“I gather you’re not a rocket scientist,” he replied.
“Name?” Bree said, ignoring the jab.
“Theodore Branson,” he replied. “My wife’s Crystal.”
“I need a photograph of your daughter, Mr. Branson,” Bree said. “I’ll also need a description of what she was wearing. I need the footprints they took of your daughter at birth. I also need any identifying features, mole, birthmark, eye color, number of teeth, anything that says Joss.”
At that Branson straightened, stowed the anger, and said, “I have a picture right here on my phone. I took it this morning at breakfast. Crystal was feeling sick from chemo and I was feeding Joss. She just looked so cute, I…” He looked lost suddenly and began to cry. “My little Miss Muffin is gone.”
“We’ll get her back, Mr. Branson,” Bree said, softening her tone.
“How?” Branson asked, his voice thin and weak.
“I’m going to trigger an AMBER Alert to start. Get your daughter’s face in front of every law enforcement officer within five hundred miles of here.”
Chapter
16
Around that same time, Marcus Sunday slipped back into the apartment in Kalorama, finding the music off and Acadia Le Duc waiting for him, wearing a simple cotton dress with an Indian pattern, no shoes, and fresh daisies in her hair. The dress was faded and threadbare and left little to the imagination, certainly not the fact that she wore nothing much beneath.
“Ready for your present, sugar?” she asked with a coy grin.
“It’s all I could think about the entire day,” he replied.
“Me, too,” she said, and started toward the hallway and the storage room.
As the writer followed, he was once again thinking that when it came to Acadia Le Duc, anything was possible.
She was a photographer by training, a good one. They’d met by chance two years before at a bar on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. There’d been this mutual, explosive, reckless attraction between them, the kind Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway had in that old movie Bonnie and Clyde. At least that was the way Sunday saw it.
Acadia was definitely crazy and bold enough to play Bonnie Parker, he thought, stopping in the storage room doorway to watch as she touched the computer genius’s shoulder just so.
Preston Elliot startled, ripped off the headphones, and whirled around, smiling. He was roughly Sunday’s size. He even sort of looked like Sunday at a quick glance.
“Huh-huh-hi, Acadia,” Preston said, stuttering painfully.
Acadia stroked the stutterer’s upper arm with the fingernails of one hand, played with her curly blond hair with the other. Preston looked mesmerized until she said, “This is my friend I told you about, sugar. He wants to see your invention at work.”
The stutterer spotted Sunday, sobered, nodded awkwardly, and acted like he wanted to speak, but didn’t. He turned to a laptop, gave it a command. The screens on the wall displayed what looked at first glance like a collage of images.
At center was a photograph Acadia had recently taken of Alex Cross’s house from across Fifth Street. Dotted lines traveled from various windows in the house out to pictures of Dr. Alex, his wife, his grandmother, his daughter, and his younger son. Set off to one side was a framed picture of Damon, Alex Cross’s older son, seventeen and a student at a prep school in western Massachusetts.
Digital lines went out from each portrait, linked to images of schools, police stations, churches, grocery stores, and various friends. There were also lines connecting each member of Cross’s family to calendar and clock icons.
“He uses mind-mapping software and an Xbox 360 with Kinect to make it work,” Acadia explained. “It’s interactive, Marcus. Just stand in front of the camera and point to what you want.”
Intrigued now, Sunday stepped in front of the screens and the Kinect camera. He pointed at the photograph of Cross. The screen instantly jumped to a virtual diary of the detective’s recent life, everything from photographs of Bree Stone, to his kids, to his white Chevy sedan and his best friend, John Sampson, and Sampson’s wife, Billie.
Sunday pointed at the calendar, and the screens showed a chronological account of everything he had seen Cross do in the prior month. He gestured at the photograph of the house, and the screen reverted to the original collage. Interested to see just how far they had taken the data, he gestured at the photograph of Damon, Cross’s older son.
The screen mutated yet again, showing a collage dominated by a color map of the campus at the prep school Damon attended, but there was little detail about the young man’s day-to-day life there.
Sunday decided he would have to beef up that portion of his research. Then he turned to Acadia and Preston. “It’s brilliant.”
“Mo-mo-more,” Preston stuttered.
“The best part, in fact,” Acadia said. “Put the helmet on, sugar.”