Hope to Die: (Alex Cross 22) Read online

  “Oh, dear Jesus,” I whispered in shock, sinking to my knees in front of her. “What has that sick bastard Mulch done to you?”

  CHAPTER

  6

  “IS IT YOUR WIFE, DR. CROSS?” Detective Aaliyah asked.

  I stared at the desecrated body lying there before me, saw the hair, the skin color, the height, the weight, the jewelry, and said, “I don’t know. I think so, but I don’t know for certain. She’s … she’s unrecognizable like this.”

  “Where were you last night?” she asked.

  Scanning the body for something, anything, that said definitively whether it was Bree or not, I replied, “I was home, Detective, watching reruns of The Walking Dead.”

  “Sir?”

  “The television show about the zombie apocalypse,” I said. “My boy Ali loves it.”

  “And he was there with you?”

  I shook my head again, felt tears trickle from my eyes, and said, “He’s gone too. They’re all gone. My entire family. Haven’t they told you? John Sampson? Captain Quintus? The FBI?”

  “FBI?” she said. “No, I caught this on my way to work, but why don’t we get out of here, let forensics do their job, and you tell me what I need to know.”

  I knelt there for several more moments, staring at the body and seeing images of my life with Bree playing in the air, making it all surreal and soul killing.

  “Dr. Cross?”

  I nodded, got wobblingly to my feet, and managed to climb back up the ladder without incident. We went to her unmarked car and got in.

  “Let’s hear it,” she said in a calm, professional manner.

  Over the next thirty-five minutes, I laid out the insanity of the past few weeks for her, trying not to leave out any important details.

  “I first learned of Thierry Mulch when he started sending me strange, taunting letters about the massage-parlor murders, calling me an idiot and proposing theories about those killings that, I admit, proved invaluable in ultimately catching the man responsible. Then a man named Thierry Mulch who claimed to be a website entrepreneur went to my son Ali’s school and gave a talk there.

  “I did a Google search on the name. It turned out there were only seven Thierry Mulches that I could find on the web. And one of them was an Internet entrepreneur. Because I was chest-deep in the investigation of the mass killings at the massage parlor, I didn’t give the coincidence much thought beyond that.

  “But it turned out Mulch had been giving me and my family a lot of thought,” I told the detective. “He bugged our house with audio and video. I think he used them to learn our habits and routines, because in a matter of hours last Friday, Good Friday, he managed to kidnap them all, including my son Damon, who goes to school up in the Berkshires in Massachusetts.”

  “How come I haven’t heard a word of this?” she asked. “And how do you know Mulch took them?”

  “Give me a chance to explain.”

  Aaliyah nodded, and I told her how Mulch used my daughter’s cell phone the night of Good Friday to send me pictures of my family, tied up, duct tape across their mouths. He also sent texts threatening to kill them all if I got the police or FBI involved. Late the next afternoon, John Sampson, my best friend and partner at Metro, came to my door, concerned that I hadn’t reported to work or at least called in to explain why I was out.

  “I got John to leave and did not tell him a thing, but Mulch didn’t care,” I said, digging in my pocket for my phone. “I began getting these pictures every hour on the hour.”

  I handed her the phone, told her to call up Photos. She did, and I saw the horror on her face as she looked at the pictures on the tiny screen showing each and every member of my family dead of a gunshot wound to the head.

  “Are they real?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “But I didn’t know that then.”

  I told Aaliyah how I disintegrated after seeing the pictures. I walked the streets of Washington like a zombie, praying someone would blow my head off. In the end, I went into a meth house with a wad of cash and told the addicts I wanted to die, that I’d pay them to kill me. Someone obligingly tried, hitting me with a piece of metal pipe.

  A girl who once lived with us, a recovering addict named Ava, found me and brought me home. I told Ava about the pictures just before I passed out from the concussion I’d sustained.

  “Ava is very bright, and excellent with computers,” I said. “While I slept, she transferred the pictures to a laptop and blew them up enough to see they were doctored.”

