by Ben Miller
Given his history of escalating violence and seemingly insatiable hunger for young girls, it is very likely that Melvin Young would eventually have attempted another attack on an innocent child. However, if numerous points within our system of protecting citizens from people like Young were changed—like SORNA’s three-tier stratification, or properly enforcing all police officers to follow protocols when dealing with underage victims of alleged sexual abuse, or insisting that state or clearances involve direct contact and scrutiny by a trained government employee—perhaps Lamaya Hollows would still be alive today.
DAY EIGHT:
MONDAY
58
Heath Reilly had lain awake most of the night, staring at his bedroom ceiling, thinking about the Playground Predator, with several thoughts about Corinne O’Loughlin sprinkled throughout. When he looked at his alarm clock and it read 5:00, he admitted to himself the futility of lying there any longer. He got out of bed, contemplated a jog, declined, got a shower, dressed, and left for the office in Quantico without eating breakfast.
Harringer had called for a task force meeting at 8:00 am on the Playground Predator case. Reilly had come back to Quantico for it, but Camilla remained in Front Royal to continue CASMIRC’s involvement in that investigation. She would join the meeting via video conference as before.
By 6:55 Reilly sat in the conference room looking at the dry-erase board in front. It contained the timeline of events in the case, as well as the text—both original and the English translation—from the notes left on each victim by the Predator. A bulletin board on the front wall had numerous photos tacked to it, each with a typed label pinned beneath it: two photos each—a posed school portrait and a forensic crime scene photo—of Stephanie McBurney, Adrianna Cottrell, and Danielle Coulter; the school playground in York; the bushes behind the playground in Frederick; the woods adjacent to the soccer fields in Front Royal; and the only identifying piece of the killer, the muddy shoeprint.
Reilly tried to clear all conscious thought, tried to open himself up to an epiphany. He thought his subconscious might connect dots that his consciousness could not. He had heard that this worked for some people. So he stared at the photos. He closed his eyes, imagining the scenes live, in three dimensions, during the times of each killing. He tried to focus on the gentle lilting of the leaves in the spring breezes. Tried to feel it, not just think about it. He saw the little girls playing, walking, weaving the fabric of their own young lives, not knowing how abruptly it would end.
But he couldn’t see the main event, the middle steps. His vision skipped to the end photos, of the dead bodies lying in the weeds. He just couldn’t see it, and it pissed him off.
59
The tiny spider stood motionless on the cream-colored ceiling, defying the laws of gravity as spiders are wont to do. It hadn’t moved in nearly an hour. Is it sleeping? Randall wondered. Do spiders even sleep?
Randall lay on the couch in his apartment. He had been here all night. He hadn’t slept, but he had rested. Over the last hour, as he kept watch over the miniscule arachnid, he felt increasingly more energy. This rest would suffice.
Muddy Waters wailed—both vocally and through his guitar—from the turntable through the speakers. Randall had put on At Newport 1960, Waters’ breakthrough live album. He often found that this album helped him to transition from a restful state to a more active, wakeful one.
He hadn’t bothered to tell his wife that he would be staying out here tonight. He had spent so many nights out here the last several months that it had become the norm; he assumed his wife stopped wondering, and likely even stopped caring. Just as she had stopped caring about everything else.
As his vitality continued to surge, his thoughts turned to his Work. The end drew near. He felt that he had sufficiently completed the preliminary tasks that set up the climax, but time would tell. Before venturing off the prescribed path of his Work, he would wait to see how things developed in the next few days. He would have to stay on top of the news, follow every footstep as best he could.
Spiders must sleep, he concluded. All living things need to sleep, at least at some point.
The next step would prove the hardest, of that he felt certain. As much as his life and his passions had changed in the last six months or so, he knew that the penultimate act of his Work would be difficult, possibly even excruciating. But necessary. He knew it was necessary.
Necessary and sufficient.
This phrase popped into his consciousness, reminding him of a Logic class he had taken in college. He recalled his professor, in a thick Italian accent—What was his name?—teaching the language of logic, with its various symbols and phrases. Randall could not remember ninety-nine percent of what he had learned in that class, but he could remember the diminutive lecturer using “necessary and sufficient” several times during each lecture to drive home one point or another.
His eyes had wandered, scanning the familiar room. All in its place, as always. He stared back up at the ceiling. The spider remained a black speck against the pale background. Had it moved? Randall couldn’t be sure.
Not all living things need sleep, he reminded himself. Plants don’t need sleep. Fungi don’t sleep. Why would arthropods have to sleep?
He could feel the spider staring back at him. He sensed a kinship, and he knew the spider would sense it too, if spiders could sense such a thing. And if spiders could read or even just comprehend language, then this spider could have a deep understanding of Randall’s Work, as long as he had been creeping around this apartment long enough. Randall hoped that he had. And he hoped the spider would stick around for a while, maybe a few days, at least long enough to see the conclusion of his Work.
