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I glanced at Ava and Jones, said, “I can’t say. But believe me, the safety of the rest of my family depends on me meeting it.”
She studied me, then shook her head. “You discharged a firearm far outside your jurisdiction. I can’t just let you walk without making a formal statement. I’m sorry, Detective Cross.”
CHAPTER
37
IT WAS NEARLY FIVE THIRTY by the time we’d made our statements and were free to leave Buckhannon. I had less than a day to meet Mulch’s deadline and no idea how to make it happen.
Atticus Jones was totally exhausted. He gave me his daughter’s phone number and fell asleep before I got the car started. The front end of the unmarked car had a serious shimmy from the washboard and pulled hard to the right, but it remained drivable. I had Ava dial the old detective’s daughter and put the burner phone on speaker.
“Gloria Jones,” she answered.
I explained that I was a cop, that her father had been helping me, and that he would be a little late for dinner. In return, I got a ranting earful for sneaking him out of the hospice in the first place.
“My God, he’s dying,” she yelled at one point. “Can’t you see that?”
Earlier in the day, I hadn’t. Not really. But now Jones was coughing and hacking in his sleep and looking terribly small and frail.
Amazingly, however, his energy picked up again when I pulled into the parking lot at Fitzwater’s Gracious Living facility a little after seven.
Gloria Jones, a handsome, well-put-together woman in her late thirties, and the receptionist came stomping out, and they didn’t have their happy faces on. They both laid into me this time, telling me how irresponsible I was even as they coaxed Jones into a wheelchair and rolled the old detective back to his room. I followed, took it all, and said nothing. Ava brought up the rear.
Jones finally yelled, “Goddamn it, Gloria, shut up for a second. Don’t you see who this poor man is?”
She looked at me, puzzled, then shrugged and said, “Detective Cross?”
“Detective Alex Cross,” Jones said.
Gloria blinked, said, “Alex … oh … I saw that story: your wife, your son, and …” She looked at me closely. “Why are you here? Why aren’t you in DC?”
There was suddenly an expression of hunger on her face, a look that I thought I recognized. “What do you do for a living, Ms. Jones?”
She told me. I had recognized that hungry expression. And in one long, stretched-out moment, I realized she might be able to help me.
“Can we keep this between us?” I said.
She shook her head. “You owe me for almost killing my dad.”
“The hell he does,” Jones protested.
“Tell you what,” I said to Gloria. “You help me, and once I’ve got my family back, I’ll gratefully tell you exactly what I’ve been doing here.”
The old detective’s daughter thought about that, then asked suspiciously, “What do I have to do in return?”
“Help me murder someone before two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”
CHAPTER
38
JOHN SAMPSON AND TESS AALIYAH drove up a muddy road out in the sticks southwest of Frostburg, Maryland. Suburbs gave way to truck farms and then to woods where drizzling rain fell.
“I heard you and Cross were boyhood friends,” Aaliyah said at one point.
“Closer than brothers,” Sampson replied. “The bond between us was instant. We were ten and he’d lost his parents, and Nana Mama, his grandmother, had brought him up to DC from South Carolina. She was a vice principal and everyone was scared of her. Me too, and she lived just down the street.”
“You were scared?” Aaliyah asked, half smiling.
