Hope to Die Read online

  “Alex?”

  I swallowed hard and said, “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  She hardened. “I’m your friend in this, you know.”

  “I know you are, Ava,” I said, feeling raw emotion get the better of dispassion. “I just can’t talk about it until I figure out a few things. You’re gonna have to trust me until then.”

  I could see she wanted to argue, but she bit her lip and did not reply.

  We stopped in Charleston around eleven that morning and had an early lunch in a greasy-spoon café on the wrong side of town. Not surprisingly, we got a little scrutiny from the locals, both black and white.

  I guess it wasn’t often they saw a big African American male in his forties traveling with a seventeen-year-old white girl sporting tats and multiple piercings, but we had other deadly things on our minds and did our best to ignore the looks.

  A waitress put a check in front of me and a piece of apple pie with vanilla ice cream in front of Ava. She’d already demolished a double cheeseburger, a hot dog, and two orders of fries, but she dug into her dessert like a starving woman as the waitress left.

  I put down money for the tab along with a generous tip. When Ava finished and the waitress returned, she saw the tip and smiled. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “Is there a Verizon store close?”

  “Sure,” she said, gesturing over my shoulder. “Mile down the street.”

  “How about an electronics store?”

  “They’re all right there,” she said. “It’s a strip mall. Can’t miss it.”

  “Appreciate it,” I said. I tossed Ava the keys, and we headed for the door.

  “Verizon?” Ava asked as we climbed into the car.

  “I need a satellite connection and a data plan.”

  “Electronics store?”

  “A video camera.”

  She thought about that, said, “For proof?”

  I nodded but said nothing more about it. We left Charleston shortly after noon with a satellite broadband modem and a GoPro high-definition camera. I had the modem plugged into Jannie’s computer and it was working like a dream. Neither my Internet connection at home nor the one at my office had ever worked that fast.

  “Keep north,” I said, typing on the keyboard until I found what I was looking for and then dialing the general phone number of the Morgantown Detachment of the West Virginia State Police.

  When a female trooper answered, I said I was John Sampson, a DC homicide detective, and I was trying to track down the lead investigator in a twenty-five-year-old case out of Buckhannon.

  “Twenty-five years?” she said skeptically. “I don’t know if … who was the investigator?”

  “Atticus Jones?” I said.

  There was a long pause at the other end of the line before she replied, “Well, if you’re going to talk to him, Detective Sampson, I’m afraid you’re going to have to be quick about it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Last I heard, poor Atticus had terminal cancer.”

  CHAPTER

  28

  TWO HOURS LATER, WE walked into the lobby of Fitzwater’s Gracious Living, a nursing facility in Fairmont, West Virginia. We’d passed the exit for Buckhannon on the way, but if the trooper was right, I had to make this visit first.

  “Atticus Jones?” I said to the receptionist.

  She gave Ava and me a critical gaze before saying, “You family?”

  “No,” I said, pushing one of my cards across the counter. “This is a business call. Mr. Jones used to be a—”

  “Detective,” she sniffed. “We hear about it all the time.”

  “Can we talk to him?” I asked.

  She looked at Ava incredulously. “You a cop too?”

  Ava, without missing a beat, said, “I get that all the time. Ever seen Twenty-One Jump Street?”

  The receptionist giggled. “You could pass for high school, Detective …?”

  “Bryce. Ava Bryce.”

  “You go on back then, Detectives,” the receptionist said, buzzing us through a door. “He’s down the hall there in the hospice lounge, but don’t get the poor thing all riled up.”

  We heard Atticus Jones before we saw him, and he didn’t sound weak to me at all.

  “You complete frickin’ idiot,” he yelled. “Who is Genghis Khan? For Christ’s sake, who is Genghis Khan?”

  Then he fell into a hacking fit.

  A frail black man with short silver hair and a boxer’s nose, a former state homicide investigator, was sitting on a couch wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers sweatshirt and pants. He was watching Jeopardy! on the television and drinking a bottle of Yuengling bock beer. There was an empty beer bottle on the table beside him. An oxygen line ran from his nose to a tank on wheels.

