Hope to Die (13 page)

“Fuck,” the passenger said. “A cop. Fuck, Billy, you said—”

“Shut up, Clete,” the driver said. “Don’t say a damn thing.”

“Gun on the ground,” a blond female deputy shouted, still aiming at me.

The driver got out while I put the Colt on the pavement. He shouted, “This crazy fucker can’t drive, was going too fast, went into three-sixties up there in front of us, and next thing we know, he’s up on the cab, gun drawn and shooting!”

“That’s not what happened at all!” Ava yelled. She’d come up in back of me. “They hit us from behind, just like Alex said.”

“No way!” the driver yelled. “No way.”

“Everybody calm down!” called a frail voice.

I could hear the click of Jones’s walker and the wheels of his oxygen tank crunching on the gravel.

The female deputy lowered her gun several degrees. “Atticus? That you?”

“Who the hell else looks like this?” Jones said as he came up beside me. “And these frickin’ idiots hit us from behind, no doubt about it. They meant to crash us, for some goddamned reason.”

The driver said, “This is bullshit. We’re gonna get railroaded here. I want an attorney.”

The passenger climbed out, spilling glass from the lap of his coverall. He looked at me like I was dirt, said, “They’re lying, all three of ’em. But I can see where this is going. I want an attorney too.”

After the deputies cuffed the two mine workers and put them in the backseat of a cruiser, the blond one, Anne Craig, came over and hugged Jones.

Deputy Craig looked at me, said, “I know who you are, Dr. Cross, and what’s happened to your family. It’s all over the news. I’m sorry, very sorry, for your losses. But why are you
here?
”

I hesitated. Jones said, “He’s looking into the old Mulch case.”

Craig rolled her eyes. She’d obviously heard about the case from Jones, probably several times.

“It could be connected to the man who has my family,” I said.

“Really?” the deputy said.

“Looks likely, as a matter of fact,” I replied.

She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “These pukes involved?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “You find out, you let me know.”

“Need you to come into town to make statements,” Craig said.

“Deputy, we’re on a tight deadline,” I told her. “I wasn’t expecting all this.”

“What kind of deadline?”

I glanced at Ava and Jones, said, “I can’t say. But believe me, the safety of the rest of my family depends on me meeting it.”

She studied me, then shook her head. “You discharged a firearm far outside your jurisdiction. I can’t just let you walk without making a formal statement. I’m sorry, Detective Cross.”

IT WAS NEARLY FIVE THIRTY
by the time we’d made our statements and were free to leave Buckhannon. I had less than a day to meet Mulch’s deadline and no idea how to make it happen.

Atticus Jones was totally exhausted. He gave me his daughter’s phone number and fell asleep before I got the car started. The front end of the unmarked car had a serious shimmy from the washboard and pulled hard to the right, but it remained drivable. I had Ava dial the old detective’s daughter and put the burner phone on speaker.

“Gloria Jones,” she answered.

I explained that I was a cop, that her father had been helping me, and that he would be a little late for dinner. In return, I got a ranting earful for sneaking him out of the hospice in the first place.

“My God, he’s dying,” she yelled at one point. “Can’t you see that?”

Earlier in the day, I hadn’t. Not really. But now Jones was coughing and hacking in his sleep and looking terribly small and frail.

Amazingly, however, his energy picked up again when I pulled into the parking lot at Fitzwater’s Gracious Living facility a little after seven.

Gloria Jones, a handsome, well-put-together woman in her late thirties, and the receptionist came stomping out, and they didn’t have their happy faces on. They both laid into me this time, telling me how irresponsible I was even as they coaxed Jones into a wheelchair and rolled the old detective back to his room. I followed, took it all, and said nothing. Ava brought up the rear.

Jones finally yelled, “Goddamn it, Gloria, shut up for a second. Don’t you see who this poor man is?”

She looked at me, puzzled, then shrugged and said, “Detective Cross?”

