Mary, Mary

So where the hell were the answers? How about just one answer for starters?
    She thought about Alex Cross—something he’d said in that book of his. “Keep asking until you find the
keystone,
the one question at the heart of it all. Then you can start working your way back out again. That’s when you start finding answers.”
    The one question. The keystone. What the hell was it?
    Well, six hours later it was still a mystery for Galletta. Just after dark, she finally let the last of the morning’s customers go home. Five people had given five different eyewitness accounts about who was sitting at the computer in question; the rest of them had no clue.
    No one Detective Galletta spoke to struck her as remotely suspicious, but all twenty-six would require follow-up. The paperwork alone was more than she wanted to think about, now or ever.
    To no one’s surprise, Mary Smith’s credit card turned out to be hot. It belonged to an eighty-year-old woman in Sherman Oaks who didn’t even realize it was gone, a Mrs. Debbie Green. Nothing else had been charged on the card; there was no paper trail, no anything.
She’s careful, and she’s organized—for such an obvious nutcase
.
    Galletta asked Brett the manager for a full-strength espresso. From here, it was back to the office, where she would sort through the day’s events while they were fresh in her memory. Her neighbor said he’d let the dog out. The Chinese place along the way to her office said twenty minutes for pickup. Life was good, no?
No!
    She wondered if she’d be home before midnight and, even then, if she’d be able to sleep.
    Probably not—on both counts.
    So what was the one question she needed to ask? Where was that
keystone?
    Or was Alex Cross just full of shit?

Chapter 41
    “SHE NEVER KNEW what she wanted, Sugar, and maybe she still doesn’t. I liked Christine, but she was never the same after what happened in Jamaica. She has to move on, and so do you.”
    Sampson and I were holed up at Zinny’s, a favorite neighborhood dive. B.B. King’s “I Done Got Wise” was wailing on the jukebox. Nothing but the blues would do tonight, not for me anyway.
    What the place lacked in cheeriness, it made up for in Raphael, a bartender who knew us by name and had a heavy pour. I contemplated the Scotch in front of me. I was trying to recall if it was my third or fourth. Man, I was feeling tired. I remembered a line from one of the Indiana Jones movies: “It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.”
    “Christine’s not the point, though, is she, John?” I looked sideways at Sampson. “The point is Little Alex. Ali. That’s how he calls himself. He’s already his own person.”
    He patted me on the top of my head. “The
point
is right here on your skull, Sugar. Now you listen to me.”
    He waited until I sat up and gave him my full attention. Then his gaze slowly drifted up to the ceiling. He shut his eyes and grimaced. “Shit. I forgot what I was going to say. Too bad, too. I was going to make you feel a whole lot better.”
    I laughed in spite of myself. Sampson always knew when to go light with me. It had been like that since we were ten years old and growing up in D.C. together.
    “Well, next best thing then,” he said. He motioned to Raphael for two more.
    “You never know what’s going to happen,” I said, partly to myself. “When you’re in love. There’s no guarantee.”
    “Truth,” Sampson said. “If you’d told me I’d have a kid, ever, I would have laughed. Now here I am with a three-month-old. It’s crazy. And at the same time, it could all change again, just like
that
.” He snapped his fingers hard, the sound popping in my ears. Sampson has the biggest hands of anyone I know. I’m six-three, not exactly chiseled, but not too shabby, and he makes me look slight.
    “Billie and I are good together, no question about it,” he went on, rambling but making sense in his way. “That doesn’t mean it can’t all go crazy someday. For all I know, ten years from now, she’ll be throwing my clothes out on the lawn. You never know. Nah—my girl wouldn’t do that to me. Not my Billie,” Sampson said, and we both laughed.
    We sat and drank in silence for a few minutes. Even without conversation, the mood darkened.
    “When are you going to see Little Alex again?” he asked, his voice softer. “
Ali
. I like that.”
    “Next week, John. I’ll be out in Seattle. We’ve got to finalize the visitation