“When times get rough and the drugs get thin,” Kevin added.
“I won’t do it!” Cam Nguyen screeched, and I pushed at the passage door, getting it open enough for me to squeeze through into the root cellar.
“Then I’ll make you, Mommy,” Carney said, and I heard a sickening thud that set the babies off all over again.
“That’ll fix her,” Carney’s sister said. “Fix her good, Kenny-Two.”
Gun up, I took two steps toward the open door, sniffing the air, smelling body odor and diapers and fear.
“I’ll get her on her knees,” Carney’s brother, Kevin, said.
I took three more soft steps and then a fourth sideways into the light that streamed from the door, looking straight into the chamber of horrors.
Cam Nguyen was slumped in a chair. Her head swung lazily the way a boxer’s will when he’s been dazed by a blow. Her nipples and lips had been smeared with lipstick, making them grotesquely large and gaudy. The babies squalled on the floor next to the tub, which was now close to full. But where were Carney and the others? They had to be either to the immediate left or right of the door.
I heard the rattle of metal to the left as I eased toward the doorway.
From what sounded like the same side, Carney said, “Is everybody in? The ceremony’s about to begin.”
The muzzle of my gun leading, I did a head bob left. My brain registered the fact that no one was there an instant before white fireworks went off in my head, blinding me as I stumbled forward and crumpled.
Chapter
77
Groping crazily beneath her with her right hand, Bree felt the burned boards under her left elbow splinter and then collapse. As she fell, her right cheek struck the jagged edge of the hole, which stabbed and cut her. Her head twisted from the pain and her right arm snapped up to protect her face from further damage.
That reflex saved her life. She felt something hit her hard beneath her upper arm and elbow; and for an instant she was hung up on something metal, tubular and strong, like a pipe. The rest of her body swung forward beneath it, dislodging her, and she fell a third time.
She was only in the air a foot or two before her shoes smashed against the lip of something, which threw her forward, prone on a molded metal surface. The pain that shot up through her ribs was electric, searing hot, and probing. Her face felt like she’d been clawed.
But Bree wasn’t falling anymore and miraculously she’d managed to keep hold of the Maglite, which shone forward, revealing an old but gleaming Coca-Cola sign leaned up against the stone wall and boxes and piles of dusty junk. Shaking, wincing in pain, aware of the blood trickling down her cheeks, Bree shined the light around, and understood her location and just how close she’d come to dying.
She was up on the hood of a seatless and wheelless old tractor. Falling through the floor, she’d hung up on a roll bar meant to protect the driver. Immediately behind and below the tractor was a harrow with dozens of circular blades meant for breaking up sod. If she’d hit there instead of here, she would have been found impaled and dead.
“I won’t do it!” Cam Nguyen screeched.
Bree heard her much more clearly that time, but again below her. Was there a subbasement? How in God’s name would she get down there? Despite the blows she’d taken, gritting her teeth against the pain, she rolled over, sat up, and threw her legs over the tractor’s dashboard.
Her feet found the base where the seat had once been attached. She stood there a moment, dripping blood but shining her light over the jumble of equipment, having no idea where to begin to look.
“No!” Cam Nguyen screamed, and now Bree could distinctly make out the sounds of the babies sobbing, as upset as if they were suffering colic.
I can’t save them, she thought desperately, shining the light all around herself. They’re going to—
Then she spotted something, that Coke sign, and took hope.
Chapter
78
I hit the floor, not unconscious, but damn close from a blow to the back of my head. A boot connected with my lower back. Another hit higher and I convulsed. My vision returned, but it was off-kilter, wavering. I realized I still had my gun and tried to get turned to shoot, but the boot stomped down on my wrist, pinning it to the ground.
“Detective Cross?” Carney said. “What an unexpected surprise.”
My vision cleared and I saw that the young officer was the only person in the room besides Cam Nguyen and the two crying babies. Carney’s baby face was a mess of twitching muscles, thin lips, and wild eyes that aimed over the tritium sights of a 9mm pistol he had pointed directly at my head.
“It’s over, Carney,” I said. “Whatever this is, it is over!”
“It is never over!” he shouted. “It goes on and on and on!”
I saw his fingers flex toward the trigger.
“Other police are here,” I said. “They’re all around us.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “I would have heard the sirens.”
“They came in silent,” I insisted. “You’ll never get out of here.”
Carney seemed to find that funny. “Of course I’m getting out of here. There are tunnels all over the place. I’ll simply do my business and slip away.”
That thought seemed to distract him from killing me for the moment. He stomped on my fingers and I let go of the pistol. He kicked my weapon across the floor and followed it, splashing through the water that had begun to spill over the top of the tub. Carney picked my gun up, grinned, and kept it trained on me as he stalked toward Cam Nguyen, who wept and cowered away from him.
“Do it, Mommy!” he bellowed at her. “Do what you always do!”
The young officer’s entire body seemed wracked with tremors then, and his posture shifted, turned feminine. So did his voice, which rose several octaves and became a woman’s.
“Take the boy, Mother,” Kelli said in a weird pleading tone. “Take Kevin before you take me.”
