“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.