“Is it her, Dr. Cross?” she asked. “Bree Stone?”
I stared at her dumbly, then said, “I have to go down.”
We went to a ladder, and how I climbed down it, I’ll never know. Every step broke my heart. Every handhold was my last.
I stepped through the crisscrossed rebar and around the front, seeing that the earrings were definitely the same ones I’d given Bree on our anniversary.
An alien moan came up out of my gut.
Taking another step, I saw that her face had been beaten beyond recognition, and that the wounding pattern had continued down the front of her body, as if someone had used garden clippers to snip off ovals of her skin every five or ten inches of her entire body, right out to the engagement ring I’d given her and her wedding band, right out to bloody stumps where the tips of her fingers should have been. Her mouth was open, and her teeth were missing.
“Oh, dear Jesus,” I whispered in shock, sinking to my knees in front of her. “What has that sick bastard Mulch done to you?”
CHAPTER
6
“IS IT YOUR WIFE, DR. CROSS?” Detective Aaliyah asked.
I stared at the desecrated body lying there before me, saw the hair, the skin color, the height, the weight, the jewelry, and said, “I don’t know. I think so, but I don’t know for certain. She’s … she’s unrecognizable like this.”
“Where were you last night?” she asked.
Scanning the body for something, anything, that said definitively whether it was Bree or not, I replied, “I was home, Detective, watching reruns of The Walking Dead.”
“Sir?”
“The television show about the zombie apocalypse,” I said. “My boy Ali loves it.”
“And he was there with you?”
I shook my head again, felt tears trickle from my eyes, and said, “He’s gone too. They’re all gone. My entire family. Haven’t they told you? John Sampson? Captain Quintus? The FBI?”
“FBI?” she said. “No, I caught this on my way to work, but why don’t we get out of here, let forensics do their job, and you tell me what I need to know.”
I knelt there for several more moments, staring at the body and seeing images of my life with Bree playing in the air, making it all surreal and soul killing.
“Dr. Cross?”
I nodded, got wobblingly to my feet, and managed to climb back up the ladder without incident. We went to her unmarked car and got in.
“Let’s hear it,” she said in a calm, professional manner.
Over the next thirty-five minutes, I laid out the insanity of the past few weeks for her, trying not to leave out any important details.
“I first learned of Thierry Mulch when he started sending me strange, taunting letters about the massage-parlor murders, calling me an idiot and proposing theories about those killings that, I admit, proved invaluable in ultimately catching the man responsible. Then a man named Thierry Mulch who claimed to be a website entrepreneur went to my son Ali’s school and gave a talk there.
“I did a Google search on the name. It turned out there were only seven Thierry Mulches that I could find on the web. And one of them was an Internet entrepreneur. Because I was chest-deep in the investigation of the mass killings at the massage parlor, I didn’t give the coincidence much thought beyond that.
“But it turned out Mulch had been giving me and my family a lot of thought,” I told the detective. “He bugged our house with audio and video. I think he used them to learn our habits and routines, because in a matter of hours last Friday, Good Friday, he managed to kidnap them all, including my son Damon, who goes to school up in the Berkshires in Massachusetts.”
“How come I haven’t heard a word of this?” she asked. “And how do you know Mulch took them?”
“Give me a chance to explain.”
Aaliyah nodded, and I told her how Mulch used my daughter’s cell phone the night of Good Friday to send me pictures of my family, tied up, duct tape across their mouths. He also sent texts threatening to kill them all if I got the police or FBI involved. Late the next afternoon, John Sampson, my best friend and partner at Metro, came to my door, concerned that I hadn’t reported to work or at least called in to explain why I was out.
“I got John to leave and did not tell him a thing, but Mulch didn’t care,” I said, digging in my pocket for my phone. “I began getting these pictures every hour on the hour.”