Cross My Heart ac-21 Read online

  But my partner discovered nothing concrete to explain Carney’s insane behavior. Then again, that’s why they’re called crazy.

  You have to think a little loony to talk with someone who is criminally insane, at least if you want to gain some real insight into his deep personality. Wishing to God I didn’t have a headache, I tried to get myself to that crazy place, to remember everything I’d heard in the root cellar before he hit me, and then to imagine the subtext of that bizarre conversation.

  I could see some of it, but there were big holes I couldn’t explain.

  “John,” I said.

  “Alex?” Sampson said.

  “Call Mahoney and ask him to find out why Carney was turned down for marine recon after passing the physical requirements.”

  He nodded. “I have some marine friends at the Pentagon who might be able to help, too.”

  “Alex?” Dr. Nelson said, looking out at us from a doorway. “Patient is in room two on the right.”

  “You observing?” I asked, going by him.

  “We all are. By video feed in my office.”

  “Good luck, baby,” Bree said. Despite the wounds and the broken ribs, she’d refused anything more than Advil. It showed in the way she moved and spoke, stiff and slow.

  I paused, took a deep breath, understood that this might be a bumpy ride, and went in to face Carney. He was restrained on the bed, looking off into space, when I took a seat opposite him. High behind me a camera rolled.

  Studying the young officer a moment there in the bright light, hairless, baby-faced, I could see how with the right makeup and clothes he’d look feminine enough to fool another woman even at close quarters.

  “Officer Carney,” I began.

  He looked over at me with disdain, said, “Wrong name.”

  “Okay,” I replied. “Who am I talking to?”

  Carney laughed, said, “Bang. Bang. As if you don’t know.”

  Then I got it and said, “Oh, hello, Kevin.”

  Carney smiled, nodded, said, “See, I told ’em you’d know who I was.”

  CHAPTER 84

  I cleared my throat, said, “Told who? Kenny-Two? Kelli? Your brother and sister?”

  “Who else? Officer Goody Two-Shoes?” Carney asked agreeably, then paused and gave me a suspicious look. “Why you asking about Kelli and Junior? Pay attention. You talking to me now, asshole!”

  I held up my palms to him, said, “Just trying to understand the—”

  Carney’s agitated face became a sea of minor tics and palsies. His eyes quivered, got glassy, and then fluttered up toward their sockets, while his head arched and the muscles in his neck strained, making his veins bulge. For a second, fearing that he was going into an epileptic fit, I almost went to him.

  But as suddenly as the attack had come on, in less than five seconds, Carney’s neck relaxed and his head lolled. He blinked lazily at me and then said in that raspy southern feminine voice I’d heard back inside the root cellar: “You’ll have to excuse Kevin. My baby brother’s faculties just aren’t quite right.”

  I studied Carney, wondering whether this was an act or a genuine case of multiple personalities. If it was an act, it was a good one, because my experience and research have shown that people with real multiple personality disorder usually “switch” from one to another quite rapidly. The fluttering eyes and the facial tics fit as well. But the arching of his neck, I’d never seen before. In any case, I decided to indulge him.

  “Well, Kelli,” I said, “when you consider what Kevin did in the massage parlor and the brothel, I’d tend to agree with you.”

  Carney shook his head, added pity to Kelli’s voice, and said, “Horrible thing what war can do to a young man, isn’t it? The violence just twists them all up inside, spits them out. Makes you kind of understand when they come home and go off like that, you know, just killing everything that moves?”

  The fit took him again, and when he rolled his head forward the second time, he wore a tough, knowing expression.

  “Don’t listen to that psychobabble crap,” he said in a voice much closer to his own. “Kevin likes to kill, pure and simple. Always has. Always will. And Kelli’s a bit delusional, always out to save someone if I let her.”

  “Big brother Kenny-Two?” I asked.

  “In the flesh,” Carney replied, coughed, and then his left eye squinted as if it pained him.

  “Your brother and sister look up to you,” I said.

