THE FBI THRILLERS COLLECTION Books 1-5 (45 page)

“No man. How about I pour some milk in your tea? Is that manly?”

“Sometimes, but not in tea. Keep it straight.”

She wanted to smack him. But he’d made her smile, a good-sized smile. She walked to a pristine white wallboard and ostentatiously wrote Equal on it with a blue washable Magic Marker. “There. All done. You happy?”

“Happy enough. Thanks. You call Chico yet?”

“Things have been happening a bit fast. I haven’t had the time.”

“If you don’t, I’ll have to take you back to the gym and throw you around.”

“The first dozen or so falls weren’t that bad.”

“I went easy on you.”

“Ollie told me you nearly tromped him into the floor.”

“At least Ollie’s a guy, so he didn’t whine.”

She just grinned at him. “This cup is too expensive to waste throwing at you.”

“Good. Do you have just plain old Lipton’s tea bags?”

“Yes.”

He watched her pour the hot water over the tea bags. “If it wasn’t a guy who made you cry, then what did?”

“I could throw a tea bag at you.”

“All right, I’ll back off, but I don’t like to see my agents upset—well, upset by something else other than me and my big mouth. Now, let’s talk about our game plan in Boston. That’s why I busted in on you this evening. There’s a lot we need to get settled before we descend on the Boston PD.”

“You’re really not going to fire me?”

“Not yet. I want to get everything out of you, then if I’m still pissed off that you lied to me, that’s when I’ll boot you out.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You got what you wanted. How sorry can you be?”

He was right about that. She was a hypocrite. She gave him a big smile. “I’m not sorry at all. I’m so relieved, so grateful, that I’ll let you say anything sexist you want, at least for tonight.”

“You won’t whine about getting up early tomorrow, will you? The flight’s at seven-thirty
A
.
M
.”

She groaned, then toasted him with her teacup. “Thank you, sir . . . Dillon. I won’t make you sorry.”

“Somehow I can’t imagine that you won’t.”

Savich left at ten o’clock, singing to himself as he left. It had to be a line from a country-and-western song, but of course she’d never heard it before. She grinned as she heard his deep voice drawl,
“A good ole boy Redneck is what I aim to be, nothing more, nothing less will ever do for me. All rigged out in my boots and jeans, my belt buckle wide, my belly lean . . .”

She closed the door, refastened the chains and clicked the dead bolt into place. That was the third or fourth time she thought she’d heard him singing country-western words. Oddly, her classical leanings weren’t offended. What could be wrong with music that made you smile?

They hadn’t spoken much about the case after all. No, he’d just checked out her digs and told her she needed a CD player. It was clear what kind of music he preferred.

She packed methodically. She prayed he would help her find the man who had killed her sister.

12

S
AVICH SAID
to Lacey, “as I told you last night, Detective Budnack will be meeting us at the station. It’s District Six in South Boston. They found Hillary Ramsgate in an abandoned warehouse on Congress Street. Somebody called it in anonymously, either the killer or a homeless person, probably the latter. But they’ve got the guy’s voice on tape so when we catch him, we can make a comparison.

“He’ll have all the police reports, the autopsy, the results of any other forensic tests they’ve done as of today. I’d appreciate it if you’d go over all this stuff. You got all our things?”

“Yes,” she said, turning in her seat to face him fully. “Also, I doubt that Detective Budnack understood the game. He knew there was a game because of the note saying Hillary Ramsgate lost and had to pay the forfeit, but he didn’t understand what it meant.”

“No, but it’s his first hit with this guy. By the time we get there, he’ll have spoken to the police in San Francisco and probably read most of the reports. Tell me your take on his game, Sherlock. I’m sure you’ve got one.”

They accepted coffee from the flight attendant, then settled back. The coffee was dreadful, but it was at least hot. She looked hard at her coffee. A lock of hair had come loose from its clamp and hung down along the side of her face, curving along her jawline. He watched her jerk it behind her ear, never looking away from that coffee of hers. What was going on here?

She said finally, “I’ve pictured this in my mind over the years, refined it, changed it here and there, done many profiles on him, and now I think I’ve got it exactly the way he did it. He knocks the woman on the head and takes her to a deserted building, the bigger the building the better. In three instances, he used abandoned and condemned houses; in one, he used a house whose owners were out of town. He’s intimately familiar with the buildings and houses. He’s set up all his props and arranged the sets. He’s turned them into houses of horror, then, finally, into mazes.

