Cross My Heart

CHAPTER 99

Around seven that evening, I came home to find the door unlocked and the front rooms of the house dark and silent. I stepped into the front hall and called out, “Anybody home?”

I heard them then, making noises like the clicking of many dead phone lines, or cigarette lighters being struck one after the other. When I flipped on the hall light, six or seven blue crabs scuttled away along the floorboards, claws raised, snapping as they went. There were more loose crabs in the television room and more still in the dining room, some on their backs on the rug, having fallen from the table where the two-burner stove still burned. Our crab pot lay on the floor, water spilled all around it.

My mind seemed to go into slow motion then, seeing the sliced plastic sheeting that separated the new addition from the old house, noticing the sawdust in the water, putting together the puzzle pieces until I grasped the scene the way one might watching a movie. But it was not real. Not real at all.

My voice, sounding far away, echoed in my head as I read the scene: Bree had set the crabs on the table and was heating the water, expecting us all soon for dinner. But someone had come from behind my wife, from back in the addition, and there’d been a struggle. The pot had been upset, hot water spilled, and the crabs somehow freed.

Frightened of what other secrets my house might now be holding, I turned and ran through the crabs and up the stairs. My wife’s service weapon and backup pistol were sitting on the shelf where she kept them, along with her badge.

Whoever grabbed Bree knew her routine, I thought. Waited for her to stow her guns before making his move. Was Bree alone? Or was everyone here when it happened?

She’d been alone, I decided. If Ali had been here, the television would have been on. If Jannie had been here, I’d have seen her laptop somewhere close. If my grandmother had been here, I’d have seen some evidence of her, the knitting bag, something.

I tried to stay calm, but there was a sudden terrible weight in the house where I’d spent so many happy years. The air in my bedroom felt pressurized, as if it were seawater and I was a hundred feet down, fighting for every breath.

What the hell was going on? Where was Damon? Where was my wife? Jannie? Ali? Nana?

I had the overwhelming sense that I was in danger of drowning as my mind tried to answer the single question that came to dominate my thinking: What has happened to my family and why?

Sampson, I thought. Someone clearheaded. He can help me figure out—

My cell phone buzzed, alerting me to a text message. Grabbing it from my pocket, I looked at the sender and felt a rush of joy. Jannie had sent me a—

Two photographs came in. I opened them, seeing Bree, Ali, and Nana Mama in the first, and Damon and Jannie in the second. They all appeared unconscious, with duct tape wrapped about their wrists and ankles and strips of it stretched across their mouths.

A message accompanied the second picture, the one of Damon and Jannie: Don’t even think about calling Sampson, or your other friends with Metro and the FBI. Look around. You are alone now, Cross. And I am watching you. If you try to bring in reinforcements to your cause, your family dies, simple as that. Do not leave your home. Await further instructions to follow — T.M.

“T.M.,” I said, feeling scalded inside. “Thierry Mulch.”

CHAPTER 100

Mulch, the faceless phantom who’d been lurking at the periphery of my life the last two weeks — sending crude letters, speaking at my son’s school, for God’s sake — now had my children, my wife, and my grandmother. That reality pounded through my head like so many wild horses. I got woozy and nauseated. I sat on the edge of my bed and massaged my temples with the heels of my palms, thinking: Who is he, Mulch? That Internet entrepreneur from Southern California who’d gone to Ali’s school? Or one of the other Thierry Mulches I’d found on the Web?

And what was his motive? Why was he doing this to me? What sort of leverage was he looking for? Was this for himself, or on behalf of a third party?

But it was the peril that my family faced that finally hit me like a shock wave off a roadside bomb. My imagination conjured up ten or more terrible endings for my wife, my children, my grandmother. Each of them felt like a concussion, one after another, so bad I feared I might crack like Carney had, splinter into several people, strangers every one.

Then my rational side stepped up, demanding that I detach from what might be happening to them, that I address the evidence and the facts. They were the only paths that might lead me to Mulch and my family.

Call Sampson. Call Quintus. Call Mahoney. Get them involved. You need manpower, and you need it now.

But Mulch had said he’d kill my family if I made that move. And he’d said he’d be watching, that he would know. Was he boasting? Bluffing?

No, I decided, he was clever enough to kidnap my entire family in an afternoon. It suggested planning. A lot of planning. So if he said he’d be watching, he’d be watching.

But how would he know if I contacted outside help?

I got to my feet then, turned off the light in the bedroom, crossed to the window, eased back the drapes, and looked down on Fifth Street. It was nearly nine by then and the sidewalks were quiet. Cars choked both sides of the street. Though the oak leaves were out, I could still see a long way east and west.

Retrieving a pair of binoculars from the closet where Bree and I kept our weapons, I began studying each vehicle in turn, looking for someone inside, or anything out of the ordinary. But I spotted no one near or in their cars on the half-block to either side of our place.

Had Mulch rented a house or apartment that had views of mine? I peered out at each house, using the binoculars to look for someone looking back at me. I did the same from Jannie’s room, above the side yard, and from Nana Mama’s room, which faces the back and the alley. I looked out every window and had suspicions about neighbors I’d known for years.

Nothing. No one.

Had I seen anything strange in the neighborhood recently? I supposed our construction project was the biggest change. But then I thought of that vacuum repair van I’d been seeing around. And that blue Tahoe with the tinted windows. Who owned them?

I went downstairs, spooking more of the crabs, went to the television room, and looked out the front windows, which offered a low-angle view of the street. Neither the Tahoe nor the van was there, as far as I could see.

Okay, then how else could Mulch know if I’ve contacted Metro or the FBI? Then it hit me. Ali had said he’d smelled Mulch in here. Why would Mulch have taken a chance like that, broken into my house with two armed police officers inside?

To bug the place, I thought. So he could watch me right now, after he’d taken my family, after he’d told me he had them.

I began to look about slowly, as if the walls had eyes and ears.

CHAPTER 101

I suddenly wanted to tear my house apart, find the bugs and—

Stop!

Stop looking around! I yelled at myself silently. If Mulch has bugs in here, he’s watching you or hearing you. If you start an obvious search, who knows what he might do?

Your family dies, simple as that.

For many moments I just stood there in the television room, staring dully at one of the blue crabs as it crept into the darkness behind our couch. The whole situation suddenly seemed to have been designed with diabolical forethought.

