Hope to Die (Alex Cross 22)

nbsp; Setting those reports aside, the homicide detective started making a list of questions she wanted answered.

It was a long-standing habit, something her father had taught her. Now a retired Baltimore homicide cop, her dad believed that a mind was only as good as the questions it was asked and the orders it was given.

“Make a good list of questions and things to do and keep it running,” he used to say. “Once you know the answer to a question or have fulfilled an order, mark it off and move on. That’s how you create momentum.”

First thing she wrote down was 1: How’s Dad doing?

After his wife, Tess’s mother, died, a little over a year ago, Bernie Aaliyah had gone through a long mourning and depression. He was doing better, becoming increasingly independent, but he had been oddly guarded about his privacy recently.

It wasn’t that he was cold to his daughter, not at all. He was just trying to rebuild his life, he said, and he was doing a good job at it, didn’t need to talk to her every day or see her several times a week as he had in the first few months after her mom passed. She knew all that. But it had been a month since she’d seen him in person and four days since they’d spoken.

After that Aaliyah wrote in quick succession the questions and must-dos that popped into her head.

2. Did someone else have snipped skin like that? Ovals? ViCAP the MO.

3. Where was Damon Cross grabbed? His prep school? The Albany train station? Or on the ride home for Easter vacation?

4. Did Cross talk to Mulch between the time he took off and our conversation alerting me to Damon’s body an hour later? Pull all phone records on every Cross phone.

5. Where is Cross? Put flags on all his credit cards and bank accounts.

Aaliyah did not think Alex Cross was in any way involved in the kidnappings or the murders. But her gut told her it was important to keep tabs on him, even if they were loose tabs, at least until he initiated further contact.

She decided to work backward through her list, first calling Ned Mahoney and asking if he and his colleagues in the FBI’s white-collar crime units could research, open, and monitor all of Cross’s accounts. Surprisingly, Mahoney thought it a very good idea, and he promised her he would.

Aaliyah had contacts of her own with the phone companies and soon had someone gathering the records she wanted. The detective then called the Kraft School and got a recording that said the offices were closed until classes resumed the following Monday morning. She knew the FBI had left messages with the school earlier, but Aaliyah left another anyway, asking the headmaster to give her a call as soon as possible. The matter was urgent and involved Damon Cross.

She hung up and was about to tackle the ViCAP request when she saw a long shadow cross her desk. She looked up and found John Sampson looming over her cubicle wall with a report in his hand.

“Read this,” he said.

She took the report, saying, “You didn’t sleep?”

“Not yet,” he replied.

Aaliyah scanned the document. It was a ViCAP report on the mutilation patterns. She glanced up. “I was just about to do this.”

Sampson grunted. “Great minds think alike.”

Aaliyah smiled and returned to the report, which focused on a murder six years before in the northern Idaho town of Bonner’s Ferry, hard by the border with Montana. A woman’s body with oval pieces of skin missing was found floating in the Kootenay River. The second page of the report showed photographs. The dead woman was a light-skinned African American, and the oval cuts were very similar to the ones found on Jane and John Doe.

“The cuts,” she said, feeling excited. “They’re almost the same.”

“Yes,” Sampson agreed. “Just not everywhere on the body.”

Indeed, the report indicated that only six pieces of skin were missing on the dead woman in Idaho. Dental records identified her as Katrina Moffett of Troy, Montana, which was about thirty miles upriver from where the body was found. Moffett, twenty-nine, a teacher in the local elementary school, had gone missing after friends dropped her at home late one night following a party at a bar called the Dirty Shame Saloon in the nearby town of Yaak.

Moffett’s husband was serving in Iraq at the time, and her friends swore she was not carrying on any kind of affair. They did say, however, that since moving to the area, she’d gotten anonymous threats that featured racial slurs.

Not surprising, Aaliyah thought. There are all sorts of Aryan nuts up there, aren’t there? Definitely. Ruby Ridge was somewhere in northern Idaho.

She went back to her reading and found that Montana state investigators had considered the same angle. They looked at everyone living in a five-mile radius of Moffett’s home and were soon considering a young man named Claude Harrow as their prime suspect.

Harrow had recently been released from the Montana State Prison at Deer Lodge after doing six years for armed robbery. During that stint, he’d joined the Aryan Brotherhood, and he was an outspoken racist.

But Harrow’s alibi of being one hundred and fifty miles from Troy the night of the murder was corroborated by four of his friends, all neo-Nazi sympathizers. Six months after the killing, Harrow inherited a small piece of land near Frostburg, in rural northwestern Maryland. He packed up and left.

At the request of Montana state investigators, the FBI kept track of Harrow in a database set aside for hate crimes. For the past three years, the neo-Nazi had been living on his inherited land, working as a part-time logger, attending skinhead functions, and doing little else.