Private jm-1

by James Patterson

  “I saw Mr. Fitzhugh this morning at the hospital,” Justine said. “He understands that picking up a fifteen-year-old girl with intent to kill isn’t going to play well with a jury.

  “Professionally speaking, I don’t think Mr. Fitzhugh has the stomach to wait on death row for the needle. He’s a sensitive and very logical person. And logically, that’s too much stress for him. Frankly, he’s on the verge of cracking wide open. If he hasn’t already.”

  Justine felt a little giddiness lifting her voice, but it didn’t matter, so she went on. “The district attorney wants to try both of you,” Justine said to Crocker. “But Michael Fescoe, my good friend and chief of police, wants to keep things simple. The first confession wins.

  “So you decide,” Justine said, clasping her hands on the table in front of her. “Who gets life? Who gets death? Right now, it’s up to you, Rude.”

  Chapter 116

  Justine felt wired and almost high as she left her office for the meeting at city hall. She touched up her lipstick, took the elevator down to the street, and got into the backseat of the fleet car.

  Jack was at the wheel, Cruz in the passenger seat.

  “You okay, Justine?” Cruz asked her.

  “Yeah. Why do you ask? Because the mayor wants to see us now and didn’t say why? Or because my brain has been permanently polluted by a serial killer?”

  “Tell him, Justine,” Jack said with a big smile. “I haven’t had a chance.”

  Cruz turned his head and grinned at her. “Yeah, Justine, tell me everything.”

  “So okay. After Crocker fires his attorney, he tells us about killing Wendy Borman in this grandiose, halfway laughing, private-school voice of his.

  “Here’s a quote, Emilio,” Justine went on. “‘It was a game, and I want credit. Why else would I have done all this planning and, you know, execution?’ ”

  Cruz whistled. “You’ve got to be kidding me. He actually said that?”

  “He was shooting for the top slot,” Jack said. “Or the bottom-depends on how you look at it.”

  “Exactly. ‘Rude’ wants to be known as the most atrocious piece-of-crap serial killer in his ‘age bracket’ in the history of LA,” Justine said.

  “Like it or not, I guess he’s going to have to share that honor with Fitzhugh. As for the fourteen victims we knew about? Crocker hints maybe there are more. He may even have some information for us on Jason Pilser’s so-called suicide. Then he asks to speak to the DA.”

  Jack picked up the story from there. Justine put her head back and closed her eyes as Jack told Cruz that Bobby Petino had made a deal with Crocker: no death penalty for a full confession to the other killings, whatever number there were.

  After that, Bobby had left the interrogation room as cool as ice. He didn’t care why the kid was a psycho-killer.

  But Justine had to understand why these privileged kids had become monsters. Crocker and Fitzhugh reminded Justine of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, another pair of brilliant teenagers who killed a schoolmate in the early 1900s, to see if they could get away with it. Smart as they thought they were, they made a rookie mistake and were sent to prison for life. It came out later that those boys had had an acted-out but unacknowledged homosexual attachment.

  Crocker and Fitzhugh had tortured their female victims, but none of the girls had been sexually assaulted. Were Crocker and Fitzhugh Leopold and Loeb all over again?

  There were more questions than answers about the nature of their psychoses, and many different bags to choose from: genetic predisposition, trauma, brain physiology, and the ever popular “who the hell knows, because we’re all different, right?”

  As a potential witness against him, Justine couldn’t spend any more time with Crocker, but she wished she could. That reptile would have told her anything she wanted to know-as long as it was about him.

  Jack pulled into the garage behind city hall, opened the door for Justine, and gave her a hand.

  Justine got to her feet, lowered her sunglasses, and said, “I’m just warning you, Jack. If the mayor tries to kick our butts for roughing up those bastards, I’m gonna kick back.”

  Chapter 117

  Mayor Thomas Hefferon was a wiry man with thick gray hair and a hanging left arm from an injury he’d taken in Desert Storm. Chief Fescoe, at a muscular six-three, looked like a bodyguard standing next to him, but Hefferon could handle himself just fine.

