Chapter 145
BREE CAME RUNNING up as I pushed the massive corpse away from me. Even now that he was dead, I still hated the bastard with all my heart and soul. Bree knelt on the ground and hugged me. “I'm sorry, Alex. I'm so sorry. All I saw was the knife. I had to shoot him.”
I kept holding on to her and rocking. “Not your fault. Not your fault.” But then I began to shudder and shake. I knew what I had lost here, knew that the Tiger had been my last chance to find my family.
We left the body and trudged back to the farmhouse. Police cars from the neighboring towns were arriving, and the trees were lit with a crimson-and-blue glare from their domes.
Sampson came out of the farmhouse as we approached. “I've gone through every room. There's no one here. I don't see any sign of them either, Alex. No blood anywhere, nothing obvious anyway. I don't think they were ever here.”
I nodded, trying to register crime scene facts and to comprehend their meaning. “1 want to look again anyway. I need to look for myself. What about Flaherty?” I suddenly thought to ask.
“The state police have him for now. He showed them he was CIA. I don't know what happens next. I don't think they can hold him.”
Cross Country
Chapter 146
WE SEARCHED THE house and a nearby work shed, and a barn-until first light of day.
Then we began to comb the surrounding grounds. At this point there were more than thirty police officers and FBI agents searching at the scene, but it still didn't seem like enough manpower to me.
Everything was feeling even more unreal now. I was here, but I wasn't. I had no idea about the passage of time either; it seemed as if I could have been at the farm for a couple of days or for just a few minutes.
Proof of life, I thought. That's what I want, isn't it? And if not that, then proof of death.
We found a Nissan minivan that had to be the vehicle the Tiger and his killer thugs had come to the farm in. The van held small arms, clothing, and video games in cardboard boxes.
But there was no sign of blood inside, no rope to tie anyone up with. Nothing to make us believe Nana or the kids had been inside the vehicle.
There were more tire tracks up near the house, but nothing seemed unusual. Judging from the look of the place, I figured it hadn't been a working farm for at least a couple of years. Town records showed that it belonged to a Leopoldo Gout, but we hadn't been able to contact the owner yet. Who was Leopoldo Gout? What did he know about what had happened here?
Finally, at around four that afternoon, Bree walked me to my car. Then she drove me home to Fifth Street. I was in no shape to continue looking, she said, and she was right.
I hoped against hope for a good ending, but there was no one there at the house. The mess in the kitchen remained as I had found it, and I left it just that way.
For memories' sake.
Nana's kitchen. Her favorite place to be.
Cross Country
Chapter 147
IT WAS ALL so baffling, so incomprehensible, wrong in so many ways.
Bree and I brainstormed for a while, but I couldn't concentrate. My thinking was too chaotic; I was too crazy in the head, too disturbed and lost. 1 didn't want to talk, didn't want to eat, and I couldn't sleep. I couldn't even keep my eyes shut the one time I lay down on the living room couch. I thought about taking a drive, then decided no, not right now.
“I'm going to go for a run,” I finally told Bree. “Clear my head. There has to be something I'm missing.”
“Okay, Alex. I'll be here. Have a good run.”
She didn't offer to come, understanding that I wanted to be alone now. I did need to be by myself, to plan, to do something that would make some sense of what had happened.
I ran, at first along familiar streets close to my house, but then on the streets winding off Fifth, where I didn't remember ever coming on foot before.
Finally I was able to concentrate a little better, and 1 began to think about what Adanne had told me in Lagos. Had her secrets caused any of this-the death of her family, her own murder, whatever had happened to Nana, Ali, and Jannie?
“Alex, I know terrible things,” she'd told me. “I'm writing a story about it. I have to tell somebody what I found out.” She was afraid that something would happen to her.
Well, something had happened to Adanne.
I continued to run and I found that 1 was getting stronger physically, or moving faster, anyway. What a cruel world this could be sometimes. Jesus. That wasn't how I looked at things usually. That wasn't me. Only now it was.
