for introduced himself as Steven Millard. He said he was with National Clandestine Service but gave no rank. I remembered now that Al Tunney had mentioned his name before I went to Africa. Millard was the group chief, who’d been involved from the start.
    All Flaherty said was, “Dr. Cross.”
    “Has there been any word about your family?” Millard wanted to know right off.
    Snyder cut in. “No word so far. They haven’t contacted him.”
    “There are cops from Metro at my house now,” I told them. “They’ll answer my phone and call me.”
    “That’s good. About all you can do,” said Millard. I couldn’t figure out what to make of him. I was sure he knew about my meeting with Eric Dana before I’d left for Africa, but how much more did Millard know?
    “I need whatever help you can give me,” I finally said. “I really need some help.”
    “You can count on it,” said Millard. “But I have a couple of questions you might be able to help us out with first. Detective Cross, why did you go to Africa in the first place?”
    “A friend of mine and her entire family were killed. I had a lead that the killer fled to Lagos. It was my homicide case.”
    Millard nodded and seemed to understand. “Tell me this, then, what did you learn in Africa? Something useful, I assume? Otherwise, why would this professional killer want to come after you and your family in Washington?”
    “I was hoping maybe you could help me out with that. What’s going on in Nigeria and here in Washington too? Can you tell me?”
    Millard clasped, then unclasped, his hands. “Did you see anything unusual or unsettling in Nigeria? We need to figure out why this killer would want to come after you here.