“Great job!” Mury called when she disappeared over the top.
Ali and I clapped and whistled, and unseen high above us, Jannie let loose a scream of triumph.
“I’m on now!” Ali said.
My son was less sure as he climbed, but every time he stalled and tried to figure out his next move, Mury would shout up some encouragement or instruction. Twenty minutes after he began, Ali disappeared over the top.
“I am the human fly!” I heard him shout.
Mury laughed. “Your kid’s a piece of work, Dr. Cross.”
“Call me Alex, and he is that.” I chuckled. “He never ceases to amaze me.”
“Ready, Alex?”
My stomach did a little flip-flop, I’ll admit it. Heights aren’t my thing, but once I commit to something, I commit.
“As I’ll ever be,” I said, going to the rope.
Mury helped rig me. As I climbed, I’d work the jumar on the main line and the Prusik knot on the rope beside it. Like the mechanical device, the knot allowed a rope to pass through only in one direction. Any weight on the safety rope attached to my harness, and the knot would cause it to cinch tight. In the unlikely failure of the jumar, the Prusik would save me a long and potentially fatal fall.
“Enjoy yourself, Doc,” Mury said. “On belay!”
“On rope!” I called back. “Climbing.”
I made it to the top, and I wish I could say it was through a series of well-calculated and smoothly executed moves, but it wasn’t. My climb was tentative and clunky, and I was immediately aware that my hip and shoulder joints weren’t as loose as they needed to be.
“You’re killing it,” Mury called to me when I’d gotten up twenty feet.
“Doesn’t feel like it.”
“What do you need?”
“How about a crash course in yoga?” I said, sweat pouring off me.
“Look for hand- and footholds in your range of motion,” he said. “Remember, not everyone climbs the exact same route. This is about you adapting to the wall.”
“C’mon, Dad!” Ali called.
“You got this!” Jannie cried.
I looked up to see them still some three stories above me, peering over the edge of the cliff. They had such joyous grins on their faces that I was inspired to keep climbing, slow and steady, trying to do everything by the book.
At forty feet, I said, “My hands are cramping. Gimme a second to rest.”
“Use your cow’s-tail,” Mury said. “Tie into that wall nut on your right.”
I reached around, grabbed the short rope with a carabiner dangling off my right hip, and clipped it to the loop of steel linked to a block of steel jammed into a crack in the cliff. Now supported by three lines, I could relax a minute and stretch my fingers and knead my palms.
“How’s the view?” Mury said.
I looked over my shoulder at the lower flanks of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a perfect sea of midsummer green shimmering in the morning light behind and below me. It was kind of thrilling, I decided, to be dangling off the side of a cliff for no reason, enjoying the beauty of nature. I smiled, looked down, and said, “Okay, I’m starting to get the attraction of this.”
Our instructor threw me a thumbs-up, said, “I told you — it’s an acquired taste and then an addiction.”
I doubted the latter would be the case, but I enjoyed the rest of the climb, finding myself thinking more about the mechanics of it than the dangers. A half an hour after I left the ground, Mury’s assistant, Carley Jo Warner, helped me up over the edge.
“Well done,” she said.
“I almost dislocated my hip a few times, but thanks,” I said, gasping. I sat still as she disconnected me from the ropes. When she was done, I lay down on my back with a silly grin on my face.
“Wasn’t that great?” Ali said, giving me a high five.
“Not at first,” I said. “But yes, eventually it was fun.”
“I can take you to a yoga class, Dad,” Jannie said.
“I’m not exactly built to be a human pretzel, but I’ll think about it.”
Before either of them could reply, my cell phone rang, which surprised me, as we’d had no service at the bottom of the cliff.
I got it out of my shirt pocket and saw my wife, Bree Stone, was calling from her DC Metro Police phone. Bree was chief of detectives and had been under a lot of stress lately.
There’d been a string of unsolved rapes and murders in the DC area, and in just the past week, in two separate incidents, two vocal and well-connected lobbyists had been shot at in Georgetown. To make it worse, there was a new commissioner of police, and everyone’s job, including Bree’s, was on the line.
I got to my feet and answered on the third ring. “Human fly here.”
Bree said, “We’ve got a double homicide, and I want you involved.”
“Why?”
“You know both victims,” she said, and she gave me their names and location.
I felt my stomach lurch and my knees wobble in disbelief and grief. In my mind, I saw them both as I’d last seen them, felt their loss like a blow to the head.
“I’m sorry, Alex.”
“Thanks. I’ll use the bubble and be there in two hours, tops.”
“I won’t be there. Another meeting with the commissioner.”
“Hang tough. You’re still the woman for the job.”
“We’ll see,” she said, and she hung up.
I looked at my kids. “Sorry, guys.”
“It’s okay,” Jannie said. “We’ve had three and a half days and lots of fun.” Ali nodded, and somehow their understanding made me feel even worse about cutting our time short.
“We will be back,” I promised, then I looked at Mury, who’d just reached the top. “Can you teach us how to do screaming rappels? We have to go.”
“Screamers.” Mury smiled. “I can do that.”
CHAPTER 5
THE FEELING OF LEANING AWAY from the cliff, pushing off the rock face, releasing my grip on the rappelling rack, falling a good fifteen feet before my boots hit the wall, then starting the whole process over again was still with me when I got out of my car and headed up the block toward the police lines.
It was July in DC, but it was strangely cool, low seventies, low humidity, with a brisk breeze. The school came into view, shut and empty for the summer. Jannie went to Harrison, and when I saw the circus of media satellite trucks around the school grounds, it made the scene that much more upsetting.
I skirted the trucks and pushed my way through the onlookers, hearing but trying to ignore the vicious gossip and speculation already spreading about the victims and the heinous crime.
In the past I had been both an FBI agent and a DC Metro Homicide detective, and now I was a consultant for both agencies. I showed my identification to the uniformed officer restricting entry to the crime scene, and he let me duck under the tape.
I made it fifteen yards before an FBI agent asked me for my ID. I gave him my FBI contractor’s badge, and he waved me through. John Sampson, my best friend and former partner at DC Homicide, came around the corner.
“FBI?” I said.
“Given the victims, not surprising.”