by CJ Lyons
"Unlike his father."
"Exactly. Alicia would want to stay put so Fletcher Sr could find her when he needed her. They fed on each other, a symbiosis." Done with the snake, she coiled it so that it was one perfect circle, eating its own tail, and threw it onto the conference table.
"Searching records going back that far is going to take time," Burroughs warned. "They won't be computerized. Most of them."
"Yeah." She shook her head, pushing unsettling images of a younger Fletcher with his middle-aged mother from her mind. "Let's get people started on that, his phone records, computer, and an in-depth look at his father. I need the complete police records of his father's and Jane Doe's homicides."
"Where are you going?"
"To talk with Alicia. Get to the heart of the matter."
"Why are you wasting time with an old woman?" Grimwald protested. "Probably senile anyway."
"I think maybe mommy dearest taught Fletcher everything he knows. Maybe including how to kill."
Chapter 30
Sunday 4:22 pm
"Mrs. Fletcher, I'm here to talk with you about your son."
"Jimmy? Is he with you? He's such a fine boy, takes good care of his sick, old mother."
Lucy pulled one of the vinyl chairs closer to Alicia's, now they sat knee-to-knee, facing each other even if the old woman couldn't see her. "Mrs. Fletcher, I'm with the FBI. My name is Supervisory Special Agent Guardino. When's the last time your son visited?"
Alicia pursed her lips, wrinkles cascading over her face, a caricature of an old woman searching her confused memories. "Jimmy, is he with you?"
"No, Alicia. He's not."
"You're the Lucy he works with, aren't you? He told me about you." Alicia smiled, her dentures slipping, then clicking into place. "Said you let your daughter get sick 'cause you were too busy to watch after her. I'd never let anything like that happen to my child. My Jimmy, he was my world. A mother should be willing to give everything for their child." Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. "Even their very lives."
Lucy clamped her jaws shut. Despite the blindness and the age and the failing body, Alicia Fletcher was sharp and cunning. She was trying to manipulate Lucy the same way Lucy wanted to manipulate her.
And from the surge of anger and guilt the old lady's words had produced, Alicia had the upper hand. Lucy was glad the other woman couldn't see her. "Tell me about Jimmy. When was the last time you spoke?"
"Jimmy? Oh, he's much too busy to bother with his old mother. Not with that big case he's helping you with. Don't you know where he is?"
Cut the crap, Lucy wanted to yell. She restrained herself. "No. I need to find him." She swallowed hard, forcing herself not to gag on her words. "I need his help, Alicia. A young girl's life may depend on it."
"One of Jimmy's girls? He's had a few you know—since I left him, had to come here. Poor boy, he gets so lonely without his mother to take care of him."
"Have you met any of Jimmy's girls? Do you remember their names?"
Alicia leaned forward. Her hand, soft and doughy in consistency but wrapped in flaky, parchment like skin, landed on Lucy's knee and squeezed. "I might. Might could remember. None of them was good enough, not for my Jimmy. He needs a special girl, one just like me. Is this girl you're talking about special?"
Sudden laughter emerged from Alicia's slit-like mouth, rattling through the room, raising the hairs on Lucy's arms.
If she was searching for a monster, she had found the monster's creator.
Lucy laid her own hand over Alicia's and ground the old woman's bones together. Alicia lurched backwards but didn't scream or call out. Instead her smile broadened into a beam of delight. As if Lucy was playing into her expectations. And by doing so, Alicia had won.
"I'll never help you find my son," Alicia said, her dead eyes meeting Lucy's gaze as if they could see.
"Then let's talk about Jimmy's father," Lucy said. She released Alicia's hand, white imprints dug into the doughy flesh like a handprint etched in plaster. "It must have been difficult, loving a man like that."
"My husband loved me, he was devoted to me. Whatever he did, it was for my own good," Alicia declared, her chin jutting forward into the air.
"Devoted to you? He left you behind every chance he had. He slept with every pretty girl he ever met, right up to the day he died."
"He had an eye for beauty and he indulged it. He always came home to me."
