Mary’s present assignment was to sort through all the unidentified mail. They could tell it was from outside the Bureau, as it came addressed to the Behavioral Science Unit, which still existed as part of the Academy program but no longer consulted with police agencies in the apprehension and profiling of serial criminals. In 1965, the name was changed to the Investigative Support Unit, or ISU.
She scratched a spot on her eyebrow, giving thought to tossing the pile of mail into the trash can. But no, FBI agents never shirked their duty. Right, she thought, peering up at Mark Conrad as he walked past her desk in his blue Brooks Brothers suit, paisley tie, and starched white shirt.
Mary had previously been employed by the Ventura police department. They had routinely cracked jokes to break the tension. The overall atmosphere at the Bureau was what she imagined it must be inside the Vatican. People talked in whispers, everything was secret, and everyone wore the same conservative clothes.
At fifty-eight, Adams was a large man with prominent features, a furrowed brow, and a serious demeanor befitting a man of his tenure and responsibilities. He suffered from what Mary called a double whammy. His once-dark hair was both graying and thinning. Since his door was open, she walked in.
“Have a seat, Stevens.”
The Investigative Support Unit was housed in a subbasement sixty feet below the Academy gun vault. At one time, it had been a bomb shelter for high-ranking U.S. government officials in the event of a nuclear war. It was depressing not having any windows, particularly considering the nature of the work. Mary was accustomed to warm weather, sunny skies, and sandy beaches.
Adams’s walls were covered with crime scene photos from a case he was profiling for the NYPD. The victims were all women in their late seventies to early eighties, and looking at their defiled and brutalized bodies seemed obscene. Although Mary had seen the images on several occasions, she still had an urge to walk over and rip them off the wall. The women looked fragile, even the ones who were physically large. Looking at them reminded her of her mother. She’d walked in on her not long ago while she was undressing, and had been saddened by the sight of her age-ravaged body. She folded her hands in her lap, waiting for Adams to begin speaking.
“I’ve been asked to have a word with you about the way you dress,” he said, glancing down at her stylish heels. “What if you got in a foot pursuit in those shoes?”
“I broke the state record in the four-forty when I was in college,” Mary said, giving him a confident smile. “No disrespect, sir, but I could outrun anyone in this unit regardless of what kind of shoes I’m wearing.”
“That may be true,” Adams said, giving her a stern look. “The problem isn’t just your shoes. Those knit sweaters you wear are too provocative, and the colors are too bold. They don’t fit the image the Bureau wants to project. You knew that when you signed on.”
“I’m wearing a black suit, sir,” Mary countered, swinging a shapely leg. “You want me to wear a black shirt, too? Someone might run over me in the parking lot.”
He winced, then blurted out, “Why can’t you wear a regular white shirt, for God’s sake? You’re exposing your cleavage.”
“Don’t you have anything better to do than worry about what I wear? You’ve got me sorting mail, so it’s not like anyone’s going to see me. I promise I’ll wear old-lady shoes as long as you don’t bitch at me about my sweaters. Jim Hunt wore a pink shirt last week and you didn’t say anything to him.”
“It was beige, not pink.”
“It wasn’t beige,” Mary argued, refusing to back down. “I know pink when I see it. At least a few people around here have kept up with the times. I don’t see why we have to dress like undertakers to do our jobs. In case you don’t know, they have color TV sets now.”
Adams looked exhausted. Mary was a relentless woman, which had served her well as a homicide detective, but made her difficult to supervise. When his phone rang, he grabbed it. “Wear anything you want. I have to take this call.”
“But when will you assign me . . . ?”
Adams didn’t answer. He either didn’t hear her, or he thought she was being disrespectful. Her spirits sank. She returned to her desk and plunked down in her chair.
Most of the letters were from mental cases, or just well-intentioned people who didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. One lady wrote that her neighbors were terrorists because she’d heard them speaking a foreign language. They also had “dark skin” and looked “shifty.” For all Mary knew, Mrs. Early’s neighbors had been speaking Spanish. But she had strict orders to forward anything even slightly suspicious to the NSB, the National Security Branch. The NSB had been formed in 1995 under a presidential directive. She tossed the lady from Idaho’s letter into the outgoing bin and picked up a manila envelope.
Mary felt something inside the package. She couldn’t be certain, but she thought it was a cassette tape. The envelope didn’t have a return address on it, which made it somewhat interesting. She knew it didn’t contain anthrax or explosives because it had already been opened and screened in the main mailroom. The unit got a good deal of mail from mental patients, containing all sorts of odd objects—fingernail clippings, pictures torn out of magazines, maps, keys, clothing, even pubic hair.
Jim Hunt stuck his head in the door to her office. At forty-five, he was an attractive man with rust-colored hair and freckled skin. “How long are you going to be assigned to this duty? Seems like a waste of talent.”
“From your ears to God’s,” Mary said, fingering the cassette tape. “This came in today’s mail. Do you know anyone who has a tape player?”
