Hope to Die (29 page)

“You’re gonna get pulled over or flip this car,” I said.

“Nah,” Lester said. “We do this all the time. Three to four a.m. is the last hour of the shift for the state police; hardly any troopers on the road. And the scanner says most of them are at some murder scene north of Jennings. Far as me flipping us? The Goat and I are one, pilgrim. We’ve never once come close to a wreck.”

“Lester
is
gifted behind the wheel, Detective,” his mother said. “What’s your name again?”

Though a part of me was desperate to keep looking out the windshield as we hurtled toward New Orleans, I twisted in my seat to see the shadow of Lester’s disfigured mother. It was only then that I saw the white cane across her lap and realized she was blind.

I told her my name, and got hers. Minerva Frost and her son were from Galveston. Lester was taking her to work.

Before I could ask what kind of work she did, she asked about my family, and I saw no reason to withhold any of it. I gave her a thumbnail sketch of what had happened and where I was going and why.

Lester seemed impressed. “I heard something about this on the news the other night. Lord Almighty, that’s tough.”

I suppose I expected some kind of sympathetic response from Minerva Frost, but she stayed silent.

Her son, however, was glancing over at me, and then in the rearview mirror, getting agitated. Lester finally said, “Ma, you have to work today, you know. You promised.”

Minerva Frost stayed silent.

“Ma, there are people with appointments. People counting on you.”

Still, his mother remained silent, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.

“Ma,” Lester said. “Did you hear what I—”

“I’m not deaf, Lester,” she replied at last. “And work will have to wait.”

“Am I missing something here?” I asked, confused.

“You need us, I think, Mr. Cross,” Minerva Frost replied.

“No. I’ll be fine. Just get me to New Orleans.”

“You have a car, Detective Cross? Shoes?”

That surprised me. How did she know I didn’t have shoes on?

“No shoes, but I’ll get them,” I said. “Really, there’s no need for you to miss work on my account, Mrs. Frost.”

“I disagree,” she said sharply. “And that is that.”

“Fuck,” Lester said under his breath.

“What was that, son?” his mother demanded.

“Truck ahead, Ma,” Lester said, and changed lanes to blow by an eighteen-wheeler as if it were standing still.

“What do you do for work, Mrs. Frost?” I asked.

“Never you mind about that,” she said. “Glad to help.”

“What, are you ashamed or something?” Lester asked his mother.

“No, I am not,” Minerva Frost retorted. “Just don’t know where Mr. Cross stands, and I don’t want to make it an issue.”

“Make what an issue?” I said, twisting around in my seat again and wincing at the soreness that went from the tips of my fingers to my arms and up into my shoulders.

She didn’t reply, and I looked at Lester, who eased off the gas, causing rumbling backfire, before he said, “She’s my mom and all, Detective Cross, and you may believe in this kind of thing or not, but that little old lady behind you has got the gift, man, like for real.”

MINERVA FROST GOT HER
gift the summer after her ninth birthday, eighteen months after she was splashed with battery acid and lost her eyesight in a terrible accident in the automotive repair shop her father ran in Galveston.

“She started seeing things, hearing things,” Lester said, downshifting as we approached Baton Rouge. “We call ’em her notions.”

Over the years I’d heard of police working with psychics, of course, and I’d heard of some of them having success, but I’d never worked with one personally.

I said, “Is that right, Mrs. Frost?”

“Kind of,” she said softly. “I just spent so much time alone that year. I mean, what child wanted to be friends with someone who looked like this? And in that loneliness, I just started to hear voices and see things in my mind. I used to brush them off as my imagination going crazy because of the blindness, but then some of the things I saw seemed to come true.”

Mrs. Frost claimed that she hadn’t told anyone about the voices or the visions for nearly twenty years. But then the economy went bust in the late seventies, and her parents needed money, so she had gone to New Orleans and set herself up as “Madame Minerva, Palm Reader.”

“She don’t read palms, by the way,” Lester said. “Just makes it look that way. People like it, for some reason, and they pay a lot of money to see her. One long day a month in the Big Easy, and the rest of them folks on the phone, and we got all we need.”

