"The mother must have done something."
He cocked open an eye. Sherlock was standing over him, a shock of her red hair falling over to cover the side of her face. He watched her tuck the swatch of hair behind her ear. Nice hair and lots of it. Her eyes were green, a pretty color, kind of mossy and soft. No, her hair wasn't really red, but more red than anything else. There was some brown and a dash of cinnamon color as well. He guessed it was auburn. That's what he'd thought the first time he'd seen her. "Yes," he said, "Mrs. Bent definitely did something."
"I don't think Mr. Bent did anything. The three fathers Russell Bent shot were clean kills. No, wait, after they were dead, Bent shot them in the stomach."
"The quick death was probably because to Bent, the father didn't count, he wasn't an object of the bone-deep hatred. The belly shot was probably because he thought the father was weak, he was ineffectual, he wasn't a man."
"What did Mrs. Bent do to Russell and his sister?" "To punish Russell and his sister, or more likely, just for the kicks it gave her, Mrs. Bent gagged them both, tied their arms behind them and locked them in the trunk of the car or in a closet or other terrifying closed-in places. Once they nearly died from carbon monoxide poisoning. The mother didn't take care of them, obviously, she left them to scrounge food for themselves. Social Services didn't get them away from her until they were ten and twelve years old. Some timing, huh?"
"How did you find out this stuff so quickly?" "I got on the phone before we left to pick up Russell Bent. I even got Social Services down to check their files. It was all there."
"So the toaster cord is a sort of a payback for what she didn't do? Beating her face was retribution?" "Yeah, maybe. A payback for all eternity." "And he must have come to believe that even though his mother was a dreadful person, he and his sister still deserved death, only they hadn't died, they'd survived, so it had to be other children just like them?"
"That doesn't make much sense, does it? But it's got to have something to do with Russell Bent feeling worthless, like he didn't deserve to live."
"But why did he pick the Lansky family?" "I don't know. No one reported any gossip about the family, nothing about physical abuse, or the mother neglecting the children. No unexplained injuries with the kids winding up in the emergency room. But you can take it to the bank that Russell Bent thought the two Lansky kids were enough like him and his sister to merit dying. He thought the mother was enough like his own mother to deserve death. Why exactly did he have to gas the children? God only knows. Your explanation is as good as any. Brady will find out, though, with the help of the psychiatrists."
"Russell Bent coached Little League. The Lansky boy was in Little League. Maybe the Lansky boy got close to Bent, just maybe the Lansky boy told Russell that his mother was horrible." She shrugged. "It really won't matter. You know what they'll do, sir. They'll dress it all up in psychobabble. Do you know what happened to the Bents' parents?"
"Yes," he said. "I know. Sherlock, call me anything but 'sir.' I'm only thirty-four. I just turned thirty-four last month, on the sixth. 'Sir' makes me feel ancient."
The three cops erupted into the office. Captain Brady was rubbing his hands together. There was a bounce to his step. There would be a press conference at midnight. Mason and Dubrosky kept giving each other high fives. Brady had to call the mayor, the police commissioner-the list went on and on. He had to get busy.
It took the CPD only two hours to prove that Bent had traveled to Des Moines and to St. Louis exactly a week before each of those murders had been committed there and back on the exact dates of the murders.
Unfortunately, at least in Lacey's view, Bent was so crazy, he wouldn't even go to trial. He wouldn't get the death penalty. He would be committed. Would he ever be let out? The last thing she heard as they were leaving the Jefferson Park precinct station was his sobs and the soft, soothing voice of his sister, telling him over and over that it would be all right, that they were in this together. She would take care of him. She had been two years older and she hadn't protected him from their mother. She wondered if the sister was really lucky that her brother hadn't gassed her.
They took a late-morning flight back to Washington, D.C. It didn't occur to Savich until they were already in the air that Sherlock might not have a place to stay.
"I'm staying at the Watergate," she said. "I'm comfortable. I'll stay there until I find an apartment." She smiled at him. "You did very well. You got him. You didn't even need the police. Why didn't you just call Captain Brady and tell him about Bent? Why did you want to go to Chicago?"