Because Randall knew it would end soon.
60
Jack tapped the radio power button on his steering wheel to silence the stereo. For the first time in a very long time, he did not want to listen to any music while he drove to his office at CASMIRC. While he often found that music relaxed him and allowed his mind to work more effectively, right now he required silence.
He told Vicki that he needed to pick up some of his research files from Class Dismissed so he could review them again before his late morning meeting with Philip Prince, which was true. He also needed to make sure—even though he knew he had at least twice before—that nothing in the official or unofficial files from the Lamaya Hollows case could make any connection between Melissa Hollows and him, beyond the obvious professional relationship. They had never exchanged text messages, e-mails, or other forms of electronic communication. The very few phone calls they shared—prior to Friday—had been during reasonable, daylight hours in order to set up interview times or pass along any new information on the case.
In addition, he hoped that reviewing the files could spark something, point him in some direction to help discover who had killed her. And why. And why this person felt it necessary to get Jack involved.
He arrived at the FBI complex in Quantico at 7:35 am. When he got off the elevator, he did not see anyone else in the office. He noticed the conference room door standing open; the lights from inside it cast a soft pale-yellow glow over most of the cubicles on the floor. Outside remained dark and dreary, accentuating the illumination from the conference room. Jack began walking towards his desk, but then he diverted his path to walk by the conference room.
Jack got to the doorway and peered in. Jack could see Reilly in semi-profile, his back mostly to the door. Reilly sat in the second row, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, staring straight ahead intensely. His eyes did not waver but remained focused on the bulletin board in the front of the room. Jack got the impression that Reilly studied the photos like someone might study one of those three-dimensional computer-generated pictures, waiting for a clearer image to pop out from the obscure colored dots.
“Heath.”
Reilly blinked once but did not startle. He slowly turned his head to the door, but his eyes did not leave the colla
ge in front of him. Jack thought that Reilly felt on the brink of an epiphany and didn’t want to miss it. Once his head had turned nearly over his shoulder, Reilly’s gaze shifted to the door. His face, initially completely expressionless, displayed a modicum of surprise a few deliberate blinks later.
“Jack. What brings you in?”
Jack shrugged. He moved into the room and sat down a row behind Reilly, a few chairs to his side. A fatherly sense came over him, instructing him to provide some comfort and reassurance to Reilly. Had he spent more time and energy looking introspectively, he would have realized that he also did this out of guilt about abandoning the CASMIRC team in the middle of a big investigation to pursue his own political ambitions. “I needed to go over some stuff from the Hollows files.”
Reilly’s eyes lit up with recognition. “Oh, yeah. I heard about Melissa Hollows. How bizarre. And sad. You’d think that family had been through enough.”
Jack was taken aback by this last statement. In Jack’s experience Reilly had never expressed much emotion about victims or their families. Perhaps acting as a lead investigator has provided him with a different perspective, Jack thought.
“Yeah,” Jack agreed. He opened his mouth to say more—about the voice mail, or the coroner’s report, or an equally empathic statement—but stopped himself. Best not to get into any detailed discussion about that case right now. Moreover, Reilly presently seemed much more interested in his Playground Predator case.
Jack looked up at the front of the room. He took in the images on the photographs. Unlike Reilly, Jack focused more on the school photos of the girls, smiling, vibrant, and still alive. He consciously tried not to focus on the crime scene photos, not because he felt squeamish in any way, but because he didn’t want to let himself get engaged in the process. His attention passed to the messages neatly written on the dry-erase board:
I DON’T REALLY HATE YOU
(SERBIAN)
I WANT TO BE SOMEBODY
(THAI)
THE MAN OF THE HOUR
(ARABIC)
“Another message came with the third victim, huh?” Jack asked, mostly rhetorically.
“Yep,” Reilly replied.
“The man of the hour,” Jack read aloud.
“Yep.”
Jack couldn’t remember ever seeing Reilly so taciturn. Either he’s so engrossed in this case that he doesn’t want to talk much, or he already feels defeated, Jack thought, hoping it was the former rather than the latter. While his paternal instincts suggested that he stay, Jack began to get up to leave, thinking he would leave Reilly alone with his thoughts.
Before he could fully stand up, Reilly asked, “What do you think it means?”
Jack looked down at him, then back to the dry-erase board. He didn’t say anything for several seconds. As much as he didn’t want to get involved in this case, for his own sake, he couldn’t allow himself to ignore Reilly’s reaching out for help. “Well, I think the obvious thing is that he is out for attention.”
“Yeah,” Reilly agreed. “What else? I feel like there’s something else here, and I just can’t see it.”
Jack sat back down. Both men leaned forward. “The focus changes,” Jack noticed. Reilly looked at him quizzically. “The first statement is all about the victim. ‘I don’t really hate you.’ The last one is all about him, ‘the man of the hour.’”
Reilly nodded. “And the middle one is what he wants to be, but he’s not there yet. By the third one, he’s attained what he wants? He’s now the Man of the Hour?”
