Damon shouted, “Show them who’s boss, sis!”
My daughter did something then that I hadn’t seen since the foot injury. Her gait became more like bounding, and she blew by the girl in second place and bore down on Claire Mason with thirty yards to go. Mason gave a backward glance, saw Jannie coming, and ran in fear. But even sheer terror wouldn’t have helped the state champ’s cause that day.
With fifteen yards remaining, Jannie caught Mason. She was a full body width ahead at the wire.
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JANNIE SLOWED, LAUGHED, and threw her arms up to the sky. Damon cheered. I whooped and hollered and felt better than I had in days. Poor Claire Mason looked shell-shocked; she was a senior heading to a top track program, and she’d been bested by a junior just back from a long time off for a foot injury.
McDonald clapped when Jannie came up a few moments later.
“That is exactly how you do it,” he said, giving her a high five. “The win’s nice. So is beating Mason. But I’m prouder of you for being a disciplined and smart athlete.”
Beaming, Jannie said, “It worked staying just off them. I felt like I had a lot in the tank when it counted.”
“Sometimes I do know what I’m talking about,” McDonald said, and he winked at her. “Enjoy the moment. I’ll talk to you Monday.”
“Leaving already?” Damon asked.
“Noon flight to Dallas,” he said, and he looked to Jannie. “Ice bath ASAP.”
Jannie groaned. “I hate ice baths.”
“But she’ll do it,” I said.
After we’d left Damon to his studies, Jannie was bubbling with excitement as she got into the car and for half the way home. Then she checked her cell phone and got quiet again.
“They giving you a hard time?”
For several moments Jannie did not reply, but then she said, “They’re idiots, Dad. They don’t know you like I know you, so I think it’s time I do some serious de-friending and maybe take a week or two vacation from all social media, even Snapchat and Instagram.”
“Two weeks? I read somewhere that it’s virtually impossible for teenage girls to get off their smartphones.”
“Alert Mark Zuckerberg. I’m going to be the first.”
I laughed. “Good for you.”
“I’m sorry for the way I’ve been acting. I guess I could only see what the trial was doing to my life.”
“And I’m sorry you’ve had to suffer for my actions. It’s not fair to you or to your brothers.”
We drove on in silence for a while. “Dad?”
I looked over and saw tears dripping down her cheeks. “What’s the matter, sweetie?”
“I love you, Dad, and I believe in you, but I’m also really scared for you.”
A big ball of emotion surged in my throat. “I love you too, Jannie, and don’t be scared for me. We’re going to be all right.”
But the closer we got to DC and home, the less I believed it.
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ALI CROSS HEARD Jannie come through the front door, and the excitement in her voice and then in Nana Mama’s, but it wasn’t enough to get him up from the desk in his father’s attic office or make him take his eyes off the computer screen showing a YouTube video of his father shooting three people.
Ali had heard about the videos on Facebook and had watched them nearly twenty times by then. The first playing had been the most difficult. He’d jerked back and shut them off when his dad pulled the trigger, killing Virginia Winslow. It reminded him so much of seeing his debate teacher shot during the kidnapping of Gretchen Lindel that he almost got sick.
Deciding not to finish the tape, he almost shut down the browser. But then he remembered Ms. Marley, his dad’s attorney, quoted in the Washington Post the day before, saying that there was something wrong with the videos, that they had been altered somehow. And he saw the comments people had posted on YouTube, most of them saying that Alex Cross was guilty as hell and deserved to spend life in prison or worse.
Ali had fought off the urge to cry reading the posts and forced himself to play the videos to the end, and then again and again, freezing the screen whenever one of the victims’ hands was visible.
No gun. No gun. No gun.
But his dad said they’d all had guns, so he’d watched the videos over and over and over again. It wasn’t until the fifteenth or sixteenth time that Ali noticed that the lighting seemed to change in the moments before each of the victims appeared, going dimmer but not dark enough that you couldn’t see them and then brightening so you could see their empty hands just before the shot.
Ali had looked at those parts of the videos in detail at least three times and could not figure out what the change in lighting meant. He reached for the computer mouse and was about to play the videos yet again when he heard someone climbing the stairs.
Heart pounding, Ali clicked off the browser, revealing a Microsoft Word file that he pretended to be scanning when his dad came in.
“Nana Mama says you’ve been up here all morning,” he said.
“I have a paper due on Monday,” Ali said, still not looking up.
“Really? What’s your topic?”
“Magic,” he said, lifting his head. “Like Harry Houdini magic.”
“The best there ever was,” his dad said. “How’s it going?”
The truth was Ali had finished writing the paper two days before, but he said, “Pretty good. I should be done on time if I work hard.”
“Good for you,” his dad said, looking around at the stacks of boxes that crowded the little office. “I’ve got to do something about this. I can’t move in here half the time.”
“Bree said it’s evidence stuff and not to touch it.”
“Too much evidence stuff,” his dad said, distracted. “Don’t stay up here all day. Go ride your bike at some point, or maybe we can go shoot a few hoops.”
“That’d be good,” Ali said, and he smiled. “Why was Jannie so happy?”
“She won her race, beat the strongest girl in Maryland.”
“Wow,” Ali said. “And no foot pain?”
“None,” his dad said and turned to leave.
“Dad?” Ali called after him. “Do you think real magic exists? That there are people who can make things appear and disappear for real?”
“No,” he said. “It’s all deception, sleight of hand, smoke, light, and mirrors.”
Ali nodded. “I think so too.”
“You want lunch?”
“I’ll come down in a bit,” Ali promised. He watched his dad duck his head going out the door and listened to him drop to the second floor, then the first.
Ali felt a moment of guilt before launching the Internet browser again. He didn’t like lying to his father or directly disobeying him, but someone had to figure out what was wrong with the videos.
He hit Play again and decided not to fast-forward, to watch them all from the beginning. He focused on the middle camera, the north one, looking back across the width of the factory floor with the bottoms of the three spotlights on the roof of the southern alcoves visible. Ali froze the screen and zoomed in.
He’d hoped to see some shadow there behind the spotlights, the suggestion of a silhouette, but he saw none. He hit Play again and noticed a tiny blue pinpoint light flash. And then it was gone.
It took Ali three attempts to freeze the middle video feed on that tiny blue light. He zoomed in on it but couldn’t tell what the light was attached to. Frustrated, he hit Play again. He focused on the third feed, the one showing the length of the factory room, with the spotlights aimed toward the mural.
He zoomed in on the spotlights, but saw no one behind them.
Who was running the lights? And where was that blue pinpoint? Try as he might, he couldn’t spot it.
“Ali!” Nana Mama yelled up the stairs. “I’ve got your bacon, lettuce, and tomato down here waiting.”
“Coming, Nana,” he cried. He cleared the browser’s history to cover his tracks, then shut down the web page.
Ali got up and headed toward the stairs, only vaguely aware of the stacks of evidence boxes he passed. Indeed, he was thinking so intently about that pinpoint blue light that he barely noticed that the box on the filing cabinet closest to the door was labeled AUTOPSIES.
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