For a moment the old days came back to her, the liaisons at the marina, hours of intimacy in the cramped quarters below deck, then the quiet time afterward when, in darkness, they would share a drink under the stars and watch the water ripple against the mossy pylons of the dock.
She caught Abby watching her with sympathy. “We always have nostalgia,” Abby said in a low voice, “even for the things we regret.”
Andrea nodded.
“Thanks for the info,” Abby added more briskly. “Now get a bite to eat at the food court. Otherwise your friends may wonder why you came up here. Then go home and stay put. And keep that phone close to you. I’ll be calling later.”
“You have some kind of plan, don’t you?”
“I always have a plan.” Abby hesitated. “In this case, I may need you to act fast.”
“To do what?”
“To get away from the watchful eyes of the federal bureaucracy. Don’t worry. It’s easier than it sounds.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will, eventually. In the meantime you’ll just have to go on trusting me, if you can.”
“I can. It’s just ...”
“Just what?”
“I’ve done such bad things. I’m not sure I deserve your help.”
“We’ve all done bad things. I know I have.”
Andrea met her eyes. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
Abby didn’t flinch. “Yes.”
“Did they deserve it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that makes it all right, then.”
“I’d like to think so.”
Andrea looked away. “The ones I killed ... they didn’t deserve ...”
“I know.”
“What I did—it’s something you go to hell for. I think about that sometimes. Being in hell.”
“Seems to me you’re already there.”
“I’m only punishing myself, that’s all.”
“That can be the worst kind of punishment.”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s enough. I don’t know if anything can ever be enough.”
A beat of silence passed between them. “Andrea,” Abby said quietly, “can I ask you something? You could’ve told the world about Jack Reynolds, ruined him, ended his career. But you never did.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“He got to me while I was in the hospital. He was the D.A., and he used his credentials to get in and talk to me alone.”
“And he threatened you?”
“No. What did he have to threaten me with? I’d already lost everything.”
“Then what ...?”
“He told me—he told me he still loved me.” Her voice broke on the last words. “He told me he’d been wrong to break up with me. That he’d been planning to take me back—until everything happened.”
“Did you believe him?”
She heard the skepticism in Abby’s question. “I know what you’re asking. How could I be so naive?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, I did believe him. He said he forgave me for the children. He said it was all right. He said I hadn’t been myself when I did it. And that I shouldn’t blame myself or think of it as a sin.”
“I see.”
“He’s the only one who said anything like that. To everyone else I was the devil incarnate. Medea, the witch. But he told me it was all right. And they were his children. He’s the last person who should ever have forgiven me—but he did.”
“Yes.” Abby’s voice was very low. “He did.”
“It wasn’t just talk. He helped me, too. He arranged it so I was declared incompetent to stand trial. If I’d been put on trial, I would have been sent to prison for life. As it was, I went into the hospital, and I was out in twelve years.”
“Yes.”
“I never would have survived prison. Do you know what they do in there to—to people who’ve killed children? He saved my life.”
“I guess he did.”
Andrea sighed. “I’m sure you think I was just manipulating me. That he didn’t want me in a courtroom because I might say too much. But you’re wrong.”
“Am I? Then why did he send those thugs into your house yesterday?”
She knew the answer to that. “Because I screwed up.”
Abby looked at her. “You?”
“I started going to his events. I didn’t think he would recognize me, not after all these years, with a wig and dark glasses. But he did. I broke the rules.”
“What rules?”
“He promised to help me only if I gave my word I would never try to see him again.”
“If you gave your word, why did you start ...?”
“Stalking him?” Andrea almost smiled.
“Attending his campaign rallies,” Abby said diplomatically.
“I don’t know. Something made me want to do it. It didn’t make sense. It was like—like I couldn’t stay away. Like I just had to see him.” She was touching her hair again—a nervous habit, but one she’d never noticed before.
“Did you hope to get back together with him?” Abby asked.
A shudder coursed through her. “No. No, of course not. I knew that could never happen.”
“Then ... why?”
“I don’t know, Abby. I just don’t.”
“Okay, okay.” Abby reached out to steady her. “Sorry I pushed. It’s an occupational hazard for those of us with a psych degree. We keep trying to peel the onion.”
Andrea wiped her eyes. “Peeling onions makes me cry.”
“Yeah, I got that. But at least now you can mince garlic with no problem.” This was a joke, but Andrea couldn’t find the strength to smile. “Look,” Abby said more seriously, “go home, lie down, close your eyes. Just keep that phone nearby and turned on.”
“Okay. I still don’t understand, though. I don’t see what you could possibly need me for.”
“It all comes back to you, Andrea. Everything comes back to you.”
That was true, of course. Reynolds and the killers who invaded her home, and the FBI people watching her and tapping her phone, and Abby’s involvement—all of it came back to her, and to what she had done twenty years ago, her ineradicable past, which she could never escape.
Abby seemed to catch her mood. She smiled. “Hey, no worries. I’m on the case. I’m handling everything.”
“I wish I could be as confident as you are.”
“It’s a gift. Now get going. Those G-men must be getting antsy. And don’t do anything to show you’re on to them. Just act normal.”