“Pete has one, I think. If he isn’t there, look in the bottom drawer of his credenza. That’s the last place I saw it. Those things are almost obsolete. They don’t even put them in cars anymore.”
“I hear you,” Mary said, getting up and heading down the narrow hallway to Pete Cook’s office.
Cook was out, so she checked the credenza and found a dust-covered cassette player. Before she left, she grabbed a sticky note and wrote to Cook that Jim Hunt said it was okay to borrow his tape recorder. All this effort, she thought, and the tape probably contained nothing more than meaningless drivel. That is, if there was anything on it at all. Adams had promised to give her a case to profile by the end of the week. She’d been on board a month, and he’d allowed her to sit in on team meetings, but she needed to sink her teeth into something meaty.
During her first year with the Bureau, Mary had worked out of the FBI’s headquarters in Washington. She had made a name for herself by cracking a drug counterfeiting ring, which had been generating over a hundred million per year. They began by producing phony Viagra pills and then moved on to medications to treat high blood pressure, cholesterol, and heart disease. The majority of the counterfeit drugs were sold over the Internet, yet some of them managed to make their way into legitimate pharmacies, particularly the independently owned stores who had to compete with the chains.
Mary had tracked down a group of individuals in China who had copied the size, color, markings, and packaging of mainstream drugs such as Viagra, Lipitor, Valium, and dozens of others. They were also producing a counterfeit version of Tamiflu.
When she’d taken the job at the Bureau, she had relocated her mother, a retired high school principal, to Washington. Thelma Stevens hadn’t wanted to leave Ventura, but she was seventy-three now and needed to be near her only living child. Mary’s brother had died in a car accident years ago, and the only people her mother had left in L.A. were her friends from church, most of them as old as, if not older than, her mother.
When she jumped at the chance to transfer to ISU so she could work with Adams and his team, she tried to talk her mother into relocating to Quantico. The woman had staunchly refused. Now Mary had to fight the traffic into D.C. on a regular basis. It was fine now, but when she got busy, it could develop into a major problem.
The only good thing about the year she’d spent in Washingto
n was Lowell Redstone, a criminal attorney she had been dating. Her mother despised Lowell, claiming he was a pompous opportunist, which wasn’t that far from the truth. Mary had no intention of getting married, so she didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Anyway, her affair with Lowell was going south. She wasn’t any good at long-distance relationships. If a man wasn’t in her bed, he wasn’t her man.
Before she left Cook’s office, Mary studied the crime scene photos tacked up on the wall. They had a serial killer at work in Wisconsin. The UNSUB, FBI lingo for an unidentified subject, had kidnapped five prepubescent boys from shopping malls throughout the state. They’d been taken to remote locations, where they were raped, sodomized, and strangled. Their lifeless bodies had been discarded on the side of the road like rubbish.
As twisted as it sounded, Mary found death intriguing. When she’d started working homicide, she could go through crime scene photos and autopsy reports as if she were flipping through magazines in a dental office. If the victims were children, however, her stomach ended up in her throat. The maniacs who killed children were abominations. If given the chance, she’d take one out in a minute. By working in the ISU, she hoped to learn what made them tick. The better she knew them, the quicker she could get the bastards off the streets.
SIX
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 27
VENTURA, CALIFORNIA
“All rise,” the bailiff announced. “Division Forty-seven of the Ventura County Superior Court is now in session, Judge Lillian Forrester presiding.”
After climbing the steps to the bench, Lily saw the defendant standing next to his public defender at the counsel table. An African-American in his mid-forties, Floyd Burkell owned a shoe repair shop on the west side of Ventura. His son had been thirteen at the time his father stabbed him to death. Burkell had slaughtered his wife as well. Together, the stab wounds came to a total of twenty-three.
Floyd Burkell had a gentle, almost sweet look to his face. He didn’t look disturbed or mentally ill. He seemed at peace with himself. The customers who had frequented his shop were shocked when they learned the terrible crimes he had committed. They described the defendant as kind, honest, hardworking, and a pillar of the community. Murderers seldom looked or acted the part, Lily knew, something more people should realize.
Burkell had built a nice life for himself. He owned his own business, employed a number of people, had a son on the honor roll, and resided in a three-hundred-thousand-dollar home in a middle-class neighborhood. Having moved to California from the slums of Detroit, he was the personification of the American dream. How could he knock it all down in a frenzied burst of incomprehensible violence?
It happened, though. Ordinary, normally civilized individuals suddenly exploded and turned into killing machines. After she and Shana were raped, Lily had experienced her own murderous rage.
Too many things had fallen into place that night, almost as if the events that followed had been ordained by a higher power. She was the supervisor over the sex crimes division at the time, and the court had just released a man who’d assaulted a prostitute, because the woman had failed to appear at the preliminary hearing. Without a victim, the state had no case. The man’s file had been in her briefcase, and her father’s shotgun was in the garage. She had motive, opportunity, and a weapon. She wouldn’t have followed through if only one of these ingredients had been missing.