Mulch shows himself to me through a letter, taunts me, and depicts me in a cartoon with a huge penis perched on by birds. Then he goes to give a motivational speech at my son’s school. How did that happen? Who arranged it? Then he kidnaps my entire family and threatens to kill them if I act to save them or bring in help. Crueler still, Mulch watches, or listens to me, as I wrestle with my demons. It smacked of sadism at some level. Mental torture, certainly.

My house became overwhelmingly claustrophobic at that point, and I craved fresh air the way a desert nomad seeks water. But I refused to grab a jacket and go out into the night. For reasons I couldn’t explain, fleeing the house felt like surrender, and I was not surrendering to this man, whoever he was, whatever his ultimate motives were.

I was going to fight for my family, but I was going to have to do it in a way that didn’t seem like fighting. So I did what any normal person would do: I went hunting for the crabs that had taken over the lower floor of the house, grabbing up the ones in the hallway and dropping them into a brown paper bag and then moving the furniture to track down the rest of the escapees.

All the while I looked for signs of electronic transmitters, but frustratingly found none. It occurred to me that Mulch might have put them high up where they couldn’t be easily seen, but where they might provide a wide-angle view of the room. But sure as I was that they were there, I couldn’t spot them.

I didn’t feel like eating anything, so I stuck the crabs in the refrigerator and sat at the dining room table, looking at the pictures Mulch had sent me using Jannie’s phone. At first I just looked at each of them, wondering bitterly if this would be the last image I’d have of my wife, my kids, the grandmother who’d raised me.

Then I thought: Jannie’s phone.

Trying not to act purposeful, I got up from the table and turned off the light. I turned off every light in my house and then eased off my shoes. In the pitch black I padded like a cat up the stairs to my office.

But hadn’t Mulch been in here? I stood in the doorway, thinking of how Damon’s Christmas penholder had been moved, feeling certain that Mulch had moved it, which meant he’d been behind my desk, possibly even monkeyed with the computer. Should I take the chance?

I wanted to log on to a website called PhoneSniffer.com. Two years ago, I’d installed an app from the company on Jannie’s and Ali’s cell phones. Both phones came with GPS chips in them that communicated through the app to the PhoneSniffer site. The last twenty-four hours of activity were visible at any given moment, and archival history was available on request.

But did I dare call up the website here?

No, I decided at last. I needed to be sure. I needed to get out of my house and to a computer I knew was clean without being spotted by Mulch.

Reluctantly, I turned and left my office. I changed into dark clothes and forced myself to lie down on my bed, to avoid thoughts of my hostage family, and to doze until the blackest hours before dawn.

At three a.m. I made my move, exiting the house through Ali’s window on a bar-and-chain fire escape ladder we kept rolled up in his closet. I got off in the walkway between our house and the Hendersons’ place next door. Instead of heading for the street or the gate to the alley, I struggled over the fence into the Hendersons’ yard, grateful that their oldest son, Pete, had taken his Rottweiler, Knot Head, away with him to college.

I climbed the fence into the Olsons’ yard and another into the Lakes’, using my peripheral vision to navigate, not daring to flick on my Maglite. A lock hung in the gate mechanism, but the hasp wasn’t shut. I lifted it out and stepped into the alleyway, looking everywhere for a long moment before heading quickly north, keeping to the shadows. I walked ten blocks before I dared to hail a cab.

Terry Simmons, the cop on duty at the rear entrance to Metro headquarters, was surprised when I walked up at three forty and presented my badge.

“Kind of early, Detective,” he said, pressing a button to let me through.

“Couldn’t sleep,” I said. “How long’s your duty?”

“Seven a.m.,” Simmons said. “Week’s over for me.”

“And it feels like mine’s just beginning,” I said, heading toward the elevators.

Ten minutes later, I was drinking coffee from a vending machine, wondering if I dared call John Sampson while waiting for the record of my children’s activities to load. Was it possible that Mulch had bugged Sampson’s place, too? Mulch had mentioned specifically that I was not to contact my partner. Was that a bluff? Or something he could know?

Confused on that issue, I focused on the PhoneSniffer site, which now showed Jannie’s position every fifteen minutes since four a.m. on Good Friday. Ali’s doings were there as well.

My daughter’s movements had been entirely predictable, based on what I already knew. She’d left the house at seven forty, gone to school, and moved to the track in the early afternoon. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon that things got disturbing.

PhoneSniffer had Jannie leaving Banneker High, heading toward the Howard University Metro station, about forty minutes after I’d left her to pick up Damon at Union Station. Two blocks shy of the Metro stop, my daughter got into a vehicle. By the time her phone had transmitted her position again, she was crossing the Fourteenth Street Bridge, heading into Virginia.

That was the last signal for almost two hours until Mulch sent the photographs of my family. PhoneSniffer pegged the phone’s position on Baron Cameron Avenue, heading into Reston, Virginia. There had been no more transmissions since then.

Ali’s last known location was two blocks from school, heading in the direction of the church shortly after school let out. Then he simply vanished from the tracking system. Mulch had to have taken their phones and disabled them. This was a dead end.

I was about to call a number at Verizon that would put me in touch with a police liaison so I could get a last fix on Bree, Damon, and Nana Mama, when I suddenly remembered my wife saying something about downloading the PhoneSniffer app onto my grandmother’s phone soon after she’d had heart problems the year before.

I went to the account page, and sure enough, there was a tracker app on Nana Mama’s phone. Calling up the page, I was surprised and happy to see that it was still on and had been sending out her position all day and night. The last transmission had been sent only three minutes before.

I clicked on the location, saw it magnified on the screen against Google Maps, and felt terrified for her.

CHAPTER 102

In the ground fog and the first dawn light, the tens of thousands of simple white gravestones looked like row after row of broken teeth, stretching in every direction as I ran along a path through Arlington National Cemetery.

When I’d pulled up at the gate at 5:30 a.m., an armed member of the US Army’s Old Guard had come out of a booth shaking his head, said, “We don’t open until eight, sir.”

I’d showed him my badge and identification and told him I was searching for my grandmother. But he’d refused me entry until I explained that she was ninety-some years old and suffered from dementia.

