Hope to Die (6 page)

I squinted at the light in the room, which suddenly felt too strong. “Three?”

Sampson said, “Semen taken from that rape scene in Alexandria, semen taken from the pants leg of Mandy Bell Lee’s murdered attorney, and the hair sample Preston Elliot’s mother filed as part of his missing-persons report.”

It took several moments before I grasped the implications of all that. Ten days before, the attorney of country-western star Mandy Bell Lee had been found poisoned in his room at the Mandarin Oriental. That same night, a man who called himself Thierry Mulch had raped a woman in Alexandria.

Since we had clear DNA evidence linking the rape and the murder to Preston Elliot, we had been working under the assumption that the missing computer engineering student and Mulch were one and the same.

But Mulch was not Elliot. He could not be Elliot because the DNA match on the bones found at the pigsty was dead certain, which meant …

“Mulch killed Elliot and dumped his body in that pig barn,” I said.

“We think so,” Sampson said, nodding. “Pigs’ll eat anything you throw at them.”

I remembered something Ali had told me about Mulch.

“It fits. When Mulch spoke at Ali’s school, he said that he’d grown up on a pig farm.”

“So how do we think this worked?” Captain Quintus asked. “Mulch got Elliot’s sperm before he killed him?”

“Why not?” Sampson replied. “It’s a brilliant way for Mulch to throw us, isn’t it? Plant a dead man’s DNA at a rape scene and at a murder?”

“This sonofabitch is diabolical,” Mahoney said.

“You’re right,” I said. “Mulch is diabolical. He’s very smart, thinks long term, and is cruel and audacious, which strikes me as narcissistically evil.”

Captain Quintus nodded. “Believes in himself above all others, thinks he’s too smart to get caught.”

“Which means he’s gotten away with serious shit before,” Sampson said. “It’s mutually reinforcing with these guys.”

Mahoney said, “What I’d like to know is, is Mulch acting solo, or are there others involved in what he’s doing?”

COULD MULCH HAVE KIDNAPPED
my entire family in less than ten hours, starting with Damon at his prep school in the Berkshires, on his own?

On Good Friday morning, Damon was supposed to have taken a 7:45 jitney from campus to the Albany train station, but according to the driver, at the last minute, Damon told a friend that he was canceling because he’d gotten a ride to Washington.

But with whom? Mulch? Or someone else?

We hadn’t been able to answer those questions because the Kraft School, like Sojourner Truth, had been closed for vacation.

In any case, I knew from personal experience that the drive from the Kraft School to DC takes at least seven hours, and Good Friday traffic had to have been thick. So let’s say eight hours. That put Mulch in Washington around four.

Bree, Ali, Jannie, and Nana Mama were all taken in the following two hours. Theoretically, then, it
was
possible that Mulch had done this alone. But if so, he’d acted with what felt like pinpoint and ruthless precision.

“My instincts say he had help,” I said. “The sperm found at the rape and the murder scene supports that too.”

“How’s that?” Mahoney asked.

“Unless Elliot was a homosexual, it makes sense to me that Mulch had a female accomplice. She lured the kid in for sex, saved his sperm, probably from a condom, and Mulch killed him afterward.”

“It fits,” Quintus said.

It did fit. As if a fog bank were lifting, we were beginning to get a clearer view of the world behind us, a world I would have given my soul to return to.

I said, “Can someone go back to George Mason, back to Elliot’s friends, ask them about any women he might have been seeing?”

“I’ll do it myself,” Mahoney promised.

I looked at Sampson. “Feel like driving?”

“Where we going?”

“That farm where they found Elliot’s bones.”

“Uh,” Captain Quintus began, sharing a glance with Mahoney. “You sure you want to be working now, Alex?”

My breath turned shallow. “I can’t just sit here and wait for more members of my family to show up dead, Cap. I refuse to. That’s what Mulch wants and I just won’t do it.”

“Alex,” Mahoney said. “Maybe—”

I glared at my old friend, said, “If I don’t work, Ned, I’ll be lost to Bree, and I won’t be lost to her. Not now.”

