Double Vision (15 page)

J
enna hit the answer button and turned on speakerphone. “I hope you're about to tell me where Calliope Jones is, because she isn't home.”

“Luckily, due to an eight-millimeter DARPA tracking chip her parents had installed in her neck without her knowledge after a failed attempt to run away at age ten, all I had to do was hack into the air force's GPS control segment and lock in on the signal. After accessing their secret databases, I was able to learn she's at a very exclusive, clandestine book signing at Two Fifteen Dradenburg,” Irv said.

“Right. Air force GPS segment,” Jenna said, throwing the SUV into reverse and backing up to have room to return the way she came. “That or you checked her Twitter feed.”

“Hey. Be nice to your friendly FBI technical analyst. Just because this time I was an able body in front of a computer screen who could find out where she might be using Google doesn't mean next time you won't need info only I can obtain without getting arrested because the government happens to pay me to find it.”

“You're right, Irv. I'm sorry. Your skills are legendary, and only you could find me a book signing on Twitter quite as
well
as you did,” Jenna said, letting out a laugh. She peeled out of the parking lot of Calliope's apartment building. The woman hadn't answered her cell, either. This would explain it. “But who are you kidding? Even if you weren't FBI, you're way too good to get arrested. Two Fifteen Dradenburg is a thrift-shop bookstore, right?” she asked.

“Ooh. I do love having my ego gently massaged while I do your bidding,” Irv said as he pecked a few more keys on his end. “Yeah, looks like a classy joint. I recommend taking a can of Cheez Whiz to go with the wine.”

“They can't all be on
Oprah
, Irv.”

“Damn right. Can't all make
Psychiatry Today
, either,” he replied.

“I was never in that magazine, smart-ass. It doesn't exist. I'll be back in touch in a little while. In the meantime, send anything and everything you can find on the grocery store patrons we have listed to Dodd, Teva, and Porter.”

“Already on it,” he said.

Jenna hung up, then glanced at Saleda out of the corner of her eye. “The color auburn—the one that I saw at Diana's that made me want to find Calliope—I saw that same color here inside Calliope Jones's place when we were looking at some painting, but I can't remember what it was to save my life. I had to rush out the second we started talking about it that day, because my pager went off about Brooklyn.”

“Don't worry. We'll find out,” Saleda said.

When they arrived at the tiny hole-in-the-wall bookstore, a bell tinkled to announce their arrival.

The store was practically empty, save for the person behind the counter and Calliope Jones, this time wearing a crisp white button-down shirt and sitting behind a rickety table stacked with many copies of a single book. One was turned up on a small easel, and it bore her name in big pink letters along with the title
Gifts of the Greeks.

Jenna and Saleda marched straight to the table.

“Ms. Jones, we need to ask you a few more questions,” Jenna said.

Calliope's mouth formed a smug, thin-lipped smile that dripped contempt. “Agent Ramey, I'm in the middle of a book signing. If you'd needed to talk to me, we had plenty of time during our prior get-together. If you require something further, we'll have to schedule an appointment at another time.”

Jenna glanced around at the empty store. “Yes, I can
tell
you're busy. However, this is a matter of life and death, as I'm sure you can understand. Didn't the Greeks believe in some sort of karma?”

“Not exactly,” Saleda piped up.

Jenna shot her a look but quickly turned back to Calliope.

Calliope, however, had glanced interestedly at Saleda. Slowly, she returned her eyes to Jenna as though she'd much rather have this conversation with the woman beside her, who was clearly more intelligent in all things Greek.

“Your colleague is correct. The Greeks were more concerned with fate. Destiny, if you will.”

“But didn't they constantly have bad things happening to them if they did something wrong? Look at Ulysses!” Jenna sputtered.

Calliope gave a patronizing laugh. “Odysseus wasn't doomed to not make it home for years because of karma, Agent Ramey. He angered a god. That's a different story entirely. Gods punish those who anger them.”

The auburn flashed in again.

“That's exactly what I want to know about. The painting we were looking at when I had to leave your apartment the other day. What was that painting again? Or rather, what were the mythological beings in the painting?”

Calliope sighed, resigned. “The Erinyes. The Furies.”

The human-like forms came back full force in Jenna's head: the tortured man, the stabbed figure, the three angry, spirit-like women. One with a torch . . .

“The Furies. Goddesses of vengeance. We need to know more about them,” Saleda said.

Saleda knew about Greek mythology?

