With Paul carrying me, it took a lot less time to reach the conference room. It was entered through two double doors that swung inward. A long table separated by comfortable chairs ran the length of the space. Heavy cloth drapes covered all but two of the floor-to-ceiling windows. There was no art on the walls, just a picture of the current president and the head of the FBI.
Lights overhead made the room brighter than daylight, bright enough to count your pores. I expected to see both Matt and Jake there, along with Mr. Levinger but what I found instead, were complete strangers that I had never seen before. Which was the definition of a complete stranger, after all. Duh.
Morton held out his hand and shook the hand of the tallest of the three men. He had slicked back hair, dark gray eyes and was almost as tall as Tempe—six foot three. He wore an expensive three-piece suit in dark blue with a red tie. The other men looked like cops—detectives. I looked everywhere but couldn’t see my friends. That made me angry. They had lied to me. All of them.
“Where is Matt Eachann? Jake Jacobs?” I demanded. “Where is my lawyer? What’s going on?”
“Have a seat, Cris,” the tall man said, and Paul let me down on the carpeted floor. I sank a good inch, it was so thick. Ugly color, though. Baby-shit brown.
“You told me that I'd get to see Matt and Jake,” I accused Morton. I rounded on him and he stepped back. As if he were afraid of me.
“He’s here, as well as Mr. Jacobs. We want to hear your side of the story first,” the SAIC said. He told the other agents they were dismissed and without a word of protest, all three left me behind. Closed the door behind them without a look or a word. I hissed at the door, so much for Paul’s empathy and good will.
Morton took a seat at the end of the table. In clear tones, he repeated the words of my outburst to the three men. No one told me their names, who they were associated with or answered any of my questions. I repeated that I wanted to see Matt, Jake and my lawyers. That I wouldn’t say one word until my demands were met. They ignored everything I said. I stood there for a full five minutes while they discussed what I had babbled out in distress. Asking questions of each other and comparing what I had said with what was in the vanilla folders.
I turned around in a high rage and hit the doors with my bandaged hands, ignoring the sudden burst of pain as the contact tore the tender new skin beneath the burns. The door did not budge. I forgot that it opened inward and my temper on it did nothing to enhance my escape. In fact, all that it did was signal to the people on the other side of the doors that something was wrong.
Both doors flew towards me, one knocking me down to the carpet. My cry of ‘oww’ was tinged with embarrassment as two more agents that I had seen before attempted to pick me up. Ryan Dennison was the only one that I knew.
“You hurt?” Agent Dennison from Albany asked. I didn’t remember the other’s name, only that he had been with Matt and Dennison when they had started tracking me.
“Have you seen Eachann or Jacobs?” I asked knowing that blood was seeping through my gloves. I felt nauseous.
“He’s just down the hall,” he said, looking at me in puzzlement.
I accepted his hand up but the instant I was on my feet, I ran for the door slipping past the agents as if they weren’t there and I was a greased pig. Now, pigs were hard enough to catch anyway – no neck, short legs with no knobs to anchor a hold of but grease him? That made it impossible to hold onto. Especially when they were screaming that high-pitched awful wail that sounded like an air-raid siren. Nobody came close to stopping me. I screamed out Matt’s name, but I needn’t have bothered, I knew where he was and with unerring instinct, I flew down the hallway to skid to a stop at the fourth door on the right. It was unmarked, a door like all the rest, next to all the others but I knew he was inside. It wasn’t locked, nor did it have one of those fancy electronic keypads.
Inside the small interview room was a table and three chairs. No windows, plain colored walls and two men who had turned in their seats when I had knocked on the door. They had been facing the third occupant. Above them blinked a red dot on a camera and signified that they were being recorded.
Matt, he looked exhausted. Unshaven. Gray. Wearing one of those paper jumpsuits and not his own clothes. When he saw me, he jumped up. The two agents with him were startled even more by his reaction than by my abrupt appearance in the doorway. Both men tried to stop me but not even a raging bear could have deterred my leap over the table.
I flew into Matt’s arms and hugged him so tightly that he grunted as I knocked the air out of him. I spoke to him in Gaelic and he replied in kind. By then, the entire group of agents, Morton, Dennison, Paul and the unknowns had reached us. Yelling at each other. It wasn’t long before the entire hallway was filled with people and uniformed cops milling around, each one trying to take charge of the melee. Some of them tried to separate me from Matt but neither of us was having that.
I screamed. One of those really shrill piercing hollers that made your ears ring and made you want to grit your teeth. Shrill enough to bring a grown man to his knees and a mother to the point of insanity. It had the same effect on this crowd.
