Cross My Heart

CHAPTER 67

In utter disbelief, Marcus Sunday sat in the front seat of the blue Tahoe down the street from Cross’s house, gaping at the live feed from the attic office streaming on Acadia’s computer.

On-screen, Cross’s wife said, “Who?”

“I’ll explain on the way downtown,” Cross said, grabbing up the drawings and exiting his office with Bree right behind.

“What’s going on, Marcus?” Acadia said, confused. “Who was right there in front of them?”

“The massage parlor killer,” Sunday said, feeling impressed and annoyed. Cross was indeed a worthy adversary, one to be respected, as all enemies must be if you intended to defeat them.

Cross had obviously taken the information from the Thierry Mulch letter and run with it a lot farther than he would have ever guessed. Dr. Alex had a suspect now. No doubt. For the first and only time since he’d decided to destroy Alex Cross, to make an example of the man, to demonstrate clearly the randomness and absurdity of life, the writer felt a pang of uncertainty.

If the detective could break open a case like this one—

“Here they come,” Acadia said.

Cross and his wife ran off the porch, past the Dumpster, down the steps to the sidewalk, and away toward their car. Fighting off the urge to smash something, Sunday started the Tahoe, waited a second, and then threw his vehicle into gear.

It had all been going so well up until the past couple of minutes, he fumed. The audio bugs he’d put in the dining room and the front room two nights ago had been performing flawlessly, and they’d heard things since that with a little creativity would prove invaluable in the days to come.

Sunday had learned, for example, that Bree Stone was obsessed with and hunting for a teenage runaway named Ava, and that she and Cross had evidently talked to the girl the night before. Cross’s son Ali, it turned out, was zombie mad, and the boy claimed to have smelled Sunday during his visit.

Was that possible? Did he have that distinctive an odor? Acadia said no, but he’d already changed deodorant and soap brands just in case.

They’d also learned that Cross’s daughter had made the track team and had a chip on her shoulder concerning the amount of family time Dr. Alex regularly missed. And dear Nana Mama would be spending as much time at St. Anthony’s as she was at home in the very near future, getting ready for the Easter celebration.

All this had been fantastic to learn. These facts had had his imagination running wild until Cross had gone up to his office and spotted the penholder out of place. That moment, caught on camera just before the fax machine rang, had been so perfect that Sunday had pumped his fist in victory and Acadia had clapped.

But then those police sketches had come in, and Cross had crowed about the killer being right in front of them the entire time, and had said nothing else!

“You probably should have put a bug in his car, sugar,” Acadia offered.

“Gee, you think?” Sunday said.

“I do,” Acadia said. “Where are we going?”

“Wherever they go, baby girl,” Sunday said. “I want to see this killer now as much as they do.”

“Kindred spirits?”

“Something like that.”

CHAPTER 68

Two hours later, feeling handcuffed and shackled, Bree and I sat in an unmarked car down Tuckerman Street from an apartment building in the Brightwood neighborhood of Washington, not far from where Joss Branson had been taken from the day care center.

We had Captain& Quintus on speakerphone and were engaged in a shouting match.

“What do you mean, you’re getting blowback?” I demanded.

“There are lives at stake here!” Bree insisted. “Babies’ lives!”

“You don’t think I know that?” Quintus shot back. “But all you’ve really got at this point are those drawings and the fact that Carney seemed to show up around the crime scenes.”

“Every crime scene! I saw him outside the spa, and the Lancasters’ house, and I swear I caught a glimpse of him in a Georgetown sweatshirt in the crowd outside the brothel. And Bree says she thinks Carney was the officer she ordered to help Mrs. Branson after she almost collapsed right after Joss was taken!”

“You’re sure he wasn’t dispatched to those scenes?” Quintus said.

“No, he was not, Captain,” I retorted. “The first night he told me and Sampson that he’d heard about the Superior Spa on his scanner while driving home. At the Lancasters’ he said he’d been dispatched for crowd control, but we just found out he was off-duty at the time.”

“It’s still not enough to perfect a search warrant. Find me more.”

“Find us another judge!” I shouted, and hung up, wanting to punch something. We knew Carney was in his apartment. I’d used a burn phone to call his landline and he’d picked up about fifteen minutes ago. Were the babies in there? Was Cam Nguyen?

“How about we send someone up, listen for crying?” Bree suggested.

“Good idea, but we can’t do it,” I replied. “Carney knows us.”

My wife threw up her hands in desperation. “So what do we do?”

“Unless Quintus finds a cooperative judge, we wait until Carney leaves for work, and then we break in.”

“Times like these make me fall in love with you all over again, Dr. Cross.”

I grinned and blew her a kiss. My phone rang. Sampson.

“John?”

“Okay, Alex,” the big man said, breathing hard. “I’ve got a few things. Carney was a marine, did a tour in Afghanistan. Suffered a minor head injury due to an IED. Recovered enough to pass the physicals for Force Recon, Special Forces, but was turned down for unnamed reasons. He took an honorable discharge, became a security guard in Albuquerque around the time of the first shooting, kidnapping, and drowning. And he was on rookie probation with Tampa PD two years ago when the second round of killings and kidnappings went down. He took the job up here four months ago, better pay, same seniority.”

“That’s enough,” I said. “Call Quintus, give him that.”

Fifteen minutes later, the captain called. “You got your warrant, Alex. Sampson’s on his way to pick it up. He’ll be there in twenty minutes, tops.”

The minutes ticked by, and I had to force myself not to imagine what might be happening up in that apartment while we waited. The emotional part of me said, Just go up there, knock down the door, and let the warrant come in behind you. Your word against Carney’s on when it was served. But a more rational voice in my head kept reminding me that we were so close to being legal that it wasn’t worth risking the fruit of the poisonous—

“There he is!” Bree cried. “Carney’s on the move!”

I looked up to see the young patrolman turn off the walkway to his apartment building and head away from us up the street dressed in civilian clothes: jeans, work boots, a plaid shirt, and a canvas jacket.

“He’s carrying something under his arm,” I said, grabbing a pair of binoculars and looking at him as he stopped beside a blue Chevy Impala and worked the key into the lock.

He opened the rear door, tossed in what he’d been carrying, then closed the door and circled the car.

“What was he carrying?” my wife asked.

“Empty, folded canvas duffel bags,” I said, lowering my binoculars as Carney climbed into the driver’s seat. “A bunch of them.”

Bree understood and looked ill. “We can’t wait for Sampson and the warrant, Alex. He’s going somewhere to drown those babies and Cam Nguyen before he goes to work.”

I agreed, started our car, and pulled out, saying, “Call John. Tell him to enter and search the apartment once he gets backup. And warn the captain.”

CHAPTER 69

Sunday saw Cross pull out of his parking space on Tuckerman Street and immediately followed half a block back.

“He’s trailing that blue Impala,” Acadia said.

“I’ve got them both,” the writer replied.

“Go right,” she said.

“I see it.”

The writer took the right, kept well back in traffic, six or seven cars behind Cross, who was six or seven cars in back of the blue Impala. Was that the murderer driving? The thought gave Sunday chills.

Acadia evidently felt much the same way, because she asked, “Do you think he’s like us?”

The writer glanced over, thinking once again how spooky it was that they thought so similarly, as if they were mirror images of the same person.

“He likes killing, certainly,” Sunday replied. “But I would imagine that it is compulsion and not enjoyment driving his darker activities.”

Acadia nodded. “No choice in the matter. Not like us at all.”

“A different subspecies,” he offered.

“Fascinating,” she replied.

They trailed the blue Impala and Cross’s unmarked car north out of the District onto Maryland Route 97, which winds through the subdivisions of Wheaton, Glenmont, and Aspen Hill. It wasn’t until Olney that farmland appeared.

There was less traffic on the road here and Sunday had to lag so far back that he lost sight of the blue Impala, and then of Cross’s car after they’d both taken a left off the rural highway at Sunshine, heading west on Damascus Road.

He could see well down the road. They were gone. “Where’d they—”

“They must have gone to that reservoir back there,” Acadia said. Sunday stomped on the parking brake and spun the wheel going forty. They went into a screeching U-turn that threw them into the opposite lane. He released the brake and hit the gas, looking for the road to—

“There it is!” Acadia cried. “Triadelphia Reservoir Road.”

Sunday took the left without braking and shot up the dirt road, heading north once more. They passed one farm after another, separated by thick patches of timber. Where were they going? The reservoir?

He crested a rise in the road.

“Oops,” Acadia said before Sunday said, “Fuck.”

The unmarked car was parked off the shoulder not eighty yards ahead and twenty yards shy of where the woods gave way to hay fields. The detective and his wife were already out, doors shut. Bree Stone was holding a walkie-talkie and moving toward the front of the car, the edge of the woods, and the fields.

But Alex Cross? He was standing there looking right at them.

CHAPTER 70

I watched the dark-blue Chevy Tahoe with the tinted windows and the DC plates pass by at a solid clip, giving me nothing more than a pair of silhouettes, a man and a woman. I started walking toward the fields, watching the SUV until it had passed the other end and a line of trees before disappearing around a bend in the road.

“What is it?” Bree asked.

“Probably nothing,” I said, slowing as we reached the edge of the woods. “Lot of dark-blue Tahoes with tinted windows in DC. Whole fleet of them at the White House.”

Beyond the field my eyes studied a long wall of pine trees, a windbreak of sorts that stretched from the road back toward an old farmhouse and an older barn surrounded by low brush. Through the binoculars, I could just make out the top of Carney’s Impala parked in the side yard by the house. From a long way off you could see that the white house paint was blistered or gone to bare clapboard. The roof of the barn looked like it had been hit by lightning at some point. There was a charred, gaping hole on one corner. The whole structure sagged left.

“They’re in that house,” Bree said.

“They have to be,” I agreed, scanning the area with the glasses, understanding that we did not want to cross that open field to get to the farmhouse. We could be seen too easily.

My wife was thinking the same way and said, “We take the ditch on the left side of the road up to that tree line, then go across.”

It made sense. We took off, running low at the left side of the road, and jumped down into the drainage ditch. Stooped over, even I couldn’t be seen as we covered the hundred and fifty yards until the line of pine trees blocked any possible view of us from the farmhouse.

Moving along the road, hugging tight to the big conifers, we crept toward the farmyard and stopped behind the very last tree. Carney’s Impala was parked next to the house and a door. The shades were drawn in every window. And what was that noise? Almost like chickens clucking?

“Cover me, then call for backup,” I whispered, drawing my pistol and meaning to run around the pines, through the brush, and get to the side of the house as fast as possible.

But when I cut around the last tree, I ran directly into an explosion of cackling, squawking, and beating wings and flying feathers that became a flock of wild turkeys flushing all around me, ten or more.

I almost had a heart attack, so surprised and startled that it was at least ten seconds before Bree grabbed me by the elbow and together we sprinted around the back of the Impala and plastered ourselves against the side of the farmhouse.

“So much for being sneaky,” I whispered, still shaking inside but aiming my pistol at the side door, expecting it to open at any moment. After that much racket, how couldn’t Carney come to investigate?

But a minute passed, and then two. Was it possible he hadn’t heard any of it? Where was—?

A man’s voice, the words unclear but the tone threatening, echoed to us from inside the house. Then a woman’s voice chimed in, equally abusive in tone.

Bree held up two fingers. Carney was in there with his accomplice. The woman who’d kidnapped the—

But then a second woman began making noises in a pleading tone.

A man yelled the first distinct words: “Shut up, you uncaring bitch!”

There was silence before babies began to bawl.

CHAPTER 71

“I’m going in there right now,” my wife whispered.

“I am, too,” I murmured. “But let’s do this by the book. Go around front, and through the door in thirty seconds. Remember, this guy is ex-marines. Very good with a gun.”

Bree understood and in a crouch ran around the front of the house and up onto the dilapidated front porch. I sidled along beneath the windows, climbed the rickety back stoop, reached out with my left hand, and turned the knob until I heard it click. The door came loose.

