by Lisa Gardner
“We read this study last year,” Kimberly said, “about how children go through phases when they will want to hear the same story over and over again. According to the scientists, there is an issue or theme in the story that the children identify with. When they have resolved the issue, they don’t need to hear the story anymore. But until then, night after night, they’ll request the same tale.”
“I’m a four-year-old?”
“You identify with something in your dream. Probably the baby elephant.”
“The baby elephant dies.”
“But he fights to live.”
“Nobody helps him. He’s desperate to join the herd. He would’ve been better off alone.”
“He’s following instinct. It’s everyone’s instinct to be part of something. In evolutionary terms, we are stronger together than alone.”
“But not in my story. In my story, the baby elephant’s desire to be with other elephants kills him.”
“No, Rainie. In your story, the baby elephant’s desire for companionship keeps him alive. What’s he running across the desert for? Why does he get up each and every time? He’s not fighting to live simply to live. He’s a herd animal. He’s fighting to join the other elephants, he’s living off the hope that if he keeps on fighting, he will get to belong. The drought will end and they will accept him. Or he’ll prove his mettle and they will accept him. Either way, he’ll end up with his herd. You did the same, Rainie. Your mother hit you, but you still kept believing it would get better. Otherwise you would’ve succumbed to alcoholism by now, or even committed suicide. You didn’t. Why didn’t you?”
“I’m stubborn,” Rainie muttered. “And stupid.”
Kimberly smiled. “But in your own way, you’re also hopeful. You’re just not comfortable with that part of yourself. I understand. I’m hopeful I will kill Tristan Shandling. I’m not comfortable with that yet either, but I figure I have a few days.”
“Kimberly,” Rainie said gently. “Word of advice—don’t go there. Tristan Shandling is a piece of shit. You play by his rules, and you won’t ever get yourself back. He will have molded the start of your career, and you’ll never get to know the kind of officer or agent you would have become. You’ll simply be what he made you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes I do. I’m a murderer, Kimberly. Thanks to Ronnie Dawson, I’m free and clear in the eyes of the law, but years ago I killed someone. I’m a murderer. And I’ll never know what else I could’ve been. Yeah, I pretty much hate that. Then again, the other person’s dead. That’s gotta suck, too.”
“I didn’t … I didn’t know.”
Rainie shrugged. “Life’s about baggage. Think twice before you hang a boulder around your neck.”
“But he’s going to keep coming,” Kimberly insisted. “You know Shandling is going to keep coming and coming until either he, or us, winds up dead. The shark is in the water, Rainie. Now, we need a bigger boat.”
Thirty minutes later, Kimberly was asleep on the sofa, her long blond hair pooled around her. The sun was beginning to wane, the white walls of the hotel room becoming washed in shades of gray. Outside the air was probably stifling. Inside it was cool and for a while Rainie simply leaned against the windowsill, six stories above, looking out at nothing in particular. Jet lag was catching up with them. Kimberly was probably down for the night. No sound came from Quincy in the bedroom.
The room was quiet. It hadn’t occurred to Rainie until now how much she both craved and abhorred silence.
Maybe she had a father. It was hard to imagine. Her mother had told her once, with Molly’s stunning indifference, that her dad could be any one of over a dozen men, and that she’d already forgotten all of their names. Men came, men went, Molly said. Don’t be a fool and expect something more.
Thirty-two years later, Rainie’s father remained a perfect blank in her mind. He had no eye color, no hairstyle, no distinguishing features. He was a black silhouette, like the mystery person with a white question mark in the middle they showed in magazines. I gave you life. Do you know who I am?
No, she didn’t.
Maybe she had a father. Or maybe it was a lie and this was all Tristan Shandling. She had to have faith. Cynicism was more likely to keep her alive.
Rainie pushed away from the windowsill. She crossed the room and opened the door to the bedroom. The blinds were drawn. The room was swathed in black intersected by faint beams of fading light. Quincy sprawled in the middle of the bed, his left arm flung across the dark floral bedspread, his right arm crooked over his head. He’d taken off his shoes and tie. His firearm and shoulder holster were positioned within easy reach on the nightstand. Otherwise he’d fallen asleep fully dressed.
