He told them how he’d worked for a computer game company for a while before he’d come up with the idea of a website for elementary school kids.
“When I was growing up, I didn’t have friends,” Sunday said. “There wasn’t a girl that would give me the time of day. I mean, would you be friends with a kid who smelled like pig poop?”
He waited until their laughter died, continued, “So I came up with this website idea so kids like you could have friends far away from home. Like all around the world. Doesn’t that sound cool?”
Kids clapped. Others shouted, “Yes!”
Sunday pointed at his head, said, “I’ll tell you more about the site in a second, but it’s important that you know that I did all this by being positive. As a kid, I used to hate that pig farm, but now I kind of like the fact that I grew up there. Makes my story even more interesting, don’t you think?”
Sunday saw that the one he was interested in was nodding, and he smiled right at the child, said, “I used to hate my parents, but now I actually like the fact that they were pig farmers.”
The writer snatched the microphone from its stand and walked across the stage, saying, “Do you get it? You can use the things you don’t like about your life to change it.”
He climbed down the stairs, knowing that he was beginning to lose some of them. “I’ll prove it,” he said, and walked straight toward the kid on the far right end of the third row.
“What’s your name?” Sunday asked, and tilted the mike at him.
The boy looked embarrassed. “Me?” he said.
“Why not?”
“Ali Cross,” the boy said, sniffing and curling his nose.
“Ali Cross,” Sunday said as if the name were a marvelous thing. “How old did you say you are?”
“Seven.”
“Second grade?”
Ali nodded, sniffed and curled his nose again.
“What do your parents do?”
“My father’s a police detective,” Ali said proudly. “He used to be with the FBI. He catches killers and, like, bad guys. So does my stepmom.”
The writer found the answer irritating but managed to look very impressed. “Well,” he said. “No pig farm and pig poop for you, then.”
The other children laughed, but Ali looked serious as he shook his head.
“No,” Sunday said. “Nothing you hate about your life?”
Cross’s son shrugged, said, “No. Not really.”
“Well, then,” Sunday said. “Maybe you aren’t the best example, Ali. Great life you’ve got, great crime-fighting mom and dad and all. But remember, life can change like that.” He snapped his finger. “You understand that, don’t you, Ali?”
The boy looked confused at first but then nodded. “Like someone in your family becoming a zombie or something?”
The kids around Cross’s son laughed nervously.
But the writer thought about that and found the idea pleasing. “Yes,” he said, patting the boy on the shoulder. “Exactly like that.”
Chapter
51
I got home before Bree that night, heard voices around the back of the house first, and saw that Nana Mama was out there inspecting the day’s work. The contractors had cut out the kitchen wall and covered the gaping hole with plastic sheeting. They’d started to frame up the addition as well.
“The wall was there when I went over to the school and gone when Ali came back an hour later,” my grandmother said, shaking her head in wonder.
“They said it will go fast now,” I replied, putting my arm around her tiny shoulders. “Before you know it, we’ll have a whole new house.”
She frowned. “I don’t want a whole new house.”
“You know what I meant.”
“I guess. Let’s go on in now, and I’ll get you dinner.”
“Kids already eat?” I asked as we walked out front.
“Nope, Ali’s waiting on you. He’s in there watching some cockamamie show about a dysfunctional family that makes duck calls.”
“Jannie?”
“Still at track practice.”
We came around the corner of the house and spotted Bree trudging up the walk past the Dumpster, looking as spent as I’ve ever seen her.
“Someone looks like they need a little love,” Nana Mama murmured. “I’ll get dinner on the table.”
I nodded and went to my wife. We hugged and I rubbed her back for a while and put my nose in her hair, the scent reminding me I had so many good people in my life. “Want to tell me about it?”
“Beer first,” she said, collapsing into a chair on the porch.
I went and got us both cold Brimstone beers from the fridge in the garage. I sipped mine, waiting until she unwound enough to tell me about a depressing visit to the Branson family late that afternoon.
“I went out there to tell them things would be okay,” Bree said. “I knew it wasn’t true.”
“How’s that?”
My wife shrugged. “Been a week since that woman took Joss.”
“Hope you’re not giving up on her, or the Lancaster kid, or Ava.”
Her eyes flashed. “Not a chance on any of them.”
“That’s my lady,” I said, and then told her about the letter from Thierry Mulch and the massage parlor killings in Albuquerque and Tampa. “Mulch was right. Because of Mad Man’s involvement, I never looked for other mass murders at massage parlors.”
Bree thought for several long moments. “You know, I haven’t looked to see if there’ve been baby kidnappings like these in other cities, either.”
I tipped my beer toward her, said, “There you go.”
Jannie came home then, full of funny stories from school and practice. Banneker is known for track, and it was interesting to hear how the school approached the sport. Nana called us all in to eat pan-fried pork chops and kale stir-fried with garlic and sea salt. Of course, she apologized for serving such a simple meal, and we all told her it was fit for a king and his family.
“How was school for you today?” Bree asked Ali as he ate his ice cream.
“Pretty good,” he said. “We got out of social studies to listen to some guy with really red hair. He said you can be anybody you want to be.”