  “They better look up to the first one out the chute,” he said, chuckled, and then his left eye squinted in pain again.

  “You hurting?”

  “Lingering migraines,” he said. “We all get ’em. Curse of the Carneys.”

  Thinking back to what I’d heard in the root cellar, and what Sampson had dug up, I hesitated fifteen, maybe twenty seconds before saying, “So tell me about the IED that got you in Afghanistan.”

  He squinted again, but this time as if he considered me a fool, and said, “How the Christ should I know? Ask the man in charge. He was there, not me.”

  Before I could reply to that, Carney’s face sagged, his eyes drifted and shut. His head rocked forward and then up like the head of a passenger drowsing on a plane.

  Eyes open and incredulous, as if he’d been shaken from a deep sleep, he looked at me as if I were part of a lingering dream and then took in the bare room, the restraints, the hospital gown, and the bandages on his shoulder and wrist.

  He seemed to startle fully awake then, acting bewildered and then agitated, struggling against the restraints for several seconds before succumbing to the pain of his wounds, turning very frightened and fixing his confused gaze on me.

  “Detective Cross?” the young officer said. “Where am I, sir? What have I done to deserve this?”

  CHAPTER 85

  Seeing how unhinged Officer Carney was acting, the psychologist in me wanted to believe that he might have no idea of the things he had done. But the detective in me was much more skeptical.

  “You saying you don’t know why you’re here, Officer?”

  “Where am I, sir?” Carney asked again.

  “Psych ward, St. Elizabeths Hospital.”

  “Psych?” he said, puzzled again. “No, that’s not … No, I’m … I’m good. I, I checked out. I’m good. I’m good.” He started to cry and then looked at me again. “They said I was good.”

  “Who said you were good?”

  “Naval doctors. VA doctors. They cleared me years ago, said I was fine. No problems with the baseline. None.”

  “You mean a concussion baseline?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Tell me about the IED in Afghanistan.”

  “But what have I done, sir?”

  “We’ll get to that later, Officer. Where was that bomb?”

  On a road southwest of Kandahar, deep in Helmand Province nine months into his tour of duty, Corporal Carney was riding as a top gunner in an armored car leading a line of trucks carrying supplies for several forward bases. The IED had been buried in the shoulder of the dirt road and detonated as he passed.

  “Nothing hit me,” Carney remembered. “No shrapnel or powder residue, just the explosive force, the waves of it going through my head. It was like I was there, alert, scoping for Taliban — hoorah — and then I wasn’t. Woke up like thirty hours later on a medevac flight to Ramstein with a piece of my skull riding beside me.”

  Doctors told Carney he’d been bleeding from his nose and ears, and that he’d sustained a moderate closed-head brain injury. They’d removed the piece of skull to relieve pressure. After an initial recovery and second surgery to reattach the skull section in Germany, he was shipped on to the Balboa Naval Medical Center in San Diego, where he underwent extensive therapy.

  “Five months and they said I was good to go,” Carney said. “And I was. Went back to my unit, and was crushing PT in like a month.”

  “But you tried out for Force Recon and were denied?”

  “Yes, sir.
”

  “They give you a reason?”

  “Given my medical history, Detective, they said they did not want to chance it.”

  “Make you angry? Sad?”

  “Both,” Carney admitted. “But I was only twenty-three. I could see an entire life out there before me. Still do. Please, Detective Cross, what did I do to get me put in here?”

  It did me no good to hold back any longer, so I told him.

  Carney became nauseated and vomited. “No,” he moaned. “No, I couldn’t. I would never do …” He looked up at me in abject despair. “Oh, my God, sir, what kind of monster have I become?”

  CHAPTER 86

  Carney was inconsolable and began to struggle wildly. There was a knock on the door. Two nurses rushed in and started to work to calm him down before he could tear his wounds open or rip out his IV.

  I went outside to find Dr. Nelson waiting with Bree and Assistant DA Brown. “I probably pushed him too hard,” I said.

