Hope to Die Read online

  “Do you think he’ll let one of them go?” Ava asked, shaking me from my conflicted thoughts.

  “We can hope so,” I said. “But I’m not counting on it.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Gloria Jones asked. “Just sit here and wait to see if a member of your family shows up somewhere?”

  “Ball’s in Mulch’s court,” her father said. “Not much else he can do.”

  I thought about that a few moments and then shook my head. “I think I’ll go to the Berkshires, try to figure out how Damon was taken.”

  “That’s a ten-hour drive, at least,” Gloria Jones said.

  “I’ll fly out of Pittsburgh, go to Albany,” I said. “His classmates and teachers should be returning today from their Easter break. Classes start tomorrow.”

  I knew it was a weak angle, but I got to my feet anyway; it was the only one I could see at the moment. Looking over at Ava, I said, “You still in?”

  She nodded, but then bit her lip. “Could I ask Mr. Jones one more thing before we leave?”

  The old detective’s eyes were closed; his breathing was shallow, and he looked so frail, he put me in mind of a baby bird that had fallen from the nest.

  “Dad?” his daughter said in mild alarm, getting up from her chair.

  “I haven’t given up the ghost yet, Gloria,” her father said with his eyes still shut. “What can I do for you, young lady?”

  Ava asked, “Did you ever track down Mulch’s mother?”

  Jones’s eyes opened and he looked at her, puzzled. “Why?”

  Ava shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he contacted her? I mean, Little Boar abused her too. She left because of that, right?”

  The old detective cocked his head in a way that indicated he’d never seen that angle, and then he said, “You’ve got a real future in this game, you know that?”

  Ava flushed, said, “It just made sense to me.”

  “Makes sense to me too, now that you mention it,” Jones croaked. “And the answer to your question is no, I did not try to track down Lydia Mulch.”

  Ava looked at me, said, “Maybe we should do that instead?”

  “It’s a good thought,” I said. “No doubt. But the trail on Mulch’s mother is thirty years cold. Damon disappeared from school less than nine days ago.”

  Ava appeared crestfallen until Gloria Jones said, “Ava, how about you stay here with me awhile and we try to find Lydia Mulch together?”

  Ava’s forehead wrinkled, and I could see she was intrigued by the idea but didn’t want to leave me.

  “Do it,” I said to Ava. “You’ll still be helping even if you’re not with me.”

  She paused, said, “You’ll come find me when it’s all over?” I walked over and hugged her, saying, “Of course I’ll come find you, Ava. You’re family. Maybe the last family I’ve got.”

  CHAPTER

  46

  AROUND THREE THAT SUNDAY afternoon, in the community of Arbutus, a suburb of Baltimore, Tess Aaliyah parked on Francis Street in front of the modest bungalow where she’d grown up. The blue and white paint was fresh. The lawn looked like it had been cut that morning. Her late mother’s flower beds were tended. And the dogwoods and the first azaleas were in bloom.

  At least Dad’s keeping the place up, Aaliyah thought, though she remained upset that he had not answered any of her phone calls last night or this morning, which was what had prompted this visit.

  Aaliyah got out of the car. But before she started toward the house, she checked the bandage that wrapped her throbbing right forearm, looking for blood or something worse, a yellow or green discharge.

  Yellow or green discharge?

  Aaliyah shuddered at the thought.

  On a day-to-day basis, not much bothered the detective. But the idea that she might have gotten an infection from Claude Harrow’s Rottweiler had nagged at her ever since the emergency room physician mentioned the possibility. The nurses had stuck her with more needles than she cared to remember, and she’d been given a powerful antibiotic. Still, you never knew what might be festering in a neo-Nazi dog’s mouth.

  To her relief, except for a slight dark red discoloration—normal seepage—the bandages looked fine. Fortunately, it turned out that her arm wasn’t broken. Even the wounds on her face weren’t all that bad—mostly just superficial abrasions.