Swinging it open, I did a quick head bob around the doorframe, and another, enough to tell me that the old kitchen was empty. The babies were still crying. My gun led as I stepped gingerly inside, seeing a cereal box and a used bowl with milk still in the bottom. The air smelled of food rotting.

The babies’ crying grew louder, but the sound was weird, off, and coming from a room on the other side of the kitchen. Blood pounding in my temples, I heard the front door open and Bree take two creaking steps before a woman started yelling over the babies’ cries.

“What did you expect?” she taunted. “After what you did to us? What did you expect?”

“Please!” the other woman cried. “I’ve done nothing to you. The babies have done nothing to you!”

“Liar!” a man roared, and I heard a loud slap.

Taking two quick steps to the doorway, I shouted, “Police!” and ducked into the room, expecting to see three adults and two babies.

Bree came in through another doorway. We stared at each other, and then at the ratty old couch, a coffee table, and a laptop computer, and no one else.

“Please, no more!” the woman sobbed, and I understood.

Going straight to the laptop, I spun it around. “Jesus.”

Naked from the waist up, Cam Nguyen sat on a chair at the center of the screen. She held the two crying children and was sobbing hysterically. Cribs flanked her. In the foreground, there was an old claw-foot bathtub. In the lower right-hand corner of the screen a red Record button glowed, and I understood. Carney wanted memories of his sick ceremony. Same reason he’d stolen the hard drive at the spa.

“Where is he?” Bree demanded, horrified. “Where’s the woman? Where are they?”

“I don’t know. The feed must be wireless, a—”

Suddenly we saw the back of Carney’s head and his canvas jacket, and then the length of him. He was dragging a garden hose, which he dropped into the bathtub. He looked at Cam Nguyen and said, “You remember the tub, don’t you, Mommy?”

CHAPTER 72

“He’s going to drown the babies in there,” Bree said in a wavering whisper. “Where are they? Where’s that room?”

I found the Mute button and hit it. “We have to move. We have to listen.”

Given the way the babies and Cam Nguyen had been crying, we should have heard them if they had been anywhere in the main or upper floor of the farmhouse. But there was nothing but the gentle clacking of tree limbs outside.

I glanced back at the screen for some clue. But aside from the cribs, a table behind Cam, and the bathtub, the room was nondescript and small, with plain white walls. Carney came toward the camera and passed beneath it, disappearing from view.

I released the Mute button and heard that woman’s voice coming from somewhere off-screen, saying, “That’s it, Mommy. Be scared of the water, just like we were.”

Then a man’s voice followed, saying, “You didn’t give us a chance, so we can’t give you one, either.”

“That wasn’t Carney,” I said.

Bree shook her head. “The other two must be in some kind of anteroom off that room. The barn?”

“Or the basement,” I said.

“I’m going out … shit, I never called for backup,” she said.

“Call on the way to the barn. I’m going downstairs. If you hear them, you call me, understand? Go through the kitchen and out that side door.”

Bree nodded, turned, and left, while I went looking for a way downstairs, the ranting of various voices and the crying of Cam Nguyen and the babies on the computer making me more frantic than ever to find them before it was too late.

After two tries revealed only an empty pantry and a small closet, a door in the hallway off the kitchen opened onto a rickety wooden staircase. I listened. Nothing. I flipped on the electric switch. No lights, either.

Digging in my pocket, I came up with a Maglite and held it under the barrel of my pistol as I dropped down the staircase into a basement filled with moldering junk and rusting tools.

They have to be in the barn, I thought, and almost turned to climb out after Bree. Then my flashlight beam picked up footprints in the dust that quickly became a well-trodden path across the basement to an empty set of floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves. Why there? Had Carney emptied the shelves recently? What had been there?

For the second time, I almost turned around.

Then I felt the slight breeze hitting my cheeks. But it wasn’t coming through the open door and down the stairs. It was blowing at me from the direction of the empty shelves. Moving fast now, I crossed to them, shining my light, seeing thick dust, and then fingerprints on the right side.

I reached out and tugged. The shelf barely moved. I set my pistol and flashlight down and grabbed it with both hands. The entire unit came free of the wall and swung toward me, moaning on rusting hinges.

“Alex?” Bree whispered over the radio. “I called Montgomery—”

I snatched up my radio, whispered, “Come back.”

Nothing.

“Bree?”

Nothing.

I hesitated, ducked down into the narrow, low-ceilinged tunnel, and tried again. “Bree?”

But all I got in return that time was static.

CHAPTER 73

Outside in the mist, Bree clicked on the Transmit button of her radio again but got zero. Her unit had died. She set it down on an old picnic table and hesitated, wondering whether to call Alex on his cell.

But then she heard something and all thoughts of calling her husband disappeared. It had been a brief noise that seemed to come from inside the old barn. Gun up, she angled fast through the high grass toward the near front corner of the sagging structure. Had that noise been the breeze whistling softly through the decrepit building? Or a muffled cry of desperation?

She stopped, listening, and then heard it again, short and almost squeaky, as if she was catching only the highest part of a longer cry. Up close, she could see how the barn had come off the sills and foundation in places. Was it safe?

The cry came a third time, louder, and Bree turned selfless. She was here to save those children from a madman. Nothing less would do.

She rounded the corner toward a set of big sliding doors and tried to push one open. It moved about eight inches before jamming in the mud. But it was enough for her to squeeze through into a dim space that smelled of old hay and spoiled leather.

Pigeons flushed from roosts on the beams above her and fled for that burned hole in the roof. Bree got out her Maglite and shined it around, seeing a loft, and a trail where lightning had spiraled from the roof down a massive wooden support post and scorched the floorboards.

The noise came louder now. Bree recognized words.

“Please!” Cam Nguyen was crying. “Please!”

It was coming from deep beneath the floorboards.

Bree shined her light, seeing gaps between the boards, and got on her knees, looking through the gaps to see a stone-walled basement cluttered with rusting old farm equipment.

There had to be a way down. She moved farther into the barn, casting the light into every corner and stall, looking for a stairway or a trapdoor. But she found none. Maybe she had to go back outside, find an entrance to the lower level. She turned and headed toward the doors.

As she crossed the charred lighting scar on the barn floor, she heard cracking before planks broke away beneath her.

CHAPTER 74

I would later learn that a man named Ezra Pike must have built the tunnel sometime in the late 1850s. Pike was a farmer on the land, a Quaker, an ardent abolitionist, and a vital cog in the Underground Railroad, which helped slaves reach Canada before and during the Civil War.

But that day, from my perspective, Pike’s tunnel was being used as a pathway to enslavement, torture, and murder. I was having no part of it, and that steeled me, made me determined to rescue Cam Nguyen and those babies. I was fifty feet down the tunnel when I heard the babies squawking somewhere ahead of me. And then the muffled voices of Carney, Nguyen, and the other man and woman we hadn’t seen yet.

Adjusting the beam, changing it to red, I cupped the bulb of the slender flashlight and stalked forward, then turned the light off altogether when the voices got loud enough to distinguish.

“Who’s going to be first, Kenny-Two?” the woman asked.

“I hate to say it because it’s so sad, sister, but it’s the boy, of course,” Carney replied. “Kevin was the first to go.”

His sister? I thought. Kevin? I moved close enough to see light glowing through cracks in the plank wall that blocked the way.

“I went first?” the other man said in a wavering voice.

“I saw it with my own eyes,” Carney replied in a grief-stricken voice. “She drowned you first, little brother. Mother of the year! Mother of us all!”

I pressed my eye to a slit in the wood and saw into a low-ceilinged space with a stone foundation, Ezra Pike’s root cellar, a way station on the long road to freedom. Carney had recently built a crude room inside the root cellar that stuck out of the stonework to my left about fifteen feet. I could see exposed two-by-fours and thick foam insulation coating what would turn out to be plywood walls. Soundproofing, I guessed.

But for some reason Carney didn’t care about sound that day. He had left the steel door ajar. Light spilled out of the room into the main root cellar.

“So Kelli went into the water next?” Kevin asked.

“As soon as there were no more bubbles rising in the tub,” Carney replied as if in awe. “She wanted us to go in reverse order of how we came into the world. Isn’t that right, Mommy?”

My hands searched the corners of the door that blocked the tunnel, trying to find the mechanism that would open it. But I couldn’t find it.

Carney said, “Mommy, give me Kevin to hold while you get down on your knees by the tub. You’ve got dirty work to do.”

In desperation, I pushed against each edge of the wall. The left one budged just as Cam Nguyen screamed, “You’re insane! I won’t do it!”

The babies began to screech and cry. Over their wailing, from somewhere far above me, I thought I heard a crash.

CHAPTER 75

Bree felt the floor giving way and instinctively threw her arms out wide. She fell through splintered wood that ripped at her legs, waist, and ribs before she slammed to a stop, trapped at her armpits. Her lower body and legs dangled in the basement below.

The impact had knocked the pistol from her hand. It lay a few inches away. But she still clutched the little Maglite.

She felt like she’d broken a rib, maybe two. And was that feeling blood?

Like ice fracturing, boards all around her started cracking and popping. For a terrifying moment she thought it would all collapse and she’d plunge through onto the rusting blade of some old piece of farm equipment in the darkness below her. But the boards held long enough for her to realize that she might escape if she acted quickly.

To get her elbows beneath her, she wiggled, strained, and struggled, trying to ignore the sharp pieces of wood biting at her from all sides like so many sharks’ teeth. She made it to her elbows and stopped there, breathing hard and thinking for the first time that the floor busting must have made a terrible noise.

Had Carney heard it? Was he coming for her from wherever he was keeping Cam Nguyen and the babies? Would he spot her lower body, shoot first, and ask questions later?

Sweat poured off her brow and she began to breathe short and fast. She realized she was starting to panic and forced herself to take deep breaths, to calm down, to take things one step at a time.

She began to move her upper body back and forth, trying to get enough momentum to rock forward up onto her hands and then push herself up out of the hole. But she gasped in pain; one of the sharp pieces of wood had found her broken ribs. And she knew for certain now that she was bleeding. She could feel the blood soaking the side of her blouse.

Biting against the pain, ignoring the fact that she was wounded, Bree tried rocking to her left. It worked, giving her just enough room to sharply wrench her weight up onto her right elbow and then her right hand, which found one of the sharp pieces of wood sticking in her ribs. She pushed at it, trying to get it out of the way so she might rock to her right and get her left hand down.

But when she did, the piece of wood snapped away, taking another board with it.

Her right arm and shoulder scraped down through the hole. Her gun went through, too. She heard it clang below in the darkness.

Her left elbow and forearm slid toward gravity, and she began to thrash and grope wildly beneath her.

CHAPTER 76

For a second or two I thought Carney had heard the noise above me, Bree, no doubt, and I got up my gun, figuring he’d come out of the room to check. But the screaming of babies in that confined space must have masked the sound of the crash, because I heard the woman Kelli say, “Course you will do it, Mommy. You’re a crack whore and we know what crack whores will do.”

“When times get rough and the drugs get thin,” Kevin added.

“I won’t do it!” Cam Nguyen screeched, and I pushed at the passage door, getting it open enough for me to squeeze through into the root cellar.

“Then I’ll make you, Mommy,” Carney said, and I heard a sickening thud that set the babies off all over again.

“That’ll fix her,” Carney’s sister said. “Fix her good, Kenny-Two.”

Gun up, I took two steps toward the open door, sniffing the air, smelling body odor and diapers and fear.

“I’ll get her on her knees,” Carney’s brother, Kevin, said.

I took three more soft steps and then a fourth sideways into the light that streamed from the door, looking straight into the chamber of horrors.

Cam Nguyen was slumped in a chair. Her head swung lazily the way a boxer’s will when he’s been dazed by a blow. Her nipples and lips had been smeared with lipstick, making them grotesquely large and gaudy. The babies squalled on the floor next to the tub, which was now close to full. But where were Carney and the others? They had to be either to the immediate left or right of the door.

I heard the rattle of metal to the left as I eased toward the doorway.

