“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.