“When the woman regains consciousness, she’s alone and unharmed. She isn’t in complete darkness, although it’s late night outside. There’s a faint light, just enough so she can see about a foot or two all around her. What she does first is call out. She’s afraid to have an answer and just as afraid when there’s dead silence. Then she’s hopeful that he’s left her there alone. She yells again.

“Then she gets herself together and tries to find a way out of the building. But there isn’t a way out. There are doors, but they’re bolted. She’s nearly hysterical now. She knows something is very wrong. Then she finds the string that was lying beside where she’d awakened.

“She doesn’t understand the string, but she picks it up and begins to follow it. It leads her through convoluted turns, over obstacles, into mirrors he’s set up to scare the hell out of her when she suddenly comes upon her own image. Then the string runs out. Right at the narrow entrance to this set he’s put into place.

“Then perhaps he laughs, calls out to her, tells her that she’s going to fail and when she fails, he’s going to have to punish her and she won’t like that. Yes, he will have to punish her because she will lose the game. But he doesn’t tell her why he’s doing it. Why should he? He’s enjoying her ignorance. Maybe he even calls out to her, taunts her, before she walks into the maze. That’s possible, too. The note thing. He only did that with the first woman he killed in San Francisco. It’s as though he’s identified what he’s done and the next time and the time after that, it isn’t necessary. Everyone will know who he is.”

He said slowly, “You are awfully certain of what he does, Sherlock.”

“I told you, I’ve thought and thought about it. The shrinks believe—as do the FBI Profilers—that he watches every move she makes, memorizes every expression on her face, possibly even films her. I’m not so sure about that.

“But I bet he even tells her she can win the game if she runs, if she manages to reach the center of the maze. She does run, hoping, praying that he isn’t lying, that she can save herself, and she runs right into this maze he’s built since there’s nowhere else for her to go. There are dead ends in the maze. Finally she finds her way to the center. She’s won. She’s breathing hard. She’s terrified, hopeful, both at the same time. She’s made it. She won’t be punished.

“He’s waiting for her there.” She had to stop trembling. She drew a deep breath, took another drink of her now-cold coffee, then said with a shrug, “This much was obvious when everything was reconstructed by experts after the fact.”

Savich said, “So then he stabs her in the chest and in the abdomen until she’s dead. Is everyone you know of certain he does this when she makes it to the center of the maze?”

“Yes. Instead of winning, she loses. He’s there, with a knife. He also cuts out her tongue. This fact never appeared in any publicized reports so that any confessions could be easily verified.”

“Why does he do that?”

She didn’t look at him. “Probably to shut her up forever. He killed only women. He hates them.”

“A game,” Savich said slowly, looking down at a ragged thumbnail. “A game that leads to certain death. I don’t understand why she loses if she manages to find the center of the maze. As you said, usually that means you’ve won. But not with this guy. You have any ideas about why he kills her when she makes it to the center of the maze?”

“Not a clue.”

But she did and he didn’t know how she did. “Do you remember the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur?”

“Yes,” she said. “I remember that at the center of the cave, Theseus came upon the Minotaur. But Theseus didn’t lose. He killed the Minotaur.”

“And Ariadne led him out with a string.”

“You’re thinking that maybe he sees himself as Theseus and that the women are the Minotaur? I don’t know. It doesn’t make much sense to me.”

“But you know that it makes perfect sense to him. How much of a study did you do of the legend?”

“Not all that much really,” she said.

“Do it when we get home again.”

“But even if I happen to discover more parallels between what the killer does and the Theseus legend, it won’t tell us anything about the man’s identity, about how to find him. Do you know that he used the same abandoned building for two of his victims in San Francisco? It was down in the China Basin. The very same building! Then the police put a watch on it, but it was too late. He was surely laughing at them, at all of us, because we were helpless.”

“It surprises me that no one saw anything. There are usually lots of homeless around those abandoned buildings. And cops do patrol. To set up all the props, he would have had to carry stuff in and out of the buildings, yet no one appeared to see anything. He would have had to transport his props. A truck? He had to make them himself or buy them somewhere.”

“Yes, but only once. He took away most of his props after he killed each woman. He left just enough so the police would know what he’d done.”

“And still no one saw anything. That boggles the mind.”

“Evidently one old man saw him, because he was found strangled near one of the abandoned buildings. It was the same kind of string used to get to the center of the maze. He wanted the cops to know it had been him.”