"Not that last time. He wasn't going to come home then, was he? He was going to leave you for good."
It was total guesswork, but Lucy knew she'd hit close to the kill zone. The color drained from Alicia's lips, the last remaining color on her face, leaving her shrouded in shades of white and ash. She stared, eyes not blinking, and if not for the pulse jumping at the side of her neck, she could have been dead.
Lucy continued. "You'd given him everything—your childhood, your life. Thirty years of your life he had stolen and now he was going to leave you."
Alicia's head trembled as if palsied by her need to deny the truth. "No. Never. It was that slut, that girl who conned him into thinking she was carrying his baby. He would never leave me, not for a filthy whore like her."
"Then why did you kill him, Alicia?"
Lucy had spoken softly but from Walden's rigid stance in the doorway, she knew he had heard her. She wasn't so certain about Alicia. The old woman had stiffened like a corpse in full rigor.
Then she laughed again. A big, rip-roaring belly laugh that shook Alicia so hard Lucy almost had Walden get one of the nurses. The laughter poured forth in waves, hurled into the air, crashing against the hushed sounds of the nursing home.
Walden shut the door, blocking the noise, and leaned against it. Barring any chance of escape.
Finally, Alicia composed herself, one hand patting Lucy's thigh as she caught her breath. Her color was back, a florid red suffused her face and neck. "You're good, girl. Do you know you're the first person in thirty-four years that ever thought hard enough to put two and two together? Can't tell you how scared I was those first few months, waiting for the cops to waltz me away in steel bracelets. But no one ever came."
"Why'd you do it, Alicia?"
"I wanted a baby. I deserved a baby. Someone to take care of me when I got older. Jimmy's baby."
Lucy had assumed Alicia had killed her husband and girl friend in a jealous rage while Alicia had been pregnant with her son. Now she realized that what really happened was far, far worse. She blinked hard, wondering if she'd heard correctly. No, no surely….
"He took her side. Tried to stop me when he found me with her, carving her open. Called me a stupid, fat old cow and told me to rot in hell." Alicia rocked in her chair. Not back and forth, not bouncing, not agitated. Instead she cradled her arms below her shriveled, sagging breasts, a mother comforting her child.
Her voice dropped, weighted down by the bitter memory. "But he forgot one thing." She tilted her head up, her grey-white eyes boring into Lucy's. "He forgot I was the one holding the knife."
"Who was she, Alicia?"
A heave of Alicia's shoulders was her only answer for a moment. "Harlot, jezebel. She doesn't deserve a name. I took from her what was rightfully mine. Jimmy's baby."
Lucy tried hard not to visualize the scene: a bloodbath, Alicia reaching into the dead or dying woman's womb, cutting her son free...
"So then it was just you and little Jimmy. It must have been tough, raising a son all by yourself."
Alicia shook her head, her voice dropping into a singsong. "No. It was a joy. My Jimmy, he's my joy. My life."
"Help me find him, Alicia. I can save him, protect him."
"He's safe at home. No one can hurt him there." She rocked harder, crooning a wordless melody.
"What about the girl? She might hurt him."
"No. She won't. He said he got a good one this time. One just like me." She twisted in her chair, fumbled at her side for one of the photo albums stacked on the table, chose one, and h
efted it onto her lap. "Here, you tell me." Her blind fingers traced the embossed words on the cover and then flipped the album open. "That's me when I was fourteen, when my James saved me."
Lucy took the album, stared at the black and white photo with its yellowed edges. Staring back at her was a dark haired, full-figured girl with a shy smile and down-turned gaze. A girl who, if she'd been wearing black jeans and a sweatshirt instead of a gingham dress with ruffles around the hem, could have been Ashley Yeager.
"Jimmy told me he got it right this time. What do you think, Supervisory Special Agent Guardino?"
Lucy slapped the album shut and stood. She wasn't going to learn Fletcher's location, not from this woman. "I think your husband wasn't the only conartist in the family. You've been wasting my time, Mrs. Fletcher."
