Hope to Die Read online

  Then the dog attacked the alligator, got hit by the tail, and was thrown to the ground. And the older cop had acted like a ninja or something, going in to save the dog and Acadia. Sunday had admired his bold moves, his élan, and his resolve, but he believed that it was too late. Bitten through the thigh like that, his lover almost certainly wouldn’t survive. Right?

  Sunday’s confidence eroded, however, when Cross pressed a rag against the wound and appeared to be talking to her. The longer Dr. Alex stayed by her side, the more paranoia tried to worm its way into Sunday’s brain.

  What was Acadia saying to him?

  Could she say anything?

  Sunday watched Acadia’s head loll to one side. Was she dead? He couldn’t tell. He lowered the binoculars. Cross had been with her thirty, maybe forty seconds. Was it enough time for her to spill her guts and reveal where Cross’s family was being held?

  It was enough time, he decided. But had she? Could she even talk?

  Sunday raised the binoculars again and kept them trained on Cross, anticipating some kind of hurry-up reaction, a sign that he had more desperate places to be. Instead, a woman came up behind Dr. Alex, and he just stayed there, looking at Acadia, hunched over in defeat.

  Sunday allowed himself a thin smile.

  Okay, then, he doesn’t know. We move to the endgame.

  But how best to do it?

  A cautionary voice in his head told him that, Cross’s defeated posture or not, he should assume that Acadia had confirmed that Marcus Sunday was Thierry Mulch. But honestly, that didn’t really bother Sunday much.

  As a writer, he knew that names were just names. You could change them anytime you wanted because it’s the actions that really define characters, not what you call them. His dear departed mother had demonstrated that.

  That same cautionary voice then told Sunday to cut his losses and slip away into a new identity. Forget the grand endgame. Let the Cross family be found, or die. It really didn’t matter in the greater scheme of things.

  But it did matter in Sunday’s scheme of things. It mattered very much. He’d thought up the premise of the game. He’d looked at it from every angle; well, almost. Sure, there had been a few bumps in the road, but otherwise he was roughly where he’d hoped he’d be at this point, give or take a few days.

  But how do I bring it to a satisfying end?

  Flashing on the image of the container barge rolling on the high water coming fast toward New Orleans, Sunday played with the idea of meeting the barge, getting inside the container, and shooting air bubbles into the IV lines. Kill them all and let them rot, let Dr. Alex suffer the loss completely and permanently. And then slip away into a new identity. He had the money and the necessary documents already. Why take a bigger risk? He’d had his fun, and now it was time to move on.

  Sunday had just about decided to let it end like that. He would get out his phone and punch in the GPS coordinates he’d taken on the way in, get to the skiff he’d stolen, take that to his rental truck, and then drive to New Orleans.

  But then flashing lights across the bayou stopped him from leaving. An ambulance pulled into the yard, and it rapidly became a chaotic scene with more and more people. EMTs went quickly to Acadia’s side and began working on her. So she was alive.

  And now Cross and Aaliyah were searching the outbuildings.

  Sunday’s grin returned. That confirmed it.

  Dr. Cross doesn’t know where his wife, kids, and granny are because Acadia did not tell him. You watch: He’s going to get chewed up now investigating the crime scene. He’s going to be neutered, a cog disjointed and spinning with nowhere to go.

  Another sheriff’s cruiser came into the yard, followed by a Louisiana state trooper’s car and then another. In minutes, it would be a carnival. The investigation was moving out of Cross’s control. Mentally, spiritually, and emotionally, the detective would be wandering now. Isolated. Lost. Just as he had been the night before Easter.

  A zombie.

  Sunday checked his watch. It was past midnight. He thought again of that barge swinging south on swollen spring currents. He put the binoculars back on Cross, watched him talking to Aaliyah and looking like a man at the end of a long, weak rope, already fearing his loss, already willing to grasp at the last strand.

  Strand of what?

  Hope?

  The last strand of hope?

