Hope to Die Read online

  Sampson looked like he wanted to tell me something, but Detective Aaliyah came over, said, “Dr. Cross, I have—”

  “John, this is Tess Aaliyah,” I said. “She’s new, from Baltimore, and she caught this case and needs to be brought up to speed on what the secret task force has found out about Mulch.”

  “Secret task force?” Aaliyah said.

  “Exactly,” I said, and walked off, trying to convince myself that that wasn’t my wife’s body in the back of that coroner’s wagon.

  But grief and loss have a way of crippling the best intentions even in the strongest of minds.

  Within a block of leaving the crime scene I was lost in memories of my first days with Bree, how she’d rescued me from a long loneliness with an unshakable love, the kind I’d thought I’d lost forever. Then the likelihood that she was gone hit me like a freight train and I began to choke and sob right there on the sidewalk.

  Every woman I’d ever loved had ended up dead or so traumatized by the violence woven through my life that she couldn’t bear the sight of me. My first wife, Maria, died in a drive-by shooting when Damon was a toddler and Jannie was just a baby. A madman took Ali’s mother hostage, and even though we managed to rescue her, it permanently fractured our relationship. And now Bree, the absolute love of my life, might have been swallowed up by the darkness that had shadowed me without pause almost since the moment I became a police officer.

  What about my kids? What about my grandmother? Were they completely doomed to follow my loves into the shadows and the darkness? And what about me?

  Was I already there? I asked myself as I walked on, wiping tears from my eyes. Had I ever left? Could I ever leave?

  On autopilot, I took a route I’d taken a thousand times with my children. Every morning, or as often as was possible, I’d walked them to their school, Sojourner Truth. I did it for years, and as I retraced those steps, I was soon drowning in memories of Damon, Jannie, and Ali as each headed to the first day of first grade.

  Damon had gone willingly, eagerly. It was all he and his friends had talked about. But Jannie and Alex Jr. had been nervous.

  “What if I get a bad teacher?” Jannie asked.

  Ali had asked the same thing, and in my mind, suddenly Jannie and Ali were right there, together, both six, and both looking at me for a response. I squatted down to them and pulled them in close to me, rejoicing in their smell and their innocence.

  “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you,” I said. “And I love you. That’s all you need to know.”

  “Love you more,” Jannie said.

  “Love you more,” Ali said.

  “Love you more and more,” I whispered. “Love you—”

  A woman said, “Dr. Cross?”

  CHAPTER

  10

  STARTLED OUT OF THAT perfect vision of my life before Thierry Mulch, I was shocked to find myself at the fence around the Sojourner Truth playground. It was deserted. I thought I heard the school bell sound for recess. But where was the laughter of my children?

  “Dr. Cross?”

  Blinking, I turned my head to see a tall, pretty African American woman in a blue pantsuit standing beside me on the sidewalk, her face painted in concern.

  “Yes,” I said, almost recognizing her, feeling irritated and not quite knowing why.

  She looked at me closely, said, “You don’t look well.”

  “I’m just … where are the kids? The bell rang. It’s recess time.”

  “It’s Easter vacation,” she said.

  I looked at her like she was a stranger in a dream.

  “Dr. Cross,” she said. “Do you know who I am?”

  I did suddenly and felt myself grow irrationally angry. “You’re Dawson. The principal. You’re the one who let Mulch in. Where have you been? We’ve been trying to find you.”

  My expression and tone must have frightened her, because she took a step back. “I’m sorry. I was on vacation, I don’t—”

  “Thierry Mulch,” I shouted. “You let that sick fuck into Ali’s school. You let him near all those children!”

  “What?” she said, her hand going to her lips. “What’s he done?”

  “He kidnapped my family,” I said. “He may have killed my wife. He may be getting ready to kill Ali.”

  The principal was horrified. “My God, no!”

  I saw how strongly she reacted, and it shook me out of the fugue state where I’d been wandering.

