by Ben Miller
“Oh my God,” Vicki said as she turned to face Jack. Dazed, he slowly met her eyes. “That poor woman,” Vicki lamented.
Jack blinked, but didn’t say anything initially. He didn’t know what to say. After several seconds he broke his silence, speaking deliberately. “She called me.”
“What?” Vicki asked. “When?”
“Yesterday,” Jack answered. “She left me a very odd message. I was cleaning my stuff out at the office, so I didn’t take the call.” Jack knew that, if authorities truly planned on a full investigation, her phone records would be checked, and her phone call to an FBI agent on the day she died surely would get noticed. He found no sense in hiding it from Vicki now.
“What did she say? Did you save the message?”
He looked down at his phone, trying to decide if he would play the message for Vicki. Before he settled on a response, his phone began to ring. He looked at the display: Philip Prince. Jack looked perplexed yet again.
“Who is it?” Vicki asked.
“Philip Prince,” Jack replied as he answered the call.
He put the phone to his ear. “Hello, Philip,” he said as he walked back onto the back deck.
“Hello, Jack. Have you seen the news about Melissa Hollows?” Prince spoke briskly, pressured, almost irritated.
“Yes, I just saw it on the news.”
“Did you have sex with that woman, Jack?”
“What?” Jack responded, truly offended. Though Prince’s accusation hit the mark precisely, Jack felt insulted that Prince would even ask.
“Did you fuck Melissa Hollows? I saw the tabloids last year, and I ignored them at the time because it was none of my business. But that has now changed. Now it is my business. No judgment here, Jack. I love Vicki and I know that you love Vicki. That has nothing to do with this. I just need to hear the truth. From you.”
“No,” Jack lied. “No I did not.”
Prince paused, and Jack offered nothing more. He sensed Prince trying to evaluate the truthfulness of his statement over the phone line. Finally, apparently satisfied, Prince said, “OK. I’m sorry to be blunt, but I’m sure you understand why I ask.”
Given the Rupert Schultz debacle which opened the political door for him, Jack understood exactly why Prince felt the need to know this information. Jack knew he might face an uphill battle to keep his brief but secretive affair with Melissa under wraps, but he also felt compelled to fight that battle. “I do, I suppose,” Jack admitted. “But it doesn’t mean I’m not offended.”
“Please accept my apologies,” Prince replied. “In this line of work, though, I suggest you get used to people caring a lot more about the details of your personal life than they ever have before.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Jack conceded.
“OK. Sorry to bother you. Back to your weekend, Jack, my boy. I’ll speak with you on Monday,” Prince said, then promptly hung up
“OK,” Jack said into an empty line.
“Daddy,” Jonah said behind him.
Jack took his phone from his ear and looked down at it, still reeling a bit from the events of the last ten minutes.
“Daddy,” Jonah repeated from behind the screen door.
Jack snapped into the present moment and turned around to face his son. “Yeah, buddy?”
Jonah pointed at the grill. Smoke poured from the borders of the closed lid.
“Shit!” Jack exclaimed, then quickly correcting himself with, “Shoot!”—which really did not make much sense, as Jonah clearly had already heard him swear. Jack darted to the grill and pulled back the lid to reveal small black orbs on the surface of the grill, more resembling charcoal than hamburgers at this point.
Jack turned back to the screen door, where now Vicki stood behind Jonah, both of them looking at him. “How does pizza sound?” he asked, deflated.
46
“Thanks for getting dinner.”
Heath Reilly sat in the desk chair of his hotel room, his foot-long turkey sub sitting on its paper wrapper in front of him.
“Sure,” Camilla replied, her voice muffled by the big bite of meatball-with-marinara sub in her mouth. She sat opposite him, on the armchair he had pulled over to the desk. After she swallowed the bolus down with the assistance of a gulp of Diet Coke, she said, “Thanks for getting the rooms.”
Reilly pointed to the end of the long dresser, beside the outdated tube television set. “There are your keys. You’re right next door, in 215.” Her small rolling suitcase sat on the floor just beside the dresser.
“Great, thanks,” she mumbled; she had already taken another bite.
Reilly felt famished earlier, but the sensation had passed, at least for now. “Beyond hungry” his mother used to call it. He grabbed a notebook from the outside pocket of his rolling tote bag and slapped it on the desk. He looked up at Camilla, who had almost finished half of her sub.
She returned his gaze, then let her eyes drop down a bit sheepishly. She grabbed a napkin as she finished chewing her most recent bite. “Sorry,” she said with an empty mouth, as she wiped around her lips. “I was starving.”
“No worries,” Reilly returned.
“Are you going to eat?”
Reilly looked back down at his sandwich, getting colder by the minute. After several more seconds, he answered her. “Yeah,” he said as he picked half of his sub.
“Something wrong?” Camilla asked.
“No,” he replied quickly, but then reconsidered. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m starting to feel the pressure of being lead on this investigation. This could get huge.”
Camilla had just picked up the second half of her sub, but she promptly put it back down. She got a determined look on her face, like a coach building up her trailing team at halftime. “First of all,” she put her elbow up on the table and stuck out her thumb, “you haven’t officially been named Lead on this yet.”
