She stood behind a tree, studying the cabin and the yard for almost ten minutes. The old Ford pickup was parked beneath the big cypress. A few moths flitted beneath the porch eaves and around the bare lightbulb by the door.

The breeze shifted. Acadia wrinkled her nose at the smell of rank water and rotted meat coming from the bayou. Years had gone by, and her mother still fed the alligators that had fed on her father’s corpse.

“Why wouldn’t I?” she’d always say. “The gators set us free, didn’t they? I owe them, don’t I?”

For her part, however, Acadia had not gone near the backwater where her father’s pets lived since the night the old bastard died. She’d go anywhere else around the twenty-acre homestead, but never, ever down there. Though not a superstitious person by nature, she thought of that sliver of wetland as cursed.

Above the noise of a preacher delivering a sermon of salvation on the radio, and Gil Grissom shooting his mouth off about X-ray analysis on the television, Acadia heard the rattle of pots and pans. Her mom was probably cleaning up after a late supper in front of the tube.

For several moments longer, Acadia stood there, just inside the shadows, racking her brain, trying to remember if she’d ever mentioned this place to Sunday. Maybe once. Maybe that very first drunken night when they’d met in a bar in the French Quarter, but never again. She’d made sure of that, telling Sunday that she’d been raised over on the Mississippi border northwest of Slidell.

Something intense must have been happening on CSI because the music coming from the TV got all creepy. Then she heard her mother start coughing and hacking. It was enough to embolden Acadia, and she finally stepped from the trees and cut across the yard toward the cabin.

Acadia thumbed the latch and opened the screened-in porch’s door, expecting Mercury, her mother’s beloved pit bull, to come charging out to meet her. Instead, she heard snores and spotted the old dog on his straw bed in the corner.

“Some protection you are,” she said.

Mercury grumbled, sighed, and farted. The door to the cabin was ajar.

“Ma?” Acadia called as she gently pushed it open, seeing dishes drying in a rack by the sink.

She stepped inside onto the rough-hewn floor and saw her mother’s overstuffed chair, empty except for the latest copy of People magazine open to the celebrity crossword. Several cans of Diet Coke sat on the TV-dinner table next to her ashtray and an open pack of Pall Malls. CSI had given way to a commercial that touted a breakthrough in fabric softeners. The preacher on the radio had shifted from salvation to a theme of damnation and hellfire for all sinners before God.

“Mama, where are you?” Acadia called louder. “It’s me.”

Her mother’s frail voice answered from her bedroom. “I’m back here, baby doll. Can you come give me a hand? With the rain, my arthritis is acting up.”

“Be right there,” Acadia said, and she walked past piles of newspapers and older editions of People magazine and a plastic bag full of empty Diet Coke cans.

In a short hallway that smelled of old age, she maneuvered through stacks of old magazines and boxes of moldy treasures her hoarder mother flatly refused to get rid of. Acadia pushed open the bedroom door, stepped in, and turned left, expecting to see her mother trying to button up her nightdress or tie her robe.

Instead, her terrorized mother lay on the bed with her arms, chest, and ankles wrapped in duct tape. The old woman whimpered, “I’m sorry, baby doll, he said he’d shoot me if I didn’t.”

Before Acadia could run, the cold muzzle of the pistol bumped the back of her head.

“Don’t you move now, lover,” Sunday whispered behind her. “I found this in the closet and I think the safety’s kinda loose on a hair trigger.”

He pushed her toward an overstuffed chair, saying, “Admit it, you’re shocked. But you’ve got to remember, I’ve got the superior mind, Acadia. Total recall. You said that first night that you grew up in the seat of Jefferson Davis Parish, and after that you always said it was Slidell. Ha. How’s that for a memory?”

“Marcus,” she said. “You left me no—”

The butt of the gun clipped Acadia hard behind the ear, and stars exploded and blew her straight into darkness.

CHAPTER

73

THOUGH THE STORMS HAD slackened and Tess Aaliyah was able to drive seventy miles per hour, we were still a solid fifty minutes west of Jennings, Louisiana, when I said into her phone, “Are we ready?”

“We are,” Mahoney said. “Just do the smart shrink thing and keep him talking long enough for my men to triangulate.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, and handed Aaliyah’s phone back to her.

Picking up the burner cell I’d bought with Ava back in West Virginia, I prayed that FBI techs using software I couldn’t begin to comprehend would be able to quickly home in on the three cell towers closest to Sunday’s position.

For the past fifteen minutes I’d been wrestling over what I should say to the man who had my family. By whatever name, Mulch or Sunday, he was a diabolical sonofabitch who would not hesitate to kill, and I was as nervous as I’d ever been punching in his phone number.

Sunday answered on the third ring and yawned before saying, “Dr. Cross? Is that you?”

Tags: James Patterson Alex Cross Mystery
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