Cross My Heart ac-21 Read online

“That’s enough!” Nana Mama cried, then stared at me. “The night that Jesus prayed in the garden and was betrayed and we’re talking about pig poop?”

  I stifled the urge to smile but threw a quick glare Ali’s way and said, “Nana’s right. That is enough. And if you want to finish your show before bedtime, you’d better get along with Jannie long enough to wash and dry the dishes.”

  “I hate washing dishes in the bathtub,” Ali grumbled. “It’s dumb.”

  “Think of washing dishes in the bathtub as pig you-know-what,” Bree said. “Use it to be a better student.”

  “Wait, what?” Ali said, throwing up his hands. “How does that make any sense?”

  I winked at my wife, said, “Nice try, but you should have quit while you were ahead.”

  Later, as the kids washed dishes in the bathtub, I couldn’t help thinking again of the tub in the old root cellar and what might have happened if Bree hadn’t discovered a trapdoor and a second way down from the barn.

  I felt my wife’s arm come around my waist. “Want to check the progress on the addition?”

  Inspecting the new work was a welcome change, something normal, not deviant, something understandable, not a mystery to solve. So I nodded and gave her a long, deep kiss.

  “I didn’t know you liked women who look like the Phantom of the Opera.”

  I looked at the bandage covering part of her face and laughed, said, “I think it’s kind of sexy.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “Get a room, you two,” Nana Mama said, chortling as she went by us toward the living room.

  Ninety-something years old and she still had a wicked sense of humor. Another reason I loved my grandmother so much.

  We went back into the dining room. While Bree separated the Velcro strips that held the big plastic sheets in place, I plugged in the extension cord and the work lights.

  The builders had come a long way in the past two or three days. The windows were in and they’d begun to frame in the bases for the kitchen cabinetry. For the first time, I could see clearly what the added space was going to mean to our family.

  “I’m beginning to like it,” Bree said. “A lot.”

  “Me, too. A hassle with the cooking and the dishwashing, but I think we’re going to be very happy when it’s all said and done.”

  My wife nodded and looked around with a satisfied smile. “Nana said the electrician will be here on Monday and we need to mark where we want all the plugs and switches before then.”

  I’d never had anything built before, so this surprised me. “Contractor doesn’t figure that out?”

  “No,” she replied. “He says it’s on us.”

  “We could ask his advice, right?”

  “Not until Monday,” she said. “He told Nana he’s taking his family to Delaware for the holiday because there’s nothing more for his crew to do until the electrician’s finished.”

  I took her in my arms, holding her gingerly because of the ribs, and said, “I love it when you talk construction.”

  Bree snickered, rolled her head around, and said, “Well, then, once Ali has finished his show and gone to bed, why don’t we take Nana’s advice?”

  “Really? With your ribs like that?”

  “We’ll try, okay?”

  “As long as you promise to use words like hammer and nail and saw.”

  “You have so little imagination, love of my life,” my wife said, very amused. “I was thinking maybe a little plumbing and stud work?”

  “Ooooh,” I said before my cell phone rang.

  “Don’t,” Bree said.

  “Got to,” I said, and answered. “Alex Cross.”

  “This is Evelyn Owens at Balboa Naval Medical Center. Am I calling at a good time?”

  I looked mournfully at my wife, thought fleetingly of plumbing and stud work, but then said, “Yes, Dr. Owens. It’s a very good time.”

  CHAPTER 89

  I showed up at St. Elizabeths around eight in the morning on Good Friday. Bree had decided to take the day off so she wouldn’t miss Jannie’s track meet. Sampson had a dentist appointment. And I hadn’t bothered to contact DA Brown. I wanted Carney all to myself and to Dr. Nelson, who would tape and observe from his office.

  When I entered the young patrolman’s room, the head of his bed was raised. He wore hospital scrubs instead of a johnny, but his ankles were still lashed down. Even though Nelson said he had backed off on the painkillers, Carney looked like he’d just woken up after a night of very hard drinking, a night when he might have blacked out and gone on a rampage.

