I handed her the phone, told her to call up Photos. She did, and I saw the horror on her face as she looked at the pictures on the tiny screen showing each and every member of my family dead of a gunshot wound to the head.
“Are they real?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “But I didn’t know that then.”
I told Aaliyah how I disintegrated after seeing the pictures. I walked the streets of Washington like a zombie, praying someone would blow my head off. In the end, I went into a meth house with a wad of cash and told the addicts I wanted to die, that I’d pay them to kill me. Someone obligingly tried, hitting me with a piece of metal pipe.
A girl who once lived with us, a recovering addict named Ava, found me and brought me home. I told Ava about the pictures just before I passed out from the concussion I’d sustained.
“Ava is very bright, and excellent with computers,” I said. “While I slept, she transferred the pictures to a laptop and blew them up enough to see they were doctored.”
Ava took that information to Sampson and to Ned Mahoney, my former partner in the Behavioral Sciences division of the FBI. Ava convinced them that my family was not dead.
Sampson and Mahoney found a way to sneak into my house without being detected by Mulch’s bugs. It turned out that there’d been a rape in Alexandria, Virginia, committed by a man who called himself Thierry Mulch. DNA evidence gathered at that crime scene had been matched to the DNA of a brilliant but erratic computer engineering student at George Mason University who’d disappeared about two weeks before.
“His name was Preston Elliot, and given the sophistication of the electronics Mulch put in my house, we believed and still believe that Elliot and Mulch are one and the same. We left the bugs in my house and decided that I would continue acting as if I thought everyone in my family was dead in order to convince Mulch/Elliot that I was completely devastated—a victim, and no threat.
“We also decided to keep everything about the hunt for my family quiet,” I said. “Days went by, and now a week. And we hadn’t heard a thing from him. Until this.”
Expressionless, Detective Aaliyah mulled over everything I had told her for several minutes. Finally she said, “You think Mulch, uh, Elliot is responsible for your … for the Jane Doe’s death?”
“He is responsible,” I said. “There’s no question.”
Aaliyah thought for several beats, and then asked, “What does he gain from doing all this to you and your family?”
“I’ve stopped asking,” I replied. “But whatever sicko obsessive reason he’s got for targeting me, on my end, it feels like torture, like he’s trying to drive me to the brink again and again, hoping that sooner or later I’ll jump off.”
She cocked her head and asked, “Will you?”
“If that is Bree in that hole, honestly, I don’t know.”
CHAPTER
7
ON THE WHOLE, MARCUS SUNDAY was pleased with the way things were proceeding. There’d been a few deviations from the original plan, but he still felt right on target.
Sunday was riding in the front passenger seat of the Durango, raptly focused on the screen of a laptop computer and the video feed transmitting from a tiny camera, hidden weeks before, high up in a tree that overlooked the construction site.
He’d seen it all, how Cross fell to his knees in front of the body and stayed there for a very long time, looking crushed.
“The end is near,” he said to Acadia, who was in the backseat. “Did you see the way he was begging right into the camera in his office before the cop banged on his door? Begging’s a classic indicator. Isn’t it, Mitch?”
The driver, a hulk of a man in jeans, hiking boots, and a Boston Red Sox jersey, nodded, said, “It is, Marcus.”
Acadia wasn’t buying it. “How would you know?”
Mitch Cochran had no neck to speak of. His massive head seemed to her like an extension of his shoulders as he glanced back and said, “Before I said fuck it all, I was in Iraq. U.S. fucking Army. Guarded Abu Ghraib prison. I saw interrogations. It’s like Marcus said, they beg before they crack. All of them.”
Acadia remained unhappy. “But how long can we wait for that to happen?”
“It won’t be long now,” Sunday assured her. “Mulch has killed Cross’s wife, and the rest of his family remains under mortal threat.”
“How long?” she demanded.
Sunday grew irritated, growled, “You can’t put a firm timetable on a p
roject of this magnitude, Acadia. Haven’t I told you again and again that the construction of a monster begins with the destruction of a man?”