Hope to Die (18 page)

That’s when I saw the snapshot taped to the wall by his pillow.

It was taken the day I married Bree, a portrait of me, my bride, and my family. Bree was radiant. Damon was as happy as I’d ever seen him. So were Ali, Jannie, and Nana Mama. And I looked like I’d won the Powerball.

Once upon a time
, I thought,
you, Alex Cross, were the luckiest man alive
.

That broke me.

She’s dead
, I thought.
They’re both dead
.

Grief welled up like a rogue wave. I got up before it could hit me fully, staggered to the switch, and turned off the light.

I groped over to Damon’s bed, lay down on my side, curled up in a fetal position, and felt the wave hit like a tsunami. I sobbed my way into sleep.

TWO MORE? HOW WAS I
going to accomplish that?

The question tormented me as I trudged out of Damon’s dorm at 5:20 Monday morning. It was still dark out. Blustering wind blew cold rain, pelting me with stinging drops as I followed the path to my car.

Two?

Then I realized that this intersection of paths above Damon’s dorm was probably where Karla Mepps had intercepted him on Good Friday morning. Ignoring the fact that I was going to be wet and cold for hours, I stopped and stood there, wondering what she’d said to make him want to abandon his plans and do something as foolhardy as catch a ride with a stranger.

The easy explanation was her sexuality. Damon was seventeen, after all, and like most seventeen-year-olds, he had to be a slave to his raging hormones.

But I knew my son. Hormones or not, he wasn’t someone who did things impulsively. He was methodical, considerate. Mulch’s accomplice had to have given Damon some reason beyond lust to go with her, I was sure of it.

Maybe I was guilty of wanting to think well of my son, of gifting him with noble attributes. But I vowed to press Karla Mepps or whoever she really was until she explained how she’d been able to swing Damon’s decision and why.

The rental was right where I’d left it. Green leaves and dead pine needles were strewn across the windshield when I opened the door and climbed in. I was soaked through to my shoulders and calves, and I shivered as I started the car and turned up the heat.

I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror and saw a man I barely recognized, with sunken eyes and puffy skin and a blank stare that reminded me of other people I’d seen who’d suffered massive personal devastation. For a moment, I sat there, not sure if this man had it in him to go on and wondering whether he should turn fully to mourning. No, I decided. I didn’t care what I looked like or how I felt. As long as there was a chance of saving any of them, I was going to fight.

Putting on the headlights, I prayed for the thousandth time that I would find them and rescue them. But I asked God for more than that. I drove through the rain toward the coffee shop, praying that before this was over, I would be able to confront Mulch, that I’d be given the chance to face him one-on-one and bring him to justice.

But for now, I remained under Mulch’s control.

As soon as I’d woken, I’d looked on Craigslist New Orleans on my phone and seen the new ad. I’d opened it, wanting to believe that a member of my family had been released because of the video. Instead, it said,
Two more on camera in forty-eight hours, and you get all survivors. Fail, and you get none. Send reply here
.

Mulch was messing with my head and heart again, and I knew it. Had he figured out the video was fake? Or had he recognized Jones? Perhaps seeing the old detective had thrown Mulch, as we’d hoped. Was this change in the original deal because of that? Or was I just being played by the sickest of minds?

Swallowing against the acid that crept up the back of my throat, I drove out through the campus gate, turned right, and slowed to a stop at the blinking red traffic signal. The lights glowed in Millie’s coffee shop across the main road.

Please let this bitch be on the tapes
, I prayed as I climbed from the car.
Please give me a sign, a break, something to hold on to here
. Up on the porch, I rapped at the door. Ward Brower, a young, tired-looking man, came out from behind the counter, drying his hands on an apron.

He opened the door, sending forth the aroma of fresh coffee brewing. I walked in. “How’s your mother?” I asked after introducing myself and shaking hands.

“Better,” Brower said. “Can I get you some coffee? Pastry?”

“I’d appreciate that. Where’s the surveillance disk?”