From what sounded like the same side, Carney said, “Is everybody in? The ceremony’s about to begin.”

The muzzle of my gun leading, I did a head bob left. My brain registered the fact that no one was there an instant before white fireworks went off in my head, blinding me as I stumbled forward and crumpled.

CHAPTER 77

Groping crazily beneath her with her right hand, Bree felt the burned boards under her left elbow splinter and then collapse. As she fell, her right cheek struck the jagged edge of the hole, which stabbed and cut her. Her head twisted from the pain and her right arm snapped up to protect her face from further damage.

That reflex saved her life. She felt something hit her hard beneath her upper arm and elbow; and for an instant she was hung up on something metal, tubular and strong, like a pipe. The rest of her body swung forward beneath it, dislodging her, and she fell a third time.

She was only in the air a foot or two before her shoes smashed against the lip of something, which threw her forward, prone on a molded metal surface. The pain that shot up through her ribs was electric, searing hot, and probing. Her face felt like she’d been clawed.

But Bree wasn’t falling anymore and miraculously she’d managed to keep hold of the Maglite, which shone forward, revealing an old but gleaming Coca-Cola sign leaned up against the stone wall and boxes and piles of dusty junk. Shaking, wincing in pain, aware of the blood trickling down her cheeks, Bree shined the light around, and understood her location and just how close she’d come to dying.

She was up on the hood of a seatless and wheelless old tractor. Falling through the floor, she’d hung up on a roll bar meant to protect the driver. Immediately behind and below the tractor was a harrow with dozens of circular blades meant for breaking up sod. If she’d hit there instead of here, she would have been found impaled and dead.

“I won’t do it!” Cam Nguyen screeched.

Bree heard her much more clearly that time, but again below her. Was there a subbasement? How in God’s name would she get down there? Despite the blows she’d taken, gritting her teeth against the pain, she rolled over, sat up, and threw her legs over the tractor’s dashboard.

Her feet found the base where the seat had once been attached. She stood there a moment, dripping blood but shining her light over the jumble of equipment, having no idea where to begin to look.

“No!” Cam Nguyen screamed, and now Bree could distinctly make out the sounds of the babies sobbing, as upset as if they were suffering colic.

I can’t save them, she thought desperately, shining the light all around herself. They’re going to—

Then she spotted something, that Coke sign, and took hope.

CHAPTER 78

I hit the floor, not unconscious, but damn close from a blow to the back of my head. A boot connected with my lower back. Another hit higher and I convulsed. My vision returned, but it was off-kilter, wavering. I realized I still had my gun and tried to get turned to shoot, but the boot stomped down on my wrist, pinning it to the ground.

“Detective Cross?” Carney said. “What an unexpected surprise.”

My vision cleared and I saw that the young officer was the only person in the room besides Cam Nguyen and the two crying babies. Carney’s baby face was a mess of twitching muscles, thin lips, and wild eyes that aimed over the tritium sights of a 9mm pistol he had pointed directly at my head.

“It’s over, Carney,” I said. “Whatever this is, it is over!”

“It is never over!” he shouted. “It goes on and on and on!”

I saw his fingers flex toward the trigger.

“Other police are here,” I said. “They’re all around us.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “I would have heard the sirens.”

“They came in silent,” I insisted. “You’ll never get out of here.”

Carney seemed to find that funny. “Of course I’m getting out of here. There are tunnels all over the place. I’ll simply do my business and slip away.”

That thought seemed to distract him from killing me for the moment. He stomped on my fingers and I let go of the pistol. He kicked my weapon across the floor and followed it, splashing through the water that had begun to spill over the top of the tub. Carney picked my gun up, grinned, and kept it trained on me as he stalked toward Cam Nguyen, who wept and cowered away from him.

“Do it, Mommy!” he bellowed at her. “Do what you always do!”

The young officer’s entire body seemed wracked with tremors then, and his posture shifted, turned feminine. So did his voice, which rose several octaves and became a woman’s.

“Take the boy, Mother,” Kelli said in a weird pleading tone. “Take Kevin before you take me.”

With that Carney tossed my gun into the tub and with his free hand grabbed Cam Nguyen by the hair. Ramming his gun against her temple, he dragged her off the chair and threw her to her knees by the tub.

“Pick up my brother,” Carney said in his sister’s voice. “And put him in the water like the baby Moses or so help me God, Kenny-Two is going to turn your brain inside out.”

“Please,” Cam Nguyen began to sob. “I …”

Carney went through another of those minor seizures and I tried to get up and go for my gun. But I had to freeze when his eyes focused again and he raged at Nguyen, “Do it, Mommy. Or die!”

Shaking uncontrollably, sobbing from the depths of her soul, Cam Nguyen reached for one of the babies.

“That’s Kelli,” Carney growled. “Take Kevin first. Don’t you remember?”

Her mouth chewed the air as she picked up poor little Evan Lancaster and held him out over the tub. Carney looked as if he were watching an old, familiar movie, his lips curled with pleasure, as if he were about to recite a favorite line.

“Put him to sleep, Mother,” he said. “Put him to sleep. He’ll stop crying.”

The next ten seconds seemed like an hour.

Carney smashed the back of Cam Nguyen’s left hand.

She howled in agony, dropped one hand that held the baby boy, but clutched him with the other by the side of his filthy little pajamas. Carney grabbed her right wrist to hammer her into dropping Evan Lancaster into the tub.

CHAPTER 79

The explosion in that confined space was deafening, disorienting.

Carney’s right shoulder erupted in blood. He staggered against Cam Nguyen, who let go of Evan Lancaster. The baby fell into the tub.

Carney grabbed his gun with his left hand and tried to raise it.

The second shot shattered his left wrist before he could fire, and his gun fell into the bath after the baby. I shot up to my feet, going for Evan Lancaster, but Cam Nguyen was way ahead of me. She’d plunged headfirst into the tub and yanked up the sputtering boy before I got there.

Over the ringing in my ears I could hear Bree shouting, “On the ground, Officer Carney! Now! Any other move, I will kill you.”

Carney looked at her like she was an apparition in a nightmare. I saw why. My wife’s face was completely swollen and lacerated. There were pieces of wood sticking out of her wounds, and blood ran like spiderwebs down over her face and shirt.

Despite my woozy head, I thrust my hand down into the tub, retrieved my service pistol, pointed it at Carney, and shouted, “You heard her. On the floor.”

The tics and contortions of rage in the young officer’s face began to disintegrate before he collapsed to his knees by the tub, looked up at the ceiling of the crude room, and moaned, “You said we weren’t doing anything wrong, Mommy. You said they were just sleeping.”

CHAPTER 80

Marcus Sunday and Acadia Le Duc heard the sirens long before they saw the lights of the Montgomery County sheriff’s cruisers and ambulances ripping up the slick dirt road toward the field and the farmhouse. The duo was up on a limestone outcropping across the road, back toward the reservoir. Sunday was using the binoculars to look down through the drizzle toward the old farm several hundred yards away.

“Shouldn’t we get out of here, sugar?” Acadia asked.

“Why would we do that?” he replied calmly. “We’re just hikers, or bird watchers, or both.”

Sunday kept the binoculars trained on the cruisers as they turned onto the driveway.

“Those were shots down there a while back,” Acadia complained. “I don’t know how things went down at your house, but I was taught to stay away from police when there’s been shooting going on.”

“Your father the bootlegger taught you that?” he asked.

“And Mama,” Acadia said. “She didn’t trust any cop. I don’t, either.”

“My daddy took somewhat the opposite perspective,” Sunday said, seeing the cruisers and ambulances stop in the overgrown farmyard. “He liked to study the people who might do him the most harm.”

“He obviously never saw you coming,” she replied.

“Oblivious,” the writer agreed as Cross appeared from the house, followed by EMTs pushing a stretcher on which a sobbing young man lay. Bree Stone followed, carrying two babies in her arms. Behind her an EMT helped a young Asian woman wrapped in a blanket.

Sunday tilted his chin, said, “Bravo, Mr. and Mrs. Cross.”

“What?” Acadia asked.

“It appears they’ve got the killer and rescued the babies and the missing prostitute.”

Acadia gazed at him, said, “I must say, you surprise me, sugar.”

“How’s that?” Sunday replied, lowering the glasses and looking at her.

Acadia shrugged. “I figured you’d be upset because, I don’t know, Dr. Cross just beat you there?”

“Did he?” the writer said. “I think not. Were it not for my letter, they would have been days behind the curve, and the Vietnamese girl and the babies would be dead.”

“And how do you know that, sugar?” she asked skeptically.

“It has to do with certain timetables I noticed in the killer’s pattern,” he replied as if lecturing a student. “In brief, he killed them all about thirteen days and some-odd hours after the attack on the massage parlor. So clearly, I am responsible in no small way for their return to safety.”

Acadia smiled slyly. “My hero again.”

She slipped into his arms and pressed herself to him.

“And now?” she asked.

“And now we get down to it,” Sunday replied. “We bring him to his knees.”

CHAPTER 81

I still had a whopper of a headache two hours after Bree rescued me, and the hostages, and took a madman into custody. And my wife’s face and ribs were killing her, even with the novocaine, the pain pills, the stitches, and the bandages.

But I don’t think we’d ever been happier.

The truth is that many kidnapping victims don’t make it home. At some point their captivity becomes their death, and there’s nothing but heartache surrounding the discovery of a body. But at close to seven that Wednesday evening, we got to witness a miracle in the emergency room of Holy Cross Hospital, the same place the ambulance had taken Harold Barnes after his heart attack two days before.

Teddy and Crystal Branson burst in.

“Is it true?” Crystal said the second she saw Bree. “Is Joss all right? Are you all right?”

“Broken ribs, a few stitches, but I’m fine. And Joss is a little hungry, a lot tired, and dealing with a mean diaper rash, but other than that, she’s—”

Teddy Branson began to cry when his wife kissed Bree on her good cheek and sobbed, “Thank you, Detective. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. You’ve given me a reason to live again.”

Twenty minutes later, we got to see the miracle repeated when the Lancasters came in to reunite with their son.

“I just want to hug you,” Dr. Lancaster wept.

“Please don’t,” Bree said, laughing and wincing. “Go on, now, he’s waiting for you.”

“Detectives,” her husband said. “We will never forget what you’ve done for us. We owe you everything.”

Then he and his wife hurried toward the room where nurses were working on their baby boy.

“Pretty nice job, Alex,” said Ned Mahoney, who’d driven the Lancasters over to the hospital.

“All thanks to my better half,” I said, nodding to Bree, who walked over gingerly. “She really saved the day.”

“Least I could do after what I went through to get to you,” she said.

Bree had told me the entire story: how she’d fallen through the charred and rotting floor, lost her pistol and landed on the tractor; and how she’d almost given up hope of getting to the subbasement before she spotted her gun lying in the harrow discs; and then how she’d acted on a hunch, went to the old Coca-Cola sign — the only thing that seemed clean in the barn basement — and pushed it aside, finding a ring in the floor, a trapdoor that led to a ladder that dropped into an anteroom off the root cellar.

“Well, I wouldn’t wish busted ribs on anyone,” I said. “But I’m overjoyed you showed up when you did.”

“Ahhh, that’s so romantic,” she said, laughed and winced again.

“I’ll say it again, Alex Cross,” Mahoney said. “You are a lucky guy.”

“Don’t I know it?” I said, and kissed my wife on the forehead.

“Carney?” Mahoney asked.

“They took him to the psych ward at St. Elizabeths,” I replied.

“You going to do the evaluation?”

“I would think so.”

“We need to go soon,” Bree said. “I’ve got a date with the couch and a big glass of wine. Maybe two.”

“One minute,” I said. “There’s someone I want to talk to before we go.”

CHAPTER 82

Cam Nguyen dozed, an IV in her arm, stitches in the back of her head, a cast around her broken hand.

Outside her room, I could hear the excited voices of the Bransons and the Lancasters celebrating their reunions with their babies. But here, around the college student turned prostitute, there was just the beeping of monitors and the dripping of whatever they’d put in her IV line.

