Hope to Die (Alex Cross 22)

12

COULD MULCH HAVE KIDNAPPED my entire family in less than ten hours, starting with Damon at his prep school in the Berkshires, on his own?

On Good Friday morning, Damon was supposed to have taken a 7:45 jitney from campus to the Albany train station, but according to the driver, at the last minute, Damon told a friend that he was canceling because he’d gotten a ride to Washington.

But with whom? Mulch? Or someone else?

We hadn’t been able to answer those questions because the Kraft School, like Sojourner Truth, had been closed for vacation.

In any case, I knew from personal experience that the drive from the Kraft School to DC takes at least seven hours, and Good Friday traffic had to have been thick. So let’s say eight hours. That put Mulch in Washington around four.

Bree, Ali, Jannie, and Nana Mama were all taken in the following two hours. Theoretically, then, it was possible that Mulch had done this alone. But if so, he’d acted with what felt like pinpoint and ruthless precision.

“My instincts say he had help,” I said. “The sperm found at the rape and the murder scene supports that too.”

“How’s that?” Mahoney asked.

“Unless Elliot was a homosexual, it makes sense to me that Mulch had a female accomplice. She lured the kid in for sex, saved his sperm, probably from a condom, and Mulch killed him afterward.”

“It fits,” Quintus said.

It did fit. As if a fog bank were lifting, we were beginning to get a clearer view of the world behind us, a world I would have given my soul to return to.

I said, “Can someone go back to George Mason, back to Elliot’s friends, ask them about any women he might have been seeing?”

“I’ll do it myself,” Mahoney promised.

I looked at Sampson. “Feel like driving?”

“Where we going?”

“That farm where they found Elliot’s bones.”

“Uh,” Captain Quintus began, sharing a glance with Mahoney. “You sure you want to be working now, Alex?”

My breath turned shallow. “I can’t just sit here and wait for more members of my family to show up dead, Cap. I refuse to. That’s what Mulch wants and I just won’t do it.”

“Alex,” Mahoney said. “Maybe—”

I glared at my old friend, said, “If I don’t work, Ned, I’ll be lost to Bree, and I won’t be lost to her. Not now.”

Mahoney nodded slowly and then gestured at Sampson and said, “But you’re driving, John. With that head injury, he’s still in no condition to be behind the wheel.”

CHAPTER

13

r /> IT TOOK SAMPSON AND me about an hour to get free of DC traffic and take blue highways out through Reston and McLean and on into the rural land you find the more west and south you go in Virginia. We rode most of the way in silence, but Sampson’s pity and grief were as clear as if he’d spoken words of condolence or shock.

Sampson’s mere presence, the living, breathing embodiment of my longest relationship in life other than Nana Mama, was the only reason I didn’t completely crack up during the drive to the pig farm. But no matter how I tried to stop it, I kept flashing on images of Bree during our courtship. That first shared bashful smile. The first time I touched her fingers. The first time her lips met mine. How much she liked to dance and laugh. How committed she was to being a cop and a stepmother to my kids.

“You thinking about her, shug?” Sampson asked.

There were times when I could swear my partner was clairvoyant. Or at least, he picked up on subtle changes in my body so perfectly that he could decipher my thoughts. Or it was an easy guess; I don’t know.

“Yeah,” I said, and fell quiet again for several long moments, swallowing hard at unbridled emotion. “John?”

“Talk to me,” he said.