Reilly shot a very hurt look at her.
“But I’m sure that you will soon, especially after today,” she encouraged. “Second of all,” her index finger popped out from her curled fingers, “this is already huge. And if we don’t start getting some answers, it’s just going to get bigger. There are three little kids dead in three states, all during the light of day and all seemingly random. This is going to start terrorizing people through the mid-Atlantic.
“Third,” she extended her middle finger to join her thumb and forefinger, “this is such a huge opportunity for you. Look what happened to Jack with one high-profile case. Not that I’m saying that you’re Jackson Byrne, but you could really make a name for yourself within the Bureau.”
Reilly, responding appropriately to this pep talk, began to look a little more animated.
“What did happen to Jack, by the way?” Camilla asked, breaking character for a minute with an intrigued look on her face. “Do you think he really is going to run for some kind of public office?” She knew that Reilly had read the article from The Post—probably a hundred times, since he had been quoted in several spots.
“Yeah, I don’t know. It doesn’t really seem like him, though, does it?”
“I don’t know. I could see it.”
“All I know for sure is that Harringer just said that Jack wouldn’t be working on this case,” Reilly said.
“Yeah. And he never said why.”
“No,” Reilly reflected. “And I guess I have been so excited to be driving this thing that I never really stopped to ask.”
“Weird,” Camilla said, contemplatively. She put her elbow back in her lap and picked up her sandwich. “Do you want to finish eating before we call Harringer?”
“Sure,” he agreed. They both ate quickly and silently. Camilla drew the last of her Diet Coke through a straw before it started slurping.
“Ready?” Reilly asked as he reached for his phone.
“Yeah,” Camilla answered as she turned to get her notebook out of her shoulder bag.
Reilly placed his phone in the center of the tab
le and called Harringer’s cell phone. Reilly tapped the icon for speaker phone.
After two rings, Harringer picked up on the other end and offered his usual greeting. “Harringer,” he said.
“Hi, Dylan, it’s Heath and Camilla,” Reilly said.
There was a brief pause, as they could hear a door closing in the background. “Ok, get me up to speed,” Harringer ordered.
They offered a brief overview of the events in Front Royal and the direct link to their killer, with Reilly doing most of the talking.
“Witnesses?” Harringer asked.
“No one reliable so far, sir,” Reilly replied. “It was a tough scene to control, but the local PD felt pretty confident that no witnesses got out without being questioned first.”
“We’re working on the surrounding neighborhoods right now, with locals going door-to-door,” Camilla explained further.
“OK. And the shoeprint?”
“I already e-mailed all of the photos back to Erikson in forensics,” Heath said. Glenn Erikson worked in their forensics lab in Quantico and was an up-and-coming expert in the field of shoeprint forensics, among other things. “I spoke to him on the phone, and he said he should have some info for us by tomorrow.”
“And the note?”
“That’s been a little tougher, sir,” Reilly admitted. “We have forensic photos of it, but I can’t get a hold of Friesz. I tried his cell, and Lisa in dispatch even connected me to his home phone—no answer.”
“Hmm,” Harringer uttered, his tone revealing neither disappointment nor confusion.
After a pause, Reilly continued, “My plan is to try him again later. If I haven’t heard from him by tomorrow, I’ll contact the field office in DC about getting another linguistics consultant.”
“Sounds fair,” Harringer commented.
After another brief pause, Camilla chimed in. “Dylan, one conclusion that we speculated today is that our killer had to know this area pretty well. He had to have surveyed these trails before today to know his best area for attack and to have an established escape route.”
“Makes sense,” Harringer conceded.
“And, in retrospect, we got the same feeling from the previous two murders,” Camilla continued. “Our un-sub definitely did re-con in York, knowing exactly how to come and go from that playground without being spotted. The same is probably true of Frederick, though neither of us have seen that crime scene first hand.”
“Right,” Harringer said. “Shaver should be able to give us more on that, hopefully by tomorrow.” Yesterday Harringer had sent Charlie Shaver to Frederick to investigate that crime scene, as well as to interview Stephanie McBurney’s family and any possible witnesses.
“Right,” Reilly and Camilla said in unison, then shared a look of surprise. Camilla went on. “So we think we should entertain the idea that something other than killing has brought our un-sub to these places. I am going to look into conventions, festivals, road shows, and so on that may have passed through these three towns in the last few months.”
“Good idea,” Harringer said.
Reilly drew a deep breath. “And I would like to try to get a subpoena for hotel records from all three towns as well. If we can find one person who booked or paid for a hotel room in each of these three towns in the last few months, that could be a great lead.”
“How many hotels and motels do you think we’re talking about here?”
Reilly paused and looked to Camilla. “There were… about seven hotel choices around Front Royal here. I would expect maybe the same around Frederick, maybe a few more in York?” Reilly guessed.
