Bleeders

by Anthony Bruno

“Mr. Lassiter,” she said in a full voice but felt awkward calling him that. She knew him as Gene and had admitted to having met him before so there was no reason why she shouldn’t use his first name. “Gene. Gene, wake up.”

  He didn’t stir.

  “Gene,” she repeated louder. “Come on. Wake up.”

  She steeled herself as she reached over and shook his shoulder. She could feel his flesh though the blue cotton shirt, and she immediately pulled her hand back. She hoped it wasn’t obvious to the others how much he creeped her out. Her stomach lurched as she remembered her date with him and how she had actually considered—no, looked forward to—a goodnight kiss. For once Barry’s annoying behavior had done some good and prevented that. Who knows what might have happened if they’d been alone in her apartment any longer.

  “Wake up!” She slapped the table with the flat of her hand a few times. “Wake up!”

  He moaned.

  “Come on, open your eyes. Wake up.”

  His long dark lashes fluttering like butterfly wings. He lifted his head and blinked. “Trisha.” His voice was thick with sleep.

  He raised his hands, and the handcuffs clinked. She reared back, thinking he was reaching out to grab her, but he was just trying to rub his eyes, forgetting that he was cuffed. He had to lean forward to bring his face to his fingers. Her heart was a frantic bird trapped in a cage.

  His face blossomed like a flower. “I’m so glad you came. Did they tell you I asked for you?”

  “Yes…” Her voice was hoarse; she cleared her throat. “Yes,” she repeated. “I was told you wanted to see me. Why?”

  His smile widened, and his eyes drank her in. He was acting as if they had shared some kind of intimacy. Most serial killers develop elaborate fantasy relationships with their targets, which the women never learn about until it’s too late. Trisha felt nauseous. Did he have a secret relationship with her?

  “I didn’t do it, Trisha. I swear.”

  “Do what?”

  “Please don’t use your shrinky techniques on me. Come on, we know each other.”

  “Yes. We do.” She kept her responses short. Let him do the talking.

  “They think I’m that killer Drac. They think I’m a serial killer.”

  “Are you?”

  “Oh, come on. I’m a wealth manager for God’s sake, not a killer. I’ve worked for your father and sister for years. When would I have time to be… what they think I am?”

  “Most serial offenders maintain full-time jobs.”

  “Why are you being so cold? That really hurts, Trisha.”

  His expression was so pitiful she felt an uncontrollable pang of compassion for him. But she immediately dismissed it. If he really was Drac, he deserved no pity.

  “I want to get out of here,” he said. “I want you to help me.”

  “I caught you in the act of assaulting Adele Cardinalli with a deadly weapon. Why do you think I would want to help you?”

  His cuffs rattled as he shook his palms as if to erase that notion. “She was annoying me. I lost my temper. I wasn’t actually going to hit her.”

  “I saw it with my own eyes, Gene. It looked to me like you were going to hit her. Hard. With a marble rolling pin.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Then help me understand.”

  “Can I get out on bail? I’m sure I have enough money for that. Can you arrange it for me?”

  “You need an attorney for that.”

  “Why? Can’t you help?”

  “No. I can’t. It’ll be up to a judge to decide whether you’ll be allowed out on bail.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “You had your chance to call a lawyer, but you called your assistant instead. Is he getting you a lawyer?”

  He sighed. “Why are you making things so difficult?”

  “You think I’m making things difficult?”

  “Yes. You could certainly make it easier for me.”

  “How so? Explain.”

  He looked at the one-way mirror and exhaled a bitter laugh. “I don’t think so. Not here.”

  “I don’t think there’s much I can do for you.”

  She stood up, hoping to play his bluff, but he didn’t stop her. He just stared at her with thirsty eyes, grinning. She felt goosebumps on her arms but refused to let anyone see her rub them. She stared back and waited.

  “We can stay like this all day,” she finally said.

  “I wouldn’t mind that. Wouldn’t mind it at all.”

  She wanted to smack the grin off his face. He was getting to her, and that upset her.

  “Tell me what you want or I’m leaving.”

  “I told you. I want to get out on bail.”

  “Gene, if you’re charged with multiple counts of murder, what judge in his right mind will let you out on bail? Think about it.”

  “I have thought about it. I’ve thought about it very carefully.” He picked up the legal pad and flipped over the top sheet. “Sit down, Trisha. I want to show you something. Please?”

  She was on high alert. When a serial offender asks for something, it’s never a casual request. There’s something he wants, and she’d been in situations where the subject had made a seemingly innocuous request just to get her into a position where he could hurt her. Like the convicted serial rapist she’d interviewed in a Delaware prison who had asked her for a tissue, and as soon as her hand was in her pocket, he threw a roundhouse that grazed her chin but fortunately failed to connect. She’d been lucky that time, and her superiors told her so. Repeatedly. She’d learned from that mistake.

  She kept her eye on Lassiter’s hands and moved the pen out of his reach, then pulled out her chair a few feet and sat down. If he tried to kick, he wouldn’t get to her.

  “Look.” He pushed the pad toward her as far as the cuffs would allow.

