Hope to Die (5 page)

Sunday noticed a mirror on the table and saw the traces of white lines on it. He frowned. “Thought we agreed no tweaking during the game.”

“We said during, not after,” Harrow replied. “Don’t worry. It’s just a pick-me-up. I been up all night and had the jitters by the time I got back here.”

Sunday debated whether to press the point, decided not to, and held out the gym bag, saying, “Balance on the first is there, plus a down payment on number two.”

Harrow motioned for him to put it on the table, asked, “How soon?”

“Tonight. The older boy.”

Sunday could tell Harrow didn’t like that.

“That kind of short notice and tight turnaround is gonna cost you,” Harrow said.

“How much?”

“To pull it off clean like that? Hundred K more on the back end.”

Sunday didn’t like renegotiations. “Quite a jump in pay.”

“Hell of a risk I’m taking. Cops involved, right?”

“I think you’d do it even if I weren’t paying you a small fortune,” Sunday said, setting the bag down.

“I might,” Harrow agreed, smiling for the first time. “Cops aside, I do enjoy and appreciate the cleaning work.”

“You’ll let me know when it’s done?”

“Man’s gotta get paid, don’t he? You want coffee?”

“Sorry, I have to catch a plane, be in St. Louis by five, no ifs, ands, or buts,” Sunday said, heading toward the door.

“And if you aren’t?”

“Bad stuff happens.”

JOHN SAMPSON ARRIVED AS
I watched the body bag being brought up out of the hole.

Built like a power forward in the NBA, he looked as weak as a kitten when he came to me with tears welling in his eyes. John and I have been brothers in all but genetics since we were ten years old. When the big man threw his arms around me, it was everything I could do not to dissolve right then and there.

“Jesus Christ, Alex,” Sampson said hoarsely. “I came as soon as I heard. Is it true? Is it—”

“I think so, but I don’t know for certain, and I won’t until tomorrow at least—and that may be the worst part,” I said in a dull voice as they put the body bag on a stretcher and wheeled it over to the medical examiner’s van.

I kept trying to think of the body in the bag as being someone other than Bree. But Mulch, he—

“You want me to take you home?” Sampson asked.

“No,” I said. “Home’s not a good place for me. Mulch watches me there, enjoys my suffering, and I won’t contribute to his enjoyment anymore. I just need to go for a walk and get my head straight.”

“Want company?” he asked.

“I’ll see you later at work.”

“Sugar, you can’t work when something like—”

“John, I
have to
work when something like this is going on,” I said firmly. “It’s the only way I’ll stay sane.”

Sampson looked like he wanted to tell me something, but Detective Aaliyah came over, said, “Dr. Cross, I have—”

“John, this is Tess Aaliyah,” I said. “She’s new, from Baltimore, and she caught this case and needs to be brought up to speed on what the secret task force has found out about Mulch.”

“Secret task force?” Aaliyah said.

“Exactly,” I said, and walked off, trying to convince myself that that wasn’t my wife’s body in the back of that coroner’s wagon.

But grief and loss have a way of crippling the best intentions even in the strongest of minds.

Within a block of leaving the crime scene I was lost in memories of my first days with Bree, how she’d rescued me from a long loneliness with an unshakable love, the kind I’d thought I’d lost forever. Then the likelihood that she was gone hit me like a freight train and I began to choke and sob right there on the sidewalk.

Every woman I’d ever loved had ended up dead or so traumatized by the violence woven through my life that she couldn’t bear the sight of me. My first wife, Maria, died in a drive-by shooting when Damon was a toddler and Jannie was just a baby. A madman took Ali’s mother hostage, and even though we managed to rescue her, it permanently fractured our relationship. And now Bree, the absolute love of my life, might have been swallowed up by the darkness that had shadowed me without pause almost since the moment I became a police officer.

What about my kids? What about my grandmother? Were they completely doomed to follow my loves into the shadows and the darkness? And what about me?

Was I already there? I asked myself as I walked on, wiping tears from my eyes. Had I ever left? Could I ever leave?

