Double Vision

by Colby Marshall

  “Maybe the victims each had a parent who died, and the Triple Shooter somehow placed blame on them for their parents’ deaths?” Saleda ventured. Saleda seemed to be thinking along the same lines.

  “What did the other two avenge?” Jenna asked.

  “Megaera, the jealous one, was particularly famous for punishing infidelity,” Calliope said.

  “Makes sense.”

  “Alecto’s job was to castigate moral crimes, particularly those against other people,” Calliope continued.

  “Except infidelity?” Saleda asked.

  Calliope looked disappointed in her prize pupil. “No, not except infidelity. The Furies each had particular crimes to which they had a special aversion, but don’t get me wrong. As an entity, they went after those who provoked their ire or those they were called upon to torture. They punished matricide and patricide first and foremost, but they also pursued other criminals and would never stop following them.”

  “What kinds of other criminals besides those committing infidelity? What were the moral crimes you mentioned?” Jenna asked.

  Calliope shrugged. “Anyone who broke rules in society, especially those not governed by society. They regulated ethical concerns. Killing mom and pop was big, but disrespecting them was bad, too. A parent calling the curse of the Erinyes on a child wasn’t taken lightly. Lack of respect for authority in general, in fact, was something the Furies took up as a cause. Impertinence toward the gods, breaking oaths. That sort of thing. Parents weren’t free from punishment, by any means, though. A mother harming her child, for example, would incur the wrath of the Furies. They were known in particular for protecting the defenseless: children, animals, beggars . . .”

  Jenna snapped to attention. “Beggars?”

  “The down-on-their luck, defenseless ones, yes,” Calliope answered.

  Jenna and Saleda exchanged a glance. Brooklyn and the homeless man. Someone had to have seen that exchange.

  Jenna whipped out her cell phone. “Irv, we need to find out if there are any surveillance cameras outside the Student Life Center at Woodsbridge Community College. I need video from the day Brooklyn Satterhorne died. That afternoon, from every single possible angle you can get your hands on.”

  “Oh, if only Google Earth kept continuous video flow,” Irv replied.

  “One day, Irv,” Jenna said.

  “You keep promising me that . . .” he said, but she could hear him push back from the table, his yawn giving away his stretching. “On it. Anything else, my liege?”

  Jenna thought for a minute. The previous Triple Shooter victims had probably committed some kind of moral sin, as well, but the chances of them learning what those might’ve been right now were slim. And yet . . .

  She stepped away from the table and hopefully out of Calliope Jones’s earshot.

  “Start thinking now about ways we can find out if the other Triple Shooter victims were, um, amoral.”

  Irv laughed in her ear. “You want me to see if they went to confession or had any recent purchases of scarlet letters in their receipt bins, or what?”

  Jenna shook her head. “I have no idea yet. But I will. Talk soon.”

  She hung up and stepped back to the table.

  Saleda didn’t ask about the conversation because she was still engaging Calliope with question after question. “If they never stopped pursuing the criminals they were after, did they eventually kill the criminals they tortured, then?”

  “Not literally,” Calliope said. “Some committed suicide, but most were simply tortured into madness.”

  Madness. Schizophrenia.

  If the UNSUB believes he’s hearing the Furies, does he believe they’re torturing him for somehow being dishonorable?

  Schizophrenics usually weren’t that logical. Still, the idea couldn’t be discounted. All the same, the idea of the Furies had to have been planted in the shooter’s head at some point. Could’ve been anywhere at any time, though. Trying to track down sources of mythological learning for someone whose identity they didn’t know would be about as fruitful as looking for the next Triple Shooter victim before he killed her.

  But the question of who the real victim was supposed to be in the grocery store still existed. Now they could look even further into the profiles of the patrons at Lowman’s that day to see who it might’ve been rather than just how they meshed with the number three.

  “If our UNSUB feels he’s being followed by the Furies—hearing them—well, is there anything in mythology that he might do, anything he might turn to to get away from them?” Jenna asked. Maybe he thought that by avenging their wrongdoings for them, like once he’d done a certain number of tasks as such, they’d let him go? They would leave him alone?

  Calliope grunted. “If your killer believes the Furies are torturing him, then good luck. That was why so many of those they punished ended up killing themselves. The Erinyes are merciless. The Furies will never stop.”

  29

  As Jenna and Saleda pulled out of the bookstore’s parking lot, Jenna searched for something—anything—to tell Irv to look for in the profiles of the people inside the grocery store during the shooting. Something that might give them some idea of who the Triple Shooter was after—chiefly, who collided with some sort of immorality that would’ve drawn the attention of the Triple Shooter and, in his head, the Furies.

  “So what’s the plan?” she asked Saleda.

  Saleda shook her head slowly as she navigated the SUV through the streets. “I’d say we could take closer looks at the previous Triple Shooter victims prior to the grocery store to see if we could learn what mysterious morality crimes they committed, then follow the trail of those in an effort to link it back to the killer the same way we’re hoping the surveillance footage from the college will give us something. But I don’t think the old victims are a useful tack. Actually attempting to determine the ‘sins’—or whatever caused the Triple to target these girls—this long after the crimes were committed would be nothing more than hoping to get lucky in a guessing game. Unless you have better ideas than I do.”

