Hope to Die (24 page)

I sped up and ignored the rain, which had started falling hard again.

“Any pictures from gas stations?” Aaliyah said.

“We’ve made the request,” Sampson said.

I said, “Can you get the rental agency to track the car’s GPS?”

“We’ve made that request too,” said Mahoney. “Hertz wants to comply, but they need to see a search warrant, which is being worked on as we speak.”

“Where was she before Texarkana?” I asked.

“She’s spent quite a bit of time in DC the past few months,” Sampson said. “In and around Kalorama.”

“We have an address?” Aaliyah asked.

“There’s nothing under her name.”

“Any other travel outside the District?” I asked.

“Lots,” Mahoney said. “She was in a mystery bookstore in Philadelphia last Tuesday, and at the airport in St. Louis on Friday. On Saturday, she was back east, buying food at a restaurant in Cumberland, Maryland.”

“Wait,” Aaliyah said. “What time did she buy the food in Cumberland?”

There was a pause before Sampson said, “Ten twelve. She charged eighteen dollars and change at, uh, Café Mark on Baltimore Street.”

“That’s not twenty miles from Frostburg,” Aaliyah said. “And it fits with the time Claude Harrow was killed and his place torched.”

“I thought that too, Tess,” Sampson said.

“You talk to anyone at that café?” I asked.

“Closed until seven tomorrow morning,” Mahoney said.

“Any other purchases?” Aaliyah asked.

“Uh, yeah,” Sampson said. “Later Saturday afternoon, she charged sixty dollars at the Harris Teeter food market on Kalorama Avenue and thirty-seven dollars at Secondi, a used-clothes consignment shop in Dupont Circle.”

“Walkable from Kalorama,” I said.

“Easily,” Mahoney agreed.

“Maybe that’s where Mulch is holding them,” Aaliyah said.

It was entirely possible. Again and again in the past few months, Acadia Le Duc had returned to that neighborhood in my city to do her spending. She’d clearly been living in the area. With Mulch? I guessed yes. But why had she gone to St. Louis? And why was she in Louisiana now?

“What about this past Sunday?” Aaliyah asked.

“She didn’t charge anything on that date, but she was busy yesterday,” Sampson said. “She bought an early breakfast at Reagan National and then rented the Dodge at the Memphis airport about four hours after she landed. Last night she bought gas and got a room at the Hampton Inn in Fort Smith, Arkansas, then nothing until the gas buy in Texarkana.”

I barely heard the last part of the report. My mind had rocketed back nearly twenty-four hours, and my hands began to shake.

“John,” I said in a trembling voice. “Just to confirm. You said she got the car at the
Memphis
airport? And you said she bought something in a Philadelphia mystery bookshop?”

“Both correct,” my partner said.

My hand shot to my mouth and the car swerved so hard I had to take my foot off the gas and hit the brakes.

“Jesus,” Aaliyah said. “What the—”

“I think I know who Thierry Mulch is,” I said. “Or is now, anyway.”

Their voices came back as one. “What? Who?”

“Marcus Sunday,” I said, feeling rage building inside me. “That Harvard guy who wrote that book about the Daley and Monahan killings,
The Perfect Criminal
. Jesus Christ, the egomaniacal sonofabitch was writing about himself!”

ACADIA LE DUC HAD
timed her approach so it was pitch-black and pouring when she took the Evangeline Highway exit off Interstate 10. She headed north around and away from Jennings, Louisiana, for nine miles, and then turned the Dodge rental onto a muddy two-track path that she bounced along for several hundred yards across the top of a dike before parking where a rice field met a swamp.

When Acadia was a girl, she’d roamed for miles in these swamps. Now she confidently climbed out of the car into the driving rain and went straight into the tangle and vine with no light to guide her. As she had the night she’d snuck into the woods behind Damon Cross’s dormitory at the Kraft School, she thought of herself as that panther tattooed on her arm and navigated by dead reckoning and by the swollen creeks that fed the Bayou des Cannes.

The panther skirted clusters of moss-covered cypress trees. She padded through overgrown tupelo groves and ancient pine plantations choked with kudzu. She fought her way through stands of reeds and knew just where to walk to stay out of the sucking mud. The rain was incessant, but it muted all sound, a good thing.