  The page was full of tiny stick figures, hundreds of them, short little bodies with round circle heads. Some of the heads were open circles, most were colored in.

  “I’ve always admired your family, Trisha. The work that your father and sister do—it’s amazing. Your father helps so many children. I often think, what would happen to all those suffering kids all over the world if your father’s money suddenly disappeared? A lot of those kids would starve. Some would die of disease because there was no medicine. Tens of thousands of kids. Hundreds of thousands. If all that money disappeared.”

  His eyes darkened. His gaze was keen and determined. She looked down at the stick figures. Kids. Thousands of them. Impoverished. Living on the edge of death and disaster. No, she thought. He couldn’t. But from what Cindy had told her, he controlled her father’s entire fund, nearly a billion dollars. She suddenly remembered the recording of his call to Richard Shugrue: “Do you remember that thing I wanted you to do? With the cell phone and the number?… I want you to go ahead and do it.” Do what? Transfer funds? Out of the country? To a place where they have numbered accounts and US authorities can’t get to them? A cold lump formed in the pit of her stomach.

  “Are you trying to blackmail me?” Her chest was tight. It was hard to get the words out.

  His eyes were on the pad as he shook his head. “Such a shame. A tragedy. A slow-motion tragedy.”

  She stared at him in disbelief. Could he really have absconded with her father’s charity? All of it? It began to sink in that he certainly could have. Her father trusted him implicitly. He said so all the time.

  “You really are a monster,” she whispered.

  He shrugged and grinned, and his chains rattled softly.

  She stood up and went to the door. She had to get out of there. She had to call Cindy and her father. They had to do something to stop this.

  She knocked on the metal door for th
e guard to let her out.

  Come on! Hurry up! Hurry up!

  The door opened, a beefy guard holding it for her.

  “Oh, Trisha?” Lassiter called out.

  She turned around.

  “Remember this?” He started to sing, mockingly high and off key. “‘When the nights are long and deep / and your thoughts won’t let you sleep / When you think no one cares/ that colts don’t need mares / Keep this voice in your heart…’” He stopped singing for the last line. “‘I need you.’”

  Her eyes shot open. Oh, my God! He did do it. He’s the one!

  She shoved her way past the guard. She couldn’t be in there any more. She was too afraid.

  >>

  Chapter 20

  Michael McCleery’s brow was furrowed, his arms crossed. “Trisha, I find this very hard to believe.”

  “Well, I don’t,” she said.

  They were in Cindy’s office at the McCleery Foundation’s headquarters on lower Fifth Avenue. Michael sat on a black-and-white batik print sofa. He wore a blue-gray tweed sports jacket over jeans and a dark blue shirt. Trisha was on her feet, pacing. She’d come straight from the Tombs to tell Cindy what Gene Lassiter had said—or more precisely, implied—and found her father here. And just as she’d feared, her father refused to believe that Lassiter could have absconded with his charity’s entire holdings. He also seemed to be angry with her for even suggesting such a thing, and once again he made her feel that she’d disappointed him. But this was much bigger than a dysfunctional family issue, and she was trying to make him understand that. Unfortunately he was stubborn. Just like her.

  Trisha stared out the window and saw the sun reflecting off the windows of the Flat Iron Building, which was just two blocks away. Cindy had gone to the CFO’s office to check the foundation’s balance online. Trisha had insisted she do that and if at all possible freeze all transactions. Cindy was just as skeptical as their father, but at least she was willing to give Trisha the benefit of the doubt.

  “I’ve known Gene for over ten years,” her father said, “and I’ve never known him to be anything but trustworthy. Now you’re telling me he’s a crook and a serial killer?”

  The knot in Trisha’s stomach tightened. It wasn’t what her father said that set her on edge, it was how he said it, his dismissive, you-don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about tone. That’s why she hadn’t told him her deepest suspicion, that Gene Lassiter had killed her mother. In her gut she believed it, but she had to think it through logically. She had to re-examine her mother’s murder as a profiler not as a daughter.

  As Trisha paced, in her mind she heard her younger self singing “I Need You,” the song she’d written for her mother. How did Gene know it? How could he possibly know it? She had recorded it, but it was never released, and after her mother’s death, she’d asked her father to destroy the masters. She’d performed it only a couple of times, and only at the house for family and friends as far as she could remember.

  “Trisha,” her father said, “I’ve never criticized your career choice—”

  She threw him a look so sharp it stopped him cold.

  “Never criticized my career choice? Can we be honest for once? You hate what I do.”

  “I do not hate what you do.”

  “It’s not what you wanted for me. You wanted me to be a musician.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You didn’t have to. The disappointed looks, the long sighs, always trying to get me to sing with you. It’s obvious.”

  “Trisha, all a father ever wants for his children is for them to be happy.”

  “You don’t think I’m happy?” She felt like a fraud saying that. She hadn’t been happy since the day her mother died. Her death had colored everything in Trisha’s life, and deep down she feared she was incapable of ever being truly happy.

  Her father’s expression softened. “Can we not fight about this now?”

  “We never fight about it. Maybe that’s the problem.”

