She’d been called a victim and Victoria didn’t like being called a victim. Even if it was true.
“Christina, take my phone and track that message ASAP,” Victoria continued. “I’ll be in there in a second. It’s top priority.”
Christina was about to comply when Dr. Oliviero stepped closer to the table. It nearly made Lara jump. She’d forgotten the psychiatrist had been in the room.
“I feel the need to point out that because of your high ranking position in the CMU, and with CMU on the case, this might give you a shorter deadline and less time to make your decision, Victoria.”
The room stalled. Everyone in it seemed to take a collective breath and hold it at the same time, waiting for Victoria to say or do something to clue them in to what would happen next. As if she could not only tell the future, but mold it with a simple command. Lara watched as her boss cut any and all eye contact with them. She kept her eyes to the tabletop instead, hindering their view of her expression.
Lara felt heat start to pulse through her chest. It was anger and shame and guilt.
How dare the bomber make Victoria a victim!
And what did it say about Lara that some of the concern she felt was more selfish? If Victoria wouldn’t tell her the secret then the complete, and rare, trust Lara had given to her boss would be shattered. Who could she trust then? It already felt like the tether between them was being slowly cut.
But just as quickly as she had the thought, she wondered why she was sitting there worrying about herself when her friend was so obviously in distress. Sure, this partially affected Lara but it fully affected Victoria.
“Take the phone to Ruiz, Agent Jackson,” Victoria ordered again. This time there was nothing but authority in her command. That voice said that no one was going to make her stand there and explain herself. Certainly not her team. “I’ve got to go make a call.”
Victoria didn’t wait for any questions or comments. Much like James, she didn’t just leave the room, she escaped it. Ty followed, phone in hand and Jennifer behind him. It left Lara alone with Dr. Oliviero and Nick. Two people keen on trying to get her to open up and talk out her emotions and thoughts and feelings and all of that nonsense.
And she wasn’t in the mood for that right now.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” she said, pushing back in her chair. She was out of the room faster than a pedestrian crossing the street during a don’t walk light.
Bombs were destroying their city and the lives of, to date, hundreds. The Whisperer, as Nick had just called him, had one hell of a twisted angle. He was working to get—What? Revenge? Satisfaction? Pleasure? Lara exhaled until she felt her body sagging. Too many questions. It was always like that. Too many damn questions and not enough answers. At least, not fast enough. It was amazing to her how this job could continue to kick up shit that only seemed like it should exist in fiction, not real life.
Without coaching her feet on where to go, Lara found they’d led her to a closed office door.
She didn’t bother knocking.
Once inside the room she closed the door behind her. And locked it.
Victoria didn’t look up at her new visitor. She had known who it would be. She also hadn’t made any calls. Instead she had her head resting in her hands. She didn’t even look up as Lara spoke.
“Tell me the secret, Victoria. Now.”
Chapter Two
“He never tried to protect his identity because he always knew he was going to kill them when he was done.”
Victoria leaned back in her chair and fixed Lara with a stare that could freeze even fire. It said she wasn’t going to hold anything back. She was going to tell the secret and every detail that made up its story.
Which is exactly what Lara wanted.
What she needed.
“Oscar Mackworth is a power-assertive rapist with all of the horrible traits in tow. Overactive ego. Insecure. Feels inadequate with women. He has to dominate, humiliate, rape women to restore his self-confidence. It’s not a choice for him. It’s an addiction. Something he has to do to feel like a man. A compulsion he can’t fight or satisfy until he’s done. He has to. He won’t stop until he’s stopped. So, I helped make sure he was.”
Victoria let out a breath. That was her secret, but not all of it. Lara needed to hear the story, the details, everything. Like Victoria, she wasn’t going to shrink back from it.
Thankfully, she didn’t have to demand that her boss continue. Victoria began again. She sounded tired.
“Originally we didn’t know who he was when the profile was created. All we knew when the case got to us was that two women had been found dead, two were missing and one had just been taken. The common denominator linking each woman despite the seemingly random locations they were taken from—grocery store parking lot, a park, jogging trail through a neighborhood, nightclub and a college admission’s building—was that each woman was early twenties and nice.” Victoria held up her hand, as if to silence Lara before she could question anything.
“And when I say nice, I mean these women would go out of their way to help you, even if they didn’t know you. If you dropped something, they’d bend down to help you pick it up. You got lost? They’d give you directions, no hesitation. Need money for the subway or a train or even some food? They’d open their purses as fast as they could. No questions asked. They would bend over backward for strangers on a daily basis, for nothing other than the satisfaction of knowing they’d helped someone. This kind of compassion extended into every part of their lives and relationships. Each woman was close to her family, had lots of friends and worked hard at her respected degrees or jobs. Hell, we even went as far back to see that they were all on the honor roll in high school. They were all good young women who just happened to offer help to the wrong man.”
