AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’d like to stay in Damon’s room if possible.”
The headmaster hesitated, and then said, “I can arrange that.”
After sending the students back to their dorms, Pelham took me to North Dorm and Damon’s room on the first floor. It faced those woods Karla Mepps had spoken of, the woods where Josh Carter, the security guard, had been bludgeoned to death in the pouring rain. Several kids were looking out their doors at me, and I nodded to them as the headmaster unlocked Damon’s room.
He handed me a key and then his business card, saying quietly, “Anything you need, you call. And I’m genuinely sorry about the way I acted and spoke earlier. The board …”
“I understand, and thank you,” I said, and patted him on the shoulder.
Then I took a deep breath and walked into the remains of Damon’s life.
CHAPTER
51
I CLOSED THE BEDROOM door, stood there in the darkness, and breathed in through my nose. They say our sense of smell is our most primal, the one that can hit us the hardest, because it comes from the deepest part of the brain.
Smell kicked me like a mule that night, and right in the gut. Damon’s window had been closed and locked for days. His scent permeated the place, and it was like he was suddenly right there in front of me.
I saw him gliding down the court at a game a year ago, when he’d come off the bench and scored three straight three-pointers, looking like he could never miss. I saw him the past Christmas. He was home, laughing his goofy lovable laugh at something Nana Mama had said. Then he was sitting on the couch the day before he’d gone back to school, Ali under one of his long arms, and Jannie under the other, all of them watching one of the college bowl games.
Was he dead? Were those memories all I was going to have of him?
I started to shake in the darkness. Fearing that more of these vivid memories would destroy me, I flipped on the light and stood there, blinking my wet eyes.
It was a small room for such a big boy, but it was neat and orderly, with posters of Chris Paul and Derrick Rose, the point guards who were his heroes, and others of Rihanna and the rapper Kendrick Lamar.
Over his desk there was a calendar with Good Friday circled in red and Home! scribbled next to it. I stared at that for the longest time before going on around the room, to his dresser and small closet, the door of which was plastered with photographs of him: playing playground ball, wearing snorkel gear in Jamaica, and standing in the suit he wore to the prom.
My hand went to my mouth and I turned toward his bed, which stretched sideways below that window Karla Mepps had threatened to climb through and …
Was that what happened? I wondered. Was she on her way to climb in Damon’s window when the security guard saw her, maybe chased her before she beat him to death with a chunk of firewood?
Women, in my experience, are rarely involved in something so vicious. Clubbing a man and beating his brains in is more of a guy thing. So what kind of woman did that make Karla Mepps? And what did it mean in terms of Thierry Mulch?
I’d long believed that Mulch had at least one accomplice, and maybe more. There was too much distance and too little time for my family to have been kidnapped without, at a minimum, one other player involved. In my mind, I’d profiled the second fiddle as the kind of male toady that heinous criminals seem to attract, someone younger than Mulch but just as sick, an apprentice, even.
A woman in that role changed everything. It suggested twisted love, an attraction between monsters.
What would she look like? The boys who’d seen her said she was very attractive and well built. But would there be something in her body language that spoke of evil? Would I have seen something that Damon missed?
Part of me wanted to call Sampson and Mahoney
and ask them to start running Karla Mepps through the criminal databases straightaway. But it was late on a Sunday night and there was a high probability that the name was an alias, and I was suddenly exhausted. Seeing my tortured reflection in the window glass against the inky blackness beyond, I told myself to sleep, that I would be no good to anyone if I couldn’t think straight.
I sat on my son’s bed, kicked off my shoes, and noticed the crucifix my grandmother had bought him last Easter. It hung above the headboard. Part of me wanted to yell at the figure on the cross, to demand to know the reason for my suffering. Instead, I got down on my knees to beg Jesus for help.
That’s when I saw the snapshot taped to the wall by his pillow.
It was taken the day I married Bree, a portrait of me, my bride, and my family. Bree was radiant. Damon was as happy as I’d ever seen him. So were Ali, Jannie, and Nana Mama. And I looked like I’d won the Powerball.
Once upon a time, I thought, you, Alex Cross, were the luckiest man alive.
That broke me.
She’s dead, I thought. They’re both dead.
Grief welled up like a rogue wave. I got up before it could hit me fully, staggered to the switch, and turned off the light.