A little stretching of the truth often works wonders.

“My granddad’s got the same sorry thing, Detective, and he’s only seventy-eight,” the sentry said. “Can’t let you drive in, but you can go search on foot.”

I showed the soldier Nana Mama’s position on my cell phone screen. According to PhoneSniffer, she’d been there since six thirty the evening before. The guard studied the location and told me that she was in section 60, an unfortunately popular place in Arlington these days. Section 60 was where they buried soldiers, airmen, sailors, and marines who had died in the global war on terror. The day before, the sentry said, ten men had been laid to rest there.

That thought only added to my worry as I began to weave my way through the gravestones of section 60, using the map to guide me. When I got to the location of all the transmissions from Nana Mama’s phone in the prior eleven hours, I found three fresh graves.

For a sickening few moments, my mind reeled with the idea that my grandmother might be dead and buried there. But then I remembered that funerals at Arlington are highly orchestrated affairs attended by members of the Old Guard, who often give the dead a twenty-one-gun salute. There was no way Nana Mama was here.

Her cell phone, however, had to be. Gravestones had not been erected, but all three burial sites were covered with fake grass, flower memorials, and small American flags stuck upright in loose soil at the heads of the graves.

Feeling like a ghoul, and asking forgiveness from the spirits of the fallen soldiers, I put on latex gloves and began to carefully search among the flowers. I found the phone twenty minutes later, but not in any of the bouquets or vases.

When I lifted the fake grass at the foot of the middle grave, the phone was just lying there inside a sandwich-size Ziploc bag. I crouched, took a picture with my camera phone, and then picked the bag up, studying the phone, which was dark. I turned the bag over. There was a small envelope in there, too. It was addressed to “Dr. Alex.”

I felt angry. Some sick freak was playing me, and I hated it.

But I set those feelings aside and fished out the envelope. It had not been sealed and contained a child’s birthday-party invitation with little bunches of balloons in the corners. There was no date, time, or place entered on the dotted lines, just these words scrawled in an odd script: “You disappoint me, Cross. I told you to stay at home and await further instructions, and here I find you out looking for your family. Go home, or suffer the consequences. Look at the picture on the phone and go home.”

Grinding my teeth, not wanting to look at the photograph, I nevertheless thumbed the button that activated the screen.

Nana Mama was lashed to a chair. Her head was slumped forward on her chest. A person — head and body outside the photograph — stood next to her, holding a bolt-action hunting rifle, pressing the muzzle to the side of her neck.

CHAPTER 103

I did as the man said. I went home and spent most of the day there, but not before taking a chance and making a short stop at DC’s new state-of-the-art crime lab on E Street in Southwest.

The MPD was in the process of moving from having sworn officers running the lab to employing skilled and degreed civilians who were increasingly taking over the forensics end of investigation in the nation’s capital. But I still knew people in the lab, and when I asked after the manager on duty I got lucky.

Five minutes later I was behind closed doors in the spanking-new office of Lieutenant Commander Alison Whitehead, an old friend and colleague who owed me a favor or three. Without revealing exactly what was happening, I got Whitehead to sign a requisition slip giving me access to several pieces of equipment that I believed might help my situation. The entire visit took less than fifteen minutes.

So I was well within the time parameters of a trip between Arlington National Cemetery and home. Twice during the drive, John Sampson called, and twice I ignored him. I parked the unmarked car in front of the house and went past the construction Dumpster and inside, hearing the phone ringing from the porch.

When I got inside, my partner and best friend was leaving a message about Easter dinner tomorrow. I’d forgotten that Bree and Nana Mama had invited them. Billie wanted to know what to bring.

“Call me so I can get her off my back,” Sampson said, and hung up.

I smelled something faintly putrid in the air then. At first, I flashed on my son, Ali, and thought Mulch might be in the house, but then I realized that one of the crabs must have gotten behind something and died.

It worked in my favor. Grumbling about the dead crab gave me cover to move furniture and clamber around the house, carrying a small handheld device that measured radio waves and electrical activity.

I found the first bug around 10 a.m. It was a tiny audio unit pinned to the upholstery on the back of one of the couch cushions. Barely giving it a glance, I set the cushion back in place as if I’d seen nothing.

That was a good thing, because I realized soon after that there was a camera of some kind in the bristles of the small broom we use once in a blue moon when we have a fire in the fireplace.

The optical bug in one of Nana Mama’s spider plants was located thirty minutes later, soon after I began picking up activity from the ceiling light over the dining room table. Luckily, the dead crab wasn’t a foot away from the camera, under a stand my grandmother uses for her houseplants.

Making a show of it, I picked the crab up by its claw and held it away from me as if it were a skunk. After putting it in a plastic bag and going out back to dump it in the trash can, I went upstairs and through my bedroom, grateful to find no bugs there.

My attic office was a different story. Pacing back and forth as if in a total fret, I was able to locate a listening bug attached to my wedding picture and a fiber-optic camera between two old homicide textbooks on the highest shelf of my choked bookcases.

By then it was noon, I’d been up for thirty hours, and I was completely exhausted. But I felt as if I was making up some ground. I knew where Mulch could see or hear me. I also knew exactly where he couldn’t.

From now on, I decided, I was going to become a creature of the dead zones in my house, making only sporadic trips to the dining room, the television room, and my office.

I yawned in the general direction of the camera in my office and then went downstairs to my bedroom. The pillows still smelled of Bree when I lay down and looked at my cell phone and the Ziploc bag that held my grandmother’s.

Theoretically, my phone was clean. As far as I knew, unless Mulch was some kind of Houdini, it had not been tampered with, which meant I was probably free to send text messages, or even to call from my bathroom with the shower on full blast. But what if Mulch was sophisticated, using intercept technology to monitor any transmissions from inside my house?

There had to be a way for me to communicate with John Sampson and Ned Mahoney without triggering a reprisal from Mulch. If a man says he’s going to kill your family, the last thing you want to do is risk a false move.

My indecision turned to drowsiness and I fell into a troubled sleep in which a faceless man with flaming-red hair taunted me as I tried to run after my family, who were sprinting around Banneker High’s track. But try as I might, I gained no ground, not even on my grandmother.

