Hope to Die (14 page)

The dog clamped down on her cheek and forehead and began to shake her. She screamed at the white-hot pain of the bite. That seemed only to inflame the dog to further violence.

As the detective felt her skin starting to tear, the attack dog suddenly hunched up stiff, from nose to tail, opened his muzzle, and released her head. Then he let out a mournful, bug-eyed howl, rolled off her, and howled again, over and over.

For a second, the detective remained dazed by the sudden ferocity of the attack, and then she realized blood was trickling down her cheeks and dripping from her forehead into her left eye. Her right forearm was throbbing and she thought she was going to be sick.

“Sampson?” she gasped.

He grunted. “Gimme a second and don’t move.”

She turned her head and saw him dragging the dog by a rope he must have gotten from the truck bed and looped around the animal’s neck. The Rottweiler’s head was down, no fight in him at all. When Sampson tied the rope tight to one of the shed’s support posts, the beast immediately lay down, groaning and panting.

Aaliyah was sitting up by the time Sampson got back to her. He’d already taken off his jacket and shirt and was tearing strips off the latter.

“Stay put,” he said. “He bit you something good.”

“He … he came out of nowhere,” the detective said, bewildered. “How did you get him off me?”

“Kicked him in the balls,” Sampson said.

He was on his knees now, folding the rest of his shirt into a large pad that he pressed across the left side of her face. “Hold that.”

Aaliyah held her hand up and pressed it to her skin, trying to ignore the sharp throbbing pain there. But she couldn’t get away from the agony in her right arm. “I think he broke my arm.”

“Hold tight a second,” Sampson said as he wrapped and tied the longer strips around the makeshift pad.

Five minutes later, he helped her to her feet. Her arm was in a sling he’d fashioned from his jacket and her shoulder holster.

“Okay,” Sampson said. “We’re gonna walk right out of here and get you to a hospital where they can give you some painkillers, clean you up, and take a look at that arm. Maybe treat you for rabies too. Who knows if that dog ever got his shots.”

“Not yet,” she said, even though she felt dizzy and sick. “What about that smell?”

“It’ll wait,” he said.

“You’ve stopped the bleeding,” she said. “Ten minutes more won’t kill me.”

Sampson hesitated, and then smiled. “You’re a tough one. You remind me of my wife. Billie’s like that too.”

Aaliyah tried to smile, but it hurt too much. She asked him for her Maglite, which was still in the mud. Sampson got it for her, cleaned it off, and once again they started to probe the barn, looking for the source of that smell.

They found it under a bench in a galvanized bucket with a perforated lid: seven inches of coagulated blood. Was it human or animal? And where had it come from?

Sampson pointed to a ZipSnip cordless cutting tool hanging above the bench that looked like it had blood on the blade, but neither of them touched it. The throbbing in her cheek and forehead turned fiery, and she resigned herself to leaving the place to the Allegheny County detectives and a full forensics team. Or, better yet, the FBI. They had jurisdiction. This was an interstate kidnap/murder case after all.

As they walked back through the woodworking machines, Aaliyah tried to figure out where the dog had come from and why she hadn’t seen him until he was in full attack mode. Remembering the angle at which the Rottweiler appeared, she went toward the horse stalls filled with lumber.

Aaliyah soon spotted a gap of about fifteen inches between the lumber pile and the far wall of the first stall. She shone her light into it.

A broken slat in the barn wall provided an opening big enough for a dog to get through. There was a filthy, ragged blanket on the floor, the dog’s bed, she supposed, and what at first glance looked like the rawhide pieces people give dogs so they’ll chew on those instead of the furniture. But then Sampson lit up a rear wall with a ledge on the top, and Aaliyah felt nauseated all over again.

Those weren’t rawhide strips in the dog’s bed or on that shelf right there in stacks, like Pringles chips without the can. They were curling ovals of black human flesh in various stages of drying.

