Hope to Die Page 9

  “Aristotle,” Jones said. “He was reading Aristotle.”

  Thierry claimed he’d been deep into Nicomachean Ethics, reading about how man can best lead a good life, and had turned off his light around eleven. An hour later, he was roused by the pigs squealing, but that wasn’t unusual. There were all sorts of turf battles in the sties. You just got used to it. Thierry said his drunken father must have gone out to see about the ruckus and fallen in.

  “I told Thierry that he didn’t seem too shook up about his daddy’s death,” the old detective recalled. “He said, ‘I hated the sonofabitch, but even I wouldn’t have wanted him to die that way.’”

  That was Thierry’s line and attitude during the entire investigation. Jones said he searched Thierry’s room and found Aristotle on the table but also Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the story of a man who murders someone he thinks no one will miss.

  Jones asked him about it, and Thierry shrugged, said he hadn’t cracked it yet but that it was a requirement for honors English. Though his father had forced him to leave school, he’d been keeping up with the requirements.

  The old detective said he tried every way he could to rattle the boy’s story, but Baby Boar never wavered. Young Mulch had admitted readily that he’d thought about killing his father. Who wouldn’t? The man was sadistic and in many ways deserved to die. And Thierry said that maybe someday, if it had come to it, he would have killed his father. But this was an accident, an act of God, and as fitting an ending as there could be for the man—eaten by his own hogs.

  Jones said, “Autopsy showed a hairline fracture of Little Boar’s skull, but the hogs gnawed and hooved on it so hard the ME couldn’t say what had caused it.”

  Soon after, the old detective learned of the offers to buy the Mulch land. He pressed Thierry on that angle too. But young Mulch said the offers were news to him. Little Boar had never confided in him about anything.

  Four months later, however, Thierry turned eighteen, and as the sole heir to the Mulch land, he signed a contract selling the property to the Crossfield Mining Company for $5.5 million. Turned out the worthless mountain was made almost entirely of coal.

  When Jones pressed Thierry about the sale, Little Boar’s son replied that he had no intention of being a pig farmer and that the sale was the practical thing to do, a way out, another act of God.

  “He knew I didn’t believe him,” Jones said, shifting in his seat and adjusting the nose clip of his oxygen line. “He knew I was going to stay after him until I figured out a way to trip him up.”

  “So you think he staged his own death?” I asked.

  CHAPTER

  33

  THE OLD DETECTIVE TIPPED his beer my way, said, “Thirteen months after he killed Little Boar. Took almost that long to get the estate through probate and establish that Thierry had a legal right to sell the land. But it went through and he turned the land over, got his money, bought a brand-new Ford pickup, and started partying hard.”

  The Crossfield Mining Company gave Thierry a month to sell the hogs and clear off the property. Two nights before they were set to bulldoze the pig farm, Baby Boar was seen drunk in town. Later that same night, around three a.m., someone traveling on Route 20 North spotted a fire burning up high on the ridge above Hog Hollow.

  Jones gestured through the windshield toward the cliff. “Back then there was no guardrail here. Carrying a full tank of gas and going better than sixty by the trajectory, Thierry’s new truck dropped two hundred and twenty-two feet and exploded in a fireball when it collided with a big boulder down there on the flat. It was a dry year and it lit the whole damn woods down there on fire, took them two days to put out the flames.”

  “Was there a body?” I asked.

  “Squished pieces of one burned black as charcoal,” Jones replied. “We recovered enough to say he was male, and that was about it. The fire that took the truck was incredibly hot, melted the steel, so hot the fire marshal thought there might have been a second accelerant on board, like naphtha or something. But we never found evidence of it. Then again, our chemical forensics weren’t exactly first class back then.”

  I nodded. Naphtha was what was burned in camping stoves. It was extraordinarily combustible stuff. A truck soaked in naphtha that was also carrying a full tank of gasoline would have created an incredible explosion.