“SHUDDUP!” I said into the sudden quiet. “I might be only twelve-years-old, gentlemen, but I've lived over two-hundred.” I paused and took a deep breath, indicating to Matt to put me down. He sat back in the chair and I sat on his lap, his arm around me and my hand in his. I leaned against his chest and was comforted to my soul.
“I killed my father. Not Matt or Jake or anyone else. Me. And I’d do it again if I had to. I shot him, but he was wearing a Kevlar vest. He came after me and was strangling me. I had a big knife I'd taken off one of his men and had it hidden under my coat. I was able to pull it out and hit him twice in the chest. It went into his heart. I killed Tempe Neige.”
I felt Matt stiffen in protest, but I hushed him with a hand on his cheek. He stared at my blood-stained gloves. “I’m only going to say this once, so you had better be recording this.”
I started in 1832 with Captain Lacey, Mr. Fitzsimmons and Crispin as they departed for the south with their wagon load of household goods and Federal gold. It took me over four hours to tell the whole story. After the first 60 minutes, Morton had one of the lesser agents bring chairs to the hallway and it was soon jammed with seated, enraptured FBI agents and cops.
After I was done speaking and my voice raw, they asked questions. Both Matt and I answered as honestly as we could. The first question that Morton asked was how I knew to defuse the bomb.
“I dunno. Tempe said it was on a mercury switch. I knew that it had to move to trigger the bomb. If it froze, it couldn’t move. CO2 is cold enough to frost metal. I hoped it was cold enough to freeze the switch. We were dead either way if I did nothing. So, I did something.”
Dennison asked Matt, “you say Neige’s body was lying in the hallway?”
“Just what Cris told me,” Matt added. “He said he stabbed him with a commando knife.”
“The Crime scene techs didn’t find a body in the hall. Just in the room in the basement set up as a firing range. Surprisingly, those bodies weren’t burned that badly. The concrete dividers protected them from the explosion and the flames. We did find a burned corpse in the garage. With broken tibias and jaw. Loose teeth next to the face.” Dennison avoided looking at me. I already knew that I had probably caused the man’s death, unable to run on broken legs from the explosion and fire.
Morton opened the folder that he had brought with him from the original conference room. He shuffled through the contents before spreading a series of photos on the table so that the images faced me. Crime scene photos.
It showed me the interior of the house, but it was hard to tell what I was looking at because it no longer resembled a house. Instead, it was more like the remnants of an F-4 tornado neighborhood. No walls remained standing of any part of the house, just blackened pieces of framing tumbled into the hole that was the cellar.
Next, he showed me photos of the man’s body in the remains of the garage. Not that there was enough left to call it a body. It looked like a creature out of a horror movie—limbs curled up in a boxer’s stance and legs drawn up into the chest. No fingers, no discernible face. Black with no skin left that wasn’t charcoaled and fractured.
I gagged. Puked onto the table even as Matt snatched me away to force my head down towards the floor. All that I could get up was a thin, foamy bile. My throat burned, and my stomach ached from the forceful heaves.
“Jesus, Morton!” he yelled. “What the hell is wrong with you? He’s a twelve- year-old kid! What are you trying to prove?”
“If his father is in here,” the SAIC said softly. “I’m sorry if it disturbs you, Cris. But we have to know if there’s any possibility of your father escaping the fire.”
“I don’t know!” I cried, wiping my mouth on my sleeve. “I thought he was dead!”
The big detective or agent turned to Matt. “Is it possible that Neige wasn’t dead? Or one of his surviving men removed his body?”
“I didn’t stay around to check for a pulse, Detective. There were two bombs in the house ready to go off,” Matt admitted. “When I got free of the restraints and checked on Crispin, he had been shot. I picked him up, got Jake moving and we ran for the escape tunnel in the panic room. Neige's body was just outside the hatch at the foot of the staircase. I didn’t see it or the blood pool myself, just a poor-quality image on the CCTV feeds. I took Crispin’s word for it that he was dead.”
“You took the word of a 12-year-old boy?” he asked derisively.
“Special agent? Detective?” Matt started.
“Supervisory-Agent-in-Charge Mark Childs,” he said and named the rest. Detectives from the Joint Task Force, from the Albany, Boston and NYC office of the FBI and NYC cops. “I’m the head of the NYC office. Paul Roads and SAIC Morton’s boss.”
“Crispin has lots of experience with death and bodies. He did live in the 1800’s. Life was cheap, and death was sudden,” Matt defended.