AT THREE IN THE
morning, I set the GoPro camera and the harness on a picnic bench beside a deserted gravel parking lot lit by high-pressure sodium lights. Across the lot, there was a long, low yellow-and-silver prefabricated metal building that put me in mind of the commercial pig barn where Preston Elliot’s bones had been found.

Aiming the high-definition camera at myself and turning it on, I felt a weight descend on my shoulders. I glanced angrily at the camera and tugged on latex gloves, saying, “I’m doing what you wanted, Mulch. When I’m done, you let someone go.”

Then I drew the Colt, bowed my head, and prayed God would forgive me for what I was about to do. I’d had to kill men before, several of them, as a matter of fact. But in those terrible moments when I’d had to turn a gun or some other weapon on a fellow human, it had always been in self-defense, situations where there’d been only the instinct to survive and all moral conduct had been nullified by my right to live.

This was different. I was about to kill for no reason other than that I had decided one life
was
worth less than another. The weight of that was like no other I have ever felt or imagined—crushing, disintegrating, and wretched at its core. I wondered whether Mulch would see the agony of my predicament crippling my posture, worming through my mind, and gnawing at my skin like some flesh-eating bacteria.

Would he feed on it?

Is this what he wanted to see?

Was I his entertainment?

For much of the night leading up to that moment, I’d been thinking hard about Mulch, about what could possibly be driving him. Atticus Jones thought that Mulch had simply fallen in love with murder and with getting away with murder. Forcing me to kill for his amusement was just a twisted next step.

So be it
, I thought numbly.
I’m dooming my soul to save the ones I love
. Feeling the torture of that, I set the pistol on the picnic table, picked up the GoPro, brought it close to my face, and whispered in a wavering voice, “This is how you want to see it, isn’t it? From my point of view?”

Then I turned the camera away slowly, took the harness hanging from the bottom, and fit it and the camera on my head. After adjusting the camera so it could pick up the gun if my arm was extended to shoot, I set off toward the building.

The temperature was in the sixties, but to me it felt like the air had been heated to a hundred degrees or more. My breath turned labored. Sweat trickled off my brow and from under my arms. And yet my hands were clammy, as if I’d just touched the cold skin of a day-old corpse.

Hearing the gravel crunch under my shoes like so many tiny brittle bones, I turned my head and the camera, giving Mulch multiple angles of the building. I drifted the camera across the sign for A. J. Machine Tool and Die before going around the near corner of the building and passing a closed loading dock. I climbed cement stairs to a door, twisted the knob, and opened it.

INSIDE THE LOADING DOCK,
the only light, a red bulb, revealed boxes, dollies, and hand trucks. With slow, soft steps I went to an interior door and hesitated there, my head bent, looking down at my gun hand and my gloved free hand, which hovered over the thumb latch. My shoulders trembled, and I wondered if I had the strength to press the latch, much less pull a trigger.

“Do it,” I choked out softly. “Just do it.”

Then I thumbed the latch and drew the door open. I raised my head, which raised the camera, and both shook ever so slightly, as if I were in the first stages of Parkinson’s disease. I stepped through into the machine shop. Without pausing to look around, I pivoted and slowly shut the door so the click was no louder than the second hand ticking on my grandmother’s clock.

The shop was lit like the loading dock, with red lights glowing in cages bolted high on the walls every thirty feet or so. At the rear of the space, however, several bright lights shone in an office with windows that were opaque for the first three feet and then clear, as if the manager liked his privacy but also wanted to be able to look out at his workers. I stood several long moments, peering intently over the tops of heavy metal lathes, drill presses, planers, cutting tools, and bending devices, until I saw dark movement behind the lower, opaque glass.

“He’s in there, Mulch,” I said in the barest of whispers.

Then I set off slowly through the machine shop, hyperaware of everything around me, sidestepping rebar and pipe, pausing in the darkness next to two of the biggest machines to listen and peer out until I spotted a shadow moving behind the glass.