  “Tell me about your mother,” I said after I’d taken the chair opposite him.

  Carney gazed over at me with zero affect for a beat before I caught the slightest ripple of hairless skin at his temples.

  “She died when I was a baby,” he said at last. “I never really knew her. Or my dad. He died in prison. I was an orphan. Ward of the State of Florida.”

  “Tough being cut off like that, no parents. Happened to me when I was ten. They put me in an orphanage until my grandmother came for me.”

  The young patrolman chewed on that, nodded. “I don’t remember much of the orphanage. An older couple, the Carneys — Tim and Judy — adopted me when I was two. I grew up with them in Pensacola, joined the marines right out of high school. My adoptive parents died in a car crash around the same time I survived the bombing in Afghanistan. I didn’t even find out they were gone until I got stateside.”

  “So you were orphaned twice?”

  “Guess you could say that,” Carney replied, and then pursed his lips. “Why are you asking me these things?”

  Clearing my throat, I said, “I’m trying to see if what you believe is real jibes with what I know to be real.”

  Carney turned defensive. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you’re lying to me. Or at least that you’ve suppressed the facts so deep that your lies seem absolutely like the truth to you.”

  “No, I …” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Detective. What do you think I’m lying about?”

  Diamond cutters will tell you that they’ll study some raw gems for hours, even days, looking for the exact right place to break the stone open so all its brilliant facets are revealed. More often than not, I take the same approach: studying, probing, looking for that moment when I can challenge a subject on some point and use that sharp challenge to crack him and get him to confess. But my gut told me I did not have to wait, study, and draw Carney out — I already understood how to break him wide open.

  “How’d your biological mother die?” I asked.

  “Bicycle accident.”

  I shook my head. “Your mother was murdered, Officer Carney.”

  You’d have thought I’d slapped him. “What? No, that’s not—”

  “Your mother was murdered,” I insisted. “And your father killed her. That’s why he went to the Polk Correctional Institution. That’s why he died there.”

  Carney’s head began to retreat. “No, that’s not right.”

  “It is right,” I replied calmly. “And the worst thing about it? You saw your father kill your mother. You saw him strangle her when you were three and a half, not a baby, Kenneth.”

  Carney stared at me as if I’d become some alien creature who’d come to haunt his nightmares. Seeing him right there on the verge of cracking, I hit him with the heaviest hammer and chisel I had in my bag.

  “What else did you see that night?” I asked. “Why did your father kill your mother? Why did he strangle her like that?”

  The tics came first this time, followed by beads of sweat that formed on Carney’s naked head before his eyeballs rolled up ever so slightly and fluttered. His body arched as if he were right there on the verge of a convulsion, before it sagged and he slumped down and regarded me with a knowing smirk.

  “Officer Goody Two-Shoes can’t face the past,” he said in a gruffer voice. “Never could. N
ever will, and that’s a fact.”

  “But you can, right, Kenny-Two?”

  “Course I can,” he replied with that lazy smile I was learning to recognize. “I’m the lone survivor, Detective, the only one who really knows what happened.”

  “Kelli and Kevin don’t know?”

  “How could they? My baby sister and brother died that night, too.”

  CHAPTER 90

  Neuropsychologist Evelyn Owens of Balboa Naval Medical Center had told me much the same thing during our phone discussion. In the wake of the closed-head injury and after Carney had exhibited several short bouts of what appeared to be multiple personality disorder, Owens said she had dug deep into the wounded veteran’s past. What she’d found was beyond disturbing.

  According to Florida Child Welfare files, Carney’s mother was named Kerry Ann Johns. On her sixteenth birthday, she had Kenneth. Two months shy of her twentieth birthday, she smoked crystal meth with Kenneth Peters Senior, her boyfriend and Kenneth Junior’s father, walked into the emergency room at Tampa General Hospital, and soon after gave birth to twins: Kelli and Kevin. They were nine weeks premature, habituated to meth, and quickly went into withdrawal. They spent nearly a month in the ICU before being placed in foster care.

