Hope to Die

  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.”

  CHAPTER

  69

  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.

  CHAPTER

  70

  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, expe
cting 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.

  CHAPTER

  71

  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.”

  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!”

  Part Four

  CHAPTER

  72

  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.