Mahoney nodded slowly and then gestured at Sampson and said, “But you’re driving, John. With that head injury, he’s still in no condition to be behind the wheel.”

IT TOOK SAMPSON AND
me about an hour to get free of DC traffic and take blue highways out through Reston and McLean and on into the rural land you find the more west and south you go in Virginia. We rode most of the way in silence, but Sampson’s pity and grief were as clear as if he’d spoken words of condolence or shock.

Sampson’s mere presence, the living, breathing embodiment of my longest relationship in life other than Nana Mama, was the only reason I didn’t completely crack up during the drive to the pig farm. But no matter how I tried to stop it, I kept flashing on images of Bree during our courtship. That first shared bashful smile. The first time I touched her fingers. The first time her lips met mine. How much she liked to dance and laugh. How committed she was to being a cop and a stepmother to my kids.

“You thinking about her, shug?” Sampson asked.

There were times when I could swear my partner was clairvoyant. Or at least, he picked up on subtle changes in my body so perfectly that he could decipher my thoughts. Or it was an easy guess; I don’t know.

“Yeah,” I said, and fell quiet again for several long moments, swallowing hard at unbridled emotion. “John?”

“Talk to me,” he said.

“I don’t know how to …” I began and then faltered. “I can’t …”

“Can’t what?”

“Think of Bree as gone,” I said through clenched teeth. “It’s like my heart can’t believe it. I didn’t even get to say good-bye. I wasn’t there to tell her how much I loved her, how she made everything in my life so …”

“Whole?” Sampson said softly.

“Anchored,” I replied.

It was the perfect word for what Bree had done in my life; she was the person who anchored me, grounded me, kept me from washing away.

“We don’t have DNA results yet,” Sampson said.

“I’ve been telling myself that.”

“And you keep telling yourself that, you hear?”

It started to rain. Sampson turned on the wipers, and the slapping sounded like nails being pounded by one of those air guns. I closed my eyes, reached up, and started rubbing at that spot on the back of my head where the junkie had hit me with a piece of pipe.

“Headaches still as bad?” Sampson asked.

“Getting better,” I said, though that was an overstatement.

“You need to get that checked out again, Alex,” Sampson said. “It’s been, like, six days and you’re still hurting. You should see a neurologist.”

“Doctors said to expect the headaches,” I said. “Part of the healing process. They could go on for months. And right now? I don’t need another doctor to tell me the same thing.”

My partner looked ready to argue, but then he spotted a sign ahead in the light rain that read
Pritchard’s Farm: Specialty Pork
.

“There it be,” he said slowing and turning.

We drove up a long dirt driveway bordered on both sides by trees that looked brilliantly green, all wet and new. It was spring, a time of rebirth. But it felt like November to me when we rolled into an orderly farmyard that reeked of a stench I can’t even begin to describe.

As we climbed from the car, we heard a squealing din coming from a huge low-roofed building that sat on a bench of earth about a quarter mile from a picture-perfect farmhouse that looked recently built.

“Pork bellies been good to someone,” Sampson observed.

A weathered woman in her forties wearing a green rain jacket, rubber gloves, and calf-high rubber boots over her jeans came around the side of the house. She carried a pitchfork and revealed smears of soil on her right cheek when she pushed off her hood and brushed back graying hair to look at us.

Sampson already had his badge out. “Mrs. Pritchard?”

“You here about the skull and the bone?” she asked.

“We are,” I said.

“Expect you better talk to Royal about that, my husband,” she said, gesturing up the hill with the pitchfork. “He’s on up to the barn. It’s feeding time. That’s the reason he found them bones, feeding time, but I expect he’ll be wanting to tell you that himself.”

WE FOUND ROYAL PRITCHARD
out on one of several catwalks that crossed above the industrial pigsty. There were thousands of young pigs, or shoats, jammed into a pit that was easily a football field long and a quarter again as wide. A short, stocky guy in muddy rubber boots and Carhartt work clothes, Pritchard had a lit cigar in his mouth as he worked a set of hydraulic controls bolted to the railing of the catwalk.