  Like a pile driver, it hit Sunday then.

  In a single, blinding instant of insight, he finally understood how he would end the game and the story of Dr. Alex Cross.

  CHAPTER

  80

  AS I WALKED BACK along the two-track toward the dirt road that accessed the Bayou des Cannes, the breeze was stiffening again, and with it the rain, and there were rumblings of new storms to the west. By the time I got to the Jeep and started driving toward Jennings, jagged lightning tormented the night sky.

  Each crack of thunder made my head feel as if it were coming apart. I needed water. I needed Tylenol. I needed—

  The disposable cell phone buzzed, alerting me to a text, as I approached the Jefferson Davis Parish seat along a westward curve in the Evangeline Highway. At a stop sign, I picked the phone up and read it.

  Go to New Orleans, it said. Alone. You have until 4:30 a.m. to reach the Big Easy. Announce your arrival in the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist, women looking for men. Do as I say, and you will see your family alive. Try to be clever and involve any kind of law enforcement, and you will see your family dead. This is your last hope, Cross. Don’t blow it now, when you’re so close to your goal. By the way, the phone that sent this text will be destroyed upon your response.

  In all honesty, I wanted to smash my own phone to smithereens. I was exhausted. I was sick of being played. I didn’t know if I had it in me to go on much longer, if at all.

  When I read the message a second and a third time, however, I kept pausing on that phrase your last hope. It was like Sunday was dangling a strip of meat over a caged and starving dog that had had enough of cruelty. I didn’t want to lunge at the offer just out of reach but knew I would.

  Despite the anger, the fatigue, and the resentment, I could not help but grasp at the final straw. I simply could not leave hope to die.

  I’m coming, Sunday, I texted back. Alone.

  CHAPTER

  81

  I BOUGHT TWO HAM and cheese sandwiches and three cups of French roast coffee at an all-night gas station near the on-ramp to the I-10.

  The sandwiches tasted like they’d been made days ago, and the coffee was stale and bitter, but I forced it all down as I sped east in a driving rain. Were Bree, the kids, and my grandmother in New Orleans? Was that where Sunday had taken them? Why there?

  Some of Mulch’s actions seemed as random as they were brutal. Or maybe that was simply a lack of information on my part. What drove a guy to do these things? He’d escaped his childhood with millions of dollars and then had indulged his desire for an education with a doctorate from Harvard. Marcus Sunday could have lived a comfortable life of the mind.

  Instead, he’d viciously slain his mother for escaping her past, and Alice Monahan and her entire family for reasons I still couldn’t fathom. Then he had the gall to write an entire book about the mass killings, extolling the murderer as a perfect killer who had left no trace and would never be identified.

  The crazy thing was that Sunday might have been right if he hadn’t decided, for whatever disturbed reason, to make me and my family the target of his ongoing homicidal vengeance. I still didn’t get that, and it gnawed at me as I passed Lafayette and drove on toward Baton Rouge.

  Other than the phone interviews and my giving Sunday a mediocre review in the Post—okay, a thumbs-down review in the Post—I’d had no contact with the man that I knew of. So why me?

  Perhaps because of my reputation, he saw me as some kind of threat. Maybe he feared I was going to eventually uncover his role in the Omaha and Fort Worth killings. Or maybe this entire cruelty had
grown out of something I hadn’t seen or heard yet.

  Had Bree done something to him at some time in her past? I couldn’t see it. No, this was about me. It had always been about me.

  But what if I was just an arbitrary object? What if some chemical in his dysfunctional brain had dripped at just the right time, and he’d obsessed on me like Mark David Chapman keyed in on John Lennon, deciding to punish me for no particular reason at all?

  I think the idea that it might have been utterly random upset me the most. In spite of everything that had happened to me in the past twelve days, I still believed in my Lord and God and in the idea that He had a plan for us all. But as I drove through the night toward a showdown or an ambush, Sunday was testing the limits of my faith.

