Kill Alex Cross

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 she 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