I blinked, said, “Get me safe first. Please? I think…I know I have a concussion. And I’m bleeding.”
You could tell she was struggling, wanting to leave, wanting—
“Just get me home,” I said. “And I’ll tell you what happened to Bree.”
And then we were two survivors trudging through the predawn streets of Washington. As small as she was, Ava managed to keep me upright as we walked toward my home. The sidewalk seemed like the rolling deck of a ship in hard seas.
But I told Ava everything: how this insane man Mulch had bugged my home, kidnapped every member of my family, and then executed them because John Sampson had come to my door. He’d even sent me pictures on my cell phone. Twice during the telling I broke down so badly I had to hold on to a street sign to keep from collapsing.
The whole time, Ava said nothing, as if this kind of tragedy was to be borne in silence and then never spoken of again. I don’t know how she did it, but she got me to the house. The storms had passed and the first light of dawn was showing in the night sky. The front door was still open. Spring-green oak leaves floated in a puddle in the hallway.
I stood there, gazing stupidly at the leaves floating, until Ava said, “Where do you want me to take you, Alex?”
“Upstairs,” I said.
“You sure you don’t want a doctor?”
“No,” I said as my house began to move. “I just need to lie down.”
And then, somehow, she’d shut the front door behind us and had gotten me up the staircase and into my bed on my back. The room spun slowly like a carousel.
“Ava?” I asked, trying to focus on her to make the whirling stop for good.
I could see she was annoyed at me.
“Bee?” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Did you kill that girl and burn her body in the factory?”
“What?” she said angrily. “No! Elise, she was my friend.”
“We have evidence at the scene, your ID and that sweater Nana Mama gave you.”
“Someone must have planted it there.”
“We have an eyewitness,” I said. “A homeless man named Everett Prough.”
Ava looked disgusted and furious now. “Of course Everett said I did it. Of course he put my things there and told you that.”
“What? Why?” I asked, confused again.
“That homeless getup is Prough’s disguise, Alex,” she said. “He’s a pimp and an ice dealer, but no one looks at him twice when he’s dressed like a bum. Elise owed him money, but only half as much as I owed him. Prough killed Elise and set her body on fire as a warning to me.”
She began to sob. “I caused it.”
Even with my blurry vision and my bruised brain, I could see that she was telling the truth. I wanted to tell her she hadn’t caused Elise’s death, and to come forward and testify against Prough to avenge her friend. I wanted to tell her that she would be protected and that she wouldn’t have to run anymore.
But was that true? My own family…
I swooned, remembered something about concussions. I wanted to say, “Don’t let me sleep, Bee.” But all I got out was “Don’t let me go…”
The last thing I remember was Ava standing in the doorway staring back at me, hoodie up, chewing her thumbnail and looking like she was getting ready to run.
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In the nightmare that followed many hours later, a blurry figure I knew as Mulch raced through the crack house after smashing my head and stealing my money. Like some cartoon character, I took the hit and still was able to get to my feet and chase him outside, except we were no longer in DC but up on that abandoned farm where Carney had taken Cam Nguyen and the babies.
Mulch went into the farmhouse, giving me just a glimpse of that shock of red hair, and I pursued him down into the basement and through the secret passage. When I left the tunnel and entered the root cellar, Mulch was gone.
But the room Carney had built inside the root cellar was still there in my dream, and light shone inside. I stepped into the light, peered into the room, and saw my family laid out side by side on the floor by the bathtub, all of them in the same position I’d seen in the pictures, lying on their sides, faces turned left, dead, bloody, and head-shot.
Their milky eyes were all open, and their blank stares a universal accusation: I had failed to protect them. I had allowed this to happen. The harshest expression was Nana Mama’s, as if she’d become ashamed of me, as if her life raising me, and protecting me, had mattered not at all when she was in dire need.
That crushed me. I fell to my knees, arms wide, weeping and begging for her forgiveness, and for Bree’s forgiveness, and Damon’s, Jannie’s, and Ali’s. But they just stared at me with their milky eyes, their expressions never changing, and I began to convulse with pain and loss, heaving and sobbing and thinking that this brutal feeling would never, ever end.
Then I heard splashing and looked through my tears at the bathtub, where Mulch had risen up out of the water carrying a hunting rifle. His face was a brilliant aluminum light above that polka-dot bow tie and that shock of red hair, and his voice came to me like a shortwave radio transmission.
“I had to shoot them like that, you know,” Mulch said. “If you head-shoot them, they can never become zombies.”
I said nothing, just stared into the blinding light of his face.
After several seconds, Mulch said, “I figured you’d thank me, Cross.”
“Why?” I whispered.
“For saving them from the doom of the walking dead.”
“No, why are you doing this to me?”
Mulch laughed with irony in his voice, said, “I’m doing it for the only reason anyone does anything. Because I can.” He started to laugh again, caustically.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
Mulch seemed to think about that. “I’m whoever you believe me to be.”
“Why don’t you kill me?”
“Why does a cat play with a mouse?” Mulch replied.
“So you will kill me?”
“Of course.”
“When?” I said.
