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“Mulch had someone else kill and mutilate people who looked like Damon and Bree. The DNA doesn’t match.”
For several moments there was no reply, but then I heard her sobbing, and tears welled in my eyes all over again. They were alive. I had a chance to save them. Ava could feel that hope as strongly as I did. Wiping away my tears, I saw that the exit for Suffern and I-287 was coming up in five miles.
“What did you find, Ava?” Aaliyah asked.
“Okay,” Ava said. She sniffled, and then told us.
It took a few moments for her discoveries to penetrate my tired brain, but when they did, I almost drove off the road.
“That’s where I am,” Ava said. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to her after that.”
“I already know what happened to her after that,” I said.
“What?” Ava, Aaliyah, and Jones cried all at once.
“Ava? Gloria? I hate to do this, but I promise I’ll call you right back.”
Over their protests, I grabbed the phone and ended the call.
“Take 287 before you tell me what the hell is going on,” Aaliyah said.
I glanced at the exit before veering away from it, staying on I-87, heading east toward Nyack and New York City.
“Where are you going?” she demanded.
“Omaha,” I said, handing her my phone. “Call and get us on the next flight out of JFK or LaGuardia.”
CHAPTER
59
SIX HOURS LATER, WE were driving north through Omaha. We passed a playground full of young children and a soccer field where older kids, eleven or twelve, were practicing on a blustery spring afternoon.
“Every kid I see seems vulnerable now,” I said to Aaliyah, who was driving. “Part of me wants to roll down the window and shout at their parents to never let their kids out of their sight. Absolutely never.”
For several moments, the detective did not reply. She’d been annoyed and on edge from lack of sleep and from the blowback she’d gotten from Captain Quintus when she’d called him after booking our flights to Omaha.
But at last, she sighed and said, “I can understand the feeling.”
Feeling was what had brought us to Omaha. I knew much of the story, but I wanted to run Ava’s discovery by the people who knew the case best. And something in my gut said that would be better done in person and on-site. Captain Quintus had disagreed, but the tickets had already been bought, and so there we were around four thirty that afternoon, driving past the Omaha Country Club into the bedroom community of Raven Oaks.
We followed the GPS on Aaliyah’s phone into a development of upscale homes, some with tennis courts and others with pools, until we reached the North Fifty-Fourth Avenue circle, which ran out to a cul-de-sac with six homes on it. As soon as we turned onto the road, I saw the unmarked car parked by the curb and told the
detective to pull in behind it.
We got out and started toward the car. My attention went immediately to the big white house at the end of the cul-de-sac and stayed there until I climbed into the unmarked car’s backseat.
“Alex, I wish we were seeing each other under better circumstances,” said the petite woman sitting sideways in the front passenger seat. Omaha police detective Jan Sergeant had aged little since I’d last seen her, seven years before.
“I do too, Jan,” I said.
Sergeant’s partner, Brian Box, sat behind the wheel looking straight ahead with an expression I remembered. Box had gone gray since I’d last seen him, but he still looked as if he’d bitten into something that didn’t taste quite right.
I’d met the two detectives eighteen months after a brutal mass murder had taken place in that white house on the cul-de-sac before us. The Daley family of Omaha—Calvin, Bea, Ross, Sharon, and Janet—were found dead in their home two nights before Christmas. Their throats had been cut with a scalpel or razor.
I’d gotten involved after a second mass murder in suburban Fort Worth. The Monahan family—Alice, Bill, Kenzie, Monroe, Annie, and Brent—were found at home with their throats slit.
I’d worked the case for the FBI but ultimately had been unable to push the investigation beyond a psychological profile I wrote of the unnamed suspect.