"I lied to Brady. I'm a glory hound-even if it's just a crumb, I'm happy. I love praise. Who doesn't?"
"But that's not even part of why you went."
"All right, Sherlock. I wanted to be in at the kill. I wanted to see this guy. If I hadn't seen him, then it would never be finished in my mind. Too, this was your first day. It was important for you to see how I work, how I deal with local cops. Okay, it was a bit of a show. I think I deserved it. You're new. You haven't seen any disappointments yet, you haven't lived through the endless frustration, the wrong turns our unit has suffered since the first murders in Des Moines. You didn't hear all the crap we got about the profile being wrong. All you saw was the victory dance. This has been only the third real score I've gotten since the FBI started the unit up.
"But I can't ever forget that there was Des Moines and St. Louis and twelve people died because we didn't figure things out quickly enough. Of course Chicago was the key, since that was his focus. As soon as I realized that the neighbors knew one another and watched out for one another, and there hadn't been any strangers at the Lansky house, then I knew our guy lived there. He had to. There wasn't any other answer."
Savich added in a tired voice, "You did just fine, Sherlock."
For the first time in years, she felt something positive, something that made her feel really good wash through her. "Thanks," she said, and stretched out in her seat. "What if I hadn't known the answer when you asked me to explain it?"
"Oh, it was easy to see that you did know. You were about to burst out of your skin. You looked about ready to fly. Yeah, you really did fine."
"Will you tell me about your first big score sometime? Maybe even the second one?"
She thought he must be asleep. Then he said in a slow, slurred voice, "Her name was Joyce Hendricks. She was seventeen and I was fifteen. I'd never seen real live breasts before. She was something. All the guys thought I was the stud of the high school, for at least three days."
She laughed. "Where is Joyce now? "She's a big-time tax accountant in New York We exchange Christmas cards," he mumbled, just before he drifted off to sleep.
7
LACEY MOVED A WEEK LATER into a quite lovely two-bedroom town house in Georgetown on the corner of Cranford Street and Madison. She had four glasses, two cups, a bed, one set of white sheets, three towels, all different, a microwave, and half a dozen hangers. It was all she'd brought with her from California. She'd given the rest of her stuff to a homeless shelter in San Francisco. When she'd told Savich she didn't have much in storage, she hadn't been exaggerating.
No matter.
The first thing she did was change the locks and install dead bolts and chains. Then she hung up her two dresses, two pairs of jeans, and two pairs of slacks on her hangers. She was whistling, thinking about MacDougal and how she'd miss him. He was on the fifth floor, working in the National Security Division. He was big-time into counterterrorism. It had been his goal, he'd told her, since a close friend of his had been blown out of the sky on the doomed Pan Am Flight 103 that exploded over Lockerbie in the late eighties. He'd just gotten his first big assignment. He would go to Saudi Arabia because of a terrorist bombing that had killed at least fifteen American soldiers the previous week.
"I'm outta here, Sherlock," he'd said, grabbed her, and given her a big hug. "They're giving me a chance. Just like Savich gave you. Hey, you really did well with that guy in C
hicago."
"The Toaster."
"Yeah. What a moniker. Trust the media to trivialize murder by making it funny. Anything big since then?"
"No, but it's been less than a week. Savich made me take three days off to find an apartment. Listen, no impulsive stuff out of you, okay? You take care of yourself, Mac. Don't go off on a tear just because you're FBI now and think you're invincible."
"This is just training for me, Sherlock. Nothing more. Hey, you're good little-sister material."
"We're the same age."
"Nah, with those skinny little arms of yours, you're a little sister."
He was anxious to be gone. He was bouncing his foot and shifting from one leg to the other. She gave him one more hug. "Send me a postcard with lots of sand on it."
He gave her a salute and was off, whistling, just as she was now, his footsteps fast and solid down the short drive in front of her town house. He turned suddenly and called back, "I hear that Savich is big into country-and-western music. I hear he loves to sing the stuff, that he knows all the words to every song ever written. It can't hurt to brownnose."