“Detective
Alex
Cross,” Jones said.

Gloria blinked, said, “Alex … oh … I saw that story: your wife, your son, and …” She looked at me closely. “Why are you
here?
Why aren’t you in DC?”

There was suddenly an expression of hunger on her face, a look that I thought I recognized. “What do you do for a living, Ms. Jones?”

She told me. I
had
recognized that hungry expression. And in one long, stretched-out moment, I realized she might be able to help me.

“Can we keep this between us?” I said.

She shook her head. “You owe me for almost killing my dad.”

“The hell he does,” Jones protested.

“Tell you what,” I said to Gloria. “You help me, and once I’ve got my family back, I’ll gratefully tell you exactly what I’ve been doing here.”

The old detective’s daughter thought about that, then asked suspiciously, “What do I have to do in return?”

“Help me murder someone before two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

JOHN SAMPSON AND TESS AALIYAH
drove up a muddy road out in the sticks southwest of Frostburg, Maryland. Suburbs gave way to truck farms and then to woods where drizzling rain fell.

“I heard you and Cross were boyhood friends,” Aaliyah said at one point.

“Closer than brothers,” Sampson replied. “The bond between us was instant. We were ten and he’d lost his parents, and Nana Mama, his grandmother, had brought him up to DC from South Carolina. She was a vice principal and everyone was scared of her. Me too, and she lived just down the street.”

“You were scared?” Aaliyah asked, half smiling.

“Miz Hope’s past ninety and she still scares me,” Sampson said, allowing a sad grin. “We get her home and safe, and I’ll be scared all over again.”

Aaliyah laughed quietly and felt better because Sampson’s attitude was that the Crosses
were
going to be saved. In her opinion, that kind of hope was still the best attitude for any detective to have. As her father had pointed out over and over again, cynical cops might be the stereotypical crime solvers, but they burned out fast. The detectives who stayed positive, who carried hope in their hearts, were the ones most likely to have stamina. She was glad that Cross’s oldest friend was coming from that place.

“Miz Hope introduced the two of you?”

“Sort of,” Sampson said, then gestured ahead. “It’s coming up on this next turn.”

They found a two-track drive that led down into the sopping forest toward a creek and Claude Harrow’s property. A padlocked quarter-inch steel cable blocked the way. They parked and got out.

It had obviously rained hard sometime in the past several hours. There were puddles, and the tree limbs and leaves hung heavy and dripped. The air should have been full of ozone and fresh as spring. But it smelled like a doused campfire.

They went around the cable and walked down the soggy road, the smoke smell getting stronger. Sampson pulled his service pistol.

“You want to start from that position?” Aaliyah asked.

“When I’m dealing with possibly murderous skinheads, this is always my starting position,” Sampson replied.

Aaliyah saw the practical wisdom in that and drew her weapon as well. They walked down the two-track lane, hearing the engorged creek, and then rounded a tight corner that revealed a clearing, a ramshackle barn, and a 1988 faded blue Chevy pickup. She guessed the pile of smoking ruins had been Harrow’s home.

“This happened today,” she said.

“Past eight or nine hours,” Sampson agreed.

“No fire department?”

He shrugged. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

They stopped just shy of the clearing. Sampson yelled, “Claude Harrow!”

The two detectives stood there for several moments waiting for a response but got none. They eased out into the yard, a mud patch, really, with sparse and thorny weeds. Sampson called out again. The breeze shifted and for a moment Aaliyah smelled stale urine. Over the gurgling of the stream, she thought she caught a low moan but couldn’t tell where it came from.

“You hear that?” she asked softly.

“NO,” SAMPSON SAID. “WHAT?”

Aaliyah stood there listening, and then shook her head. “Nothing.”

She scanned the mud for footprints, seeing the vague impressions of several going back and forth between the burned building and the barn, and others crossing over toward the woods and a steep little hillside. She could already tell that the rain had marred the tracks, made them useless.

