Hope to Die Read online

  I felt better after the shower and a change of shirt from my locker, more alert than I had been in days. When I reached the third floor, the demolition team was long gone, and the floor had been swept clean. I went through the plastic sheeting and saw five people standing near that island of desks under the fluorescent lights.

  Sampson looked like he had something left over from the pig farm on his shoe. I was about to tell him I had the same problem when I noticed Mahoney stirring a dark cup of coffee. Captain Quintus was drinking water, and Aaron Wallace, the DC police chief, appeared saddened.

  Detective Tess Aaliyah was the only one who gave me a steady gaze.

  She swallowed, said, “I wanted to tell you myself.”

  Questions exploded through my brain. Had they found Mulch? Had another member of my family turned up? Was I going to have to be tortured again, go to a dump scene to identify someone I loved? In the end, it was something even more unimaginable and cruel.

  “The autopsy,” Aaliyah said. “I was there, and …”

  Her eyes were watering and she shook her head.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “We still don’t have DNA, but the blood types match,” she said. “And there’s …”

  Sampson cleared his throat, said, “She was pregnant, Alex. Six weeks.”

  Hearing about the blood type had made the grief real. Hearing about the baby was too much.

  My head spun and I felt sicker than at the pig farm. I sat down hard in one of the chairs, put my face in my hands, the headache pounding with every bit of its earlier fury.

  “I’m sorry,” Aaliyah said. “Had you been trying?”

  I shook my head bitterly, said, “This is a miracle and a tragedy at the same time. Can you believe that?”

  “Shug?” Sampson said.

  A great part of me wanted to rail at the sky and the moon, curse God and demand to know why I’d been singled out for this kind of punishment.

  Instead, I gazed around at all of them and said, “Bree had uterine fibroids about five years ago. They removed them, but the procedure left scars. The doctors told us she’d likely never have children. A one-in-a-thousand chance, they …”

  I don’t think I’ve ever felt more bewildered in my life than I was at that moment. I didn’t even hear Chief Wallace come over beside me, but I felt his heavy hand on my shoulder before he said, “Hell of a thing you’re going through, Alex. Hell of a thing. Too much for one man to handle.”

  I nodded, cleared my throat, and in a voice tight with emotion said, “Chief, it’s beyond anything I’ve ever had to deal with before.”

  He patted my shoulder again. “I can’t imagine the stress.”

  “I’m still standing.”

  The chief took a chair, set it opposite me, and sat down on it, his forearms resting on his thighs, and his face twisted in anguish. “I know you’re still standing. I know you’re a fighter, and I know this is personal. That’s what makes what I’m going to say now so hard.”

  I’d been nodding, but now I knitted my brow. “Chief?”

  “Alex, for your own good, and because I respect you so much, I’m placing you on medical leave.”

  That made no sense. “What?”

  “For the time being, I want you to take a break from this investigation, let us work on your behalf for once. I’m sorry, Alex, but I need your gun and badge.”

  For a moment, even those words didn’t penetrate, but then they did and it felt like I was being tossed overboard.

  “Chief, you can’t do that,” I pleaded. “I’m good. I’m handling this.”

  “No one in your situation could be good,” Wallace said. “You showed up at your kid’s school crying and then you ranted at the principal. You mistreated a cooperative witness this afternoon—hit him, as I understand it.”

  I looked at Sampson, not believing what was being said, and whispered, “You can’t do this. I have to find—”

  Captain Quintus shook his head, said, “Alex, we’re all afraid that the injury to your head and the pressure of all that’s happened to you is too enormous to be dealt with while trying to work. We want you to go to a hospital to meet with a neurologist who’s waiting to do a baseline—”

  “That’s not happening,” I said. “Not now.”

  “Alex,” Ned Mahoney began.

  “You think I asked for this?” I demanded, feeling the heat rise in my face. “Who asks for his family to be taken? Who asks for his wife to be cut to pieces? Who asks to be pounded and pounded and—”

  Only then did I realize I’d been shouting at them.

  “They say that’s part of it, shug,” Sampson said. “The anger. Coming from the concussion as much as from Mulch. You need help. You see that, don’t you?”

  “Of course he does, John,” Mahoney said. “He knows the statistics.”

  “Gun and badge, Detective,” the chief said sadly, holding out his hand.

  CHAPTER

  19

  THE FIGHT WENT OUT of me then, like a liquid draining from my core in a matter of seconds. I handed my badge and gun to Chief Wallace, said, “Appreciate your concern.”

  “We’ll get these back to you as soon as the doctors say it’s okay,” Wallace reassured me. “You’re an incredible asset to this department and we know it.”

  I nodded, stood, went to my desk, and picked up a framed picture of my family and some mail. But I also managed to palm something valuable from the back of my department-issue laptop.

  With the photograph in my right hand and the mail and flash drive in my jacket pocket, I headed for the plastic sheeting. Sampson and Mahoney fell in on either side of me.

  “I’m not going to tip over, you know,” I said as we went back through that demolition site.

  “Just making sure you go to the GWU hospital,” Sampson said.

  “See the neurologist,” Mahoney added.

