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.”
CHAPTER
53
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!”
CHAPTER
54
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, par
t 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.”
CHAPTER
55
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.
“Lot of sun the past two days,” he said. “Really keeping the banks strong.”
Acadia was barely listening. Her eyes were roaming over the elaborate life-support system keeping Alex Cross’s family alive.
Strapped to bunks bolted into the walls, the five were intubated and on ventilators. They had nasogastric tubes inserted to prevent them from aspirating. Intravenous lines ran from their hands to the automated Harvard pumps that governed the flow of IV fluids.
Above each bunk there was a four-liter bag of liquid hanging on a hook. The average person can survive on one and a half liters of maintenance fluids a day. Each of the bags would sustain a patient for roughly sixty hours.
There were also three smaller bags hanging on each hook, all of which were linked to smaller pumps before they joined the main IV line. One bag held sixty hours’ worth of midazolam, a relaxant similar to Valium. Another contained a two-and-a-half-day supply of morphine. The third was an equal amount of pancuronium. A molecular relative of the South American toxin curare, the third drug was a paralytic, used in surgeries or, as in this case, induced comas.
Acadia took it all in with a long sweeping glance, seeing no evidence of disruption or breakage. Sunday had bribed a brilliant, corrupt doctor with a cocaine habit to design the system and obtain the medications. The doctor had even helped program the automated infusion based on the weight, sex, and age of each patient.
Cross’s ninety-something grandmother had been the trickiest. She weighed less than one hundred pounds, and she had a history of mild cardiac problems. Every time Acadia came into the container car, she expected to find the old woman long gone. Acadia went to her first. Nana Mama’s heart rate was slightly up from the last time she’d checked. And her blood pressure looked a little low. But besides that, she was solid.
Satisfied, Acadia steeled herself for the side of nursing she’d hated in the four years she’d done it. She pulled down the old woman’s sheet, changed her diaper, threw the old one into a garbage bag, and checked her Foley catheter for signs of infection. There were none. She emptied the urine bag, replaced it, then drew the sheet back up over her, unable to shake the idea that Cross would chase her for the rest of his life. He wasn’t the kind of man who gave up, especially when his family was involved.
She glanced at Sunday, who was still studying the computers, and then at the array of medicines in the bags hanging off hooks above the old woman’s bunk. She continued with her routine, checking the vitals and cleaning the other four. The Cross children were strong, Jannie especially. She had the heart and build of a serious athlete. Acadia caught Sunday looking at the girl’s naked form with great interest and realized that he hadn’t touched her since they’d taken the Cross family hostage. When she started working on Bree Stone, Sunday was almost leering.
“She’s quite well put together, don’t you think?” Sunday asked, moving around for a better view. “You can see why Dr. Alex would be so crushed by her death.”
Acadia said nothing. She knew a thing or two about men. When they stopped wanting sex, you were in danger of being cheated on, dumped, or worse. Given the sheer audacity and scope of what Sunday had done already, she started to suspect that worse was the option he’d eventually settle on.
That suspicion built within her, and by the time she’d gotten the new four-liter IV bags and the drugs from the storage chest and swapped them out, it had become a conviction. Her time was growing short. Sooner rather than later, Sunday would kill her.
What was it he’d written in his book? That the perfect criminal was a universe unto himself? He works alone, or kills his accomplices? That was exactly what Sunday had written. But maybe—
“Acadia?” Sunday said. “Are we done here?”
She looked o
ver at him, hesitated, but then came to a decision, thinking: It’s time to ride the comet.
She said, “I’m just nervous about the intubations and the nasogastric tubes.”
“Yeah?” he said with zero interest.
“They’re showing signs of contamination,” she said. “It could lead to sepsis, and we’d find the five of them dead the next time we came in here.”
Sunday thought a few moments, said, “I don’t like that. If they die, I want it to be at my hands.”
“What I thought,” she said. “But your quack doctor there told me that if this kind of contamination ever happened, we should remove the tubes and change the depth of the comas.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning they wouldn’t be out cold like this, and they’d be able to breathe on their own without the tubes. But they’ll still be so doped up, they won’t move.”
Sunday studied her, said, “What about food?”
“The IVs will carry them through the next check.”
“Your call,” he said finally. “You’re the medical professional.”
Acadia nodded, relieved. “It’ll take me ten or fifteen minutes. You might want to go tell the captain so he doesn’t come snooping around.”
“Oh, he’s …” Sunday said, then hesitated. “No, that’s a good idea. Lock it up when you’re done.”
“Tight,” she said.
At each bunk, Acadia reprogrammed the Harvard pump, cutting off the paralytic and lowering the dosages of the other two drugs by 55 percent. She also shortened the duration of the infusion so that about forty-two hours from that moment, they would all start to wake up.
Last, Acadia loosened the restraints so that in forty-five hours or so, one of them might be able to get free and help the others. If the change in the medications worked the way she expected, a few hours after that, by the time they reached New Orleans, they’d be able to pound on the walls, make enough noise to attract attention, and get themselves rescued before Sunday could return.