Responding to the pig farmer’s manipulations, a long line of feeders crossed above the sty from left to right, dropping corn in a steady, drenching stream. The pigs were going berserk in response, all trying to follow the rain of food, squealing and grunting so loud that it changed the pounding in my head, made it like the inside of a bell that was tolling.

Sampson got Pritchard’s attention, and the farmer shut down the feeding system, which sent the pigs into a howling, squealing rage that seemed to join with the gonging in my head, speeding it, amplifying it, until I just couldn’t take being in there any longer, and I ran blindly for the door.

Five seconds later, I burst out of the pigsty and ran on out toward the tree line in the rain, trying to control the excruciating pain that crackled from the base of my skull up. But the pain wouldn’t stop, and I felt my stomach roll and thought I might be violently sick.

By the time Sampson came out with the pig farmer ten minutes later, however, the rain had cooled me down. My stomach was feeling better, and the ringing in my head had softened to a distant pealing.

“That smell takes some getting used to, even with a cigar to mask it,” Pritchard allowed, looking sympathetic. “No doubt ’bout that. But I don’t mind, you know? That’s the smell a’ money in there, sure as I’m standing right here.”

“Pork futures are up, huh?” Sampson asked.

“It’s the new white meat, ain’t you heard?” Pritchard replied. “Price a’ fatted shoats has doubled past three years.”

“You found the skull and a bone?” I asked.

The farmer nodded. “I showed your partner where. Wasn’t too far from where you was standing when you got to feeling kind of, well, piggish, what I call it.”

“Tell him how you found the skull,” Sampson said.

Pritchard shrugged. “One of them things. The hopper jammed out in the middle, and the corn was just pouring there, and every pig in the place wanted to be at the center. Anyway, I opened up the sides enough I could see the skull and bone there, plain as day, in the dung. Fished the skull out with a hook duct-taped to a pole. Sheriff’s deputies used a claw thing to get the bone.”

“Nothing else? No other bones?”

Pritchard’s cheek twitched. “Not that I seen, but hell, there’s three, maybe four inches of shit in there front to back. You’re welcome to come rake through it after the gold on the hoof’s up to weight and off.”

“How long will that be?” I asked.

“Twenty days.”

I have never been the sort of man who flies off the handle, but for some reason, I thought about the possibility there were other bones in that pigsty, and I just lost it.

“We’re not waiting fucking twenty days,” I shouted at him. “The fucker who dumped the body in there killed my goddamned wife! I’m getting a warrant and I’m getting those goddamned pigs out of there today.”

“Christ, Detective,” Pritchard said, looking offended. “I’m sorry about your wife, Jesus knows I am. But you’re acting like I tossed a body in there.”

“Did you?” I demanded.

Pritchard said, “Hell no. What the—”

I had seven inches and fifty pounds on the farmer. When I popped him in the chest with my right hand, he staggered backward and sat down hard in the gravel, shocked.

“You know a guy named Mulch?” I demanded. “He related to you?”

“Alex!” Sampson said.

I ignored him. “Is he?”

The farmer acted scared as he complained, “I don’t know no one named Mulch, no, sir, and that’s a fact.”

“Mulch was raised on a pig farm,” I replied angrily. “He came here specifically to get rid of that body. Mulch has to know you.”

“No, sir,” Pritchard repeated flatly. “Never even heard of that name. Go down and ask my wife. Ellie and I been together since high school, and she’ll tell you the same.”

He looked at Sampson. “I called the sheriff second I fished out that skull. I could’ve just left it and it’d be fragments in the pig shit by now. Think on that.”

It all went out of me then, and I realized what I’d done.

My shoulders sank and I squatted down next to him, shaking my head before I said softly, “Mr. Pritchard, I was way out of line there. I apologize. My wife …”

There was a moment of silence before he said quietly, “I understand, Detective. When my mom died, I wandered around in a haze for days.”

I reached out my hand and helped him up. “Again, I’m sorry. I honestly don’t know what came over me.”

Sampson put his hand on my shoulder, said, “Think we better leave Mr. Pritchard to his chores.”

I nodded, apologized a third time, and then walked away from the pig farmer, unwilling to look at the barn anymore, unable to block out the sounds of the ongoing riot inside.