  She crossed the lawn diagonally, heading toward the side door to the kitchen. Her dad’s Chevy Tahoe was parked in the driveway. His surf-casting rods were in the ski carrier he used to transport them to the beach.

  That’s where he’d been. Fishing again. He’d probably been out all night.

  Sighing with relief, she climbed the stoop, and she was reaching out with her good arm to knock when she heard a woman chuckle.

  “Bernie, you’re awful,” she said, and chuckled again.

  “I swear, Christine,” Aaliyah heard her father reply. Then he chuckled.

  For a moment, the detective was so stunned she didn’t know what to do. She stopped herself from knocking.

  Christine?

  Aaliyah felt a pit open up in her stomach. Her mother had been dead fourteen months. Christine?

  She’d known the day would come, of course, when her father would move on, find someone else to spend his life with. He was only in his late sixties. It made sense. But she’d had no inkling of … Christine?

  “Oh, hello,” said the woman, startling Aaliyah.

  She hadn’t heard Christine walking over, but there she was on the other side of the screen door, a very tall and very pretty redhead in jeans, a denim shirt, and pearls. Aaliyah guessed she was somewhere in her fifties, maybe early sixties, if she’d had work done.

  “I’m looking for my dad?” Aaliyah said.

  The woman let out a quiet shriek of pleasure. “You’re Tess?”

  “That’s me.”

  She grinned widely, opened the door, and extended her hand, saying, “What a wonderful surprise. I’m Christine Prince. Your father’s been telling me so much about you.”

  “Has he, now?” Aaliyah asked.

  “You’re all he talks about,” she said, and chuckled that chuckle.

  “Tess?” her father said, coming up behind Christine Prince, limping slightly from the wound that had ended his career.

  Seeing the rods on the car, she’d expected to find her father in his fishing clothes: the canvas pants, the windbreaker, and that goofy hat he wore with all the lures on it. But he had on a starched white shirt, creased khakis, and his shoes were shined.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said. “I was just in the neighborhood and—”

  “What the hell happened to your arm and your face?”

  “Dog bites.”

  “What? How come you didn’t call me?”

  “I did,” she said. “About seventeen times last night and this morning.”

  Bernie Aaliyah seemed chagrined. He looked over at Christine Prince before saying, “That damn smartphone’s the stupidest gadget I’ve ever owned.”

  “Right,” Aaliyah said, and she glanced at Christine Prince, who caught her skepticism right away.

  “Bernie,” she said. “I just realized I forgot my purse at the house. Pick me up in, say, an hour?”

  Aaliyah’s father hesitated and then said, “Sure. That’ll do.”

  “It was so nice meeting you,” Christine Prince said.

  “You too,” Aaliyah said, hearing the lack of conviction in her voice.

  The older woman smiled anyway, nodded, and then walked past her and down the stoop. The detective stepped inside, said, “She seems nice.”

  “She is nice,” her dad growled, turning away and walking into the kitchen. “She lives down the street in the Evanses’ old house. Lost her husband in a car crash two years ago. We met three weeks ago, out walking.”

  “So you an item?”

  He turned, frowning. “An item? Nah. She’s just … I dunno. Nice. Funny.”

  “And pretty.”

  “You got a pro
blem with that, young lady?”

  She shrugged. “I guess I would have expected you to mention her. But then again, you don’t answer your phone these days.”

  He sighed, said, “I should have called you back. But the fish were on yesterday, and …”

  “You had a dinner date,” Aaliyah said. “I get it.”

  “It’s not like that,” he said flatly. Then he changed the subject. “Saw you’re working that Cross case. Good man, Cross. Wicked thing he’s going through.”

  Aaliyah hesitated, and then realized it might be better to talk shop than Christine Prince. At least for the time being.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” she said.

  “Guess you better tell me all about it, then,” he replied. “Coffee?”

  “I’d love some, Dad.”