  It occurred to me that he hadn’t said anything about the video of the double homicide I was supposed to send him later today. Seemed that wasn’t important to him anymore—he just wanted me in New Orleans.

  Crossing the Atchafalaya River, I was hit with waves of doubt and surges of raw emotion that brought tears to my eyes. What if, after enduring it all, I simply found them dead? What if it was as random as that?

  I swiped at the tears with my sleeve and prayed, “Please don’t let that happen. Take me if You want, but dear God, let them live.”

  The rain slowed, and I sped up toward the national wildlife refuge and the elevated highway that separates Lafayette from Baton Rouge. For several miles, there was a strange dead calm when the wind and rain stopped altogether. I sped up even more, going sixty-eight now.

  Then, out of nowhere, gusts of wind rose up, turned gale force, buffeted the car, and sent leaves ripped from trees down in the refuge windmilling across the already slick surface of the highway. A small sedan in front and to the right of me fishtailed on the wet leaves, corrected, and almost straightened out.

  Then it swung violently sideways into my lane, and I had to swerve, throwing my car hard to the right.

  I’d taken all sorts of defensive-driving classes in the course of my career, but nothing I knew could save me from smashing my right front fender into the guardrail.

  Going better than sixty when it hit, the car upended, spiraled up, and cleared the guardrail before plunging into darkness.

  CHAPTER

  82

  METEOROLOGICAL DATA WOULD LATER conclude that four different tornadoes hit southern Louisiana that night. The third, an EF2-level twister, formed near Ville Platte around 1:35 a.m. and wreaked destruction all the way to Opelousas. The vortex lost shape there, but the forces of it continued on in spiraling powerful gusts that swept down over the wildlife refuge and the highway, causing the sedan in front of me to skid and making me swerve, which sent the rented Jeep Cherokee into the guardrail and then over the side of the elevated interstate.

  I remember feeling outside myself as I fell, as if this were happening to someone else entirely. The single remaining headlight beam gave me a split-second view of a dense forest canopy before the driver’s side of the car smashed into it. The window next to me shattered, and then everything went kaleidoscopic and herky-jerky as branches snapped beneath the car, interrupting but not stopping the fall.

  The nose of the car smashed into an ancient cedar tree, snuffing out the remaining headlight and causing the trajectory of my descent to change. The Jeep whipsawed rearward in one last, long drop, at least ten or fifteen feet.

  The back of the car’s impact with the ground should have been colossal, bone-breaking certainly, perhaps neck-snapping and fatal. And the sound should have been deafening.

  Instead, the swamp seemed to open up and swallow the speed and mass of the car with a noise that was a bizarre cross between the thwacking of a tennis racket hitting a ball and the splash of a kid doing a cannonball into a pool. Reeds, swamp water, and oozing black mud blew out the rear window and sucked up half the car before it stopped.

  For several long moments in the pitch-black, I sat there in the astronaut’s position, rocked back in total shock. Finally I moved, shaky with adrenaline.

  Nuggets of shatterproof glass spilled away from my arms, which, other than suffering from a funny-bone sensation, were working. So were my legs, and so was my neck, which, like my head and face, was splattered with the muck that had saved my life.

  I pushed at buttons to get one of the interior lights to go on, but the electrical system had died. I dug in my pants pocket, found the mini-Maglite I always carry, and shone it about, trying to get a full sense of my predicament.

  The swamp had swallowed the back half of the Jeep and pinned my door shut. The hood jutted above me, free of the mud. Broken branches and limbs stuck up from the grille like a bizarre floral arrangement.

  I got my cell out and saw it had died. There was no calling until I could recharge it. The driver of the car that had swerved in front of me had to have seen me go over the guardrail, right? The police had probably been alerted, or would be in minutes. Had there been any other cars or trucks close enough behind me to see the crash?

  I couldn’t remember. At that late hour, in the bad weather, traffic had been exceedingly light.

  What if no one came?

