Hope to Die by James Patterson Read Free Book Online

to be behind the wheel.”

CHAPTER
13
     
    IT TOOK SAMPSON AND me about an hour to get free of DC traffic and take blue highways out through Reston and McLean and on into the rural land you find the more west and south you go in Virginia. We rode most of the way in silence, but Sampson’s pity and grief were as clear as if he’d spoken words of condolence or shock.
    Sampson’s mere presence, the living, breathing embodiment of my longest relationship in life other than Nana Mama, was the only reason I didn’t completely crack up during the drive to the pig farm. But no matter how I tried to stop it, I kept flashing on images of Bree during our courtship. That first shared bashful smile. The first time I touched her fingers. The first time her lips met mine. How much she liked to dance and laugh. How committed she was to being a cop and a stepmother to my kids.
    “You thinking about her, shug?” Sampson asked.
    There were times when I could swear my partner was clairvoyant. Or at least, he picked up on subtle changes in my body so perfectly that he could decipher my thoughts. Or it was an easy guess; I don’t know.
    “Yeah,” I said, and fell quiet again for several long moments, swallowing hard at unbridled emotion. “John?”
    “Talk to me,” he said.
    “I don’t know how to …” I began and then faltered. “I can’t …”
    “Can’t what?”
    “Think of Bree as gone,” I said through clenched teeth. “It’s like my heart can’t believe it. I didn’t even get to say good-bye. I wasn’t there to tell her how much I loved her, how she made everything in my life so …”
    “Whole?” Sampson said softly.
    “Anchored,” I replied.
    It was the perfect word for what Bree had done in my life; she was the person who anchored me, grounded me, kept me from washing away.
    “We don’t have DNA results yet,” Sampson said.
    “I’ve been telling myself that.”
    “And you keep telling yourself that, you hear?”
    It started to rain. Sampson turned on the wipers, and the slapping sounded like nails being pounded by one of those air guns. I closed my eyes, reached up, and started rubbing at that spot on the back of my head where the junkie had hit me with a piece of pipe.
    “Headaches still as bad?” Sampson asked.
    “Getting better,” I said, though that was an overstatement.
    “You need to get that checked out again, Alex,” Sampson said. “It’s been, like, six days and you’re still hurting. You should see a neurologist.”
    “Doctors said to expect the headaches,” I said. “Part of the healing process. They could go on for months. And right now? I don’t need another doctor to tell me the same thing.”
    My partner looked ready to argue, but then he spotted a sign ahead in the light rain that read
Pritchard’s Farm: Specialty Pork
.
    “There it be,” he said slowing and turning.
    We drove up a long dirt driveway bordered on both sides by trees that looked brilliantly green, all wet and new. It was spring, a time of rebirth. But it felt like November to me when we rolled into an orderly farmyard that reeked of a stench I can’t even begin to describe.
    As we climbed from the car, we heard a squealing din coming from a huge low-roofed building that sat on a bench of earth about a quarter mile from a picture-perfect farmhouse that looked recently built.
    “Pork bellies been good to someone,” Sampson observed.
    A weathered woman in her forties wearing a green rain jacket, rubber gloves, and calf-high rubber boots over her jeans came around the side of the house. She carried a pitchfork and revealed smears of soil on her right cheek when she pushed off her hood and brushed back graying hair to look at us.
    Sampson already had his badge out. “Mrs. Pritchard?”
    “You here about the skull and the bone?” she asked.
    “We are,” I said.
    “Expect you better talk to Royal about that, my husband,” she said, gesturing up the hill with the pitchfork. “He’s on up to the barn.