Hope to Die (23 page)

“On my dear mama’s soul,” Sunday assured her.

Jillian swallowed, said, “Last I knew, around midnight, just as I was going on shift, she had car trouble and said she wouldn’t be coming here after all.”

“Okay,” he said reasonably. “Where did she say she was going?”

“Her apartment in New Orleans,” she said, a little too quickly.

Sunday could spot a liar a mile away, much less six inches. He smiled, said, “So she’s going to her mother’s.”

A wave of fear pulsed through Jillian’s face. “Marcus, no, she—”

He pressed against her throat again, said, “Shhh, now. No more of that. I’m going to need a place to sleep for a few hours. I can crash here, right?”

“That’s not a good—”

He increased the pressure on her throat again, and she gulped and nodded.

Sunday released her and let her lead the way. As they crossed through a small, tidy kitchen, he saw her hesitate as she passed a block of knives on the counter.

“Don’t even think about that, darlin’,” he said.

“What? I was wondering if you were hungry.”

He was, but that could wait. He said, “I just want to sleep for now. I’ll eat later, and then you’ll be rid of me.”

From the stiffness of her posture as they entered the hall, Sunday knew she was having a hard time believing him. But that was okay. He was having a hard time believing it himself.

Jillian stopped, gestured through an open door, said, “There’s an extra bed in there you can use.”

“No, no,” he said, pushing her forward. “I was thinking we’d sleep together so I’d know if you got up or tried to make a phone call.”

“I wouldn’t,” she said, her voice cracking as she went through the door at the end of the hall.

“Just the same,” Sunday said, following her into the master bedroom, a tasteful and orderly space with a decidedly feminine touch.

“I need to take a shower,” she said.

“That’s a great idea,” he said. “But later, after.”

Jillian turned and, without meeting his eye, said, “After?”

“C’mon, now, darling, you take off those scrubs, show Marcus what he’s been missing, and he’ll show you what Acadia’s been getting,” he said.

“Please, Marcus,” she whimpered.

“Take them off,” he said. “Or I’ll tear them off you.”

Looking humiliated, she shed the top and bottom, and then took off her bra and panties.

“Well, Jillian, I must say, you’ve exceeded my expectations,” Sunday said, shucking his running shorts. “You’re an Aphrodite as Rubens might have painted her, pale and voluptuous. Now lie facedown on the bed and let old Marcus go to work on you. You watch; it’ll relieve the unnecessary tension between us, Jillian. It’ll help us both get a great afternoon snooze.”

TESS AALIYAH AND ALEX CROSS
checked out of the hotel shortly after noon and headed to the airport. It was Cross’s idea to set up there, and Aaliyah agreed with the strategy. If they had a break of any kind anywhere in the country, they wanted to be able to move as fast as possible.

They went to a café inside the airport and spent nearly five hours there, drinking coffee, eating, and reviewing every aspect of the case. They identified questions they wanted answered and let their imaginations and investigative instincts paint the space between what they knew and what they didn’t know about Thierry Mulch and Acadia Le Duc.

The more time Detective Aaliyah spent with Cross, the more she respected him. An ordinary man—cop or otherwise—faced with this kind of pressure would have buckled long ago. But Cross just seemed to shrug the weight from one shoulder to the other, bearing the load with a grace she couldn’t imagine. Based on his accomplishments, Cross could easily have been a know-it-all or a pompous ass, yet he was an excellent listener, gave of himself, and didn’t seem to have an egotistical cell in his formidable body.

He also displayed a remarkable ability to compartmentalize. Though he and Aaliyah were talking about things that directly affected the lives of his family, Cross seemed able to divorce himself from what had to be disturbingly emotional aspects of the case and keep working the investigation rationally and logically.

When Aaliyah came back after a bathroom break around a quarter to five, Cross said, “We’ll give it another couple of hours, then find a hotel again.”

“What about the video of the killing you’re supposed to make?”

“Gloria Jones is supposed to call me when she’s ready for me,” Cross said. “On another note, how’s your dad’s hip these days?”