“Normal.” This time Andrea did smile. “Yes, that’s me.”
She left the restroom, taking care not to look for the FBI men, as Abby had warned. But they were there, anyway. She knew it now, knew it even without seeing them.
They would always be there.
33
Tess arrived at the crime scene shortly before noon. The neighborhood was as unprepossessing as she’d expected. Crandall, in the passenger seat of the Bureau car, glanced up at the two-story apartment building in distaste.
“I lived in a place like this when I was starting my own business.” His expression indicated that the memory wasn’t a happy one.
“Didn’t you start more than one business?”
“Three in all. No success with any of them. I guess I was meant to be a fed. It’s in my genes.”
“There are worse things to be.”
“True. I could be a biker, like Dylan Garrick.”
“You could be dead, like Dylan Garrick.”
“That, too.”
It was the most he’d said to her today. He still mistrusted her for keeping Abby’s secrets. Tess couldn’t really blame him, but he would have to work with her now. Hauser, trying to keep a low profile on MEDEA, hadn’t wanted a swarm of L.A. agents descending on Santa Ana. He’d authorized only the two of them to check it out, while the rest of the squad worked the ca
se from the field office in Westwood.
They climbed the stairs to Garrick’s apartment, identifiable by the yellow crime scene tape across the door. Tess stripped away the tape and unlocked the door with a key she’d obtained from the Santa Ana resident agency.
From behind her on the landing, Crandall said, “Carson wanted us to wait for him before we went in.”
Carson was the supervisory agent who managed the RA. He’d been driving behind them when they left Civic Center Drive, but apparently they’d lost him along the way. Tess wasn’t going to wait. “He’ll be here soon enough. Let’s look around on our own.”
She pushed open the door and went in, trailed by Crandall. The first thing she saw was the bloody stain on the futon where Dylan Garrick’s head had lain. There were spatter patterns on the wall. More dried blood was dimly visible on the soiled short-nap carpet. The body was gone, as were Garrick’s handgun and the pillow used to muffle the two shots.
Criminalists had gone over the apartment, dusting for prints and bagging fibers and other trace evidence. Tess saw black ferric oxide on some surfaces, silver nitrate on others. The walls and larger objects in the room had been decorated in more elaborate shades, from gaudy Pinkwop and Redwop powders that were processed with a portable laser, to fluorescent greens and oranges that luminesced in ultraviolet light. Whoever dusted the place had been thorough. Tess wondered if Abby’s prints had been among those collected.
In her career she had visited many crime scenes, enough of them to make the experience almost routine. But there was one she had never forgotten—the bedroom of the house she’d rented in a Denver suburb, where Paul Voorhees had been murdered by the serial killer Mobius.
Other shocks had shaken her life, but finding Paul was the one that lingered. She’d never felt the same about a murder scene. Other people could crack jokes and act casual in the presence of death. Not her. She stood in Dylan Garrick’s apartment as she would stand in a church—hushed and solemn.
In one hand she carried a folder of crime-scene photos from the morning conference. She slipped out a picture of the body and studied it, getting a better sense of how Garrick had been positioned. He’d been beaten before he was shot—pistol-whipped with his own firearm. The photo showed the damage to his face, including a broken nose that left a trail of dried blood snaking down to his upper lip. The gun itself, dropped on the floor, had dried blood on the barrel.
Could Abby have hurt him that way? Cracked the gun across his face, crunching bone? Tess wanted to say no. Yet she couldn’t forget Abby at the Boiler Room, carving her steak with grim enthusiasm, the knife gripped tight in her hand. She’d been riding a wave of rage and hate, and there was no telling how far she’d ridden it later that night.
Of course she’d denied everything. But she had no alibi. And although there was no obvious way for her to track down Garrick, she was resourceful. She could have figured something out. She could have come here.
If she had, she came as Garrick’s guest. The lock on the door had not been tampered with. Garrick let her in—or came home with her. Typically, in her work with stalkers, Abby would arrange to meet the guy in some seemingly accidental way, ingratiate herself with him, gain access to his home. She wasn’t above holding out the promise of sexual favors. She ...
Tess looked more closely at the photo. “You see this?” she asked Crandall.
“What?”
“Garrick’s pants. They’re open. Unzipped.”
Crandall shrugged. “Guys hang around with their pants open when they’re alone. You know, for comfort. Not me,” he added hastily, “but—some guys.”
She barely heard him. She was thinking of Abby’s M.O. “Mmm.”
“What does that mean?”
“It meant nothing. It was just mmm.”
Crandall started to ask something else. A voice from the doorway interrupted him.
“Crack the case yet?” It was Senior Supervisory Agent Dwight Carson, who’d finally arrived.
A tall, paunchy man testing the Bureau’s weight limit, Carson was from somewhere down south originally, a fact he liked to advertise by putting a little extra corn pone in his voice when he remembered to. Tess found him friendly enough, but behind his geniality there was an agenda, of course. He had been left in the dark about MEDEA. He didn’t know what the L.A. office was involved in. Naturally he wanted to know.
