Page 24 of Return of the Spider

“I want to be there for that first class.”

“I thought you’d be more supportive.”

“I support anything that promotes more kissing.”

I remembered something my grandmother said after she’d met Maria and repeated it—with an addition of my own. “You really are an old soul… in a wondrous body.”

“Don’t start any of that now,” Maria said, wagging her finger as she got up from the table and cleared my plate. “Or you won’t be able to get up and chase bad guys in the morning.”

I made a mournful face, then said, “Can I at least look in on Damon?”

She looked up at the clock and nodded. “I’ll do the dishes.”

“No, you will not,” I said. “I’ll take a quick peek and be right back.”

Maria smiled. “Then I’m going to put my feet up and watch TV. Volume on low.”

I’d squirted the hinges of the door of my little boy’s room with WD-40, so it opened without a sound. A slat of weak light cut the gloom inside, revealing Damon in his crib along the far wall, his blankets kicked off, as usual.

He lay on his back, right leg over his left, left hand on his forehead, left elbow held high to form a triangle. How in God’s name Damon found the position comfortable, I didn’t know, but it was one of his favorite positions to “conk out in,” as Maria put it. I quietly crossed the room, looked down at my son, and, as I’d done every day since the miracle of his birth, gave thanks for the second-greatest gift I’d been given in this life.

PART TWO

Master Class

CHAPTER

16

I tried to followMaria’s suggestion about looking at my work from a different perspective, spending time with the cold hard facts, the proven clues, then trying to extrapolate possibilities from them.

We also searched for evidence from other sources, including the FBI. From my research days, I knew a special agent over there, Ellen Bovers, whom I had interviewed several times.

I called Ellen and asked if there was a security camera overlooking the intersection where the Chain Bridge met the Canal Road. She checked, said there were CCTV cameras on both ends of the bridge and indeed on all the other bridges connecting the District to Virginia and Maryland.

I gave her a six-hour time frame and asked if she could get mevideo footage from the Chain Bridge camera on the Washington side. Bovers told me she’d try.

Despite that effort and others, it wasn’t until six days after Conrad Talbot’s body was found that we started to break through. That morning, Abby Howard’s doctors gave me and Sampson the okay to ask her a few questions.

Her mother, Lisa, and her father, U.S. Marine colonel and judge advocate general Marc Howard, met us in the visitors’ area at the hospital. They had told Abby about Conrad’s death the day before, and it had not gone well.

“We should have waited,” Colonel Howard said, sighing. “That’s on me. But I didn’t want her to find out from anyone but us, you know?”

“I can appreciate that,” I said.

“Either of you detectives have kids?”

“I do,” I said. “A toddler and another one on the way. I promise we will be extra-sensitive with your daughter.”

We found Abby on her side, her back to the door, monitors beeping, her head wrapped up like a swami’s.

“Abby?” I said when I reached the foot of her bed.

“Go ’way,” she said, her voice slightly slurred due to the painkillers.

“Abby, I’m with the police. Detective Alex Cross. I’m here with Detective John Sampson. We’re trying to find whoever shot you and Conrad.”

She shrugged. “Done, no matter who did it.”