What the hell was going on? Where was Damon? Where was my wife? Jannie? Ali? Nana?
I had the overwhelming sense that I was in danger of drowning as my mind tried to answer the single question that came to dominate my thinking: What has happened to my family and why?
Sampson, I thought. Someone clearheaded. He can help me figure out—
My cell phone buzzed, alerting me to a text message. Grabbing it from my pocket, I looked at the sender and felt a rush of joy. Jannie had sent me a—
Two photographs came in. I opened them, seeing Bree, Ali, and Nana Mama in the first, and Damon and Jannie in the second. They all appeared unconscious, with duct tape wrapped about their wrists and ankles and strips of it stretched across their mouths.
A message accompanied the second picture, the one of Damon and Jannie: Don’t even think about calling Sampson, or your other friends with Metro and the FBI. Look around. You are alone now, Cross. And I am watching you. If you try to bring in reinforcements to your cause, your family dies, simple as that. Do not leave your home. Await further instructions to follow—T.M.
“T.M.,” I said, feeling scalded inside. “Thierry Mulch.”
Chapter
100
Mulch, the faceless phantom who’d been lurking at the periphery of my life the last two weeks—sending crude letters, speaking at my son’s school, for God’s sake—now had my children, my wife, and my grandmother. That reality pounded through my head like so many wild horses. I got woozy and nauseated. I sat on the edge of my bed and massaged my temples with the heels of my palms, thinking: Who is he, Mulch? That Internet entrepreneur from Southern California who’d gone to Ali’s school? Or one of the other Thierry Mulches I’d found on the Web?
And what was his motive? Why was he doing this to me? What sort of leverage was he looking for? Was this for himself, or on behalf of a third party?
But it was the peril that my family faced that finally hit me like a shock wave off a roadside bomb. My imagination conjured up ten or more terrible endings for my wife, my children, my grandmother. Each of them felt like a concussion, one after another, so bad I feared I might crack like Carney had, splinter into several people, strangers every one.
Then my rational side stepped up, demanding that I detach from what might be happening to them, that I address the evidence and the facts. They were the only paths that might lead me to Mulch and my family.
Call Sampson. Call Quintus. Call Mahoney. Get them involved. You need manpower, and you need it now.
But Mulch had said he’d kill my family if I made that move. And he’d said he’d be watching, that he would know. Was he boasting? Bluffing?
No, I decided, he was clever enough to kidnap my entire family in an afternoon. It suggested planning. A lot of planning. So if he said he’d be watching, he’d be watching.
But how would he know if I contacted outside help?
I got to my feet then, turned off the light in the bedroom, crossed to the window, eased back the drapes, and looked down on Fifth Street. It was nearly nine by then and the sidewalks were quiet. Cars choked both sides of the street. Though the oak leaves were out, I could still see a long way east and west.
Retrieving a pair of binoculars from the closet where Bree and I kept our weapons, I began studying each vehicle in turn, looking for someone inside, or anything out of the ordinary. But I spotted no one near or in their cars on the half-block to either side of our place.
Had Mulch rented a house or apartment that had views of mine? I peered out at each house, using the binoculars to look for someone looking back at me. I did the same from Jannie’s room, above the side yard, and from Nana Mama’s room, which faces the back and the alley. I looked out every window and had suspicions about neighbors I’d known for years.
Nothing. No one.
Had I seen anything strange in the neighborhood recently? I supposed our construction project was the biggest change. But then I thought of that vacuum repair van I’d been seeing around. And that blue Tahoe with the tinted windows. Who owned them?
I went downstairs, spooking more of the crabs, went to the television room, and looked out the front windows, which offered a low-angle view of the street. Neither the Tahoe nor the van was there, as far as I could see.
Okay, then how else could Mulch know if I’ve contacted Metro or the FBI? Then it hit me. Ali had said he’d smelled Mulch in here. Why would Mulch have taken a chance like that, broken into my house with two armed police officers inside?
To bug the place, I thought. So he could watch me right now, after he’d taken my family, after he’d told me he had them.
I began to look about slowly, as if the walls had eyes and ears.
Chapter
101
I suddenly wanted to tear my house apart, find the bugs and—
Stop!
Stop looking around! I yelled at myself silently. If Mulch has bugs in here, he’s watching you or hearing you. If you start an obvious search, who knows what he might do?
Your family dies, simple as that.
For many moments I just stood there in the television room, staring dully at one of the blue crabs as it crept into the darkness behind our couch. The whole situation suddenly seemed to have been designed with diabolical forethought.
Mulch shows himself to me through a letter, taunts me, and depicts me in a cartoon with a huge penis perched on by birds. Then he goes to give a motivational speech at my son’s school. How did that happen? Who arranged it? Then he kidnaps my entire family and threatens to kill them if I act to save them or bring in help. Crueler still, Mulch watches, or listens to me, as I wrestle with my demons. It smacked of sadism at some level. Mental torture, certainly.