  CHAPTER

  47

  WHILE HER FATHER BREWED a pot, Aaliyah told him about the mysterious Thierry Mulch, about the complex and highly orchestrated kidnapping of Cross’s family, about the condition of the bodies dumped at Cross’s house, even about the fact that Bree Stone had been miraculously pregnant at the time of her death.

  “Jesus,” her father said, shaking his head. “Jesus, that’s tragic.”

  She agreed and went on, describing the scene at Claude Harrow’s place, focusing on the burned shack, the dog, and those ovals of drying skin.

  “They a solid match to Cross’s wife and kid?”

  “Still waiting for the initial results from the FBI lab, but we’re working under that assumption.”

  Before taking the rifle slug that shattered his pelvis six years before, Bernie Aaliyah had been one of the best homicide detectives in Baltimore. He’d basically taught her everything she knew about investigative work. So she was interested to hear his take.

  He thought about it a few moments, poured her a cup of coffee, and then said, “Obviously, if the skin matches, Harrow’s your killer, but unless he’s the dumbest dick on the face of the earth, he’s not this Mulch character.”

  His daughter nodded. “I don’t think anyone plays with gas in front of an open woodstove. Not even raving meth heads.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “So this Mulch, he kills Harrow after Harrow kills Cross’s wife and son for him?”

  “Looks that way from where I’m standing.”

  “Me too,” he replied. “What does Cross think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Last the FBI told me, he’d bought gas in Fairmont, West Virginia. Stayed in a motel there last night too.”

  “What’s he doing in Fairmont?”

  “He’s not talking to us. They took him off the investigation.”

  “That’s not a good thing.”

  “I’m aware of that, Dad.”

  “Just saying,” he replied, and then got a puzzled look on his face.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Probably nothing,” he replied. “But your mom had fibroids removed, long before the cancer.”

  “Like twenty-five years ago,” she replied. “I remember.”

  He nodded. “It’s why we couldn’t have any more kids.”

  “And?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” he said. “Medical advances and all that. But what are the odds of Cross’s wife getting pregnant if she had the same kind of scarring as your mom?”

  His daughter shrugged again. “Like I said, a tragic miracle.”

  They talked some more, and then Aaliyah glanced at the clock. “I should be going. And you’ve got your date to pick up.”

  Aaliyah almost laughed when her father flushed and said, “It’s not a date.”

  “What is it, then?”

  He struggled, and then said, “We’re just two people who live alone going down to the harbor for a walk and some dinner.”

  The detective hesitated, then stood and planted a kiss on his cheek. “Whatever it is, she seems nice. I should have been nicer to her. Tell her I’m sorry for being a bitch.”

  “You weren’t a bitch.”

  “Yes, Dad, I was.”

  They hugged and he promised to return her calls promptly in the future. She went to her car, and as she drove off she saw him hurrying to get the fishing poles off the Chevy.

  “It’s a date,” she said, and she smiled wistfully.

  Then she realized it had been months since she’d had a proper date.

  But rather than dwell on the state of her own nonexistent love life, Aaliyah got back on 95 and drove, once again going through the facts of the case as she knew them. As she passed the exit for Greenbelt, her phone rang. John Sampson.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “On my way in,” she said.

  “Just talked to Mahoney. FBI lab made a preliminary match on the skin samples,” he said. “They came from the same bodies.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But better to know.”

  “I’ll be there in forty minutes, tops.”

  “See you then.”

  “Wait a second,” she blurted. “Could you transfer me to the ME’s office? Rodriguez? She did the autopsies.”

  He grunted and she heard him punching in numbers and then a ringing. Aaliyah had expected the pathologist’s voice mail, but there was a click.

  “Amy Rodriguez.”

  “This is Tess Aaliyah.”

  “Detective,” Rodriguez said. “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” Aaliyah said. “But I was just wondering what the odds were of Bree Stone getting pregnant despite the uterine scarring?”