  Then it dawned on me that time was ticking away. Sunday had given me a deadline. I had to be in New Orleans by 4:30 a.m. That was two hours and forty minutes from now. I couldn’t afford to wait for rescue. In fact, I couldn’t afford to be rescued. There would be police and ambulances and questions that I had no time to answer.

  After unbuckling my seat belt, I had to do several contortionist moves to get my head and shoulders across the front passenger seat and my feet and legs up onto the driver’s seat. At some point during the car’s fall, the passenger-side window had been blown out too. I punched out the remaining glass, pushed aside the vegetation, and looked out, happy to see that the muck was a good eight inches below me.

  Shining the flashlight around, I saw a stand of cedar and cypress trees on a bank of sorts about five feet off the nose of the car. My beam picked up scars and broken branches on the tree closest to a twenty-five-foot cement stanchion that supported that section of the highway.

  Overhead, a truck roared by and disappeared in a hiss. It was raining again, and if there were sirens coming, I couldn’t hear them. I flashed the light back at the stanchion and up its side a solid ten feet, and I found what I was looking for. Okay, I thought. I have a chance.

  Looking around, I smiled, dug in my pocket, and came up with my jackknife. With several quick cuts, I removed the driver’s-side and passenger’s-side seat belts and tied and snapped them together to form a makeshift rope about four feet long with a closed buckle at one end from which a two-foot piece of strap hung. I tied that around my waist.

  After taking several deep breaths, I put the flashlight between my teeth and squirmed my head, shoulders, body, and hips out the car’s window. At that point, I was sitting in an awkward position, gripping the windshield frame.

  I needed another handhold and grasped the butt end of the windshield wiper and used it as leverage to hoist myself out and onto the hood of the car, which was canted left and rose steeply. I got my right shoe braced against the windshield frame and my left against the wiper base, and I was able to reach up and grab some of the tree limbs sticking up from the front grille.

  It wasn’t pretty, but I managed to pull myself up onto the nose of the car, which was rock solid. It took me three attempts to get into a crouch, left knee down in the branches, right foot up on the grille.

  Gripping two other limbs, I took several deep breaths, said a prayer, and then sprang out into space.

  CHAPTER

  83

  I ALMOST MADE THE bank. My right foot actually reached firmer ground, but my left leg plunged into mud up to my thigh. For three to four minutes, I couldn’t move at all. But when I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to lose my left shoe and probably my right, I grabbed at the exposed root of the tree I’d crashed through and hauled myself out and up, left shoe gone, but right still in
place.

  Panting, I again listened for sirens but still heard none. I found the ground like a saturated sponge that demanded the gingerly placement of my bare left foot. Twice in the ten feet or so to the stanchion, I broke through the spongy earth into the mud. The second time, my right shoe disappeared.

  I didn’t bother trying to dig in the muck; I crept to the side of the cement upright. Shining my flashlight, I saw that the lower flank of the stanchion was smooth and uninterrupted cement. But ten feet up, a rung of bent steel rebar stuck out. I’d seen it from the car.

  There were other rungs above it every two feet or so, climbing toward the underside of the highway and the guardrail. When road crews put up these kinds of giant engineered supports, they need a way up and down them during the installation process. The rungs are set in the cement to form a ladder.

  When the work is done, however, they cut off the first four or so rungs to make it impossible for kids or thrill seekers to climb them. The rest are left in place in case the stanchion ever needs to be inspected from above.

  Now, I’m six foot two and have a thirty-inch reach, but I’d known just looking at it from the car that I had no chance of snagging the lowest rung on my own. I untied the strap I’d made with the pieces of the seat belts and held it with the buckle and loose strap away from me. Then I began to spin it slowly, checking for any give in the knots and testing the weight of the buckle.

  When I thought I had it right, I sort of underhand-lobbed the buckle up there. It clanged off the rung and rebounded back to me so hard, I had to duck. The second time and the third time were not much better. On my fourth attempt, however, I changed tactics, going back to basics, taking the buckle in my right hand and holding the end of the strap in my left.