That was when I realized that Mulch had attached strings to my arms, legs, and head. Still running, I looked over my shoulder and up to see the strings stretching high into the sky, where they met a crossbar held by white-gloved hands.

Aside from the red hair and a polka-dot bow tie, all I could see of the puppeteer was a mouth populated by the gravestones of Arlington National Cemetery.

Church bells tolled in the distance.

The bells became my doorbell ringing downstairs and I roused groggily, realizing I’d been asleep for hours. It was nearly seven in the evening.

Somebody started knocking, and then I heard John Sampson’s voice calling up through the open bedroom window, “Alex? Bree? Anybody home?”

I snapped wide-awake, thinking, What if Mulch could hear that? What if he thinks I called my partner?

CHAPTER 104

For a second I was frozen, staring at my phone and at Nana Mama’s inside the Ziploc bag. The plan came to me in an instant, and rather than questioning it, evaluating it, I ran with it.

“Be right down,” I yelled toward the window.

I picked up the Ziploc bag and palmed it. Then I took a big breath and went downstairs, remembering the placement of the optical bugs. If I was right, Mulch had no view of the front hallway, though he could probably hear any conversation at the front door.

Time for a little disinformation, I thought, turned the handle, and swung the door open so I was looking through the screen.

“Hi, John,” I said in a purposefully weak voice.

“You haven’t been answering your phone, and my wife’s in a tizzy about what we’re supposed to be bringing for Easter dinner,” Sampson said, studying me through the screen. “Don’t you listen to your messages?”

“Not when I’ve got four people puking their insides out,” I said. “Damon brought some nasty stomach bug home from school. Norovirus or something. It’s killing Bree with the cracked ribs and all.”

Sampson took a step back with a foul look on his face. “You got it?”

“Not yet,” I replied. “But I’ve been up all night with everyone else.”

Sampson took another step back, and I took that as a cue to open the screen door and step out onto the porch, saying, “Easter dinner’s touch and go for the time being, John. Could be one of those eighteen-hour viruses, though.”

“Hate those things,” my partner said. “Had one in Cancún last year that laid me flat, and I’m not up to repeating that scene anytime soon.”

“Don’t blame you,” I said loudly, and took several steps toward him, offering my hand so he could see the Ziploc bag and the phone inside. He glanced at it, showed no reaction, just reached for my hand.

Stepping in to throw my arm around him in a guy’s hug, I whispered, “Thierry Mulch, the guy who sent me the bizarre letter about the massage parlor killings, has taken my family hostage. Look at the picture on the phone. They’re all like that. My house is bugged. Not certain about my cell. Mulch says he’ll kill them if I contact police or the FBI. Hang back for now. And pray.”

“For sure, Alex,” Sampson said in a normal voice, stepping back nice and relaxed, as if he heard that sort of dire message every day. “I know Billie still wants to make the green beans and bacon dish you all like.”

“Bacon might be tough on their stomachs,” I said, turning to go back inside. “I’ll let you know.”

“All right,” Sampson said. “Have a good evening.”

“Long as I’m not moving buckets around I’ll be fine,” I said, and shut the door. Pausing there, I listened to Sampson’s footsteps fade away and started toward the stairs and the bedroom.

But then my phone vibrated. A text from Bree: You were told not to contact police. You were told the penalty.

I immediately texted back, He’s my partner, Mulch. He came asking about Easter dinner. I did not call him. Repeat: I did not call him.

For several agonizing minutes I got no reply, then my phone buzzed with a second text from Bree: Suffer the consequences, Cross.

Before I could do a thing, my phone buzzed again — a picture with a time stamp, taken just moments before.

Nana Mama lay sprawled on her side on a cement floor. There was a pool of blood beneath her slack, spattered face, and a gaping wound on the left side of her head, just above the ear.

CHAPTER 105

It was like someone had struck me in the stomach with an axe blade.

Doubled over, I whimpered in a child’s voice, “No. Please, dear God, no.”

I staggered forward, trying to sit on the stairs, but the disbelief and grief were overwhelming, and I lurched into the banister. Falling to the hallway floor, feeling gutted, I sobbed my heart out.

For more than three decades, Nana Mama had been my rock, my anchor, more so than any of my wives or significant others. She’d rescued me from the orphanage. She’d pushed and cajoled me through school, and had seen me receive my PhD in psychology.

My grandmother was right there when I wed my first wife, Maria, and rocked Damon and Jannie for hours when they were babies. She held my hand at Maria’s funeral, and helped me through the tough times after Ali’s mother left me. She had been overjoyed the day I married Bree. Throughout Nana Mama’s entire life, she’d been open and kind and tough to everyone, family and friends, and especially to me.

I’d always thought of her as immortal somehow.

And now, Regina Cross Hope was gone in a pool of blood, lying on some cold cement floor in God only knew what basement or empty building, a bullet through her head courtesy of a psychopath named Mulch whom I knew next to nothing about.

But I instantly hated Mulch. I had never really hated any of the bloodthirsty lunatics I’d faced in the past, preferring to look at them as disturbed creatures I was charged with capturing. But Mulch felt beyond Gary Soneji. He felt beyond Michael “The Butcher” Sullivan, too.

Killing my grandmother, Mulch had gone for the jugular, and I wanted to fight back, throttle him with my bare hands. Knowing he was listening, I almost screamed out how much I loathed him, how much I wanted to kill him, but something deep inside me had me biting my tongue, still hoping that somehow I’d be able to turn the electronic bugs against him.

Nausea welled inside me. Crawling to the downstairs bathroom, I threw up again and again, trying to get rid of something worse than any stomach bug. Gasping, covered in sweat, I sat with my back to the wall by the toilet, wondering if I should just call Sampson where Mulch could hear me and openly declare war on the coward who’d just executed a ninety-one-year-old woman in cold blood.

But for almost an hour, my thoughts and actions would not track. Every time I tried to formulate a plan, my brain peeled off and found that image of Nana Mama dead of a gunshot wound in a garish light. It paralyzed me.

The second photograph came an hour later. This time Bree had taken the bullet, lying on her side like Nana Mama in a pool of her own blood, the gunshot wound visible behind her left ear.

I could not control my agony in any way, shape, or form. It simply devoured me and I began screaming for my dead wife from the depths of my soul.

