Hope to Die (Alex Cross 22)

22

IT WAS NEARLY DAWN that Saturday morning after Easter.

Tess Aaliyah had been in Alex Cross’s backyard since eleven the night before, overseeing her second crime scene in less than twenty-four hours.

She’d welcomed the help from John Sampson and Ned Mahoney, allowing Cross’s current partner to search the house and his former FBI partner to take charge of the gathering of evidence. From blood spatters, tire tracks, and marks in the dirt, they’d determined that the killer had brought the body into the alley behind the house and then dragged it through the gate into the backyard.

Mahoney’s men believed the tracks were made by a pickup truck with bald tires. They’d also discovered that, like Bree’s, many of the boy’s teeth had been pulled.

Watching the corpse loaded into a body bag and wheeled out of the backyard, Aaliyah was thinking that in one sense the teeth pulling went along with the generalized mutilations of the bodies, but in another nagging sense, it didn’t. The teeth removal and the clipped fingertips could be efforts to hide the victim’s true identity.

But the DNA would give it away eventually. So why desecrate the body?

The detective understood, of course, that sometimes with the criminally insane, there was no specific reason for why they did what they did. But the almost uniform size of the oval cuts combined with the regular pattern made her believe that there was some sort of logic to it, twisted or otherwise.

She made a note to herself to ask Mahoney to run the pattern and the oval cuts through the ViCAP files to see if they had ever surfaced before, and then she followed the gurney bearing the corpse around the side of the house. As first light appeared in the sky, she saw that the media had descended on the scene.

Captain Quintus was on the front porch, and she went to him.

“Anything?” he asked.

“Lots,” Aaliyah said. “I just can’t tell you if any of it’s usable yet. You?”

The homicide captain shook his head, looking drawn and exhausted.

Mahoney joined them, said, “Quantico computer lab called me ten minutes ago. The bugs Mulch put in the house? They were designed to transmit through Cross’s wireless network, but where the feeds went is anyone’s guess at this point.”

Sampson came out of the house holding his phone. “Alex still isn’t answering. He doesn’t even have his phone on. We can’t track him.”

“Probably why he doesn’t have it on,” Mahoney said.

“He’ll call in eventually, though, right?” Aaliyah asked.

“I don’t know,” Sampson replied. “Sounds to me like he’s on a mission.”

“Can I put out a bulletin on him?” Aaliyah asked. “Request that he be detained for questioning?”

“Questioning?” Sampson said. “For what?”

Aaliyah held up her hands. “Just doing my job here, Detective. I’d be asking the same thing of anybody who saw two murdered family members in the same day and then fled.”

“We know Alex Cross a whole lot better than you do, Detective Aaliyah,” Mahoney fired back. “He isn’t fleeing. He’s hunting.”

“While suffering from a closed-head injury?” she said calmly.

“We don’t know that,” Captain Quintus replied.

“Really?” she said. “You all certainly sounded sure of it last night.”

Silence descended on the group for several seconds before Quintus said, “I won’t put out a bulletin.”

“But Captain—” Aaliyah began.

“End of discussion, Detective. I won’t do it.”

CHAPTER

23