  “Detective Jones?” I said when he stopped coughing.

  Jones took us in sidelong at first, swigging his beer before setting it down and putting the TV on mute. Turning slowly, he waved a bony finger at us.

  “I am pushing eighty,” he said. “And in my entire life I’ve never forgotten a face.”

  “Really?” Ava said, warming to him. “I’m like that too.”

  “Super-recognizer?” he said, studying her.

  “Uh, guess that’s what you’d call it.”

  “It is exactly what you’d call it, young lady,” Jones said in a no-nonsense tone. “Saw a whole to-do on it couple months back on Sixty Minutes. You ever watch that show, Dr. Cross?”

  I decided that if this guy was dying, I was going to live a hundred years.

  I smiled. “You recognized me?”

  “Told you,” he said. “Saw you speak once.”

  “Where was that?” I asked.

  “Seminar I took at Quantico ’bout ten years back. You guest-lectured one day. Criminal psychology.”

  “I make an impression?” I asked, taking a seat opposite him.

  “Hell, I’d been thirty years on the job by that time, but yes, sir, you did teach me a thing or two. I will admit that.”

  “Nice to hear,” I said, smiling. “I’m hoping you can pay me back the favor.”

  “That right?” Jones said, perking up. “How’s that?”

  “You can tell me about Thierry Mulch.”

  The old man’s eyes narrowed, and his jaw set hard before he wagged that bony finger at me again and said in an emotional whisper, “I knew it. That evil, calculating, pig-farming daddy-killer. I knew it all along!”

  CHAPTER

  29

  THE OLD DETECTIVE FELL back against the couch hacking so hard I thought he’d break a rib. But after thirty or forty seconds of this, he stopped, grabbed a plastic cup, and spit in it. He looked in the cup, then up at me.

  “Good news,” Jones said. “Blood, but no lung tissue.”

  I was still spinning from his remark about Mulch. Pig-farming daddy-killer?

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “What did you know all along?”

  “That Thierry Mulch is alive,” the old detective croaked. “That’s what you came to tell me, wasn’t it?”

  Alive?

  I said, “But I read his obituary.”

  “Course you did. Don’t mean a damn thing.”

  “Back up a minute. What makes you think he’s alive?”

  The old man reached up and thumped on his chest. “Always felt that way, in here. Never could shake the feeling. Why? What’s he done?”

  “If it’s the same man, he killed my wife and son,” I said. “And he’s holding my grandmother and my two other children hostage. He’s threatening to kill them too if I don’t do what he wants.”

  Jones looked appalled. “I knew that boy had gotten a taste for it.”

  “Taste for what?” Ava asked.

  “Murder,” the old detective said. “Thierry killed his father, and then another guy, probably a transient. I couldn’t prove it, though.”

  “Time out,” I said, waving my hands. “Could you start at the be
ginning?”

  The detective hesitated before saying, “Be better if I could also show you, so you’d understand the lay of the land.”

  “You up for a ride down to Buckhannon?”

  Jones laughed. “You’d have to sneak me out the back door. Otherwise that nosy gal at the front desk will be calling my daughter, Gloria, up in Pittsburgh ’bout it, and she’ll have what my granddaughter Lizzie calls ‘a cow.’”

  I smiled again. “If you’re up to it?”

  “What else am I gonna do? Wheel of Fortune? I’m too far gone for that Vanna White.”

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll sneak you out the back.”

  The old man seemed to lose ten years then. He grabbed a walker and struggled to his feet. “Just have me back by seven. Gloria’s coming down to pay a visit, have dinner. You got room for an oxygen tank?”

  “We do.”

  “And you, young lady,” he said, waving that finger at Ava. “Go in that fridge and get me the rest of that six-pack.”

  She glanced at me, and I said, “You think that’s a smart idea for someone in your condition?”

  “What’s it gonna do, kill me?” Jones asked and then laughed. “Nah. A cigarette might kill me, but not a beer.”