“Stop it!” I shouted when the initial shock had passed. “Don’t do this, Mulch! No more!”

Trembling from head to toe, fighting off the urge to vomit again, I wiped aside my tears with my sleeve and texted him back on Bree’s phone. Please, Mulch. I’ll do anything you say. Just stop killing them.

Feeling scorched inside, I stared at my phone and then went into the dining room where Mulch could see me. I crossed to the spider plant and looked directly into the camera lens. I cried out to Mulch to spare my children from my grandmother’s fate and my wife’s. I begged him until I was hoarse, and I texted him over and over again: Have mercy on them. Have mercy on my children.

At nine o’clock I got a picture sent from Jannie’s phone. It was my son Damon, executed in the same manner, sprawled on his side in his own blood. My disbelief became a raw, tearing sensation, as if someone were literally skinning me alive and disemboweling me at the same time.

Damon. My firstborn. My son. My—

My mind collapsed inward, forgot time, and I saw Damon as an infant, sleeping in the swing Maria had found in a secondhand store, and me sitting by his side, thinking that I had never seen anything so beautiful. Then there he was as a Little Leaguer, unsure up there on the mound, looking to me in the stands for support. And Damon as I’d last seen him up on the Kraft School campus after winning a basketball game in the final seconds with a perfect three-point jumper.

GONE.

GONE.

The word began ringing in my head, like a huge bell tolling, and with each peal — GONE — I got weaker, and weaker, dissolving, turning primitive, unable and unwilling to move a muscle, knowing that no matter what I did, no matter what I said, Thierry Mulch was bent on killing them all.

I left the dining room and went upstairs. I lay on my bed, looking up at the ceiling, feeling as if someone had been harvesting chunks of my brain, seeing everything in my room as if down a long, dark tunnel that was closing with every minute that passed.

At ten o’clock that Saturday night, the photograph of Jannie came. Same position. Same shot to the head. A girl who hours earlier had been told that her life could be extraordinary, that her talent was almost unlimited, was gone.

GONE.

GONE.

It was my only thought.

GONE.

GONE.

Ali died at one minute before eleven, according to the time stamp. My little boy’s eyes were open and vacant, an expression I’d seen on scores of corpses over the years.

GONE.

My entire family was GONE. For a long time I lay curled up in a fetal position on the bed. Then, around midnight, though I was still unable to think at all, my legs swung off the bed as if of their own accord. I stood up, seeing everything around me as if through a scratched and blurry lens.

There was no conscious thought at that point, but my brain was not dead. Fully infected by the overwhelming virus of loss, my mind turned reptilian, and the reptile commanded me to walk.

CHAPTER 106

Dropping the phone, I trudged out the front door of my house, left it open to the wind of a coming storm. I walked in a state of total shock through the streets of Washington, alternately catatonic and then overwhelmed by grief, sobbing my heart out. People who passed me on the sidewalks seemed creatures from another lifetime. Their laughter was like some foreign language I’d never understand again.

By two Easter morning the streets were deserted. By three, they were empty and dark, and thunderstorms lashed the city.

I’d been walking like that for hours by then but didn’t feel hungry, or thirsty, or tired in any way. When lightning bolts ripped the sky and thunder clapped right over my head, I barely flinched. Not even the pouring rain could slow me or soothe the agony burning through every inch of my body.

I heard my little boy’s voice telling me that the only way to kill a zombie was to destroy its brain.

Is this what Thierry Mulch wanted?

Mulch had destroyed everything I loved, everything I believed in. He’d left me a dead, soulless man doomed to endless, meaningless movement. I started hoping that he or some anonymous street predator would appear in my path at last and blow my head off with a shotgun, or crush it with an axe.

In search of that kind of predator, I walked into the worst neighborhoods in DC, desperate for an end to my suffering. But street after street was empty. Everyone had gone inside.

Some internal guidance system brought me later to a known crack and meth house about twenty blocks from my home. I walked through the living dead in that place, seeing the open sores on their skin, the sunken eye sockets, and their rotten teeth, envying the way some of them were drifting on their drugs and others were so far gone that reality didn’t register at all.

One filthy woman who looked older than my grandmother but was probably a few years younger than Bree glanced up from her glass pipe when I stopped in front of her. Her nose was gushing. Her lips were split and bleeding.

“Whaddya want?” she demanded.

“I want to die,” I told her.

“Join the club, honey,” she replied, cackled, and went back to smoking her glass pipe.

“I have money,” I said to her and four or five other people who were lying around in their various stupors. “I want to die.”

Pulling a roll of bills out of my pocket, I held it up and asked, “Who’s brave enough to kill the zombie?”

Several people lying on a mattress stirred and came alert. One guy in a ratty T-shirt and grimy hair looked at the money hungrily. “How much?”

“All of it,” I said dully.

I heard a gravelly voice behind me say, “I’ll take that deal.”

Then I heard a faint whistle as something swung violently through the air before cracking against the back of my skull not far from where Carney had hit me. Everything exploded and I fell into the deepest darkness I’ve ever known.

CHAPTER 107

I wanted to stay there in that darkness, surrender to nothingness.

So there was no joy when I came to with a searing pain in my head and realized to my dismay that I was still alive. Lying in the filth in the crack house, suffering the second blow to my head in several days, I felt the room swirl like a ship in a whirlpool as I begged God to end the pain, to take me back down into that blackness that had been such a relief.

Opening my eyes, I had trouble focusing for several long minutes. Everything just kept blipping and slipping by me like one of those filmstrips we used to watch in elementary school. When I finally was able to stop the room from spinning, I thought it was empty except for that woman, who looked a hundred years old. She was passed out a few feet from me, twitching, drooling, but still clutching her pipe and butane lighter.

Reaching around the back of my head, I felt coagulating blood and a nasty knot where I’d been hit. The money was gone. So were my shoes. But my wallet and badge had been placed neatly beside me.

Getting to my hands and knees, I felt woozy, sick, and the room reeled like a kite in a gale. I fell back on my side, fighting off the urge to puke.

“Why do you want to die, Alex?” a voice asked.

I knew that voice, though I couldn’t place it. My head felt ten times its size and pounded when I turned it toward a dark corner of the room, where a gaunt young woman with close-cropped bleached-blond hair, dark makeup, and several nose piercings was looking at me, a lit cigarette dangling from her lips.