  Hefferon motioned all of us-Justine, Cruz, Fescoe, Petino, Cronin, and myself-to join him at the glass conference table with its long view of the skyline.

  He said, “I’m glad all of you could make it on such short notice. Chief Fescoe has news.”

  Fescoe folded his hands on the table. “Eamon Fitzhugh made a deal with Bobby and confessed to his part in killing Wendy Borman. We’ve got his computer at the lab now. Turns out this sick SOB must have obsessive-compulsive disorder,” the police chief said. “He saved every file, every text message back to 2006. It’s going to take weeks to figure out the wireless eavesdropping program he used to bait the victims. That freak is kind of a genius, I’ve been told.”

  Justine said, “That’s interesting, Mickey. Crocker thinks of himself as the genius. He calls Fitzhugh a tool.”

  Cronin said, “Both of them are tools. So that’s it, huh? I get my life back after two years? Hey, now I don’t know what to do with myself.”

  After the laughter stopped, Hefferon said, “You folks did a tremendous job. Chief, it took guts to bring Private in on the case. Jack, hope to see you again.

  “Justine, Nora, all those hours, and years, more than paid off. You too, Emilio. I hear you scared the snot out of Fitzhugh. Fact is, LA is a safer place because of your dedication. Thank you.”

  Damn, but that thanks felt good. Whatever brain chemical it released made my whole body happy. No amount of money could compare to the high of taking out the trash and slamming down the lid, knowing it was nailed shut for good.

  We were sipping champagne and joking around as we had our pictures taken with the mayor, when my phone signaled me from my inside breast pocket.

  It was a voice mail message transferred from my office phone and marked “urgent.” The caller was a Michael Donahue.

  I knew the name but couldn’t place it-then it came to me like a punch to the face. Donahue was the owner of the Irish pub Colleen frequented.

  I hit a button, listened to Donahue speaking gravely in his heavy Irish brogue. I replayed the message so I could be sure of what he had said.

  “Jack. It’s bad. Colleen is at Glendale Memorial Hospital. Room four eleven. You need to come there quickly.”

  Chapter 118

  I tore up the freeway north, heading toward the hospital.

  I tried to reach Donahue, but my calls went straight to voice mail.

  I was scared, preoccupied, and the exit came up too fast.

  I twisted the wheel hard and lost control. The car fishtailed, came to a stop, and stalled out five inches from a concrete divider.

  Horns honked as freeway traffic flashed by me at seventy. My hands shook as I restarted the engine and finally made it safely down the off-ramp. Jeez, I’d almost totaled my car, and maybe myself.

  Twenty-five minutes after getting Donahue’s call, I bulled my way through the lobby of Glendale Memorial and stabbed the elevator button until the doors opened and then closed behind me.

  By some kind of blind bloodhound instinct, I found Colleen’s room on the first try.

  I strong-armed the swinging door, and Donahue got up from the bedside chair, came toward me, and shook my hand.

  “Take it easy on her, Jack. She’s not well.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’ll leave the two of you alone.”

  Colleen’s cheeks were flushed. Her hair was damp at her temples. The white cotton blankets covered her to her chin.

  She looked very small in the bed, like a feverish child.

  I took Mike’s vacated chair, leaned over, and tou
ched her shoulder. I was scared for her. She’d never been sick since I’d met her. Not a day.

  “Colleen. It’s Jack.”

  She opened her blue eyes and nodded when she saw me.

  “Are you okay? What happened?” I asked.

  Medication dragged at her voice. “I’m going home.”

  “What are you saying? To Dublin?”

  A terrible thought came to me-like a balled fist to the gut. “Were you pregnant? Did you lose the baby?”

  Colleen’s blank expression became a smile. She laughed and then she was swept up in a kind of hysteria that turned to sobs. She put her hands up by her cheeks, and I saw shocking white bands of gauze and tape binding her wrists.

  The gauze was striped with bright blood, which was seeping through.

  What had she done?

