The FBI Profiler Series 6-Book Bundle

by Lisa Gardner

  One night in a fit of jealous rage, she’d hightailed it over to Rainie’s tiny home in the middle of the soaring woods. She’d driven up the dirt driveway at full steam, already formulating a bold confrontation in her head.

  She’d discovered her husband and Rainie sitting on the huge back deck in complete silence, each just staring out into the woods and holding a beer.

  Sandy had gone back home without ever saying a word.

  Over the years she’d come to realize that she simply couldn’t fathom her husband and Rainie’s relationship. She didn’t know what caused the long silences between them or the unspoken exchanges. She didn’t understand how Shep could sometimes seem to belong more to Rainie than to her, when Sandy had borne him two children and, as best as she could tell, Rainie only handed him bottles of Bud Light.

  Whatever bonded them was deep, but at least it wasn’t sexual. So Sandy did her best to fight her nagging, painful wish that Shep would come to her when he was troubled, instead of heading to another woman’s house for hours of companionable silence.

  “Mommy, what happened to school?”

  Sandy looked at her daughter, genuinely startled by the question and the sound of her daughter’s voice. Becky had barely spoken since the shooting, and when she did, it was generally a one-word statement. “What do you mean, honey?”

  “There’s no school today.”

  “No, Becky, there’s no school today.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “You don’t have to go to school tomorrow either, sweetheart. I don’t want you to worry about school. It’s all done for a bit.”

  Her daughter continued to eye her intently. “Are the other kids going to school?”

  “You mean your classmates? No.” Sandy was trying to pick her words carefully. “They’re all done with school for a bit as well.”

  “It’s not summer.”

  “It’s almost summer.”

  “Mommy, it’s not summer.”

  “Becky … You know something bad happened at school, right? You understand that?”

  Becky nodded.

  “Well, that bad thing has made everyone sad. You’re sad, aren’t you?”

  Becky nodded again.

  “I’m sad,” Sandy said softly. “Daddy’s sad. And the other kids, they’re sad too. So for a little bit, because everyone is so sad, there’s no school.”

  “But someday?”

  “Someday, Becky, yes, there will be school. But it’s okay, honey! It won’t be until you’re ready, and we’ll make sure the school is very safe. So the bad thing—”

  “The monster.”

  Sandy hesitated. “Yes, so the monster can’t happen anymore.”

  Becky stared at her. Her eyes were big and serious. Sandy hadn’t realized until now just how old her little girl had become. Then Becky returned her attention to her bowl of whipped cream and Jell-O. Sandy understood. Becky didn’t believe her. She already assumed her world wouldn’t be safe again. Not in a time when monsters could go to school.

  Sandy returned to the kitchen sink, downing the last of her orange juice and then carefully, methodically washing the glass. The light on the answering machine blinked madly at her, but she’d already heard the message yesterday. Mitchell trying to find her, before Shep had changed their phone number to end the relentless calls. Mitchell, so sorry to disturb her at a time like this, but he was desperately trying to get his hands on the Wal-Mart reports. Could she please give him a quick buzz and tell him where he might find the files?

  Sandy knew what he was looking for. She could picture the files perfectly in her mind. But she hadn’t picked up the phone and called him back.

  Maybe Shep was right. Maybe she’d been working too much, putting her own needs in front of the children’s. If she’d been home more, paying more attention … If Danny had felt safer, more important, more loved …

  If … if … if …

  Sandy shut off the water. Her hands were shaking on the faucet; she had tears in her eyes.

  Mommy, what happened to school?

  I want to make the world safe. Oh God, honey. I wish I could make the world safe for you.

  “Mommy.”

  Sandy turned back to Becky. For a moment, she thought she saw blood on her daughter’s face and she nearly screamed. Strawberry Jell-O, her mind filled in belatedly. Strawberry Jell-O.

  But then she saw the tears in her daughter’s eyes.

  “My tongue hurts.”

