Read Hope to Die for Free Online Page A

a black hoodie.
    “That’s not the picture of Mulch I saw on the other version of the website,” Dawson said. “I saw the guy who came here, red hair, red beard, everything.”
    “Will the real Thierry Mulch please stand up?” I said, and I felt the throbbing in my head start up all over again.

CHAPTER
11
     
    MY HEAD WAS STILL pounding when I reached the sealed-off construction area on the third floor of Metro headquarters. Men in hard hats and respirator masks were using sledgehammers to bust down drywall. The air was full of gypsum dust as I went to the plastic sheeting that sealed off the destructing from the already destructed.
    I started to cough and that only made the pain in my head worse. A part of me wanted to shut down then, to curl up in a fetal position right there in the dust and let it settle on me as I mourned my wife. But a greater part of me needed to keep pushing on. If I was to have any hope of saving the rest of my family, I had to keep moving, keep asking questions, keep fighting as long and as hard as possible.
    I tore open the flap and stepped inside a large space already stripped down to the cement floors. In the middle, under a bank of fluorescent shop lights, stood eight desks. At them or around them, good men and women were working.
    Ned Mahoney, my old partner at the FBI, was talking with Sampson. Mahoney spotted me and jumped up. “Jesus, Alex, I just heard. And I’m so goddamn … I don’t know what to say except I promise you, we’re moving heaven and earth to find this bastard.”
    I swallowed hard, patted him on the shoulder. Mahoney and I had worked together in Behavioral Sciences at Quantico. We’d toiled on too many cases involving the criminally insane to bullshit each other with psychological nuances and false premises.
    “Ned,” I managed. “If we don’t catch him, he’ll carve them all up in the same twisted way.”
    “That’s not happening,” said Captain Roelof Antonius Quintus, my boss, who was coming toward me with other members of the task force. “If that Jane Doe turns out to be Bree, he’s killed a DC cop. At the very least, he’s kidnapped a DC cop’s family. For that, he
will
pay.”
    The rest of the detectives and FBI agents behind him nodded grimly.
    “Thank you, Captain,” I said, nodding to the others. “Thank you all for everything you’re doing.”
    I got out the envelope I’d taken from Dawson’s office.
    “I went to Sojourner Truth and found the principal back from vacation,” I told them. “I have a business card Mulch gave her when he went there to speak to the kids.”
    I handed it over to the captain, explaining about the fake website that was almost like the one a real Thierry Mulch ran.
    “Everything was the same except the picture of Mulch. It took sophisticated computer work. The kind Preston Elliot could do in his sleep.”
    Quintus, Sampson, and Mahoney exchanged glances.
    “Why don’t you sit down, Alex,” the captain said.
    “What’s going on?”
    Quintus took a deep breath and pointed to a chair. Reluctantly, I sat in it, and I felt my eyes begin to burn even before Ned Mahoney spoke.
    “Three days ago, the Fairfax County sheriff was called to a commercial pig farm in Berryville, Virginia,” Mahoney began. “The owner found a human skull and a piece of femur in some machinery. Quantico ran the DNA and got three immediate matches.”
    I squinted at the light in the room, which suddenly felt too strong. “Three?”
    Sampson said, “Semen taken from that rape scene in Alexandria, semen taken from the pants leg of Mandy Bell Lee’s murdered attorney, and the hair sample Preston Elliot’s mother filed as part of his missing-persons report.”
    It took several moments before I grasped the implications of all that. Ten days before, the attorney of country-western star Mandy Bell Lee had been found poisoned in his room at the Mandarin Oriental. That same night, a man who called himself Thierry Mulch had raped a woman