  “I’m sorry if I insulted you. What you do with the FBI is honorable and valuable. But what I meant to say is that I think your suspicions about Gene Lassiter are a bit off base. Let’s be honest. Because of what happened to your mother, you tend to see serial killers in every shadow on every street everywhere. To you everyone is a potential killer.”

  A deep sadness weighed her down like an iron coat. He might be right. But someone had to stand up for murder victims and see that they got justice. That was her job, her mission.

  “So is there anything you can do for Gene?” her father said.

  She stared at him as if he’d just punched her in the stomach.

  “Do for him?” she said. “Like what?”

  “Help him get out of jail for starters. Can’t you pull some strings?”

  “No. I don’t have that kind of pull. And if I did, I wouldn’t use it for him. I caught him in the act of attacking a woman, Dad. He was about to kill her. Don’t you get it?”

  “Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty. In this country at least.”

  She went to the sofa and sat down next to him. “Dad, let me explain something to you. Gene Lassiter is now the prime suspect in a string of serial killings. His fate is in the hands of the legal system. I can’t influence that and I would never try. So please don’t ask.”

  He sat forward, elbows on his knees. “How many women is he suspected of killing?”

  “Four and one attempted.”

  “Okay, let me point out something to you. Every single day we earn roughly $200,000 on Gene’s investments. Every day. With one day’s profits, we can have over 50,000 kids inoculated against small pox, to give just one example. Out of that 50,000, ten percent—5,000 kids—would most likely die. The statistics bear this out.”

  “So what are you saying, Dad?”

  “I’m saying that I want you to consider the worth of human life. Five thousand children versus four adult women.”

  “There are plenty of other wealth managers in New York. He’s not the only one.”

  “True, but Gene is extraordinary. Without him, the return on our investments wouldn’t be nearly as high. If we were to lose just one percent on our annual yield, we wouldn’t be able to do as much for the kids, and that would mean thousands of tragedies.”

  “And what about those dead women and their families? They don’t count? They’re just collateral damage? Lassiter has a talent for making money, but because he happens to make it for a good cause, we should just give him a pass? Set him free and let him keep killing? Is that how you see it?”

  “You are so single-minded I can’t talk to you. You refuse to see the big picture.”

  She couldn’t keep it bottled up any longer. “And what if Gene Lassiter was the one who killed mom? Would you feel the same way?” Her voice quavered. “Would you?”

  His voice cracked with sadness. “You see serial killers everywhere.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, regretting that she’d said that. She had no evidence, and the allegation made her seem like an over-emotional idiot. And here they were yet again—him sulking and her feeling terrible for having disappointed him. Too many of their meetings ended like this. It had to stop.

  “Dad, we can’t leave it like this.”

  He refused to look at her.

  “Dad, please.” Tears welled in her eyes. “Don’t shut me out. You always shut me out. You—”

  Cindy barged into the room, her face pale. “It’s gone! All of it!”

  “What?” he said. “What are you talking about?”

  “The money, Dad. Trisha’s right. We looked online. The accounts are empty.”

  He was silent. “Oh, my god,” he finally said in a faraway whisper. His world was imploding.

 
; Trisha took his hand, her heart breaking to see him like this. She thought of the sheet of paper with all the little stick figures.

  Trisha lay on top of the bed covers, staring out the window at the late afternoon sun angling across the rooftops and water towers, the same view her parents had when they’d lived here years ago. The television on the bureau was on, tuned to a baseball game, but she’d turned the sound down. She was exhausted and could have easily fallen asleep in her clothes if she let herself, but after all that had happened that day, she expected another land mine to go off at any moment and she wanted to be ready.

  She’d spent the afternoon at the McCleery Foundation offices, trying to trace the cash, stocks, and bonds that had been held at Lassiter Wealth Management. The people at Lassiter’s office insisted they had no idea what had happened, but they also said that Lassiter maintained complete and in some cases sole control over certain customer accounts, and the McCleery Foundation was one of those. Trisha had been on the phone for hours, calling the FBI’s Financial Fraud Division, explaining the situation again and again to one agent after another, giving them as much information as she could get out of her father and Cindy. One of the more knowledgeable agents in Washington was candid with her. Money laundering had become very sophisticated in recent years. Secret numbered bank accounts, such as the legendary Swiss bank accounts, don’t offer the kind of protection and anonymity they used to, thanks to increased international cooperation. But there were private launderers who for a fee will keep illegally obtained money moving, making it hard to trace, sometimes using it to purchase real estate, oil, gold, grain, weapons, automobiles, virtually anything that could be resold in order to obscure the source income.

  When Trisha had explained all this to her father, he put his face in his hands and cried, and seeing him cry, she cried, too.

  She kicked off her shoes and let them fall to the floor. She stared at the golden light, and her mind wandered. When her parents had lived here back in the seventies, it must have been a wonderful time. They were young and creative, care free, willing to take risks. They slept in this room, saw sunsets over these rooftops, cradled baby Cindy. It must have been such a happy time for them. They could never have imagined that one day they would be the victims of such incredible crimes.