“He called you Mags.”
“Yeah. Most people do.” She moved away, crossing the room, her thoughts jumbled and a little confused. “I was born Margaret Grace Franklin. Everyone always called me Maggie or Mags. Mostly Mags since high school.”
“Who’s Gracie Colson?”
“A persona.”
She turned to look at him, found him sitting on the edge of the hearth, leaning forward like he didn’t have the strength to hold himself upright. Her heart ached when she looked at him, ached in a way she knew was dangerous for her. He was a suspect in a case, a person of interest. She never should have allowed herself to be drawn so completely in. But now it was too late to stop what had already started. Yet, she knew he’d never forgive her when she finished that statement when she offered her confession.
“I’m FBI, Durango.”
He sucked in a deep breath, leaning even further toward the floor. She thought for a moment he might fall from the hearth, but then he straightened, swiveling his hips so that he wouldn’t have to look at her when his chin came up. Instead, he looked toward the back of the room, toward the walls covered in her mother’s oil paintings and family photographs.
“It’s long and complicated, but the short and simple of it is that I was undercover at Mastiff.”
“For three years?”
“I never imagined it would be that long. No one did. In fact, they were about to pull me out when Kyle died.”
“Then I guess that was a lucky break for you.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
He turned his head slightly, his eyes just visible to her. “You were there to watch me? To see if I killed again?”
“Yes.”
“The FBI thinks I’m the Harrison Strangler?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head, turning his back to her to face the far wall. He was quiet for a long time, and she wasn’t sure if she should fill the silence with more explanations, or if she should stay quiet. She opted for the easy answer, waiting. But she was afraid she’d have to wait too long to make this right.
Finally, he sighed, running his hands through his hair as he shifted toward her.
“Why is the FBI interested in this case? They don’t normally get involved in these cases unless the killer crosses state lines or kills a significant number of people. This killer . . . He’s been prolific, but not like Bundy or Gacy.”
“He’s crossed state lines.”
Durango shook his head. “I’ve never heard that.”
She stepped over to the couch and took a seat, leaning forward herself to rest her face in her hands for a second as she organized her thoughts.
“I was still at Quantico when a professor, a former profiler, presented one of his cases to us. He gave us a brief outline and then three profiles, asking us to pick the profile that best fit the case. And then we were given three suspects and asked to pick the one who was eventually arrested in the case.” She rubbed her face and sat up, looking over at him. “The victim was a college student found in her dorm room. She was strangled, her body naked and posed on the bed. The posters were removed from her walls and the mirrors covered.” She saw him look up. “Sound familiar?”
He didn’t have to answer for her to know what he thought.
“The investigators at the time focused on several students and a professor the woman was thought to be involved with. The profiler, however, focused on another young man who lived in the dorm across the quad from the victim. He was known to have a crush on her. And that young man was the one who is now serving time for the murder. But I didn’t agree. While he fit the profile well, he just . . . There was something off about it. I went to my professor with my concerns, but he didn’t see what I saw.”
She tilted her head to one side. “Once I graduated and was moved out into the field when I had access to the FBI’s databases and everything, I began investigating the murder myself. And that’s when I realized this murder—which took place outside of San Francisco—was not the only one of its kind in California. And then I stumbled onto several others. A couple in Colorado. A few in Nevada. Two or three in New York. Three women were killed in Texas.”
Durango began shaking his head. “That’s not possible.”
“After a couple of years, I had enough evidence suggesting a single perpetrator that I went to my supervisor. He blew me off at first, but I can be rather persuasive when I want to be.” She smiled, but he didn’t return it. “He finally listened to me. He gave me the green light to dig deeper into the case, to make more connections that might allow us to move forward. The problem was, some of the cases had gone to court, and there were several people serving time for the crimes. And others, the local cops were set on a specific suspect and wouldn’t listen to my suggestion that it was part of a serial pattern. I had to push hard just to get a detective’s notes or a coroner’s report.”
“Why was I not contacted by the FBI when the murders began in Chicago?”
“There were breaks between batches of murders. Years long, sometimes. My bosses wanted to know what the killer was doing during those breaks. They didn’t believe it was possible that it was a serial with breaks like that. So unusual . . . I didn’t even know about the killings in Chicago when they first began because the press coverage was minimal at first. I was out of the state for most of the first year. And then when I did hear about it, when I went to my boss, he wanted to sit back and see what you came up with. Once again, I was up against resistance. I was basically the only one who saw the pattern, who thought this was an important case. And you didn’t put all your notes on the computer system. I couldn’t hack into them the way I’d done some others.”
“I don’t like computers.”
“Don’t I know it?” She sighed. “Somehow, I managed to convince my boss that I had something when Tina Mason was killed. We were about to swoop in, force you to share your notes when you arrested that Dirk Francis. My boss, he wanted to wait and see. And then you were arrested, Francis was dead, and everything blew up. Of course, my bosses wanted nothing to do with the scandal. They pulled me off the case, refused to allow me to investigate any further. But when you were acquitted, everyone thought you’d done it. My boss was so convinced that he’d turned over some evidence, my evidence, to the district attorney.”
