Hope to Die (27 page)

“Dr. Cross, we’re not done with this case,” the detective said, trying to sound encouraging. “Not by a long shot. One call, and the FBI puts out all points bulletins on Sunday. He’ll be seen eventually.”

“Eventually might not be soon enough,” I said, feeling leaden. “Like I said, Mulch is cleaning up. If he hasn’t already killed them, he’s probably on his way to do it.”

“Don’t give up hope,” Aaliyah said. “And text me where we’re staying.”

I promised to get her a room and then trudged back toward the rental car, not caring that it was raining again. Mulch had been here, done his dirty business, and fled, probably by skiff, and probably heading to wherever he was keeping Bree, Damon, Jannie, Ali, and Nana Mama.

For the first time since I’d left Damon’s room at Kraft, fear got hold of me, captured me, entombed me, and I felt like dying would be better than once again facing the dark depths of Sunday’s imagination.

MARCUS SUNDAY WATCHED MUCH
of it through high-power binoculars from across the bayou. He’d relished that swirl in the chocolate water, and he’d held his breath when the first alligator prowled up the bank toward Acadia.

The expression on Acadia’s face before the attack was worth the price of admission. He didn’t think it could ever get better than that. But then she’d gotten her gag spit out a few seconds before the alligator tore into her thigh.

As Sunday heard her shrieks, saw her writhe, his fascination had soared exponentially. In an instant, he understood why ancient Romans had flocked to the Circus Maximus when the gladiators were fighting animals.

Keeping the binoculars glued to the bloody drama, Sunday thought that he’d been born in the wrong time, that being here, watching this, was, well, exceptional, a peak experience if there ever was one.

Then Cross, the police dog, and a small army of cops had appeared out of nowhere, which shocked Sunday, made him realize just how close he’d come to being surrounded and caught before he could bring his entertaining little experiment to an end.

Then the dog attacked the alligator, got hit by the tail, and was thrown to the ground. And the older cop had acted like a ninja or something, going in to save the dog and Acadia. Sunday had admired his bold moves, his élan, and his resolve, but he believed that it was too late. Bitten through the thigh like that, his lover almost certainly wouldn’t survive. Right?

Sunday’s confidence eroded, however, when Cross pressed a rag against the wound and appeared to be talking to her. The longer Dr. Alex stayed by her side, the more paranoia tried to worm its way into Sunday’s brain.

What was Acadia saying to him?

Could she say anything?

Sunday watched Acadia’s head loll to one side. Was she dead? He couldn’t tell. He lowered the binoculars. Cross had been with her thirty, maybe forty seconds. Was it enough time for her to spill her guts and reveal where Cross’s family was being held?

It was enough time, he decided. But had she? Could she even talk?

Sunday raised the binoculars again and kept them trained on Cross, anticipating some kind of hurry-up reaction, a sign that he had more desperate places to be. Instead, a woman came up behind Dr. Alex, and he just stayed there, looking at Acadia, hunched over in defeat.

Sunday allowed himself a thin smile.

Okay, then, he doesn’t know. We move to the endgame
.

But how best to do it?

A cautionary voice in his head told him that, Cross’s defeated posture or not, he should assume that Acadia had confirmed that Marcus Sunday was Thierry Mulch. But honestly, that didn’t really bother Sunday much.

As a writer, he knew that names were just names. You could change them anytime you wanted because it’s the actions that really define characters, not what you call them. His dear departed mother had demonstrated that.

That same cautionary voice then told Sunday to cut his losses and slip away into a new identity. Forget the grand endgame. Let the Cross family be found, or die. It really didn’t matter in the greater scheme of things.

But it did matter in Sunday’s scheme of things. It mattered very much. He’d thought up the premise of the game. He’d looked at it from every angle; well, almost. Sure, there had been a few bumps in the road, but otherwise he was roughly where he’d hoped he’d be at this point, give or take a few days.