  “How’d you identify Thierry?”

  “Couldn’t,” the old detective said. “Little Boar believed in dentists less than in schools. Thierry had never been to a dentist in his life, and there was no such thing as DNA testing back then. Everyone just assumed it was him. Happened on the Mulch road in a Mulch truck with a male driver. Must have been a Mulch at the wheel.”

  “But you didn’t think that added up?”

  Jones shook his head. “No, I think he killed someone else, a transient or a hitchhiker, put him in the truck, and sent it flying off the cliff.”

  The old detective started to cough then, one of those long hacking sessions that shook his entire body. When he finally calmed, he said weakly, “I think we better start back, Dr. Cross. My daughter will be all shook up I’m not there when she comes for dinner.”

  “We’ll get you back in time,” I said and started the car.

  One of those huge yellow ore trucks was climbing the last grade out of Hog Hollow, but I had plenty of room to pull out in front of it and start down the windy, pitted road to the state highway. The washboard was worse heading downhill because of all those massive trucks hitting the brakes before the tight turns, and I had to fight the wheel; the unmarked car shimmied as if a big dog had hold of the front bumper and was shaking it violently.

  “What about the five million dollars?” Ava asked. “Where’d it go?”

  The old detective had his bony hand on the dashboard, bracing himself, but he cracked a smile at me, said, “She’s sharp. I was just getting to that.”

  “She is sharp,” I said. I glanced in the rearview and saw her blush.

  Jones said he couldn’t find a record of Thierry depositing the $5.5 million in any bank in the state or in any of the states that border West Virginia.

  “Was the check cashed?” Ava asked.

  The old detective smiled again. “You got serious instincts, young lady. It took years to get Crossfield’s attorney, a guy named Pete Garity, to talk to me candidly. He kept citing attorney-client privilege. But three years after Thierry’s pickup was found burning with a body in it, I brought Mr. Garity a bottle of Maker’s Mark and we got into it, and finally he admitted that young Mr. Mulch had been much shrewder than he appeared at first glance. The mining company had wanted to pay Thierry with a certified check, but he’d insisted on bearer bonds.”

  My head whipped toward him, and I was starting to say the word bearer when I caught bright yellow motion in the rearview mirror. Fifty yards back, one of the ore trucks was coming at us like a juggernaut.

  “Hold on!” I shouted and stomped on the gas.

  CHAPTER

  34

  DETECTIVE TESS AALIYAH DRANK down her second double espresso since rising after six fitful hours of sleep and heading back to the office that Saturday afternoon. The murders were still in that critical forty-eight-hour window when most lethal crimes are solved, and she didn’t want to waste a moment of it.

  Aaliyah got to her desk around two and picked up a six-inch pile of files and reports, early forensic findings, and summaries of interviews patrol officers had conducted with Cross’s neighbors.

  She scanned through the early reports, finding the one that matched Bree Stone’s blood type to that of Jane Doe, and another that matched Damon Cross’s blood type to that of John Doe. There was a sticky note attached to the second report that said the FBI had pushed the DNA work on both bodies to the front of the line, but even in this day and age, it was roughly a fifty-hour process, which meant results on Jane Doe and Bree Stone were a day away, maybe more. And the tests on Damon would be back Monday at the earliest.

&
nbsp; Setting those reports aside, the homicide detective started making a list of questions she wanted answered.

  It was a long-standing habit, something her father had taught her. Now a retired Baltimore homicide cop, her dad believed that a mind was only as good as the questions it was asked and the orders it was given.

  “Make a good list of questions and things to do and keep it running,” he used to say. “Once you know the answer to a question or have fulfilled an order, mark it off and move on. That’s how you create momentum.”

  First thing she wrote down was 1: How’s Dad doing?

  After his wife, Tess’s mother, died, a little over a year ago, Bernie Aaliyah had gone through a long mourning and depression. He was doing better, becoming increasingly independent, but he had been oddly guarded about his privacy recently.