Alicia snatched at the book, cradled it against her chest like the imaginary child she had rocked earlier. "You'll never find him. Jimmy's a smart boy. Just like his father."
Her laughter followed Lucy and Walden as they escaped from the room.
"Are you as creeped out as I am?" Lucy asked as she drove Walden towards Sligo. Taylor had found an address for a Moore family that had reported a daughter missing back in 1944. The property now belonged to an Arthur Moore, Alicia's younger brother, a retired PennDot worker and widower.
It was a long shot, but better than sitting around doing nothing. In the meantime, Burroughs was getting PBP to sit on Alicia in case Fletcher tried to contact her.
Walden shrugged. "No worse than the usual shit we see everyday."
"Guess I'm getting old, but our usual child predator isn't this sick and twisted. I mean," she hastened to add when she caught his sharp look, "they are warped, perverted bastards, but they all share basically the same underlying pathology. Once you figure out their individual take on it, it's all the same song and dance. Come on, Walden, you've been working SAFE crimes longer than I have, don't you think that's true?"
"Seems like whenever I start to think that way, the good Lord throws down the gauntlet and stubborn bastard that I am, I just have to pick it up."
"So you've seen something like this before? A woman so warped by thirty years of loving a man who didn't love her back that she kills him and cuts his child from the womb of another woman in order to raise it as her own?"
"Love works in mysterious ways."
She glanced over at him, uncertain if he was making fun of her or not. His face was its usual inscrutable blank slate.
"You married, Walden?"
He shifted in his seat and she knew she'd made him uncomfortable. He wore no wedding ring, but he had the air of a man who'd been happily married. Unlike Burroughs. She waited, not pressing him.
"Yes. To my high school sweetheart. Sheila." His voice held a hint of nostalgia.
"What happened?"
"Four—no, it'll be five years this Thanksgiving—she died."
"I'm sorry."
"You know how they always talk about high blood pressure and strokes killing all us black men? Well, it's the black women who should really be worried. Especially those with high stress jobs like being the wives of federal agents. I was working the Mara Salvatrucha gang that were responsible for over a dozen executions around the DC area."
"I remember. They went on a killing spree when we apprehended one of their leaders. Targeted federal judges, US attorneys, trying to shut down our case."
"Tense couple of months. I got called out on a raid night before Thanksgiving. We got the guys, did the paper work and I went home. The lights were all on, but that wasn't unusual, Sheila always waited up for me. Said she couldn't sleep until I got home." He turned his head to look out the window.
Lucy shifted her weight, her back and shoulder definitely waking up from the numbing medicine the doctor had used. Sitting still seemed to make the pain worse, so she had insisted on driving but now was regretting her decision as she needed both hands on the wheel to steer around the twisting mountain roads.
Walden made a small sound, half regret, half grief, and continued. "Found her in the kitchen, turkey sitting on the counter, a sweet potato pie on the floor beside her. Doctors said it was a massive heart attack, she died instantly. They said.
"I never could figure out how they know that for sure, figured it's the same as when we have to make death notifications. Always tell the family they went fast, peacefully, felt no pain. Never give them a reason to think things might have gone differently, that they could have done anything differently..."
"That's when you transferred to Atlanta, to the SAFE unit down there?"
"Yeah. Fresh faces, fresh start." He fiddled with the AC control. "Didn't do much good. Still live for the work, just like always. Think I'd have learned my lesson, wouldn't you?" He shrugged, more a shifting of his mood than an actual acknowledgment of emotion. "Take a warning from someone who's been there. Don't let it happen to you, Lucy."
She snorted. "You mean like hunting for a sick bastard like Fletcher when my daughter's sick in the hospital?"
"The doctors tell you what's going on yet?"
"No. They're in a wait and see stage—could be nothing more than a virus, or they might have to slice out one of her lymph nodes and do a biopsy."
"They're worried about cancer?"
"Worried about everything it seems. Just no fucking answers." She rolled her shoulders back and tried to ease the tension from her neck and jaw. "Let's focus on Fletcher. At least we can do something good for one kid."
"If she's still alive."