If only the two of them could've been sharing their two brains—one with color associations, the other with this knowledge—maybe they could've avoided Calliope Jones altogether.

“Very good.” Calliope nodded at Saleda. She folded her hands on the table, perfectly manicured nails shining gently in the low light of the store. “The three goddesses of vengeance, sometimes known as the Daughters of Night. The latter is a misnomer, though. They were the children of Mother Earth, or Gaea, and Uranus.”

Thank goodness we have their family tree.

“Did they each perform a different function?” Jenna asked, remembering only one holding a torch. She couldn't quite recall the other two. One might've been draped in cloth . . .

“Oh, yes. Quite. Tisiphone was the avenger of murder, Alecto represented constant anger, and Megaera, oh, Megaera,” Calliope said, laughing jovially, as though thinking of an old friend. “She was the jealous one.”

“Tisiphone avenged murder,” Jenna repeated, confused. The other two had been named with traits, but only the one seemed to have a specific purpose.

Calliope nodded. “Specifically matricide and patricide, though technically she avenged all homicide. We'll just call that her pet peeve. She was described in the
Aeneid
as guarding the gates of Tartarus itself wearing a blood-wet dress.”

“She was the cloth-draped figure in the painting?” Jenna asked.

“You're thinking of Orestes's mother, my sweet. She is wrapped in red cloth in this particular painting and has a golden dagger protruding from her chest. The three Furies are torturing Orestes. He had killed his mother, you see.”

Jenna closed her eyes and found she could recount the painting better than she imagined she could've. The auburn burned through again. The colors lined up, so it was possible these were the voices the Triple Shooter heard in his head. Still, the concept of a homicidal maniac murdering in the name of avengers of homicides sounded either too good to be true or like it had to be stand-up material, especially given that as far as Jenna knew, none of the shooting victims had killed anyone.

“Maybe the victims each had a parent who died, and the Triple Shooter somehow placed blame on them for their parents' deaths?” Saleda ventured. Saleda seemed to be thinking along the same lines.

“What did the other two avenge?” Jenna asked.

“Megaera, the jealous one, was particularly famous for punishing infidelity,” Calliope said.

“Makes sense.”

“Alecto's job was to castigate moral crimes, particularly those against other people,” Calliope continued.

“Except infidelity?” Saleda asked.

Calliope looked disappointed in her prize pupil. “No, not except infidelity. The Furies each had particular crimes to which they had a
special aversion
, but don't get me wrong. As an entity, they went after those who provoked their ire or those they were called upon to torture. They punished matricide and patricide first and foremost, but they also pursued other criminals and would
never
stop following them.”

“What kinds of other criminals besides those committing infidelity? What were the moral crimes you mentioned?” Jenna asked.

Calliope shrugged. “Anyone who broke rules in society, especially those not governed by society. They regulated ethical concerns. Killing mom and pop was big, but disrespecting them was bad, too. A parent calling the curse of the Erinyes on a child wasn't taken lightly. Lack of respect for authority in general, in fact, was something the Furies took up as a cause. Impertinence toward the gods, breaking oaths. That sort of thing. Parents weren't free from punishment, by any means, though. A mother harming her child, for example, would incur the wrath of the Furies. They were known in particular for protecting the defenseless: children, animals, beggars . . .”

Jenna snapped to attention. “Beggars?”

“The down-on-their luck, defenseless ones, yes,” Calliope answered.

Jenna and Saleda exchanged a glance. Brooklyn and the homeless man. Someone had to have seen that exchange.

Jenna whipped out her cell phone. “Irv, we need to find out if there are any surveillance cameras outside the Student Life Center at Woodsbridge Community College. I need video from the day Brooklyn Satterhorne died. That afternoon, from every single possible angle you can get your hands on.”

“Oh, if only Google Earth kept continuous video flow,” Irv replied.

“One day, Irv,” Jenna said.

“You keep promising me that . . .” he said, but she could hear him push back from the table, his yawn giving away his stretching. “On it. Anything else, my liege?”

Jenna thought for a minute. The previous Triple Shooter victims had probably committed some kind of moral sin, as well, but the chances of them learning what those might've been right now were slim. And yet . . .

She stepped away from the table and hopefully out of Calliope Jones's earshot.

“Start thinking now about ways we can find out if the other Triple Shooter victims were, um, amoral.”

Irv laughed in her ear. “You want me to see if they went to confession or had any recent purchases of scarlet letters in their receipt bins, or what?”