My skepticism must have shown, because Lester said, “Hey, man, her gift is real. Like I said, I barely saw you standing there, but she did, and she told me you were in trouble and to stop.”

“That true?” I asked her. “You
saw
me?”

“An image of someone in need,” Minerva Frost said.

“How did you
see
me?” I asked.

“You mean the mechanics of it? The physics of it? I don’t rightly know, pilgrim. It’s like I’ve got this antenna, you could say, and every once in a while I’ll hear or see things, like they’re beamed in from outer space or something, and there you were, barefoot and covered in filth. I could tell you were a desperate man in need of help.”

Now, I have a PhD in psychology from Johns Hopkins and my life’s work has made me skeptical about everything I’m told. But I didn’t want to question Minerva Frost. For too many reasons to count, I wanted to believe her.

“You see or hear anything about my family?” I asked. “Or Marcus Sunday?”

“I do not,” she said sadly. “But if and when I do, you will most assuredly be the first to know.”

We spoke little during the rest of the white-knuckle ride Lester Frost took us on from Baton Rouge to the western outskirts of New Orleans. At 4:22 a.m., we pulled off the I-10 and into a twenty-four-hour Phillips 66 truck stop.

“Do me a favor, and I’ll pay for your gas,” I told Lester, who looked suspicious.

“What favor?”

I handed him my cell phone and two twenties. “I can’t go in there looking like this, but I bought this phone at one of these truck stops, and I remember they sell a backup battery that you stick in the charge port. Can you get it for me?”

Lester looked ready to refuse, but his mother said, “Course he will.”

Scowling, Lester started the gas pump and then stomped off toward the truck-stop store. A few minutes later, he exited carrying the backup battery. It wasn’t fully charged as advertised, but to my relief, it started the phone, and I was able to call up Craigslist New Orleans on the browser. As Sunday had instructed me, in the Casual Encounters section, women looking for men, I posted under the headline “Waiting for Sunday.”

My message read,
I’m here, Mulch. Your move
.

I sat there while Lester topped off the tank and cleaned the windshield of bugs and leaves. It was still pitch-dark outside. Not even a hint of dawn.

“There now,” Minerva Frost said out of the blue.

I kid you not, a split second later, before I could even look over at her, my phone buzzed with a text.

I thought you’d given up
, it read.
Come alone. Or I end the game, and you lose absolutely everything
.

Following that was an address on Esteban Street, in Arabi, just south of New Orleans on the east bank of the Mississippi River.

Lester Frost climbed in, said, “Give this to my mom?”

I took the coffee. Her hand came up but went far wide of the cup when I reached over the backseat with it. I had to guide her fingers to it. Her skin was as soft as a baby’s bottom, and for reasons I can’t explain, I felt calmer for touching it.

Lester reacted sourly when I gave him the address.

“Most of that area’s toast ’cause of Katrina,” he said, starting up the GTO, which rumbled so loud he had to almost shout at me. “Fifteen feet of water rolled through there when the levee broke. They found corpses in the attics. Place is haunted. I bet we get to that address and all we see is a cement pad, or sea grass, or at best a skeleton of a house.”

In the backseat, Madame Minerva said, “Arabi
is
a place for ghosts, Detective Cross, but the man you’re after, he’s waiting for you near there. And your family is close by, rocking in cradles.”

THE ROCKING ROUSED NANA MAMA
from a deep, dark, and puzzling place.

At first, Cross’s grandmother felt only that she was shifting side to side, as if she were floating in water, and nothing more. For a very long time, she didn’t know who or what she was.

But then she heard the pump and flush of her heartbeat in her temples, and something more high-pitched and infrequent. She smelled something sharp and medicinal. She tried to open her eyes to find the source of that tinny noise and that antiseptic odor but couldn’t.

True consciousness came maddeningly slowly, one step forward and two steps back. Her mind wavered there in a pulsing zone of gradually building sensations—touch, mouth dryness, and that smell—and then retreated to that deep, dark, and puzzling place.