My house became overwhelmingly claustrophobic at that point, and I craved fresh air the way a desert nomad seeks water. But I refused to grab a jacket and go out into the night. For reasons I couldn’t explain, fleeing the house felt like surrender, and I was not surrendering to this man, whoever he was, whatever his ultimate motives were.
I was going to fight for my family, but I was going to have to do it in a way that didn’t seem like fighting. So I did what any normal person would do: I went hunting for the crabs that had taken over the lower floor of the house, grabbing up the ones in the hallway and dropping them into a brown paper bag and then moving the furniture to track down the rest of the escapees.
All the while I looked for signs of electronic transmitters, but frustratingly found none. It occurred to me that Mulch might have put them high up where they couldn’t be easily seen, but where they might provide a wide-angle view of the room. But sure as I was that they were there, I couldn’t spot them.
I didn’t feel like eating anything, so I stuck the crabs in the refrigerator and sat at the dining room table, looking at the pictures Mulch had sent me using Jannie’s phone. At first I just looked at each of them, wondering bitterly if this would be the last image I’d have of my wife, my kids, the grandmother who’d raised me.
Then I thought: Jannie’s phone.
Trying not to act purposeful, I got up from the table and turned off the light. I turned off every light in my house and then eased off my shoes. In the pitch black I padded like a cat up the stairs to my office.
But hadn’t Mulch been in here? I stood in the doorway, thinking of how Damon’s Christmas penholder had been moved, feeling certain that Mulch had moved it, which meant he’d been behind my desk, possibly even monkeyed with the computer. Should I take the chance?
I wanted to log on to a website called PhoneSniffer.com. Two years ago, I’d installed an app from the company on Jannie’s and Ali’s cell phones. Both phones came with GPS chips in them that communicated through the app to the PhoneSniffer site. The last twenty-four hours of activity were visible at any given moment, and archival history was available on request.
But did I dare call up the website here?
No, I decided at last. I needed to be sure. I needed to get out of my house and
to a computer I knew was clean without being spotted by Mulch.
Reluctantly, I turned and left my office. I changed into dark clothes and forced myself to lie down on my bed, to avoid thoughts of my hostage family, and to doze until the blackest hours before dawn.
At three a.m. I made my move, exiting the house through Ali’s window on a bar-and-chain fire escape ladder we kept rolled up in his closet. I got off in the walkway between our house and the Hendersons’ place next door. Instead of heading for the street or the gate to the alley, I struggled over the fence into the Hendersons’ yard, grateful that their oldest son, Pete, had taken his Rottweiler, Knot Head, away with him to college.
I climbed the fence into the Olsons’ yard and another into the Lakes’, using my peripheral vision to navigate, not daring to flick on my Maglite. A lock hung in the gate mechanism, but the hasp wasn’t shut. I lifted it out and stepped into the alleyway, looking everywhere for a long moment before heading quickly north, keeping to the shadows. I walked ten blocks before I dared to hail a cab.
Terry Simmons, the cop on duty at the rear entrance to Metro headquarters, was surprised when I walked up at three forty and presented my badge.
“Kind of early, Detective,” he said, pressing a button to let me through.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I said. “How long’s your duty?”
“Seven a.m.,” Simmons said. “Week’s over for me.”
“And it feels like mine’s just beginning,” I said, heading toward the elevators.
Ten minutes later, I was drinking coffee from a vending machine, wondering if I dared call John Sampson while waiting for the record of my children’s activities to load. Was it possible that Mulch had bugged Sampson’s place, too? Mulch had mentioned specifically that I was not to contact my partner. Was that a bluff? Or something he could know?
Confused on that issue, I focused on the PhoneSniffer site, which now showed Jannie’s position every fifteen minutes since four a.m. on Good Friday. Ali’s doings were there as well.
My daughter’s movements had been entirely predictable, based on what I already knew. She’d left the house at seven forty, gone to school, and moved to the track in the early afternoon. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon that things got disturbing.
PhoneSniffer had Jannie leaving Banneker High, heading toward the Howard University Metro station, about forty minutes after I’d left her to pick up Damon at Union Station. Two blocks shy of the Metro stop, my daughter got into a vehicle. By the time her phone had transmitted her position again, she was crossing the Fourteenth Street Bridge, heading into Virginia.
That was the last signal for almost two hours until Mulch sent the photographs of my family. PhoneSniffer pegged the phone’s position on Baron Cameron Avenue, heading into Reston, Virginia. There had been no more transmissions since then.
Ali’s last known location was two blocks from school, heading in the direction of the church shortly after school let out. Then he simply vanished from the tracking system. Mulch had to have taken their phones and disabled them. This was a dead end.
I was about to call a number at Verizon that would put me in touch with a police liaison so I could get a last fix on Bree, Damon, and Nana Mama, when I suddenly remembered my wife saying something about downloading the PhoneSniffer app onto my grandmother’s phone soon after she’d had heart problems the year before.
I went to the account page, and sure enough, there was a tracker app on Nana Mama’s phone. Calling up the page, I was surprised and happy to see that it was still on and had been sending out her position all day and night. The last transmission had been sent only three minutes before.
I clicked on the location, saw it magnified on the screen against Google Maps, and felt terrified for her.
