Hope to Die (20 page)

When he had them on, he twisted around in his seat, grabbed Cochran, and pulled him over onto his back. Cochran looked up at him blankly. But Sunday knew better. Though paralyzed, the man was fully in control of his mind.

“Some surplus pancuronium,” Sunday told him matter-of-factly. “If I gave it enough time, you’d suffocate. But the truth is, you’ve been very useful, Mitch Cochran. I owe you a little mercy.”

Despite Cochran’s paralysis, Sunday saw hope flicker in his eyes.

Then Sunday reached up and over him, got a pillow from the sleeping berth, and smothered the man to death.

I STARTLED AWAKE IN
the front seat of the unmarked cruiser and looked around blearily, seeing farmland and tractors along the interstate, and then Tess Aaliyah hunched over the wheel, looking wired.

“Where are we?”

“North of New York City,” she replied.

“I can drive.”

“You had a head injury recently.”

“Haven’t had a headache or symptom in two days. Honestly.”

She glanced at me, saw my sincerity, and then nodded. “I’ll get off at the next stop. We need gas anyway.”

“You’re a machine.”

“Why?” she said.

“You drove all night, and now you turn around and drive back?”

“Oh, believe me, I will crash in a big way when I get home to my bed. Right now, I’m just like a homing pigeon.”

“I appreciate it. I appreciate everything that you’ve done for me. You’re a fine detective. And you’ve done your dad proud.”

She looked over at me, embarrassed.

“What?” I said. “You didn’t think I knew who your father was?”

Aaliyah shrugged, said, “I try not to broadcast it.”

“Must be hard to live in the shadow of a legend.”

“Sometimes,” she said, and then she seemed eager to change the subject. “I wonder if we’ll get a match on Mepps.”

I’d contacted John Sampson and Ned Mahoney before we left the Kraft School, and was buoyed at first by the DNA tests, which had come in at last, confirming that neither body in the morgue belonged to a member of my immediate family. Then I’d had to come to grips with the fact that two innocent people had died simply because they looked like my wife and son. In its own way, that knowledge was one more torture Sunday was inflicting on me.

Pushing that pain aside, I had gotten Sampson and Mahoney up to speed on all that had happened to me in the prior two days, and then I’d forwarded the JPEG of Damon and Karla Mepps at the coffee shop. Ned had promised to run the image through facial-recognition software that would search through a broad cross section of state and federal databases, including criminal records, driver’s licenses, and passports.

The problem was that that could take even longer than the DNA testing. In the movies, someone feeds a picture to a computer, makes a few keystrokes, and out pops a name. In fact, facial recognition is a laborious process based on complex algorithms that tax even the fastest of computers.

“Mahoney said the search might take hours,” I told Aaliyah. “Or it could grind on a few days before the system finds a match or admits defeat.”

“Like it did with that picture of Mulch from the fake ID?” she asked.

I nodded. “Either he’s not in any of the databases or he altered his face for that picture.”

She put on the blinker and took the Ramapo exit off Interstate 87. My cell phone rang. I checked it and saw it was Gloria Jones calling.

“This is Alex Cross,” I said.

After a loud sigh of relief, the television news producer said in a lower, more conspiratorial tone, “Let me get Ava and find somewhere we can talk. Call you back in two minutes.”

“Okay,” I said, wondering what was up.

Aaliyah pulled into a gas station, headed in to use the restroom. I filled the tank. It wasn’t until after the detective had returned with a Diet Coke and a bag of Kettle Chips and we’d gotten back on the highway, this time with me behind the wheel, that my cell rang again.

Aaliyah said, “Take 287 South. It’s quicker to DC.”

I nodded, answered the cell, put it on speaker, and set it up on the dash so Aaliyah could hear.

“Ava?” I said.

“I’m here, Alex,” she replied. “You won’t believe what we found!”

“I had very little to do with it,” Gloria Jones said. “This was all Ava.”

“Well, I’m in a car with Detective Aaliyah of DC Metro Homicide,” I said. “We’d both like to hear whatever you’ve got, but Ava, I have something wonderful to tell you.”

“Yes?”

“It’s complicated, but we believe Damon and Bree are alive.”

She gasped. “But—”

“Mulch had someone else kill and mutilate people who looked like Damon and Bree. The DNA doesn’t match.”

For several moments there was no reply, but then I heard her sobbing, and tears welled in my eyes all over again. They were alive. I had a chance to save them. Ava could feel that hope as strongly as I did. Wiping away my tears, I saw that the exit for Suffern and I-287 was coming up in five miles.

“What did you find, Ava?” Aaliyah asked.