Victoria shook her head a little, as if trying to escape the injustice. Like one motion could put distance between her and the gruesome past. Lara had tried that trick once or twice herself.
It never worked.
“Mora Williams and her sister were both born into poverty but not from lack of effort on their mother’s behalf. She worked three jobs to try and support both girls but when they were in high school she died. Cancer. It was fast. The older sister became the guardian of Mora and Mora turned her grieving heart toward a dream to become a doctor. With the same determination her mother had, she threw herself into her studies and landed a scholarship to a school she never could have dreamed about when she was younger. It didn’t pay for housing so she and her sister decided to move in together and work several jobs between them to live in an apartment that looked just like the one they grew up in. But they didn’t care. Together they were realizing a dream that would have made their mother proud. It didn’t matter they left one hole and got into another. Because, at the end of the day, Mora planned to have a career, to help ease her and her sister’s struggles while helping those who were sick and hurt. She also eventually wanted to have children that wouldn’t have to know how precarious life can be. I tell you this not to waste time but to humanize a wonderful young woman because, sometimes this job—any job that sees senseless death—makes people like us forget that victims aren’t just people who were killed. They were people first, with dreams and bills and pain. Just like the rest of us.”
Victoria, a woman Lara had rarely seen so emotional, especially at work, paused to collect herself.
“Mora was found in a Dumpster,” she continued again. Lara’s stomach dropped, though she had known that Mora was most likely already dead when the story began. It still hurt. “Ligature strangulation so her killer could watch her die more slowly. She was naked, had been brutally raped, beaten, mutilated. The cops on scene figured it was just a random act of violence by some thug who saw an opportunity and took it. Then he did what everyone does when they’re done with something,
and threw her away.”
In tandem it seemed Lara and Victoria tensed, angry.
“And honestly, those beat cops were incompetents. Blaming a junkie was easy, less paperwork, I guess. But thank God for the garbage worker who’d found her. In his statement he said Mora almost looked like she was wearing the garbage instead of just buried beneath it.”
“Wearing it?” Lara had to ask.
Victoria motioned to her chest. “She was positioned so that she was on her back. There was only garbage across her chest and on her crotch. Every other inch of skin was left bare. Like someone had carefully arranged her. Just like Harley Kelley, a young woman who had been found in a Dumpster in a park she and her toddler son frequented. A detective who wasn’t an incompetent confirmed both women were tortured, raped and killed the same way. We got the case when Jocelyn Ryan and Margaret Richards disappeared from public places two months apart—three months after Mora, and four months after Harley. The man responsible was profiled as late thirties, white and most likely a blue-collar worker. He didn’t mind getting dirty. He was strong and liked control. He used a ligature to strangle them because using his hands was too much risk. The ligature gave him the same amount of pleasure because he still got to watch them suffer. He was also charming or, at least, approachable. The women he took were kind, not stupid, and yet he was able to grab them from public places, no matter the time or crowd, without much effort. He made it appear like they were wearing garbage as a last act of humiliation. He also took all of their belongings they had on them at the time of abduction. Trophies.”
“And Oscar Mackworth?” Lara asked when Victoria took another pause. “When did you start to suspect him?”
Victoria’s nostrils flared. She answered with grit in her voice. “He was the garbage man who found Mora, can you believe that? Without him we would never have made the connection to Harley in the first place. We never would have realized there was a serial rapist and killer. At least not connecting Harley and Mora.”
“That’s why he came forward,” Lara guessed. “He wanted the authorities to know what he was doing. He inserted himself into the investigation so he’d get recognition.”
Victoria nodded, disgusted. “When Melanie Martinez, the last woman to be brutally raped, killed and left in a Dumpster, was reported missing, we went back through every single detail of every death. We reinterviewed every witness. It wasn’t until we were looking up Oscar’s information again that I realized he was connected to every single woman. His garbage route intersected with each of their life routines. The park Harley frequented, the grocery store Mora shopped at, the club Jocelyn went to, the neighborhood Margaret jogged through and the last stop being the college campus Melanie worked at. It gave us a reason to dig deeper on Oscar and then we realized he fit the profile we’d made to a tee. He even had a mother who had abused and then abandoned him, helping to create a man who absolutely hated women. So, I went after him.”
They were getting to the secret now. Lara felt herself bracing for it. And wondering how she might view Victoria after she learned it. Would she agree with what the woman had done? Or would it be just another dirty secret that she wished she didn’t know?
“Initially Oscar was helpful until he realized he was our number one suspect. Then this man, seemingly so nice before, turned cold quickly. He became sarcastic and goading. We tailed him, talked to—it felt like—everyone he’d ever met. But we couldn’t find any hard evidence. Just speculation. Theories. Gut feelings. And then we found Melanie. In a Dumpster on the same campus she was taken from. The medical examiner confirmed it was the same MO as the others. But he also confirmed that she had been pregnant at the time of death.”
