CHAPTER 7.

IT'S NAOMI. Scootchie is missing, Alex.

We held the most intense Cross family emergency conference in our kitchen, where they'vealways been held. Nana made more coffee, and also herbal tea for herself. I put the kids tobed first. Then I cracked opened a bottle of Black Jack and poured stiff drinks of whiskey allaround.

I learned that my twenty-two-year-old niece had been missing in North Carolina for four days.

The police down there had waited that long to contact our family in Washington. As apoliceman, I found that hard to understand. Two days was pretty standard in missing-personcases. Four days made no sense.

Naomi Cross was a law student at Duke University. She'd made Law Review and was near the topof her class. She was the pride of everyone in our family, including myself. We had a nicknamefor her that went back to when she was three or four years old. Scootchie. She always used to“scootch” up close to everybody when she was little. She loved to “scootch,” and hug, and behugged. After my brother Aaron died, I helped Cilia to raise her. It wasn't hard she wasalways sweet and funny, cooperative, and so very smart.

Scootchie was missing. In North Carolina. Four days now.

“I talked to a detective named Ruskin,” Sampson told the group in the kitchen. He was tryingnot to act like a street cop, but he couldn't help it. He was on the case now. Flat-faced andserious. The Sampson stare.

"Detective Ruskin sounded knowledgeable about Naomi's disappearance.

Seemed like a straight-ahead cop on the phone. Something strange, though. Told me that a law-school friend of Naomi's reported her missing. Her name's Mary Ellen Klouk."

I had met Naomi's friend. She was a future lawyer, from Garden City, Long Island. Naomi hadbrought Mary Ellen home to Washington a couple of times. We'd gone to hear Handel's Messiahtogether one Christmas at the Kennedy Center.