by Robb T White
‘Still no motive,’ she said. ‘All this—for what? None of these people have anything in common.’
‘Let’s ask him when he’s sitting in the room.’
She hadn’t slept more than three hours since the raid. Her nerves were frazzled but her zeal was notched up.
‘Do you want some assistance with the brother?’ Huff asked her.
‘That’s why I was looking for you,’ she said. ‘He keeps trying to charm me. I’ve been in there for an hour and all he wants to do is draw a contrast between him and his brother. I thought having you in the room might change the chemistry.’
Calling for a man to rescue her, but pride be damned. Every second counted.
‘He was in hiding from his brother,’ Huff said. ‘But he claims he had no idea about his brother’s other life. He seemed so oppressed by life, his expression.’
‘He’s already writing his memoirs,’ Jade said.
Fred Wöissell’s face showed how disappointed he was that she had brought another officer into the room. He thought he was making headway with the attractive FBI agent. Clean her up, swap that tacky blazer for a Dolce & Gabbana leather blazer, eyeliner to bring out that delicious Asian upper-eyelid crease, and—voilà!—another beautiful woman emerges, guided by Frederick Wöissell’s helping hand …
‘Mr. Wöissell, this is Lieutenant Huff. We just have a few more questions.’
Fred leaned over to give the cop a firm handshake.
‘Call me Fred, please.’ He looked toward Jade when he said it.
‘OK, Fred, we appreciate your cooperation. Your brother is out there and we need to bring him in alive and unharmed if we can.’
‘Of course, Lieutenant. I’ll do everything I possibly can. Our family will be shamed for generations because of him.’
‘Fred, you said your brother was different after a near-drowning episode after a hockey game when you were boys. Can you elaborate on that, please?’
‘Certainly. Everything was normal up to then,’ Fred began. ‘We were close despite the age difference, obviously, but I looked out for him. I was looked up to by Charles all through our boyhood years. But, then, when he came home from the hospital after his accident, he was changed. Instead of outgoing and happy, he turned morose. He seemed bitter. He was full of doubts about everything. Never contented. Teenage angst, I thought it, but quite obviously the forces of darkness had him in thrall even at so young an age.’
God, “forces of darkness”. He made her want to heave.
‘That accident,’ Jade asked, ‘how did it happen?’
‘Who can say? Thin ice, skating too close. The point is, I got him out of there, at some risk to myself, and I did the CPR and kept him alive by the time the paramedics got there. He was never grateful.’
He went on for another hour to detail the ways Charles had become introverted, moody.
‘I was afraid he was suicidal. I asked our parents—well, our father as our own mother was deceased by this time—to intervene, get him some help.’
Fred shrugged and threw his hands up from his lap. Only so much he could do.
‘I was barely out of my teens myself,’ he said.
‘We found nothing in his room—no certificates, gym memberships, trophies or anything to suggest he was interested in martial arts,’ Huff said.
‘That is what I was about to get to. He’d remained locked in his room for almost a year. He went from excelling at three sports in high school to a bookworm almost overnight. He reads constantly. Our father signed him up with private instructors that cost a fortune, mind you. Charles had—I don’t know how many—black belt instructors, boxing instructors, ex-Marine Corps combat veterans—you name it.’
Fred shook his head sadly. ‘Little did my father know he was providing a sick mind with lethal skills.’
‘We checked Charles’s academic records at the prep school—you attended the same one, am I correct?’
‘Yes, I excelled—’
‘His grades are outstanding. For someone so maladjusted, his academic performance at the same time he’s withdrawing from the world is puzzling, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I’m no psychiatrist. Why don’t you consult your own Bureau for the answer?’
We did, she thought, and they made a dog’s breakfast of it.
‘We want someone with your intimate knowledge to share what you know,’ she said.
‘Charles was loved. That’s all I can say about it. What my lunatic brother did despite my best efforts and my parents is not for me to say.’
