by G. M. Ford
Right back took twenty minutes. And even then it wasn’t Fullmer and Dean. It was Special Agent in Charge Angelo Molina.
“You two are quite a piece of work. You and your friend Dougherty there.” He paced along the other side of the table with his hands thrust deep in his pockets. “I’ve gotten more information out of suicide bombers than I’ve gotten out of you two.” His face spoke of grudging admiration. Corso wasn’t buying it.
“You must have missed the last part of my chat with Fullmer and Dean,” Corso said. “I no longer wish to talk without my attorney present. As Mr. Fine also represents Miss Dougherty, she likewise no longer has anything to say.”
“You know, Mr. Corso, keeping one’s mouth shut until one’s lawyer arrives is generally a good idea. In this case however…”
Something in Molina’s tone caught Corso’s attention. “I was straight with you,” Corso said. “I didn’t clam up. I told you the truth. I didn’t kill the cop. Only thing he was gonna have from his encounter with me was a hell of a headache. That’s how it went down. Just like I told you. You don’t believe me, there’s nothing left to say.”
With almost ceremonial deliberation, Molina pulled out the green metal chair and sat down opposite Corso, his back to the one-way window. “Just for the sake of argument…” He waved a well-manicured hand. “Let’s assume for a moment that I believe you.”
“Just for the sake of argument,” Corso said.
“Hypothetically.”
“Okay, so you believe me. Can I go now?”
Molina smiled. “Perhaps,” he said. “But there’s a minor hitch.”
“Why am I sooo not surprised?”
“Because I did hear you say you didn’t wish to answer any further questions without your attorney present…which is, of course, your constitutional right…the very sort of right which the Bureau is charged with defending.”
Corso winced. “Gimme a break,” he said.
Molina held up a finger. “If, however, you would consent to answering a few straightforward questions from me…”He shrugged. “Who knows?”
Corso thought it over. “Such as?”
“You say in your statement that you fired Officer Richardson’s weapon at Mr. de Groot…who then fled.”
“Yes.”
“How many times did you fire?”
“Nice try. I told you. Once.”
“And you thought you hit something.”
“The truck, not him. Sounded like I broke a window or something.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“Man had a high-powered rifle with a scope. I just stuck my arm out there and cranked one off. I wasn’t looking.”
“Probably a wise move,” Molina conceded.
Corso tried to lean out over the table but was stopped by the chain. “What’s any of this got to do with a dead cop in Wisconsin?” he asked.
Molina reached into his pants pocket and brought out a fist. He held his balled hand above the table, thumb up, and slowly relaxed his grip. Six bullets dropped onto the scarred surface with a clatter. Five live rounds and one empty shell casing. “These,” he said, “have everything to do with a dead officer in Wisconsin.”
“How’s that?”
“They’re hand loads,” he said. “All of them. Got an extra fifteen grains of powder packed in them.” He looked down contemptuously at the cartridges. “Officer Richardson was lucky he didn’t blow his hand off with these stupid things. I’d fire one of my men in a heartbeat for pulling a cowboy stunt like that.”
“Where are we headed here?” Corso demanded.
“Newark Airport, I believe.”
“What’s at Newark Airport?”
“Mr. de Groot’s pickup truck. In the long-term lot.”
“Ah.”
“With one of its headlights broken out.” He gave Corso a moment to process the information. “Newark forensics says it took a round. My own people found broken glass where you said Mr. de Groot had the truck blocking the road. The glass matches samples from a company that specializes in after-market truck restoration.” He spread his hands and then dropped them on the table. “On the surface, that would seem to account for the expended round we found in Officer Richardson’s piece.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you. No way I offed a cop over a material-witness beef. That’s insane. I don’t even know anybody that stupid.”
“So then somebody drops your sheet in front of me, and right away I can see you’re a dangerous man who has trouble controlling his temper. But”—he gently tapped the table—“but I’ve accounted for the only spent shell in the gun you’re supposed to have used in the crime.” He took a deep breath. “Of course…I’m a cynical man, in a cynical job,” he said. “So right away I start to stew about how you might have gotten hold of some more of those hand loads. I’m thinking maybe you left town with a whole handful of ammo we don’t know about. I’m thinking maybe, at one time, you had the officer’s whole equipment package in your possession. Maybe you threw it out the window somewhere along the line. Who knows?”
“So you called Wisconsin.”
Molina nodded.
“And?”
“And the rest of Officer Richardson’s equipment was found intact. Two speed loaders…full of the same hand loads. Nothing missing.” He laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back in the chair. “Except for his tie. I believe you mentioned his tie in your statement, didn’t you?”
“I used it to truss him up. Around his ankles and then up through the cuffs so he couldn’t get to his feet. He wasn’t the kind of guy I wanted in my rearview mirror.”
“Of course, you could have taken the tie yourself in hopes of being able to use it later to muddy the water.” He wrinkled his forehead, then waggled a hand. “But now we’re getting into TV territory.” Molina looked to Corso for agreement but got nothing in return. “So…I get back on the phone. I’m thinking maybe Officer Richardson wasn’t wearing a tie that day. Maybe he was off duty. Who knows?”