  It took some doing, but soon we had Detective First Grade Atticus Jones, retired, up front and the oxygen tank in the backseat with Ava. Jones cracked a beer before I even got in the driver’s seat and started calling out directions.

  When we were finally heading south on the interstate, I said, “Can you give us the part of the story where we don’t need to know the lay of the land?”

  There was no answer for a moment, and then I heard a wheezing noise. Ava laughed softly. I glanced over. The old detective’s eyes were shut, his mouth was hanging open, and he was gently snoring.

  I guess two beers will do that to you when you’re pushing eighty and close to death.

  CHAPTER

  30

  ATTICUS JONES SLEPT UNTIL we were a mile shy of Buckhannon, where he seemed to hear some internal alarm clock because he came awake with a loud snort, looked around, and said, “Take Route Twenty south.”

  We rolled into the town, and as I turned onto the two-lane highway, I was surprised. I suppose I expected Buckhannon to be some idyllic backwater on a Saturday afternoon, and it was quaint, with older brick buildings and blooming trees everywhere, but the place was also bustling with dump trucks and pickups of every shape and size and crawling with ore rigs loaded with coal.

  “There are mines here?” Ava asked.

  “You are in Coal Central, young lady,” the old detective replied. “Buckhannon’s the county seat of Upshur County. You throw a stick in Upshur County, and there’s a mine. You shake a dog, and a mining consultant will jump off before the fleas. That Sago Mine where they had the explosion back in 2006? Killed those twelve men? That’s just up the road there. Lot of money coming out of Buckhannon. Lot of black lung too. Killed my father. Killing me.”

  “You were a miner here?” I asked, surprised.

  “Four years to get the money to go to West Virginia Wesleyan over there on the other side of town,” Jones said. “Hated every minute of the mines but had to do it. Now, south of French Creek Road, you’ll be looking for the signs to the Pig Lick Mine, up that Pig Lick Road. About nine miles out of town.”

  We drove past a mine-safety school and then traveled along the Buckhannon River, which looked beautiful in the spring sunshine. We reached Pig Lick Road fifteen minutes later.

  There were warning signs about mining trucks and steep grades, and the dirt road had potholes and long stretches of washboard that had us bouncing all over the place even going slow. The enormous, bright yellow Crossfield Mining Company ore trucks laden with tons of coal, however, didn’t seem affected in the least by the road conditions, and they scared the hell out of us as they barreled downhill going sixty-plus. But I managed to keep the sedan well out of their way through a series of switchbacks the Pig Lick Road made as it climbed the ridge.

  Just below the top, however, an ore truck came up behind us, real close, and started honking for us to get out of the way.

  “Don’t worry,” Jones told me. “You get to the crest there around the next bend and you’ll find a place to pull off where you can see and he can get by.”

  The road was wider in the saddle and I did as he said, swinging the car into a pull-off with a guardrail that separated it from a cliff that fell away several hundred feet to a narrow valley floor. The mining truck slowed as it passed. I saw a man in the passenger seat. He wore a blue uniform, sunglasses, and a yellow hard hat. He glowered at me as he went by.

  CHAPTER

  31

  I SHRUGGED THE GUY’S anger off and gazed across the valley to where it looked like some giant had come along and lopped off the entire top of a mountain. The wound was almost a mile long and God only knew how wide. Dust rose off the top of the strip mine, stirred by the breeze and the dozens of trucks moving to and fro.

  “Below us, that’s Hog Hollow,” Jones said. “That’s where Thierry came from.”

  “The mine?” I asked, confused.

  “No, no, that wasn’t around back then,” the old detective said. “But it’s part of the story.”

  Jones cracked another bock beer and sipped from it as he explained that Thierry Mulch had been born into a family of pig farmers and moonshiners. Four generations of Mulches had lived in the bottom of Hog Hollow, the narrow valley between us and the present-day Pig Lick Mine.