  I shrugged, said, “You’re right.”

  We rode the elevator in silence. Sampson and I got out on one. Mahoney went to the basement to retrieve his car.

  “Can I take a leak without you peeking over my shoulder?” I asked.

  My partner thought about it, said, “I wouldn’t put that duty on my worst enemy.”

  I managed a laugh and then walked around the corner and into a hallway that ran back toward the crime lab. I pushed the door to the men’s room open loudly, kicked off my shoes, picked them up, and jogged down the hall in my socks, taking several turns before the staircase that led to the parking garage.

  I opened the basement door in time to see Mahoney’s taillights as he went up the exit ramp. Pete Koslowski, a sergeant and head of the motor pool, was an old friend. When I told him I needed a ride, he flipped me the keys to an unmarked car.

  They were right, I thought as I climbed into the car. I probably did need to see a neurologist. But that would mean at least an overnight stay for observation, maybe two or three. I didn’t have that much time to waste. Whatever was going on inside my head was going to have to wait.

  My phone started ringing two minutes later.

  Sampson called, and then Mahoney. I kept clicking the ringer off and headed for the house. I was going to need a few things. As I drove, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the phone screen lighting up every few seconds.

  It lit up again while I was idling at a red light on New York Avenue, and I reached over to shut the phone off altogether.

  Then I saw the caller ID.

  It said Mulch.

  When I answered, I heard shallow, raspy breathing, as if someone were trembling with excitement, and then an electronically altered voice said, “So good of you to take my call, Dr. Cross.”

  CHAPTER

  20

  “DO YOU UNDERSTAND?” MULCH asked two minutes later.

  Each and every word of my first direct conversation with the man who’d taken my family and butchered my wife was seared on my injured brain, and I couldn’t reply.

  “Do you understand what you need
to do to see the surviving members of your family alive again?” Mulch asked insistently.

  I couldn’t answer him. My mind kept flashing on vague images from some movie I’d seen where each of a man’s four limbs was tied to a different horse, all of them facing in different directions.

  “Cross?”

  “I can’t, I …”

  “Too late,” Mulch said, sounding cold and hard through the static that camouflaged his voice. “Another one bites the dust. Look in your backyard and then call me back.”

  The static and connection died.

  I stared at the phone, and then dug out a blue light from the glove box, opened the window, and stuck it on the roof. Shaking from head to toe, I flipped on the siren and floored the accelerator.

  Six minutes later I flipped off the siren, pulled the blue light, and turned onto my block. With every inch I drove, my fear and sorrow grew.

  “Please, God, no,” I whispered again and again.

  But the closer I got to my home, the more I understood that the time for God had passed. There was someone, one of my children or my grandmother, dead in my backyard.

  Mulch had done it once. He’d do it twice.

  I no longer had any doubt of it.

  I skidded to a stop in front of my home, took a flashlight, and circled to the narrow walkway that led around the side of the house to the backyard. Playing the beam about, I saw the foundation, the plywood walls of the addition, and the portable toolshed and toilet the contractors had brought in.

  Where the rear fence of my yard met the gate that led out to the alley, my light found the body, and I was hit with the second shock wave of the day, a blow that felt supernatural in its strength, and pure evil in its intent.

  But I didn’t go down to my knees as I had earlier. I stood there, seeing Damon’s class ring on his right hand, the chain and the St. Christopher’s medal around his neck, and the stud and tiny loop earrings in his right ear.

  He lay on the ground, his lower body twisted toward the wall, his torso and head turned to the night sky. His face had been battered beyond all recognition. And across his entire body, front and back, oval disks of skin were missing every four or five inches or so, as if Mulch had been trying to simulate a leopard’s spotted pelt.

  I tried to tell myself that it might not be my son.

  But a thousand memories of Damon spun tragically around me. The air rang with a chorus of his voices: as a giggling toddler who’d loved to suck his thumb and curl up in my lap while his mom made breakfast on Saturday mornings; as a troubled five-year-old trying to understand why his mother had died; as a joyous, victorious ten-year-old after he’d almost single-handedly won a basketball game; as a young man who loved to laugh.

  Damon had a beautiful laugh that came up out of his belly and seized his whole body. It was genuine and contagious, and one of the things I most loved about him.

  Right then and there, I knew that I was doomed to pine for that laugh every day for the rest of my life. I wanted to cross the yard and take my firstborn in my arms, feel the weight of the man he’d become.

  But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  With every passing moment looking at the corpse, I became aware that I’d been changed that day, irrevocably transformed into someone I no longer recognized.

  Up until Mulch, I’d always considered myself a moral man, guided by principles; there were certain lines I’d never cross, or even contemplate crossing. But as I gazed at the desecration of my son, I knew that all my principles had been sacrificed, and all rules of conduct destroyed.

  “This is not happening again,” I vowed to my son before turning away. “I promise you that.”

  Flipping off the flashlight, I felt myself swell with righteous anger and went fast around the side of the house, only to pull up short, startled by the silhouette of someone standing there ahead of me.

  CHAPTER

  21

  “ALEX?” AVA SAID IN a fearful voice. “Is that you?”