Rainie entered the room. She closed the door behind her. Then finally, fully clothed herself, she crawled onto the bed. Quincy didn’t stir.
The collar of his white dress shirt was unbuttoned. She could just make out the first whorls of dark, springy chest hair. She had once run her fingers through that light matting of hair. She had pressed her palm over his breast and felt the strong rhythm of his heart.
“Quincy,” she murmured, so he wouldn’t startle awake and try to shoot her, “it’s me.”
He sighed heavily in his sleep. Then he rolled over on his right side, away from her.
She sat beside him. She inhaled the faint, soapy scent of his cologne. A year later she still didn’t know its name and she wondered why she’d never asked him. Back when they’d tried dating, she would return home with that scent still lingering in her nostrils. She’d fall asleep smelling Quincy, and burrow deeper into the covers like a contented cat. When she woke up the next morning, alone, fragrance gone, she’d always felt a stab of disappointment.
She reached out now and lightly touched his shoulder. His cotton shirt was soft beneath her fingers, his arm warm. He didn’t jerk away.
Rainie lay down at his side. She kept waiting for something. Fear. Discomfort. Yellow-flowered fields. Smooth-flowing streams. The places she’d learned to escape to in her mind. Mostly she was aware of the heat of Quincy’s body, pressed against her side. And she remembered now what she’d felt that final evening with him. Desire. Real, honest to goodness desire. She hadn’t known she was capable of such a thing.
Quincy would never hurt you, Kimberly had said. Rainie knew that. She probably even truly knew that. Maybe it was herself she still didn’t understand.
People could hurt you. They could beat you with their fists and they could do worse; they could die and leave you all alone with no hope of ever making things right. And people could attack you. They could inflict great physical and emotional harm. And you could attack back. You could even kill them, inflicting its own kind of great physical and emotional harm.
And you could punish yourself then, because your mother was dead and someone had to play the role of the abuser. So you could punish yourself day after day, creating the very lifestyle that got you into this mess because you didn’t know any other way to live.
You could do all that, or maybe you could try to change. You could give up drinking. You could stop sleeping around. You could try treating yourself better, even respecting yourself. Except sooner or later, you also had to try believing in yourself, and maybe she still wasn’t so good at that. She’d always figured it was better to be hostile and belligerent first, then no one could ever accuse her of hiding her true colors. Truth in advertising, that was her policy.
Dying in the desert. Struggling to survive, desperate to belong, but still not figuring out how to live.
She rolled over on the bed. She pressed her cheek against the curve of Quincy’s back. She could hear his heartbeat here, too. It sounded slow, and steady, and strong. She wrapped her arm around his lean waist. He murmured in his sleep. And then his hand came up and clasped hers.
She waited for the fear to strike. Images of yellow-flowered fields and smooth-running streams. Nothing.
She inhaled his cologne.
She felt the warmth of his hand. And she thought.… She thought this spooning business felt very nice.
Rainie closed her eyes. She held Quincy and finally fell asleep.
27
Quincy’s House, Virginia
“Where have you been?”
A little after six-thirty Saturday morning, Glenda Rodman stood blurry-eyed in Quincy’s foyer, watching Special Agent Albert Montgomery finally walk through the front door. It had been forty-eight hours since she’d last seen her fellow agent. Her gray suit was hopelessly rumpled from sleeping fitfully in Quincy’s desk chair. Her face looked like death warmed over. Multiple days of listening to threatening phone call after threatening phone call did take its toll on a person.
Now, the gifts had started. Yesterday morning, a disemboweled puppy in Quincy’s mailbox. Yesterday afternoon, four rattlesnakes released outside the gate. Two had made it onto Quincy’s property. Two had gone to the neighbors, where they had garnered the attention of a pet cat and two-year-old boy. Fortunately, the child’s mother had snatched him away and called animal control before anyone got hurt. Last night, Glenda had gotten to listen to a voice cackle with glee on the answering machine, telling Quincy that when the rattlesnakes were done with him, he’d personally come skin the agent and make him into a belt.