“Maybe.” Jack began to see where this might go. His paternal instinct grabbed his tongue before he could announce his suspicion; he wanted Reilly to feel like he could figure it out for himself. “So what happened between the second victim and the third victim? What allowed him to achieve his desired status?”
Reilly’s eyes widened. “The article. The article in The Post.”
Jack’s eyes widened too, though not as dramatically, as if he had not already considered this. “Yes.”
“But we were so disparaging to him in that article. Why would that help him? How could that build him up?” Reilly asked.
Jack shrugged. “What is it they say in Hollywood—there’s no such thing as bad publicity?”
Reilly sighed. “I guess.” He placed his head into his hands and rubbed his eyes. “Christ, I really hope we didn’t set him off with that article.”
From behind both of them, an ever-confident voice answered, “We didn’t.” Reilly and Jack turned to see Dylan Harringer, standing in the doorway. “He had done too much recon. He knew those soccer fields and those trails way too well to have put it together in two days.”
“Right,” Reilly remembered, breathing an inner sign of relief.
Harringer moved toward the front of the room. “This continues to be all part of his master plan. We just have to figure out the next step before it happens.” Without a pause in his cadence, Harringer asked, “What are you doing here, Jack?”
Jack looked up, somewhat startled by the abrupt change in topic. “I came to look over a couple more old files.”
“Melissa Hollows?” Harringer surmised. Jack nodded. Harringer looked down at his watch. “We’re meeting to discuss this—” He tapped the top of the dry-erase board, where it said THE PLAYGROUND PREDATOR, with an almost imperceptible roll of his eyes. “—in five minutes. You’re welcome to sit in if you’d like.”
Jack shook his head. “No, thanks, I need to get going soon.”
Harringer nodded as he looked down at the front podium. “Right.” Jack detected a hint of disdain in his voice, and, while he may have understood the reason behind it, he did not care for it. Jack kept looking at Harringer, but Harringer kept his focus on the podium, as if he couldn’t muster enough respect for Jack to look him in the eye.
The growing tension broke when the computer in the front podium beeped with the characteristic tones of an incoming video call. Harringer moved the mouse and clicked. “Hello, Camilla,” he said into the computer.
“Hi, Dylan,” they could all hear through the computer’s speakers. Harringer grabbed a remote control from a small drawer in the podium and turned on the overhead projector. He made a slight adjustment to the camera on top of the podium that faced out to the rest of the conference room. Before the projector had warmed up enough for Camilla’s image to appear in front of them, Camilla said, “Hi, Heath.”
Reilly, who had been staring down at the floor the last few minutes, looked up to the camera. “Hey, Camilla.”
“Is that Jack?” she asked.
“Hey, CC, how are you?” Jack responded.
“Good, are you back on this case?”
“No, I just needed to stop by for a minute and saw Happy Pants here sitting by himself,” he thumbed toward Reilly, “so I thought I’d try to cheer him up.”
“You should have seen him the other night,” Camilla cajoled. Her faint image began to appear on the front screen as the bulb in the projector warmed up. “He really was Happy Pants.”
Reilly looked up at her, confused at first. He then rolled his eyes. “Christ.”
Jack looked at Reilly. “What’s this?”
Reilly shrugged, trying to act nonchalant. “It’s nothing. She’s being ridiculous.”
“He had drinks with your reporter friend, Corinne O’Loughlin,” Camilla explained, a widening smirk on her face. While it came across as a tease, she genuinely appreciated the opportunity to imbue some humanity into Reilly, the erstwhile just-the-facts-ma’am Special Agent. She hoped others could see him a little more like she had, with a little more depth to him.
“Wartime?” Jack asked, turning toward Reilly.
Reilly looked up at him, no longer hiding any emotion. He looked offended. “Yeah, Wartime. What’s that all about?”
Jack smiled warmly. “It doesn’t mean anything, Heath. I know it sounds pejorative, but it’s not meant to. It refers to lyrics from a song she reminded me of, and then it seeme
d to fit her personality.” He could tell that this did not make Reilly feel much better, so he tried to retreat. “A little bit, just a little bit.”
“Well, I still don’t think it’s right and I still don’t think…” He trailed off when his eyes met Jack. Jack stared straight ahead. The intense expression on Jack’s face brought a pit immediately into Reilly’s stomach. Reilly felt scared, as if something unexpected had just happened; he wondered if the abrupt change in Jack’s countenance signaled that he had suffered a mini-stroke. “Jack?” he said, almost whispering through tightened vocal cords, his voice cracking a little.
Jack stood up, walked to the end of the row of chairs, and up to the front of the room beside the dry-erase board, his eyes never leaving the text upon it. “Lyrics,” Jack said softly. He turned to face the rest of the room. Harringer and Reilly both watched him intently, their eyes tracking his every movement. “They’re song lyrics,” he repeated.