With that Carney tossed my gun into the tub and with his free hand grabbed Cam Nguyen by the hair. Ramming his gun against her temple, he dragged her off the chair and threw her to her knees by the tub.
“Pick up my brother,” Carney said in his sister’s voice. “And put him in the water like the baby Moses or so help me God, Kenny-Two is going to turn your brain inside out.”
“Please,” Cam Nguyen began to sob. “I…”
Carney went through another of those minor seizures and I tried to get up and go for my gun. But I had to freeze when his eyes focused again and he raged at Nguyen, “Do it, Mommy. Or die!”
Shaking uncontrollably, sobbing from the depths of her soul, Cam Nguyen reached for one of the babies.
“That’s Kelli,” Carney growled. “Take Kevin first. Don’t you remember?”
Her mouth chewed the air as she picked up poor little Evan Lancaster and held him out over the tub. Carney looked as if he were watching an old, familiar movie, his lips curled with pleasure, as if he were about to recite a favorite line.
“Put him to sleep, Mother,” he said. “Put him to sleep. He’ll stop crying.”
The next ten seconds seemed like an hour.
Carney smashed the back of Cam Nguyen’s left hand.
She howled in agony, dropped one hand that held the baby boy, but clutched him with the other by the side of his filthy little pajamas. Carney grabbed her right wrist to hammer her into dropping Evan Lancaster into the tub.
Chapter
79
The explosion in that confined space was deafening, disorienting.
Carney’s right shoulder erupted in blood. He staggered against Cam Nguyen, who let go of Evan Lancaster. The baby fell into the tub.
Carney grabbed his gun with his left hand and tried to raise it.
The second shot shattered his left wrist before he could fire, and his gun fell into the bath after the baby. I shot up to my feet, going for Evan Lancaster, but Cam Nguyen was way ahead of me. She’d plunged headfirst into
the tub and yanked up the sputtering boy before I got there.
Over the ringing in my ears I could hear Bree shouting, “On the ground, Officer Carney! Now! Any other move, I will kill you.”
Carney looked at her like she was an apparition in a nightmare. I saw why. My wife’s face was completely swollen and lacerated. There were pieces of wood sticking out of her wounds, and blood ran like spiderwebs down over her face and shirt.
Despite my woozy head, I thrust my hand down into the tub, retrieved my service pistol, pointed it at Carney, and shouted, “You heard her. On the floor.”
The tics and contortions of rage in the young officer’s face began to disintegrate before he collapsed to his knees by the tub, looked up at the ceiling of the crude room, and moaned, “You said we weren’t doing anything wrong, Mommy. You said they were just sleeping.”
Chapter
80
Marcus Sunday and Acadia Le Duc heard the sirens long before they saw the lights of the Montgomery County sheriff’s cruisers and ambulances ripping up the slick dirt road toward the field and the farmhouse. The duo was up on a limestone outcropping across the road, back toward the reservoir. Sunday was using the binoculars to look down through the drizzle toward the old farm several hundred yards away.
“Shouldn’t we get out of here, sugar?” Acadia asked.
“Why would we do that?” he replied calmly. “We’re just hikers, or bird watchers, or both.”
Sunday kept the binoculars trained on the cruisers as they turned onto the driveway.
“Those were shots down there a while back,” Acadia complained. “I don’t know how things went down at your house, but I was taught to stay away from police when there’s been shooting going on.”
“Your father the bootlegger taught you that?” he asked.
“And Mama,” Acadia said. “She didn’t trust any cop. I don’t, either.”
“My daddy took somewhat the opposite perspective,” Sunday said, seeing the cruisers and ambulances stop in the overgrown farmyard. “He liked to study the people who might do him the most harm.”
“He obviously never saw you coming,” she replied.
“Oblivious,” the writer agreed as Cross appeared from the house, followed by EMTs pushing a stretcher on which a sobbing young man lay. Bree Stone followed, carrying two babies in her arms. Behind her an EMT helped a young Asian woman wrapped in a blanket.
Sunday tilted his chin, said, “Bravo, Mr. and Mrs. Cross.”
“What?” Acadia asked.
“It appears they’ve got the killer and rescued the babies and the missing prostitute.”
Acadia gazed at him, said, “I must say, you surprise me, sugar.”
“How’s that?” Sunday replied, lowering the glasses and looking at her.
Acadia shrugged. “I figured you’d be upset because, I don’t know, Dr. Cross just beat you there?”
“Did he?” the writer said. “I think not. Were it not for my letter, they would have been days behind the curve, and the Vietnamese girl and the babies would be dead.”
“And how do you know that, sugar?” she asked skeptically.
“It has to do with certain timetables I noticed in the killer’s pattern,” he replied as if lecturing a student. “In brief, he killed them all about thirteen days and some-odd hours after the attack on the massage parlor. So clearly, I am responsible in no small way for their return to safety.”
Acadia smiled slyly. “My hero again.”
She slipped into his arms and pressed herself to him.
“And now?” she asked.
“And now we get down to it,” Sunday replied. “We bring him to his knees.”