  Ava took that information to Sampson and to Ned Mahoney, my former partner in the Behavioral Sciences division of the FBI. Ava convinced them that my family was not dead.

  Sampson and Mahoney found a way to sneak into my house without being detected by Mulch’s bugs. It turned out that there’d been a rape in Alexandria, Virginia, committed by a man who called himself Thierry Mulch. DNA evidence gathered at that crime scene had been matched to the DNA of a brilliant but erratic computer engineering student at George Mason University who’d disappeared about two weeks before.

  “His name was Preston Elliot, and given the sophistication of the electronics Mulch put in my house, we believed and still believe that Elliot and Mulch are one and the same. We left the bugs in my house and decided that I would continue acting as if I thought everyone in my family was dead in order to convince Mulch/Elliot that I was completely devastated—a victim, and no threat.

  “We also decided to keep everything about the hunt for my family quiet,” I said. “Days went by, and now a week. And we hadn’t heard a thing from him. Until this.”

  Expressionless, Detective Aaliyah mulled over everything I had told her for several minutes. Finally she said, “You think Mulch, uh, Elliot is responsible for your … for the Jane Doe’s death?”

  “He is responsible,” I said. “There’s no question.”

  Aaliyah thought for several beats, and then asked, “What does he gain from doing all this to you and your family?”

  “I’ve stopped asking,” I replied. “But whatever sicko obsessive reason he’s got for targeting me, on my end, it feels like torture, like he’s trying to drive me to the brink again and again, hoping that sooner or later I’ll jump off.”

  She cocked her head and asked, “Will you?”

  “If that is Bree in that hole, honestly, I don’t know.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  ON THE WHOLE, MARCUS SUNDAY was pleased with the way things were proceeding. There’d been a few deviations from the original plan, but he still felt right on target.

  Sunday was riding in the front passenger seat of the Durango, raptly focused on the screen of a laptop computer and the video feed transmitting from a tiny camera, hidden weeks before, high up in a tree that overlooked the construction site.

  He’d seen it all, how Cross fell to his knees in front of the body and stayed there for a very long time, looking crushed.

  “The end is near,” he said to Acadia, who was in the backseat. “Did you see the way he was begging right into the camera in his office before the cop banged on his door? Begging’s a classic indicator. Isn’t it, Mitch?”

  The driver, a hulk of a man in jeans, hiking boots, and a Boston Red Sox jersey, nodded, said, “It is, Marcus.”

  Acadia wasn’t buying it. “How would you know?”

  Mitch Cochran had no neck to speak of. His massive head seemed to her like an extension of his shoulders as he glanced back and said, “Before I said fuck it all, I was in Iraq. U.S. fucking Army. Guarded Abu Ghraib prison. I saw interrogations. It’s like Marcus said, they beg before they crack. All of them.”

  Acadia remained unhappy. “But how long can we wait for that to happen?”

  “It won’t be long now,” Sunday assured her. “Mulch has killed Cross’s wife, and the rest of his family remains under mortal threat.”

  “How long?” she demanded.

  Sunday grew irritated, growled, “You can’t put a firm timetable on a p
roject of this magnitude, Acadia. Haven’t I told you again and again that the construction of a monster begins with the destruction of a man?”

  “You’ve said a lot of things,” Acadia shot back. “Like that Cross would crumble the night we sent those pictures.”

  “Cross was in pieces,” he snapped. “He still is and it’s growing worse. Didn’t you just see that with your own eyes? He’s disintegrating.”

  Acadia was silent for several long moments before saying, “More I think about it, sending those photographs was a mistake.”

  “A mistake?” Sunday replied, clearly annoyed.

  Acadia said, “You went for the short-term shock value of having Cross see his entire family murdered with gunshot wounds to the head. But you were also giving away leverage. You did the same thing by dumping her there. A dead person can’t be helped, Marcus. A dead person can’t be saved. There’s less motivation now for him to become the perfect killer you want him to be.”

