Hope to Die (Alex Cross 22)

I opened the basement door in time to see Mahoney’s taillights as he went up the exit ramp. Pete Koslowski, a sergeant and head of the motor pool, was an old friend. When I told him I needed a ride, he flipped me the keys to an unmarked car.

They were right, I thought as I climbed into the car. I probably did need to see a neurologist. But that would mean at least an overnight stay for observation, maybe two or three. I didn’t have that much time to waste. Whatever was going on inside my head was going to have to wait.

My phone started ringing two minutes later.

Sampson called, and then Mahoney. I kept clicking the ringer off and headed for the house. I was going to need a few things. As I drove, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the phone screen lighting up every few seconds.

It lit up again while I was idling at a red light on New York Avenue, and I reached over to shut the phone off altogether.

Then I saw the caller ID.

It said Mulch.

When I answered, I heard shallow, raspy breathing, as if someone were trembling with excitement, and then an electronically altered voice said, “So good of you to take my call, Dr. Cross.”

CHAPTER

20

“DO YOU UNDERSTAND?” MULCH asked two minutes later.

Each and every word of my first direct conversation with the man who’d taken my family and butchered my wife was seared on my injured brain, and I couldn’t reply.

“Do you understand what you need

to do to see the surviving members of your family alive again?” Mulch asked insistently.

I couldn’t answer him. My mind kept flashing on vague images from some movie I’d seen where each of a man’s four limbs was tied to a different horse, all of them facing in different directions.

“Cross?”

“I can’t, I …”

“Too late,” Mulch said, sounding cold and hard through the static that camouflaged his voice. “Another one bites the dust. Look in your backyard and then call me back.”

The static and connection died.

I stared at the phone, and then dug out a blue light from the glove box, opened the window, and stuck it on the roof. Shaking from head to toe, I flipped on the siren and floored the accelerator.

Six minutes later I flipped off the siren, pulled the blue light, and turned onto my block. With every inch I drove, my fear and sorrow grew.

“Please, God, no,” I whispered again and again.

But the closer I got to my home, the more I understood that the time for God had passed. There was someone, one of my children or my grandmother, dead in my backyard.

Mulch had done it once. He’d do it twice.

I no longer had any doubt of it.

I skidded to a stop in front of my home, took a flashlight, and circled to the narrow walkway that led around the side of the house to the backyard. Playing the beam about, I saw the foundation, the plywood walls of the addition, and the portable toolshed and toilet the contractors had brought in.

Where the rear fence of my yard met the gate that led out to the alley, my light found the body, and I was hit with the second shock wave of the day, a blow that felt supernatural in its strength, and pure evil in its intent.

But I didn’t go down to my knees as I had earlier. I stood there, seeing Damon’s class ring on his right hand, the chain and the St. Christopher’s medal around his neck, and the stud and tiny loop earrings in his right ear.

He lay on the ground, his lower body twisted toward the wall, his torso and head turned to the night sky. His face had been battered beyond all recognition. And across his entire body, front and back, oval disks of skin were missing every four or five inches or so, as if Mulch had been trying to simulate a leopard’s spotted pelt.

I tried to tell myself that it might not be my son.