  The psychiatrist nodded. “Especially given the surgeries last night.”

  “I’ll come back in the morning?”

  Nelson thought about that, said, “I’ll let you know this evening.”

  “What am I supposed to tell my boss?” Brown asked, checking her watch.

  “Tell him he’s going to have to hold his horses a little while longer.”

  That did not sit well with the assistant DA, and she scowled.

  “You believe him, Alex?” Bree asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said.

  “No doubt he’s going for an insanity plea here,” the prosecutor said.

  “Maybe because he is insane, Counselor,” my wife said, surprising me.

  “You don’t know that,” Brown snapped.

  “Neither do you,” Bree said.

  I said, “I’m not convinced this is entirely about a head injury.”

  “Why?” my wife and the prosecutor said at the same time.

  “Because I can’t see a link yet between the injury, the three other personalities, and the heinous things that have been done in this case.”

  Before anyone could reply, Sampson appeared, coming down the hallway in a hurry from the elevators. “You don’t answer your phone?”

  “Not when I’m interviewing a mass murderer and baby kidnapper.”

  “Yeah, well, I think I found some folks you’re going to want to talk to before you go interviewing Officer Carney again.”

  He handed me two phone numbers, said, “My contact says they’re busy people. If you can’t reach them at first, keep trying.”

  I did keep trying, all that afternoon and into the evening. But as of seven p.m., I had not yet heard back from Chief Petty Officer Sheldon Drury, stationed at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, or Dr. Evelyn Owens of Balboa Hospital in San Diego.

  “Dinner!” Nana Mama called.

  The air smelled of meat frying and garlic, enough to tear me away from my phone. But Ali rolled over on his stomach on the couch and moaned, “Nana Mama, it’s almost the end. Fifteen minutes? Please?”

  “It’s not fifteen minutes until the end of that episode and you know it, young man,” my grandmother shot back. “Now stop it and get to the dinner table. It’s an important night.”

  I watched from the hallway as Ali groaned, shut off the television, and trudged to the table as if he carried the weight of the world. Jannie was already at the table, spooning out pork chops my grandmother had pan-seared and then baked in a glass pan with sautéed sweet onions, olive oil, garlic, and a little Dijon mustard. With egg noodles, green beans, and fresh applesauce on the side, there are few dishes in the world that rival it. A cold Dr Pepper only adds to the experience. At least in my book.

  In any case, my fifteen-year-old daughter was acting a hundred and eighty degrees different than she had a few nights before, now bubbly and open. Bree sported a new, smaller bandage on her face that showed just how swollen it had become. Her right eye was almost shut. She had to be in pain, but you never would have known it the way she engaged Jannie, getting her to talk about history and English — her favorite classes — and how the coach was expecting great things from her the following afternoon.

  For once I just sat down and let them go on, listening to them babble while I dwelled on my sessions with Officer Kenneth Carney and his three alter egos. Was it real? Were there four people in his head? Or was this an elaborate—

  “Alex?” Nana Mama said, breaking into my thoughts.

  “Right here.”

  “The heck you are,” she said, shaking a wooden spoon at me. “I asked you twice how many pork chops you wanted.”

  “I was giving it some thought. And I’ll take two.”

  Bree, Jannie, and Ali were trying unsuccessfully to hide their smiles.

  “Two it is,” she said, and passed me my plate.

  We said grace, thanked God for our many blessings, and prayed for Damon to have safe travels in the morning.

  “What time’s Damon get in?” Jannie asked, cutting her chop.

  Bree replied before I could, saying, “He’s getting the nine o’clock jitney to Albany. Train leaves at ten twenty. He changes in New York City and gets here around quarter to five. He’ll be home in time for supper.”

  That thought made me very happy. I knew Damon loved being away at school, but I loved having my firstborn home under my roof.

  “Speaking of suppers, Ali, do you know what tonight is?” Nana Mama asked.