  “We left messages for you all week here at the school,” I said. “The FBI. The police.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Dawson said, her voice quivering. “I was in Jamaica, visiting my cousins, and I only just got back. I was going to my office to get ready for next week when I saw you standing here. How can I help? Anything.”

  “Tell me about Thierry Mulch. Everything you know.”

  Dawson said that Mulch had contacted her out of the blue, first by e-mail, and then by phone. He said he was a web entrepreneur who had had several successful ventures but was looking for a different demographic and a bigger audience. His idea was to create a social-media platform for the six- to twelve-year-old crowd that could be accessed only by verified members of that crowd.

  “To keep out the perverts?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Not a bad business concept.”

  “That’s what I thought. So when he asked to come speak to the kids, I saw it as an opportunity. And he checked out completely. I mean, his company has a legitimate website. Here, come into my office, I’ll show you.”

  We went to the front doors of the school. She opened them and we went inside, turning on lights. The odors in the hallway were so familiar and so intertwined with memories of my children that I stopped breathing through my nose.

  In her office, Dawson got on her desktop computer, typed, and then frowned before typing again. With a sinking expression, she said, “Either I’ve got it wrong or the website’s gone offline.”

  The principal started rummaging in her desk, said, “But I’ve got his business card here some—here it is!”

  “Don’t touch it!” I yelled, coming around the desk quickly as she shrank back. “I’m sorry. It’s just that we’ll want to fingerprint it.”

  In a thin voice, she said, “He wore thin white gloves.”

  “Of course he did,” I said, wanting to punch a wall. “But just the same. Do you have a plastic sandwich bag?”

  “Will an envelope do?”

  “Yes.”

  She got me an envelope and I used a pair of tweezers to pluck the business card from the drawer and place it on her desk.

  “I’ve got a photocopy of his driver’s license too,” she said.

  “We’ve already got one of those, but thanks,” I replied, studying the card and then taking a picture of it with my smartphone.

  Thierry Mulch, President, TMI Entertainment, Beverly Hills. It gave a phone number in the 213 area code and an address on Wilshire Boulevard. It also had a web address—www.TMIE1.info—and an e-mail address, [email protected].

  I was about to drop the card into the envelope and take it with me downtown for processing when something about the URL and the e-mail pinged deep in my recent memory.

  “Try www.TMIE.com on your computer.”

  Principal Dawson frowned, typed the URL in, and struck Return. The screen blinked, and up came the home page of TMI Enterprises, a multimedia and social-networking company.

  “This is it,” she said. “This is his website.”

  “Click on ‘Corporate Officers.’”

  She did and the screen jumped to another page that featured pictures and short bios of the people running the company. At the top of the heap was someone I’d seen when I’d visited the website two weeks before: a blond surfer-type guy in his late twenties wearing thick black glasses and a black hoodie.

  “That’s not the picture of Mulch I saw on the other version of the website,” Dawson said. “I saw the guy who came here, red hair, re
d beard, everything.”

  “Will the real Thierry Mulch please stand up?” I said, and I felt the throbbing in my head start up all over again.

  CHAPTER

  11

  MY HEAD WAS STILL pounding when I reached the sealed-off construction area on the third floor of Metro headquarters. Men in hard hats and respirator masks were using sledgehammers to bust down drywall. The air was full of gypsum dust as I went to the plastic sheeting that sealed off the destructing from the already destructed.

  I started to cough and that only made the pain in my head worse. A part of me wanted to shut down then, to curl up in a fetal position right there in the dust and let it settle on me as I mourned my wife. But a greater part of me needed to keep pushing on. If I was to have any hope of saving the rest of my family, I had to keep moving, keep asking questions, keep fighting as long and as hard as possible.

  I tore open the flap and stepped inside a large space already stripped down to the cement floors. In the middle, under a bank of fluorescent shop lights, stood eight desks. At them or around them, good men and women were working.