“What did they say?” Corso asked.
“Actually, the jury was split on the matter. His boss, the sheriff, couldn’t remember whether he’d been wearing a tie or not. His fellow officers seemed pretty sure he had been.”
“So?”
“So I recalled that you said in your statement that Deputy Sheriff Richardson had a flair for the media. That he liked to be in the news.”
“So you asked Wisconsin for some pictures,” Corso said.
“And guess what?”
“What?”
“With the exception of a shot where the vic and his father are shown ice fishing for Muskie”—his nostrils flared in revulsion—“Officer Richardson was wearing the same regulation brown tie in every picture.”
“Can I go now?”
Molina made an apologetic face. “I’m sure you understand what a dilemma I find myself faced with. On the one hand, I have an obligation to honor the Wisconsin warrant. On the other, I’m fairly sure you aren’t the perp. At least not the way Wisconsin imagines it coming down.” Again he spread his hands in resignation. “I don’t need to be spending resources on something this old. I’ve got my own fish to fry. What to do?”
Molina pushed the chair back and got to his feet. “What I did is what I always do. I backed up. Got simple instead of complicated. You show me crop circles, I think stoned kids, not Martians. It’s just how I am. So anyway…I called Wisconsin. Wanted to talk to the ME who did the workup.” He shook his head in disgust. “Turned out they don’t really have an ME out there. They find a guy with a bullet in his head, they assume he died of a gunshot wound. What can I say? So it turns out the guy I talked to was an undertaker. Anyway…seemed to me if it came down the way you said it did, the deceased should have had some sort of contusion on the back of his head. Assuming, of course, he still had a back of his head.” He waved a hand in the air. “The want just said he’d been shot in the head with his own gun. I mean anything was possible.”
/> “And?”
“And sure enough, our friend the undertaker found a knot on the back of the vic’s head the size of a tennis ball. A full-blown hematoma. He figured it happened when the vic hit the floor after being shot.” Molina rubbed his hands together. “They faxed us out some pictures. I had a forensic pathologist from Quantico take a look.”
“And?”
“Couple of things. First off, the angle of the bullet was strange. The bullet entered beneath the chin and rattled around inside the skull. Quantico says it’s consistent with the kind of wound somebody gets if they’re struggling for the gun and it goes off. But the hematoma…now that’s something else.” He began to pace. “See…Quantico says there had to be a time lapse between when the victim hit his head and when somebody blew his brains out and stole his tie. Twenty minutes minimum. Probably more like thirty. Because if the heart had stopped pumping blood, the body couldn’t have raised a knot of that size on the back of the man’s head. You follow me here?”
Corso said he did. “So,” Molina went on, “now I’ve really got a problem. I pretty much know you’re not the perp, but I can’t think of a single good reason why I ought to help you out here. I mean sure…you gave us your version of the story in fifty words or less. Then you spent the next six hours toying with my agents, while your girlfriend in the next room won’t even admit that Dougherty’s her real name. With that kind of cooperation, I mean why in hell should I go out of my way to help you out of the soup?”
“You use a lot of food metaphors,” Corso said. “You ever notice that?”
“I’m Italian,” Molina said with a shrug.
“What do you want?” Corso asked.
Molina bent over and picked up his briefcase from the floor. He set it on the table and opened the lid. He made sure he was looking at Corso when the bundle landed. Mary Anne Moody’s drawings. “You want to tell me about these?” he said.
“Now I’m wondering why it is I should help you out,” Corso said.
Molina smiled. “Because, Mr. Corso, you have pissed off a lot of people around here. We find you with a suitcase full of false documentation—documentation that has compromised the integrity of every known database including our own—and you run your silly-ass song and dance about somebody named Abdul Garcia. Our technical people would like to take you down to the basement. Get medieval on you. See maybe what they couldn’t get out of you with your feet in a bucket of cold water and your privates wired up to a field telephone. If you know what I’m saying.”
Molina reached to unfold the pictures. “Don’t,” Corso said. “I’ve seen them.”
“Not the kind of images that fade away, are they?”
“I want quid pro quo,” Corso said.
“You’re in no position to—”
“Quid pro quo and I’ll tell you everything I know.”
“Such as?”
“I want to know what came down in Smithville, New York, in the spring of 1968. It’s going to involve people going to jail, people leaving the area in a hurry. Social workers calling the cops. It’s gonna involve public school records and it’s gonna involve kids, which means a lot of it is going to be sealed, and I want to see it anyway.” He rattled his belly chain. “I want out of these goddamn manacles, and I want my own clothes back. After that, maybe we can talk.”
“And for this you’ll give me what?” Molina asked.
Corso thought it over. “I don’t think it’s got a name.”
“Try me.”
“Serial killers kill people they don’t know, right?”
“Usually they start close to home, but once they get rolling it’s mostly stranger to stranger. Why?”
“’Cause I think maybe we’ve got a whole new category of killer here.”
