Deadly Cross (Alex Cross #28)(92)

I got frantic, swatted at the flies, and spit them out. Bree grabbed me beneath the armpits, trying to help me up.

“Are you okay?” she said.

The dizziness eased. I nodded and began to struggle to my feet. But as I did, I saw that vortex of flies in a completely different way.

They weren’t pouring out of the van. They weren’t pouring from the coffins. They were coming from beneath the vehicle.

“Wait,” I said. I shook off Bree’s help, sprawled on the ground to look underneath the van, and saw through the flies to the corpse I’d been smelling since the wind changed.

The deer, a doe, had died in the past day or two. A knife had split the guts wide open. The heat did the rest.

It was brilliant camouflage in its own macabre way: a vile-smelling deterrent to the nosy types who might second-guess their decision to investigate the mound of vegetation where something dead and putrid lay.

I jumped up and told Bree what I’d seen, then climbed into the van, only now seeing the full interior. Beyond the coffins were lighting equipment, tripods, and a blowup mattress. The walls to either side were fitted with brackets for hand and power tools.

My eyes went to the two portable drills, side by side in the brackets, both featuring large batteries and Phillips-head screw bits sticking out the noses. Bree and I grabbed them and got to work.

I started unscrewing the first box. With a screech and then a long whine, the screw was out. I paused and heard muffled screaming inside.

“She’s alive!” I shouted and went at the screws with a fury I have rarely possessed. I paused as the next screw left the plywood lid and heard yelling from inside Bree’s box. But nothing yet from the third.

We kept shouting to the girls inside the boxes that they were safe now, that Peters was dead, and we were coming to help them. As I removed the third screw on my box, Deputy Cafaro charged onto the scene and Bree yelled at her to call ambulances and medevac helicopters to land on the maintenance road.

A minute later, the last screw came up. I tried to lift the top, but it wouldn’t budge. It had been glued shut. I found a crowbar that I used to pry it off.

“Helicopters on their way,” Cafaro said, coming back.

I lifted and handed her the first lid, seeing poor Rachel Christopher inside the wooden box, naked, blindfolded, gagged, and bound at the ankles and wrists with silver duct tape.

Thrilled that Rachel was alive but wanting to spare her the embarrassment of being naked in front of a man she barely knew, I said, “Deputy Cafaro, there’s a young lady in here who needs your help.”

Then I turned and went with the drill to the silent third coffin and began to remove the screws. Bree used the crowbar to pry off the second coffin’s lid.

“It’s Tina,” she told me, then reached into the box. “It’s okay, honey. Let me help you.”

Their blindfolds came off and then the gags. The Christopher twins were both shaking and sobbing as they sat up, their backs to me. Bree and Cafaro cut the duct tape from their wrists and ankles, freeing them.

The deputy ran back to her Suburban and returned with two space blankets to wrap around the girls just as I removed the last screw on the last coffin. In quick order, I had the lid pried off.

Dee Nathaniel was inside, bound, although not blindfolded or gagged. Her face and body had been beaten badly. Her eyes were swollen shut. There was a lot of caked blood from a gash on her head. And she wasn’t moving.

I was starting to check her neck for a pulse when she shifted her chin, moaned, opened one of her eyes to a slit, then moved her split, swollen lips and whispered thickly, “I’m not dead yet, Dr. Cross.”

“No, you are not!” I cried, pumping my fist and feeling like we’d triumphed over impossible odds. “You are alive, Dee Nathaniel! And you are going to the hospital and then home to your mom!”





CHAPTER 109





A MONTH LATER, I CLIMBED a steep, windy trail up Old Rag Mountain. It was the first of October, a Saturday, still hot but not intolerable, and there was a nice steady breeze blowing through the trees.

“How much farther?” asked John Sampson, who was leading.

“A quarter mile?” Bree said.

She was behind him. Bree looked over her shoulder at me and smiled.

My lovely wife had been doing a lot of smiling lately. She loved her new job. There was even talk of sending her to Paris on an assignment.

I smiled back, thinking about Ronald Peters and how we’d all overlooked him. Well, everyone but Randall Christopher, evidently.

We’d found phones and laptops that belonged to Christopher and Kay Willingham in the rafters of Peters’s home in Takoma Park, Maryland. We also found a collection of videos and digital photographs on CDs that featured the girls he’d killed.

The Christopher girls had been traumatized by their abduction and captivity, but Peters had not sexually abused either of them. Dee Nathaniel, however, had twice been raped and filmed by Peters.

She had a broken jaw from his beating her after he realized that her phone had not been completely dead. She’d been able to turn it on when he left her alone briefly on the second floor of the old silica plant, where he’d kept them overnight. He’d broken two of Dee’s ribs and her right wrist.

But when I’d gone to see her with Bree at home the other day, Dee said she was feeling much better. She was in therapy to deal with the experience and said that she was happy to report that Peters may have violated her body and messed with her mind, but he had not touched her soul.