I turned to leave, but she said behind me, “You’re the one who saved us.”

Going to stand by her, I said, “My wife did. We’re both with Metro police.”

“My head hurts.”

“You suffered a moderate concussion,” I said, and rubbed the back of my head where Carney had hit me. “Worse than mine.”

Nodding slowly, Cam said, “He wanted me to drown those babies.”

“I saw it, heard it. A horrible thing. But you’re safe now, all three of you. And Carney’s locked away in a padded room.”

“That’s his name, Carney?” she asked. “He talks like three or four different people.”

“I’m beginning to understand that,” I said, and noticed her eyes drooping. “I’ll be back to talk to you tomorrow, okay?”

She nodded sleepily.

“Is there anyone I can call to say you’re okay?”

“My par …” she managed before drifting away.

Outside, Bree was waiting. So was Mahoney, who said he’d drive us home. Given the way my head was feeling, I wasn’t arguing. Neither was Bree.

Ten minutes later we were heading back into the city. I sat in the backseat. It was long past rush hour, but traffic was thick. Hundreds of cars went by us, each filled with their own drama, their own agenda, completely severed from the madness we’d been forced to confront and defeat that day.

It dawned on me then that the hardest part of my job was the separation from normal, the constant interaction with the bizarre and the troubling. At some point that had to affect you, had to twist your mind, even if you were a highly trained and experienced psychologist. It had to turn you into someone else.

But not today, I told myself. Not today.

I remembered that I had the number of the restaurant Cam Nguyen’s parents owned in California. I got out my cell, found the number in my recent contacts, and hit Call.

“Nguyen Pho Shop,” a man said.

“Mr. Nguyen?”

“Yes, who this?”

“Detective Cross, sir. I called a couple of weeks ago about your daughter being missing?”

A pause. “She dead?”

“I’m very happy to say that we found her alive, Mr. Nguyen. She’s been through hell and back, but she’s very much alive.”

The silence that followed surprised me.

“Sir, do you understand what I—”

“She makes shame working as prostitute,” he shot back. “Cam be better off dead.”

He hung up on me.

CHAPTER 83

At two P.M. Holy Thursday, inside the psych ward at St. Elizabeths, Patrolman Kenneth Carney was strapped to a bed in a locked room having a murmured conversation with no one. The attending psychiatrist, Arthur Nelson, an old friend of mine, said that after surgeries on his hand and shoulder, Carney had been brought there for observation. Despite the drugs, he quickly went from disoriented to grief-stricken to violent. Nelson had ordered him into restraints.

“I’m recommending lithium once he’s done with the opiates,” Nelson said when I turned from the small bulletproof window set in the door.

“I’d like to talk to him now,” I said.

Nelson raised an eyebrow but said, “Your call, Alex. You’ve dealt with more of the criminally insane than I have.”

I looked over at Sampson, Bree, and Elaine Brown, an assistant district attorney who’d been assigned to the case. All three nodded.

“I’ll have him brought to a treatment room,” Nelson said.

We went out into a waiting area. Assistant DA Brown disappeared to make some phone calls. My head still ached. Of course it didn’t help that Bree, Nana Mama, and I had polished off two bottles of Chianti the night before to dull the pain of our wounds and celebrate the fact that despite the way Cam Nguyen’s father had reacted to his daughter’s rescue, we’d solved an almost impossible case.

At least that was how Captain Quintus had described the investigation on the eleven o’clock news, adding that my wife would be receiving a special commendation for her heroic efforts. Both the Lancasters and the Bransons had appeared on camera as well, holding their babies and praising us and the department for making their families whole again.

As the news stories had noted, however, the exact motives behind Carney’s actions remained murky. Which was why we were all at St. Elizabeths and not taking a hard-earned day off for a job well done.

Sampson’s search of Carney’s apartment had turned up the 9mm pistol the officer had used to murder eight people in cold blood. He also found the ash-colored wig, the clothes, and even the makeup the hairless young man had applied to transform himself into Kelli Adams the kidnapper; as well as the hoodie, brown wig, and fake beard he’d used when roaming the streets as the mass murderer Kevin Olmstead.

But my partner discovered nothing concrete to explain Carney’s insane behavior. Then again, that’s why they’re called crazy.

You have to think a little loony to talk with someone who is criminally insane, at least if you want to gain some real insight into his deep personality. Wishing to God I didn’t have a headache, I tried to get myself to that crazy place, to remember everything I’d heard in the root cellar before he hit me, and then to imagine the subtext of that bizarre conversation.

I could see some of it, but there were big holes I couldn’t explain.

“John,” I said.

“Alex?” Sampson said.

“Call Mahoney and ask him to find out why Carney was turned down for marine recon after passing the physical requirements.”

He nodded. “I have some marine friends at the Pentagon who might be able to help, too.”

“Alex?” Dr. Nelson said, looking out at us from a doorway. “Patient is in room two on the right.”

“You observing?” I asked, going by him.

“We all are. By video feed in my office.”

“Good luck, baby,” Bree said. Despite the wounds and the broken ribs, she’d refused anything more than Advil. It showed in the way she moved and spoke, stiff and slow.

I paused, took a deep breath, understood that this might be a bumpy ride, and went in to face Carney. He was restrained on the bed, looking off into space, when I took a seat opposite him. High behind me a camera rolled.

Studying the young officer a moment there in the bright light, hairless, baby-faced, I could see how with the right makeup and clothes he’d look feminine enough to fool another woman even at close quarters.

“Officer Carney,” I began.

He looked over at me with disdain, said, “Wrong name.”

“Okay,” I replied. “Who am I talking to?”

Carney laughed, said, “Bang. Bang. As if you don’t know.”

Then I got it and said, “Oh, hello, Kevin.”

Carney smiled, nodded, said, “See, I told ’em you’d know who I was.”

CHAPTER 84

I cleared my throat, said, “Told who? Kenny-Two? Kelli? Your brother and sister?”

“Who else? Officer Goody Two-Shoes?” Carney asked agreeably, then paused and gave me a suspicious look. “Why you asking about Kelli and Junior? Pay attention. You talking to me now, asshole!”

I held up my palms to him, said, “Just trying to understand the—”

Carney’s agitated face became a sea of minor tics and palsies. His eyes quivered, got glassy, and then fluttered up toward their sockets, while his head arched and the muscles in his neck strained, making his veins bulge. For a second, fearing that he was going into an epileptic fit, I almost went to him.

But as suddenly as the attack had come on, in less than five seconds, Carney’s neck relaxed and his head lolled. He blinked lazily at me and then said in that raspy southern feminine voice I’d heard back inside the root cellar: “You’ll have to excuse Kevin. My baby brother’s faculties just aren’t quite right.”

I studied Carney, wondering whether this was an act or a genuine case of multiple personalities. If it was an act, it was a good one, because my experience and research have shown that people with real multiple personality disorder usually “switch” from one to another quite rapidly. The fluttering eyes and the facial tics fit as well. But the arching of his neck, I’d never seen before. In any case, I decided to indulge him.

“Well, Kelli,” I said, “when you consider what Kevin did in the massage parlor and the brothel, I’d tend to agree with you.”

Carney shook his head, added pity to Kelli’s voice, and said, “Horrible thing what war can do to a young man, isn’t it? The violence just twists them all up inside, spits them out. Makes you kind of understand when they come home and go off like that, you know, just killing everything that moves?”

The fit took him again, and when he rolled his head forward the second time, he wore a tough, knowing expression.

“Don’t listen to that psychobabble crap,” he said in a voice much closer to his own. “Kevin likes to kill, pure and simple. Always has. Always will. And Kelli’s a bit delusional, always out to save someone if I let her.”

“Big brother Kenny-Two?” I asked.

“In the flesh,” Carney replied, coughed, and then his left eye squinted as if it pained him.

“Your brother and sister look up to you,” I said.

“They better look up to the first one out the chute,” he said, chuckled, and then his left eye squinted in pain again.

“You hurting?”

“Lingering migraines,” he said. “We all get ’em. Curse of the Carneys.”

Thinking back to what I’d heard in the root cellar, and what Sampson had dug up, I hesitated fifteen, maybe twenty seconds before saying, “So tell me about the IED that got you in Afghanistan.”

He squinted again, but this time as if he considered me a fool, and said, “How the Christ should I know? Ask the man in charge. He was there, not me.”

Before I could reply to that, Carney’s face sagged, his eyes drifted and shut. His head rocked forward and then up like the head of a passenger drowsing on a plane.

Eyes open and incredulous, as if he’d been shaken from a deep sleep, he looked at me as if I were part of a lingering dream and then took in the bare room, the restraints, the hospital gown, and the bandages on his shoulder and wrist.

He seemed to startle fully awake then, acting bewildered and then agitated, struggling against the restraints for several seconds before succumbing to the pain of his wounds, turning very frightened and fixing his confused gaze on me.

“Detective Cross?” the young officer said. “Where am I, sir? What have I done to deserve this?”

CHAPTER 85

Seeing how unhinged Officer Carney was acting, the psychologist in me wanted to believe that he might have no idea of the things he had done. But the detective in me was much more skeptical.

“You saying you don’t know why you’re here, Officer?”

“Where am I, sir?” Carney asked again.

“Psych ward, St. Elizabeths Hospital.”

“Psych?” he said, puzzled again. “No, that’s not … No, I’m … I’m good. I, I checked out. I’m good. I’m good.” He started to cry and then looked at me again. “They said I was good.”

“Who said you were good?”

“Naval doctors. VA doctors. They cleared me years ago, said I was fine. No problems with the baseline. None.”

“You mean a concussion baseline?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Tell me about the IED in Afghanistan.”

“But what have I done, sir?”

“We’ll get to that later, Officer. Where was that bomb?”

On a road southwest of Kandahar, deep in Helmand Province nine months into his tour of duty, Corporal Carney was riding as a top gunner in an armored car leading a line of trucks carrying supplies for several forward bases. The IED had been buried in the shoulder of the dirt road and detonated as he passed.

“Nothing hit me,” Carney remembered. “No shrapnel or powder residue, just the explosive force, the waves of it going through my head. It was like I was there, alert, scoping for Taliban — hoorah — and then I wasn’t. Woke up like thirty hours later on a medevac flight to Ramstein with a piece of my skull riding beside me.”

Doctors told Carney he’d been bleeding from his nose and ears, and that he’d sustained a moderate closed-head brain injury. They’d removed the piece of skull to relieve pressure. After an initial recovery and second surgery to reattach the skull section in Germany, he was shipped on to the Balboa Naval Medical Center in San Diego, where he underwent extensive therapy.

“Five months and they said I was good to go,” Carney said. “And I was. Went back to my unit, and was crushing PT in like a month.”

“But you tried out for Force Recon and were denied?”

“Yes, sir.”

“They give you a reason?”

“Given my medical history, Detective, they said they did not want to chance it.”

“Make you angry? Sad?”

“Both,” Carney admitted. “But I was only twenty-three. I could see an entire life out there before me. Still do. Please, Detective Cross, what did I do to get me put in here?”

It did me no good to hold back any longer, so I told him.

Carney became nauseated and vomited. “No,” he moaned. “No, I couldn’t. I would never do …” He looked up at me in abject despair. “Oh, my God, sir, what kind of monster have I become?”

CHAPTER 86

Carney was inconsolable and began to struggle wildly. There was a knock on the door. Two nurses rushed in and started to work to calm him down before he could tear his wounds open or rip out his IV.

I went outside to find Dr. Nelson waiting with Bree and Assistant DA Brown. “I probably pushed him too hard,” I said.

The psychiatrist nodded. “Especially given the surgeries last night.”

“I’ll come back in the morning?”

Nelson thought about that, said, “I’ll let you know this evening.”

“What am I supposed to tell my boss?” Brown asked, checking her watch.

“Tell him he’s going to have to hold his horses a little while longer.”

That did not sit well with the assistant DA, and she scowled.