  Ned Mahoney, my old partner at the FBI, was talking with Sampson. Mahoney spotted me and jumped up. “Jesus, Alex, I just heard. And I’m so goddamn … I don’t know what to say except I promise you, we’re moving heaven and earth to find this bastard.”

  I swallowed hard, patted him on the shoulder. Mahoney and I had worked together in Behavioral Sciences at Quantico. We’d toiled on too many cases involving the criminally insane to bullshit each other with psychological nuances and false premises.

  “Ned,” I managed. “If we don’t catch him, he’ll carve them all up in the same twisted way.”

  “That’s not happening,” said Captain Roelof Antonius Quintus, my boss, who was coming toward me with other members of the task force. “If that Jane Doe turns out to be Bree, he’s killed a DC cop. At the very least, he’s kidnapped a DC cop’s family. For that, he will pay.”

  The rest of the detectives and FBI agents behind him nodded grimly.

  “Thank you, Captain,” I said, nodding to the others. “Thank you all for everything you’re doing.”

  I got out the envelope I’d taken from Dawson’s office.

  “I went to Sojourner Truth and found the principal back from vacation,” I told them. “I have a business card Mulch gave her when he went there to speak to the kids.”

  I handed it over to the captain, explaining about the fake website that was almost like the one a real Thierry Mulch ran.

  “Everything was the same except the picture of Mulch. It took sophisticated computer work. The kind Preston Elliot could do in his sleep.”

  Quintus, Sampson, and Mahoney exchanged glances.

  “Why don’t you sit down, Alex,” the captain said.

  “What’s going on?”

  Quintus took a deep breath and pointed to a chair. Reluctantly, I sat in it, and I felt my eyes begin to burn even before Ned Mahoney spoke.

  “Three days ago, the Fairfax County sheriff was called to a commercial pig farm in Berryville, Virginia,” Mahoney began. “The owner found a human skull and a piece of femur in some machinery. Quantico ran the DNA and got three immediate matches.”

  I squinted at the light in the room, which suddenly felt too strong. “Three?”

  Sampson said, “Semen taken from that rape scene in Alexandria, semen taken from the pants leg of Mandy Bell Lee’s murdered attorney, and the hair sample Preston Elliot’s mother filed as part of his missing-persons report.”

  It took several moments before I grasped the implications of all that. Ten days before, the attorney of country-western star Mandy Bell Lee had been found poisoned in his room at the Mandarin Oriental. That same night, a man who called himself Thierry Mulch had raped a woman in Alexandria.

  Since we had clear DNA evidence linking the rape and the murder to Preston Elliot, we had been working under the assumption that the missing computer engineering student and Mulch were one and the same.

  But Mulch was not Elliot. He could not be Elliot because the DNA match on the bones found at the pigsty was dead certain, which meant …

  “Mulch killed Elliot and dumped his body in that pig barn,” I said.

  “We think so,” Sampson said, nodding. “Pigs’ll eat anything you throw at them.”

  I remembered something Ali had told me about Mulch.

  “It fits. When Mulch spoke at Ali’s school, he said that he’d grown up on a pig farm.”

  “So how do we think this worked?” Captain Quintus asked. “Mulch got Elliot’s sperm before he killed him?”

  “Why not?” Sampson replied. “It’s a brilliant way for Mulch to throw us, isn’t it? Plant a dead man’s DNA at a rape scene and at a murder?”

  “This sonofabitch is diabolical,” Mahoney said.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Mulch is diabolical. He’s very smart, thinks long term, and is cruel and audacious, which strikes me as narcissistically evil.”

  Captain Quintus nodded. “Believes in himself above all others, thinks he’s too smart to get caught.”

  “Which means he’s gotten away with serious shit before,” Sampson said. “It’s mutually reinforcing with these guys.”

  Mahoney said, “What I’d like to know is, is Mulch acting solo, or are there others involved in what he’s doing?”