‘That’s another thing,’ Jade said, keeping her contempt out of her voice, ‘you called us, but we hadn’t yet made a connection to Charles. Yet you were very … concerned he might harm you.’
‘I’ve been very cooperative,’ Fred said, sensing the lovefest between him and the agent was never going to happen. ‘I’m leaving. If you have any more questions for me, you can send them to my lawyer.’
Fred stood up and flipped a business card onto the table.
‘It’s one of the best law firms in Providence,’ Fred added. ‘If I were you, I would choose your questions very carefully regarding me or any member of my family.’
Huff stood up to his full height and blocked the doorway; he looked at Fred.
‘I generally don’t allow the people I’m interviewing to precede me out the door. You’ll kindly wait until Agent Hui and I leave first.’
‘That went well,’ Huff said to her while they watched Fred Wöissell storm off.
‘That is one disagreeable person,’ Jade said.
‘You buy any of it?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s a dead end. What about the sister?’
‘She told Lombardi, our detective handling interrogations, Charles once told her Fred used a hockey stick to keep him from climbing out of that frozen pond.’
‘Holy cow.’
‘Lombardi said the same thing later except it had a little more zing to it.’
‘I think I’ll give up wondering why people do the things they do,’ Jade said.
‘He’s still a monster,’ Huff said and turned around to head off to the muster room for the shift change.
‘Indeed,’ she whispered after him. ‘He is.’
The hurts of childhood. They never do go away.
Chapter 57
SHE FELL BACK ON the bed exhausted.
It was time for patience, time for letting law enforcement do what it needed to do with all its spread tentacles. If Wöissell so much as stuck his head up to order a pizza, they’d have him.
All that remained of tonight’s to-do list was to call Bar-Jonah and bring him up to date. He seemed eager to write up everything, so she’d give him all the details and let him garner the praise. If she never wrote another 302, it would be too soon. When Wöissell was brought in, as was certain to happen given how close they were, she’d be able to wrap up her abortive career with a big bow and leave with her head held high.
I won’t miss it, she thought. None of it—the in-fighting, the politics and back-stabbing, the endless hours and the report writing ad nauseam. Relaxing in a bath, she thought about another European, not Wittgenstein, but Kafka, the novelist who spoke most closely to her own detestation of bureaucracy. How did gravitas ever come to nullify the absurd, except through the intellectual arrogance of small-minded academics who battened on them?
She let her mind drift as the water reached her neck. “Womb-bliss,” Freud called it.
Her thoughts turned back to Wöissell and what she’d learned of him today. None of what his older brother said changed her opinion or softened her feelings toward the man who had beat her so badly. His dedication to mayhem, more than his strength, appalled her.
One of the books they’d found in his room had a passage she’d gone over that day. It described a tsuki iriminage and a ‘heaven and earth’ throw that, if it failed to topple an aggressor, put him off balance enough for one to escape. She could have used that to avoid being pinned
down in that dark cabin cruiser. She did everything she knew to keep alive. It was only the fact of Agent Silva coming down the steps that saved her life.
Her motel phone rang and she let it ring. She didn’t want to answer it. The lieutenant was meeting her tomorrow at the satellite office for a conference call with Buffalo, Fayetteville, and Pittsburgh. Bar-Jonah was coordinating everything.
She hid a smirk when he announced he would be doing a PowerPoint for all the agents. It brought back memories of her Smiley Face stint. His body count was yet to be known. What a horror that was to contemplate, she realized. She’d never look at a county fair the same way again.
Bar-Jonah had been busy while she and the lieutenant worked the interrogation rooms of the Wöissell clan. He’d tracked down other interesting unsolved cases:
Clarksburg, West Virginia, a 55-year-old man, divorced, father of two. The retired insurance executive went walking his dog on Liberty Avenue by the West Fork River. Found dead near the iron trestle bridge the evening of the town’s Italian Heritage Festival. His head was turned around on his neck so that he was looking backwards. His temper made him feared by his neighbors.