“Oh,” he said, his face falling. “I checked as soon as I came in. That day and the day after it are already erased. It’s automatic, I’m afraid.”

I THOUGHT I’D PREPARED
myself for that possibility, but hearing the words stated so flatly at that hour of the morning on so little sleep, I felt crushed, as if God were purposely ignoring me, as if He’d completely damned me and my family and I wasn’t worth His attention anymore.

“You okay, Dr. Cross?” Brower asked.

I lifted my head and looked at him with eyes blearier than his own. “No, I was hoping … I don’t know.”

“You want to sit down, sir?” Brower said, offering to help me to one of the tables.

“I’m okay,” I said. “And I’ve got a long way to go. Can I get the coffee and pastries take-out?”

“Sure, straightaway,” he said, glancing at me one more time as if he were afraid I might tip over.

My head felt scalded as I watched him pour the coffee and bag the pastries. If he said anything else, I can’t recall it.

“How much?” I asked when he pushed the cup and the bag toward me.

“On the house,” Brower said, bowing his head. “Sorry about your son.”

Nodding slightly, I took the coffee and the bag as if I were breathing in confusion and exhaling defeat.

“How far you got to go?” Brower asked, looking concerned.

“What’s that?”

“Where are you headed?”

“No idea,” I said, then turned and walked toward the door, dreading opening it, feeling like I was exiting the coffee shop and entering a bleak, dark future, an eternity of hopeless pain, an end to all I ever was and all I ever could have been.

Headlights swung up the road as I pushed open the coffee shop’s door and stepped out onto the porch. Falling torrentially from low, leaden skies, the rain billowed like curtains across the parking lot in the gray dawn. I crossed the porch, stepped down two stairs and out from under the eave, then stopped to let the cold rain whip my skin numb. I stood there, taking the brunt of it full in my face, feeling the icy water like needles and not—

“Alex!” a woman’s voice called. “Detective Cross!”

I wiped my eyes with the soaked sleeve of my jacket, looked beyond my rental car, and spotted Tess Aaliyah climbing out of a DC Metro unmarked car.

She ran up to me, looking wired.

“We tried to find you,” she said, her voice trembling. “But we couldn’t until Mahoney tracked your credit cards and we figured you were going to Damon’s school. So I jumped in a car and drove all night because I wanted you to hear this in person.”

My stomach fell fifty stories. “Another body?”

“No,” Aaliyah said, breaking into a beaming smile and starting to cry. “But there’s a very good chance Bree is alive. And Damon too!”

MY BRAIN REJECTED THE
news out of hand.

A cruel joke. That’s all that was.

Aaliyah looked at me with the same kind of concern Brower had shown.

“Alex, did you hear what I said?”

I said nothing, the disbelief and the fear of hope just locking me up.

“Bree and Damon are likely alive,” she insisted.

“Don’t tell me that unless you have DNA evidence!” I yelled. “Do you?”

“No, but—”

“Then I don’t want to hear it,” I said. “I can’t.”

“We have conclusive evidence that the female victim is not Bree,” she said calmly. “The Jane Doe had no uterine scarring. The body you saw at the construction site belonged to Bernice Smith, a woman from northern Pennsylvania who’d gone missing two days earlier.”

I said nothing, wanting to believe but petrified to do so.

“Dr. Cross,” Aaliyah said, coming around me to show me a picture on her phone. “This is her. Mulch had a racist murderer named Claude Harrow put Bree’s jewels and wedding ring on Bernice Smith. Harrow mutilated her enough to make you believe it could be your wife.”

I looked at the rain-soaked screen, seeing a smiling woman who did look very much like Bree: same height, same athletic build, same basic facial structure.

Bree could still be alive?

“What about Damon?” I asked.

“Just awaiting the DNA, which should be in this morning, but if Mulch used one surrogate, I figure we’ll find that John Doe is not your son.”

I felt dizzy. “I need to sit down.”