  “I told Mike not to call you. I’m mortified for you to see me like this… I’ll be all right. Please go, Jack. I’m fine now.”

  “What were you thinking, Colleen?”

  I thought back over the past weeks and months. I hadn’t noticed that Colleen was depressed. How had I missed it? What the hell was wrong with me sometimes?

  “I was completely daft,” she said. “I just hurt so much. You don’t have to tell me again. I know it’s over.”

  “Colleen. Oh, Colleen,” I whispered.

  She closed her eyes, and shame washed over me. Guilt and shame. I did care about Colleen, but she cared more. It had been selfish of me to stay with her for so long, when I knew we’d gone as far as we could go. I’d hurt this woman-and she’d done this to herself. What a terrible thing.

  I don’t know how long the silence between us lasted. Maybe it was only a minute, but it was time enough to think about what Colleen meant to me and to try to imagine a future for the two of us. It was sad, but I just couldn’t see it.

  “At least you won’t be having to listen to my queer way of talkin’,” she said.

  “Don’t you know that I love to listen to your voice?”

  “You were good to me, Jack. Always. I won’t forget that.”

  “Damn it, Molloy. I want you to be happy.”

  She nodded, tears slipping down her cheeks.

  “You too,” she said. “I want that for you too.”

  Neither of us said another word.

  I kissed her good-bye, then I walked out, and I knew I would never see Colleen again, and that was my loss.

  I had let another good woman get away, hadn’t I? What the hell was wrong with me?

  Chapter 119

  I had planned a “wrap party” at the Pacific Dining Car to thank the guys in the lab as well as the primaries on the Schoolgirl case for a job extremely well done.

  After seeing Colleen, I couldn’t celebrate and I couldn’t fake it.

  I phoned Sci, told him I had a family emergency, and asked him to stand in for me as host. Then I did the unthinkable. I turned off my phone.

  I drove to Forest Lawn, an old and sprawling cemetery where dozens of celebrities were buried. My sweet mom was buried there too.

  She’d been taken down by a previously undiagnosed heart disease during the heat and ugliness of my father’s trial. It was a sharp, unexpected ending to an unfulfilled life. Maybe it was my mother and father’s bad relationship that kept me away from marriage.

  I took off my jacket and sat on the grass near her simple stone, engraved with hands folded in prayer above an inscription: “Sandra Kreutzer Morgan is with God.”

  A lawn mower hummed in the distance, and I saw the flash of Mylar balloons, probably hovering over the grave of some poor child buried nearby.

  I didn’t talk to my mother’s bones or her spirit. I didn’t even pray until just before I left.

  But I thought about the good times we’d had together: the rare picnics, a few tailgate parties after football games, watching Peter Sellers movies with her on late-night TV. She had probably seen The Pink Panther a hundred times. So had I. So had Tommy.

  I grinned thinking about that, and after a while I rolled my jacket into a pillow and lay down. I got mesmerized by the slow shifting of the oak leaves in the branches overhead.

  And then I fell off the planet for a while.

  I must have slept long and deep, because I was awakened by a groundskeeper shaking my arm, saying, “Sir, we’re closing. You have to leave, sir.”

  I touched Mom’s stone, found my car, and as the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh, my car seemed to drive itself to a pretty carriage house I knew well in the flats of Beverly Hills.

  I parked on Wetherly, a tidy residential block, and sat for a while just looking at Justine’s small, beautiful house. I turned my phone back on and tapped in her number.

  Justine answered on the first ring. “Jack. What was this family emergency?” she asked. “You missed the party.”

  “Colleen is going back to Dublin,” I said. “We talked it over. After that I went out to Forest Lawn. I needed time to think.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “ ‘Sure,’ he says,” Justine said, tweaking me. “Well, I’ve had to do some mental reorganization of my own. See, um, Bobby dumped me to go back to his wife. Too bad for Bobby, though; she didn’t want him anymore.”

  I wanted to comfort Justine, and at the same time I was happy to hear this breaking news. Justine was too good for Bobby Petino, or to get tainted by the smudge and stink of California politics.

