Criss Cross (Alex Cross #27)(23)

“I don’t like other people doing my work,” I said, and I stepped over the chain.

Sampson hesitated. “We don’t have warrants.”

“Since when have you leaned Boy Scout?” I asked and then gestured at the for sale sign. “We’re thinking of buying a fishing camp to retire to in our old age.”

“I’m a little too young for retirement.”

“Don’t you watch those financial-adviser commercials?” I said. “It’s never too early to think about retirement.”

Sampson pursed his lips, shrugged, and then stepped over the chain. Cicadas buzzed from thickets on both sides of the two-track, and somewhere ahead crows were squawking.

I kept studying the mud, hoping to see some indication that a vehicle had come in here recently. But there’d been thunder-storms in the area for the past three days, and other than our own prints, the wet ground appeared undisturbed.

“Doesn’t exactly feel like a setting for romance,” Sampson said.

“Different strokes,” I said.

We were there looking for a missing thirty-seven-year-old woman named Arlene Duffy. Duffy ran a successful chain of day-care centers and worked ferociously hard. She always had a jar of gummy bears on her desk.

Although single and, according to her staff, not dating anyone, Duffy had left work early the day of her disappearance and bought a merry widow corset at a Victoria’s Secret at a mall in Falls Church. Her car was still parked there eight days later.

Security tapes from the mall revealed Ms. Duffy getting into a black Chevy Tahoe. The windows were tinted. The license plates were doctored.

But using computer-image enhancement programs, we’d been able to make out the sticker on the bumper of the vehicle. It said spellman’s live bait and tackle.

Sampson and I came to an overgrown clearing with a lake beyond it. There were several boarded-up cottages in the tangle of thorny vines that choked the place.

Sampson pointed to the biggest building, which had a caved-in front porch roof. Hanging by a single nail, a rusty sign said spellman’s live bait and tackle.

We walked down to the water.

“Place is hardly developed at all,” I said. “Just a few cabins way over there.”

“You’re saying this could be a retirement investment?” Sampson asked as crows began to quarrel somewhere in the woods.

“Gorgeous spot,” I said, seeing a crow dive-bomb into the weeds on the far side of the old fishing shop. Another one came screaming in behind it, and then they both came out angry over something.

I walked that way, found a game trail, followed it for fifteen yards. Then I stopped and called out to Sampson.

He came over quickly and peered at the colorful mound in the trail in front of me. “Gummy bears?”





CHAPTER 28





“WHAT THE HECK’S A PILE of gummy bears doing there?” Sampson asked.

“Exactly,” I said, squeezing one. “And they’re fresh.”

“I don’t get this.”

“Arlene Duffy always kept a jar of these on her desk, remember?” I said, gazing down the game trail. “There are more of them up there.”

Sampson and I stepped off the trail and walked parallel to it through the thorns and vines, seeing a gummy bear or two every few feet. We soon left the clearing and entered a thicket.

The light was dimmer, but I could see a crow on its side, quivering, on the trail ahead of me. There were gummy bears all around the bird, which seemed to be suffering some kind of seizure.

“Those candies are poisoned,” I said, gesturing at the crow. “Some of them, anyway.”

We found another dead bird and then a third before we reached a second, smaller clearing in the forest. A single decrepit cabin slouched there, overgrown by climbing vines, moss, and saplings.

The gummy bears led us toward the cabin, but when the breeze picked up and changed direction, the candies no longer mattered.

“Jesus,” Sampson said, pulling out a handkerchief and covering his mouth and nose. “I think there’s camphor in the car if we need it,” he said.

I mouth-breathed as I walked up onto the ramshackle porch, already hearing the blowflies. I got out the small flashlight I always carry and flicked it on.

The plank floor was buckled and covered in dead leaves, trash, and the odd gummy bear or two. I stepped gingerly inside, hoping to God the floor didn’t give way.

The boards grumbled but held as I took another step, then a third.

I swung the flashlight toward the buzzing flies. The beam passed over an old woodstove and the ruins of a couch before illuminating a headless corpse lashed to a chair. The head rested on a table beside her.

“It’s her,” I called out, feeling depressed and angry. “Arlene Duffy.”

“Shit,” Sampson said. “You’re sure?”

“She’s wearing the merry widow,” I said, playing the light over her. “And he cut off her head, Meat Man–style.”

“You’re kidding,” Sampson said, no doubt remembering the gruesome details of a case we had worked a decade before.

“I wish I were,” I said, taking a step toward her. She’d been dead for at least two days and was putrefying in the heat.

Despite the cloud of flies, I could see the gummy bears stuffed in her mouth. A note written in lipstick was pinned to her chest.