Was it death?

That was her first real thought:
Is it death?

Am I dying? Am I dead?

But what was
death?

It took forever before she could define the word. When she did, other things came back to her. She was Regina Hope. She was Nana Mama. And she was very old. She was lying on her back. She was sore everywhere, and she was rocking ever so slightly side to side and up and down.

What’s causing that rocking?
Nana Mama thought before the darkness took her once more.

AT A QUARTER TO FIVE
that morning, Tess Aaliyah watched the coroner seal the corpse of Acadia Le Duc’s mother inside a black bag and then remove it from the house. She flashed on the image of her own mother being taken from her deathbed, and she wondered what would be worse, to die a lingering death from cancer or to feel the life cut out of you all at once.

Blinding fatigue hit Aaliyah then, and she asked one of the deputies still on the scene, a fresh-faced kid named Earl Muntz, if she could get a lift into town.

“Absolutely,” Deputy Muntz said. “But I have to do something quick first, won’t take but five minutes. Is that okay, or can I find you someone who’ll get you there sooner?”

“No,” Aaliyah said. “It’s fine.”

She walked with Deputy Muntz up the two-track from the Le Duc place wondering if she’d ever forget the gruesome things she’d seen there, and she decided she would not, and could not. That glimpse into the nightmare that was Marcus Sunday was so vivid and lurid, it would be impossible to erase.

How far would he go?
she wondered.
How far will he go?

These were the questions she wanted to ask Acadia Le Duc when she stabilized. The same questions had to be eating at Alex Cross, she thought, as they reached Muntz’s patrol car. She got in, and for the first time in hours, she dug out her phone, looking for a text message about her hotel room.

There was nothing from Cross or anyone else. That was odd. Cross clearly said he’d book her a room, and that had been when? Around one?

The deputy put the cruiser in gear, turned north away from town. Aaliyah punched in the number of Cross’s disposable cell. It rang several times and then went to a recording that said, “This message box has not been opened.”

“Shit,” she said.

“What’s that?” Muntz said, driving on in the first pale light of dawn.

“I can’t find Cross,” she said. “He never texted me about my hotel room, and he’s not answering his phone.”

“Hotel room’s not a problem,” Muntz said. “My sister-in-law’s parents own the Budget. I’ll call and get you one.”

“Thanks,” Aaliyah said.

“Don’t mention it,” Muntz said, and punched a number on his speed-dial.

Aaliyah barely listened to him getting her a room. She felt drained to the point of dizziness, and her eyes got heavy and drifted shut. She was aware that the cruiser was slowing and turning. Muntz had hung up the phone. She dozed deeper on the whine of the tires and then bounced awake when the cruiser hit a rut.

Her head snapped forward. Her chin hit her chest, and her eyes flew open.

“Ouch,” the deputy said, stopping the cruiser. “I was afraid that was going to happen. I’m sorry for waking you. You just sit here and crash, and I’ll go ahead on foot to make sure the car is secure. Shouldn’t take more than ten minutes.”

“What car?” Aaliyah asked, yawning.

“That rental Acadia Le Duc was driving,” he said.

“You have the keys?” she asked, coming fully alert.

“The forensics guys have them,” he said. “They’ll be here to process it after they finish with the cabin. I’m just supposed to check it, make sure the car’s locked up tight.”

“You have a slim jim?” Aaliyah asked. “Some latex gloves?”

Muntz’s face lost color. “We’re not messing with evidence.”

“I’m not planning to mess with any evidence,” she said. “I just want to see it first. So do you have a slim jim or am I going to have to use a rock?”

The deputy looked like he wanted to argue, but then he sighed. “I’ve got a slim jim and gloves.”

Using Muntz’s big Maglite, they walked across a dike above rice fields and found the blue Dodge Avenger parked in the weeds where the farmland gave way to dense woods and swamp. The doors were locked. The deputy proved handy with the slim jim and opened the door, which triggered the car alarm.