She shook herself loose. “You figure it out. You are the detective.” Then she walked away and didn't look back. That angry face of hers and the mystery of her anger toward me followed me all the way home.

Chapter 124

THE NEXT TWELVE hours of the trip passed very slowly, but finally I arrived in Washington. I wasn't able to reach Nana to tell her I was home. So I just grabbed a taxi waiting at Reagan International and headed to Fifth Street.

It was a little past nine and the nighttime traffic was heavy, but I was glad to be in DC again. Sometimes it feels that way when I come home after a long, hard trip, and this time certainly qualified. I couldn't wait to be in my own house, my own bed.

Once I was in the cab, I got lost in a kind of jet-lagged reverie.

No one had any idea about the carnage and suffering until they actually visited parts of Nigeria, Sudan, Sierra Leone-and there were no easy answers or solutions either. I didn't believe that the violence I had seen came from regular people being evil. But those at the top were, at least some of them.

And then there were psychopaths on the loose, like the Tiger and the other killers for hire, the wild boys. The fact that terrible conditions might have made them killers hardly seemed to matter.

The irony that kept jabbing at me was that I'd spent the last dozen years chasing murderers in the States, and it seemed like child's play now, nothing compared with what I'd seen in the past weeks.

I was shaken out of my reverie when the cab slid over to the side of the road. What was wrong now? I was home, and still misfortune followed me? What-aflat tire?

The driver peered back and nervously announced, “Engine trouble. I am sorry. Very sorry.” Then he pulled a gun and yelled, “Traitor! Die!”

Chapter 125

SOMEBODY WAS STUBBORNLY ringing the front-door bell at the Cross house. Ringing it again and again and again.

Nana was in Ali's bedroom, putting him down the way he liked her to, lying in bed next to him until the sweet boy drifted off to sleep as she whispered the words of a favorite story.

Tonight the book was Ralph S. Mouse, and Ali wouldn't stop giggling at every page, often a couple of times on the same page, saying, “Read it again, Nana. Read it again.”

Nana waited patiently for Jannie to get the front door. But it rang again, and then again. Persistent and rude and maddening. Jannie had been making a cake in the kitchen. Where was that girl? Why didn't she answer the door?

“Now who can it be?” Nana mumbled as she pushed herself up and out of Ali's bed. “I'll be right back, Ali--Janelle, you are trying my patience, and that's not a good idea.”