That got Durango’s attention. He jumped to his feet.
“What evidence?”
She was a little weary of telling him this. But he had to know. They only had so much time to figure out something she’d been working on for seven years and had yet to make a significant advance on. A week at most.
They weren’t going to be able to do it. She knew it in her heart. But they had to try.
“Every murder took place in a location where you were.”
“What?”
“The San Francisco murder? Your father was filming a few scenes for a movie there that week. A couple of summers later, he was filming a movie in Colorado. You were with him. You were with him when he went to Las Vegas for an awards thing. You were with him in New York when the killings happened there. And you were attending a junior college in Texas when several girls were killed there. Everywhere there was a murder, you were there.”
He shook his head. “That’s not possible.”
“It is. I was very careful when I researched it. The timing . . . It’s eerie, Durango. It points right to you.”
“You think I did this?”
“I did. Once. But not anymore.”
He turned away, pacing the length of the room with his hands deep in his pockets. She could see that he was looking at it from the side of him that was such a stellar detective, the side that had been trained to work with the evidence, the logic until he could make sense of it. But it was clear from the expression on his face that the conclusion he kept reaching was not one that he was ready to consolidate with the other side of him, the human side of him.
“That’s why they fought so hard to prosecute me,
why they didn’t drop the charges when the coroner’s report cleared me.”
“They believed it had to be a mistake. That the coroner had misread the thermometer on the scene.”
Durango shook his head. “He wouldn’t have done that.”
“He didn’t do that. But I know you weren’t there.”
He continued to pace, growing more and more agitated. “If this is true, if these other murders are connected, and they happened at times when I was in the vicinity, I . . . hell, you’ve got to know I never traveled alone. My father travels with an entourage, at least, he did then. And those trips were all related to movies he was filming. My father, instead of sending us to camp, forced us to work on his movies, intentionally scheduling movies during school breaks.”
“I’ve generated lists of people who traveled with you. Most of them check out, and a lot of them weren’t on all the trips.”
“There would be people on those trips that you wouldn’t know about, people my father brought on the sly. Undocumented workers. His lovers. Starlets desperate enough to appear in a film without credit or compensation. There were dozens of people only he would have knowledge of.”
She sat up, crossing her arms over her middle. “And how many of those undocumented workers went to college with you?”
What little hope had begun to spark in Durango’s eyes suddenly disappeared. She hated that, hated to see him so defeated. But she understood the feeling. She was beginning to feel the weight of their deadline, the urgency of this task.
She stood, leaving him to his thoughts. She’d dumped a lot in his lap. He needed time to digest it all.
The kitchen was fully stocked, thanks again to Mr. Young. She filled the kettle with water and put it on the stove, watching the flames lick the bottom as they burned off the little bit of moisture that had splashed there. She could remember her mom doing this same thing whenever she had a problem she needed to discuss. She’d come home from school, and her mother could tell just by the look on her face that it was time for a cup of tea. They’d settled down together at the table and sip at their tea until she spilled it all, often with tears running down her face, all the darkness of her adolescent angst.
The tea always seemed to be the cure. But now she knew it was her mom, and, goodness knew, she needed her mom now.
Margaret Grace, Mr. and Mrs. Franklin’s daughter, recruited out of college to the FBI, fought the bad guys on a daily basis. But she couldn’t do anything to protect her own parents from the drunk driver who forced their car off the road as they drove home from a church picnic one lovely Sunday afternoon.
And she couldn’t suppress the anger that ate at her every single day. Anger at the idiot who chose to get behind the wheel after drowning his pain from his newly minted divorce in a bottle all that afternoon. Anger at the bartender who served him and then watched him drive away. Anger at the timing that allowed her parents to be on that part of the road at that exact moment. Anger at the doctors who couldn’t save them, the paramedics who didn’t arrive quickly enough, the cops who didn’t respond just a few seconds faster to the 911 call. Anger at the lives ruined and the fact that her mom would hate to know that had happened because of her.
Anger at herself for not being there.
Anger at Durango for making her want to be Gracie Colson, to want to forsake this life and embrace that one. Three years undercover, it was unusual, but not unheard of. Maybe she’d gotten in too deep. Maybe when he touched her, she wanted to be what he saw, not who she was. Gracie and Mags were two very different people. Gracie was innocent, kind, gentle. Gracie never had a serious boyfriend, never tasted more than a sweet wine. Gracie never stayed up past midnight and only on a Friday or Saturday night. Gracie worked harder than everyone else, took care of everyone else, and never asked for recognition, but drank in what little she received. Mags was the rebellious daughter of a preacher, the cliché who partied harder than her contemporaries who were raised by what her daddy would call heathens. Mags left her virginity behind when she was barely old enough to take sex ed in high school. Mags went off to college not to get an education, but to get as far from the small-town culture as possible. Mags joined the FBI because they’d let her do things with computers that would be illegal on the outside; because it would shock the hell out of her pious father who expected her to get an education in bible study or, at worst, literature, and then come home and make babies with the youth minister in his church.