“You believe him, Alex?” Bree asked.

“I don’t know yet,” I said.

“No doubt he’s going for an insanity plea here,” the prosecutor said.

“Maybe because he is insane, Counselor,” my wife said, surprising me.

“You don’t know that,” Brown snapped.

“Neither do you,” Bree said.

I said, “I’m not convinced this is entirely about a head injury.”

“Why?” my wife and the prosecutor said at the same time.

“Because I can’t see a link yet between the injury, the three other personalities, and the heinous things that have been done in this case.”

Before anyone could reply, Sampson appeared, coming down the hallway in a hurry from the elevators. “You don’t answer your phone?”

“Not when I’m interviewing a mass murderer and baby kidnapper.”

“Yeah, well, I think I found some folks you’re going to want to talk to before you go interviewing Officer Carney again.”

He handed me two phone numbers, said, “My contact says they’re busy people. If you can’t reach them at first, keep trying.”

I did keep trying, all that afternoon and into the evening. But as of seven p.m., I had not yet heard back from Chief Petty Officer Sheldon Drury, stationed at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, or Dr. Evelyn Owens of Balboa Hospital in San Diego.

“Dinner!” Nana Mama called.

The air smelled of meat frying and garlic, enough to tear me away from my phone. But Ali rolled over on his stomach on the couch and moaned, “Nana Mama, it’s almost the end. Fifteen minutes? Please?”

“It’s not fifteen minutes until the end of that episode and you know it, young man,” my grandmother shot back. “Now stop it and get to the dinner table. It’s an important night.”

I watched from the hallway as Ali groaned, shut off the television, and trudged to the table as if he carried the weight of the world. Jannie was already at the table, spooning out pork chops my grandmother had pan-seared and then baked in a glass pan with sautéed sweet onions, olive oil, garlic, and a little Dijon mustard. With egg noodles, green beans, and fresh applesauce on the side, there are few dishes in the world that rival it. A cold Dr Pepper only adds to the experience. At least in my book.

In any case, my fifteen-year-old daughter was acting a hundred and eighty degrees different than she had a few nights before, now bubbly and open. Bree sported a new, smaller bandage on her face that showed just how swollen it had become. Her right eye was almost shut. She had to be in pain, but you never would have known it the way she engaged Jannie, getting her to talk about history and English — her favorite classes — and how the coach was expecting great things from her the following afternoon.

For once I just sat down and let them go on, listening to them babble while I dwelled on my sessions with Officer Kenneth Carney and his three alter egos. Was it real? Were there four people in his head? Or was this an elaborate—

“Alex?” Nana Mama said, breaking into my thoughts.

“Right here.”

“The heck you are,” she said, shaking a wooden spoon at me. “I asked you twice how many pork chops you wanted.”

“I was giving it some thought. And I’ll take two.”

Bree, Jannie, and Ali were trying unsuccessfully to hide their smiles.

“Two it is,” she said, and passed me my plate.

We said grace, thanked God for our many blessings, and prayed for Damon to have safe travels in the morning.

“What time’s Damon get in?” Jannie asked, cutting her chop.

Bree replied before I could, saying, “He’s getting the nine o’clock jitney to Albany. Train leaves at ten twenty. He changes in New York City and gets here around quarter to five. He’ll be home in time for supper.”

That thought made me very happy. I knew Damon loved being away at school, but I loved having my firstborn home under my roof.

“Speaking of suppers, Ali, do you know what tonight is?” Nana Mama asked.

“The night I have to wait until I finish Walking Dead?” he grumbled.

For a second there I thought my grandmother was going to lay into him as only a former high school vice principal can, but instead she said softly, “No.”

In the silence that followed, I watched my son’s head twist toward Nana Mama, who’d cradled her chin in her interlaced wrinkled fingers and watched him as if she were magically summoning his attention.

Then she smiled and said, “If you really think about it, the event we celebrate tonight was part of the very first zombie story, the best ever.”

CHAPTER 87

Outside, down the street, in the back of the dark van that now sported a sign advertising a bogus paint company, Marcus Sunday was alone and listening in on the Cross family dinner conversation. Acadia Le Duc was long gone.

Sunday rolled his eyes as Nana enticed her grandson into the story of the Last Supper by selling it as a critical scene in a zombie tale, all the while feeling repulsed by the fact that Dr. Alex’s entire clan was in there munching on fried pork chops.

Sunday hated pork. The whiff of a chop sizzling or a hock boiling set him on edge. So did the odor of bacon. Those thoughts took him back to the months after his father’s death and the skeptical West Virginia state police detective who’d kept nosing around the Mulch farm, acting as if young Thierry Mulch was somehow responsible for his old man’s having a heart attack and falling in among his pigs and having his remains gnawed to broken bones. It had taken DNA tests just to identify the old man.

The detective’s name was Alan Jones, and Detective Jones had tried everything to get young Mulch to admit his involvement in his father’s death, even bringing up the fact that his mother had abandoned the family and his father had recently shot down his idea of going to college to study, of all things, philosophy.

But eighteen-year-old Thierry had been too smart for Detective Jones, razor-focused on the long term. He had never once lost his cool, even when the detective had questioned his decision to sell his father’s farm to a coal mining company that had been after the property for years, and to sell all the pigs.

“Why would you give all this up?” Detective Jones kept asking.

And every time, Mulch had told him the same thing: “Because I hate pigs and because I can.”

Because I can. Wasn’t that the reason you did anything in life? Sunday mused. For a moment he flashed on the industrial pig farm where he’d dumped Preston Elliot’s body. Would there be anything left of him to find?

No, he thought. Impossible. His father had died in a sty holding twenty-four pigs and there had been little to analyze beyond shattered bones and teeth. There had to have been at least a thousand pigs in that barn where he’d dumped Preston Elliot. Maybe more. By now they’d long shit out the computer genius and rolled in it, the way pigs do.

Then Sunday startled from his thoughts and realized that Ali Cross was talking about him.

“Dad, if Jesus was a zombie,” Ali was saying, “do you think he smelled like the one in here the other night, like that guy who came to my school?”

“You mean Thierry Mulch?” asked Cross.

“That was his name, Dad!” Ali cried. “Thierry Mulch. He really smelled bad, like Damon’s basketball shoes. Must have been all that pig poop he grew up in.”

Sunday flashed on a pretty redheaded girl who’d heaped scorn and laughter on him again and again during high school. He saw her again as an older woman pleading for the life of her husband and children.

Pleased by those memories, Sunday muttered, “Just wait, little Cross. You’ll be getting a big whiff of me before you know it.”

CHAPTER 88

Sitting at the dining room table amid the laughter Ali’s comment had triggered, I said, “He really told you he grew up on a pig farm?”

My younger son bobbed his head enthusiastically. “He said he hated it, but it was all good because he used the hate to get out of the pig poop.”

Jannie grinned and punched Ali in the shoulder. “He did not.”

“Did so!” Ali shouted at his sister before turning his protesting face in my direction. “Or something like that, Dad. Ask Mrs. Hutchins.”

I gestured his way with my fork, said, “You know what? I just might do that.”

Ali stuck his tongue out at Jannie, who groaned, “You are such a little brat sometimes.”

“I am not, and you should go sit in pig poop somewhere,” he shot back.

“That’s enough!” Nana Mama cried, then stared at me. “The night that Jesus prayed in the garden and was betrayed and we’re talking about pig poop?”

I stifled the urge to smile but threw a quick glare Ali’s way and said, “Nana’s right. That is enough. And if you want to finish your show before bedtime, you’d better get along with Jannie long enough to wash and dry the dishes.”

“I hate washing dishes in the bathtub,” Ali grumbled. “It’s dumb.”

“Think of washing dishes in the bathtub as pig you-know-what,” Bree said. “Use it to be a better student.”

“Wait, what?” Ali said, throwing up his hands. “How does that make any sense?”

I winked at my wife, said, “Nice try, but you should have quit while you were ahead.”

Later, as the kids washed dishes in the bathtub, I couldn’t help thinking again of the tub in the old root cellar and what might have happened if Bree hadn’t discovered a trapdoor and a second way down from the barn.

I felt my wife’s arm come around my waist. “Want to check the progress on the addition?”

Inspecting the new work was a welcome change, something normal, not deviant, something understandable, not a mystery to solve. So I nodded and gave her a long, deep kiss.

“I didn’t know you liked women who look like the Phantom of the Opera.”

I looked at the bandage covering part of her face and laughed, said, “I think it’s kind of sexy.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Get a room, you two,” Nana Mama said, chortling as she went by us toward the living room.

Ninety-something years old and she still had a wicked sense of humor. Another reason I loved my grandmother so much.

We went back into the dining room. While Bree separated the Velcro strips that held the big plastic sheets in place, I plugged in the extension cord and the work lights.

The builders had come a long way in the past two or three days. The windows were in and they’d begun to frame in the bases for the kitchen cabinetry. For the first time, I could see clearly what the added space was going to mean to our family.

“I’m beginning to like it,” Bree said. “A lot.”

“Me, too. A hassle with the cooking and the dishwashing, but I think we’re going to be very happy when it’s all said and done.”

My wife nodded and looked around with a satisfied smile. “Nana said the electrician will be here on Monday and we need to mark where we want all the plugs and switches before then.”

I’d never had anything built before, so this surprised me. “Contractor doesn’t figure that out?”

“No,” she replied. “He says it’s on us.”

“We could ask his advice, right?”

“Not until Monday,” she said. “He told Nana he’s taking his family to Delaware for the holiday because there’s nothing more for his crew to do until the electrician’s finished.”

I took her in my arms, holding her gingerly because of the ribs, and said, “I love it when you talk construction.”

Bree snickered, rolled her head around, and said, “Well, then, once Ali has finished his show and gone to bed, why don’t we take Nana’s advice?”

“Really? With your ribs like that?”

“We’ll try, okay?”

“As long as you promise to use words like hammer and nail and saw.”

“You have so little imagination, love of my life,” my wife said, very amused. “I was thinking maybe a little plumbing and stud work?”

“Ooooh,” I said before my cell phone rang.

“Don’t,” Bree said.

“Got to,” I said, and answered. “Alex Cross.”

“This is Evelyn Owens at Balboa Naval Medical Center. Am I calling at a good time?”

I looked mournfully at my wife, thought fleetingly of plumbing and stud work, but then said, “Yes, Dr. Owens. It’s a very good time.”

CHAPTER 89

I showed up at St. Elizabeths around eight in the morning on Good Friday. Bree had decided to take the day off so she wouldn’t miss Jannie’s track meet. Sampson had a dentist appointment. And I hadn’t bothered to contact DA Brown. I wanted Carney all to myself and to Dr. Nelson, who would tape and observe from his office.

When I entered the young patrolman’s room, the head of his bed was raised. He wore hospital scrubs instead of a johnny, but his ankles were still lashed down. Even though Nelson said he had backed off on the painkillers, Carney looked like he’d just woken up after a night of very hard drinking, a night when he might have blacked out and gone on a rampage.

“Tell me about your mother,” I said after I’d taken the chair opposite him.

Carney gazed over at me with zero affect for a beat before I caught the slightest ripple of hairless skin at his temples.

“She died when I was a baby,” he said at last. “I never really knew her. Or my dad. He died in prison. I was an orphan. Ward of the State of Florida.”

“Tough being cut off like that, no parents. Happened to me when I was ten. They put me in an orphanage until my grandmother came for me.”

The young patrolman chewed on that, nodded. “I don’t remember much of the orphanage. An older couple, the Carneys — Tim and Judy — adopted me when I was two. I grew up with them in Pensacola, joined the marines right out of high school. My adoptive parents died in a car crash around the same time I survived the bombing in Afghanistan. I didn’t even find out they were gone until I got stateside.”

“So you were orphaned twice?”

“Guess you could say that,” Carney replied, and then pursed his lips. “Why are you asking me these things?”

Clearing my throat, I said, “I’m trying to see if what you believe is real jibes with what I know to be real.”