She grabbed me by the arm and led me up the stairs to the coffee shop, and we went in again, both of us dripping. Aaliyah got me to a chair and I sat down hard.

For two and a half days I’d endured the hell of their deaths. And now the woman in the foundation was definitely not Bree, which meant the body in my backyard probably wasn’t Damon’s. Though it was clearly possible that Mulch still planned to kill them, part of me wanted to erupt with joy.

Instead, I laughed caustically, said, “First the doctored photographs, and now this? Killing my family again and again? Mulch is trying to drive me insane, isn’t he?”

“He’s tormenting you,” Aaliyah said, sitting beside me.

“Don’t you let him, whoever he is,” said the coffee-shop owner, setting two steaming mugs in front of us. “Don’t let him do it to you. You just gotta be strong and stay true to yourself.”

I looked at him appraisingly, said, “You’ve got experience with someone trying to drive you crazy?”

“I do,” he said. “My ex-wife tried.

She’s still trying.” Something about the way he said it made me laugh, and the agony of the past few days lifted and was replaced by hope. They were alive! God had not abandoned me.

It was unspeakable that Mulch had killed and butchered two innocent people to make me suffer, but I was overwhelmed with gratitude that my family was alive. They were not safe, but they could all still be saved. Humbled, I put my face in my hands, shook with happiness, and thanked my Savior from the bottom of my soul.

Then I looked at Aaliyah through teary eyes and said, “You can’t know how low I was when you told me.”

“I could see it,” she said, choking up and patting me on the thigh.

I cleared my throat and said, “Tell me about Harrow. And what happened to you?” I added, noticing some abrasions on her face.

“Harrow is dead,” Aaliyah said, getting back to business. “We think Mulch killed him after the murders and burned his place down. I got my face scratched up there during the investigation; it’s a long story. What about you? Where have you been?”

“Tracking Mulch,” I said. “Also a long story.”

“The headmaster said something about a woman taking Damon,” she said. “And that there was possibly a picture of her here?”

“It got erased,” Brower said sadly, back behind the counter again.

The door to the coffee shop opened with a tinkle of a bell and then shut.

“The FBI computer lab might be able to pull the erased image off the hard drive,” Aaliyah said. “It could take days, but it might be worth a try.”

Days?
I thought.
Did they have—

“Excuse me?” a boy said. “Are you Damon’s father?”

I looked over to see a string bean of a kid with wet red hair and bad acne, wearing a Kraft School hoodie, gray sweatpants, and flip-flops despite the weather.

“Yes?” I said.

“I’m Roger Wood, a friend of Damon’s,” he said awkwardly. “I was just having breakfast with Tommy Grant and Porter Tate, and they said I should come find you.”

“Okay …” I said as the coffee-shop door opened and several more customers came in out of the rain.

“They said you’d want to see this,” the boy said.

He held up an iPhone and handed it to me.

I took one look at the screen and wanted to scream.

Instead, I jumped up and bear-hugged the startled kid.

“What is it?” Aaliyah asked.

“He got her,” I said, grinning wildly and handing her the phone. “He caught that bitch in living color.”

THE CURRENT WAS UP
on the Mississippi River just north of Memphis. It tugged and punched at the moored barge
Pandora
, making Acadia Le Duc unsteady as she watched Marcus Sunday work at the lock sealing the cargo container. She was worried that things had gone far enough, that this game Sunday was playing was ultimately going to be a loser.

A guy like Cross didn’t quit when it came to family, Acadia thought. If any member of the family was actually killed, Cross would hunt Thierry Mulch until his dying breath, which meant that he’d be hunting Acadia as well.

She didn’t like that idea. She didn’t like it at all.

Still, when Sunday pushed the hatch open and climbed through it, Acadia took a deep breath and followed him in, carrying a large canvas beach bag. Sunday shut and locked the hatch behind her and then flipped a toggle switch to illuminate the interior of the long, narrow space.

Sunday went immediately to a computer bolted to a stand, called up the screen, and studied it.