“You call him Crispin.”
“That’s because I am Crispin,” I said. “I’m more Crispin than I am Cris Snow. At least, my memories are.”
“Is there any place that your – Neige would go for help or to hide?” Morton interrupted.
“Maybe if he was in Louisiana. Up here, I don’t know.”
“Well,” Supervisory Agent Childs said, “we have some good news for you. We’ve found your grandfather. Arlen DeAngelis.”
I stared at him. I didn’t have a grandfather. “My grandfather? Are you sure? Why didn’t this...grandfather come forward before? Like two years ago when I needed one? My mom’s dad or Tempe’s father? I didn’t think he had any relatives. Except for Elmira. And she’s dead.”
“The LBI found her body in the swamp near her home,” Morton added. “Neige is wanted in connection with her murder. We also found a male skeleton near hers.”
“My mom said that his father disappeared when he was young. He killed his own dad, too. Like father, like son,” I said bitterly. Matt rounded on me.
“You are nothing like him, Crispin. Nothing!”
“He’s a sergeant in the State Troopers, out of Unadilla, NY,” Childs said, ignoring the interruptions. “He told us that he didn’t know that Violet Smith was Violet Snow or that she was his daughter. Her real name was Ariadne DeAngelis. Once the lab had the DNA results, they checked it against CODIS, and his name came up. Then, he came forward with a legal claim.
“He said his daughter and he were estranged. She became pregnant at 15 and ran away when he wanted her to abort the pregnancy. He lost track of her for twenty years.”
“He wanted to abort me?”
“Not you, Cris. That baby never came to term, she miscarried. From what your grandfather could backtrack, she had hitch-hiked to the south, Florida, Louisiana and found work. Supported herself by low-paying jobs and met your father in New Orleans. They married. She tried to contact her father when she was pregnant with you, but he refused to return her calls. When he finally did make contact, she had moved, left no contact information and was going by the Violet name. Neige wouldn’t tell Sergeant Delaney where you had moved to or what had happened. In fact, he didn’t know you had been born.
“He said he recognized you from your eyes. They're just like hers.”
“I never met him. I bet he just wants the Trust Fund,” I snapped. “Why would he come out now? Where was he when I needed him? My mom must have left him for a reason. Maybe he beat her like...” I stopped before I could descend into another breakdown.
“It doesn’t matter, Cris,” Childs shrugged. “He’s your legal next-of-kin. Your only other option is to go into foster care.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not. I can and will apply to be an emancipated minor. So, once more, where is my lawyer?”
Childs sighed. “He’s waiting in the other conference room. Follow me.”
He stood up. All of us stood and we trooped after him down the hall but in the opposite direction from the original room where he had taken us. Jason Levinger and another man were seated at a large table talking animatedly to each other and ignoring the bored agent that was babysitting.
They both jumped to their feet when Morton opened the door and rushed for Matt and then saw me.
“Tell me that you didn’t say anything,” Matt’s brother-in-law begged.
“Doesn’t matter if we did,” I said squeezing out from between the two. “They didn’t read me my rights, nor did I have a legally responsible adult with me. Whatever I said is inadmissible anyway. And all the evidence burned up in the fire.”
Morton, Levinger and Childs stared at me with their mouths hanging slack.
“Furthermore, you’re holding Matt and Jake on kidnapping charges that are bogus. I went with them voluntarily.
“Mr. Levinger, we’re ready to leave now.” I stared steadfast at the FBI agents and detectives.
“Your grandfather has custody of you,” Childs returned.
Jason stepped forward, handing over papers to the SAIC. “Request for Cris Snow, aka Cris Neige to become an emancipated minor, signed by Judge Orwell and witnessed by ADA Martin Clement.”
Childs took the papers and scanned them swiftly, noting that I had yet to sign them.
“Pen?” I asked Jason and he held out a gold Cross, pointing where I was to sign and initial.
“A formality,” he added. “The papers are already filed in court.”
“It’s good to have friends in high places,” Matt said flatly. He picked up my hand. “You ready to go home, Cris?”
I nodded. Stepped aside and waited until one of them deigned to escort us to the lobby. Jake was waiting there with another expensively dressed, high-priced lawyer. The crowd followed us and stood there in grim silence as Mr. Levinger took charge. A young man met him, handing over three heavy winter coats. One for Matt, Jake and me. Matt helped me into it, my arm was still sore.
On the way out the door, I saw the short, stocky man dressed in gray state trooper uniform, but I ignored him. He watched me with hot, angry eyes.