"I think she's alive. Just like Alicia couldn't let go of her James, I think our Jimmy can't let go of Ashley."
"It's weird that she and Alicia were both fourteen when they met the men in their lives."
"Seems like Alicia saw James Fletcher as her savior, her rescuer."
"Might have been an abusive household. Isolated farm, way back then, who knows what went on?"
"Maybe Arthur Moore can tell us."
"Think Jimmy ever knew his maternal relatives? Could this uncle of his be helping him?"
"The way Alicia got out of there, I doubt she ever went back with her son."
She turned onto a weed-choked dirt road. Drove another half mile and saw an old two-story farmhouse with a single steeply-pitched gable in the middle and windows arranged to look like two eyes above and three teeth below.
A small barn sat twenty yards from the house. There were no vehicles, no movement, no signs of anyone living. She exited the vehicle, her hand on her weapon. Walden joined her, his lips tightened into a single straight line—as close to anxious as she'd seen him.
It was cooler out here away from the city, but still unseasonably warm. The sun was low in the sky, filtered through the trees as if through dirty windows. There was no wind, the trees that surrounded the clearing and lined the road stood still, drooping with dust-covered leaves.
And it was quiet. Way too quiet, even to someone who'd grown up in the country like Lucy. As if birds and animals and stray breezes all avoided this place. No movement came from either building.
Lucy bent down, ignoring the fresh wave of pain rippling through her back, and examined the ruts in the dirt lane. "Someone's been here recently. Tire tracks are fresh."
"Maybe he's gone out for Sunday dinner? Think our Mr. Moore is a big bingo player or the like?"
"Nothing says we can't take a look around." They were still standing near the cover of their own vehicle, a good forty feet from either the house or barn. "Which first?" she asked. "House or barn?"
Walden drew his weapon—a sure sign of how wrong this place was. You didn't go calling on tax-paying citizens with your gun drawn, even if they may be relatives of a killer. You also didn't need a locked and loaded forty caliber Glock to go knock on a door of an empty house.
"There may be a vehicle in the barn," he said, removing his sunglasses and letting his eyes adjust to the eerie half-light. "If he's here, he may be waiting for us to go to the house, make a break for it."
; Prepare for the worst, hope for the best and everyone goes home in one piece—typical cop philosophy. Lucy grabbed a pair of binoculars from the tactical gear in the rear of the Blazer. They both donned tactical vests, the weight pulled on Lucy's injured shoulder like a slaughter house hook hoisting a side of beef.
Together, they avoided the lane and cut across the knee-high weeds to approach the house. They circled it warily, stopping to examine the porch and the front entrance from ten yards away.
"Cameras," she pointed as she squinted through the binoculars. "One on the corner of the porch roof, aimed at the driveway, one on that post aimed at the front steps. I can't see inside, there are curtains over the windows."
"Let's try around back."
They continued to circle the house. All the windows were covered, there was no other entrance apparent until they reached the rear of the house. Now they were draped in shadow. Lucy shivered, wished for a jacket.
"What are those?" Walden asked, pointing to several greyish blobs sitting in the yard.
Lucy glanced away from her scrutiny of the house. "You're such a city boy. Those are salt licks. For the deer." She focused on the back door. "Wait here."
"What are you doing?"
"He wouldn't have any traps outside, not if he's willing to attract wild animals close to the house. I think I can get a look through a slit in the curtains over the door."
"Maybe the uncle put out the salt licks and Fletcher doesn't give a shit about blowing up a bunch of deer."
She kept walking, slowly, scanning every inch she could see. A camera aimed out from above the door, but it was easy to outflank it and ease her way against the building, staying in its blind spot.
She pressed her body against the door, angled her view through the small slit in the curtains. "It's dark inside," she yelled to Walden. "No movement. Some pots and pans left out, a few cans in the trash, can't make out much—"
She stopped, tried to get a better look. A jacket hung on a hook beside the door. She couldn't see all of it, but one sleeve was bunched up, sticking out far enough to be in her field of vision. It was dark inside, but not pitch black, more of a murky grey.