As Acadia moved, her thoughts turned to Marcus Sunday. It had been nearly thirty hours since she’d run. How was he taking it? Bad, she was sure, especially if he’d figured out she’d looted a few of his accounts. If she’d been a liability and a threat before, she was an exponentially larger liability and threat now.

Acadia not only understood everything about the Cross kidnapping plot and the two murders Claude Harrow had done for Sunday but knew Sunday’s entire sordid story, how he’d made the money he’d gotten from selling his father’s pig farm to the coal company disappear, how he’d managed to create a new identity after faking his death, and even how he’d had academic transcripts forged so brilliantly that he had gotten into Harvard.

Acadia also knew how Sunday had planned the death of his mother’s family. She’d heard blow-by-blow descriptions of how he’d killed each and every one of them. She knew the same kinds of details about the Monahan slayings in Texas. In short, she simply knew too much.

Marcus was the smartest, most self-actualized man she’d ever known, an outsider who’d created his own rules, the most basic of which was his personal survival. Sooner rather than later, he’d start hunting her.

So Acadia had several choices. Did she keep going after tonight? Head for Mexico and the money she’d moved there? Or did she contact the police, maybe even Alex Cross, and cut herself a deal in return for immunity and witness protection? Or did she contact the police, give them enough information to nail Sunday and save the family, but then disappear into another life? Marcus had proven that it could be done, hadn’t he?

An hour after Acadia entered the swamp, she still had not yet decided what she was going to do. The rain slowed a bit. She caught the faint glow of lights ahead and dropped her pace to a crawl. After every step she paused and listened to each rustle and snap in the woods around her. She sniffed the air for strange smells but caught only the washed scent of ozone and the perfume of rain. But the closer she got to those lights, the more her breath tasted of old and bitter memories.

The place where Acadia was born, raised, and forced to commit patricide appeared in bits and pieces through the leaves. Weeds surrounded the cabin, which pitched slightly off its stone foundation. The roof sagged, and the screened-in porch defied gravity. Somewhere to her left out there in the darkness, the old dock creaked and groaned.

Acadia got closer still and saw lights behind the threadbare curtains. She also heard a radio in the cabin tuned to a gospel station, and a television blaring the theme song to
CSI
, her mother’s favorite show.

She stood behind a tree, studying the cabin and the yard for almost ten minutes. The old Ford pickup was parked beneath the big cypress. A few moths flitted beneath the porch eaves and around the bare lightbulb by the door.

The breeze shifted. Acadia wrinkled her nose at the smell of rank water and rotted meat coming from the bayou. Years had gone by, and her mother still fed the alligators that had fed on her father’s corpse.

“Why wouldn’t I?” she’d always say. “The gators set us free, didn’t they? I owe them, don’t I?”

For her part, however, Acadia had not gone near the backwater where her father’s pets lived since the night the old bastard died. She’d go anywhere else around the twenty-acre homestead, but never, ever down there. Though not a superstitious person by nature, she thought of that sliver of wetland as cursed.

Above the noise of a preacher delivering a sermon of salvation on the radio, and Gil Grissom shooting his mouth off about X-ray analysis on the television, Acadia heard the rattle of pots and pans. Her mom was probably cleaning up after a late supper in front of the tube.

For several moments longer, Acadia stood there, just inside the shadows, racking her brain, trying to remember if she’d ever mentioned this place to Sunday. Maybe once. Maybe that very first drunken night when they’d met in a bar in the French Quarter, but never again. She’d made sure of that, telling Sunday that she’d been raised over on the Mississippi border northwest of Slidell.

Something intense must have been happening on
CSI
because the music coming from the TV got all creepy. Then she heard her mother start coughing and hacking. It was enough to embolden Acadia, and she finally stepped from the trees and cut across the yard toward the cabin.

Acadia thumbed the latch and opened the screened-in porch’s door, expecting Mercury, her mother’s beloved pit bull, to come charging out to meet her. Instead, she heard snores and spotted the old dog on his straw bed in the corner.