They went closer to what was left of the burned building: smoking posts and charred beams. A twisted black stovepipe jutted up out of the wreckage. Aaliyah walked around one way and Sampson the other. Moving closer to the black pipe, she spotted the woodstove. Its door was wide open.

Aaliyah took another two steps, smelled something like burned meat, and saw a chain saw—or what was left of it, anyway—a scorched toolbox, a charred gas can, and something else, partially buried in the blackened debris.

“I got a body,” she called out.

“Sonofabitch,” Sampson said.

When someone is burned alive, the corpse is often found curled up in a fetal position. This was the case here as well. The body was rolled onto its left side facing Aaliyah, knees drawn to the chest and hands wrapped around them. More often than not in these kinds of deaths, the victim is found with his chin tucked down to his chest and his arms wrapped around his head, as if his last instinct was to shield his face from the flames.

But this burned corpse wasn’t positioned like that at all. The head was twisted upward, and the black, empty eye sockets seemed to be looking right at the detective. The victim’s mouth was frozen open, as if his last utterance had been a scream.

“Stupid Nazi,” Sampson said. “Fueling up the chain saw with the woodstove open. Rocket scientist of the year. How much you want to bet he was a meth head?”

Aaliyah saw how it could be interpreted like that but reserved judgment.

“Any tracks over your way?” she asked.

“Plenty of man tracks and a bunch of an animal of some sort,” he replied. “We need to call this into the Allegheny County Sheriff.”

She nodded, pulled out her cell. “No service.”

Sampson looked at his, said, “So much for ‘Can you hear me now?’”

Aaliyah backed away from the smoking debris and moved toward the pickup truck. The Chevy was parked under a tin-roofed shed that hung off the side of the cockeyed barn. There were landscaping tools in its bed, and shovels, pickaxes, ropes, and the like. Holstering her gun, she squatted to peer under the carriage at the tires.

Sampson joined her, said, “They seem bald to me.”

The tires would have to be examined by an expert to say for sure, but they looked the part. What did that mean? If these tires and the tracks in Cross’s alley matched, was Thierry Mulch also Claude Harrow, and vice versa? Was that the madman over there, burned to a crisp?

Or was it someone entirely different?

Aaliyah prayed that the potential evidence had not all gone up in fire and ash, and then she stood and walked to the doors of the barn. There was a steel bar and a padlock on them. The wind shifted and she could have sworn she smelled stale urine again, and then something new, another odor she recognized all too well.

Sampson stepped up beside her, and she pointed to her nose and sniffed. The big detective took a deep breath. His expression hardened, and he said, “That’s blood rotting.”

“I’m going in there,” she said.

“Absolutely,” Sampson said.

He went to Harrow’s pickup truck, put on a pair of work gloves, and got the pickax. The blade hit the wood and chopped the hasp holding the lock with one blow.

Sampson dropped the tool, slid back the steel bar, and tugged open the doors. Pistol out again, Aaliyah stepped up, seeing in the gloom what looked like a horse barn that had been turned into a woodworking shop.

There were several stalls on the right wall filled with stacked lumber. In the center of the space stood band and table saws, an old lathe, and several other woodworking machines she couldn’t name. There was a long wooden bench at the back of the barn, and hand tools hung on the wall above it. Flipping on the small Maglite she always carried, Aaliyah took another step, trying to get a better angle on all of it.

The dog exploded from the shadows without warning, a huge leaping Rottweiler.

AALIYAH TRIED TO GET
the gun around but instead felt crushing pain bolt through her right forearm as she was knocked off her feet by something with the force of a tackling linebacker.

She hit the wet ground hard. The wind was slammed out of her lungs, and her pistol and flashlight fell from her hands.

The dog instantly released his hold on her arm. His toenails ripped into her shins and thighs as his powerful legs scrambled for purchase. The Rottweiler lunged up her body, snapped at her face and neck with his bloody mouth.

Aaliyah tucked her chin down, trying to protect her throat.