A family of three, all trailer park victims, a daughter and her parents. She was suspected of the Munchausen-by-proxy deaths in two of her three children. Family Services removed one other child, a four-year-old daughter from the house. The parents were killed first and the daughter’s trailer was entered and she was killed. Police had no suspects and the manners of all three deaths were similar and highly unusual. A sharp object, possibly an ice pick, was driven through the right ear into the brains of all three victims. A rodeo had been in town the day prior to the bodies being found by relatives.
Erie, Pennsylvania. A single man in his late thirties who collected SSI and sold designer drugs was implicated in the deaths of two high school students that year. He was out on bail. Among his other unsavory habits were alcoholism, animal abuse, and he was known as a frequenter of prostitutes. He was found dead on a remote trail in Presque Isle State Park with a broken neck.
The Megabyte Food Truck Festival in Baltimore last year. A man suspected of being a stalker of women, a peeping tom and possible rapist, was found in a dumpster with his neck wrenched so badly it flopped on the autopsy table.
One she picked out for special attention: the CEO of a pharmacy company that jacked up the price of his company’s life-saving cancer drug 700 per cent. He was found outside his luxury Greenwich Village townhouse in a Lamborghini Countach. His eyes weren’t removed but were hanging from the optic nerves, dangling down both cheeks.
Bar-Jonah turned up another case as disturbing, involving an obscure bikers’ club in San Antonio. The clubhouse was burned to the ground with three members inside. A rival gang was blamed. All three members had lengthy criminal records and were acquitted of a gang rape after a festival downtown the month before.
All but one Deadly Sin was invoked one way or another: Lust, Wrath, Gluttony, Greed, Pride, Sloth—but not Envy.
She hit her body with an icy shower spray before stepping out of the tub.
Her cell phone trilled its Beethoven Ninth ring tones.
‘Special Agent Hui,’ she said. No such thing in an FBI agent’s lexicon as ‘hello.’
‘Jade, I mean, Agent Hui, it’s Huff,’ the voice said.
‘Yes, Lieutenant, what is it?’
‘It’s Wöissell. He slipped past the two officers out front.’
‘You mean Fred, the brother?’
‘Him,’ he said. ‘Blitz attack, his own house.’
‘Tell me,’ she said.
‘The stepmother had her throat slashed ear to ear. We found her in a La-Z-Boy. It looks as though she was passed out drunk. Fred was upstairs in his bedroom. Broken neck. Both eyes removed. The M.E.’s investigator thinks they’re lodged in his throat.’
‘There’s more?’
‘Two hours earlier, a private nursing facility in Cranston. Someone purporting to be Fred Wöissell went to visit the father, Charles, Sr. He convinced the staff to allow him to take the patient out for some fresh air in a wheelchair on the grounds. They found him sitting in the wheelchair tied upright. Neck was broken but no one even noticed. It looked like the old man had fallen asleep under a blanket.’
‘Do you want me to come in?’
‘No, we’re bringing in a team of state investigators. This thing’s getting crazy. I’ve got reporters camped out front now.’
He’s calling to warn me, she realized. How?
Fred, the brother might have said something before he died.
‘How did Fred—look?’
‘He must have done it with a Navy Seal knife or something like it—scored down to the skull bone deep across both eyes. One big cross over each eye. Ever see a cartoon figure with big X’s? Something like that. You can get the autopsy details with me tomorrow.’
‘Agent Hui … you there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Jade, Wöissell’s a rabid dog now.’
‘Yes.’
‘I can send a couple officers over,’ Huff said.
‘No, no, I’ll call the office. I’ll be OK,’ she said.
‘Where are you? Just so I know.’
‘Room 311, the Hampton. It’s on Rochambeau.’
Part of her wanted him to come looking. Part of her shriveled up at the thought. A Quantico proverb came to mind: The most dangerous dog is a wounded dog. It applied more to her than to him.
She shivered. A satori. The father’s murder was a mercy killing.
Not so Fred’s. He had saved Envy up for last: his own brother.