For several confused seconds I had no idea who she was. Then she rolled her head at me as she exhaled her drag of smoke, and I knew her.

“Ava?” I grunted.

“Don’t call me that,” she snapped. “I’m Bee now, like the bug.”

“Bee,” I said, hanging my head and closing my eyes.

“You shouldn’t be in a place like this,” Ava said.

I opened my eyes, seeing two of her. “And you should?”

“Got nothing better because I deserve nothing better,” Ava said, spitting out the words. “But you, you got everything, Alex, so pick up your badge and wallet and get out of here before something really bad happens to you.”

When I shook my head it felt like paint cans were swinging from side to side inside my skull. “I’ve got nothing anymore.”

“C’mon,” she said, taking a drag. “You have Bree, Nana Mama, and—”

A rage built in me. “No,” I said. “They’re all dead, Ava.”

She could tell by my tone that it was true. The color drained from her face and she stared at me dully for a long while through the smoke curling in her eyes. Tears began to well and drip down her cheeks. Then she stabbed the butt out angrily and got to her feet as if to go.

“Help me home,” I said.

“I can’t do that. It will be day soon and I have to get safe.”

I blinked, said, “Get me safe first. Please? I think … I know I have a concussion. And I’m bleeding.”

You could tell she was struggling, wanting to leave, wanting—

“Just get me home,” I said. “And I’ll tell you what happened to Bree.”

And then we were two survivors trudging through the predawn streets of Washington. As small as she was, Ava managed to keep me upright as we walked toward my home. The sidewalk seemed like the rolling deck of a ship in hard seas.

But I told Ava everything: how this insane man Mulch had bugged my home, kidnapped every member of my family, and then executed them because John Sampson had come to my door. He’d even sent me pictures on my cell phone. Twice during the telling I broke down so badly I had to hold on to a street sign to keep from collapsing.

The whole time, Ava said nothing, as if this kind of tragedy was to be borne in silence and then never spoken of again. I don’t know how she did it, but she got me to the house. The storms had passed and the first light of dawn was showing in the night sky. The front door was still open. Spring-green oak leaves floated in a puddle in the hallway.

I stood there, gazing stupidly at the leaves floating, until Ava said, “Where do you want me to take you, Alex?”

“Upstairs,” I said.

“You sure you don’t want a doctor?”

“No,” I said as my house began to move. “I just need to lie down.”

And then, somehow, she’d shut the front door behind us and had gotten me up the staircase and into my bed on my back. The room spun slowly like a carousel.

“Ava?” I asked, trying to focus on her to make the whirling stop for good.

I could see she was annoyed at me.

“Bee?” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Did you kill that girl and burn her body in the factory?”

“What?” she said angrily. “No! Elise, she was my friend.”

“We have evidence at the scene, your ID and that sweater Nana Mama gave you.”

“Someone must have planted it there.”

“We have an eyewitness,” I said. “A homeless man named Everett Prough.”

Ava looked disgusted and furious now. “Of course Everett said I did it. Of course he put my things there and told you that.”

“What? Why?” I asked, confused again.

“That homeless getup is Prough’s disguise, Alex,” she said. “He’s a pimp and an ice dealer, but no one looks at him twice when he’s dressed like a bum. Elise owed him money, but only half as much as I owed him. Prough killed Elise and set her body on fire as a warning to me.”

She began to sob. “I caused it.”

Even with my blurry vision and my bruised brain, I could see that she was telling the truth. I wanted to tell her she hadn’t caused Elise’s death, and to come forward and testify against Prough to avenge her friend. I wanted to tell her that she would be protected and that she wouldn’t have to run anymore.

But was that true? My own family …

I swooned, remembered something about concussions. I wanted to say, “Don’t let me sleep, Bee.” But all I got out was “Don’t let me go …”

The last thing I remember was Ava standing in the doorway staring back at me, hoodie up, chewing her thumbnail and looking like she was getting ready to run.

CHAPTER 108

In the nightmare that followed many hours later, a blurry figure I knew as Mulch raced through the crack house after smashing my head and stealing my money. Like some cartoon character, I took the hit and still was able to get to my feet and chase him outside, except we were no longer in DC but up on that abandoned farm where Carney had taken Cam Nguyen and the babies.

Mulch went into the farmhouse, giving me just a glimpse of that shock of red hair, and I pursued him down into the basement and through the secret passage. When I left the tunnel and entered the root cellar, Mulch was gone.

But the room Carney had built inside the root cellar was still there in my dream, and light shone inside. I stepped into the light, peered into the room, and saw my family laid out side by side on the floor by the bathtub, all of them in the same position I’d seen in the pictures, lying on their sides, faces turned left, dead, bloody, and head-shot.

Their milky eyes were all open, and their blank stares a universal accusation: I had failed to protect them. I had allowed this to happen. The harshest expression was Nana Mama’s, as if she’d become ashamed of me, as if her life raising me, and protecting me, had mattered not at all when she was in dire need.

That crushed me. I fell to my knees, arms wide, weeping and begging for her forgiveness, and for Bree’s forgiveness, and Damon’s, Jannie’s, and Ali’s. But they just stared at me with their milky eyes, their expressions never changing, and I began to convulse with pain and loss, heaving and sobbing and thinking that this brutal feeling would never, ever end.

Then I heard splashing and looked through my tears at the bathtub, where Mulch had risen up out of the water carrying a hunting rifle. His face was a brilliant aluminum light above that polka-dot bow tie and that shock of red hair, and his voice came to me like a shortwave radio transmission.

“I had to shoot them like that, you know,” Mulch said. “If you head-shoot them, they can never become zombies.”

I said nothing, just stared into the blinding light of his face.

After several seconds, Mulch said, “I figured you’d thank me, Cross.”

“Why?” I whispered.

“For saving them from the doom of the walking dead.”

“No, why are you doing this to me?”

Mulch laughed with irony in his voice, said, “I’m doing it for the only reason anyone does anything. Because I can.” He started to laugh again, caustically.

“Who are you?” I demanded.

Mulch seemed to think about that. “I’m whoever you believe me to be.”

“Why don’t you kill me?”

“Why does a cat play with a mouse?” Mulch replied.