  After Johns and Peters were released from rehab, they petitioned for and got custody of Kenneth and the twins. Carney’s biological parents managed to stay clean for a year. But caring for any child is difficult, much less three children, with two of them suffering from medical and developmental problems.

  The stress became overwhelming, and Johns and Peters fell back into old habits. They began smoking meth again. To support their habits, Carney’s father turned to burglary, and his mother to prostitution.

  “She worked in a massage parlor?” I asked Kenny-Two.

  “My father hated her for it,” he replied bitterly.

  “How about you?”

  “Bitch was not exactly mother of the year, was she?”

  “That why Kevin likes to shoot up places like the Superior Spa?”

  Carney’s eyes barely fluttered before his voice changed into the higher range of the Kevin personality. “Fucking A,” he said. “Does a man good to see filthy whores and their customers begging and dying.”

  “So you see your mother in your victims?” I asked.

  “Don’t you?” he asked in a scoffing tone.

  “Why did you take one of the hookers with you?”

  He chuckled. “Kenny-Two says we got to get a mommy home with the kids before the ceremony can begin.”

  I thought about that and what I’d heard in the root cellar and said, “Tell me about that night, the first time the ceremony was performed.”

  Carney gazed without expression at me for several seconds before his eyes got lazy and his head bobbed. When he lifted his chin, his manner had turned feminine once more.

  “Mama said she’d had enough of us,” he said, sounding like Kelli again. “She gave us all cough medicine and told us we were going to take a bath. Kevin and I took the cough medicine like any good baby would. Kenny-Two spit it out.”

  “So you don’t remember what happened?”

  Carney’s face looked haunted. “I remember seeing her smoking from a glass pipe and crying when she picked up Kevin and said she was going to give him a bath. When she came for me I remember looking for where my twin brother was and Mama said not to worry, that he’d had his diapers changed and gone to bed. Mama said it was time for my bath.”

  “And then what happened?”

  No more than two beats passed with Carney’s eyes shivering before he surfaced once more as Kenny-Two.

  “She pushed Kelli under the water while I screamed at her, begging her not to do it,” he said. “I’d seen her put Kevin back in his crib, all naked and wet and blue. I’d seen her pour the cleaning liquid on him. I knew what was happening.”

  “Because you didn’t take the cough syrup?”

  “Being contrary keeps you alive, ever notice that?”

  “Or it kills you,” I replied, and tapped my pen on my notepad. “Where was your father during all this?”

  “Smoking glass somewhere on his way home,” Kenny-Two replied in disgust. “He told the court he got to the apartment all wired, saw Kevin lying in his crib soaked in citrus cleaner my mom brought home from the massage parlor.

  “Then my dad heard me screaming in the bathroom, pushed open the door, and seen what she’d done to Kelli, and what she was trying to do to me. My mom started crying, telling him everything was cleaner this way.”

  “Your dad snapped.”

  He nodded. “Choked my mom to death with the cord to her bathrobe while I watched.”

  I sat there a long while, trying to absorb it all, thinking about what drugs, a sordid night, and a traumatic brain injury had spawned. Sixteen dead men, women, and children in Albuquerque, Tampa, and DC. Every one of them had left behind lives torn apart as harshly as Carney’s.

  Aside from the senseless killings, the worst thing about it all was the fact that a few minutes later, Kenny-Two faded and the eager young man who’d fought for his country and dreamed of being a homicide detective resurfaced.

  I gave him a summary of what his other personalities had told me and had to watch it torture him into wretchedness and despair. Carney hung his head and sobbed like an innocent man wrongly accused and doomed for it.

  I stood, put my hand on his heaving good shoulder, and said, “I think it’s time we took a break, Kenny. I’ll be back to see you on Monday.”