Lily flew backward in time and was holding her twelve-year-old daughter, stroking her hair and softly whispering in her ear.
The man who had raped Lily and her daughter was gone. She tried to lock his image in her mind, the glimpse she’d got of him in the light from the bathroom just before he had fled—the red sweatshirt, the gold chain with a crucifix, which had struck her several times in the face.
“It’s over, baby,” Lily told Shana. “He’s gone. He’ll never hurt you again.” The shrill of the siren was fading from earshot. No one had called the police. Their agonized screams had gone unnoticed.
Time stood still as she rocked Shana in her arms and listened to her pitiful, wracking sobs. A million things raced through her mind. Two or three times she tried to pull away so she could call the police. Shana was holding her so tightly, though, that she stopped. He was long gone by now, lost in the night. Every sordid detail replayed itself in her mind. A hard ball of rage had formed in the pit of her stomach and was spilling bile into her mouth.
“Shana, darling, I’m going to get up now, but I’ll be right here. I’m going to get a wash rag from the bathroom, and then I’m going to call the police and your father.” Lily inched away and pulled on her robe, tying the sash loosely around her waist. The rage was somehow calming her, moving her around like a machine with a great churning engine.
“No,” Shana shouted in a voice Lily had never heard before. “You can’t tell Dad what he did to me.” She reached out and grabbed the edge of her mother’s robe as she tried to get up, causing it to open and expose her nakedness. Lily quickly retied it again. “You can’t tell anyone!”
The face was a child’s, but the eyes were a woman’s. She would never be a child again, never see the world as a safe place without fear. Lily cupped her hand over her mouth, biting her knuckle as she stifled a scream that welled up inside of her. “We must call the police. We must call Daddy.”
“No!” Shana screamed again. “I think I’m going to be sick.” She ran to the bathroom, regurgitating the contents of her stomach on the tile floor before she got to the commode.
Lily dropped to the floor with her and wiped her face with cold towels. She reached up and opened the door to the medicine cabinet, pulling out a bottle of Valium a doctor had recently prescribed due to the stress of her pending divorce. Her hands were shaking as she poured out two pills, one for herself and one for Shana. “Take this,” she said, handing her the pill with a paper cup of water. “It will relax you.”
Shana swallowed the pill and watched with round eyes as her mother tossed one into her own mouth. She let Lily help her back to bed. Once again, she cradled her in her arms.
“We’re going to call Daddy and we’re going to go home, leave this house. I won’t call the police, but we’re going to tell Daddy. We have no choice, Shana.”
Lily knew exactly what she would be subjecting her daughter to if she reported the crime. The police would stay for hours, forcing them to relive the nightmare, sealing every detail forever in their memory. Then there was the hospital and medical exam. They would probe Shana’s ravaged body and comb her public hairs. They would swab their mouths. If they apprehended him, months of court appearances and testimony would consume their lives. Shana would have to sit on the witness stand and repeat every sordid moment of this night in lurid detail to a room full of strangers. She would have to rehearse her testimony with the prosecutor like lines in a play. In that room, breathing the same air, he would also sit. Then the ordeal would become known. A kid at Shana’s school might learn what had happened and spread it around.
The most despicable thought of all, a fact Lily alone was far too aware of, was that after all they had suffered, would suffer, while the nightmares were still the sweating, waking, screaming kind, before they could even begin to resume a normal life, he would be free. The term for aggravated rape was only eight years, out in four. He would even receive credit for time served before and after the crime. No, she thought, he would receive a consecutive term for the oral copulation, amounting to a few more years. It was not enough. And she felt certain he had committed other vicious crimes, maybe even murder. She recalled the taste of dried old blood on the knife. This crime was a murder: the annihilation of innocence.
She also had to consider her career, her life’s work, her dream of becoming a superior court judge. A door was closing in her face. Thought by thought, she was moving further away from reporting the rape to the authorities.
His face kept appearing before her, and somewhere in the far reaches of her mind, Lily knew she had seen him before. Her m
emory of the attack clouded the past and she was no longer able to distinguish reality from imagination.
She called Shana’s father, then hung up and looked at the clock. A mere two hours to destroy their lives. What would this do to John? Shana was his life, his shining star, his sheltered baby girl. When Shana was born, John had shoved Lily away and centered all his attention on their child: holding her, kissing her, when he no longer kissed his wife. Starting to tremble, Lily hugged herself. She had to be strong.
It seemed like only minutes before John arrived. Time had been standing still, hanging over them like a powerful storm, its unleashed fury contained and waiting. He appeared in the doorway to the bedroom. “What in the hell is going on here? The front door is wide open.” His tone was accusing, demanding, and it was vented at the woman who had left him.
Shana’s muscles had begun to relax in Lily’s arms. Her breathing was shallow, her body too still. “Daddy,” she said, hearing his voice and crying out. “Oh, Daddy.” He ran to her side of the bed and Lily released her. As John engulfed her in his large arms, she pressed her body to his chest, sobbing, “Oh, Daddy.”
The Cheater Page 5