  Sandy rushed across the kitchen. She looked at her daughter’s mouth, and to her dismay, she realized it was bleeding. Poor Becky’s tongue was bleeding.

  “What happened? Did you bite your tongue? Ah, honey, let me get you a washcloth and an ice cube. Hang on a second.”

  She picked up the salad, carrying it over to the sink. It wasn’t until she was running a fresh washcloth under the tap that she looked in the bowl and noticed the way light glinted off fragments of Jell-O.

  Very slowly, Sandy got out a spoon. She dug through the salad. She pulled out five shards of glass.

  Baby killer. Baby killer. Baby killer.

  It’s a children’s salad! Even if you hate us, what kind of animals put shattered glass in a fucking children’s salad!

  She returned to Becky with surprising calmness. She wiped off her little girl’s face; she gave her an ice cube to suck on. Already the bleeding appeared to have stopped. The glass shards were small. Maybe they hadn’t done much damage.

  Tenderly Sandy feathered back Becky’s fine blond hair. “How are you feeling, honey?”

  “Okay.”

  “Did you eat much?” she asked lightly.

  Becky shook her head. “Not hungry.”

  “If your tummy hurts, you’ll tell me, won’t you?”

  Becky nodded. Sandy decided to let it go. Becky seemed fine and Sandy didn’t want to frighten her with another trip to the emergency room.

  “I know,” Sandy said briskly, “let’s make some snickerdoodle cookies! I’ll bring out all the ingredients and you can help me measure everything. How does that sound?”

  Becky shrugged.

  “Wonderful. Let me just clean this stuff up and we’ll be on our way.”

  Sandy gave her daughter a bright, reassuring smile. She kept her chin high and her features composed. Then she returned to the kitchen sink, where she spooned all the Jell-O salad and the three other casseroles into the garbage disposal while she swore to herself that she would not, would not, would not cry.

  “Don’t let the monster get you, Mommy.”

  “Becky, I would never dream of doing any such thing.”

  SIXTEEN

  Thursday, May 17, 6:33 A.M.

  Quincy did not dream of his daughter. In the gray hours of the morning, he tossed and turned in the pink Motel Hotel, caught in a case that had happened nearly a decade ago. Thirteen-year-old Candy Wallace, with the pretty blond hair and hundred-watt smile. Beautiful, sunny Candy Wallace, who was raised a devout Baptist and had no idea of the true evil that lurked in men’s hearts.

  She was snatched on her way home from school on a normal Wednesday afternoon. One minute she was walking down the street. The next, a pile of books was all that remained.

  But Candy’s captor hadn’t really wanted Candy. He wanted Polly, her sixteen-year-old sister, and getting the wrong sibling angered him. So he took to calling the Wallaces’ home. He would put Candy on the phone. And then he would do things to her while her sister and parents listened.

  After the first phone call, Quincy was brought in to listen as well. They considered him to have expert ears.

  Now, in the throes of his dream, he did not remember Candy Wallace’s screams or the agonized face of her mother. He did not recall her sister Polly begging for the man to stop, to please come take her instead. She would willingly go with him if he would just let her little sister go. Please, please, please.…

  Mostly, Quincy remembered Candy’s last words, after five days of endless agony.

&nb
sp; “Please don’t be sad, Mom and Dad. It’ll all be over soon and I know I’m going to a better place. God loves me and will take care of me. I’m going to be fine. I love you. I love even this bad, bad man. My heart is true.”

  Quincy woke up with tears on his cheeks.

  He lay in his bed for a long time, thinking of the strength of a thirteen-year-old girl, thinking of God and faith and the things he’d left behind after too many years on the job.

  A day after the last phone call they found Candy Wallace’s body, naked, bruised, and mutilated. Three weeks after that they arrested the man who did it, an unemployed handyman who had once worked on the air-conditioning unit at the Wallaces’ home. He said Candy had insisted on telling him that God loved him, so he’d cut out her tongue. Quincy had thought that there was nothing they could do to this man that would ever be enough.