  “Your understanding of the animal condition is shallow at times, Acadia,” Sunday sniffed. “This is all timing.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she said, crossing her arms.

  “Ever watch a dog trainer at work?” he asked. “I mean a real trainer, someone who teaches hunting or attack dogs?”

  “My shithead of a daddy ran coonhounds.”

  “Then you know what the predator-prey response is?”

  “I can guess,” she said. “Critter runs in the woods, a dog chases it. Tries to kill it. It’s in its nature.”

  “There you go,” Sunday said, snapping his fingers at her. “And the way trainers build that predator-prey response is by taking something away from the dog, something that the dog values highly, like a bone or a toy. They let Bowser go for days thinking his favorite bone or toy is gone for good. Then they show it to him attached to a rope. When that dog goes to chase his toy, the trainer jerks it just out of reach—all the time, just out of reach. Isn’t that right, Mitch?”

  Cochran downshifted and slowed, saying, “The dog goes fucking crazy, doing anything in his power to have that toy again. That’s when the trainer steps in and takes total control of the situation, uses the toy as a reward for a job well done.”

  He glanced at Acadia. “And how do I know that? We had fucking dogs at Abu Ghraib. Lots of ’em.”

  Cochran took a right turn onto a muddy road a few miles south of Frostburg, in rural northwestern Maryland. They passed a ramshackle farm, and Sunday heard the echoes of pigs squealing in his mind. The road wound up into an oak forest clad in new lime-green leaves.

  A mile into the woods, Sunday started looking at the trees closely, and then he said, “That’s it. Those birches on the right. Park over there.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  COCHRAN PULLED THE DURANGO almost to the drainage ditch next to three birches that grew close together, almost as if they were shoots of the same tree.

  “We’ve got ten minutes still,” Sunday said, and he turned his attention to the laptop again. But Cross was nowhere to be seen around the construction site.

  “You can’t go in early?” Acadia asked, sounding irked. “I told you seventy-two hours is the limit of how far we can push things. That window’s closing fast.”

  Sunday checked his watch. “We’re at sixty-seven hours. We’ll make it.”

  “I gotta go number two,” Cochran said.

  “What are you, in kindergarten?” Acadia snapped.

  “Maybe that’s my problem, I’m too fucking childlike.” Cochran laughed, got out of the car, and walked off.

  Sunday looked off through the windshield in silence, and then said, “That farm we passed brought back memories. Mulch grew up in a hellhole like that.”

  “The fabled origins?” Acadia asked.

  “Whence Mulch sprang. And where Mulch died.”

  “Ever been back?”

  “Not even close,” Sunday said, checking his watch. “I think I’m good to go now.”

  “Sure you don’t want one of us along?” Acadia asked.

  Sunday shook his head and said, “It took me a long time to find this guy and gain his trust. I don’t want to spook him in any way, especially not now, when he’s proven so resourceful.”

  “Don’t forget the honey,” Acadia said, and she handed Sunday a small gym bag with a Nike swoosh on it.

  “I’m not back in fifteen, you and Cochran come looking, but slow, right?”

  “Armed?”

  “Definitely.”

  Sunday got out, smelling the rot of spring everywhere around him. It had started to sprinkle. He decided he liked the light rain. Hitting the new leaves on the trees, it would soften all other sound and give him a chance to check out the scene before he fully committed.

  Sunday slid down the bank, then found and followed an overgrown logging trail, mindful to keep the bag raised so the brambles and thorns would not tear it. Soon he smelled wood smoke and slowed to a creep. He approached a ledge that overlooked a clearing and, beyond it, a swollen creek.

  To his right and below, hard by the creek bank, there was a plywood-and-tarpaper shack. Smoke curled from a stovepipe that jutted from the roof. An old blue Chevy pickup with a capper sat between the shack and a barn of sorts.