  “The night I have to wait until I finish Walking Dead?” he grumbled.

  For a second there I thought my grandmother was going to lay into him as only a former high school vice principal can, but instead she said softly, “No.”

  In the silence that followed, I watched my son’s head twist toward Nana Mama, who’d cradled her chin in her interlaced wrinkled fingers and watched him as if she were magically summoning his attention.

  Then she smiled and said, “If you really think about it, the event we celebrate tonight was part of the very first zombie story, the best ever.”

  CHAPTER 87

  Outside, down the street, in the back of the dark van that now sported a sign advertising a bogus paint company, Marcus Sunday was alone and listening in on the Cross family dinner conversation. Acadia Le Duc was long gone.

  Sunday rolled his eyes as Nana enticed her grandson into the story of the Last Supper by selling it as a critical scene in a zombie tale, all the while feeling repulsed by the fact that Dr. Alex’s entire clan was in there munching on fried pork chops.

  Sunday hated pork. The whiff of a chop sizzling or a hock boiling set him on edge. So did the odor of bacon. Those thoughts took him back to the months after his father’s death and the skeptical West Virginia state police detective who’d kept nosing around the Mulch farm, acting as if young Thierry Mulch was somehow responsible for his old man’s having a heart attack and falling in among his pigs and having his remains gnawed to broken bones. It had taken DNA tests just to identify the old man.

  The detective’s name was Alan Jones, and Detective Jones had tried everything to get young Mulch to admit his involvement in his father’s death, even bringing up the fact that his mother had abandoned the family and his father had recently shot down his idea of going to college to study, of all things, philosophy.

  But eighteen-year-old Thierry had been too smart for Detective Jones, razor-focused on the long term. He had never once lost his cool, even when the detective had questioned his decision to sell his father’s farm to a coal mining company that had been after the property for years, and to sell all the pigs.

  “Why would you give all this up?” Detective Jones kept asking.

  And every time, Mulch had told him the same thing: “Because I hate pigs and because I can.”

  Because I can. Wasn’t that the reason you did anything in life? Sunday mused. For a moment he flashed on the industrial pig farm where he’d dumped Preston Elliot’s body. Would there be anything left of him to find?

&
nbsp; No, he thought. Impossible. His father had died in a sty holding twenty-four pigs and there had been little to analyze beyond shattered bones and teeth. There had to have been at least a thousand pigs in that barn where he’d dumped Preston Elliot. Maybe more. By now they’d long shit out the computer genius and rolled in it, the way pigs do.

  Then Sunday startled from his thoughts and realized that Ali Cross was talking about him.

  “Dad, if Jesus was a zombie,” Ali was saying, “do you think he smelled like the one in here the other night, like that guy who came to my school?”

  “You mean Thierry Mulch?” asked Cross.

  “That was his name, Dad!” Ali cried. “Thierry Mulch. He really smelled bad, like Damon’s basketball shoes. Must have been all that pig poop he grew up in.”

  Sunday flashed on a pretty redheaded girl who’d heaped scorn and laughter on him again and again during high school. He saw her again as an older woman pleading for the life of her husband and children.

  Pleased by those memories, Sunday muttered, “Just wait, little Cross. You’ll be getting a big whiff of me before you know it.”

  CHAPTER 88

  Sitting at the dining room table amid the laughter Ali’s comment had triggered, I said, “He really told you he grew up on a pig farm?”

  My younger son bobbed his head enthusiastically. “He said he hated it, but it was all good because he used the hate to get out of the pig poop.”

  Jannie grinned and punched Ali in the shoulder. “He did not.”

  “Did so!” Ali shouted at his sister before turning his protesting face in my direction. “Or something like that, Dad. Ask Mrs. Hutchins.”

  I gestured his way with my fork, said, “You know what? I just might do that.”

  Ali stuck his tongue out at Jannie, who groaned, “You are such a little brat sometimes.”

  “I am not, and you should go sit in pig poop somewhere,” he shot back.