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Hope?
The last strand of hope?
Like a pile driver, it hit Sunday then.
In a single, blinding instant of insight, he finally understood how he would end the game and the story of Dr. Alex Cross.
CHAPTER
80
AS I WALKED BACK along the two-track toward the dirt road that accessed the Bayou des Cannes, the breeze was stiffening again, and with it the rain, and there were rumblings of new storms to the west. By the time I got to the Jeep and started driving toward Jennings, jagged lightning tormented the night sky.
Each crack of thunder made my head feel as if it were coming apart. I needed water. I needed Tylenol. I needed—
The disposable cell phone buzzed, alerting me to a text, as I approached the Jefferson Davis Parish seat along a westward curve in the Evangeline Highway. At a stop sign, I picked the phone up and read it.
Go to New Orleans, it said. Alone. You have until 4:30 a.m. to reach the Big Easy. Announce your arrival in the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist, women looking for men. Do as I say, and you will see your family alive. Try to be clever and involve any kind of law enforcement, and you will see your family dead. This is your last hope, Cross. Don’t blow it now, when you’re so close to your goal. By the way, the phone that sent this text will be destroyed upon your response.
In all honesty, I wanted to smash my own phone to smithereens. I was exhausted. I was sick of being played. I didn’t know if I had it in me to go on much longer, if at all.
When I read the message a second and a third time, however, I kept pausing on that phrase your last hope. It was like Sunday was dangling a strip of meat over a caged and starving dog that had had enough of cruelty. I didn’t want to lunge at the offer just out of reach but knew I would.
Despite the anger, the fatigue, and the resentment, I could not help but grasp at the final straw. I simply could not leave hope to die.
I’m coming, Sunday, I texted back. Alone.
CHAPTER
81
I BOUGHT TWO HAM and cheese sandwiches and three cups of French roast coffee at an all-night gas station near the on-ramp to the I-10.
The sandwiches tasted like they’d been made days ago, and the coffee was stale and bitter, but I forced it all down as I sped east in a driving rain. Were Bree, the kids, and my grandmother in New Orleans? Was that where Sunday had taken them? Why there?
Some of Mulch’s actions seemed as random as they were brutal. Or maybe that was simply a lack of information on my part. What drove a guy to do these things? He’d escaped his childhood with millions of dollars and then had indulged his desire for an education with a doctorate from Harvard. Marcus Sunday could have lived a comfortable life of the mind.
Instead, he’d viciously slain his mother for escaping her past, and Alice Monahan and her entire family for reasons I still couldn’t fathom. Then he had the gall to write an entire book about the mass killings, extolling the murderer as a perfect killer who had left no trace and would never be identified.
The crazy thing was that Sunday might have been right if he hadn’t decided, for whatever disturbed reason, to make me and my family the target of his ongoing homicidal vengeance. I still didn’t get that, and it gnawed at me as I passed Lafayette and drove on toward Baton Rouge.
Other than the phone interviews and my giving Sunday a mediocre review in the Post—okay, a thumbs-down review in the Post—I’d had no contact with the man that I knew of. So why me?
Perhaps because of my reputation, he saw me as some kind of threat. Maybe he feared I was going to eventually uncover his role in the Omaha and Fort Worth killings. Or maybe this entire cruelty had
grown out of something I hadn’t seen or heard yet.
Had Bree done something to him at some time in her past? I couldn’t see it. No, this was about me. It had always been about me.
But what if I was just an arbitrary object? What if some chemical in his dysfunctional brain had dripped at just the right time, and he’d obsessed on me like Mark David Chapman keyed in on John Lennon, deciding to punish me for no particular reason at all?
I think the idea that it might have been utterly random upset me the most. In spite of everything that had happened to me in the past twelve days, I still believed in my Lord and God and in the idea that He had a plan for us all. But as I drove through the night toward a showdown or an ambush, Sunday was testing the limits of my faith.
It occurred to me that he hadn’t said anything about the video of the double homicide I was supposed to send him later today. Seemed that wasn’t important to him anymore—he just wanted me in New Orleans.
Crossing the Atchafalaya River, I was hit with waves of doubt and surges of raw emotion that brought tears to my eyes. What if, after enduring it all, I simply found them dead? What if it was as random as that?
I swiped at the tears with my sleeve and prayed, “Please don’t let that happen. Take me if You want, but dear God, let them live.”
