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“I still don’t buy it,” Box said at last.
“Why not?” Aaliyah asked. “It looks obvious to me.”
“Yeah?” Box said. “Except there was another mass murder exactly like this one. You tell me you’ve got Mulch connected to that one too, and I’ll start believing that this dead guy is behind it all.”
“Smart man,” I said.
“Dr. Cross,” Detective Sergeant began.
“No, he’s right,” I said. “I do need that and I don’t have it. Can we use a desk and a computer at your office?”
Box said, “Are you—”
“It’s the least we can do,” Sergeant said.
Twenty-five minutes later, Aaliyah was working at a computer in the Homicide bureau of the Omaha Police Department, and I was making phone calls. I called Ned Mahoney first, hoping we’d gotten some kind of match through the facial-recognition software, but so far, he said, it was still searching. I told him about Mulch looking like a suspect in the Daley slayings.
“Anything that links Mulch to the killings in Fort Worth?” he asked.
“Not yet,” I said. “I’ll let you know.”
I called John Sampson next and brought him up to date. He was with our computer experts looking through the files of Preston Elliot, the dead programmer whose bones were found in the pigsty in rural Virginia.
“Get anything yet?” I asked.
“Not so far,” he admitted. “But they found some encrypted files about an hour ago. So maybe we’ll get lucky once they break them.”
Then I called the Fort Worth Police Department looking for Detective J. P. Vincente and found out he was now Lieutenant J. P. Vincente.
“Alex Cross,” Vincente said. “Fuck, man, I am so fucking sorry about the world of shit that’s whirling around you now, my brother.”
Vincente was smart and profane, and I liked him a lot. He’d come up from poverty and was a tireless worker and an all-around good guy.
“Appreciate it, JP,” I said. “I need some help that might help you.”
“With what?”
“You ever hear the name Thierry Mulch come up during your investigations into the Monahan murders?”
After a pause, he said, “Name doesn’t ring a fucking bell. Why? Who is he?”
“The son of Bea Daley, and the sonofabitch who took my family.”
It took a while to explain. When I’d finished, Vincente said, “Name doesn’t click for me. But let me pull up the file.”
“Look for anything that connects the mother to Mulch or West Virginia or anything that sticks out.”
“I’ll get back to you,” he promised and hung up.
Detective Sergeant took us to an excellent steak house for dinner. The meat was amazing—Omaha, after all—but I had little appetite and turned down all offers of alcohol. I was trying to juggle so much at the same time that I couldn’t chance anything that might cloud my judgment.
Aaliyah looked exhausted around nine o’clock when she said good night and went to one of the rooms we’d rented at the Hyatt. I felt exhausted and unsure of where to go or what to do next beyond flopping into a bed.
There was the deadline for delivering video proof of a double killing. But Gloria Jones and her friend in LA were already putting something together. All I had to do, she said, was find a place to film my part in the fake murder sometime later the following day.
There was nothing for me to do in the meantime.
That frightened me. As long as I was moving, trying some new avenue of investigation, I was able to keep my family’s situation from getting to me. Now, however, lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling, it came back down on me like a crushing force.