Chapter
102
In the ground fog and the first dawn light, the tens of thousands of simple white gravestones looked like row after row of broken teeth, stretching in every direction as I ran along a path through Arlington National Cemetery.
When I’d pulled up at the gate at 5:30 a.m., an armed member of the US Army’s Old Guard had come out of a booth shaking his head, said, “We don’t open until eight, sir.”
I’d showed him my badge and identification and told him I was searching for my grandmother. But he’d refused me entry until I explained that she was ninety-some years old and suffered from dementia.
A little stretching of the truth often works wonders.
“My granddad’s got the same sorry thing, Detective, and he’s only seventy-eight,” the sentry said. “Can’t let you drive in, but you can go search on foot.”
I showed the soldier Nana Mama’s position on my cell phone screen. According to PhoneSniffer, she’d been there since six thirty the evening before. The guard studied the location and told me that she was in section 60, an unfortunately popular place in Arlington these days. Section 60 was where they buried soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines who had died in the global war on terror. The day before, the sentry said, ten men had been laid to rest there.
That thought only added to my worry as I began to weave my way through the gravestones of section 60, using the map to guide me. When I got to the location of all the transmissions from Nana Mama’s phone in the prior eleven hours, I found three fresh graves.
For a sickening few moments, my mind reeled with the idea that my grandmother might be dead and buried there. But then I remembered that funerals at Arlington are highly orchestrated affairs attended by members of the Old Guard, who often give the dead a twenty-one-gun salute. There was no way Nana Mama was here.
Her cell phone, however, had to be. Gravestones had not been erected, but all three burial sites were covered with fake grass, flower memorials, and small American flags stuck upright in loose soil at the heads of the graves.
Feeling like a ghoul, and asking forgiveness from the spirits of the fallen soldiers, I put on latex gloves and began to carefully search among the flowers. I found the phone twenty minutes later, but not in any of the bouquets or vases.
When I lifted the fake grass at the foot of the middle grave, the phone was just lying there inside a sandwich-size Ziploc bag. I crouched, took a picture with my camera phone, and then picked the bag up, studying the phone, which was dark. I turned the bag over. There was a small envelope in there, too. It was addressed to “Dr. Alex.”
I felt angry. Some sick freak was playing me, and I hated it.
But I set those feelings aside and fished out the envelope. It had not been sealed and contained a child’s birthday-party invitation with little bunches of balloons in the corners. There was no date, time, or place entered on the dotted lines, just these words scrawled in an odd script: “You disappoint me, Cross. I told you to stay at home and await further instructions, and here I find you out looking for your family. Go home, or suffer the consequences. Look at the picture on the phone and go home.”
Grinding my teeth, not wanting to look at the photograph, I nevertheless thumbed the button that activated the screen.
Nana Mama was lashed to a chair. Her head was slumped forward on her chest. A person—head and body outside the photograph—stood next to her, holding a bolt-action hunting rifle, pressing the muzzle to the side of her neck.
Chapter
103
I did as the man said. I went home and spent most of the day there, but not before taking a chance and making a short stop at DC’s new state-of-the-art crime lab on E Street in Southwest.
The MPD was in the process of moving from having sworn officers running the lab to employing skilled and degreed civilians who were increasingly taking over the forensics end of investigation in the nation’s capital. But I still knew people in the lab, and when I asked after the manager on duty I got lucky.
Five minutes later I was behind closed doors in the spanking-new office of Lieutenant Commander Alison Whitehead, an old friend and colleague who owed me a favor or three. Without revealing exactly what was happening, I got
Whitehead to sign a requisition slip giving me access to several pieces of equipment that I believed might help my situation. The entire visit took less than fifteen minutes.
So I was well within the time parameters of a trip between Arlington National Cemetery and home. Twice during the drive, John Sampson called, and twice I ignored him. I parked the unmarked car in front of the house and went past the construction Dumpster and inside, hearing the phone ringing from the porch.
When I got inside, my partner and best friend was leaving a message about Easter dinner tomorrow. I’d forgotten that Bree and Nana Mama had invited them. Billie wanted to know what to bring.
“Call me so I can get her off my back,” Sampson said, and hung up.
I smelled something faintly putrid in the air then. At first, I flashed on my son, Ali, and thought Mulch might be in the house, but then I realized that one of the crabs must have gotten behind something and died.
It worked in my favor. Grumbling about the dead crab gave me cover to move furniture and clamber around the house, carrying a small handheld device that measured radio waves and electrical activity.
I found the first bug around 10 a.m. It was a tiny audio unit pinned to the upholstery on the back of one of the couch cushions. Barely giving it a glance, I set the cushion back in place as if I’d seen nothing.
That was a good thing, because I realized soon after that there was a camera of some kind in the bristles of the small broom we use once in a blue moon when we have a fire in the fireplace.
The optical bug in one of Nana Mama’s spider plants was located thirty minutes later, soon after I began picking up activity from the ceiling light over the dining room table. Luckily, the dead crab wasn’t a foot away from the camera, under a stand my grandmother uses for her houseplants.