  He’d flown back to Virginia feeling isolated and worn to the bone.

  He’d entered his home but walked away from his family, because he’d never learned to go from a crime scene to the people he loved. At times like this, he couldn’t look at his daughters without seeing all the horrors that could befall them. The handymen, the drifters, the charming law students. He couldn’t look at his family without seeing pain and suffering and death.

  Now Quincy got out of bed. He called the hospital to learn that Amanda’s condition hadn’t changed. His ex-wife was asleep in the room if he wanted to speak with her. Quincy told the nurse not to wake her. His other daughter, Kimberly, was not at the hospital. She had probably returned to school. Like him, she seemed to have accepted that her sister was gone, a defection to Quincy’s camp that Bethie couldn’t bear.

  Of course, things between his ex-wife and their younger daughter had been tense ever since last year, when Kimberly had announced she was studying sociology at New York University. Someday she wanted to be a profiler with the FBI. Just like her dad.

  Quincy pulled on an old pair of running shorts and a gray FBI T-shirt. He hit the street, inhaling sharply at the cold sting of morning. Then he was off and running, still thinking of a young girl’s dying screams and unfailing love. Still thinking of his own daughter, and the tragedy he hadn’t protected her from after all those years of trying to make the world a safe place.

  And then he was thinking of Rainie and her shadowed gray eyes and strong, stubborn chin. The way she took her punches. The way she still got up for the fight.

  Once he’d made the mistake of thinking that isolation was protection, that focusing solely on his work would make a difference for people, for his family. He had listened to a young girl die, but he had not heard what she was saying.

  Quincy was old, but he was learning.

  He ran for a long time, with the mountain air cool and clean against his cheeks. He greeted a beautiful morning in a lush, coastal valley and he understood why Rainie Conner still lived here, perfectly.

  Shortly before one, Quincy showed up in the tiny task-force center in the attic of city hall. He hadn’t expected Rainie to be back yet from the autopsies scheduled in Portland, but she was already sitting at her sawhorse desk when he arrived. She didn’t look up right away, scribbling intently on some piece of paper.

  He took a moment to study her. Her face was paler than yesterday, the shadows deeper under her eyes. Another sleepless night, he presumed, coupled with a brutal morning. Autopsies were never easy, particularly when they were of children.

  Judging from her focused movements, however, Rainie still had no intention of slowing down.

  She reminded him of someone else. It took him a moment to place the name. Tess. Tess Williams. Another case, years ago, but with a better ending. Tess had made the mistake of marrying the perfect man, the kind other women always said was too good to be true. In Jim Beckett’s case, they were right. The handsome, dedicated police officer had had a small sideline activity. He pulled over beautiful blondes for speeding, and then he murdered them. Tess had been the first person to figure out her husband’s evil doings, and she’d slowly gathered the evidence against him while still sharing his bed.

  Jim Beckett did not go down without a fight. He cut a long, bloody swath through the task-force team, including putting some fresh scars on Quincy’s own chest. But Tess proved to be tougher than anyone had suspected. When Beckett hunted her down after he escaped from prison, Tess made sure the Massachusetts taxpayers never had to pay for his room and board again.

  Quincy hadn’t thought of her in years. He tried to do the math on how old her daughter Samantha would be now. Ten years old? It had been a bit. He wondered how she and Tess were doing.

  He never followed up on the people in his cases. Even in the ones that went well, he was still a reminder of a dark time. Somehow, it didn’t seem appropriate to be sending out Christmas cards.

  “Are you going to stand there mooning all afternoon?” Rainie asked from her desk, still staring down at her paper.

  “Just admiring the view.”

  She looked up long enough to shoot him a hard glance. “Oh, please.”

  “The autopsies went that well, I see.”

  “Everything I ever feared, plus ten. For heaven’s sake, either get in the room or shut the door. I can’t stand people loitering in the doorway.”

