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My head felt scalded as I watched him pour the coffee and bag the pastries. If he said anything else, I can’t recall it.
“How much?” I asked when he pushed the cup and the bag toward me.
“On the house,” Brower said, bowing his head. “Sorry about your son.”
Nodding slightly, I took the coffee and the bag as if I were breathing in confusion and exhaling defeat.
“How far you got to go?” Brower asked, looking concerned.
“What’s that?”
“Where are you headed?”
“No idea,” I said, then turned and walked toward the door, dreading opening it, feeling like I was exiting the coffee shop and entering a bleak, dark future, an eternity of hopeless pain, an end to all I ever was and all I ever could have been.
Headlights swung up the road as I pushed open the coffee shop’s door and stepped out onto the porch. Falling torrentially from low, leaden skies, the rain billowed like curtains across the parking lot in the gray dawn. I crossed the porch, stepped down two stairs and out from under the eave, then stopped to let the cold rain whip my skin numb. I stood there, taking the brunt of it full in my face, feeling the icy water like needles and not—
“Alex!” a woman’s voice called. “Detective Cross!”
I wiped my eyes with the soaked sleeve of my jacket, looked beyond my rental car, and spotted Tess Aaliyah climbing out of a DC Metro unmarked car.
She ran up to me, looking wired.
“We tried to find you,” she said, her voice trembling. “But we couldn’t until Mahoney tracked your credit cards and we figured you were going to Damon’s school. So I jumped in a car and drove all night because I wanted you to hear this in person.”
My stomach fell fifty stories. “Another body?”
“No,” Aaliyah said, breaking into a beaming smile and starting to cry. “But there’s a very good chance Bree is alive. And Damon too!”
CHAPTER
54
MY BRAIN REJECTED THE news out of hand.
A cruel joke. That’s all that was.
Aaliyah looked at me with the same kind of concern Brower had shown.
“Alex, did you hear what I said?”
I said nothing, the disbelief and the fear of hope just locking me up.
“Bree and Damon are likely alive,” she insisted.
“Don’t tell me that unless you have DNA evidence!” I yelled. “Do you?”
“No, but—”
“Then I don’t want to hear it,” I said. “I can’t.”
“We have conclusive evidence that the female victim is not Bree,” she said calmly. “The Jane Doe had no uterine scarring. The body you saw at the construction site belonged to Bernice Smith, a woman from northern Pennsylvania who’d gone missing two days earlier.”
I said nothing, wanting to believe but petrified to do so.
“Dr. Cross,” Aaliyah said, coming around me to show me a picture on her phone. “This is her. Mulch had a racist murderer named Claude Harrow put Bree’s jewels and wedding ring on Bernice Smith. Harrow mutilated her enough to make you believe it could be your wife.”
I looked at the rain-soaked screen, seeing a smiling woman who did look very much like Bree: same height, same athletic build, same basic facial structure.
