Chapter 2
Tuesday, 9:55 a.m.
Moira McBain stalked through the halls of the Dallas County Correctional Facility, led by a police officer escort. The two walked with brisk efficiency, rounding one corner, then another, Moira’s heels clack-clack-clack-ing against the tile floor. Finally, they stopped in front of the door to an interrogation room. A few feet away stood a tall, earnest looking man in a suit, wearing a name tag with the FBI logo on it, but Moira ignored him for a moment. She turned to the cop, pointed with her thumb to the holding room they stood in front of.
“That him?” she asked briskly.
The cop nodded. “Yup, that’s him. Jack Dunnell. Best of luck to ya,” he told her, shooting her a sympathetic look, and then walked off.
“Hey, partner,” came the suited man’s gentle voice, as he flashed her a smile that she did not return. “You ready for this?”
“I’m always ready,” Moira replied humorlessly, pushing her long, red hair behind her shoulders as if she were getting ready for a job interview. “Dunnell’s a violent psychopath, Andy, narcissistic personality disorder with homicidal ideations. No different than any other skel we’ve busted.”
Andrew Hall gave an ever so slight laugh, taking a step closer to Moira and putting a supportive hand on her upper arm. “This freak show kidnapped little girls and cut ‘em into pieces. This is the kind of case that agents fifteen years on the job need help dealing with, Moira. It’s okay.”
“But I don’t,” Moira replied, giving him a cool smile. “I’ll be fine.”
Andy’s face betrayed a hint of sadness, but he smothered it quickly, removed his hand. “All right. I’ll be right there if you need me.”
The smile warmed a few degrees. “Thanks,” she told him genuinely, her grey eyes growing a bit friendlier.
The moment of warmth passed quickly, and Moira grabbed the door handle and pulled the door open. With Andy a step behind her, she strode toward the table on the other side of which sat Jack Dunnell. He was a large man, with a bald, watermelon-shaped head with a scar near one temple. He sat back in his chair, looking carefree and relaxed, handcuffed hands resting in his lap.
“Well, well,” came his low, rasping voice, which sounded as if someone were rubbing sandpaper against his vocal cords as he spoke. “The welcoming committee’s here.”
“Hello, Mr. Dunnell,” Moira nodded to him, regarding him neutrally. “I’m Moira, this is my partner Andy. We’d like to ask you some questions.”
“’Course you would,” Dunnell replied, a grin breaking out over his face, seeming as calm as if he were meeting the two agents for coffee. “But I always got time to talk to pretty ladies, so go right ahead. By the way,” he added, as if it were an afterthought, “Your accent … Scottish?”
Moira hesitated only slightly as she sat down, Andy sitting in the chair next to her. “… I’m from the Scottish Highlands, yes.”
“Not the point, Dunnell, and you know it,” Andy Hall interjected. “Tell us what you did with the bodies.”
“Mine’s right here,” he pointed to himself with the thumb of one hand. “But, uh, not for you, though. I don’t swing that way. Your partner, though….” He turned his eyes slowly to Moira, let out a wolf whistle.
“The bodies you killed, Dunnell,” Hall replied testily. “You know, little girls. Little pieces. You hid them. We found one of your human remains dumps. What’d you do with the other four bodies?”
Disappointment crept into Dunnell’s features as his eyes remained fixed on Moira. “You need your white knight to protect you all the time?” he asked, rolling his eyes derisively at Andy before returning his glance to her. “Gotta tell ya, not so fond of weak women.”
“You liked weak women well enough when it made them easier for you to cut ‘em up an’ hide ‘em,” Moira replied, trying to quash down the feeling of irritation that she felt rise up in her. Dunnell was trying to get her goat, and she knew it. Any sign that it was working would only encourage him.
Dunnell waved a hand dismissively. “Pffft,” he snorted. “You’re really gonna let the fact that there are a few dead girls out there stand in the way of what we could have together?”
Moira reached a hand into her suit jacket, pulled out a photograph. A young boy, perhaps ten years old, smiling that wide-eyed smile that only children can, before the realities of life set in. She held it at Dunnell’s eye level. “This is Troy Smith,” she told him, voice cold and hard. “His sister, Alice? You killed her. Troy’s an only child now, thanks to you.”
Dunnell once again regarded this assertion dismissively. “Even if I did, what’s it to ya? Not like it’s your sister, or anything.”
It was an off-hand comment, of course. There was no way that Dunnell could have known about Ian, and Moira knew that. And yet she couldn’t stop her face from twitching, just for a moment, eyes threatening to moisten and a lump forming in her throat.