Carney turned defensive. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re lying to me. Or at least that you’ve suppressed the facts so deep that your lies seem absolutely like the truth to you.”

“No, I …” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Detective. What do you think I’m lying about?”

Diamond cutters will tell you that they’ll study some raw gems for hours, even days, looking for the exact right place to break the stone open so all its brilliant facets are revealed. More often than not, I take the same approach: studying, probing, looking for that moment when I can challenge a subject on some point and use that sharp challenge to crack him and get him to confess. But my gut told me I did not have to wait, study, and draw Carney out — I already understood how to break him wide open.

“How’d your biological mother die?” I asked.

“Bicycle accident.”

I shook my head. “Your mother was murdered, Officer Carney.”

You’d have thought I’d slapped him. “What? No, that’s not—”

“Your mother was murdered,” I insisted. “And your father killed her. That’s why he went to the Polk Correctional Institution. That’s why he died there.”

Carney’s head began to retreat. “No, that’s not right.”

“It is right,” I replied calmly. “And the worst thing about it? You saw your father kill your mother. You saw him strangle her when you were three and a half, not a baby, Kenneth.”

Carney stared at me as if I’d become some alien creature who’d come to haunt his nightmares. Seeing him right there on the verge of cracking, I hit him with the heaviest hammer and chisel I had in my bag.

“What else did you see that night?” I asked. “Why did your father kill your mother? Why did he strangle her like that?”

The tics came first this time, followed by beads of sweat that formed on Carney’s naked head before his eyeballs rolled up ever so slightly and fluttered. His body arched as if he were right there on the verge of a convulsion, before it sagged and he slumped down and regarded me with a knowing smirk.

“Officer Goody Two-Shoes can’t face the past,” he said in a gruffer voice. “Never could. Never will, and that’s a fact.”

“But you can, right, Kenny-Two?”

“Course I can,” he replied with that lazy smile I was learning to recognize. “I’m the lone survivor, Detective, the only one who really knows what happened.”

“Kelli and Kevin don’t know?”

“How could they? My baby sister and brother died that night, too.”

CHAPTER 90

Neuropsychologist Evelyn Owens of Balboa Naval Medical Center had told me much the same thing during our phone discussion. In the wake of the closed-head injury and after Carney had exhibited several short bouts of what appeared to be multiple personality disorder, Owens said she had dug deep into the wounded veteran’s past. What she’d found was beyond disturbing.

According to Florida Child Welfare files, Carney’s mother was named Kerry Ann Johns. On her sixteenth birthday, she had Kenneth. Two months shy of her twentieth birthday, she smoked crystal meth with Kenneth Peters Senior, her boyfriend and Kenneth Junior’s father, walked into the emergency room at Tampa General Hospital, and soon after gave birth to twins: Kelli and Kevin. They were nine weeks premature, habituated to meth, and quickly went into withdrawal. They spent nearly a month in the ICU before being placed in foster care.

After Johns and Peters were released from rehab, they petitioned for and got custody of Kenneth and the twins. Carney’s biological parents managed to stay clean for a year. But caring for any child is difficult, much less three children, with two of them suffering from medical and developmental problems.

The stress became overwhelming, and Johns and Peters fell back into old habits. They began smoking meth again. To support their habits, Carney’s father turned to burglary, and his mother to prostitution.

“She worked in a massage parlor?” I asked Kenny-Two.

“My father hated her for it,” he replied bitterly.

“How about you?”

“Bitch was not exactly mother of the year, was she?”

“That why Kevin likes to shoot up places like the Superior Spa?”

Carney’s eyes barely fluttered before his voice changed into the higher range of the Kevin personality. “Fucking A,” he said. “Does a man good to see filthy whores and their customers begging and dying.”

“So you see your mother in your victims?” I asked.

“Don’t you?” he asked in a scoffing tone.

“Why did you take one of the hookers with you?”

He chuckled. “Kenny-Two says we got to get a mommy home with the kids before the ceremony can begin.”

I thought about that and what I’d heard in the root cellar and said, “Tell me about that night, the first time the ceremony was performed.”

Carney gazed without expression at me for several seconds before his eyes got lazy and his head bobbed. When he lifted his chin, his manner had turned feminine once more.

“Mama said she’d had enough of us,” he said, sounding like Kelli again. “She gave us all cough medicine and told us we were going to take a bath. Kevin and I took the cough medicine like any good baby would. Kenny-Two spit it out.”

“So you don’t remember what happened?”

Carney’s face looked haunted. “I remember seeing her smoking from a glass pipe and crying when she picked up Kevin and said she was going to give him a bath. When she came for me I remember looking for where my twin brother was and Mama said not to worry, that he’d had his diapers changed and gone to bed. Mama said it was time for my bath.”

“And then what happened?”

No more than two beats passed with Carney’s eyes shivering before he surfaced once more as Kenny-Two.

“She pushed Kelli under the water while I screamed at her, begging her not to do it,” he said. “I’d seen her put Kevin back in his crib, all naked and wet and blue. I’d seen her pour the cleaning liquid on him. I knew what was happening.”

“Because you didn’t take the cough syrup?”

“Being contrary keeps you alive, ever notice that?”

“Or it kills you,” I replied, and tapped my pen on my notepad. “Where was your father during all this?”

“Smoking glass somewhere on his way home,” Kenny-Two replied in disgust. “He told the court he got to the apartment all wired, saw Kevin lying in his crib soaked in citrus cleaner my mom brought home from the massage parlor.

“Then my dad heard me screaming in the bathroom, pushed open the door, and seen what she’d done to Kelli, and what she was trying to do to me. My mom started crying, telling him everything was cleaner this way.”

“Your dad snapped.”

He nodded. “Choked my mom to death with the cord to her bathrobe while I watched.”

I sat there a long while, trying to absorb it all, thinking about what drugs, a sordid night, and a traumatic brain injury had spawned. Sixteen dead men, women, and children in Albuquerque, Tampa, and DC. Every one of them had left behind lives torn apart as harshly as Carney’s.

Aside from the senseless killings, the worst thing about it all was the fact that a few minutes later, Kenny-Two faded and the eager young man who’d fought for his country and dreamed of being a homicide detective resurfaced.

I gave him a summary of what his other personalities had told me and had to watch it torture him into wretchedness and despair. Carney hung his head and sobbed like an innocent man wrongly accused and doomed for it.

I stood, put my hand on his heaving good shoulder, and said, “I think it’s time we took a break, Kenny. I’ll be back to see you on Monday.”

The young officer didn’t acknowledge me, just continued to cry from deep, deep inside. I sighed and moved toward the door.

“Detective Cross?” he called after me in a trembling voice.

I paused at the door and looked back. “Yes?”

“Can they give the death penalty to someone like me?” he asked.

With more than two decades of police work behind me, I’d thought I’d grown calloused when it came to dealing with killers, insane and otherwise. But that moment devastated me because Carney’s tone was desperate, wishful.

The poor bastard was asking me if there was any hope for a quick end to his suffering. And I had to shake my head and listen to his gut-shot moaning as I left.

CHAPTER 91

It was foggy on the campus of the Kraft School, which felt emptier than it had been during Acadia’s prior visit. Many students had no doubt left already for the Easter holiday week. So much the better, she thought as she sipped from her third double espresso of the day and pretended to admire the architecture of the closest building. It would be easier to—

Damon Cross exited the far door of his dorm and set off on a paved path across the quad, carrying a Puma duffel bag and an orange backpack. Acadia moved diagonally toward the teenager, getting just ahead of him at an intersection of the paved paths. She never looked his way.

“Hi there, Ms. Mepps,” Damon said behind her.

Acadia smiled to herself, then pivoted with a more quizzical expression, saw him, and acted surprised. “Now, look at this. I never expected to see you again, Mr. Damon Cross.”

The teenage boy took that statement somewhat awkwardly.

“Well,” Acadia said. “I just put down a deposit on my nephew’s tuition.”

“He got in that fast?”

“Smart boy, great grades, sugar,” she replied. “How are you?”

“Good,” he said with a hint of bashfulness. “I’m heading to catch the jitney to Albany and the train back home for nine days of sleep!”

Acadia smiled, said, “How much do the jitney and train cost?”

“You mean, like, together?” he asked, checking his watch.

“Yes.”

“I dunno, sixty-eight for the train and like twenty for the jitney. Look, good seeing you, and glad your nephew was admitted, but I got to go.”

“Maybe I can save you seventy dollars,” Acadia said.

Damon had been turning. Now he halted, looked back. “Excuse me?”

“I am on my way to Virginia on business and have to go right through Washington,” she said. “You give me twenty dollars for gas and you pocket the difference.”

Two other students, a boy and a girl, walked by, carrying their bags. The girl glanced at Acadia, said, “We’ve got to hurry, Damon.”

“Okay, Silvia,” he said, looking embarrassed. “I’ll be right along.” When they’d left, he looked at Acadia and said, “I dunno. I don’t think so.”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself. I could have used the company and some help driving. My left eye’s been bothering me and it’s a long way. Good-bye, Damon Cross. I wish my nephew was going to meet you.”

Acadia started back in the direction of the admissions office, thinking that men are like boys in that they always want what they’ve been denied.

“Okay,” Damon called before she’d gotten twenty yards on. “If I can help you with the driving because of your eye, and the gas, I guess it’ll be fine.”

She turned, grinning. “You don’t know how much of a help this is.”

“I should run up there and tell the jitney driver,” he said.

“Do that, and I’ll come around to pick you up,” she said.

Ten minutes later, the jitney left. Acadia pulled up in front of Damon and said, “Get in.”

“You want me to drive, Ms. Mepps?” he asked, putting his backpack and bag in the backseat.

“My eye’s got at least an hour in it,” she said as he got in and buckled his seat belt. “And call me Karla.”

As she drove on, he said, “You know the way?”

“I got here, didn’t I?”

“True,” he said awkwardly.

“Latte?” she asked, gesturing to a center console and two to-go cups from the coffee shop across from the campus. “I figured to drink them both, but we can stop later.”

“Oh,” Damon said, and took the cup. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” she said as he took a sip.

“If you don’t mind me asking, what’s wrong with your eye?”

“The doctor says it’s strained,” she replied. “But my family has a history of glaucoma, so I’m not sure.”

“What’s your job?” he asked, and took a longer draw on the coffee.

“I am a traveling saleswoman,” Acadia replied, grateful that Sunday had convinced her to make her false identity deep. “I represent several fashion manufacturers up and down the East Coast.”

“That’s cool,” Damon said.

“I like to think so,” she said, and went on to move the focus off her and onto Damon, who warmed up and enthusiastically answered all her questions as they drove back roads west toward the New York State Thruway.

About thirty minutes into the drive, however, and soon after he’d finished his coffee, Damon’s energy began to wane. He yawned. At a stop sign she caught him blinking several times as if he were confused about something.

Ten miles from Glenmont, she heard the first thickness in his tongue when he said, “I should probably call my dad, tell him I’ll be home early.”

“Cell service is horrible through here,” she said. “I’d wait until we’re on I-87. Good service there.”

Damon’s words were slurred when she took the exit ramp onto the thruway heading south. “You said, I drive … the interstate.”

“Sorry, sugar,” she said. “You’ve had much too much Rohypnol to be anywhere near the wheel of a car.”

Acadia glanced over to find him staring with unfocused eyes.

“Roofie?” he said woozily. “That’s … a date-rape drug.”

“Yes, it is,” Acadia said, patting his leg as he started to pass out. “But don’t you worry your virgin little heart over it. You and I are going on a far stranger journey than sex.”

CHAPTER 92

Around the corner from the Cross residence, Sunday waited patiently in the van, which now sported a magnetic sign that read, SILVER SPRING ELECTRICAL CONTRACTORS AND REPAIR. It was a quarter to noon. The guys from Dear Old House were just leaving for the holiday weekend.

Things were falling neatly into place, he decided, putting the van in gear the second they left his view. Acadia had texted him that she’d picked up a friend and was on her way, already driving across the George Washington Bridge.

