A brood of kids was clustered behind him, trying to see who had come to the house in the middle of the night.
“The American wants to buy a vehicle,” Moses said simply. “He has cash for it.”
I hung back at first, at Moses’ advice. Before I offered any money, we needed to see exactly what our options were.
“You’re lucky,” the man at the door said and smiled thinly. “We stay open late.”
The best of the old wrecks he had out back was an ancient Mazda Drifter, with a tattered canopy over the bed and an empty space in the dash where the odometer used to be.
But the engine turned over, gingerly, on the first try. And the price was right—five hundred in leones.
Plus, he didn’t mind our spending the night right there in the truck.
I told Moses he had done more than enough and that he should go home, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He stayed with me until morning and then went out to secure the few things he said I’d need for my safe journey, including a police clearance sheet to leave the country.
While I waited, the gravity of this trip back started to sink in. I had to cover more than a thousand miles of unfamiliar countryside to Lagos, over multiple borders, with no more guidance than the maps that Moses only hoped he’d be able to find for me.
So when he came back, I had a proposition for him.
“Make this trip with me and you can keep the truck,” I said. “As a fair trade for your services.”
I expected a conversation, or at least a pause, but there was none.
He hoisted a goatskin bag of provisions from his shoulder into the truck, then handed me back the money he hadn’t spent.
“Yes,” he said simply. “I will do it.”
Chapter 63
“SAMPSON?”
“Yeah?”
“This sucks big-time, you know that? I hate you.”
“Should have called tails, Bree.”
The house on Eighteenth Street was quiet now, not the nasty hive of activity it had been on the night of the murders. Today, this morning, Bree and Sampson had it to themselves. Not that either one of them wanted to be here at the crime scene.
That was why they’d tossed a coin on the front stoop.
Sampson got the master suite.
Bree got the children’s bedroom.
She blew into a latex glove, put it on, and unlocked the door, letting it swing to a stop before she stepped inside. Then she put her head down and hurried upstairs.
“I hate you, John,” she called out.
The kids’ bodies were gone, of course, but there was the residue of printing powder everywhere. Otherwise, the murder scene looked the same: matching yellow comforters soaked through with blood; wide spatter pattern on the bunk bed, rug, walls, and ceiling; two small desks on the opposite wall, undisturbed, as if nothing unspeakable had happened here.
Ayana Abboud had been ten. Her brother, Peter, seven.
The hit on their father, Basel Abboud, was a hell of a lot easier for Bree to comprehend. His columns in the Washington Times had been an early and insistent voice for US military intervention in Darfur, with or without UN Security Council buy-in. He wrote of widespread bribes and corruption both in Africa and Washington. By definition, the man had enemies on at least two continents.
The kind of enemies who go after your wife and kids while they’re at it? It sure looked that way. All four of them had been slaughtered in their house.
Bree turned a slow three-sixty, trying to see it all for the first time again. What jumped out at her now? What had they missed before? What would Alex see if he were here instead of in Africa?