When Glenda slept, she did not have pleasant dreams.
Now, she glared at Montgomery, who had managed to shower and change since she’d last seen him. Her resentment felt an awful lot like a wronged wife’s.
“I’ve been in Philly, of course.” Montgomery scowled at her, coming through the door and kicking it shut behind him. He shrugged off his stained overcoat.
“Your assignment was to help me stake out Quincy’s house.”
“Yeah, but that was before he turned his ex-wife into a shish kabob. You think the local yokels know how to handle a scene like that? Christ, I had to teach ‘em how to analyze the glass shards myself. They really thought the window was broken from the outside. Dipshits.”
“Agent, your assignment—”
“Hey, fuck assignment. The action isn’t here anymore, Rodman. It’s in Philadelphia. If we want to know what’s going on, we gotta focus our attention there.”
“There are still things happening here!”
“What, a bunch of harassing phone calls? Dead pets? Oh you’re right, we’ve learned so much by being here the last three days.” Montgomery gave her a dubious look. Glenda shifted uncomfortably.
Nothing much had happened here. Poor Bethie had been attacked and brutalized in Philadelphia. Yesterday, Glenda had received word from Everett that Quincy’s ailing father had been kidnapped from a Rhode Island nursing home. Three agents had immediately been assigned to look for Abraham Quincy; after seeing what had happened to Pierce’s ex-wife, however, no one was hopeful.
So yes, there was action. But none of it was here. Glenda simply sat. She listened to horrible, horrible phone threats. And she felt her nerves fray inch-by-inch, hour-by-hour. Still, this was her task. She believed in her assignment. And it bothered her that Montgomery hadn’t had the decency to even consult with her, though he apparently knew as much about what was going on in Quincy’s house as she did.
“It’s important to learn the source of the information leak,” she told Montgomery. “And the person might still show up. We can’t rule that out.”
“What person? Quincy’s phantom stalker? Come on, don’t tell me you’re still buying his little fairy tale.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, I’ll do you a favor. As the agent who’s spent the last forty-eight hours in Philadelphia, I’ll give it to you straight. That was no break-in. That was no stranger-to-stranger crime. The whole fucking thing is so staged it could open as a Broadway show. Take the bathroom window, the supposed mode of entry. It was broken from the inside out and the glass shards moved to disguise the fact. Then we have the state-of-the-art home security system—deactivated with proper code a little after ten P.M., same time the neighbor swears she saw Elizabeth Quincy enter the home with a man matching Quincy’s description. Even the crime scene—it was a fast, brutal attack, no rape, no torture. Posing of the body, postmortem mutilation, all done for show. All done to make it look like a sexual sadist predator.”
“You think Quincy did it.”
“I know Quincy did it. But hey, I have no career track left in the Bureau, so I can afford to look honestly at the reigning golden boy. On the other hand, I’m sure the very notion makes you real uncomfortable. I mean, taking on the best-of-the-best and all—”
“Shut up.” Glenda stalked away from him into the kitchen. Montgomery, however, followed.
“I know you don’t like me,” he persisted. “I know I dress wrong. I know I don’t do politics well or play all the little reindeer games. I’m a fat, wrinkled slob. That doesn’t mean I’m an idiot.”
“True, your state of dress does not mean you’re incompetent—your conduct on the Sanchez case does.”
“Oh.” He drew up short, his hands clasping self-consciously in front of him. “Figured it was only a matter of time before you heard about that.”
Glenda felt better now, as if she were gaining the upper hand. She had known there were problems with the Society Hill crime scene. Quincy had all but told her that he would end up as the prime suspect. It was still difficult to hear her own doubts pouring from Montgomery’s lips. She went on the offensive instead.
“You screwed up the Sanchez case—”
“I made a mistake.”
“Quincy saved the day.”
“I never said he was a bad profiler.”
“Oh come on, everyone knows you blame him. It’s bad enough to choke, let alone have another agent come along, get it right, and grab all the credit. How many times do you replay that in your head at night, Albert? How many times do you revisit every little nuance of that case, and feel your hatred for Quincy grow a little bit more?” She stared hard at Montgomery. The agent bowed his head.