“Okay,” Ava said. She sniffled, and then told us.

It took a few moments for her discoveries to penetrate my tired brain, but when they did, I almost drove off the road.

“That’s where I am,” Ava said. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to her after that.”

“I already know what happened to her after that,” I said.

“What?” Ava, Aaliyah, and Jones cried all at once.

“Ava? Gloria? I hate to do this, but I promise I’ll call you right back.”

Over their protests, I grabbed the phone and ended the call.

“Take 287 before you tell me what the hell is going on,” Aaliyah said.

I glanced at the exit before veering away from it, staying on I-87, heading east toward Nyack and New York City.

“Where are you going?” she demanded.

“Omaha,” I said, handing her my phone. “Call and get us on the next flight out of JFK or LaGuardia.”

SIX HOURS LATER, WE
were driving north through Omaha. We passed a playground full of young children and a soccer field where older kids, eleven or twelve, were practicing on a blustery spring afternoon.

“Every kid I see seems vulnerable now,” I said to Aaliyah, who was driving. “Part of me wants to roll down the window and shout at their parents to never let their kids out of their sight. Absolutely never.”

For several moments, the detective did not reply. She’d been annoyed and on edge from lack of sleep and from the blowback she’d gotten from Captain Quintus when she’d called him after booking our flights to Omaha.

But at last, she sighed and said, “I can understand the feeling.”

Feeling was what had brought us to Omaha. I knew much of the story, but I wanted to run Ava’s discovery by the people who knew the case best. And something in my gut said that would be better done in person and on-site. Captain Quintus had disagreed, but the tickets had already been bought, and so there we were around four thirty that afternoon, driving past the Omaha Country Club into the bedroom community of Raven Oaks.

We followed the GPS on Aaliyah’s phone into a development of upscale homes, some with tennis courts and others with pools, until we reached the North Fifty-Fourth Avenue circle, which ran out to a cul-de-sac with six homes on it. As soon as we turned onto the road, I saw the unmarked car parked by the curb and told the detective to pull in behind it.

We got out and started toward the car. My attention went immediately to the big white house at the end of the cul-de-sac and stayed there until I climbed into the unmarked car’s backseat.

“Alex, I wish we were seeing each other under better circumstances,” said the petite woman sitting sideways in the front passenger seat. Omaha police detective Jan Sergeant had aged little since I’d last seen her, seven years before.

“I do too, Jan,” I said.

Sergeant’s partner, Brian Box, sat behind the wheel looking straight ahead with an expression I remembered. Box had gone gray since I’d last seen him, but he still looked as if he’d bitten into something that didn’t taste quite right.

I’d met the two detectives eighteen months after a brutal mass murder had taken place in that white house on the cul-de-sac before us. The Daley family of Omaha—Calvin, Bea, Ross, Sharon, and Janet—were found dead in their home two nights before Christmas. Their throats had been cut with a scalpel or razor.

I’d gotten involved after a second mass murder in suburban Fort Worth. The Monahan family—Alice, Bill, Kenzie, Monroe, Annie, and Brent—were found at home with their throats slit.

I’d worked the case for the FBI but ultimately had been unable to push the investigation beyond a psychological profile I wrote of the unnamed suspect.

“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.”

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.

“I still don’t buy it,” Box said at last.

“Why not?” Aaliyah asked. “It looks obvious to me.”

“Yeah?” Box said. “Except there was another mass murder exactly like this one. You tell me you’ve got Mulch connected to that one too, and I’ll start believing that this dead guy is behind it all.”

“Smart man,” I said.

“Dr. Cross,” Detective Sergeant began.

“No, he’s right,” I said. “I do need that and I don’t have it. Can we use a desk and a computer at your office?”

Box said, “Are you—”

“It’s the least we can do,” Sergeant said.

Twenty-five minutes later, Aaliyah was working at a computer in the Homicide bureau of the Omaha Police Department, and I was making phone calls. I called Ned Mahoney first, hoping we’d gotten some kind of match through the facial-recognition software, but so far, he said, it was still searching. I told him about Mulch looking like a suspect in the Daley slayings.

“Anything that links Mulch to the killings in Fort Worth?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “I’ll let you know.”

I called John Sampson next and brought him up to date. He was with our computer experts looking through the files of Preston Elliot, the dead programmer whose bones were found in the pigsty in rural Virginia.

“Get anything yet?” I asked.

“Not so far,” he admitted. “But they found some encrypted files about an hour ago. So maybe we’ll get lucky once they break them.”

Then I called the Fort Worth Police Department looking for Detective J. P. Vincente and found out he was now Lieutenant J. P. Vincente.