  It wasn’t that he was cold to his daughter, not at all. He was just trying to rebuild his life, he said, and he was doing a good job at it, didn’t need to talk to her every day or see her several times a week as he had in the first few months after her mom passed. She knew all that. But it had been a month since she’d seen him in person and four days since they’d spoken.

  After that Aaliyah wrote in quick succession the questions and must-dos that popped into her head.

  2. Did someone else have snipped skin like that? Ovals? ViCAP the MO.

  3. Where was Damon Cross grabbed? His prep school? The Albany train station? Or on the ride home for Easter vacation?

  4. Did Cross talk to Mulch between the time he took off and our conversation alerting me to Damon’s body an hour later? Pull all phone records on every Cross phone.

  5. Where is Cross? Put flags on all his credit cards and bank accounts.

  Aaliyah did not think Alex Cross was in any way involved in the kidnappings or the murders. But her gut told her it was important to keep tabs on him, even if they were loose tabs, at least until he initiated further contact.

  She decided to work backward through her list, first calling Ned Mahoney and asking if he and his colleagues in the FBI’s white-collar crime units could research, open, and monitor all of Cross’s accounts. Surprisingly, Mahoney thought it a very good idea, and he promised her he would.

  Aaliyah had contacts of her own with the phone companies and soon had someone gathering the records she wanted. The detective then called the Kraft School and got a recording that said the offices were closed until classes resumed the following Monday morning. She knew the FBI had left messages with the school earlier, but Aaliyah left another anyway, asking the headmaster to give her a call as soon as possible. The matter was urgent and involved Damon Cross.

  She hung up and was about to tackle the ViCAP request when she saw a long shadow cross her desk. She looked up and found John Sampson looming over her cubicle wall with a report in his hand.

  “Read this,” he said.

  She took the report, saying, “You didn’t sleep?”

  “Not yet,” he replied.

  Aaliyah scanned the document. It was a ViCAP report on the mutilation patterns. She glanced up. “I was just about to do this.”

  Sampson grunted. “Great minds think alike.”

  Aaliyah smiled and returned to the report, which focused on a murder six years before in the northern Idaho town of Bonner’s Ferry, hard by the border with Montana. A woman’s body with oval pieces of skin missing was found floating in the Kootenay River. The second page of the report showed photographs. The dead woman was a light-skinned African American, and the oval cuts were very similar to the ones found on Jane and John Doe.

  “The cuts,” she said, feeling excited. “They’re almost the same.”

  “Yes,” Sampson agreed. “Just not everywhere on the body.”

  Indeed, the report indicated that only six pieces of skin were missing on the dead woman in Idaho. Dental records identified her as Katrina Moffett of Troy, Montana, which was about thirty miles upriver from where the body was found. Moffett, twenty-nine, a teacher in the local elementary school, had gone missing after friends dropped her at home late one night following a party at a bar called the Dirty Shame Saloon in the nearby town of Yaak.

  Moffett’s husband was serving in Iraq at the time, and her friends swore she was not carrying on any kind of affair. They did say, however, that since moving to the area, she’d gotten anonymous threats that featured racial slurs.

  Not surprising, Aaliyah thought. There are all sorts of Aryan nuts up there, aren’t there? Definitely. Ruby Ridge was somewhere in northern Idaho.

  She went back to her reading and found that Montana state investigators had considered the same angle. They looked at everyone living in a five-mile radius of Moffett’s home and were soon considering a young man named Claude Harrow as their prime suspect.

  Harrow had recently been released from the Montana State Prison at Deer Lodge after doing six years for armed robbery. During that stint, he’d joined the Aryan Brotherhood, and he was an outspoken racist.

  But Harrow’s alibi of being one hundred and fifty miles from Troy the night of the murder was corroborated by four of his friends, all neo-Nazi sympathizers. Six months after the killing, Harrow inherited a small piece of land near Frostburg, in rural northwestern Maryland. He packed up and left.