Goodness, she thought, country-and-western music? She knew what it was but that was about it. It was twangy stuff that was on radio stations she always turned off immediately. It hadn't ever been in her repertoire-not that she'd had much of a repertoire the past seven years. The last time she'd played the piano was in the bar at the Watergate a week and a half before. The drunks had loved her. She'd played some Gershwin, then quit when she forgot the next line.
She was standing in the middle of her empty living room, hands on hips, wondering where she was going to buy furniture when the doorbell rang.
No one knew she was here.
She froze, hating herself even as she felt her heart begin to pound. She had been safe at Quantico, but here, in Washington, D.C., where she was utterly alone? Her Lady Colt was in the bedroom. No, she wasn't about to dash in there and get it. She drew in a deep breath. It was the paperboy. It was someone selling subscriptions.
The only people she knew were the eight people in the Criminal Apprehension Unit and Savich, and she hadn't given them her address yet. Just Personnel. Would they tell anyone?
The doorbell rang again. She walked to her front door, immediately moving to stand beside it. No one would shoot through the front door and hit her. "Who is it?''
There was a pause, then, "It's me, Lacey. Douglas."
She closed her eyes a moment. Douglas Madigan. She hadn't seen him for four months, nearly five months. The last time had been at her father's house in Pacific Heights the night before she'd left for Quantico. He'd been cold and distant with her. Her mother had wept, then ranted at her for being an ungrateful girl. Douglas had said very little, just sat there on the plush leather couch in her father's library and sipped at very expensive brandy from a very old Waterford snifter. It wasn't an evening she liked to remember.
"Lacey? Are you there, honey?"
She'd called her father the day before. Douglas must have found out where she was from him. She watched her hand unfasten the two chains. She slowly clicked off the dead bolt and opened the door.
"I've got a bottle of champagne, just for us." He waved it in her face.
"I don't have any silverware."
"Who cares? I don't usually drink champagne from a spoon anyway. You nervous to see me, Lacey? Come, honey, all you need is a glass or two."
"Sorry, my brain's a bit scattered. I wasn't expecting you, Douglas. Yes, I've got some cheap glasses. Come in."
He followed her to the empty kitchen. She pulled two glasses from the cupboard. He said as he gently twisted the champagne cork, "I read about you in the Chronicle. You just graduated from the Academy and you already nailed a serial killer."
She thought about that pathetic scrap, Russell Bent, who'd murdered twelve people. She hoped the inmates would kill him. He had murdered six children and she knew that prisoners hated child abusers and child killers. She shrugged. "I was just along for the ride, Douglas. It was my boss, Dillon Savich, who had already figured out who the guy was even before we went. It was amazing the way Savich handled everything-all low-key, not really saying anything to anybody. He wanted the local cops to buy in to everything he'd done, then give them the credit. He says it's the best P.R. for the unit. Actually, I'm surprised my name was even mentioned."
She smiled, remembering that the very next day Assistant Director Jimmy Maitland came around to congratulate everyone. It had been quite a party. "Savich told me that I had arrived just in time for the victory dance. Everyone else had done all the hard work. His main person on the case was with his wife in the hospital, having a baby, the wife, that is. And so I went in his place. Savich was right. I didn't do a thing, just watched, listened. I've never seen so many happy people."
"It was a Captain Brady of the Chicago police who thanked the FBI on TV, for all their valuable assistance. He mentioned both your names."
"Oh dear, I bet Savich wasn't very happy about that. I had the impression that he'd asked Captain Brady not to say anything. Oh well, it's still very good press for the FBI. Now everyone knows about his unit."
"Why the hell shouldn't the two of you get the credit? He caught a serial killer, for God's sake."
"You don't understand. The FBI is a group, not an individual. Loyalty is to the Bureau, not any single person."
"You're already brainwashed. Well, here's to you, Lacey. I hope this works out the way you want it to."
Douglas raised his glass and lightly clicked it against hers. She merely nodded, then took a sip. It was delicious. "Thank you for bringing the champagne."