Harringer paused on the other end, which left Reilly’s heart hanging in his throat. This felt like his first major contribution to the investigation, other than gathering existing data, and he craved acceptance of his idea. Finally, after about fifteen seconds—which felt like fifteen minutes—Harringer responded. “I think that’s a great idea.” Reilly breathed an inaudible sigh of relief while Harringer continued. “But it’s going to be a tough sell. Getting records from two to three dozen places over a—what?—two month span? Four month span? Plus we’re going to need a federal judge— we’re dealing with three states.” He paused again, contemplating the suggestion. “Let me make some phone calls tomorrow and see if I can get anything done. It’ll be Sunday, but I could find someone who will listen.”
Reilly, feeling vindicated, shot a genuinely proud smile at Camilla. He looked like a fifth grader who had just successfully spelled “onomatopoeia” in the spelling bee. Ever the loyal partner, she offered an approving smile back at him. As much as she sometimes disliked working with Reilly, for his often childish, stubborn behavior, his awkward, insecure interactions, and his feigned arrogance, she still felt herself rooting for him to succeed.
“What else?” Harringer queried.
Reilly shrugged and looked at Camilla, as if to say, I’m done.
Camilla, however, was not. “I’m going to attend the autopsy tomorrow morning. Based on what we saw at the scene, though, I’m not expecting anything different from the other two.”
“Yep,” Harringer agreed. “Don’t mention anything about the sternal bruising or the fractured ribs, at least until the end. See if they pick up on that subtlety on their own. Keep in mind that we still haven’t leaked that to anyone, and we don’t plan to.”
“Yes, sir,” Camilla complied.
“While we’re on the subject of leaks…” Harringer paused for effect. Reilly and Camilla could hear him shifting in his seat. When he came back in, his voice was louder; he must have pulled his phone closer to his face. “Tell me how ‘The Playground Predator’ got out.”
Reilly and Camilla exchanged a surprised glance. Reilly broke the silence. “I… we didn’t know that it had.”
“On the news tonight, during your little press conference. A field reporter for a local station used it. Then the networks followed. I’ve seen it in half-a-dozen headlines on the net and heard it on every news network in the last hour.” Harringer sounded annoyed, as expected.
“I don’t know, sir,” Reilly admitted.
“Camilla?” Harringer inquired.
“No, sir. I didn’t mention it to anyone.”
“All right,” Harringer said. “What about your little red-headed reporter friend?”
“I… don’t know,” Reilly responded. “I was very clear on our agreement. I’ll touch base with her to get her story.”
Camilla rolled her eyes, but it went unnoticed by Reilly.
“OK.” The tone in Harringer’s voice had changed, from mildly accusatory back to collegial. It also had the tone of a denouement; Camilla could almost picture him putting his hands on his hips. “I’ll touch base with you two tomorrow. Keep trying to reach Friesz.”
“Will do. Thanks, sir. Have a good night,” Reilly concluded.
“Yep.” Harringer replied. Then he hung up.
47
About an hour later Reilly sat by himself at a table beside the bar in Trendsetters, a local TGI Friday’s knock-off. He mostly kept his eyes on the door, but occasionally he would look down at his quarter-empty bottle of Michelob Ultra and peel back the label a little further. He had spoken to Corinne O’Loughlin about thirty minutes ago and asked her to meet him here. She had just checked into her hotel, so she asked for about a half an hour to get oriented.
Reilly looked down at his watch. The half hour had elapsed four minutes ago.
He knew why he felt nervous, as he was immensely attracted to Corinne, but he genuinely had business to discuss with her. So this really did not constitute a social gathering whatsoever, he convinced himself. Once again he mentally went through his list of topics to discuss with her, chief among which was the moniker of The Playground Predator.
He looked back up at the entrance and caught a glimpse of her curly red locks, most of which she had pulled back in a pony tail, with a few stragglers purposefully left behind to dangled over the right side of her face. He felt his
heartbeat accelerate and quickly looked away, back down at his beer. He suddenly felt embarrassed and a little stupid.
She approached his table, and he looked up surprised, as if he hadn’t seen her come in.
“Hey!” Corinne said.
“Hey,” Reilly said as he stood up impulsively. It felt like the gentlemanly thing to do.
She signaled to the bar on her right. “Are they coming to the table, or should I get a drink at the bar?”
“I’ve seen a waitress or two roaming around, but I think you’re better off going straight up.”
She nodded and turned to go to the bar. She whirled back in his direction and looked down at his beer. “You need another?”
Reilly looked down at the bottle in his hands—still three-quarters full. “No, I’m good.” He sat back down as she walked over to the bar. It took her all of ten seconds to get the young male bartender’s attention. She leaned over to place her order amidst the raucousness of four college-aged men beside her. Reilly’s gaze moved down to examine her ass. Again his pulse quickened slightly. He quickly looked away to avoid getting caught, and then he took a deep breath to try to refocus. Professional, he reminded himself.
Corinne came back over to the table a couple of minutes later, carrying three bottles of Michelob Ultra. She slid one over in front of him and kept the other two for herself. “I thought I’d save us a trip in a few minutes,” she explained.
“Oh, thanks,” Reilly responded sheepishly. He had hoped to buy her a drink.
“I ordered some nachos too—I’m starving.”
“Yeah, fine.”
“Did you eat?” Corinne took a swig of her beer.
Reilly nodded. “Subway.”