Chapter 58
SHE SAW THE CHERRY-BLUE lights of the cruiser’s top rack as it turned into her motel parking lot. The knock came twenty minutes later.
When she looked through the peephole, she saw a uniformed officer and opened the door. He looked middle-aged with a worried look on his face. Too late, her instincts screamed.
He collided into her and she realized the full scope of her mistake: shoved into her from behind. She rolled out of the way and dove between the beds just as a shot rang out.
Three shots. Pow, pow, pow.
The lamp exploded near her head. Chips of wood blew up from the night stand. She risked getting her arm or hand shot. No choice—her gun lay in its holster on the night stand by the bed.
When she came up with the gun at the ready, firing into the empty doorway in double shots, he was gone.
The door was open.
The officer lay at the foot of the first bed with a massive bullet wound to the back of his head and blood pooling on the carpet.
She approached the door in her firing stance, knowing he could be out there. Right, left, right, left again. The adrenalin shock hit her so hard it felt like a fist slammed into her head and her stomach revolted from the sudden violence.
No sign of him, no sound of fleeing footsteps possible on the carpeted hallway. A distant sound of a pneumatic door closing below. She raced toward the sound, thumbing her cell phone to punch 911.
Cops, sirens—the Doppler shift of so many movies and so much tragedy. The room stank of cordite. Her heart was still thumping wildly in the adrenalin flush and her hands shook from the fury of the last ten seconds that seemed another part of time, a whole different temporal experience excised from her consciousness and planted in its own compartment. Not clock time at all.
She’d misjudged Wöissell’s ferocity to kill, thinking he was cowering, hiding from the police. He doesn’t stop, so you better not, her brain said.
She returned to her room to call out everyone. The least she could do was to keep the body of that officer company until his fellow officers arrived. What would follow, she knew all too well, was not going to be good for anyone, especially her.
Tears streaked her cheeks from the emotional exhaustion but her voice remained steady as she made call after call and gave precise information as they taught her. This was going to jolt a lot of people out of bed.
The media circus Providence PD kept out was going to come at her and the FBI in a tsunami of sensationalism, demands for answers, the question they would be asking most: with Charles Wöissell on the loose in Providence, now a cop-killer, why was the manhunt for so vicious a murderer kept out of the news for so long?
Pride, her own deadly sin. Now she would pay.
Chapter 59
SHE WAS RIGHT ABOUT everything in the aftermath of the police officer killing at the motel. Heads were rolling; hers was going to be one of the first on the block. An OPR committee was re-convened, an unprecedented move. She would go down in FBI annals as a lesson for future Quantico instructors to draw, not a legend. Her every move, past and present, was going under the microscope. Every decision since she’d arrived in Providence with the mandate to oversee a joint interagency task force. All on her. Poor Daniel Bar-Jonah was going to get spattered with some of the mud, rookie notwithstanding.
Bar-Jonah was hard to reach. He had his own problems. Gilker was going to face criticism for appointing him and her, her for this kind of high-profile duty so soon after her return to duty and Bar-Jonah for his lack of field experience.
She managed to secure a quick meeting with Lieutenant Huff as he fought off his own critics in the department and in the media gauntlet he and his officers had to run every day.
They met for coffee at a bistro on Westminster.
‘How are you holding up?’
He looked as if he hadn’t slept in four days.
‘I’m coping,’ he said. ‘It’s been a rough week on my wife and kids. I had to keep the boys home from school because they were getting into fights at school over this unholy mess. You?’
‘The Providence supervisor hasn’t looked me in the eye since I got back to the office,’ she said. ‘I’m tied to a desk until the oversight committee summons me. They barely wrapped up the last inquisition on me.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Never mind.’
‘Sorry to hear it anyway. I don’t see how you can be blamed,’ Huff said. ‘It wasn’t your fault Wöissell got back inside. We had every street covered with an unmarked in case he drove past. If anybody is to blame, it’s me for leaving two officers parked outside instead of planting them inside the house.’