“Some protection you are,” she said.

Mercury grumbled, sighed, and farted. The door to the cabin was ajar.

“Ma?” Acadia called as she gently pushed it open, seeing dishes drying in a rack by the sink.

She stepped inside onto the rough-hewn floor and saw her mother’s overstuffed chair, empty except for the latest copy of
People
magazine open to the celebrity crossword. Several cans of Diet Coke sat on the TV-dinner table next to her ashtray and an open pack of Pall Malls.
CSI
had given way to a commercial that touted a breakthrough in fabric softeners. The preacher on the radio had shifted from salvation to a theme of damnation and hellfire for all sinners before God.

“Mama, where are you?” Acadia called louder. “It’s me.”

Her mother’s frail voice answered from her bedroom. “I’m back here, baby doll. Can you come give me a hand? With the rain, my arthritis is acting up.”

“Be right there,” Acadia said, and she walked past piles of newspapers and older editions of
People
magazine and a plastic bag full of empty Diet Coke cans.

In a short hallway that smelled of old age, she maneuvered through stacks of old magazines and boxes of moldy treasures her hoarder mother flatly refused to get rid of. Acadia pushed open the bedroom door, stepped in, and turned left, expecting to see her mother trying to button up her nightdress or tie her robe.

Instead, her terrorized mother lay on the bed with her arms, chest, and ankles wrapped in duct tape. The old woman whimpered, “I’m sorry, baby doll, he said he’d shoot me if I didn’t.”

Before Acadia could run, the cold muzzle of the pistol bumped the back of her head.

“Don’t you move now, lover,” Sunday whispered behind her. “I found this in the closet and I think the safety’s kinda loose on a hair trigger.”

He pushed her toward an overstuffed chair, saying, “Admit it, you’re shocked. But you’ve got to remember, I’ve got the superior mind, Acadia. Total recall. You said that first night that you grew up in the seat of Jefferson Davis Parish, and after that you always said it was Slidell. Ha. How’s that for a memory?”

“Marcus,” she said. “You left me no—”

The butt of the gun clipped Acadia hard behind the ear, and stars exploded and blew her straight into darkness.

THOUGH THE STORMS HAD
slackened and Tess Aaliyah was able to drive seventy miles per hour, we were still a solid fifty minutes west of Jennings, Louisiana, when I said into her phone, “Are we ready?”

“We are,” Mahoney said. “Just do the smart shrink thing and keep him talking long enough for my men to triangulate.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, and handed Aaliyah’s phone back to her.

Picking up the burner cell I’d bought with Ava back in West Virginia, I prayed that FBI techs using software I couldn’t begin to comprehend would be able to quickly home in on the three cell towers closest to Sunday’s position.

For the past fifteen minutes I’d been wrestling over what I should say to the man who had my family. By whatever name, Mulch or Sunday, he was a diabolical sonofabitch who would not hesitate to kill, and I was as nervous as I’d ever been punching in his phone number.

Sunday answered on the third ring and yawned before saying, “Dr. Cross? Is that you?”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Sunday,” I said. “Did I wake you?”

“I was just about to turn off the hotel-room lights,” he replied. “I’ve got a big day planned for tomorrow.”

“In Austin?”

“That’s right. You still in Omaha?”

“Back in DC, and again, sorry to call, but I could use your help.”

“Well, of course,” Sunday said, and he yawned again. “How can I be of service?”

“You know, I jumped to conclusions about your book,” I said. “And I wanted to apologize again about that. I know we differ about the quotes you attributed to me, but I went back through the book earlier this evening and was really impressed how you got inside the perfect criminal’s or, now, Thierry Mulch’s mind.”

There was a pause, and I heard what sounded like gospel music playing in the background before he said, “That’s high praise coming from you, Dr. Cross. I truly appreciate that.”

“You’re welcome. So, anyway, I was wondering, now that you’ve had the chance to consider Mulch’s background, if you had come to any kind of deeper insight into his character and what he might have done with my family?”

There was another pause, this one longer, before Sunday said, “As a matter of fact, Dr. Cross, Thierry Mulch is all I’ve thought about since you told me he was my perfect criminal.”