“So you will kill me?”

“Of course.”

“When?” I said.

“I think it’s time right now,” Mulch said matter-of-factly. “Lie down there beside your wife and your grandmother, on your side, right cheek in that perfect puddle of blood, staring left into oblivion.”

I got down without hesitation, gazing one last heartbreaking time at my family, each one of them in turn, before twisting my head from them, eyes wide open and aware of the muzzle of the rifle swinging past my face.

“Shoot straight,” I choked.

“I always do,” Mulch said, and pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER 109

There was a sound like an artillery shell going off in my head, and a wicked electrical pain that fragmented into different arms of excruciating energy that spiked out with fingers in all directions, as if Mulch had shot me with a lightning bolt and not a .30–06.

The lightning came not through that gaping bullet hole I expected on the left side of my head, but from low and at the back of my head, right where someone had hit me in the crack house.

Then I smelled ammonia and jerked toward confused consciousness.

“Alex?”

Wincing at the pulsing pain at the back of my head, I felt my eyes come open blurrily, seeing three figures that soon became Ava, John Sampson, and Ned Mahoney. We were all in my bedroom. The door was shut.

“What …?” I started to say. “How …?”

Sampson tossed a smelling salt capsule away and threw a thumb at Ava, saying in a low voice, “Real smart girl here, Alex. You don’t know the half of it, but eventually she came and got us.”

I blinked, felt fire in my eyes. “Eventually? What time is it? What day?”

“Easter Sunday,” Mahoney said. “Six in the evening. You’ve been out about thirteen hours.”

Almost a day had passed since Nana Mama died, I thought, wanting to cry again, realizing that each coming hour would bring one tragic reminder after another.

“Mulch killed them all,” I said to Sampson and Mahoney. “Executed them with a hunting rifle in cold blood.”

“Maybe,” Ava said. “Maybe not.”

Suddenly and irrationally angry, I twisted my pounding head at the teenager and snapped, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Ava shrank, started to move toward the door.

“Hear her out, Alex,” Mahoney said. “She’s got us convinced.”

“Convinced of what?” I demanded. “That Mulch had a partner who performed the executions?”

“No, Alex,” Sampson said. “Ava’s convinced us that your family’s still alive.”

CHAPTER 110

I refused to believe it. The idea that they had somehow all survived gunshots to the head required more hope than I had left in my heart, maybe more hope than was left in the universe.

But then Ava explained that she’d left me passed out on the bed, intending to take off and then call 911 down the road. As she passed the doorway into the television room, however, she saw my phone lying on the carpet.

As dark as it sounds, Ava wanted to see the pictures I’d described, and she picked up the phone. Mindful of Mulch’s camera trained on her from the bristles of the fireplace broom, she’d gone halfway up the stairs and started to look at them.

“Why did you do that?” I asked, irritated again.

“I dunno,” Ava said, shrugging. “Interested?”

“Whatever, it’s a damn good thing she did, Alex,” Mahoney said.

Sampson nodded. “Though we would have figured it out eventually.”

“Figured out what?” I demanded.

The FBI agent pulled out an iPad and called up every picture Mulch had sent me so that they were all visible, side by side. He held the screen out to me. I couldn’t bear to look at them until he said, “Notice anything odd when you look at them all at once?”

Steeling myself, ignoring the pain in my skull, I forced my gaze onto Nana Mama’s corpse, and then Bree’s, Damon’s, Jannie’s, and Ali’s. They were all in virtually the same position.

“Mulch killed them in a ritualistic manner,” I said. “Fetishizing their death.”

“I thought about that,” Ava said.

I looked at her again, this time in surprise. “You did?”

“I used to listen to you talk to Bree about your jobs,” she said defensively. “And, I dunno, the pictures seemed too ritualistic.”

Before I could reply, Sampson twirled his finger, said, “Get to it, Ava.”

Ava nodded, stepped up beside the bed. She took the iPad from Mahoney, tapped at the screen, and then turned the device so I saw it horizontally. The pictures of Bree and Jannie showed in split screen one atop the other. Ava gestured to the gunshot wounds, said, “They’re the same.”

“Of course they look alike,” I said. “He shot them in the same place.”

“They’re the same,” she insisted, and then pointed to the blood pooled around their faces. “It’s pretty much the same here, too, like the same amount of blood, and the shape of it. And notice these spatters?”

I didn’t see it at first, but then I flashed on my nightmare, and how Mulch had told me to assume the same position in that perfect puddle of blood. My subconscious had seen what Ava had seen. It had been trying to tell me the same thing.

I nodded in shock. “They’re nearly identical.”

Sampson said, “Ava spotted it, snuck out, and brought your phone to my house. I’d been at work with Ned since you gave me Nana Mama’s phone yesterday evening. Billie brought Ava to us downtown, and she quickly convinced us after we blew the pictures up on a computer screen.”

Mahoney nodded. “I had the skeleton crew on duty at Quantico do a quick analysis to confirm our take. There’s no doubt that every one of those pictures was Photo-shopped. A very good job, but Photoshopped.”

A glimmer of optimism began to glow in my chest. Was it possible? Were they alive? Could they be?

CHAPTER 111

Then the skeptic in me took hold, said, “Why would Mulch do this?”

“Trying to break you, I suspect,” Mahoney said.

“But why?” I insisted.

“You’ll be able to ask him when we find him,” Sampson said. “And by the way, we believe his name is not Thierry Mulch. It’s Preston Elliot; he’s a graduate student in computer science at Georgetown.”

My head hurt again. “Wait, what?”

Mahoney said, “John called me right after you gave him Nana Mama’s phone. We’ve been on Mulch ever since, and on you, by the way.”

I squinted at him. “How’s that?”

“Well, what did you think, that we weren’t going to get your house under surveillance?” the FBI agent replied. “We had two teams trailing you on your long walk last night. We honestly had no idea what you were up to, and you weren’t answering your phone, so we figured Mulch had contacted you and you were going to meet him.”

It took a few moments for that to sink in, but then I said, “But how do you know Mulch’s real name is Preston Elliot?”

“DNA, luck, a sex crimes report out of Alexandria, and complaints in Georgetown and Bethesda,” Sampson replied, frowning. “But not in that order.”

