“We couldn’t have done this over the phone?” said Box.

“I thought you’d want to hear it in person, Box,” I said. “And I needed to see the scene again, and I wanted Detective Aaliyah to see it as well.”

“We’re not going in there and upsetting those people without cause,” Sergeant said.

“No need to go inside. We can do this from here.”

“So, out with it,” Detective Box said.

“Tell us about Bea Daley,” I said.

Box shrugged, said, “Nice woman. Housewife. Devoted to her husband and her kids. Did charity work, PTA, that sort of thing. But quiet.”

“What about before she married Calvin?” I asked.

Sergeant said, “I believe she was born in Helena, Montana, and attended the university in Missoula before marrying Calvin.”

“Next of kin?” Aaliyah asked.

“Dead, as we understood it,” Sergeant said. “This is about Bea?”

“She’s the key,” I confirmed. “She’s the reason her entire family was murdered that night.”

“You have proof of that?” Box said, turning in his seat for the first time and looking highly skeptical.

Aaliyah and I told them about Thierry Mulch and his runaway mother, Lydia. Then we explained that Ava and Gloria Jones had searched for Mulch’s mother on Ancestry.com under both her maiden and married names and gotten nothing. But then, remembering that Atticus Jones had thought the man she’d run off with was from Montana or Oklahoma, they did searches in both those states.

“They found a record of a Lydia Mulch changing her name in Butte, Montana, about six months after she was last seen in West Virginia,” I said. “She changed her name to Bea Townsend.”

Detective Sergeant sat up, intent on what I was saying, but Box looked unimpressed.

“Six months later,” I said, “Bea Townsend marries Calvin Daley in Omaha and gets yet another name. Daley was a mining engineer. I don’t have it confirmed yet, but I’m betting he worked in Buckhannon as a consultant around the time Lydia Mulch disappeared. It just all adds up.”

“Adds up to what?” Box cried.

“Motive,” I said.

“For whom?” Sergeant asked.

“Thierry Mulch,” I replied.

“The son who’s officially dead?” Box scoffed.

“And the man who’s taken my family,” I said, keeping my cool and talking to Detective Sergeant. “Can’t you see it, Jan? Rather than a mysterious intruder who leaves no evidence and no link to the crime, now you’ve got a homicidal son scorned and bent on revenge. He plans, waits for the night of a snowstorm, slips in, kills everyone in the house, and then vanishes without a trace.”

Sergeant was staring off into the distance as she said, “I do see it.”

“Fuck, c’mon, Jan,” Box began. “This is—”

“Right,” she said. “It fits, Brian. Think about it: the ME said that Bea Daley was the last to die.”

I nodded. “Mulch wanted her to feel it. He killed her family first, showed her the bodies, or maybe made her watch her husband and children die, and then he slit his own mother’s throat.”

CHAPTER

60

THERE WAS AN EXTENDED silence in the car. Down the street, a woman in her thirties came out of the house where I believed Thierry Mulch had slaughtered his mother and her second family. A little boy walked by the woman’s side as she went to the mailbox, and she gave us a long glance before they went back in.

Tags: James Patterson Alex Cross Mystery
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