Mags and Gracie were very different. Now, lost between both worlds, the woman standing in the modest farmhouse’s kitchen had no idea which she was. The innocent or the wild, the selfless or the selfish. All she knew was that she’d lost more than she’d allowed herself to appreciate when Mags’ parents died and that she was desperately afraid she’d lose what little she had left if she couldn’t keep Durango Masters alive and free. If she didn’t find the real Harrison Strangler, she would lose more than her identity. She’d lose the obsession that had brought her to this place. She’d lose her purpose.
She couldn’t imagine anything worse than that.
Chapter 4
Lorenzo, Indiana
Franklin Family Home
Durango wasn’t sure what was harder to wrap his mind around: that Gracie wasn’t Gracie, or that the Harrison Strangler wasn’t just some insane killer who’d become fixated with Durango.
The strangler had to be someone Durango knew personally, someone who’d been a part of his life since he was a preteen. And that made no sense to him.
He paced the living room of that strange farmhouse for a long time, his detective’s mind trying to reconcile what he knew of the case with what Gracie—or Mags, whatever she called herself—had told him. San Francisco. He was thirteen when he visited San Francisco with his father, brother, and the whole cast of the movie Jackson was working on at the time. Thirteen. How could the FBI believe a thirteen-year-old could commit such a crime?
But, again, he remembered running into some pretty tough thirteen-year-olds when he worked patrol both in Dallas and Chicago.
Still, he and Billy were normal thirteen-year-old boys that summer. Well, as normal as the son and stepson of Jackson Chamberlain could ever be.
“My mother’s gone,” Billy said, coming into Durango’s room in the hotel suite they were sharing. “Jackson says she’ll be back in a few days, but I’m not so sure.”
“She always leaves, but she always comes back.”
“One of these days, she won’t come back.”
Durango put down the comic he’d been reading to look at his stepbrother, really look at him. They’d been brothers for a little over two years now, but it felt like Billy had been part of his life forever. He liked not being alone when Jackson decided to disappear for weeks at a time, liked having someone else to share in his disappointments whenever the man who called himself his father failed to show up to football and soccer games. It also didn’t hurt that his new brother carried around a good forty pounds more than him. It came in handy when other kids at their private school decided to bully Durango out of jealousy for what they perceived as his celebrity studded, cushy life.
“She won’t leave you, Billy.”
“She’s done it before. When I was little, she once left me for six months with my grandmother. And then nearly a year with an ex-boyfriend and his new girl. Talk about awkward situations!”
Durango didn’t like Billy’s mother, not just because she’d married his father and took over the house like she owned the whole thing, but because of the way she treated Billy. She liked to slap him over the head for no reason, just smack him because he was within range. He’d seen her kick him a few times, too. But what really disturbed him was the way the woman looked at Billy, like she believed he was the devil incarnate. And then she’d turn her gaze on Durango and her expression would change, softening, and she’d get this softness about her lips that made him feel things he knew weren’t right.
It was creepy. He wished the woman would just
disappear.
“We’re in San Francisco for the summer, Billy. Living in a hotel and eating room service. You should forget about her and learn to relax a little.”
Billy smiled, throwing himself onto the bed beside Durango. “You’re right. I should.”
“We could do some sightseeing later. Father left a car for us to do whatever we want.”
“We should. I heard some people talking downstairs about this pizza place near the university.”
“That’s the spirit.” Durango elbowed him before picking up his comic. “Now let me finish my reading. Green Arrow is about to stop the purge!”
Now that he thought about it, Durango realized that summer in San Francisco was the same summer Jackson finally booted his seventh wife to the curb. He couldn’t remember what his excuse was, but she left the hotel one night and never came back. Jackson never bothered to explain it to them, only brushing off Billy’s questions whenever he thought to ask about the woman. When they returned to Los Angeles at the end of summer, Jackson announced they were divorcing, and she wouldn’t be coming back. He remembered Billy worrying more over his own fate than his mothers, especially since she’d apparently chosen not to take him with her. But that was one thing Jackson did right. He pronounced himself Billy’s father and promised he’d never have to leave his home. Ever.
It was a strange time, a good summer, but a hard one, too. Durango didn’t shed any tears for that woman, but he could remember Billy shedding quite a few. He did what he could to soothe his brother’s fears and believed Billy came out the other end relatively unscathed. But it was also a busy summer, one in which Durango didn’t have time to flirt with some college coed, let alone murder the poor girl. But he couldn’t imagine who else it could have been, either.
He kept coming back to the same thing: the idea that someone close to him, someone close to his family, was capable of these murders. Someone close to him had been killing for nearly twenty years, and he hadn’t seen it. He never suspected it.
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