He explained that one of the first things he and Mahoney had done was to run criminal database searches on Thierry Mulch.

Sampson added, “We got our first break through a rape case in Alexandria last week. A woman named Claudia Dickerson, twenty-eight, a CPA, reported that a man who kept referring to himself as Mr. Mulch had attacked her and her boyfriend, Richard Nelson, at her front door. Mulch forced them inside her apartment, knocked Nelson cold, and then raped Ms. Dickerson from behind. She never saw his face, but he left DNA.”

“Has it been analyzed yet?” I asked.

“Not completely,” Mahoney said, holding up one hand. “But give us a minute or so here to finish telling you what we do know.”

Sampson said, “We came across Mulch’s name two other times in the databases. He caused a stink at the Four Seasons in Georgetown about two weeks ago. Same guy Ali described: tall, red hair, bow tie. He also took a Bentley out for a test drive from EuroMotorcars in Bethesda, an eight-hour test drive. And we contacted the principal at Ali’s school. She said he’d approached her by e-mail and directed her to a website about his social media company and its new app for kids. He said he wanted to inspire kids and pick their brains, so she agreed to let him come speak. She also sent us a copy of Mulch’s California driver’s license. Fake, by the way. There’s no such Mulch on record out there.”

Mahoney turned the iPad again and I came face to face with Thierry Mulch for the first time. Rooster-red hair. Bushy red eyebrows. Abe Lincoln beard. A lazy expression.

“You have a picture of Preston Elliot?”

The FBI agent nodded, typed on the iPad again, came up with the computer scientist’s Georgetown ID, said, “We think he’s wearing a disguise in the driver’s license photo, but they’re roughly the same height and weight, and look at the other facial features.”

I did, and saw striking similarities in the cheekbones and along the jawline. I looked at the eyes and knew they were the same person. “And you have DNA evidence that directly links the rape to Preston Elliot?”

Sampson said, “We do, and you’re not going to believe how.”

He explained that he’d found a report from the lab on my desk, an analysis of the semen and vaginal traces found at the scene of Mandy Bell Lee’s attorney’s death.

“Are you saying Mulch killed Tim Jackson?”

“We’re saying that Preston Elliot killed Tim Jackson,” Mahoney replied. “We got a dead-on match between the semen taken from the attorney’s hotel room and the DNA samples FBI agents took from Elliot’s hairbrush after he was reported missing last week. And the vaginal secretions on Jackson’s pants match DNA samples taken from Claudia Dickerson, the rape victim. By the way, the rape and Jackson’s murder took place within hours of each other.”

For several moments, I didn’t reply, and then I said, “Why would Elliot smear Jackson with the evidence of a rape?”

“Could have just been on Elliot’s pants and he rubbed up against Jackson while he was poisoning him,” Sampson said.

My head hurt too much to think critically about that possibility. I said, “My family is alive.”

They all nodded. “As far as we know,” Mahoney said.

“So what are we going to do?”

The FBI agent said, “Launch an investigation as if they’d been murdered. Don’t let on that we know they’re alive, leaving you to act the mourner out of his mind here in the house where Elliot/Mulch can watch you.”

Sampson said, “We think he wants to watch you suffer, Alex.”

“But why?” I asked again. “I don’t know this guy Elliot.”

“Like John said, you’ll get to ask him about his motives when we catch him,” Mahoney replied.

“And I just go on about my life in the meantime?”

Ava said, “No, you go on with the life of a man who’s just lost everything. You go on as a victim, Alex.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Sampson remarked with a soft smile at Ava.

Mahoney added, “In the meantime, we work the murder and Mulch angle and wait for Elliot to make a move, surface, maybe even contact you under a different name.”

I flashed on Nana Mama, Bree, Damon, Jannie, and Ali, said, “And my family?”

“We do everything in our power to find them and bring them home safe,” Sampson said. “And we pray.”

CHAPTER 112

That mission gave me renewed strength, and an easing of the pain in my head. I said, “Okay, we’ll do it your way for the time being. Wait, how did you both get in here? Wouldn’t Mulch or Elliot have seen you on camera?”

“No, I thought of that,” Ava said. “They came in the way I went out: across the roof of your addition.”

“Like I said, smart girl,” Sampson added.

“Plan on leaving the same way?”

“As a matter of fact,” Mahoney said, and tossed me a disposable cell phone. “Use that when you need to talk, and for God’s sake, keep it on you.”

I caught the phone and swung my legs off the bed, feeling a rush of agony at the back of my head. “I’m probably going to need stitches.”

“Ava will take you to the ER once we’re gone,” Sampson said.

I looked at her. “You’re staying?”

“Can’t leave you alone with a nasty concussion, can I?” Ava said.

I smiled, said, “I suppose not.” Then I looked at my best friend, said, “When you get the chance, tell Captain Quintus to have an arrest warrant drawn up for Everett Prough, a homeless guy cum pimp and ice dealer who hangs around that abandoned factory where we found the burned Jane Doe, who now has a name: Elise …”

I glanced at Ava, who said, “Littlefield.”

“Elise Littlefield,” Sampson said, and wrote it down. “Okay.”

We shook hands, and then Ava and I waited several minutes for Mahoney and Sampson to get down off the roof of the addition and leave by the back gate.

I hugged Ava, said, “Thank you.”

Ava was stiff at first but then softened, said, “No, thank you, Alex. I should have come to you and Bree sooner. But I was ashamed of what I’d become after everything you’d done for me.”

“Water under the bridge,” I said, and let her go. “Right now, we’ve got other things to think about.”

Ava made a show of helping me down the stairs, and I acted the shattered, injured, and demoralized victim while we intentionally made a tour of the dining and television room, looking for my jacket.

A good part of me wanted to grab up one of the cameras, look into the lens, and tell Preston Elliot I was coming for him. But I kept my cool and went with Ava out onto the front porch.

The air was clean after the previous night’s thunderstorms, and you could still smell the scent of Easter hams cooking somewhere on the block. I thought of how this holiday should have been celebrated with the ones I love all around me. It filled me with rage.

Looking at the night sky and the glittering stars, I vowed to Nana Mama, Bree, Damon, Jannie, and Ali that I would not rest until I’d found them all and brought them home.

Then I crossed my heart and followed Ava down onto the sidewalk.