But how do I bring it to a satisfying end?

Flashing on the image of the container barge rolling on the high water coming fast toward New Orleans, Sunday played with the idea of meeting the barge, getting inside the container, and shooting air bubbles into the IV lines. Kill them all and let them rot, let Dr. Alex suffer the loss completely and permanently. And then slip away into a new identity. He had the money and the necessary documents already. Why take a bigger risk? He’d had his fun, and now it was time to move on.

Sunday had just about decided to let it end like that. He would get out his phone and punch in the GPS coordinates he’d taken on the way in, get to the skiff he’d stolen, take that to his rental truck, and then drive to New Orleans.

But then flashing lights across the bayou stopped him from leaving. An ambulance pulled into the yard, and it rapidly became a chaotic scene with more and more people. EMTs went quickly to Acadia’s side and began working on her. So she was alive.

And now Cross and Aaliyah were searching the outbuildings.

Sunday’s grin returned. That confirmed it.

Dr. Cross doesn’t know where his wife, kids, and granny are because Acadia
did not
tell him. You watch: He’s going to get chewed up now investigating the crime scene. He’s going to be neutered, a cog disjointed and spinning with nowhere to go
.

Another sheriff’s cruiser came into the yard, followed by a Louisiana state trooper’s car and then another. In minutes, it would be a carnival. The investigation was moving out of Cross’s control. Mentally, spiritually, and emotionally, the detective would be wandering now. Isolated. Lost. Just as he had been the night before Easter.

A zombie.

Sunday checked his watch. It was past midnight. He thought again of that barge swinging south on swollen spring currents. He put the binoculars back on Cross, watched him talking to Aaliyah and looking like a man at the end of a long, weak rope, already fearing his loss, already willing to grasp at the last strand.

Strand of what?

Hope?

The last strand of hope?

Like a pile driver, it hit Sunday then.

In a single, blinding instant of insight, he finally understood how he would end the game and the story of Dr. Alex Cross.

AS I WALKED BACK
along the two-track toward the dirt road that accessed the Bayou des Cannes, the breeze was stiffening again, and with it the rain, and there were rumblings of new storms to the west. By the time I got to the Jeep and started driving toward Jennings, jagged lightning tormented the night sky.

Each crack of thunder made my head feel as if it were coming apart. I needed water. I needed Tylenol. I needed—

The disposable cell phone buzzed, alerting me to a text, as I approached the Jefferson Davis Parish seat along a westward curve in the Evangeline Highway. At a stop sign, I picked the phone up and read it.

Go to New Orleans
, it said.
Alone. You have until 4:30 a.m. to reach the Big Easy. Announce your arrival in the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist, women looking for men. Do as I say, and you will see your family alive. Try to be clever and involve any kind of law enforcement, and you will see your family dead. This is your last hope, Cross. Don’t blow it now, when you’re so close to your goal. By the way, the phone that sent this text will be destroyed upon your response
.

In all honesty, I wanted to smash my own phone to smithereens. I was exhausted. I was sick of being played. I didn’t know if I had it in me to go on much longer, if at all.

When I read the message a second and a third time, however, I kept pausing on that phrase
your last hope
. It was like Sunday was dangling a strip of meat over a caged and starving dog that had had enough of cruelty. I didn’t want to lunge at the offer just out of reach but knew I would.

Despite the anger, the fatigue, and the resentment, I could not help but grasp at the final straw. I simply could not leave hope to die.

I’m coming, Sunday
, I texted back.
Alone
.

I BOUGHT TWO HAM
and cheese sandwiches and three cups of French roast coffee at an all-night gas station near the on-ramp to the I-10.

The sandwiches tasted like they’d been made days ago, and the coffee was stale and bitter, but I forced it all down as I sped east in a driving rain. Were Bree, the kids, and my grandmother in New Orleans? Was that where Sunday had taken them? Why there?