  Quincy took his time entering, eyeing her more cautiously. She was more ragged than he’d expected. When she spoke, her voice carried the edge of someone teetering on the brink of a dark place. He would bet she hadn’t let herself cry. That was a bad sign. Sometimes you had to cry after autopsies. It was the only way to release the pain.

  “Writing up the report?” he asked neutrally.

  “Nope. Writing up a list. What do you think of the mysterious man in black?”

  “Pardon?”

  “The man in black, the figure various kids reported seeing at the school. Fact or fiction?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What if he exists? Could a stranger be involved in shooting up a school?”

  “You would be amazed at the things a stranger can do,” Quincy said slowly, “even one met over the Internet. Witness all the young kids currently being lured from chat rooms into real-life meetings with pedophiles.”

  “Fine.” She scribbled furiously. “Man in black. Connection to Danny through the Internet, then tries to cover tracks by erasing the hard drives of the machines. Except then we’re back to Melissa Avalon. Why one precise gunshot to her head? I hate that fucking wound.” Rainie caught herself, blew out a breath of air, and briskly started writing again. “We can work on that angle later. Next up, school counselor Richard Mann.”

  “What about Richard Mann?”

  “He’s young, thirty-three according to his file, though he doesn’t look a day older than fifteen if you ask me. If we go back to assuming that Melissa Avalon was the intended target, he could have motive. Maybe he had a thing for Melissa Avalon and didn’t like learning about her private staff meetings with VanderZanden. Plus, as a counselor, he’d know what buttons to push to drive Danny over the edge. That takes care of means.”

  Quincy finally got it. “You’re working on a list of other possible suspects.”

  “Yes, the fed can be taught.”

  Quincy arched a brow. She wasn’t just edgy this afternoon, she was brutally cutting.

  “May I ask who you have listed?”

  “Charlie Kenyon, Principal VanderZanden, the mysterious man in black, and now Richard Mann.”

  “I thought the principal had an alibi.”

  “At first glance, but you never really know until you start applying pressure.”

  “Charlie Kenyon makes sense,” Quincy mused after a moment, deciding it would be most productive to play along. “An older, influential kid. We already know he has trouble with authority and likes to hang around the school. I’m less convinced about the principal. Even if it was a love affair gone awry, I have a hard time seeing him shooting two students and an even more difficult time seeing him coerce Danny into taking t
he blame.”

  “Strong authority figure. Danny can’t stand up to his own father, so why should he be able to stand up to the school principal? Plus, you heard his last words in the interview. The kid’s scared. When you’re in elementary school, who seems more all-powerful and all-knowing than your principal?”

  Her logic wasn’t bad. “But then there is VanderZanden’s reaction to consider. He appears genuinely grief-stricken.”

  Rainie granted that. Then her eyes lit up. “What about his wife?”

  Quincy exhaled slowly and watched her scribble it down. Her movements were feverish. She was trying too hard.

  “Rainie, why are you making this list?”

  “Focus. This investigation lacks focus.”

  “You already have a suspect in custody. That appears very focused to me.”

  “Yes, but we don’t know if he’s the right suspect.”

  “His fingerprints on the casings haven’t convinced you?”

  “They didn’t convince you.”

  “I’m paid more to be skeptical.”

  Rainie set down her pen. She paused long enough to look him in the eye, and Quincy was startled by the sight of her pale skin stretched taut over her gaunt face. Apparently she was forgoing food as well as sleep. It was only a matter of time, then, until she crashed.

  “Shep visited me last night,” she said abruptly.

  “Ah,” Quincy said. Things became much clearer for him. “Laid on the personal guilt.”

  “Of course. What are friends for? Even better, he contacted the crime lab himself through a friend. Turns out Abe Sanders has been holding out on us.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  “There’s a problem with one of the .38 shell casings. Not only does it completely lack prints or smudges—as in it appears to have been wiped clean—but ballistics found something strange about it. When I followed up this morning, I learned that it had some kind of residue inside, probably a polymer.”