Hope to Die (Alex Cross 22)

His cell rang at five thirty. Cross answered, listened, and said, “Yes, Sheriff, this is Alex Cross. What can you tell me about Acadia Le Duc?”

He listened again, then said, “I understand that it was sealed. You should know, however, that DC Metro Police and the FBI consider her an accomplice in a kidnapping and murder spree.”

Cross nodded at Aaliyah and then listened without comment for nearly fifteen minutes. Finally, he said, “No, I wish you’d hold off on that until I can get there, but in the meantime, you should put that cabin under surveillance. And I’ll let you know our ETA once I get a better handle on how we’re going to do this.”

Then Cross hung up, looking energized again, and said, “We need to get to Jennings, Louisiana, the quickest way possible.”

CHAPTER

69

IN JILLIAN GREEN’S CONDO in Corpus Christi, Marcus Sunday awoke refreshed and with a pleasant dull ache in his loins. He checked his watch, yawned, and got to his feet naked.

Sunday left the bed in a shambles, with the blankets in a heap and long, thin tears in the sheets as if fingernails had gouged them. He pushed open the bathroom door and smelled bleach. He cocked his head, appreciating the sight of Acadia’s BFF lying in the bathtub, water up to her neck, her eyes still bugged out from having been choked with his belt as he fucked her from behind.

He’d heard that being strangled during sex causes stronger orgasms in some women, and he’d decided to experiment. Jillian certainly proved the point, he thought. She’d gone off into la-la land there at the end, quivered unbelievably just before she’d died.

Sunday turned on the shower, waited until it warmed, and then climbed into the chill water with the dead woman. He paid the corpse no mind as he washed himself head to toe with antibacterial soap.

When he was done, he pushed her head under the bleach water. After three minutes, he pulled the plug on the tub, stepped out onto the mat, and dripped dry while using a washcloth to hold the showerhead and rinse Jillian’s body with cold water. When he was done, he poured three capfuls of Drano into the drain, wiped down the shower controls with the washcloth, and brought it and the bathmat to the master bedroom.

Sunday stripped the bed, took the sheets and blankets to the washing machine. He put them in and added half a cup of Clorox before turning it on hot. He wiped down the machine knobs and found the vacuum. He vacuumed from the edge of the tub back into the master bedroom and then put on his running gear again. Then he cleaned his way out of the house, back through the kitchen and into the garage.

After removing the vacuum-cleaner bag, he wiped down the vacuum with the damp washcloth and then set the machine in a corner, as if it were always kept there. With the washcloth, he pressed the garage-door opener, waited until it was completely up. A kid on a bicycle went past but didn’t look his way.

Sunday stabbed the switch and took off, vaulting off the top of the stairs, sprinting along the Mini Cooper, then hurdling the security beam.

He was down the street and in the rented truck thirty seconds later. He’d dump the vacuum bag at a rest stop out on I-10, heading east.

CHAPTER

70

A WIDE SWATH OF violent weather swept across the southern plains that evening. Thunderstorms delayed our takeoff and landing, so it was eight before we stepped off a United Airlines jet in Houston. The ride had been a rodeo, and there was talk of tornado activity throughout the night from eastern Texas into western Louisiana, which, unfortunately, was where we were headed.

“I’m praying this isn’t a wild-goose chase,” Aaliyah said as I drove a rented Jeep Cherokee out of the airport into a pelting rain.

“It’s the strongest straw we’ve got to grasp at,” I said. “Put Jennings in the GPS.”

She did, and the machine told us we had a hundred-and-seventy-eight-mile road trip ahead of us. Luckily, most of the way would be on Interstate 10. We theoretically could be there around ten thirty.

But wind and rain buffeted the car and slowed us. Was this trip worth it? Was it worth risking the drive at night with all the weather warnings?

I still thought so after going over what Sheriff Gauvin had told me over the phone. Gauvin had been new to the force the night Acadia Le Duc called in the accidental death of her father. Like Thierry Mulch’s father, Jean Le Duc had a reputation for violence and booze. He’d beaten his wife and daughter several times, but both had refused to testify against the man.

The mother had a fresh black eye when Gauvin and the sheriff arrived on the scene—a cabin on the banks of a bayou outside Jennings—early one morning after a torrential rain. Acadia and her mother said Jean Le Duc had gotten wildly drunk the evening before and took it out on his wife before she and her daughter managed to barricade themselves in the windowless back room, their usual method of surviving his tirades.

They claimed to have spent the entire night there. Acadia went searching for her father when they found the cabin and shed empty. She went down by the dock, expe

cting to find him passed out on his airboat, a common enough occurrence. Then she heard a commotion in the pen where her father kept his pet alligators.

“All that was left was his right forearm, which conveniently had an identifying tattoo on it,” Gauvin had said. “That and other evidence I won’t get into led us to believe that Acadia and her mother, or Acadia acting on her own, killed old Jean and then fed him to the alligators. But we could never prove it, and most folks around here said, ‘Good riddance.’”

Acadia left Jennings after graduation and moved to New Orleans to enter a nursing program at Loyola. That was a while back, but the sheriff said he saw her several times a year, when she came to visit her mother.

“So the mom knows how to get in touch with her?” I’d asked.

“Expect so,” he said.