“What did you mean that he was laughing at us?” She had been nineteen years old at the time her sister was murdered. How was she involved? He would find out later. She was just shaking her head at him as he said, very quietly, “You’re on a cycle too, Sherlock. A seven-year cycle. He’s done nothing for seven years, just gone about his business, probably stewing inside but not enough to make him snap. As for you, you’ve given the last seven years of your life to him.”

She was stiff, her eyes colder than the ice frozen over her windshield the previous winter. It was what Douglas had said
to her, what her father had said: “It’s none of your business.”

“I suppose your family has told you it isn’t very healthy.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“I imagine you couldn’t bear it, that you couldn’t bear to let your sister go, not the way she was removed, like the pawn in a game that she had to lose.”

She swallowed. “Yes, that’s close enough.”

“There’s more, isn’t there? A whole lot more.”

She was very pale, her fingers clutched around the paper coffee cup. “No, there’s nothing more.”

“You’re lying. I wish you wouldn’t, but you’ve lied for a very long time, haven’t you?”

“There’s nothing more. Please, stop.”

“All right. Do you want to shoot this guy once we nab him? You want to put your gun to his head and pull the trigger? Do you want to tell him who you are before you kill him? Do you think killing him will free you?”

“Yes. But that’s unlikely to happen. If I can’t shoot him then I want him to go to the gas chamber, not be committed the way Russell Bent will be. At least that’s what my brother-in-law, Douglas Madigan, told me.”

“No one knows yet if Russell Bent will be judged incompetent to stand trial. Don’t jump the gun. Life imprisonment without parole isn’t good enough?”

“No. I want him dead. I don’t want to worry about him escaping and killing more women. I don’t want to worry that he might be committed to an institution, then fool the shrinks and be let loose. I don’t want him still breathing after he killed seven—no, eight—people. He doesn’t deserve to breathe my air. He doesn’t deserve to breathe any air.”

“I’ve heard the opinion that since killing a murderer doesn’t bring back the victim, then as a society we shouldn’t impose the death penalty, that it brings us down to the murderer’s level, that it’s nothing but institutional revenge and destructive to our values.”

“No, of course it doesn’t bring the victim back. It’s a ridiculous argument. It makes no sense at all. It should be very straightforward: If you take another human life, you don’t deserve to go on living. It’s society’s punishment, it’s society’s revenge against a person who rips apart society’s rules, who
tries himself to destroy who we are and what we are. What sort of values do we have if we don’t value a life enough to eradicate the one who wantonly takes it?”

“We do condemn, we do imprison, we just don’t necessarily believe in killing the killer.”

“We should. It’s justice for the victim and revenge as well. Both are necessary to protect a society from predators.”

“What about the argument that capital punishment isn’t a deterrent at all, thus why have it?”

“It certainly wouldn’t be a deterrent to me, the way the appeals process works now. The condemned murderer spends the taxpayer’s money keeping himself alive for at least another thirteen years—our money, can you begin to imagine?—no, I wouldn’t be deterred. That monster, Richard Allen Davis, in California who killed Polly Klaas and was sentenced to death. You can bet you and I will be spending big bucks to keep him alive for a good dozen more years while they play the appeals game. Someone could save him during any appeal in those years. Tell me, if you knew that if you were caught and convicted of killing someone you’d be put to death within say two years maximum, wouldn’t it make you think about the consequences of killing? Wouldn’t that be something of a deterrent?”

“Yes. And I agree that more than a decade of appeals is absurd. Our paying for all the appeals is nuts. But revenge, Sherlock, just plain old revenge. Wouldn’t you have to say that the committed pursuit of it is deadening?”

That’s what he’d wanted to say all along. She was very still, looking out the small window down at the scattered towns in New England. “No,” she said finally, “I don’t think it is. Once it’s over you see, once there’s justice, there can be a final good-bye to the victim. Then there’s life waiting, life without fear, life without guilt, life without shame. It’s all those things that are deadening.” She said nothing more.

He pulled a computer magazine out of his briefcase and began reading. He wondered what else had happened to her. Something had, something bad. He wondered if the something bad had happened to her around the time her sister had been killed. It made sense. What the hell was it?

• • •

Homicide Detective Ralph Budnack was a cop’s cop. He was tall, with a runner’s body, a crooked nose that had seen a good half dozen fights, intelligent, a stickler for detail, and didn’t ever give up. His front teeth lapped over, making him look mischievous when he smiled. He met them at the District 6 Station and took them in to see his captain, John Dougherty, a man with bags under his tired eyes, bald and overweight, a man who looked like he wanted to retire yesterday.