Roses Are Red

nausea, loss of coordination. I hadn’t noticed anything unusual.
    When she had finished her examination of Jannie, Dr. Bone from the emergency room took me aside. “We’ll keep her here overnight for observation, Detective Cross. We’d like to be extra careful.”
    “Extra careful is good,” I said. I was
still
shaking a little. I could see it in my hands.
    “She might be here longer than that,” Dr. Bone then added. “We need to do more tests on Jannie. I don’t like the fact that there was a second seizure.”
    “All right. Of course, Doctor. I don’t like that there was a second seizure either.”
    There was a bed available on the fourth floor, and I went up there with Jannie. Hospital policy required that she be taken up on a gurney, but I got to push it. She was groggy and unusually quiet in the elevator going up; she didn’t ask me any questions until we were alone behind a curtain in the hospital room.
    “Okay,” she said then. “Tell me the truth, Daddy. You have to tell me everything. The
truth.
”
    I took a deep breath. “Well, you probably had what’s called a grand mal seizure. Two of them. Sometimes they just happen, sweetheart. Out of the blue, like tonight. Damon’s punch might have had something to do with it.”
    She frowned. “He barely touched me.” Jannie stared into my eyes, trying to read me. “Okay,” she said. “That’s not so bad, is it? At least I’m still here on planet Earth for now.”
    “Don’t talk like that,” I told her. “It isn’t funny.”
    “Okay. I won’t scare you,” she whispered.
    Jannie reached out and took my hand and we held on tight. In a few minutes she was fast asleep, still holding on to my hand.

Part Two
    HATE MAIL

Chapter 22
    NO ONE COULD FIGURE OUT what was happening, or why.
    He just loved that. The feeling of superiority it bred. They were all such dithering fools.
    On a numerical scale of 9.9999 out of 10, things were going very well. The Mastermind was certain that he hadn’t made a meaningful mistake. He took particular satisfaction in the Falls Church robbery and especially the four puzzling murders.
    He relived every moment of the bloody crime as if he had been there instead of lucky Messrs. Red, White, and Blue, and Ms. Green. He visualized the scene at the manager’s house, and then the murders at the bank, with intense pleasure and satisfaction. The Mastermind re-created it in his mind again and again and never tired of the scenario, especially the killings. The artistry and symbolism of them infused him with confidence in the cleverness of his thinking — the rightness of it.
    He found himself smiling at the thought of the phone call to the police: the tip that a robbery was in progress. He’d made the call. He wanted the First Union employees killed.
That was the whole goddamn point. Didn’t anybody see that yet?
    He had another team to recruit now, the most important one, and the hardest to find. The final crew had to be extremely capable and self-sufficient, and, because of that self-sufficiency, they would pose a danger to him. He understood very well that clever people often had large and uncontrollable egos.
He
certainly did.
    He brought up the names of potential candidates on his computer screen. He read lengthy profiles and even criminal records, which he thought of as their résumés. Then suddenly that dreary, rainy afternoon, he came across a crew that was as different from the others as he was from the rest of humanity.
    The proof? They had no criminal record. They had never been caught, never even been suspected. It was why they’d been so hard for him to find. They seemed perfect — for his perfect job — for his masterpiece.
    No one could figure out what was going to happen.

Chapter 23
    AT 9:00 A.M. , I met with a neurologist named Thomas Petito, who patiently explained the tests Jannie would go through that same morning. He wanted first to eliminate some possible causes of the seizures. He told me that worrying would do no good, that Jannie was in excellent hands —
his
— and that for the moment the best thing I could do was to go to work. “I don’t want you worrying needlessly,” Petito said. “And I don’t want you in my way.”
    I drove I-95 South to Quantico that afternoon after I had lunch with Jannie. I needed to visit with the FBI’s best technicians and profilers, and they were at Quantico. I didn’t like leaving Jannie at St. Anthony’s but Nana was with her now, and there