“I think it’s time right now,” Mulch said matter-of-factly. “Lie down there beside your wife and your grandmother, on your side, right cheek in that perfect puddle of blood, staring left into oblivion.”
I got down without hesitation, gazing one last heartbreaking time at my family, each one of them in turn, before twisting my head from them, eyes wide open and aware of the muzzle of the rifle swinging past my face.
“Shoot straight,” I choked.
“I always do,” Mulch said, and pulled the trigger.
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There was a sound like an artillery shell going off in my head, and a wicked electrical pain that fragmented into different arms of excruciating energy that spiked out with fingers in all directions, as if Mulch had shot me with a lightning bolt and not a .30-06.
The lightning came not through that gaping bullet hole I expected on the left side of my head, but from low and at the back of my head, right where someone had hit me in the crack house.
Then I smelled ammonia and jerked toward confused consciousness.
“Alex?”
Wincing at the pulsing pain at the back of my head, I felt my eyes come open blurrily, seeing three figures that soon became Ava, John Sampson, and Ned Mahoney. We were all in my bedroom. The door was shut.
“What…?” I started to say. “How…?”
Sampson tossed a smelling salt capsule away and threw a thumb at Ava, saying in a low voice, “Real smart girl here, Alex. You don’t know the half of it, but eventually she came and got us.”
I blinked, felt fire in my eyes. “Eventually? What time is it? What day?”
“Easter Sunday,” Mahoney said. “Six in the evening. You’ve been out about thirteen hours.”
Almost a day had passed since Nana Mama died, I thought, wanting to cry again, realizing that each coming
hour would bring one tragic reminder after another.
“Mulch killed them all,” I said to Sampson and Mahoney. “Executed them with a hunting rifle in cold blood.”
“Maybe,” Ava said. “Maybe not.”
Suddenly and irrationally angry, I twisted my pounding head at the teenager and snapped, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Ava shrank, started to move toward the door.
“Hear her out, Alex,” Mahoney said. “She’s got us convinced.”
“Convinced of what?” I demanded. “That Mulch had a partner who performed the executions?”
“No, Alex,” Sampson said. “Ava’s convinced us that your family’s still alive.”
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I refused to believe it. The idea that they had somehow all survived gunshots to the head required more hope than I had left in my heart, maybe more hope than was left in the universe.
But then Ava explained that she’d left me passed out on the bed, intending to take off and then call 911 down the road. As she passed the doorway into the television room, however, she saw my phone lying on the carpet.
As dark as it sounds, Ava wanted to see the pictures I’d described, and she picked up the phone. Mindful of Mulch’s camera trained on her from the bristles of the fireplace broom, she’d gone halfway up the stairs and started to look at them.
“Why did you do that?” I asked, irritated again.
“I dunno,” Ava said, shrugging. “Interested?”
“Whatever, it’s a damn good thing she did, Alex,” Mahoney said.
Sampson nodded. “Though we would have figured it out eventually.”
“Figured out what?” I demanded.
The FBI agent pulled out an iPad and called up every picture Mulch had sent me so that they were all visible, side by side. He held the screen out to me. I couldn’t bear to look at them until he said, “Notice anything odd when you look at them all at once?”
Steeling myself, ignoring the pain in my skull, I forced my gaze onto Nana Mama’s corpse, and then Bree’s, Damon’s, Jannie’s, and Ali’s. They were all in virtually the same position.
“Mulch killed them in a ritualistic manner,” I said. “Fetishizing their death.”
“I thought about that,” Ava said.
I looked at her again, this time in surprise. “You did?”
“I used to listen to you talk to Bree about your jobs,” she said defensively. “And, I dunno, the pictures seemed too ritualistic.”
Before I could reply, Sampson twirled his finger, said, “Get to it, Ava.”
Ava nodded, stepped up beside the bed. She took the iPad from Mahoney, tapped at the screen, and then turned the device so I saw it horizontally. The pictures of Bree and Jannie showed in split screen one atop the other. Ava gestured to the gunshot wounds, said, “They’re the same.”
“Of course they look alike,” I said. “He shot them in the same place.”
“They’re the same,” she insisted, and then pointed to the blood pooled around their faces. “It’s pretty much the same here, too, like the same amount of blood, and the shape of it. And notice these spatters?”
I didn’t see it at first, but then I flashed on my nightmare, and how Mulch had told me to assume the same position in that perfect puddle of blood. My subconscious had seen what Ava had seen. It had been trying to tell me the same thing.
I nodded in shock. “They’re nearly identical.”
Sampson said, “Ava spotted it, snuck out, and brought your phone to my house. I’d been at work with Ned since you gave me Nana Mama’s phone yesterday evening. Billie brought Ava to us downtown, and she quickly convinced us after we blew the pictures up on a computer screen.”
Mahoney nodded. “I had the skeleton crew on duty at Quantico do a quick analysis to confirm our take. There’s no doubt that every one of those pictures was Photoshopped. A very good job, but Photoshopped.”
A glimmer of optimism began to glow in my chest. Was it possible? Were they alive? Could they be?
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Then the skeptic in me took hold, said, “Why would Mulch do this?”