The side door to the office was open, throwing a thick shaft of light toward heavy-duty shelving that held stacks of sheet metal and steel bar. Ten feet from that light, I hesitated again, thinking I could not go through with it, that I could not sacrifice an innocent human being even if it meant saving another innocent human being who just happened to be more precious to me.

But could I imagine having to face another member of my family dead, beaten to a pulp and carved up for fetish reasons I couldn’t begin to fathom?

I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. The war inside me echoed in the short, sharp breaths I was taking and in the jerky way I stepped into the dim light.

Wearing a green baseball cap and a green jacket that said
SECURITY
, an old black man sat with his back turned not ten feet from me, hunched over, facing one of those old rolltop desks. He was hunt-and-peck typing on a computer keyboard. The screen was big, but he craned his neck toward it as if he could barely see what he was working on.

“Sir,” I said softly. “I’m here, sir. It’s time.”

The man froze for a long moment, then hunched over more and said, “Let me close this. One last letter to my daughter.”

I just stood there, looking at his back, sniffling and feeling tears dripping down my cheeks. The computer screen went dark.

Atticus Jones swiveled in the chair to face me. Despite the shadows, I could make out his expression of resoluteness and courage. He licked his lips before he said, “I’ve lived a long life, young man, but the pain’s too much. You’re doing me a favor; nothing wrong with mercy. I want to see my wife again. I want to see my mother and my father. I want you to see your loved ones too. In this life, not the next.”

“Yes, sir,” I sobbed. “And may God have mercy on my soul.”

Then Jones clasped his hands and bowed his head. A slat of light crossed his face, and then it was lost in shadow.

I raised the Colt shakily, the barrel wavering during several sharp breaths before the wispy white hair of his head steadied in the Colt’s sights.

And I squeezed the trigger.

And I shot that wonderful old man dead.

SUNDAY HIT PAUSE, STARED
at the dead man on the computer screen.

“Look it there, Marcus,” Acadia purred. “Cross made it a mercy killing. Bet you weren’t expecting that. I know I wasn’t, but even so, it’s made me hornier than ought to be allowed in civilized—”

He cut her off, snarling, “My love? With all due respect for your insatiable libido, please shut the fuck up.”

They were in the living room of an apartment Sunday had rented in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood. He sat on the couch. She and Cochran stood behind him.

“Why should I shut the fuck up?” Acadia demanded hotly after a moment’s pause. “Isn’t this what you wanted? Cross a murderer, an existential man? Or are you just pissed that he’s made it seem more like a blessing than a killing?”

Sunday wanted to spin around and slap her silly. But he restrained himself and said, “It has nothing to do with that. I’m thinking, Acadia. You’ve heard of that, haven’t you? Thinking?”

“Screw you, Marcus,” she said, and she stormed down the hall, went into the bedroom, and slammed the door.

“Don’t matter,” Cochran said. He came around to the front of the couch. “’Bout it being a mercy killing, I mean. He did it, pulled the trigger. Straight up.”

Sunday said nothing. Part of him agreed. But then he noticed a stirring in his gut.

Gut feelings had saved Sunday in more than one desperate situation. Gut feelings had led him to torch Thierry Mulch all those years ago, hadn’t they? Gut feelings had made him a fortune, given him freedom, hadn’t they?

They had, and as he continued to study that image of the dead man, Sunday realized that his stomach had gone nervous and acidic when it should have been calm and alkaline. Watching the video had made him feel vulnerable.

But why?

Why was he so agitated? However Cross tried to mitigate his crime, Cochran was right: he had done the deed. There was no doubt about that, was there? No. Cross
had
abandoned moral order. Cross
had
become a cold-blooded murderer. Cross
had
become a universe unto himself.
Just like me
, Sunday thought.

But something about the victim bothered him, something beyond the fact that the man appeared to have been terminally ill and eager for death. Something about that man seemed … well … off.