“The man with the really red hair is right,” Nana Mama said. “Anything you can dream, you can become.”
“Yeah,” Ali said. “Like that.”
“What was his name?” I asked.
He thought about that, his nose wrinkled, and then he shrugged. “I can’t remember, but he started some website for kids.”
Bree and Jannie got up and started clearing the table. Jannie said, “I got this, Bree, you look tired.”
“You want to wash them in the bathtub by yourself?”
“It’s not that bad.”
My wife looked at me, said, “Can I use your office for a bit?”
“Sure.”
“Maybe we could go for a drive later?”
“That, too.”
She smiled, got her computer bag, and disappeared upstairs.
“Dad?” Ali said. “Wanna watch the first episode of The Walking Dead with me? I recorded it.”
Zombies weren’t really my cup of tea, but given that my grandmother had succumbed to the show’s charms, I agreed.
Sitting on the couch a few moments later with the DVR cued to play, Ali said, “You’re gonna love this, Dad. It’s based on comic books.”
He said it so earnestly I had to laugh and rub his head.
Okay, I had to admit. It was good. If you haven’t seen the show, it starts with Rick Grimes, a sheriff’s deputy, waking up from a coma only to discover that the world has been taken over by “walkers,” or zombies. The actor who plays Grimes is very convincing and you buy into the situation right away. But it wasn’t until I learned that Grimes’s family had survived and were living with other nonwalkers outside the city that I really got hooked, and—
“Alex?”
My wife stood in the doorwa
y to the dining room, holding a sheaf of papers and staring at it in total disbelief.
“What’s the matter?” I said, getting to my feet.
She shook her head. “You’re not gonna believe what I found.”
Chapter
52
Captain Quintus and John Sampson gazed at Bree and me skeptically around ten the next morning. A Friday. We were in the conference room. The homicide supervisor and my partner had only just arrived.
“Wait,” Quintus said. “You’re saying they’re connected?”
“Yeah,” Sampson said. “Run that one by me again.”
I held both palms out toward my wife, who said, “I went on the Internet last night, searching for news stories about baby kidnappings in other cities. It’s horrible to say this, but it’s more common than you think.”
Quintus nodded. “Every couple of years, some wacko tries to steal a kid.”
“Some succeed,” Bree said. “And if the parents are from a lower socioeconomic class, the stories don’t get big play.”
Sampson said, “But how are the killings and the kidnappings connected?”
“The cities,” Bree replied. “And the dates.”
During her research, Bree had found references to the kidnapping of five-month-old Juanita Vicente and seven-month-old Albert Tinkler in Albuquerque, in April four years before. The connection didn’t dawn on her until she discovered two separate abductions in Tampa, in April two years later, a boy and a girl, four months and eight months old.
“It’s virtually the same time frame as the massage parlor shootings in those cities,” I said.
We showed them stories from April four years prior in the Albuquerque Journal and others published April two years ago in the Tampa Tribune, which referenced the massage parlor killings, the missing prostitutes, and the baby kidnappings on the same day but not in the same articles.
“They were thought of and treated as separate crimes,” Bree said. “We believe they’re all part of the same series of crimes perpetrated by the same two people, a man and a woman working together.”
Studying the reports intently, Quintus mumbled, “Jesus H. Christ.”
“It gets worse,” I said, putting the last of the stories from both papers on the captain’s desk. “In Albuquerque and in Tampa, the babies were found several days after the dead prostitutes. Drowned. But here’s the thing. When we compared the autopsy reports, we saw that the babies and the hookers died at roughly the same time.”
“So let me get this straight,” Captain Quintus said. “Every two years this couple hits a massage parlor, kills everyone except for one prostitute, whom they take hostage, and then they kidnap two babies, girl and boy.”
“Correct,” Bree said. “And then the prostitutes are strangled and the babies are drowned. And then they’re dumped apart.”
“They died at roughly the same time, right?” Sampson asked.
I nodded. “Give or take an hour.”
“Any other timetable to this?” Captain Quintus said.
“I don’t follow,” Bree said.
“Parallels as far as time sequences,” he replied a little testily. “I haven’t had as much experience with ritualistic killings as Alex has, but here you have two years between each of the events, which always occur in April. There have to be other consistencies like that.”
I agreed and started going through the files, looking at dates and times, while Bree, Sampson, and Quintus continued to analyze what we already knew, looking for more connections we might have missed. Ten minutes later, they were speculating on what could possibly have driven a man and a woman to mass murder, kidnapping, and infanticide, when I saw another parallel.
“Thirteen days and seventeen or eighteen hours,” I said, interrupting them. “In both Albuquerque and Tampa, the babies and the prostitutes were murdered in the early evening thirteen days after the massage parlor was attacked.”
“You’re sure?” Quintus said.
“Positive,” I replied. “Which means—”
“Cam Nguyen, Joss Branson, and Evan Lancaster are all dying this coming Wednesday night,” Sampson said.