22
What am I going to tell a judge?” Molina demanded. “That some famous author has a hunch some kid who’s supposed to have been buried up in the mountains has actually been traveling around killing people for the past thirty years? Killing her own husband and kids. Killing nuns, for pity’s sake. All this from a guy who’s been fired by the New York Times for fabricating a story. Who’s currently under indictment in Texas over some information he said he had when he didn’t. Who’s got a pair of felony assault beefs in his jacket. Come on, help me out here, Corso. We’re gonna be digging up graves, we’re gonna have to do a whole lot better than that.”
Corso threw his hand out over the array of files and folders that littered the table in front of him. “It’s all in there,” he said. “The state of New York made Smithville send their kids to public school in March of ’68. Eight boys, six girls.
“Ten seconds after the girls from Smithville hit the public school system they started telling anybody who’d listen they were being sexually abused at home. It’s no damn wonder the parents didn’t want to send their kids to school. They knew what was going to happen.” He picked up a red folder marked “Confidential.” “There’s a hundred seventy pages”—he shook the folder—“a hundred seventy pages of conversations between counselors and social workers and five of the Smithville girls. Rape, sodomy, beatings”—he dropped the folder on the table—“being passed around from house to house like trade goods. I’m less than halfway through this pile and there’s stuff in there that would make a mechanic blush, for Christ’s sake.” He grabbed the red folder again. Leafed through it until he found what he was looking for.
“Listen to this. It’s dated April fourth, 1968. It’s an interagency report on Leslie Louise de Groot. Generated by the Rockland County Department of Child Protective Services at the request of Hillburn, New York, School District Thirty-Two.” He rattled the papers. “Here goes:
“Pursuant to your request for a psychological profile on the minor Leslie Louise de Groot, I met with the young woman in my office for a period of three hours on March twenty-seventh, 1968. Before beginning, I wish to stipulate as to the diagnostic difficulty inherent in reaching conclusions from such a short contact with the patient, for whom no prior medical records appear to exist. That said: Miss de Groot appears to be an average fifteen-year-old girl. Five feet eight, somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred and twenty pounds. She has wavy black hair and blue eyes. While she claims to be what she describes as “a Ramapo Indian,” in the absence of prior medical data, I would be unwilling to hazard a guess as to her actual ethnic or racial background.
“Paragraph,” Corso said.
“In the course of our conversations, Miss de Groot described the same horrific pattern of sexual abuse at the hands of her extended family as she related to your staff. I have absolutely no doubt as to her veracity in reporting these events. Nor do I, for a moment, doubt the debilitating effect of her experiences on her developing psyche.
“Miss de Groot is extremely disturbed. The bizarre nature of her experiences has forced her to cope in ways not normally demanded of human beings, and most certainly not of children. She harbors homicidal fantasies involving her abusers and yet, as is often the case, is unable to imagine herself in any other milieu. What we have is the classic approach-avoidance syndrome at its most extreme: a victim who is inexorably, and in all probability permanently, bonded to her abusers. Miss de Groot copes with her situation by attempting to control everything in her immediate environment. Variables that are not under her control are seen as threats and treated accordingly.
“Without further data, I am, at this time, unable to expand upon the above opinion.
“Now listen to this,” Corso said.
“The scope of possible behaviors emanating from the experiences which Leslie has suffered range from violence either to herself or to others, a wide array of compulsive behavioral disorders, extreme sexual aggression (which in Leslie’s case could be manifested toward both women and men), and, as is often the case, could include extreme clinical depression and schizophrenia.
“The prognosis for this young woman is not encouraging.
“It’s signed Phoebe Hill, M.D., Ph.D. Yadda-
yadda.” Corso dropped the paper on the table. “That’s sick as hell,” Corso said.
Molina hooded his eyes. “It’s also thirty years old.”
“Nine adults did serious prison time for aggravated child abuse. The rest of the kids ended up in foster homes. Permanently. Somebody showed up one night and burned down whatever was left of the town. What the hell else do we need?”
Molina put both hands on the table. Leaned toward Corso. “What?” he demanded. “You think this is lost on me or something? I’ve got two daughters, man. Twelve and fifteen. Takes every bit of restraint I’ve got not to follow them around when they leave the house. Every day I see what human beings are capable of doing to one another for a blow job or a bottle of wine or maybe just for the hell of it. And every time my kids leave the house, I start seeing all the pictures that twenty years in the Bureau’s stored inside my head. So don’t be lecturing at me like you’ve cornered the market on outrage, okay. You’re not the only person in the world who gives a shit.”
“Sorry,” Corso said.
“We need something that connects it to right now. Something that makes it important that we disturb the dead. Something timely that connects this Leslie Louise de Groot girl to this Mary Anne Moody and this…”He looked to Corso for help.
“Sissy Marie Warwick,” Corso said.
“Some connection other than your gut feeling that they’re all the same person. I need something tangible.”
“Show the judge the drawings,” Corso said.
Molina winced. “Edith Wells is a grandmother three times over. She and her husband, Grant, spend a couple of months every summer up at their little retreat in the Poconos. They’re big with the Rockland County Opera and the ballet. You understand what I’m saying to you here? I show her those drawings, I’ll be assigned to South Dakota within forty-eight hours. I don’t think my family would like that. Matter of fact, I don’t think they’d come along.” He shook his head. “No way. Not gonna happen.”