  “I wish. I’m on the same page, though. I don’t think finding the ‘sins’ of the previous victims is what we need to focus on,” Jenna said. Her comment to Irv from a few minutes before popped into her head. “What we need is some way to look at the so-called ‘morality’ of the people in the grocery store at the time of the mass shooting. One of them was the target, and figuring out which might be our best shot at tracing how this guy came to be there to off him or her.”

  “Good luck with that. My ideas were sketchy for that angle on the old Triple Shooter victims. They didn’t magically turn into something more worthwhile when we started talking about the grocery store victims. The only thing I can think of is to do more interviews,” Saleda replied.

  Jenna sighed and leaned back, intentionally banging her head against the seat’s headrest. Asking people to confide all the ways in which an objective party might consider them to be immoral and getting useful answers was about as likely as she and Claudia making a party of burying the proverbial hatchet and skipping away from the fresh hole as best buds. Even if the survivors of the grocery store shootings were willing to tell their darkest secrets—which they most likely wouldn’t be—if they happened to be anything like Brooklyn and somewhat subjectively awful, they wouldn’t have the self-awareness to explain that they treated other human beings like crap.

  “Okay, so other than interviews, if you were looking into someone’s life and a person’s actions, what would you use to try to assess their . . . I don’t know . . . moral compass?” Jenna asked.

  “Shit,” Saleda said. “Uh, movie preferences? Maybe Netflix downloads? Music taste?”

  The pearl pink color Jenna associated with subjectivity flashed in. “Too individualized to personal taste. The music one person thinks is immoral doesn’t faze another. We n
eed something more universal. Something that applies to or at least exists on the same plane as the guidelines Calliope Jones laid out regarding moral crimes the Furies punish.”

  “All right. So sexual deviances, maybe. Swing groups? Cheating. How we’d know much of this kind of detail on any one of these people we’re talking about is beyond me, though. Maybe there’s some giant list of swingers kept on the Internet I don’t know about, though I daresay Irv could dig it up . . .”

  Jenna laughed. “Yeah. I can just see us arranging stakeouts on thirty people to determine the chances any one of them might be cheating on a spouse. I’m sure the Bureau would be happy to clear that use of manpower.”

  “Yes. And judges tend to giddily approve search warrants and seizures of victims’ property when we can’t yet prove any of it directly relates to a suspect at all. ‘We know one of these people is immoral’ is a little too vague for any judge without a blood alcohol level of point five to grant,” Saleda said with her own chuckle.

  “Point five if they were even victims,” Jenna countered. “They’re not, though. They’re potential victims. Of a past crime. So now we don’t need a judge who registers point five on a Breathalyzer so much as one with enough whiskey in his bloodstream that he can’t take one because he’s passed out. We find him, we’re covered. One of us holds the paperwork still, and the other moves the pen across it in his hand.”

  “Even better. Now we just need to know where to go to find sloppy-drunk judges in the middle of the afternoon. Know any favorite watering holes?”

  Jenna’s phone vibrated, and she laughed as she pulled it out. She’d kind of hoped it would be Yancy, seeing as how they hadn’t talked since their spat, but it was Charley, wondering whether or not he should be worried if Ayana ate a bath crayon. Great.

  She replied that no, unless Ayana had choked on it, he had nothing to worry about. The things were as nontoxic as they came, which, sadly, she couldn’t say for most things in Ayana’s life.

  Truth was, though, A had no idea her life was at all strange or different from that of any other kid. She didn’t know any better than having her grandfather and uncle take care of her every day while Mommy was at work, or that there was something extremely disturbing about living in a house you were locked into with a series of nearly undecipherable locks and passwords that changed far more often than Uncle Charley’s socks. Funny how kids could have that sort of perspective, whereas adults tended to lose that innocence.

  Color burst forth in Jenna’s mind. A terra-cotta shade, one she’d seen before. But where?

  She closed her eyes, concentrated on the hue, tried to hold it there. Remember.

  Dodd.

  The mental images of him flew through her brain: Dodd in Liam Tyler’s house just before he’d left; Dodd in the SUV on the way back to Quantico following their last outing, when he’d talked about no longer having a family; Dodd squatting on the floor in front of Molly Keegan that first time Jenna had seen him.

  It was the color she’d come to associate with Dodd, but finally she understood why it was flashing in at this very moment. When she’d first met Dodd, he’d been interviewing Molly Keegan without so much as a tip from Yancy to go on.

  “I only came over because she is a kid, and kids are different . . . Kids are honest, notice things some people don’t,” he’d said when she had asked him why he was questioning Molly. “She has a unique point of view.”

  How this little girl kept finding her way into the case, Jenna might never know. But one thing seemed for sure right now.

  “Saleda, you aren’t going to like this, but I think we do need to conduct another interview. With Molly Keegan.”

  Saleda’s neck arched back. “What? Why?”