On autopilot, I took a route I’d taken a thousand times with my children. Every morning, or as often as was possible, I’d walked them to their school, Sojourner Truth. I did it for years, and as I retraced those steps, I was soon drowning in memories of Damon, Jannie, and Ali as each headed to the first day of first grade.

Damon had gone willingly, eagerly. It was all he and his friends had talked about. But Jannie and Alex Jr. had been nervous.

“What if I get a bad teacher?” Jannie asked.

Ali had asked the same thing, and in my mind, suddenly Jannie and Ali were right there, together, both six, and both looking at me for a response. I squatted down to them and pulled them in close to me, rejoicing in their smell and their innocence.

“There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you,” I said. “And I love you. That’s all you need to know.”

“Love you more,” Jannie said.

“Love you more,” Ali said.

“Love you more and more,” I whispered. “Love you—”

A woman said, “Dr. Cross?”

STARTLED OUT OF THAT
perfect vision of my life before Thierry Mulch, I was shocked to find myself at the fence around the Sojourner Truth playground. It was deserted. I thought I heard the school bell sound for recess. But where was the laughter of my children?

“Dr. Cross?”

Blinking, I turned my head to see a tall, pretty African American woman in a blue pantsuit standing beside me on the sidewalk, her face painted in concern.

“Yes,” I said, almost recognizing her, feeling irritated and not quite knowing why.

She looked at me closely, said, “You don’t look well.”

“I’m just … where are the kids? The bell rang. It’s recess time.”

“It’s Easter vacation,” she said.

I looked at her like she was a stranger in a dream.

“Dr. Cross,” she said. “Do you know who I am?”

I did suddenly and felt myself grow irrationally angry. “You’re Dawson. The principal. You’re the one who let Mulch in. Where have you been? We’ve been trying to find you.”

My expression and tone must have frightened her, because she took a step back. “I’m sorry. I was on vacation, I don’t—”

“Thierry Mulch,” I shouted. “You let that sick fuck into Ali’s school. You let him near all those children!”

“What?” she said, her hand going to her lips. “What’s he done?”

“He kidnapped my family,” I said. “He may have killed my wife. He may be getting ready to kill Ali.”

The principal was horrified. “My God, no!”

I saw how strongly she reacted, and it shook me out of the fugue state where I’d been wandering.

“We left messages for you all week here at the school,” I said. “The FBI. The police.”

“I’m so sorry,” Dawson said, her voice quivering. “I was in Jamaica, visiting my cousins, and I only just got back. I was going to my office to get ready for next week when I saw you standing here. How can I help? Anything.”

“Tell me about Thierry Mulch. Everything you know.”

Dawson said that Mulch had contacted her out of the blue, first by e-mail, and then by phone. He said he was a web entrepreneur who had had several successful ventures but was looking for a different demographic and a bigger audience. His idea was to create a social-media platform for the six- to twelve-year-old crowd that could be accessed only by verified members of that crowd.

“To keep out the perverts?”

“That’s right.”

“Not a bad business concept.”

“That’s what I thought. So when he asked to come speak to the kids, I saw it as an opportunity. And he checked out completely. I mean, his company has a legitimate website. Here, come into my office, I’ll show you.”

We went to the front doors of the school. She opened them and we went inside, turning on lights. The odors in the hallway were so familiar and so intertwined with memories of my children that I stopped breathing through my nose.

In her office, Dawson got on her desktop computer, typed, and then frowned before typing again. With a sinking expression, she said, “Either I’ve got it wrong or the website’s gone offline.”

The principal started rummaging in her desk, said, “But I’ve got his business card here some—here it is!”

“Don’t touch it!” I yelled, coming around the desk quickly as she shrank back. “I’m sorry. It’s just that we’ll want to fingerprint it.”

In a thin voice, she said, “He wore thin white gloves.”

“Of course he did,” I said, wanting to punch a wall. “But just the same. Do you have a plastic sandwich bag?”

“Will an envelope do?”

“Yes.”

She got me an envelope and I used a pair of tweezers to pluck the business card from the drawer and place it on her desk.