“Never seen this much interest in our friendly neighborhood Scorps before,” he observed as he stepped inside. He called the bikers Scorps, apparently to save the effort of pronouncing the extra syllables.
“It’s a zero-tolerance policy,” Tess said mildly. “We’re cracking down on premeditated homicides.”
“Not really the Bureau’s bailiwick.”
“It is today.”
“Evidently. Still seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a piece of”—he caught himself before cussing in front of a lady—“uh, piece of work like Dylan Garrick.”
“Garrick is tied in to a home invasion in San Fernando.”
“Sure, I know. Our office is the one that made the connection. But I can’t see why VALSHOOT has so many people’s panties in a twist.”
VALSHOOT, short for Valley Shooting, was the codename for the attack on Andrea Lowry’s house. The incident could hardly have been codenamed MEDEA without raising unwanted questions in Santa Ana.
“There are various considerations involved,” Tess said, hoping this formulation would be sufficiently vague to discourage further curiosity.
It wasn’t. “And one of those considerations required flying in Annie Oakley?”
“What?”
“No offense. That’s what some of us call you around here.”
“Annie Oakley.” Tess shut her eyes. “Great.”
“It’s a compliment. Annie was a straight shooter and ahead of her time. One of the original woman’s libbers, you might say.”
“Well, I guess it’s better than Ma Barker.”
“No one’s gonna call you a barker,” Carson said.
This was so cornball she would have laughed, if she hadn’t been in a room still smelling of cordite and blood. She steered their conversation in a more professional direction. “Can the shooter’s height be determined by the angle of fire?”
The question had a purpose. Abby wasn’t tall.
Carson shook his head. “Crime scene people say the gunman was probably leaning over Garrick, bent low. Which means he could be any height.”
He—or she, Tess thought.
“Both shots were fired at nearly point-blank range. No exit wounds. Coroner recovered the rounds inside the vic’s head.”
“You mean the autopsy’s already been done?”
“It was put on a rush basis. Pretty fancy treatment for a dead gangbanger. I gather there was some pressure applied all the way from Washington.” He gave Tess a shrewd look. “Though I don’t know why D.C. would care so much.”
“Neither do I,” she said evenly.
“I’ll just bet you don’t.”
It might have turned into a staring contest if Crandall hadn’t cut in. “You were saying two rounds were recovered.”
Carson looked away, conceding defeat—for now. “Right. Nine-millimeter hollowpoints. One of them was all mashed up and fragmented. Ricocheted around the skull cavity something fierce. The other’s intact. Ballistics has already matched it to Garrick’s gun.”
Tess ran a finger through some Redwop powder on an end table. “I assume forensics picked up a lot of prints.”
“Whole slew of them, but most probably belong to Garrick or the girls he brought up here. According to the neighbors there were quite a few. The prints sure as hell didn’t get left by any housekeeper. Look at this rat’s nest.”
“How about the doorknob?” Crandall asked.
“Killer wiped it clean when leaving. He’s a cool customer.”
Tess thought wiping the knob was exactly the kind of precaution Abby would take.
“You want a
guided tour?” Carson asked. He headed into the kitchen without waiting for their assents. “Lots of beer in the fridge, hard liquor in the cabinets. Nothing else in here but takeout containers and fast food leftovers. No drugs on the premises. Garrick was busted for cocaine a few years ago, but lately he seems to have been staying clean.”
“Not exactly turning his life around, though, was he?” Tess asked.
Carson led them down the hall. “He was still a stone-cold killer. Probably quit the coke because he couldn’t afford a rep as a user. No one hires a hit man who’s got an itchy nose.”
They entered the bedroom. Carson waved at hand at a tall stack of magazines on the floor. “See those? Porn. And over here”—he directed their attention to homemade cabinets constructed of cinderblocks and planks—“a whole library’s worth of X-rated videos. Agent McCallum, if you’ve ever wanted to catch Debra Banger in Sperms of Endearment, this is your chance.”
“I’ll pass.”
“Other than the magazines, which you can bet he didn’t buy for the articles, there’s no reading matter on the premises. Not a book anywhere. This boy’s interests were limited to drinking and fu—uh, fornicating.”
“And killing,” Tess said.
Carson opened a bureau. The drawer was empty. “You know about the gun he kept here. The MK-23. It’s at the crime lab now. There was a silencer with it, kind of banged up, and some other gear.”
Crandall toed the pile of smut, looking thoughtful. “I’m surprised the killer didn’t toss the residence and take the MK, if only to eliminate evidence linking Garrick to the San Fernando raid.”
“Or just to get hold of an expensive piece of hardware,” Tess added.
Carson nodded. “My theory is that the killer got spooked. You know he muffled the shots with the pillow. Tried to, anyway. First shot was probably quiet enough, but the pillow’s stuffing was half blown away, and it wouldn’t have silenced the second shot nearly as well. That report was louder than our friend expected. He knew someone in the building would hear it, so he amscrayed pronto.”
That was possible, Tess thought. But it was also possible that Abby had deliberately left the gun in place so Garrick could be tied to the crime.
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