“You wanted this, didn’t you?” she challenged. “The perfect opportunity to come in and torpedo Quincy’s career.”
“No.”
“Yes!”
“No! Dammit!” Montgomery glowered. He looked trapped and cornered, shifting around his heavy bulk until he finally seemed to realize there was no place left to run. Then he planted his feet. “You want to know the truth?” he spat back. “Fine, I’ll tell you the truth. Not that you’ll believe me, not that anyone will believe me, but I took this goddamn case to save Quincy’s butt. I took it ’cause I thought, hey, if you can’t be the hero, you might as well save the hero. That’s gotta count for something.”
“What?”
“Do I have to put this on a Hallmark card? I figured I could help Quincy. And yeah, I kind of thought that might jumpstart my career. Altruistic, I ain’t. But I’m not a total jackass either. My career is in the toilet. Do a good deed, however, and I might escape the eternal flush. I’m fifty-two years old, Glenda. My ex-wife hates me and so do my kids. I got nine hundred dollars in the bank. What the fuck am I going to do if I’m no longer an agent?”
Glenda frowned, wanting to refute Montgomery’s argument, but coming up empty. She didn’t know what to think anymore. She didn’t like Montgomery. His ill-kept appearance did bother her. So did his disappearing act. But he had a point. In the patriotic world of the Bureau, there was no greater currency than saving a fellow agent’s hide. If he did find Quincy’s stalker, Montgomery’s career would get a second chance. Probably, its only chance.
“But now you think Quincy murdered his ex-wife,” she said.
“You bet I do.”
“Because the scene is staged?”
Montgomery shrugged. “Because of a lot of things. Frankly, the phone calls bother me. If you were out to get someone and you had his private telephone number, would you fool around with prank calls, or would you just go out and kill the man? I mean, we’re saying this guy has some connection with Quincy
’s career. So we’re talking about a psychopath. Now, what kind of psychopath wants to talk about killing an agent, when he can attack the agent?”
“We discussed this. It’s a ruse, a way of disguising the UNSUB’s true identity by creating hundreds of other suspects with opportunity and motive.”
“But it also alerts the victim,” Montgomery countered. “Seems like a massive downside to me. Especially when you consider that in this day and age, the UNSUB can simply read articles on-line about how to conceal evidence. He has the element of surprise, then has all night to cover his tracks.”
“Maybe the UNSUB didn’t want an easy murder. Assuming vengeance is the motive, maybe he wanted to make sure Quincy suffered first.”
“Maybe. Or maybe we’re making this all too complicated. Look, from where I sit, there is another plausible theory to everything that’s happened: Quincy made this whole thing up. Ran the ad in the prison newsletters himself. Then showed up in Everett’s office with his, ‘The sky is falling, the sky is falling!’ routine, knowing that Everett will follow protocol and assemble a case team. Now Quincy has four federal agents swearing to the Philadelphia police that someone is stalking him, and that mysterious person probably murdered his ex-wife and kidnapped his old man. But is someone stalking him? Or was this all a cover-up, so that he could kill his ex?”
“Listen to yourself, Albert. You’re saying Pierce was willing to dupe the Bureau and harm his own father, simply to cover up an attack on his wife.”
“We don’t know that Quincy harmed his father.”
“Abraham Quincy is a bedridden Alzheimer’s patient. He’s now been missing from the nursing home for over twenty-four hours. That’s not good.”
“Papa Quincy was checked out by Pierce Quincy, bearing proper ID.”
“Anyone can get a fake driver’s license.”
“Yeah, and anyone can use a real one. Glenda, we got no body. For all we know, Abraham is tucked away at some nice posh resort, courtesy of his son. When the police buy Quincy’s story of the phantom stalker, Abraham will promptly reappear, having magically escaped his evil captor. Or maybe Quincy will phone in an anonymous tip and the searching agents can rescue his dad. Either way, no harm, no foul, and Quincy’s story is better all the time.”