  Kevin “Little Boar” Mulch, Thierry’s father, had gone to school with Atticus Jones but dropped out at fourteen when his father, “Big Boar,” died. The boy had to take over the family’s affairs.

  Little Boar married his second cousin Lydia when he was in his twenties and she was no more than sixteen. Lydia was a looker, which made Little Boar obsessively jealous. She was also bookish, which made him angry and resentful.

  “Little Boar was ignorant and knew it but buried his own shame by always belittling Lydia,” Jones told us. “Got worse after she had Thierry, who they called Baby Boar.”

  Addicted to his own rotgut hooch, Thierry’s father became increasingly violent as his son grew up and revealed himself to be as bookish and smart as his mother. Little Boar put Lydia in the ER at St. John’s Hospital on a number of occasions, once with a fractured arm, another time with a fractured jaw. Twice, Lydia brought Thierry into the same ER. His father had seen fault with how Baby Boar had done his chores and beat him with a barber’s shaving strop.

  “No one arrested the guy?” Ava said.

  “Those were sadly different times, young lady,” the detective said. “And from what I know, kids teased Thierry unmercifully as a child. They called him Pig Boy and would taunt him with ‘Sooooweeee’ and ‘Here, piggy, piggy!’”

  When Thierry was thirteen, his mother met a mining engineer, someone from Montana or Oklahoma, and they had an affair. Without a word to her husband or son, Lydia left the family, took off with the engineer, and was never seen around Buckhannon again.

  Everyone knew. People laughed behind Thierry’s father’s back, which made him get drunker, angrier, and even more reclusive. School became the boy’s refuge, the only place he could go to escape his father’s wrath.

  “Smart boy, that Thierry,” Jones said. “Real smart. And that was the shame of it all, what I think led to the killing.”

  Thierry wanted to go to college. Little Boar laughed at his son, told Baby Boar he would spend his life just like his father, tending to the hogs, but maybe Thierry could use his chemistry-class skills to make better moonshine. The farm had more than a hundred pigs on it, but Thierry’s father said there was no money for something as useless as school.

  The summer before what would have been Thierry’s senior year, his father ordered him to quit high school, said it was a waste of time and he wouldn’t stand for it. Right around then, a lawyer showed up in Hog Hollow with an offer to buy the Mulch property.
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  Little Boar owned twenty-six hundred acres, seventeen hundred of them barely tillable in the rocky bottom of the hollow and the rest considered worthless for generations, a steep, rocky ridge covered in hornpout hickory and other trash trees. Given that assessment of the property, the lawyer’s offer was more than generous, in the high six figures. Little Boar refused to sell, said Hog Hollow and Pig Lick Mountain were sacred ground to the Mulch family and would always stay that way.

  A month later, the offer was doubled, and Thierry’s father refused again. The offer was tripled the month after that, and a drunken Little Boar pointed a double-barreled twelve-gauge at the attorney and told him to get off his property and never come back.

  Jones took a sip, gestured toward the hollow, and said, “So it’s October first now, and school’s on in Buckhannon, and Thierry’s not there. About eight in the morning, I get a call from the sheriff. Thierry had just called in hysterical, said his father had fallen in with the hogs sometime during the night and they’d eaten most of him.”

  CHAPTER

  32

  FOR A SECOND I almost didn’t believe my own ears, and then I said, “It’s him, then. No doubt now.”

  I explained about Preston Elliot’s skull and femur found at the commercial pig operation in Virginia.

  “It is him,” Jones crowed and slapped his thigh. “I knew it! When I got down to that farm about two hours later, I knew Thierry had killed his old man. I could just feel it; something about the way he moved when he showed me to the feedlot that the deputies had cleared. It was like he’d been relieved of some heavy burden.”

  When he got to the pigsty, Jones saw that most of Little Boar’s flesh had been consumed already. Thierry showed little emotion, just gave this blank stare at what was left of his father. He told Jones that Little Boar had been drinking the evening before. The boy said that he did what he always did when his father was into his second jar of moonshine: he went to his room, locked the door, and read a book.