  Jenna blew out a breath, already resigning herself to the next sparring match with Liam Tyler at worst, another unpleasant encounter with him at best. Hell, she didn’t blame him. If she was the girl’s parent—or parental figure—she’d want their family to be allowed to move on as well as possible and stop thinking about this whole mess as much as they could, too.

  “Because,” Jenna said, “she might be the only person who was in that grocery store who could give us some conjecture that might show the good guys from the ‘possibly immoral’ guys on instinct. It’s a talent only children have most of the time, because everyone else knows too much, is too ingrained with social protocol. For most, the norm has become not to look, not to stare. To give people too much benefit of the doubt.”

  “Are you sure this is absolutely necessary? The only way to do whatever it is you think we need to do? This isn’t going to make my day or my career any easier. Teva’s already been over there once today to talk to Molly about how she found Eldred Beasley’s phone number and to take a statement from her about their conversation.”

  “But you’re making my point for me, Saleda. Forget for a minute all the implications of that she could find him to contact him based only on her observations. The sole reason she initiated that contact was because she noticed where no one else did that he—a man who’d been as close to the shooter as she had, if not closer—had been missing from the room where the witnesses who saw the shooter were held until statements could be taken. She called Beasley because she had noticed he should’ve been included in the group none of us noticed to put him in,” Jenna said.

  “I know, I know. It’s just . . .” Saleda groaned. “Just be for damned sure this is the right step, Jenna. The only step. Please? For me? My sanity?” Saleda said.

  “I am sure,” Jenna said, Dodd’s words haunting her thoughts. “She notices things some people don’t.”

  30

  Molly poked her head through the railings at the top of the stairs. She couldn’t see Dr. Ramey, but she could hear her voice. She was with another woman this time. Thank goodness. Liam did not like that Agent Dodd from before, even though Molly thought he was a nice enough man. Maybe he’d just had a bad day the other day, the same kind Molly had had the day her friend had kicked her in the shin accidentally while their class was learning how to play soccer at PE. She’d been grumpy all afternoon the day that happened.

  “Ladies, I’m trying to be hospitable, but this is getting a bit ridiculous and excessive,” Liam’s voice echoed from the foyer. “What could a six-year-old possibly know about a crime scene that others couldn’t undoubtedly tell you more about?”

  Molly resisted the urge to blow a raspberry. Six was a perfectly fine number to have as an age. Sure, it was a devil’s number to some people, but it was also the number of geese a-laying in “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Geese were neat birds. It was the number of legs insects were born or hatched with, the number of cans in a regular pack of soda, and the atomic number of carbon. Nothing wrong with six. She knew a lot of things about a lot of different subjects as a six-year-old!

  She shouldn’t have taken Dr. Ramey into Liam’s office that day during their tour. That was all there was to it. He didn’t even really like her looking at his art, like the rock collection imprints and the painting. No wonder he’d acted like Dr. Ramey bugged him after that. He’d never said anything to Molly about it, but she’d known as soon as he’d come in the office while they were talking that day that she shouldn’t have been there, brought a guest inside. The heat had crept up her neck to her cheeks the same way it did anytime she went in his office to look at the artwork when he wasn’t in there. The very first day she’d noticed the artwork, stood to admire it, Liam had come over and talked to her about the painting the same way she had discussed it with Dr. Ramey. But after that time, he hadn’t been happy to have her visit the office and look at the art. She guessed she didn’t blame him. She wouldn’t want other people staring at her stuff when she wasn’t there, either. It just felt creepy.

  “Mr. Tyler, we believe Molly can answer certain questions for us based on where she was located inside the building at the time the shooting occurred,”
the unfamiliar female said.

  Her stepfather let out an audible sigh.

  One. Two. Three.

  “Fine. I’ll call her down. But let’s keep it short this time. Okay, ladies?”

  Molly jerked her head back through the rails and sprinted the few steps down the hallway back to her room.

  “Molly? Hon? Can you come down for a few minutes?”

  She closed her door as she came out so it would sound like she’d been in her room all the time. She took the stairs one by one at a hop, all twelve. Twelve in a dozen, twelve dozen in a gross. Twelve months in a year. Twelve edges on a cube, like her Rubik’s cube. Force twelve, the maximum wind speed possible for a hurricane.

  She landed on both feet at the bottom. “What’s going on, Liam?”

  “Dr. Ramey and Agent Ovarez came by to talk to you. Is that all right?”

  She glanced past him to the foyer, where she saw Dr. Ramey smile and wave as well as the lady with darker skin and almost-black hair pulled into a ponytail who stood beside her. “Sure.”

  “You know you don’t have to if you don’t want to, right?” Liam asked.

  Molly nodded. Never mind that he didn’t think she could help. “I know. I want to.”

  Liam turned and gestured for the two agents to come over. Molly followed as he led them into the kitchen, poured them both a cup of coffee and Molly a glass of juice.

  “Well, you ladies let me know if I’m needed. I’ll be in the living room,” he said.

  Dr. Ramey thanked Liam, and he left.