Chapter
53
Almost forty excruciating hours passed with no significant gain in any of the investigations we were running. The entire time, I was aware of the clock ticking on the lives of the coed and the two babies. I kept thinking about my own kids, how gut-wrenching this all had to be for the Branson and Lancaster families. More than once, I bowed my head and prayed that we’d get some kind of break.
Around four thirty on Palm Sunday, we did.
I was at home, upstairs in my office after attending Mass with Nana Mama, when I got a text from Detective Brefka. It had taken almost ten days for a tech at the FBI computer lab at Quantico to debug the files from the city’s closed-circuit television cameras in the blocks around the Superior Spa the night of the mass killings. Brefka had spent the weekend going through them all and sent a report on what he’d found to my departmental e-mail.
I forwarded the file to Sampson and called him at home. I got Billie, who turned testy when I said John needed to download the file and then call me back. Billie reminded me curtly that he had not had a day off in three weeks. I replied that I hadn’t had a full day off in four weeks, and that it shouldn’t take long.
“Alex, you really know how to handle my wife,” Sampson said when he called back about twenty minutes later.
“Really?” I said.
“No,” he replied.
“Got the file up?”
“Right here.”
Brefka’s report noted that the street camera closest to the massage parlor had been on the blink and caused most of the corruption in the data files. But street cameras to the north and south of the Superior Spa showed a few things he thought we’d want to see. He gave a URL to click on.
I did. My screen jumped, and a video began to buffer and display snatches of CCT footage along with a running time stamp.
At 5:45 the night of the killings and soon after Blossom Mai saw her, Cam Nguyen walked by a camera two blocks south of the Superior Spa, wearing a yellow Windbreaker, sweatpants, and running shoes. She carried a Prince tennis bag and was heading toward the massage parlor.
At 6:40 p.m. a businessman in his fifties passed in front of a camera a block east of the massage parlor, heading toward the spa.
At 7:02, a street camera three blocks north picked up a figure walking south. Of better-than-average height and build, the figure carried a backpack and wore baggy jeans, Nike basketball shoes, and a Redskins sweatshirt with the hood up, shielding his face but not his hands. He was Caucasian.
At 7:06, the businessman rushed past that same camera. He had a contented smile on his face.
Thirty-two minutes later, at 7:38, the figure in the Redskins sweatshirt passed a camera two blocks south of the Superior Spa. Head down, hood up, you never saw the face. But you could see Cam Nguyen clearly. She wore the same tennis outfit from earlier in the evening and walked very close to the guy in the Redskins hoodie.
“There’s our killer and kidnapper,” I said.
“Redskins sweatshirt?” Sampson said. “We’re not dealing with a psychotically disgruntled fan, are we?”
“How would he know Mad Man was in the Superior Spa?” I asked. “No, this was about Cam and the hookers. Francones just got in the way.”
“Where is Mad Man?” Sampson replied. “He’s not on the tape at all.”
I thought about that, said, “He got there by taxi? Stopped right out front where the camera was on the blink?”
“Possible.”
“I say we get a still shot of Mr. Redskins and Cam Nguyen out to the media. See if anyone recognizes her or the shooter’s hoodie and backpack.”
“I have a better idea,” I replied, rewinding the file and stopping it a few seconds later. “We’ll put out video of the guy in the suit. You can see his face clearest, coming and going.”
“Okay, but why th
at guy?”
“The Redskins fan passes the camera at seven oh two, heading south on the way to the massage parlor, and the businessman comes back the other way at seven oh six, leaving the massage parlor,” I said. “Unless I’m terribly mistaken, sometime in those four minutes this happy and lucky customer of the Superior Spa came face to face with our suspect.”
Chapter
54
The following evening around eight, Abigail Barnes whipped an almost-empty bottle of Chianti Classico past me and Sampson. The bottle missed her intended target—a sandy-haired fifty-something guy in an Armani suit—and shattered the face of an antique mariner’s clock that hung on the living room wall. Wine spattered across the tan rug.
“You pig, Harry!” Abigail Barnes raged. “You goddamned pig! Do you know what this will do to me?”
Harry Barnes gaped at his wife, turned pissed off, and shouted, “That was Grandmother’s clock, Abby! What the fuck is—? Who the hell are these—?”
Abigail Barnes went ballistic. With a crazed look, she shot across the living room of their million-dollar home in Chevy Chase, screeching like a banshee, her ruby-red fingernails leading, as if she intended to scratch her husband’s eyes out.
She was wearing a ruby-colored sweat suit emblazoned with the logo of the Chevy Chase Country Club. Sampson grabbed her by the nape of the jacket and stopped her before she could attack. She jerked to a halt, struggled.
“Let me go, Detective!” she screamed.
“That won’t help things, Mrs. Barnes,” Sampson said.
“Detective?” said her husband, who looked baffled and then worried.
“Washington DC Metro Homicide,” I said, showing the man my badge.
“Murder?” Barnes said, paling. “Abby, what’s—”
His wife wrenched so hard against Sampson’s grip that I heard fabric tearing before she went off on Barnes again. “I saw you, you pig, on tape!” she yelled. “So pleased with yourself after God knows what debauchery!”