Some of Mulch’s actions seemed as random as they were brutal. Or maybe that was simply a lack of information on my part. What drove a guy to do these things? He’d escaped his childhood with millions of dollars and then had indulged his desire for an education with a doctorate from Harvard. Marcus Sunday could have lived a comfortable life of the mind.

Instead, he’d viciously slain his mother for escaping her past, and Alice Monahan and her entire family for reasons I still couldn’t fathom. Then he had the gall to write an entire book about the mass killings, extolling the murderer as a perfect killer who had left no trace and would never be identified.

The crazy thing was that Sunday might have been right if he hadn’t decided, for whatever disturbed reason, to make me and my family the target of his ongoing homicidal vengeance. I still didn’t get that, and it gnawed at me as I passed Lafayette and drove on toward Baton Rouge.

Other than the phone interviews and my giving Sunday a mediocre review in the
Post
—okay, a thumbs-down review in the
Post
—I’d had no contact with the man that I knew of. So why me?

Perhaps because of my reputation, he saw me as some kind of threat. Maybe he feared I was going to eventually uncover his role in the Omaha and Fort Worth killings. Or maybe this entire cruelty had grown out of something I hadn’t seen or heard yet.

Had Bree done something to him at some time in her past? I couldn’t see it. No, this was about me. It had always been about me.

But what if I was just an arbitrary object? What if some chemical in his dysfunctional brain had dripped at just the right time, and he’d obsessed on me like Mark David Chapman keyed in on John Lennon, deciding to punish me for no particular reason at all?

I think the idea that it might have been utterly random upset me the most. In spite of everything that had happened to me in the past twelve days, I still believed in my Lord and God and in the idea that He had a plan for us all. But as I drove through the night toward a showdown or an ambush, Sunday was testing the limits of my faith.

It occurred to me that he hadn’t said anything about the video of the double homicide I was supposed to send him later today. Seemed that wasn’t important to him anymore—he just wanted me in New Orleans.

Crossing the Atchafalaya River, I was hit with waves of doubt and surges of raw emotion that brought tears to my eyes. What if, after enduring it all, I simply found them dead? What if it was as random as that?

I swiped at the tears with my sleeve and prayed, “Please don’t let that happen. Take me if You want, but dear God, let them live.”

The rain slowed, and I sped up toward the national wildlife refuge and the elevated highway that separates Lafayette from Baton Rouge. For several miles, there was a strange dead calm when the wind and rain stopped altogether. I sped up even more, going sixty-eight now.

Then, out of nowhere, gusts of wind rose up, turned gale force, buffeted the car, and sent leaves ripped from trees down in the refuge windmilling across the already slick surface of the highway. A small sedan in front and to the right of me fishtailed on the wet leaves, corrected, and almost straightened out.

Then it swung violently sideways into my lane, and I had to swerve, throwing my car hard to the right.

I’d taken all sorts of defensive-driving classes in the course of my career, but nothing I knew could save me from smashing my right front fender into the guardrail.

Going better than sixty when it hit, the car upended, spiraled up, and cleared the guardrail before plunging into darkness.

METEOROLOGICAL DATA WOULD LATER
conclude that four different tornadoes hit southern Louisiana that night. The third, an EF2-level twister, formed near Ville Platte around 1:35 a.m. and wreaked destruction all the way to Opelousas. The vortex lost shape there, but the forces of it continued on in spiraling powerful gusts that swept down over the wildlife refuge and the highway, causing the sedan in front of me to skid and making me swerve, which sent the rented Jeep Cherokee into the guardrail and then over the side of the elevated interstate.

I remember feeling outside myself as I fell, as if this were happening to someone else entirely. The single remaining headlight beam gave me a split-second view of a dense forest canopy before the driver’s side of the car smashed into it. The window next to me shattered, and then everything went kaleidoscopic and herky-jerky as branches snapped beneath the car, interrupting but not stopping the fall.