“You’ll let me know when it’s done?”
“Man’s gotta get paid, don’t he? You want coffee?”
“Sorry, I have to catch a plane, be in St. Louis by five, no ifs, ands, or buts,” Sunday said, heading toward the door.
“And if you aren’t?”
“Bad stuff happens.”
CHAPTER
9
JOHN SAMPSON ARRIVED AS I watched the body bag being brought up out of the hole.
Built like a power forward in the NBA, he looked as weak as a kitten when he came to me with tears welling in his eyes. John and I have been brothers in all but genetics since we were ten years old. When the big man threw his arms around me, it was everything I could do not to dissolve right then and there.
“Jesus Christ, Alex,” Sampson said hoarsely. “I came as soon as I heard. Is it true? Is it—”
“I think so, but I don’t know for certain, and I won’t until tomorrow at least—and that may be the worst part,” I said in a dull voice as they put the body bag on a stretcher and wheeled it over to the medical examiner’s van.
I kept trying to think of the body in the bag as being someone other than Bree. But Mulch, he—
“You want me to take you home?” Sampson asked.
“No,” I said. “Home’s not a good place for me. Mulch watches me there, enjoys my suffering, and I won’t contribute to his enjoyment anymore. I just need to go for a walk and get my head straight.”
“Want company?” he asked.
“I’ll see you later at work.”
“Sugar, you can’t work when something like—”
“John, I have to work when something like this is going on,” I said firmly. “It’s the only way I’ll stay sane.”
Sampson looked like he wanted to tell me something, but Detective Aaliyah came over, said, “Dr. Cross, I have—”
“John, this is Tess Aaliyah,” I said. “She’s new, from Baltimore, and she caught this case and needs to be brought up to speed on what the secret task force has found out about Mulch.”
“Secret task force?” Aaliyah said.
“Exactly,” I said, and walked off, trying to convince myself that that wasn’t my wife’s body in the back of that coroner’s wagon.
But grief and loss have a way of crippling the best intentions even in the strongest of minds.
Within a block of leaving the crime scene I was lost in memories of my first days with Bree, how she’d rescued me from a long loneliness with an unshakable love, the kind I’d thought I’d lost forever. Then the likelihood that she was gone hit me like a freight train and I began to choke and sob right there on the sidewalk.
Every woman I’d ever loved had ended up dead or so traumatized by the violence woven through my life that she couldn’t bear the sight of me. My first wife, Maria, died in a drive-by shooting when Damon was a toddler and Jannie was just a baby. A madman took Ali’s mother hostage, and even though we managed to rescue her, it permanently fractured our relationship. And now Bree, the absolute love of my life, might have been swallowed up by the darkness that had shadowed me without pause almost since the moment I became a police officer.
What about my kids? What about my grandmother? Were they completely doomed to follow my loves into the shadows and the darkness? And what about me?
Was I already there? I asked myself as I walked on, wiping tears from my eyes. Had I ever left? Could I ever leave?
On autopilot, I took a route I’d taken a thousand times with my children. Every morning, or as often as was possible, I’d walked them to their school, Sojourner Truth. I did it for years, and as I retraced those steps, I was soon drowning in memories of Damon, Jannie, and Ali as each headed to the first day of first grade.
Damon had gone willingly, eagerly. It was all he and his friends had talked about. But Jannie and Alex Jr. had been nervous.
“What if I get a bad teacher?” Jannie asked.