As a general rule, Detective Aaliyah did not discuss her dad without his permission, but Bernie was an admirer of Cross’s work and she didn’t think he’d mind.

“I don’t know if you know, but the entire right side of his pelvis was shattered,” she said. “He gets around okay after four operations, but you can tell it still bothers him.”

“The hip or not being on the job?”

She smiled. “Both.”

“I remember what a machine he was,” Cross said. “Must have made him crazy. To be done with his career, I mean.”

“Oh, it did at first,” Aaliyah said. “I thought he was going to drive my mother insane, and he abused alcohol for a bit, but then Mom got sick, and she became the focus of his life until she passed, last year.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. What does your dad do with his time now?”

“He fishes a lot, and putters in the yard, and he’s got a lady friend.”

“You okay with that?”

Aaliyah cocked her head, reappraised him, and said, “So it is true you’ve got telepathy and X-ray vision.”

Cross chuckled. “Just a knack for reading body language.”

“Then you should go play poker in Vegas.”

“Does that mean you’re not okay with his lady friend?”

God, he was good
, she thought. Gentle, but relentless.

“I’ve met her only once,” Aaliyah replied. “She’s nice. And, I don’t know, I guess I don’t want to see my dad hurting anymore.”

“That’s perfectly understandable,” Cross said. “And it must be tough for you because he’s struggling toward normalcy and you’re not a part of it on a day-to-day basis.”

Aaliyah hadn’t thought of it that way before, but she nodded, realizing that Cross had a vast reserve of emotional intelligence as well as an analytical side.

His cell rang at five thirty. Cross answered, listened, and said, “Yes, Sheriff, this is Alex Cross. What can you tell me about Acadia Le Duc?”

He listened again, then said, “I understand that it was sealed. You should know, however, that DC Metro Police and the FBI consider her an accomplice in a kidnapping and murder spree.”

Cross nodded at Aaliyah and then listened without comment for nearly fifteen minutes. Finally, he said, “No, I wish you’d hold off on that until I can get there, but in the meantime, you should put that cabin under surveillance. And I’ll let you know our ETA once I get a better handle on how we’re going to do this.”

Then Cross hung up, looking energized again, and said, “We need to get to Jennings, Louisiana, the quickest way possible.”

IN JILLIAN GREEN’S CONDO
in Corpus Christi, Marcus Sunday awoke refreshed and with a pleasant dull ache in his loins. He checked his watch, yawned, and got to his feet naked.

Sunday left the bed in a shambles, with the blankets in a heap and long, thin tears in the sheets as if fingernails had gouged them. He pushed open the bathroom door and smelled bleach. He cocked his head, appreciating the sight of Acadia’s BFF lying in the bathtub, water up to her neck, her eyes still bugged out from having been choked with his belt as he fucked her from behind.

He’d heard that being strangled during sex causes stronger orgasms in some women, and he’d decided to experiment. Jillian certainly proved the point, he thought. She’d gone off into la-la land there at the end, quivered unbelievably just before she’d died.

Sunday turned on the shower, waited until it warmed, and then climbed into the chill water with the dead woman. He paid the corpse no mind as he washed himself head to toe with antibacterial soap.

When he was done, he pushed her head under the bleach water. After three minutes, he pulled the plug on the tub, stepped out onto the mat, and dripped dry while using a washcloth to hold the showerhead and rinse Jillian’s body with cold water. When he was done, he poured three capfuls of Drano into the drain, wiped down the shower controls with the washcloth, and brought it and the bathmat to the master bedroom.

Sunday stripped the bed, took the sheets and blankets to the washing machine. He put them in and added half a cup of Clorox before turning it on hot. He wiped down the machine knobs and found the vacuum. He vacuumed from the edge of the tub back into the master bedroom and then put on his running gear again. Then he cleaned his way out of the house, back through the kitchen and into the garage.

After removing the vacuum-cleaner bag, he wiped down the vacuum with the damp washcloth and then set the machine in a corner, as if it were always kept there. With the washcloth, he pressed the garage-door opener, waited until it was completely up. A kid on a bicycle went past but didn’t look his way.