Now it was Sunday’s turn to have a little fun.

The writer pulled into the parking spot the contractors had left and got out. He was wearing a set of green workman’s clothes with a badge that identified him as Phil Nichols of Silver Spring Electrical and carrying a metal clipboard. Sunday bounded up the steps and gave a sharp rap on the door, then rang the bell. Moments later, Nana Mama came to the door in her church clothes, opened it on a safety chain, and said suspiciously, “May I help you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said deferentially. “Sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Cross, but I’m the electrical sub on your addition. Did I miss the Dear Old House guys?”

“They just left,” she said.

“Dang it,” he said. “Well, I can probably look at it myself. Can I go around back? I won’t be long. I’m just trying to get a general sense of where we are before heading down to St. Anthony’s.”

Cross’s grandmother softened. “For the Stations of the Cross?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I promise you I won’t be long.”

“You attend St. Anthony’s?” she asked.

“Regularly? No,” he said. “St. Tim’s in Fairfax. But St. Anthony’s is the only church doing the stations at a time I can go.”

She nodded. “I’ll see you there, then.”

“That’s nice,” he said, smiled. “Am I good to make a quick check of the addition, then?”

She nodded. “Come around. I’ll give you five minutes. I have to be over at the church soon.”

“No problem, ma’am,” he said, turned, and walked off the porch and around the side of the house, remembering how he’d sprinted along this same route the night Ali Cross had spotted him. But when he got around the side, the plastic sheeting was gone. The addition walls were all up, the windows were in, and a steel door blocked access.

He heard the key in the dead bolt, put on his happy face. Nana Mama opened the door and waved him in, saying, “It’s not too bad. They just swept it.”

“This will take no time at all,” he said, and went in.

Sunday spent about ten minutes looking around the addition, jotting notes as he exclaimed how nice the great room and the new kitchen were going to be. Rain had begun to patter on the roof when he beamed at Nana Mama and said, “That will do it until someone marks where you want the outlets, the switches, and whatnot.”

“My grandson’s planning to do all that tomorrow,” the old woman said.

“Perfect,” Sunday replied, made as if to leave, and then stopped. “Can I give you a ride, Mrs. Cross? Do my good deed for the day in honor of the good Samaritan who helped our lord in his time of trouble?”

Nana Mama glanced at the roof, listened to the rain, and then nodded. “Very nice of you to offer. And I’m Regina Hope. Cross was my maiden name.”

He stuck out his hand and shook hers, saying, “Wonderful to meet you, ma’am.” He almost added, “I’m Thierry Mulch.” But he caught himself, glanced at the badge, and said, “Phil Nichols.”

“I’ll get my umbrella, Mr. Nichols,” she said.

“Do you want me to go around?” Sunday asked.

“No, no, walk through with me,” she said. “You’re parked right out front?”

“Yes, Mrs. Hope,” he replied. “Thank you.”

He continued on in this deferential way, holding the umbrella for Nana Mama and supporting her elbow as they made their way down the walkway and as she climbed into the van. Nana Mama looked around, saw that the van was neat as a pin, and nodded. “I do appreciate this, Mr. Nichols.”

“Glad to do it, Mrs. Hope,” he said, and shut the door.

Sunday walked around, got in. He fished in his right-hand pants pocket, found the pen, and palmed it. Then he dug in his left pocket and came up with the keys. He started the van and pulled out of the spot.

“You’ll have to go around the block,” Cross’s grandmother said. “St. Anthony’s is back the other way.”

“I thought so,” he said, putting on the blinker and seeing her turn her head to look out the rain-streaked passenger-side window.

Sunday thumbed the pen’s button, seeing the small hypodermic needle drip for an instant before he stabbed it into her thigh and drove a small dose of Rohypnol into her. Nana Mama screamed and tried to reach for the syringe.

But Sunday let go of it and used his forearm to pin the old woman against the seat until she lost consciousness.

CHAPTER 93

Three hours later, Ali Cross skipped across the playground at Sojourner Truth School. Nine whole days of vacation! They weren’t going to Florida or anything like that. But Damon was coming home, and he’d have his big brother to hang out and play basketball with—

The little cell his father had given him rang. He stopped and answered.

“Dad?”

“How’d you guess?”

“You’re the only one who ever calls this phone,” Ali said.

“Oh, right,” his dad replied. “You on your way to St. Anthony’s?”

“Yes,” Ali said impatiently. “Where are you?”

“Heading to Jannie’s track meet.”

“I’d rather do that than go to church,” Ali said.

“You weren’t listening this morning. Stations of the Cross are over by now. You’re coming to the track meet with Nana Mama.”

“Oh,” Ali said, sort of remembering that his father had said something about that at breakfast. “Okay. Nana will be there?”

“Probably inside.”

“When’s Damon getting home?”

“In time for dinner. Got to go.”

“Gotta move!”

He and his dad were laughing as they hung up.

Most of the kids had already cleared the playground. Heading out through the gate in the fence onto Franklin Street, Ali turned away from home and had soon crossed the intersection and headed north on the east side of Twelfth Street toward St. Anthony’s, some eight blocks away.

He’d crossed Hamlin Street and was walking by a funeral home when a panel van came roaring up alongside him. “Hey, kid! You Ali Cross?”

Ali stopped, looked over, saw through the open window of the van that his great-grandmother was slumped in the front seat, out cold. The guy in the sunglasses driving looked worried.

“I was bringing her from church to find you and she passed out,” he yelled. “Get in, we got to get her to the hospital!”

Ali didn’t think. He bolted for the van, opened the side door, and jumped in, seeing computers and electrical gear bolted onto shelves. The van was moving the second he closed it.

“What happened to her?” Ali said fearfully. He was crouched on his knees now between and behind the front seats.

“Heart,” the driver said. “I don’t know.”

“Nana!” Ali said, shaking his great-grandmother’s shoulder. “Nana, wake up.”

But she didn’t move. “Oh, no,” he moaned. “Is she dead?”

“No,” the driver said. “She’s breathing. I think. Check.”

Ali struggled to stand, to lean over the seat to see if that was true. That was when the boy smelled the zombie at the wheel. The look of shock on Ali’s face was so deep that Sunday caught it. Cross’s younger son tried to push himself backward and opened his mouth to scream. Sunday was ready.

Quick as a whip, he raised an aerosol can and sprayed the boy in the face with vaporized chloroform. The boy staggered backward, smashed off one of the shelves, and collapsed on the floor of the van.

Sunday opened a window and kept an eye on Ali in the rearview mirror as he drove toward St. Anthony’s Church. The chloroform would not last long.

He pulled in and parked in the small lot behind the church. Within three minutes he’d injected Ali with about the same amount of Rohypnol as he’d given his great-grandmother, enough to keep them both out a good twelve hours.

Before he drove on, he texted Acadia: Got two. Your play.

CHAPTER 94

Jannie was all warmed up, stripped down out of her sweats, and making little sprints to get her muscles firing. My daughter was as tall as or taller than the other girls warming up for the quarter-mile. But she was easily the thinnest girl out there, as well as the youngest athlete in the entire event, the first meet of the year, a prestige invitational on Benjamin Banneker High’s home track.

Sitting in the stands, I checked my watch, said, “Ali and Nana are going to miss this if they don’t get here soon.”

“They’re probably caught in traffic,” Bree said, shading her eyes from the afternoon sun. “Call them.”

Reaching for my phone, I heard the starter call out: “Take your mark.”

“Too late, here we go,” Bree said as the seven girls in the race moved toward the starting line. Jannie was in lane two, well back in the stagger.

“She told me at breakfast that she’s got no expectations,” I said, despite the fact that my stomach was doing flip-flops, the way it always does when I see one of my kids about to compete. “Her coach said this is just for the experience.”

“That why you’re practicing your ballet pose?” my wife asked.

“Just trying to see a little better,” I replied.

“Alex, you’re six three, you can always see a little better.”

“Set,” the starter said, raising the gun.

The gun went off and they sprang off the line, driving their arms and legs down the straightaway toward the first curve. Once around the track as fast as you can go, the quarter-mile takes speed, strength, and guts.

My daughter had gone to the starting line remarkably relaxed, but the second the pistol fired, the intensity exploded out of her with such force that it caught me completely off-guard.

So did her speed, which was evident almost immediately as she began to make up the stagger and run the curve. When they entered the backstretch, Jannie was barely third and boxed in by the second- and fourth-place runners. I wasn’t thinking strategy, just praying that she hadn’t blown her wind in that first hundred and ten yards.

But again to my surprise, Jannie ran with the older girls stride for stride down the backstretch, and she didn’t look like she was straining at all. Then they entered the far turn, still in that tight bunch with Jannie boxed in third, jostling with the elbows of the second- and fourth-place runners. I felt certain she’d stay boxed as they exited the curve and headed toward home.

Then the girl in second place, a senior from College Park, made her move, trying to get ahead of the leader, a senior from Eastern High. The girl in front sped up and gave no ground, but the give-and-take opened up a gap between the second- and fourth-place girls.

Jannie seized on the opportunity like a cagy veteran. She leaped diagonally through the opening. Showing strength and guts I’d never known she had, my daughter gritted her teeth, dug deep, and ran like there was a lunatic with a blowtorch chasing her.

She caught and passed the girl from College Park with sixty yards to go and ran neck and neck with the senior from Eastern, who was a fighter, too. She held Jannie off until the thirty-yard line, where my baby girl hit the afterburners and broke the tape two full body lengths ahead.

CHAPTER 95

Bree and I went wild, or at least as wild as two bruised and injured people can, cheering and whooping it up along with hundreds of Jannie’s schoolmates who were stomping their approval on the metal grandstands and clapping wildly.

Down on the track, the coach was hugging Jannie. The other competitors in the race were eyeing her in shock and awe. My daughter was at least three years younger than them, a girl against women, and she’d blown their doors in. I still couldn’t believe it as Bree and I made our way down to the track.

Jannie came toward me with the coach in tow. She had tears in her eyes.

“Did you see it?” she asked.

“Every incredible second of it.”

“Fifty-four nine,” said the coach, an earnest guy in his late thirties who looked shocked. “Paul Anderson. Honor to meet you, sir, ma’am. Saw you both on the news the other night.”

Bree touched her facial bandages and smiled. “What’s fifty-four nine?”

“Why, her time,” Anderson said, beaming.

“That’s good?” I asked.

“Mr. Cross, that’s one-point-twenty-five seconds off the national high school record of fifty-three sixty-five, set back in 1979!” Anderson said. “It’s also now the school record!”

“That is good,” Bree said.

“At fifteen? In her first race?” Coach Anderson cried. “It’s ridiculous! And I’m telling you, that wasn’t the strongest I’ve seen Jannie run. Not by a long shot.”

This was all staggering news, hard to wrap my head around. I knew it was a big deal that she’d made the Banneker track team, but this?

“So what exactly are you saying?”

He leaned over the fence and replied, “Get ready for every NCAA Division One track coach to come to watch her run and knock at your door with scholarship money. Get ready to watch her smash records in the coming years. Your daughter, Detective, is a running marvel.”

Glancing at Jannie, who was grinning, her eyes shiny, I said, “Don’t let it go to your head.”

“I promise,” she said, and laughed.

“We’ll all talk later,” Coach Anderson said. “I’ve still got athletes in the last few events.”

“Absolutely,” I said, then looked at my daughter in wonder. “Where did that come from?”

She shrugged. “I have absolutely no idea. I’ve always been fast, but I dunno, something clicked last year, and running just felt different.”

“God’s given you a remarkable gift,” Bree said. “You’re obligated to work hard to make that gift as big as it can be. You know that, right?”

Jannie nodded and glanced at me.

“She’s right,” I said, and tried to lean over and kiss Jannie.

But she pulled back, acting embarrassed, and whispered, “Dad. C’mon.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was overwhelmed by the moment.”

“Need a ride home?” Bree asked, trying to defuse the awkwardness.