  CHAPTER

  12

  COULD MULCH HAVE KIDNAPPED my entire family in less than ten hours, starting with Damon at his prep school in the Berkshires, on his own?

  On Good Friday morning, Damon was supposed to have taken a 7:45 jitney from campus to the Albany train station, but according to the driver, at the last minute, Damon told a friend that he was canceling because he’d gotten a ride to Washington.

  But with whom? Mulch? Or someone else?

  We hadn’t been able to answer those questions because the Kraft School, like Sojourner Truth, had been closed for vacation.

  In any case, I knew from personal experience that the drive from the Kraft School to DC takes at least seven hours, and Good Friday traffic had to have been thick. So let’s say eight hours. That put Mulch in Washington around four.

  Bree, Ali, Jannie, and Nana Mama were all taken in the following two hours. Theoretically, then, it was possible that Mulch had done this alone. But if so, he’d acted with what felt like pinpoint and ruthless precision.

  “My instincts say he had help,” I said. “The sperm found at the rape and the murder scene supports that too.”

  “How’s that?” Mahoney asked.

  “Unless Elliot was a homosexual, it makes sense to me that Mulch had a female accomplice. She lured the kid in for sex, saved his sperm, probably from a condom, and Mulch killed him afterward.”

  “It fits,” Quintus said.

  It did fit. As if a fog bank were lifting, we were beginning to get a clearer view of the world behind us, a world I would have given my soul to return to.

  I said, “Can someone go back to George Mason, back to Elliot’s friends, ask them about any women he might have been seeing?”

  “I’ll do it myself,” Mahoney promised.

  I looked at Sampson. “Feel like driving?”

  “Where we going?”

  “That farm where they found Elliot’s bones.”

  “Uh,” Captain Quintus began, sharing a glance with Mahoney. “You sure you want to be working now, Alex?”

  My breath turned shallow. “I can’t just sit here and wait for more members of my family to show up dead, Cap. I refuse to. That’s what Mulch wants and I just won’t do it.”

  “Alex,” Mahoney said. “Maybe—”

  I glared at my old friend, said, “If I don’t work, Ned, I’ll be lost to Bree, and I won’t be lost to her. Not now.”

  Mahoney nodded slowly and then gestured at Sampson and said, “But you’re driving, John. With that head injury, he’s still in no condition to be behind the wheel.”

  CHAPTER

  13
r />   IT TOOK SAMPSON AND me about an hour to get free of DC traffic and take blue highways out through Reston and McLean and on into the rural land you find the more west and south you go in Virginia. We rode most of the way in silence, but Sampson’s pity and grief were as clear as if he’d spoken words of condolence or shock.

  Sampson’s mere presence, the living, breathing embodiment of my longest relationship in life other than Nana Mama, was the only reason I didn’t completely crack up during the drive to the pig farm. But no matter how I tried to stop it, I kept flashing on images of Bree during our courtship. That first shared bashful smile. The first time I touched her fingers. The first time her lips met mine. How much she liked to dance and laugh. How committed she was to being a cop and a stepmother to my kids.

  “You thinking about her, shug?” Sampson asked.

  There were times when I could swear my partner was clairvoyant. Or at least, he picked up on subtle changes in my body so perfectly that he could decipher my thoughts. Or it was an easy guess; I don’t know.

  “Yeah,” I said, and fell quiet again for several long moments, swallowing hard at unbridled emotion. “John?”

  “Talk to me,” he said.

  “I don’t know how to …” I began and then faltered. “I can’t …”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Think of Bree as gone,” I said through clenched teeth. “It’s like my heart can’t believe it. I didn’t even get to say good-bye. I wasn’t there to tell her how much I loved her, how she made everything in my life so …”

  “Whole?” Sampson said softly.

  “Anchored,” I replied.

  It was the perfect word for what Bree had done in my life; she was the person who anchored me, grounded me, kept me from washing away.

  “We don’t have DNA results yet,” Sampson said.

  “I’ve been telling myself that.”