Lara felt herself harden, every inch of her on the edge at just the mention of being pregnant. The story of the women had been horrible enough. Add in a pregnancy and it was even more relatable to her. A sense of loss she knew she’d never get over ached in her chest. She physically moved in her chair to try to refocus. This wasn’t about her past. It was about Victoria’s and all the women killed.
“She wasn’t showing, it was too early in the pregnancy, and she hadn’t told anyone yet. That was one hundred percent confirmed. No one, not even her husband or best friend, knew. Believe me, I was there when they found out. Her husband, Mike, was shattered at the news. I’ve never seen a man cry like that. You can’t fake that. So, when I had yet another talk with Oscar you can only guess at my surprise when the man said what a pity it was that she had been killed while expecting a child.” Victoria leaned forward. “If Melanie hadn’t told her husband and best friend yet, then why on earth would she tell a stranger like Oscar?”
Lara didn’t like the answer. But she knew it.
“She told him because she thought he might not kill her if he knew,” she said, hating the words. She tried not to imagine the young woman pleading with the man to no avail. Yelling she was pregnant, over and over again until her voice was hoarse. Crying and screaming and praying with every fiber of her being that Mackworth would find mercy. That he would spare her, if only for her child’s sake.
But this was an old story. One Lara knew already. Melanie had been raped, tortured and murdered. There was no happy ending for her or her unborn child.
It made Lara feel sick.
Especially when Victoria returned to her original question.
“I finally got a warrant to search his house. It was clean and I guess I wasn’t surprised about that. Oscar is an intelligent, psychotic, but intelligent, man. There was no evidence of the rapes or murders. No sign of the trophies or the women’s belongings that he kept. But his knowledge of the pregnancy was enough to get him arrested. Everyone just wanted to be able to tell the public it was over. They just wanted to point a finger at someone. And then, when I thought it was over, done, there was talk of an acquittal...” She bared her teeth for a second. “I couldn’t chance him getting out. So, I lied and I convinced others to lie, as well.” Victoria’s gaze went cool, even. Just like her voice. There was no regret in her words when she continued. “I took a ring from Melanie’s apartment and said it had just been found hidden in the shed outside of the house. It was a small, delicate ring but it was big enough to squash the acquittal. Enough to water the seed of doubt that was already there. And, that’s why Oscar is still in prison now.”
Victoria smiled. It was small and not at all happy.
“It was wrong, against everything I stand for, but, Lara, Oscar Mackworth was, is and will always be an evil, intelligent man. I couldn’t let him back out into the world. Not with knowing what he’d do.”
The story was done. Victoria Russo’s secret was out. It hung in the air between them like a fog, mirroring emotions so thick that Lara couldn’t tell which she was feeling at the moment.
But, without a doubt, there was one thought that was loud and it screamed “Moretti.” Still in prison for everything he had done—everyone he had hurt, killed, manipulated, Lara included—he was one man that Lara believed should stay in prison until the day he died. But would she falsify evidence to keep him there if there was a chance he could get out?
Yes. Yes, she would. She’d do anything to make sure he was never let out.
Law be damned.
Lara was quiet a moment. No longer having to wonder if she agreed with what the woman in front of her had done. Still, she had to ask one question.
“After he was arrested, did the rapes and killings stop?”
Victoria sat up as straight as she could. She smiled. This time it was genuine. “Yes. Yes, they did.”
Lara felt better, though she knew it was a feeling that wouldn’t last. Not with a bomber running through the city, toying with people. Not with Victoria’s name and career on the line. Not with their job, a constant battle of good versus evil and all the murky gray between. She let out a sigh, but Victoria surprised her by one more story.
“I thought everyone already knew they did.”
Chapter Three
Tech analyst Christina Ruiz looked like she was caught in between a hard place and a hard place.
Her hair was strung out, her face was flushed and the words that had been tumbling out of her mouth in the middle of answering questions had been bad enough that even Lara had been shocked.
The tech analyst stood at the end of the table now, ready to address the team as a whole. You didn’t have to be an FBI agent to detect that what she had to say was just more bad news onto the ever-growing pile of shit that had become their norm.
“I’ve been working my ass off to trace the anonymous message sent to you,” she started, addressing Victoria. “How he got his hands on your Oscar Mackworth secret—well fuck if I know. Sorry, I meant hell if I know.” She visibly tried to reign in her agitation and continued. “Without wasting time to tell you how the dark web works and delving into the world of computer hacking, anonymous IP addresses and burner phones, I’m going to sum this up in the best, most helpful way I can by telling you how I can trace him.” She went to the whiteboard and uncapped a marker. They watched as she wrote “I CAN’T.” Christina slammed her finger against the words and then looked back at the team. “Dramatic, I know, but I want you to get the point. This Whisperer, or whatever the hell you want to call him, has managed to hide his trail from me. Even more than that. He’s erased it completely.”
Tough Justice: Countdown Box Set Page 20