Jenna shook her head. “I have no idea yet. But I will. Talk soon.”

She hung up and stepped back to the table.

Saleda didn't ask about the conversation because she was still engaging Calliope with question after question. “If they never stopped pursuing the criminals they were after, did they eventually kill the criminals they tortured, then?”

“Not literally,” Calliope said. “Some committed suicide, but most were simply tortured into madness.”

Madness. Schizophrenia.

If the UNSUB believes he's hearing the Furies, does he believe they're torturing him for somehow being dishonorable?

Schizophrenics usually weren't that logical. Still, the idea couldn't be discounted. All the same, the idea of the Furies had to have been planted in the shooter's head at some point. Could've been anywhere at any time, though. Trying to track down sources of mythological learning for someone whose identity they didn't know would be about as fruitful as looking for the next Triple Shooter victim before he killed her.

But the question of who the
real
victim was supposed to be in the grocery store still existed. Now they could look even further into the profiles of the patrons at Lowman's that day to see who it might've been rather than just how they meshed with the number three.

“If our UNSUB feels he's being followed by the Furies—hearing them—well, is there anything in mythology that he might do, anything he might turn to to get away from them?” Jenna asked. Maybe he thought that by avenging their wrongdoings
for
them, like once he'd done a certain number of tasks as such, they'd let him go? They would leave him alone?

Calliope grunted. “If your killer believes the Furies are torturing him, then good luck. That was why so many of those they punished ended up killing themselves. The Erinyes are merciless. The Furies will never stop.”

A
s Jenna and Saleda pulled out of the bookstore's parking lot, Jenna searched for something—
anything—
to tell Irv to look for in the profiles of the people inside the grocery store during the shooting. Something that might give them some idea of who the Triple Shooter was after—chiefly, who collided with some sort of immorality that would've drawn the attention of the Triple Shooter and, in his head, the Furies.

“So what's the plan?” she asked Saleda.

Saleda shook her head slowly as she navigated the SUV through the streets. “I'd say we could take closer looks at the previous Triple Shooter victims prior to the grocery store to see if we could learn what mysterious morality crimes they committed, then follow the trail of those in an effort to link it back to the killer the same way we're hoping the surveillance footage from the college will give us something. But I don't think the old victims are a useful tack. Actually attempting to determine the ‘sins'—or whatever caused the Triple to target these girls—this long after the crimes were committed would be nothing more than hoping to get lucky in a guessing game. Unless you have better ideas than I do.”

“I wish. I'm on the same page, though. I don't think finding the ‘sins' of the previous victims is what we need to focus on,” Jenna said. Her comment to Irv from a few minutes before popped into her head. “What we need is some way to look at the so-called ‘morality' of the people in the grocery store at the time of the mass shooting. One of them was the target, and figuring out which might be our best shot at tracing how this guy came to be there to off him or her.”

“Good luck with that. My ideas were sketchy for that angle on the old Triple Shooter victims. They didn't magically turn into something more worthwhile when we started talking about the grocery store victims. The only thing I can think of is to do more interviews,” Saleda replied.

Jenna sighed and leaned back, intentionally banging her head against the seat's headrest. Asking people to confide all the ways in which an objective party might consider them to be immoral and getting useful answers was about as likely as she and Claudia making a party of burying the proverbial hatchet and skipping away from the fresh hole as best buds. Even if the survivors of the grocery store shootings were willing to tell their darkest secrets—which they most likely wouldn't be—if they happened to be anything like Brooklyn and somewhat
subjectively
awful, they wouldn't have the self-awareness to explain that they treated other human beings like crap.

“Okay, so other than interviews, if you were looking into someone's life and a person's actions, what would you use to try to assess their . . . I don't know . . . moral compass?” Jenna asked.

“Shit,” Saleda said. “Uh, movie preferences? Maybe Netflix downloads? Music taste?”

The pearl pink color Jenna associated with subjectivity flashed in. “Too individualized to personal taste. The music one person thinks is immoral doesn't faze another. We need something more universal. Something that applies to or at least exists on the same plane as the guidelines Calliope Jones laid out regarding moral crimes the Furies punish.”

“All right. So sexual deviances, maybe. Swing groups? Cheating. How we'd know much of this kind of detail on any one of these people we're talking about is beyond me, though. Maybe there's some giant list of swingers kept on the Internet I don't know about, though I daresay Irv could dig it up . . .”