And Dunnell saw it. “Or is it?” he asked, leering at her now like a predator savoring its cornered prey’s fear. “What’s the matter, girl? You think I killed one a’ yours too? You’re a bit old to have one that young….”
“That’s because I don’t,” Moira replied, voice and face now perfectly even, neutral, dispassionate. “You’re imagining things.”
“Maybe,” Dunnell answered, leaning back. “But I don’t think so. I think someone’s mixing business and pleasure. What happened, little girl? House burn down? Kid get into the medicine cabinet?”
Moira sat there, her mind split between thoughts of Ian, and desperately trying not to think of him, because that would make her expression change, betray some emotion, give this madman something to latch onto….
“Or was it worse than that?” Dunnell continued. “Maybe not so much an accident. Maybe something happened while you were left home on watch…?”
Before she even knew what she was doing, Moira was out of her seat, grabbing Dunnell by his orange jumpsuit and slamming him up against the wall. Her vision was red as pure, blinding rage exploded inside her “The only pleasure I’m gonna take is in watching you fry for murder, you sick pile of piss….”
Somewhere behind her, she was sure Andy was calling to her, pleading with her to stop, but she did not listen, could not even hear it. Her entire concentration was focused on the desire to pummel this man into oblivion, to kill him herself in ‘self-defense,’ and it was only the barest measure of self-discipline that prevented her from doing so.
“Agent McBain?” came the unfamiliar voice from behind her. “Agent McBain?”
Moira’s head slowly turned – one of the jail’s guards was calling for her. Slowly, her fist unclenched, she released Dunnell. “Yes?” she asked.
“There’s a phone call for you from the Federal Building, ma’am,” the guard told her, looking dismayed at what he’d just seen. “Are you all right, sir?”
“Fine,” Dunnell answered, licking his lips. “She was just giving me a kiss, that’s all. No need to worry.” He flashed Moira a predatory look, rubbing her nose in it.
“A – all right,” Moira replied. “I’ll be right there.”
She could not get out of the room fast enough.
--
When Moira reunited with her partner ten minutes later, Andy’s face was full of worry. She noticed it, of course, but pretended she didn’t, stopping at a professional distance away from him and speaking in clipped tones, her grey eyes steady on his face. “We’re up early tomorrow, Andy.”
“Oh?” he asked, banishing the worry from his face for a moment. “What’s the word?”
“That was Assistant Director Pileggi. He wants us in on a raid going down at nine a.m. sharp.”
“Raid of what?”
“You know all the house fires we’ve been having recently – the ones the Bureau and local police think are arson?” Moira asked.
“You mean the ones that are apparently completely random and have no apparent pattern?” Andy retorted.
“We
ll, apparently one of the analysts found a pattern, and then some, because they think they’ve found where the perps are holed up. Old abandoned glue-making factory. We’re doing a joint op with the Dallas P.D.”
Andy nodded. “I love the smell of arrest warrants in the morning.”
Moira cracked a very slight smile as a moment’s silence fell between them.
“Moira?”
“Hmm?”
“Who was she?”
“Who was who?”
“Your sister. I didn’t know you had one.”
The first hints of anxiety, even of panic, crept into Moira’s gut, but she covered them with cool confidence. Raising an eyebrow at Andy, she replied calmly, “That’s because I didn’t.”
Andy seemed skeptical. “Well, something Dunnell said shook you up, and it started right about the time he asked if he’d killed your sister. What’s goin’ on here, partner?” he asked, with a warm smile and a gentle hand on her arm.
You should really tell him, came a small voice in her head. He cares about you. He’s never been anything but good to you. She felt herself tempted to obey the voice as she stood there for a long moment, frozen in indecision.
Neither was Ian, she answered the voice with finality, easily silencing it. At least, not until he –
No. If she let her brain go further down that train of thought, if she let herself remember what Ian had done, it would break her composure and bring her to tears. Crying in front of her partner was the last thing she needed to be doing. “You’re imagining things,” she told him simply, brusquely.
“No, I’m not,” he replied, in an even tone that held complete confidence that he was right.
“I never had a sister, and Dunnell certainly didn’t kill anyone related to me. He just – I guess he just spooked me, okay?” she asked, a bit more aggressively than she needed to.
“All right,” he replied, clearly not believing it but knowing better than to press the issue. “I’ll see you back at the office?”
“Yeah, sure,” she replied, giving him a quick smile before turning on her heel and marching toward the exit to the prison.
She waited until she had shut herself in her car before she cried.
Weaver Page 3