"You're welcome."
"His wife had the baby at about midnight."
"Whose wife? Oh, the agent who'd done all the work."
"Yeah, I thought he'd cry that he'd missed it, but he was a good sport about it. Why are you here, Douglas? I only called my father yesterday with my new address."
He poured himself some more champagne, sipped it, then said with a shrug and a smile, "It was good timing. I had to come to Washington to see a client and decided to put you up front on my itinerary." He moved into the living room. "I like your living room. It'll have lots of afternoon sunlight. It's good sized. Why don't you have any furniture?"
"It wasn't worth it to have all my old stuff trucked across the country. I'll get some new stuff."
They were standing facing each other in the empty living room. Douglas Madigan downed the rest of his champagne and set his empty glass on the oak floor. He straightened, took her glass, and set it next to his. "Lacey," he said, taking her upper arms in his hands, "I've missed you. I wish you had come home for a visit, but you didn't. You didn't write me or call. You left a hole in my life. You're beautiful, you know that? I'll bet all the guys are always telling you that, or just staring at you, even with your hair all frizzy around your face, even with those baggy jeans you're wearing and that ridiculous sweatshirt. What does it say across the back? Dizzy Dan's Pizza? What the hell is that all about?"
"Nothing, Douglas, just a local place. And no one seems to have noticed my soul-crushing beauty at all. But you're kind to say so." Actually, she'd gone out of her way at the Academy and now at Headquarters to dress very conservatively, even severely. As for her hair, she'd always worn it pulled back and clipped at the base of her neck. But this was Saturday. She was in jeans and a sweatshirt, her hair loose around her face. Since it wasn't raining and there was next to no humidity, Douglas obviously didn't know what frizzy was.
"You're looking good, Douglas. But you never change. Maybe you just get better." It was true. He was six feet tall, had a lean runner's body and a thin face with soulful brown eyes. Women loved him, always had. Even her mother had never said a word against Douglas. He charmed easily. He dominated just as easily.
"Thank you." He touched her hair, then sifted it through his fingers. "Beautiful. It's auburn, but not really. Perhaps more Titian, but there's some blond in there too and
some brown. Ah, you know I didn't want you doing this silly FBI thing. Why? Why did you leave me and do this?"
Leave him? She said in her low, calm voice, the one she'd practiced and practiced at the Academy when she took courses in interviewing, "I always wanted to be in law enforcement, you know that. The FBI is the best, the very best. It's the heart of the whole system."
"The heart? I doubt it. As to your always wanting to be in law enforcement, I don't remember that. You started out as a music major. You play the piano beautifully. You were playing Beethoven sonatas since you were eleven years old. You wanted to go to Julliard. I remember you dropped out of the Fletcher competition. I always believed you weren't quite of this world. You seemed to live for your music. Of course we all changed after Belinda. It's been a very long time now. Seven long years. Your father didn't appreciate your talent, didn't understand it since he didn't have any at all, but everyone else did. Everyone was worried about you when you sold your Steinway years ago, when you stopped even playing at parties. Hell, you even stopped going to parties."
"That was a long time ago, Douglas. Dad isn't particularly disappointed in me now. He hoped I'd finally do something worthwhile. He hoped this was my first step to growing up. He only acted cold to me because I hadn't asked him to help me get in. He was dying to use his pull, and I didn't let him." Actually, she had blackmailed him. When the FBI agents interviewed him after she'd applied, he'd not said much of anything about Belinda or how Lacey had changed. She'd told him straight out that she'd never speak to him again if he did. He'd evidently glossed over everything, and very smoothly. She'd gotten into the FBI, after all.
She still missed her piano, but that missing was buried deep down, so deep she scarcely ever thought of it now. "Yes, I did sell it. It just didn't seem important anymore." A piano was nothing compared to what Belinda had lost. Still, though, she would still find herself playing a song on the arm of a chair, playing along with the music in a movie or on the car radio. She could remember when she was nineteen playing on the arm of a young man she was dating.
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