  At the request of Montana state investigators, the FBI kept track of Harrow in a database set aside for hate crimes. For the past three years, the neo-Nazi had been living on his inherited land, working as a part-time logger, attending skinhead functions, and doing little else.

  Aaliyah looked up at Sampson, said, “Frostburg’s what? An hour and a half from here?”

  “Give or take,” Sampson said. “Here’s the best part: I ran Harrow’s name through the Maryland DMV and he’s got a 1988 Chevy pickup. How much do you want to bet his tires are bald?”

  Aaliyah grabbed her coat. “Let’s go look.”

  “Great minds,” Sampson said, tapping his temple. “I’ve already requisitioned a car.”

  CHAPTER

  35

  THE MINING TRUCK CAUGHT up to us as I power-drifted the sedan through the oncoming switchback, gunning the accelerator instead of braking, trying to get the tires to skip off the ruts and washboard. The ore truck’s massive fender barely brushed my car’s rear bumper.

  But I knew we were done for.

  Control of the vehicle was wrenched out of my hands and given over to God and physics. The sedan went into a sickening twist that threw the rear end around hard. I got a snap look through the windshield and up into the cab of the mining truck as we spun down the road.

  Trees and rocks whirled by as I threw my forearm across Atticus Jones’s chest. The car tires caught on some deeper rut and pitched us up on two wheels. Ava screamed, sure we were flipping. But something about the next rut we hit caused the car to slam back down on all four wheels, and then it was heading straight down the mountain in the wrong lane of the empty road.

  “The truck!” Ava screamed. “It’s coming again!”

  The ore truck was coming hard in its lane, and I suspected the driver meant to get up alongside of us and then bump us off the road into the woods. We were still going forty miles an hour when I mashed the brakes.

  The mining truck shot by us. I hauled hard on the steering wheel, brought our car in behind the big rig, and released the emergency brake. He sped up, trying to outrun me, but by that point I was so infuriated that I would have driven off a cliff, fallen two hundred feet, and risked a fireball just to catch these bastards and find out why they were trying to kill us. I stayed with them the entire way down the mountain and caught up when they reached the T where Pig Lick Road met West Virginia State Highway 20.

  There was surprisingly heavy traffic in both directions, other trucks from other mines and school buses and cars, and the ore truck was forced to stop at the sign. I pulled in close behind the rear of the truck where I couldn’t be seen in their mirrors. I threw the car in park, bolted out, and drew the Colt.

  I ran to the pas
senger side and sprinted along the flank of the ore truck. The brakes sighed. The truck rolled. I jumped up onto the running board and grabbed a metal handle meant to help passengers access the cab just as the mining truck began to accelerate out onto the highway in a tight curve that almost threw me off.

  But when the truck straightened out and began to gain speed, I was still holding on. I tapped the window with the Colt. The passenger was that same guy who’d given me the glowering look at the top of the pass into Hog Hollow.

  He’d been laughing then, and he still bore a smirk when he jerked at my tapping and looked over to find me aiming at him at point-blank range. Through the window I caught a subtle shift in his shoulders and suspected him of reaching for the door handle.

  I aimed away from his head, just past his nose, closed my eyes to protect them from flying glass, and pulled the trigger. The Colt barked and jumped in my hand. The bullet shattered the window, showering the guy with hailstones of glass and turning the truck’s windshield into a spider’s web.

  “The next one’s going through your brain, asshole!” I shouted. “Stop this truck! Now!”

  “What the fuck, man, are you insane?” the driver yelled.

  “You’re next!” I shouted.

  CHAPTER

  36

  THE DRIVER DOWNSHIFTED AND slammed on the brakes, trying to throw me, but I held tight and kept the Colt aimed at the passenger’s head until we came to a full stop right in the middle of the northbound lane of Route 20.