  There was a long pause before the pathologist replied and flipped everything about the case right on its head.

  CHAPTER

  48

  I REACHED THE KRAFT SCHOOL in the Berkshires around eight thirty that evening, pulled up to the gate and showed my ID to a security guard, who recognized my name.

  “Everyone’s in shock over your son’s murder,” she said sadly. “I didn’t know him, but I knew who he was, always happy, always smiling. I’m so very sorry for your loss, sir, and I’m praying for Damon’s soul. And your wife’s.”

  Every word burned into my heart and brought new stinging to my eyes. “Thank you, I appreciate that. I really do. Can you tell me where I can find the new headmaster, Mr. Pelham?”

  “I’d try his office in the administration building, Wiggs Hall,” the guard said. “If he’s not there, he’s in the chapel.”

  I thanked her again, wiped my eyes with my sleeve, and drove into the campus, dreading the fact that I would have to go into Damon’s room before the night was over. Steeling myself, I parked in the visitors’ lot, got out of the car I’d rented at the Albany Airport, and headed up the walkway, past the admissions building, where Damon had worked as a tour guide. More than two hundred kids attended Kraft, and it was an unseasonably warm spring night, but I didn’t see a single student around.

  Wiggs Hall was beyond admissions, a big stone building covered in ivy. The front door was unlocked, and I went inside, smelled wood polish and then cigarette smoke. The door to the headmaster’s suite was ajar. I knocked lightly and pushed it open, finding the outer office lit but empty.

  Then I heard a man’s refined New England–accented voice coming through an open doorway on the other side of the headmaster’s secretary’s desk.

  “I’ve only just returned from St. Kitts, Mr. Baldwin, and I’m still getting up to speed on the circumstances, but I can state unequivocally that if that was Damon Cross, his murder had nothing to do with Kraft,” he said. “He evidently lived in a very rough part of DC, where these senseless tragedies are commonplace.”

  I stood there forcing myself to take deeper and deeper breaths while he paused to listen.

  Then he went on, said, “I understand it’s a potential public-relations nightmare, Mr. Baldwin, but again, I can’t control the home lives of students, especially those who come up here on athletic scholarships from
crime-ridden ghettos. Kraft’s reputation will be fine, I assure you, and I’ll be sending a personal letter about the situation to all the parents in the next hour.”

  There was another pause, and I was wondering just how callous and self-serving the discussion was going to get before I heard him tell Mr. Baldwin that he would call with an update in the morning. Then he hung up.

  I walked across the carpet and looked into the office to see a tanned, sandy-haired man wearing a blue polo shirt, collar up. He was seated, turned away from me, facing a computer screen. I’d met the previous headmaster when Damon transferred to the school two years before, but not Charles Pelham IV, who’d taken over last September.

  I rapped twice on the doorjamb, and Mr. Pelham started, pivoted in his chair, and started again when he saw me standing there.

  “Y-yes?” he stammered. “Who are you?”

  Sensing the headmaster wasn’t used to having a strange African American man of my size appear in his office unannounced, I said, “I’m Damon Cross’s father.”

  Pelham stiffened, and then stood and came around the desk. “Mr. Cross. Dr. Cross. I’m so very sorry for your loss.”

  He was a small man with tennis-player arms. I shook his strong hand without enthusiasm and said, “Thank you.”

  “We can’t believe it,” he said. “I know I can’t. I … I only just heard.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Well,” the headmaster said, taking a step back. “How can I—”

  “Help?” I said. “I’d like to start by talking to some of Damon’s friends, whoever might have seen him last.”

  “Well,” the headmaster said uncomfortably, “I’m sure that can be arranged. I’d have to contact the parents first, of course.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He headed for his desk, saying, “To get their permission.”

  “For what?”

  “To talk to you,” Pelham said, seeming happier to have a desk between us. “This has evidently been very upsetting to many of the students and their parents, and I’d want to make sure I had their okay before I …”