Hope to Die (Alex Cross 22)

I went out and shut her door behind me, sure that I’d find better air up in my attic office, where I could think more clearly. But as I started to climb the stairs, it dawned on me that one devastating odor was already gone.

Damon, my seventeen-year-old, my firstborn, had been away at prep school in Massachusetts the past two months. The idea that I might never smell Damon again shattered whatever resolve I still possessed.

As I flashed on those photographs that haunted my dreams, wondering if they were enactments of things to come, my headache turned excruciating. Maddened, I charged up the stairs into my office and stuck my face right in front of a camera hidden between two books on homicide investigations.

“Why, Mulch?” I yelled. “What did I ever do to deserve this? What the hell do you want from me? Tell me! What the hell do you want from me?”

But there was no response, just that little lens staring back at me. I grabbed the lens, tore it free of the transmitter, and crushed it under my heel.

Fuck Mulch, or Elliot, or whatever he called himself. I didn’t care that I’d just showed him we knew about the bugs. Fuck him.

Panting, wiping the sweat off my forehead, I decided to destroy all the bugs in the house before their presence destroyed me.

Then a dog started barking across the street, and someone began to pound on my front door.

CHAPTER

5

I OPENED MY DOOR to find a short, fit, and attractive brunette in her midthirties looking like she wanted to be anywhere but on my front porch as she held out her detective’s badge.

“Dr. Cross,” she said. “I’m Tess Aaliyah. I’m with Metro Homicide.”

“You are?” I asked, because I’d never met her before.

“Came on board last week from Baltimore PD Homicide, sir,” Detective Aaliyah replied. “While you were solving the massage-parlor murders and the baby kidnappings.”

For a moment I was puzzled, didn’t know what she was referring to, but then, like a window opening a crack, it came back to me. Even though those cases felt like they’d enveloped me a lifetime ago, not a week, I nodded, said, “No partner, Detective … uh …”

“Aaliyah,” she said, cocking her head to study me. “Chris Daniels is my partner, but he evidently shattered his ankle this morning lifting weights.”

I winced, nodded, said, “Daniels is a good guy.”

“Seems that way so far,” she agreed. She swallowed and looked at the porch boards.

“How can I help you, Detective?”

Aaliyah let out a short, sharp breath before looking me in the eye. “Sir, there was a body found down the street a few blocks, at a construction site. Female African American. She’s been badly mutilated, and I’m sorry, Dr. Cross, but your wife’s badge and ID are there as well. Is your wife here?”

I almost collapsed right there, but I grabbed the doorjamb and choked out, “She’s missing.”

“Missing?” the detective said. “Since …”

“Just take me there,” I said. “I need to see this for myself.”

It was a two-minute ride, which I spent in a near catatonic state. Aaliyah kept asking me questions, and I kept saying, “I need to see her.”

There were patrol cars ahead, and yellow tape, familiar things in my life, but I got no solace from them. I have e

ntered murder scenes too many times to count, but I have never been as frightened of what I was about to see as I was that morning, walking next to Aaliyah, past a patrolman and through a gate in a chain-link fence that blocked off the construction site.

“She’s in the bottom, sir,” Aaliyah said.

I walked to the edge and looked down into the hole dug for the foundation.

Crushed stone and rebar filled the bottom of the excavation, ready for cement. A woman of Bree’s height, build, and hairstyle lay on her right side, her back to me. Streams of dried blood caked her skin from scores of oval wounds to her entire dorsal side. She was wearing the same bra and panties Bree had been wearing on Good Friday. And that was Bree’s watch.

I staggered a step closer to the edge, felt bolts of lightning go off in my head, and thought for certain I was going to fall in there with her. But Detective Aaliyah grabbed hold of my elbow.