  I wondered where Justine was right now. I pictured her in a chaise in her study, or lying in bed with the TV turned down, a glass of wine in her hand. My emotional pull toward her was almost a physical force.

  “What are you doing right now?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “I could come over,” I said. “Just for a while.”

  There was a deep pause that I filled with hope.

  “Jack, we both know that would be a bad idea,” Justine said. “Why don’t you just get a good night’s sleep, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I was saying her name when she disconnected the line. I watched the lights go off in her house, one by one.

  And then I drove to my home alone.

  Epilogue

  It’s A Wrap

  Chapter 120

  Out-of-work actor Parker Dalton knocked on the door of Suite 34 at the Chateau Marmont.

  He held the folding massage table by its handle, reset his cap with his other hand, and waited on the dark print carpet for Mr. Cushman to invite him in for his daily rub.

  Dalton loved this job, actually. Stars had always stayed at the Chateau, and some of them actually lived here several months at a time. The sightings of Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, Matthew Perry, and others made fantastic entries on Dalton’s blog and always gave him hope for his own career.

  Mr. Cushman was no star, but he was a celebrity, what with his wife having been murdered and the killer still on the loose.

  Dalton had tweeted about his sessions with Mr. Cushman, and his friends and innumerable friends of friends begged for more tweets, more details, more snarky observations.

  When Mr. Cushman didn’t come to the door, Dalton phoned his room on the direct line. He heard the phone ring inside the suite, and when Mr. Cushman didn’t pick up, he considered his options.

  Should he leave-or call the front desk?

  It wasn’t exactly rare for Mr. Cushman to be semidrunk when Dalton arrived. But maybe there had been an accident. Maybe he had fallen in the shower.

  Dalton finally called the desk, and within minutes the day manager came up, a tall blond guy with a rockin’ build and the name “Mr. Straus” on the tag on his vest. Straus questioned Dalton briefly and then opened the door to Cushman’s suite.

  Dalton stood at the threshold and called out, “Mr. Cushman.” When there was no answer, he followed Straus into the large suite.

  The spare 1930s-style furniture was undisturbed. Bottles and glasses littered the tabletops, garbage spilled out of trash cans, and white curt
ains billowed over the unmade bed.

  “I don’t see Mr. Cushman anywhere,” said Dalton.

  “No kidding,” said Straus.

  Dalton watched Straus open the closet doors-and he saw his opportunity to snoop. What did Mr. Cushman wear when he wasn’t naked or in his pajamas?

  The closet was empty and so were the dresser drawers.

  The bathroom, with its wonderful period black-and-white tiles, was a mess: medicine cabinet open, just a used razor and a bottle of aspirin inside, towels all over the floor.

  “Man, looks like he checked out without telling me,” said Parker Dalton.

  “Christ,” said the manager, beginning to shake his head. “He didn’t check out. He bolted.”

  “Are you calling the police?”

  “Be serious. This is the Chateau Marmont.”

  Parker Dalton was tweeting before he left the legendary and, some said, haunted hotel. Oh, man, what a tale he had to tell. By the end of the day, twenty thousand nosy people would know that Andy Cushman had stiffed the hotel and scampered away.

  Chapter 121

  It was late afternoon when Del Rio turned off Lobo Canyon and parked his gray Land Rover off Lobo Vista Road.

  The sky was as gray as the car, as gray as his clothes, camouflage he didn’t need because this was such a desolate spot.

  Del Rio was thinking about Jack as he took his Remington 700, fitted with a ten-power scope, from the rear of the car.

  He walked off-road, taking a deer path up an incline through the scrub.

  The rise got steeper, and when the trail bore to the right, Del Rio broke a new path through the weeds, grabbing onto grasses and coyote brush and pulling himself up the hillside in places where his shoes slid on the slope.

  When he reached the plateau, he took in the view of the farmhouse seventy-five yards below him, with its sun-bleached outbuildings and stretch of terrain that looked like a rumpled and dusty carpet had been tossed over the hills.