  The young officer didn’t acknowledge me, just continued to cry from deep, deep inside. I sighed and moved toward the door.

  “Detective Cross?” he called after me in a trembling voice.

  I paused at the door and looked back. “Yes?”

  “Can they give the death penalty to someone like me?” he asked.

  With more than two decades of police work behind me, I’d thought I’d grown calloused when it came to dealing with killers, insane and otherwise. But that moment devastated me because Carney’s tone was desperate, wishful.

  The poor bastard was asking me if there was any hope for a quick end to his suffering. And I had to shake my head and listen to his gut-shot moaning as I left.

  CHAPTER 91

  It was foggy on the campus of the Kraft School, which felt emptier than it had been during Acadia’s prior visit. Many students had no doubt left already for the Easter holiday week. So much the better, she thought as she sipped from her third double espresso of the day and pretended to admire the architecture of the closest building. It would be easier to—

  Damon Cross exited the far door of his dorm and set off on a paved path across the quad, carrying a Puma duffel bag and an orange backpack. Acadia moved diagonally toward the teenager, getting just ahead of him at an intersection of the paved paths. She never looked his way.

  “Hi there, Ms. Mepps,” Damon said behind her.

  Acadia smiled to herself, then pivoted with a more quizzical expression, saw him, and acted surprised. “Now, look at this. I never expected to see you again, Mr. Damon Cross.”

  The teenage boy took that statement somewhat awkwardly.

  “Well,” Acadia said. “I just put down a deposit on my nephew’s tuition.”

  “He got in that fast?”

  “Smart boy, great grades, sugar,” she replied. “How are you?”

  “Good,” he said with a hint of bashfulness. “I’m heading to catch the jitney to Albany and the train back home for nine days of sleep!”

  Acadia smiled, said, “How much do the jitney and train cost?”

  “You mean, like, together?” he asked, checking his watch.

  “Yes.”

  “I dunno, sixty-eight for the train and like twenty for the jitney. Look, good seeing you, and glad your nephew was admitted, but I got to go.”

  “Maybe I can save you seventy dollars,” Acadia said.

  Damon had been turning. Now he halted, looked back. �
��Excuse me?”

  “I am on my way to Virginia on business and have to go right through Washington,” she said. “You give me twenty dollars for gas and you pocket the difference.”

  Two other students, a boy and a girl, walked by, carrying their bags. The girl glanced at Acadia, said, “We’ve got to hurry, Damon.”

  “Okay, Silvia,” he said, looking embarrassed. “I’ll be right along.” When they’d left, he looked at Acadia and said, “I dunno. I don’t think so.”

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself. I could have used the company and some help driving. My left eye’s been bothering me and it’s a long way. Good-bye, Damon Cross. I wish my nephew was going to meet you.”

  Acadia started back in the direction of the admissions office, thinking that men are like boys in that they always want what they’ve been denied.

  “Okay,” Damon called before she’d gotten twenty yards on. “If I can help you with the driving because of your eye, and the gas, I guess it’ll be fine.”

  She turned, grinning. “You don’t know how much of a help this is.”

  “I should run up there and tell the jitney driver,” he said.

  “Do that, and I’ll come around to pick you up,” she said.

  Ten minutes later, the jitney left. Acadia pulled up in front of Damon and said, “Get in.”

  “You want me to drive, Ms. Mepps?” he asked, putting his backpack and bag in the backseat.

  “My eye’s got at least an hour in it,” she said as he got in and buckled his seat belt. “And call me Karla.”

  As she drove on, he said, “You know the way?”

  “I got here, didn’t I?”

  “True,” he said awkwardly.

  “Latte?” she asked, gesturing to a center console and two to-go cups from the coffee shop across from the campus. “I figured to drink them both, but we can stop later.”

  “Oh,” Damon said, and took the cup. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it,” she said as he took a sip.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, what’s wrong with your eye?”

  “The doctor says it’s strained,” she replied. “But my family has a history of glaucoma, so I’m not sure.”