“I’ve got a photocopy of his driver’s license too,” she said.

“We’ve already got one of those, but thanks,” I replied, studying the card and then taking a picture of it with my smartphone.

Thierry Mulch, President, TMI Entertainment, Beverly Hills
. It gave a phone number in the 213 area code and an address on Wilshire Boulevard. It also had a web address—
www.TMIE1.info
—and an e-mail address,
[email protected]
.

I was about to drop the card into the envelope and take it with me downtown for processing when something about the URL and the e-mail pinged deep in my recent memory.

“Try
www.TMIE.com
on your computer.”

Principal Dawson frowned, typed the URL in, and struck Return. The screen blinked, and up came the home page of TMI Enterprises, a multimedia and social-networking company.

“This is it,” she said. “This is his website.”

“Click on ‘Corporate Officers.’”

She did and the screen jumped to another page that featured pictures and short bios of the people running the company. At the top of the heap was someone I’d seen when I’d visited the website two weeks before: a blond surfer-type guy in his late twenties wearing thick black glasses and a black hoodie.

“That’s not the picture of Mulch I saw on the other version of the website,” Dawson said. “I saw the guy who came here, red hair, red beard, everything.”

“Will the real Thierry Mulch please stand up?” I said, and I felt the throbbing in my head start up all over again.

MY HEAD WAS STILL
pounding when I reached the sealed-off construction area on the third floor of Metro headquarters. Men in hard hats and respirator masks were using sledgehammers to bust down drywall. The air was full of gypsum dust as I went to the plastic sheeting that sealed off the destructing from the already destructed.

I started to cough and that only made the pain in my head worse. A part of me wanted to shut down then, to curl up in a fetal position right there in the dust and let it settle on me as I mourned my wife. But a greater part of me needed to keep pushing on. If I was to have any hope of saving the rest of my family, I had to keep moving, keep asking questions, keep fighting as long and as hard as possible.

I tore open the flap and stepped inside a large space already stripped down to the cement floors. In the middle, under a bank of fluorescent shop lights, stood eight desks. At them or around them, good men and women were working.

Ned Mahoney, my old partner at the FBI, was talking with Sampson. Mahoney spotted me and jumped up. “Jesus, Alex, I just heard. And I’m so goddamn … I don’t know what to say except I promise you, we’re moving heaven and earth to find this bastard.”

I swallowed hard, patted him on the shoulder. Mahoney and I had worked together in Behavioral Sciences at Quantico. We’d toiled on too many cases involving the criminally insane to bullshit each other with psychological nuances and false premises.

“Ned,” I managed. “If we don’t catch him, he’ll carve them all up in the same twisted way.”

“That’s not happening,” said Captain Roelof Antonius Quintus, my boss, who was coming toward me with other members of the task force. “If that Jane Doe turns out to be Bree, he’s killed a DC cop. At the very least, he’s kidnapped a DC cop’s family. For that, he
will
pay.”

The rest of the detectives and FBI agents behind him nodded grimly.

“Thank you, Captain,” I said, nodding to the others. “Thank you all for everything you’re doing.”

I got out the envelope I’d taken from Dawson’s office.

“I went to Sojourner Truth and found the principal back from vacation,” I told them. “I have a business card Mulch gave her when he went there to speak to the kids.”

I handed it over to the captain, explaining about the fake website that was almost like the one a real Thierry Mulch ran.

“Everything was the same except the picture of Mulch. It took sophisticated computer work. The kind Preston Elliot could do in his sleep.”

Quintus, Sampson, and Mahoney exchanged glances.

“Why don’t you sit down, Alex,” the captain said.

“What’s going on?”

Quintus took a deep breath and pointed to a chair. Reluctantly, I sat in it, and I felt my eyes begin to burn even before Ned Mahoney spoke.

“Three days ago, the Fairfax County sheriff was called to a commercial pig farm in Berryville, Virginia,” Mahoney began. “The owner found a human skull and a piece of femur in some machinery. Quantico ran the DNA and got three immediate matches.”