I, Alex Cross

worry about what comes next."
    Michelle seemed conflicted. She looked around at each of us, not speaking a word.
    "So all right, then," Nana said. She patted her chest a few times. "Lord, all this grief has given me an awful feeling. Michelle, take my arm, would you?"
    I knew Nana’s heart was breaking too. Caroline was her granddaughter, though she never really got to know her, and gone forever now. Meanwhile, there was someone else here who needed her help.
Maybe that’s where I get it,
I thought. Sometimes the best, or only, way to take care of the dead is to take care of the living.

Chapter 17

    MICHELE DID GO back to her home in Rhode Island that night. I put her on a plane to Providence myself, but I made sure she had my numbers and told her that I hoped we’d hear from her — when she was ready.
    The next morning, I was right back at it, the investigation of her daughter’s awful murder, and possibly the murders of others.
    The first thing I tackled at the office were the phone numbers we’d found at Caroline’s apartment and in Timothy O’Neill’s bedroom.
    My backup plan was to hit up the Bureau for help, but I had a feeling about these numbers. If there was a key to unlocking them, it was probably something that Caroline or Timothy O’Neill could use on a regular basis. I was betting I could do this myself.
    I started by writing out all the lettered strings I had on a piece of paper, just to get them rolling around in my head.
    A simple A-to-Z, one-through-twenty-six substitution didn’t seem right, since anything above J, or 10, wouldn’t apply to a phone keypad.
    But what if it came off the keypad itself?
    I opened my cell on the desk and wrote down what I saw.
    ABC — 2
    DEF — 3
    GHI — 4 (I = 1?)
    JKL — 5
    MNO — 6 (O = 0?)
    PQRS — 7
    TUV — 8
    WXYZ — 9
    The one and the zero keys didn’t have any letters of their own, of course, but the I and O seemed like intuitive substitutions.
    That still left G and H for number four, and M and N for number six.
    When I used that logic to translate the first string, BGEOGZAPMO, it gave me 2430492760. Then I took the first three digits and Googled them as an area code. But 243 came up invalid.
    It felt too soon to abandon the idea, so I kept going with it. I translated the rest of my list into numbers and lined them all up in a column on the page to see if anything jumped out at me.
    It sure did. Nearly half the numbers started with a
two
.
    It didn’t take long from there to see that all of those numbers had a zero in the fourth position and another two in the seventh.
    202 is Washington’s area code.
    I went back to the first number and underlined.
    2430492760
    Things were starting to come together. When I looked at the same positions in the non-202 numbers, all but three gave me either 703 or 301, which are for areas of Virginia and Maryland close to DC.
    The final three codes turned out to be from Florida, South Carolina, and Illinois — out-of-town customers, presumably.
    Again, I went back to the first string. If positions one, four, and seven were an area code, didn’t it make sense to look at positions two, five, and eight for the exchange? I started scribbling again.
    2430492760 = 202
    2430492760 = 447
    2430492760 = 3960
    202-447-3960
    Next question — was 447 an actual DC exchange? I grabbed the phone book and found out that it was.
    This was starting to feel like the first good day of my investigation. A very good day.
    Once I’d deciphered everything I had so far, I called a good friend at the phone company, Esperanza Cruz. I knew that the reverse directories we used at work were only good for listed numbers. It took Esperanza maybe fifteen seconds to find the first listing.
    "Okay, now you’ve got me curious," she said. "This one is for Ryan Willoughby, unlisted. What’s
he
done? Other than being a walking, talking stiff."
    I was surprised but not shocked. Ryan Willoughby was the six o’clock anchor for a network TV affiliate here in the Washington area.
    "Esperanza, if you and I were actually having this conversation, I could tell you, but given as how we never spoke today —"
    "Yeah, yeah, story of my life, Alex. What’s the next number?"
    In a few minutes, I had a list of fifteen names. Six of them were familiar to me, including a sitting congressman, a professional football player, and the CEO of a high-profile energy-consulting firm in town. This thing was starting to bubble over, and not in a good way. When I