  In the long frenzy of the day, I’d completely forgotten about the runaway girl who’d saved my life and my sanity in so many ways. When had she left the house? Last night? I honestly didn’t know.

  “Alex?” she said, her voice higher.

  “It’s me, Ava.”

  She ran to me, hugged me, sobbing: “Is it true? Bree?”

  I held her to me, unable to tell her that Damon was in the backyard. “It looks that way,” I said.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, pushing her back gently. “I have to leave now, Ava.”

  “Why? Where are you going?”

  “To find Mulch.” I kissed her on the cheek and started toward the house.

  Ava hurried behind me, saying, “I’m going with you.”

  “No, you are not,” I said.

  “Please, Alex,” she begged. “I can help you find them. I showed you how the pictures were faked. I can help. I’m good at that kind of stuff.”

  It was a bad idea to bring Ava with me for too many reasons to count.

  But she was gifted with computers, and damn street-smart. She’d shown me that again and again. I thought about what Mulch wanted me to do to save the rest of my family, and I saw in an instant how it might work.

  “You have a driver’s license?”

  “No, but I can drive. My mom’s last shitty boyfriend taught me.”

  “Can you listen? Follow orders?”

  Ava’s chin retreated several inches, but she nodded. “I owe you and Nana Mama.”

  I dug in my pocket, came up with my house key, and opened the door.

  “Go find Jannie’s laptop. It’s in her room.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” I admitted. “Just get the computer.”

  While she went upstairs to look for the computer, I got a bag of clothes and my backup weapon, an old .45-caliber Colt 1911. The pistol was bigger and heavier than the nine-millimeter Glock I had turned over to Quintus, but it had excellent balance, and I shot it well. At short range with the 230-grain bullets and the hot loads, it could drop a charging rhino in its tracks.

  “I’ve got it,” Ava said, looking at the gun as I tugged on a jacket.

  “Good,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “Do I need one of those?” Ava asked.

  “One of what?”

  “A gun?”

  At first I dismissed it out of hand. Bringing her along was bad enough. Arming her was crazy, but I asked, “You ever shot a gun?”

  She shook her head. “Seen it on TV.”

  “Little bit different in reality,” I said, but I went into Bree’s closet and reached under her nightgowns for the small Ruger nine-millimeter she sometimes kept in her purse when we went out somewhere fancy.

  Ava reached for it, but I put it in my pocket, along with a box of bullets. “I’ll see how you do along the way before I let you anywhere near it.”

  “But Alex—” she began.

  “Follow orders,” I said. I picked up the bag and left the house with her trailing. Locking the door, I realized that if I was to have any hope of catching up with Mulch before he killed the rest of my family, I was going to have to divorce myself from what had already happened. I was going to have to compartmentalize, focus on the task, and deal with my grief later. I was going to have to act as if I were on a case where I had zero emotional involvement.

  We left with Ava driving and me riding shotgun with Jannie’s computer in my lap. I never looked back. I couldn’t bear the thought of it.

  Ava was no polished driver, but she had grit and settled into the task with every bit of her little being. “Where are we going?” she asked again after I’d seen she could follow basic directions and not hit oncoming cars.

  “Get across the bridge,” I replied. “Head south until I tell you different.”

  Soon we were on I-95 in the far right lane heading toward Richmond, Virginia. My mind no longer felt fried. It had a purpose and began
to click off the things I needed: money, lots of it, and a new phone, and a new car, and I had to tell someone about Damon.

  Though I did not want to, I turned my phone back on. Rather than give in to my first impulse and dial Sampson, I called Detective Tess Aaliyah.

  “It’s Cross,” I said when she answered.

  “Where the hell are you?” Aaliyah demanded. “You need to be in a hospital. Everyone’s looking for—”

  “There’s a male body in my backyard,” I said. “I believe it’s my son Damon.”

  Ava almost went off the road.

  “My God,” the detective gasped. “Are you there now?”

  “I don’t think I’ll ever go back there, Detective,” I said.

  “Where are you?”

  “Mulch has us heading in the general direction of hell,” I replied, before lowering the window and hurling my iPhone onto the highway while going sixty miles an hour.

  CHAPTER

  22

  IT WAS NEARLY DAWN that Saturday morning after Easter.

  Tess Aaliyah had been in Alex Cross’s backyard since eleven the night before, overseeing her second crime scene in less than twenty-four hours.

  She’d welcomed the help from John Sampson and Ned Mahoney, allowing Cross’s current partner to search the house and his former FBI partner to take charge of the gathering of evidence. From blood spatters, tire tracks, and marks in the dirt, they’d determined that the killer had brought the body into the alley behind the house and then dragged it through the gate into the backyard.

  Mahoney’s men believed the tracks were made by a pickup truck with bald tires. They’d also discovered that, like Bree’s, many of the boy’s teeth had been pulled.

  Watching the corpse loaded into a body bag and wheeled out of the backyard, Aaliyah was thinking that in one sense the teeth pulling went along with the generalized mutilations of the bodies, but in another nagging sense, it didn’t. The teeth removal and the clipped fingertips could be efforts to hide the victim’s true identity.