Jenna laughed. “Yeah. I can just see us arranging stakeouts on thirty people to determine the chances any one of them might be cheating on a spouse. I'm sure the Bureau would be happy to clear that use of manpower.”

“Yes. And judges tend to giddily approve search warrants and seizures of victims' property when we can't yet prove any of it directly relates to a suspect at all. ‘We know one of these people is immoral' is a little too vague for any judge without a blood alcohol level of point five to grant,” Saleda said with her own chuckle.

“Point five if they were even victims,” Jenna countered. “They're not, though. They're
potential
victims. Of a
past
crime. So now we don't need a judge who registers point five on a Breathalyzer so much as one with enough whiskey in his bloodstream that he can't take one because he's passed out. We find him, we're covered. One of us holds the paperwork still, and the other moves the pen across it in his hand.”

“Even better. Now we just need to know where to go to find sloppy-drunk judges in the middle of the afternoon. Know any favorite watering holes?”

Jenna's phone vibrated, and she laughed as she pulled it out. She'd kind of hoped it would be Yancy, seeing as how they hadn't talked since their spat, but it was Charley, wondering whether or not he should be worried if Ayana ate a bath crayon. Great.

She replied that no, unless Ayana had choked on it, he had nothing to worry about. The things were as nontoxic as they came, which, sadly, she couldn't say for most things in Ayana's life.

Truth was, though, A had no idea her life was at all strange or different from that of any other kid. She didn't know any better than having her grandfather and uncle take care of her every day while Mommy was at work, or that there was something extremely disturbing about living in a house you were locked into with a series of nearly undecipherable locks and passwords that changed
far
more often than Uncle Charley's socks. Funny how kids could have that sort of perspective, whereas adults tended to lose that innocence.

Color burst forth in Jenna's mind. A terra-cotta shade, one she'd seen before.
But where?

She closed her eyes, concentrated on the hue, tried to hold it there.
Remember.

Dodd.

The mental images of him flew through her brain: Dodd in Liam Tyler's house just before he'd left; Dodd in the SUV on the way back to Quantico following their last outing, when he'd talked about no longer having a family; Dodd squatting on the floor in front of Molly Keegan that first time Jenna had seen him.

It was the color she'd come to associate with Dodd, but finally she understood why it was flashing in at this very moment. When she'd first met Dodd, he'd been interviewing Molly Keegan without so much as a tip from Yancy to go on.

“I only came over because she
is
a kid, and kids
are
different . . . Kids are honest, notice things some people don't,”
he'd said when she had asked him why he was questioning Molly.
“She has a unique point of view.”

How this little girl kept finding her way into the case, Jenna might never know. But one thing seemed for sure right now.

“Saleda, you aren't going to like this, but I think we
do
need to conduct another interview. With Molly Keegan.”

Saleda's neck arched back. “What? Why?”

Jenna blew out a breath, already resigning herself to the next sparring match with Liam Tyler at worst, another unpleasant encounter with him at best. Hell, she didn't blame him. If she was the girl's parent—or parental
figure
—she'd want their family to be allowed to move on as well as possible and stop thinking about this whole mess as much as they could, too.

“Because,” Jenna said, “she might be the only person who was in that grocery store who could give us some conjecture that might show the good guys from the ‘possibly immoral' guys on instinct. It's a talent only children have most of the time, because everyone else knows too much, is too ingrained with social protocol. For most, the norm has become not to look, not to stare. To give people
too much
benefit of the doubt.”

“Are you sure this is absolutely necessary? The only way to do whatever it is you think we need to do? This isn't going to make my day or my career any easier. Teva's already been over there once today to talk to Molly about how she found Eldred Beasley's phone number and to take a statement from her about their conversation.”

“But you're making my point for me, Saleda. Forget for a minute all the implications of that she
could
find him to contact him based only on her observations. The sole reason she initiated that contact was because she noticed where no one else did that he—a man who'd been as close to the shooter as she had, if not closer—had been missing from the room where the witnesses who saw the shooter were held until statements could be taken.
She
called Beasley because she had noticed he should've been included in the group none of us noticed to put him in,” Jenna said.

“I know, I know. It's just . . .” Saleda groaned. “Just be for damned sure this is the right step, Jenna. The only step. Please? For me? My sanity?” Saleda said.

“I
am
sure,” Jenna said, Dodd's words haunting her thoughts. “She notices things some people don't.”