I told Moses he had done more than enough and that he should go home, but he wouldn't hear of it. He stayed with me until morning and then went out to secure the few things he said I'd need for my safe journey, including a police clearance sheet to leave the country.
While I waited, the gravity of this trip back started to sink in. I had to cover more than a thousand miles of unfamiliar countryside to Lagos, over multiple borders, with no more guidance than the maps that Moses only hoped he'd be able to find for me.
So when he came back, I had a proposition for him.
“Make this trip with me and you can keep the truck,” I said. “As a fair trade for your services.”
I expected a conversation, or at least a pause, but there was none.
He hoisted a goatskin bag of provisions from his shoulder into the truck, then handed me back the money he hadn't spent.
“Yes,” he said simply. “I will do it.”
Cross Country
Chapter 63
“SAMPSON?”
“Yeah?”
“This sucks big-time, you know that? I hate you.”
“Should have called tails, Bree.”
The house on Eighteenth Street was quiet now, not the nasty hive of activity it had been on the night of the murders. Today, this morning, Bree and Sampson had it to themselves. Not that either one of them wanted to be here at the crime scene.
That was why they'd tossed a coin on the front stoop.
Sampson got the master suite.
Bree got the children's bedroom.
She blew into a latex glove, put it on, and unlocked the door, letting it swing to a stop before she stepped inside. Then she put her head down and hurried upstairs.
“I hate you, John,” she called out.
The kids' bodies were gone, of course, but there was the residue of printing powder everywhere. Otherwise, the murder scene looked the same: matching yellow comforters soaked through with blood; wide spatter pattern on the bunk bed, rug, walls, and ceiling; two small desks on the opposite wall, undisturbed, as if nothing unspeakable had happened here.
Ayana Abboud had been ten. Her brother, Peter, seven.
The hit on their father, Basel Abboud, was a hell of a lot easier for Bree to comprehend. His columns in the Washington Times had been an early and insistent voice for US military intervention in Darfur, with or without UN Security Council buy-in. He wrote of widespread bribes and corruption both in Africa and Washington. By definition, the man had enemies on at least two continents.
The kind of enemies who go after your wife and kids while they're at it? It sure looked that way. All four of them had been slaughtered in their house.
Bree turned a slow three-sixty, trying to see it all for the first time again. What jumped out at her now? What had they missed before? What would Alex see if he were here instead of in Africa?
Africa! For the first time, it made some sense to her for him to be there. This kind of violence-Africa was where it came from. This warning could only be fully understood in the context of Lagos, Sierra Leone, Darfur.
Certainly, the killers made no pretense of covering their tracks or hiding anything. Patent prints were visible everywhere that there was blood. Hundreds of latents had turned up as well, all over the house - the walls, the beds, the bodies of the dead.
Food had been hastily consumed in the kitchen: the remains of a pork chop dinner, Neapolitan ice cream scooped from a tub, soda pop, and liquor.
Imagine the level of stupidity, or the indifference to being caught, tried, and sentenced to lifetime in prison for these unspeakable murders.
Bree didn't need results to know that none of these prints would flag in the FBI's fingerprint ID system. Her best guess was that the killers were young African nationals with no priors in the US and, most likely, no record of having entered the country either. Some of them would probably match prints taken at Eleanor Cox's home, some would not. They were savage ghosts whom someone older could use to do his dirty work, she thought. Very efficient. And very much fucked up in their heads. God, she hated him-whoever was behind this!
She came full circle and was staring at the children's beds again when a soft tap-tap sounded at the dormer window behind her.
Bree wheeled around and nearly cried out in surprise. She had always had a fear of getting shot in the back.
A young boy, small and wide-eyed, hung on to the fixed burglar bars outside, and he was looking in at her. When their eyes met he let go of the bars with one arm and beckoned her over.
“I saw the bad murders. I saw every thing,” he said in a quiet voice meant only for her. “I know who the killers are.”