Looking uncomfortable, Jannie said, “I should finish watching the meet. Be part of the team.”

“You should,” I said, checked my watch. It was ten past four. “I’m going to Union Station to get Damon.”

“I’m going to get dinner,” my wife said. “See you in an hour?”

“Hour, hour and a half,” I said.

We headed toward the exit. We were almost out when I said, “Wait, I should tell Jannie that if Nana Mama and Ali show up they should all take a taxi home.”

But when I turned, I saw something I wasn’t expecting at all. My baby girl, my track prodigy, was talking to a very tall, very muscular, very handsome boy, and she was smiling wider than she had been winning the race.

“I thought there might be something going on there,” Bree said. “His name’s Will Crawford. He’s the captain of the team.”

This whole teenage daughter thing was new to me. So was the idea of boys in her life. Honestly, I felt like I was constantly in unexplored terrain with Jannie. “So what should I do?”

“My advice?” Bree said. “Give her some space. Send her a text and walk away.”

CHAPTER 96

Damon was supposed to arrive at Union Station at four forty-five.

I got to the station with four minutes to spare and jogged through the grand main hall, remembering the last time I was in the rail depot, back on Christmas Day, when a terrorist named Hala al-Dossari tried to bomb the place.

Al-Dossari was currently behind bars in a federal super-max facility in Kansas, but she would always haunt Union Station, at least in my mind.

Approaching the Amtrak ticket counter, I glanced up at the arrivals and departure board and saw that Damon’s train was right on time and passengers would arrive through gate G.

Hey bud, I texted him. I’ll be right at the top of the stairs.

I expected some kind of rapid response. After all, that was what Jannie had given me, answering my text about Ali and Nana Mama within thirty seconds. But I got nothing back from Damon. Then again, he rarely answered his phone. Why was I paying fifty bucks a month so he could have the damn thing if he—

The train’s arrival was announced, and quickly passengers began to pour up the stairs through gate G. But they were all gone within ten minutes. I walked down the stairs and found the porter, who said he’d just walked the length of the train and it was empty except for Amtrak personnel.

Had Damon missed it? Wouldn’t he have called? Or texted?

I tried his cell and was immediately switched to voice mail, which meant either the phone was off or the battery was dead. But couldn’t he have borrowed someone else’s phone? He knew I’d be waiting. I’d told him so the other night.

Maybe he had missed it and was taking the next express train, or a local. I went back up into the main hall to the ticket counter and asked the teller if he could check to see if Damon had gotten on the train at Albany.

“Can’t do that,” the teller said snippily. “Right-to-privacy laws.”

I showed him my badge, and he sniffed. “It’s a federal law, Detective.”

“Do me a favor?” I asked.

“If I can,” he said, in a way that said he wouldn’t.

“Call Amtrak Police Captain Seymour Johnson for me?”

The teller stiffened. “I know who he is.”

“I bet you do.”

Captain Johnson owed me big-time for my role in helping to unravel and thwart the al-Dossari bomb plot, and ten minutes later he looked up from his computer and shook his head. “He’s not in the system, Alex.”

Okay, I thought, trying to remain calm. Where is he? Where could he be?

I thought of calling Bree and Jannie to see if they’d heard from him, but it seemed unlikely. If anyone, he would have tried to contact me. I scrolled through my contacts list and found the number of the Kraft School. I got a recording that said the school was in recess for the Easter holiday and told me to push zero in an emergency.

A security guard named Whitfield answered in a bored tone. I identified myself as Damon Cross’s father and explained the situation.

“Oh, you know kids,” Whitfield replied. “He probably—”

“Could you check his room, please?”

The guard hesitated. “I don’t know if I can—”

“Mr. Whitfield,” I said, hugely irritated. “Is it not true that one of your fellow guards was killed in the past week?”

That got to him. “Yes. But that has nothing—”

“Mr. Whitfield, I am a homicide detective, so we’re going to go with my instincts here. I want you to go and check my son’s room and then get back to me. And I want the name of the jitney service he was supposed to have used to get to Albany. Or I’ll track down the headmaster and see what he can do.”

“I’ll call you back in ten minutes,” Whitfield said, and hung up.

I called Bree and was relieved when she picked up. “Where are you?”

“Almost home from Maine Avenue Fish Market with crabs and a jar of Blue Crab Bay boil seasonings. Damon’s favorite.”

I told her about Damon not making any train from Albany that morning.

“But where would he go?”

“I’m trying to figure that out,” I said.

“Keep me posted,” she said. “But Alex, Damon is a big boy who can take care of himself. Let’s not panic yet. He probably got a ride and forgot to tell you.”

But as I hung up, I had the growing, oppressive sense that something could be going very wrong in my son’s life. I flashed on his late mother, saw her holding him as a baby. That only fueled my fears.

Where are you Damon? Where are you, son?

Please, God, make my boy okay.

CHAPTER 97

Jannie Cross had never felt like this before. It was as if in one day, one afternoon really, she’d become a different kind of creature, like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly in 54.9 seconds. This morning she’d come to school as Jannie Cross, the only freshman varsity runner, and she’d just left, heading toward the Howard University Metro station with people calling her a phenom and Will Crawford asking if she was interested in going to the senior prom.

The senior prom! With Will Crawford!

It was easily the greatest day of her life, exhilarating and scary and fun and too many other emotions to count. Could it get any better than this? Was what Coach Anderson said true? Could I break more records? Run in college? Or even go to the Olympics?

That last question sent shivers down her spine. Could I do that? Run at that level? Faster than anyone in the world?

Jannie felt indescribably warm and complete at that idea. It was as if she’d found her purpose and identity in life, doing something that she loved, something that made her very, very happy. The fact that her dad had been there to see it was so good. And Bree, too. It was all good, all—

“Jannie Cross?” a woman asked in a soft southern drawl.

Jannie startled and looked up. She was still two blocks from the Metro station. There was a very pretty woman with curly blond hair, in jeans and a leather jacket, in front of her at the curb, holding a car door open.

“Yes?” Jannie said, feeling uncertain about the situation.

“My name’s Dee-Dee,” she said. “I’m a friend of your brother Damon. And, well, you were the first person he wanted to see when he got home.”

Jannie cocked her head, confused. “He’s in there? Damon?”

“Still asleep after helping me on the long drive from school,” the woman said so softly that Jannie was forced to come closer to hear. “I think he had a long night with his friends.”

“I thought my dad was picking him up at the train station,” Jannie said, taking several steps toward the car. She looked into the backseat and saw Damon sleeping on a pillow leaned up against the rear right window.

“I was coming right through DC,” Dee-Dee said. “And he helped with gas and driving, but before he went to sleep, he forgot to give me your address.”

“That’s easy,” Jannie said. “I’ll show you.”

Pleased, the woman closed the rear door and opened the front passenger door. “Thank you so much. He was actually very excited to be coming home, before he hit the snooze button.”

Jannie’s head was so full of thoughts and dreams that she barely heard the woman. It was enough that her big brother was in the car and she could wake him and tell him all that had happened that day.

She climbed into the front seat and was putting on her safety belt when she finally realized that something was off about the situation. “How did you know where I—?”

When the needle jabbed into the side of her neck, Jannie made a yipping noise, like a puppy that’s had its paw stepped on, and almost immediately saw dots and then blackness.

CHAPTER 98

At that same moment, Marcus Sunday waited in the shadows where the new addition met the old house. Thanks to Nana Mama’s key, he’d been able to sneak in the back a solid half hour before Bree Stone returned home. He’d gone upstairs and printed a few items, and then had returned here to wait.

Through the plastic sheeting that sealed off the construction site, he watched Cross’s wife enter the dining area, moving stiffly, her face bandaged. She’d been hurt somewhere in her core, he thought. That was good. A trained cop is a difficult person to manage. An injured cop not so much.

Bree put two sacks of blue crabs on the dining room table and then set about filling a big pot with water to put on the little two-burner they’d been using. Gingerly she removed her jacket. She was wearing her shoulder holster, left side, the injured side, so she’d have to reach across her body to draw.

Sunday was so close to the second-biggest prize of the day that he had to fight not to hyperventilate. The writer lived for these kinds of moments, when he was free, unencumbered by any convention whatsoever, a stranger in many ways even to himself.

Boundaries? Limits? There were none now, as far as he was concerned. No reason to be subtle here, he thought. When you get the chance, you take her.

But Sunday was cunning enough to understand that he couldn’t act like a bull in a china shop. He had to do this cleanly, with no noise that might alert Bree before it was too late.

She turned on the burners, put a lid on the pot, and went upstairs to change. She was deeply favoring her left side. Good. All good.

Sunday knew from experience that the long Velcro strips that sealed off the Visqueen sheets might be loud enough to be heard upstairs.

Instead of chancing that, he got out a utility knife with a fresh blade, and a 9mm Beretta, and waited. The hypodermic needle with the Rohypnol was in his shirt pocket, ready to go.

Now all he needed was for Bree to return to see if the pot was boiling. Five minutes later, he heard the staircase creak and the padding of feet. Cross’s wife walked right into the dining room, right to the pot. She had her back to him, wore sandals, yoga pants, and a loose blouse. No holster. No gun.

In two silent diagonal downward slashes, Sunday opened a large triangle of the sheeting. It flapped forward, leaving the writer a gaping hole through which to aim. “You watch pots, they never boil,” he growled at her.

Bree jumped and knocked into the pot. It fell. The heated water poured all around the bags of crabs. She tried to turn around, but Sunday was already through the sheeting and right behind her, the muzzle of the Beretta pressed to the nape of her neck. “Don’t do it,” he said. “Or I’ll be forced to kill you.”

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” he replied, kicking her feet apart and feeling for a second weapon at her ankle. But she’d taken both holsters off upstairs.

“What do you want?” she said. “Do you know who I am? Who lives here?”

“I know exactly who lives here,” Sunday replied. “So listen. We’re going out through the addition and the gate into the alley. If you value your family, you’ll do exactly as I say. Now, back through that hole in the plastic.”

Bree hesitated and he pushed her roughly in the ribs, showing her that he understood where her balance points were, that he understood where her injuries lay. From that point on, Cross’s wife did as he instructed, leading the way through the addition to the steel door and out into the backyard.

It was just before dark and the neighborhood was alive with dogs barking, moms calling their children to dinner, baseballs striking leather mitts. But the only thing Sunday was focused on as they made their way to the rear gate was the smell of Bree Stone. That, as much as the threat of violence, aroused him. When he and Acadia were finally alone, they’d tear each other apart.

When they got to the gate, he said, “Open it.”

Bree hesitated, said, “I’m a cop. You know what they do to people who mess with cops?”

“I know what I’m going to do if you mess with me,” Sunday said.

Cross’s wife threw the latch and pulled open the gate.

“Slow left,” he said. “Go to the back of the van and open the door.”

The alley was quiet, dark, and empty. His vehicle was ten yards away. Sunday knew that if Bree were to try a countermeasure, she would do so climbing into the van, as much out of panic as opportunity.

For a moment as she climbs in she’ll be higher than me, he thought. She’ll also be seeing her stepson and Cross’s grandmother.

Sure enough, when Bree opened the door and started to get in, she spotted Ali and Nana Mama, passed out, duct tape across their mouths and around their wrists and ankles. She tried to mule-kick Sunday, but he’d already anticipated that move and eased off to the side. With her leg fully extended, he stuck the hypodermic needle through the stretchy fabric of her yoga pants and buried it and the drug in her right haunch. Bree gave a kind of half-scream and fell forward on her broken ribs, out cold.

Sunday pushed her legs in, calmly shut the rear door, got into the driver’s seat, and left. When he was well away from the Cross household, he checked his phone and saw that he had a new text from Acadia: Done. Moving.

Right behind you, he replied.

Tucking his phone back in his breast pocket and putting the van in drive, he thought: Let the enormity of his plight take hold in Cross’s vivid imagination, let him wallow in it a good while before Thierry Mulch flips the switch and shows Dr. Alex his new and stark reality.