“Trying to break you, I suspect,” Mahoney said.
“But why?” I insisted.
“You’ll be able to ask him when we find him,” Sampson said. “And by the way, we believe his name is not Thierry Mulch. It’s Preston Elliot; he’s a graduate student in computer science at Georgetown.”
My head hurt again. “Wait, what?”
Mahoney said, “John called me right after you gave him Nana Mama’s phone. We’ve been on Mulch ever since, and on you, by the way.”
I squinted at him. “How’s that?”
“Well, what did you think, that we weren’t going to get your house under surveillance?” the FBI agent replied. “We had two teams trailing you on your long walk last night. We honestly had no idea what you were up to, and you weren’t answering your phone, so we figured Mulch had contacted you and you were going to meet him.”
It took a few moments for that to sink in, but then I said, “But how do you know Mulch’s real name is Preston Elliot?”
“DNA, luck, a sex crimes report out of Alexandria, and complaints in Georgetown and Bethesda,” Sampson replied, frowning. “But not in that order.”
He explained that one of the first things he and Mahoney had done was to run criminal database searches on Thierry Mulch.
Sampson added, “We got our first break through a rape case in Alexandria last week. A woman named Claudia Dickerson, twenty-eight, a CPA, reported that a man who kept referring to himself as Mr. Mulch had attacked her and her boyfriend, Richard Nelson, at her front door. Mulch forced them inside her apartment, knocked Nelson cold, and then raped Ms. Dickerson from behind. She never saw his face, but he left DNA.”
“Has it been analyzed yet?” I asked.
“Not completely,” Mahoney said, holding up one hand. “But give us a minute or so here to finish telling you what we do know.”
Sampson said, “We came across Mulch’s name two other times in the databases. He caused a stink at the Four Seasons in Georgetown about two weeks ago. Same guy Ali described: tall, red hair, bow tie. He also took a Bentley out for a test drive from EuroMotorcars in Bethesda, an eight-hour test drive. And we contacted the principal at Ali’s school. She said he’d approached her by e-mail and directed her to a website about his social media company and its new app for kids. He said he wanted to inspire kids and pick their brains, so she agreed to let him come speak. She also sent us a copy of Mulch’s California driver’s license. Fake, by the way. There’s no such Mulch on record out there.”
Mahoney turned the iPad again and I came face to face with Thierry Mulch for the first time. Rooster-red hair. Bushy red eyebrows. Abe Lincoln beard. A lazy expression.
“You have a picture of Preston Elliot?”
The FBI agent nodded, typed on the iPad again, came up with the computer scientist’s Georgetown ID, said, “We think he’s wearing a disguise in the driver’s license photo, but they’re roughly the same height and weight, and look at the other facial features.”
I did, and saw striking similarities in the cheekbones and along the jawline. I looked at the eyes and knew they were the same person. “And you have DNA evidence that directly links the rape to Preston Elliot?”
Sampson said, “We do, and you’re not going to believe how.”
He explained that he’d found a report from the lab on my desk, an analysis of the semen and vaginal traces found at the scene of Mandy Bell Lee’s attorney’s death.
“Are you saying Mulch killed Tim Jackson?”
“We’re saying that Preston Elliot killed Tim Jackson,” Mahoney replied. “We got a dead-on match between the semen taken from the attorney’s hotel room and the DNA samples FBI agents took from Elliot’s hairbrush after he was reported missing last week. And the vaginal secretions on Jackson’s pants match DNA samples taken from Claudia Dickerson, the rape
victim. By the way, the rape and Jackson’s murder took place within hours of each other.”
For several moments, I didn’t reply, and then I said, “Why would Elliot smear Jackson with the evidence of a rape?”
“Could have just been on Elliot’s pants and he rubbed up against Jackson while he was poisoning him,” Sampson said.
My head hurt too much to think critically about that possibility. I said, “My family is alive.”
They all nodded. “As far as we know,” Mahoney said.
“So what are we going to do?”
The FBI agent said, “Launch an investigation as if they’d been murdered. Don’t let on that we know they’re alive, leaving you to act the mourner out of his mind here in the house where Elliot/Mulch can watch you.”
Sampson said, “We think he wants to watch you suffer, Alex.”
“But why?” I asked again. “I don’t know this guy Elliot.”
“Like John said, you’ll get to ask him about his motives when we catch him,” Mahoney replied.
“And I just go on about my life in the meantime?”
Ava said, “No, you go on with the life of a man who’s just lost everything. You go on as a victim, Alex.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Sampson remarked with a soft smile at Ava.
Mahoney added, “In the meantime, we work the murder and Mulch angle and wait for Elliot to make a move, surface, maybe even contact you under a different name.”
I flashed on Nana Mama, Bree, Damon, Jannie, and Ali, said, “And my family?”
“We do everything in our power to find them and bring them home safe,” Sampson said. “And we pray.”
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That mission gave me renewed strength, and an easing of the pain in my head. I said, “Okay, we’ll do it your way for the time being. Wait, how did you both get in here? Wouldn’t Mulch or Elliot have seen you on camera?”