  Sunday noticed the sheet across the window that faced in his direction was fluttering, and he knew he’d been spotted. So he held up the bag and climbed over the ledge and down into the yard. A door creaked open. A big male Rottweiler came bounding out toward him.

  Sunday stopped and stayed perfectly still, his eyes watching the dark space beyond the door as the dog growled low and circled him, taking his wind. When the dog barked, the door opened wider, and Sunday crossed to the shack. He climbed the stoop, passing a chain saw and a gas can, and went inside.

  “That necessary every time?” Sunday asked the muscular bald guy crossing the dim space to a crude kitchen. His name was Claude Harrow.

  “Every time,” Harrow replied. “Puts a man’s mind at ease, ’specially now that you and I done crossed a dark line together.”

  The dog came in behind him. Sunday shut the door and stood there until his eyes adjusted and he could make out the Formica table, lawn chairs, busted couch, and woodstove in the corner. The walls were bare except for a large Confederate flag and a framed eight-by-ten photograph of Adolf Hitler in full salute. The dog went to the stove and lay down by the stove, head up, watching Sunday.

  “Looked like it all went according to plan,” Sunday said, smelling bleach and seeing a washtub close to him on the floor. Two butcher knives and a pair of tin snips were soaking in three inches of chlorine and water.

  “Well, what’d you expect? Amateur hour?” Harrow replied, and he turned to him, revealing a thin, nasty scar on his right cheek and a tattoo of a flaming sword on the side of his neck.

  Sunday noticed a mirror on the table and saw the traces of white lines on it. He frowned. “Thought we agreed no tweaking during the game.”

  “We said during, not after,” Harrow replied. “Don’t worry. It’s just a pick-me-up. I been up all night and had the jitters by the time I got back here.”

  Sunday debated whether to press the point, decided not to, and held out the gym bag, saying, “Balance on the first is there, plus a down payment on number two.”

  Harrow motioned for him to put it on the table, asked, “How soon?”

  “Tonight. The older boy.”

  Sunday could tell Harrow didn’t like that.

  “That kind of short notice and tight turnaround is gonna cost you,” Harrow said.

  “How much?”

  “To pull it off clean like that? Hundred K more on the back end.”

  Sunday didn’t like renegotiations. “Quite a jump in pay.”

  “Hell of a risk I’m taking. Cops involved, right?”

  “I think you’d do it even if I weren’t paying you a small fortune,” Sunday said, setting the bag down.

  “I might,” Harrow agreed, smiling for t
he first time. “Cops aside, I do enjoy and appreciate the cleaning work.”

  “You’ll let me know when it’s done?”

  “Man’s gotta get paid, don’t he? You want coffee?”

  “Sorry, I have to catch a plane, be in St. Louis by five, no ifs, ands, or buts,” Sunday said, heading toward the door.

  “And if you aren’t?”

  “Bad stuff happens.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  JOHN SAMPSON ARRIVED AS I watched the body bag being brought up out of the hole.

  Built like a power forward in the NBA, he looked as weak as a kitten when he came to me with tears welling in his eyes. John and I have been brothers in all but genetics since we were ten years old. When the big man threw his arms around me, it was everything I could do not to dissolve right then and there.

  “Jesus Christ, Alex,” Sampson said hoarsely. “I came as soon as I heard. Is it true? Is it—”

  “I think so, but I don’t know for certain, and I won’t until tomorrow at least—and that may be the worst part,” I said in a dull voice as they put the body bag on a stretcher and wheeled it over to the medical examiner’s van.

  I kept trying to think of the body in the bag as being someone other than Bree. But Mulch, he—

  “You want me to take you home?” Sampson asked.

  “No,” I said. “Home’s not a good place for me. Mulch watches me there, enjoys my suffering, and I won’t contribute to his enjoyment anymore. I just need to go for a walk and get my head straight.”

  “Want company?” he asked.

  “I’ll see you later at work.”

  “Sugar, you can’t work when something like—”