Sunday stabbed the switch and took off, vaulting off the top of the stairs, sprinting along the Mini Cooper, then hurdling the security beam.

He was down the street and in the rented truck thirty seconds later. He’d dump the vacuum bag at a rest stop out on I-10, heading east.

A WIDE SWATH OF
violent weather swept across the southern plains that evening. Thunderstorms delayed our takeoff and landing, so it was eight before we stepped off a United Airlines jet in Houston. The ride had been a rodeo, and there was talk of tornado activity throughout the night from eastern Texas into western Louisiana, which, unfortunately, was where we were headed.

“I’m praying this isn’t a wild-goose chase,” Aaliyah said as I drove a rented Jeep Cherokee out of the airport into a pelting rain.

“It’s the strongest straw we’ve got to grasp at,” I said. “Put Jennings in the GPS.”

She did, and the machine told us we had a hundred-and-seventy-eight-mile road trip ahead of us. Luckily, most of the way would be on Interstate 10. We theoretically could be there around ten thirty.

But wind and rain buffeted the car and slowed us. Was this trip worth it? Was it worth risking the drive at night with all the weather warnings?

I still thought so after going over what Sheriff Gauvin had told me over the phone. Gauvin had been new to the force the night Acadia Le Duc called in the accidental death of her father. Like Thierry Mulch’s father, Jean Le Duc had a reputation for violence and booze. He’d beaten his wife and daughter several times, but both had refused to testify against the man.

The mother had a fresh black eye when Gauvin and the sheriff arrived on the scene—a cabin on the banks of a bayou outside Jennings—early one morning after a torrential rain. Acadia and her mother said Jean Le Duc had gotten wildly drunk the evening before and took it out on his wife before she and her daughter managed to barricade themselves in the windowless back room, their usual method of surviving his tirades.

They claimed to have spent the entire night there. Acadia went searching for her father when they found the cabin and shed empty. She went down by the dock, expecting to find him passed out on his airboat, a common enough occurrence. Then she heard a commotion in the pen where her father kept his pet alligators.

“All that was left was his right forearm, which conveniently had an identifying tattoo on it,” Gauvin had said. “That and other evidence I won’t get into led us to believe that Acadia and her mother, or Acadia acting on her own, killed old Jean and then fed him to the alligators. But we could never prove it, and most folks around here said, ‘Good riddance.’”

Acadia left Jennings after graduation and moved to New Orleans to enter a nursing program at Loyola. That was a while back, but the sheriff said he saw her several times a year, when she came to visit her mother.

“So the mom knows how to get in touch with her?” I’d asked.

“Expect so,” he said.

“If she got in trouble, would she head there? To her mom’s?”

“She might,” Gauvin said.

“What’s the Le Duc place like?”

“The house is a dump, but there are outbuildings and the property’s big,” the sheriff said. “And it’s on the Bayou des Cannes. Isolated. There isn’t another house around there for a mile, maybe more.”

It was, in short, the kind of place a madman like Mulch might keep five hostages. The sheriff offered to go out to Le Duc’s mother’s to ask some questions and have a look around, but I asked him not to, saying that I wanted to be there in case that
was
where my family was being held. Instead, I asked that the road into the place be monitored.

Shortly after ten, the rain eased somewhat, and I was able to relax my death grip on the wheel. The rain had been falling in sheets, and the glare off the wet road was forcing me to squint when my cell phone rang again.

IT WAS NED MAHONEY.
I answered and put the phone on speaker.

“Alex?” Mahoney said. “Where are you now?”

I glanced at Aaliyah, who said, “About ten miles west of Beaumont.”

“Your hunch about Le Duc’s mom might be paying off,” Mahoney said. “We got access to Le Duc’s credit cards. About five hours ago, she bought gas in Natchitoches. Four hours before that, she bought gas and food in Texarkana. She’s driving a blue 2014 Dodge Avenger rental and heading in your direction.”