Hope to Die (10 page)

“Hmm,” Mulch said in that static-blurred voice. “And you told the police what I asked you to do?”

“No,” I replied. “Per your orders, I’ve told no one.”

“So you
do
understand?”

“I understand. I agree to your terms.”

“Excellent,” Mulch said. “Your surviving family members will very much appreciate your actions. So let’s set a deadline, shall we? Say, twenty-four hours?”

“Thirty-six,” I said.

“Twenty-four,” he replied.

“I can’t just do it. I have to develop a plan.”

“Thirty hours,” Mulch shot back finally. “And remember: I want proof. Video proof. And you damn well better be full in the frame, or there’ll be one less Cross come tomorrow night. By the way, this is the last time this number will work.”

“How exactly am I supposed to get proof to you, then?” I demanded.

“Go on Craigslist New Orleans an hour before the deadline,” he said. “Click Casual Encounters and look for a personal ad from TM in the men-looking-for-women section. E-mail the video to the poster.”

He hung up.

Setting down the phone I’d bought at a truck stop near Richmond, Virginia, the night before, I looked at Ava, who was curled up in a ball in the passenger seat. She looked played out.

I said, “You can leave anytime you want, you know. No hard feelings.”

Acting a little insulted, Ava said, “I’m not going anywhere except with you.”

I started the unmarked car. “All I’m saying is that, at some point, you might want to bail, and if you do, it’s okay. I will never hold it against you. Ever.”

Ava said nothing, just reached over and turned up the heat. We were in a campground in Glen Maury Park, three miles off Interstate 81, west of Lynchburg. She’d driven the entire five hours to get there while I’d used Jannie’s computer to go through the flash drive I’d taken from the task force. The drive contained all the files and leads the six-investigator team had generated since my family was taken, as well as my own research into Thierry Mulch.

We’d gotten to the campground around three in the morning and found it empty. We’d slept, me in the front seat, Ava in the back beneath my jacket. I am a big man, and the front seat was probably the most uncomfortable place I have ever slept. But I passed out almost immediately and didn’t stir until I heard Ava get out to go to the outhouse.

The five hours of sleep had evidently let my deep subconscious digest the bizarre and violent events of the prior day as well as everything I’d managed to read during the long ride to the park.

Now, in the gathering light, my short-term plan of attack seemed as plain as day.

THE VERY FIRST TIME
Thierry Mulch contacted me—by letter, during the investigation into the massage-parlor murders—I’d done a long Internet search and found only a handful of men spread out around the country who had that name. Every single one of the Thierry Mulches checked out, and none of them looked remotely like the red-bearded, red-haired man who’d shown up at Sojourner Truth.

There was also one other Thierry Mulch I’d come across, in an obituary. He’d died in a terrible car crash at age nineteen in West Virginia.

Had someone adopted the dead Mulch’s identity? Maybe the man who had my family used the name only when he was dealing with me.

The dead Mulch was an extreme long shot, but we were going to check it out.

I put the car in gear, left the park, got back on I-81, and headed north toward the interchange with I-64 near the border with West Virginia. We stopped at a truck stop near Covington later that morning, and I bought gas, food, and coffee and withdrew another five hundred dollars from an ATM.

When we were well into West Virginia, almost to Lewisburg, Ava finally said, “Where are we going?”

“A small town called Buckhannon.”

“Does it have to do with Mulch?”

“It might.”

“Was that Mulch you were on the phone with this morning?”

“Yes,” I said, as if I were talking about the paperboy and not a psychopath. But my only hope was to be dispassionate about doing what Mulch wanted, seeing it as a means to an end and nothing more.

After another long silence, Ava asked, “What does he want proof of?”

I glanced over to find her studying me intently. She was intuitive and smart, and I shouldn’t have been surprised.

“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.”

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!”

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 beginning?”

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.