Chapter
81
I still had a whopper of a headache two hours after Bree rescued me, and the hostages, and took a madman into custody. And my wife’s face and ribs were killing her, even with the novocaine, the pain pills, the stitches, and the bandages.
But I don’t think we’d ever been happier.
The truth is that many kidnapping victims don’t make it home. At some point their captivity becomes their death, and there’s nothing but heartache surrounding the discovery of a body. But at close to seven that Wednesday evening, we got to witness a miracle in the emergency room of Holy Cross Hospital, the same place the ambulance had taken Harold Barnes after his heart attack two days before.
Teddy and Crystal Branson burst in.
“Is it true?” Crystal said the second she saw Bree. “Is Joss all right? Are you all right?”
“Broken ribs, a few stitches, but I’m fine. And Joss is a little hungry, a lot tired, and dealing with a mean diaper rash, but other than that, she’s—”
Teddy Branson began to cry when his wife kissed Bree on her good cheek and sobbed, “Thank you, Detective. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. You’ve given me a reason to live again.”
Twenty minutes later, we got to see the miracle repeated when the Lancasters came in to reunite with their son.
“I just want to hug you,” Dr. Lancaster wept.
“Please don’t,” Bree said, laughing and wincing. “Go on, now, he’s waiting for you.”
“Detectives,” her husband said. “We will never forget what you’ve done for us. We owe you everything.”
Then he and his wife hurried toward the room where nurses were working on their baby boy.
“Pretty nice job, Alex,” said Ned Mahoney, who’d driven the Lancasters over to the hospital.
“All thanks to my better half,” I said, nodding to Bree, who walked over gingerly. “She really saved the day.”
“Least I could do after what I went through to get to you,” she said.
Bree had told me the entire story: how she’d fallen through the charred and rotting floor, lost her pistol and landed on the tractor; and how she’d almost given up hope of getting to the subbasement before she spotted her gun lying in the harrow discs; and then how she’d acted on a hunch, went to the old Coca-Cola sign—the only thing that seemed clean in the barn basement—and pushed it aside, finding a ring in the floor, a trapdoor that led to a ladder that dropped into an anteroom off the root cellar.
“Well, I wouldn’t wish busted ribs on anyone,” I said. “But I’m overjoyed you showed up when you did.”
“Ahhh, that’s so romantic,” she said, laughed and winced again.
“I’ll say it again, Alex Cross,” Mahoney said. “You are a lucky guy.”
“Don’t I know it?” I said, and kissed my wife on the forehead.
“Carney?” Mahoney asked.
“They took him to the psych ward at St. Elizabeths,” I replied.
“You going to do the evaluation?”
“I would think so.”
“We need to go soon,” Bree said. “I’ve got a date with the couch and a big glass of wine. Maybe two.”
“One minute,” I said. “There’s someone I want to talk to before we go.”
Chapter
82
Cam Nguyen dozed, an IV in her arm, stitches in the back of her head, a cast around her broken hand.
Outside her room, I could hear the excited voices of the Bransons and the Lancasters celebrating their reunions with their babies. But here, around the college student turned prostitute, there was just the beeping of monitors and the dripping of whatever they’d put in her IV line.
I turned to leave, but she said behind me, “You’re the one who saved us.”
Going to stand by her, I said, “My wife did. We’re both with Metro police.”
“My head hurts.”
“You suffered a moderate concussion,” I said, and rubbed the back of my head where Carney had hit me. “Worse than mine.”
Nodding slowly, Cam said, “He wanted me to drown those babies.”
“I saw it, heard it. A horrible thing. But you’re safe now, all three of you. And Carney’s locked away in a padded room.”
“That’s his name, Carney?” she asked. “He talks like three or four
different people.”
“I’m beginning to understand that,” I said, and noticed her eyes drooping. “I’ll be back to talk to you tomorrow, okay?”
She nodded sleepily.
“Is there anyone I can call to say you’re okay?”
“My par…” she managed before drifting away.
Outside, Bree was waiting. So was Mahoney, who said he’d drive us home. Given the way my head was feeling, I wasn’t arguing. Neither was Bree.
Ten minutes later we were heading back into the city. I sat in the backseat. It was long past rush hour, but traffic was thick. Hundreds of cars went by us, each filled with their own drama, their own agenda, completely severed from the madness we’d been forced to confront and defeat that day.
It dawned on me then that the hardest part of my job was the separation from normal, the constant interaction with the bizarre and the troubling. At some point that had to affect you, had to twist your mind, even if you were a highly trained and experienced psychologist. It had to turn you into someone else.
But not today, I told myself. Not today.
I remembered that I had the number of the restaurant Cam Nguyen’s parents owned in California. I got out my cell, found the number in my recent contacts, and hit Call.
“Nguyen Pho Shop,” a man said.
“Mr. Nguyen?”
“Yes, who this?”
“Detective Cross, sir. I called a couple of weeks ago about your daughter being missing?”
A pause. “She dead?”
“I’m very happy to say that we found her alive, Mr. Nguyen. She’s been through hell and back, but she’s very much alive.”
The silence that followed surprised me.
“Sir, do you understand what I—”
Cross My Heart Page 19
