Authors: Lisa Gardner
SIXTEEN
Thursday, May 17, 6:33
A
.
M
.
Q
UINCY DID NOT
DREAM
of his daughter. In the gray hours of the morning, he tossed and turned in the pink Motel Hotel, caught in a case that had happened nearly a decade ago. Thirteen-year-old Candy Wallace, with the pretty blond hair and hundred-watt smile. Beautiful, sunny Candy Wallace, who was raised a devout Baptist and had no idea of the true evil that lurked in men’s hearts.
She was snatched on her way home from school on a normal Wednesday afternoon. One minute she was walking down the street. The next, a pile of books was all that remained.
But Candy’s captor hadn’t really wanted Candy. He wanted Polly, her sixteen-year-old sister, and getting the wrong sibling angered him. So he took to calling the Wallaces’ home. He would put Candy on the phone. And then he would do things to her while her sister and parents listened.
After the first phone call, Quincy was brought in to listen as well. They considered him to have expert ears.
Now, in the throes of his dream, he did not remember Candy Wallace’s screams or the agonized face of her mother. He did not recall her sister Polly begging for the man to stop, to please come take her instead. She would willingly go with him if he would just let her little sister go. Please, please, please. . . .
Mostly, Quincy remembered Candy’s last words, after five days of endless agony.
“Please don’t be sad, Mom and Dad. It’ll all be over soon and I know I’m going to a better place. God loves me and will take care of me. I’m going to be fine. I love you. I love even this bad, bad man. My heart is true.”
Quincy woke up with tears on his cheeks.
He lay in his bed for a long time, thinking of the strength of a thirteen-year-old girl, thinking of God and faith and the things he’d left behind after too many years on the job.
A day after the last phone call they found Candy Wallace’s body, naked, bruised, and mutilated. Three weeks after that they arrested the man who did it, an unemployed handyman who had once worked on the air-conditioning unit at the Wallaces’ home. He said Candy had insisted on telling him that God loved him, so he’d cut out her tongue. Quincy had thought that there was nothing they could do to this man that would ever be enough.
He’d flown back to Virginia feeling isolated and worn to the bone.
He’d entered his home but walked away from his family, because he’d never learned to go from a crime scene to the people he loved. At times like this, he couldn’t look at his daughters without seeing all the horrors that could befall them. The handymen, the drifters, the charming law students. He couldn’t look at his family without seeing pain and suffering and death.
Now Quincy got out of bed. He called the hospital to learn that Amanda’s condition hadn’t changed. His ex-wife was asleep in the room if he wanted to speak with her. Quincy told the nurse not to wake her. His other daughter, Kimberly, was not at the hospital. She had probably returned to school. Like him, she seemed to have accepted that her sister was gone, a defection to Quincy’s camp that Bethie couldn’t bear.
Of course, things between his ex-wife and their younger daughter had been tense ever since last year, when Kimberly had announced she was studying sociology at New York University. Someday she wanted to be a profiler with the FBI. Just like her dad.
Quincy pulled on an old pair of running shorts and a gray FBI T-shirt. He hit the street, inhaling sharply at the cold sting of morning. Then he was off and running, still thinking of a young girl’s dying screams and unfailing love. Still thinking of his own daughter, and the tragedy he hadn’t protected her from after all those years of trying to make the world a safe place.
And then he was thinking of Rainie and her shadowed gray eyes and strong, stubborn chin. The way she took her punches. The way she still got up for the fight.
Once he’d made the mistake of thinking that isolation was protection, that focusing solely on his work would make a difference for people, for his family. He had listened to a young girl die, but he had not heard what she was saying.
Quincy was old, but he was learning.
He ran for a long time, with the mountain air cool and clean against his cheeks. He greeted a beautiful morning in a lush, coastal valley and he understood why Rainie Conner still lived here, perfectly.
SHORTLY BEFORE ONE,
Quincy showed up in the tiny task-force center in the attic of city hall. He hadn’t expected Rainie to be back yet from the autopsies scheduled in Portland, but she was already sitting at her sawhorse desk when he arrived. She didn’t look up right away, scribbling intently on some piece of paper.
He took a moment to study her. Her face was paler than yesterday, the shadows deeper under her eyes. Another sleepless night, he presumed, coupled with a brutal morning. Autopsies were never easy, particularly when they were of children.
Judging from her focused movements, however, Rainie still had no intention of slowing down.
She reminded him of someone else. It took him a moment to place the name. Tess. Tess Williams. Another case, years ago, but with a better ending. Tess had made the mistake of marrying the perfect man, the kind other women always said was too good to be true. In Jim Beckett’s case, they were right. The handsome, dedicated police officer had had a small sideline activity. He pulled over beautiful blondes for speeding, and then he murdered them. Tess had been the first person to figure out her husband’s evil doings, and she’d slowly gathered the evidence against him while still sharing his bed.
Jim Beckett did not go down without a fight. He cut a long, bloody swath through the task-force team, including putting some fresh scars on Quincy’s own chest. But Tess proved to be tougher than anyone had suspected. When Beckett hunted her down after he escaped from prison, Tess made sure the Massachusetts taxpayers never had to pay for his room and board again.
Quincy hadn’t thought of her in years. He tried to do the math on how old her daughter Samantha would be now. Ten years old? It had been a bit. He wondered how she and Tess were doing.
He never followed up on the people in his cases. Even in the ones that went well, he was still a reminder of a dark time. Somehow, it didn’t seem appropriate to be sending out Christmas cards.
“Are you going to stand there mooning all afternoon?” Rainie asked from her desk, still staring down at her paper.
“Just admiring the view.”
She looked up long enough to shoot him a hard glance. “Oh, please.”
“The autopsies went that well, I see.”
“Everything I ever feared, plus ten. For heaven’s sake, either get in the room or shut the door. I can’t stand people loitering in the doorway.”
Quincy took his time entering, eyeing her more cautiously. She was more ragged than he’d expected. When she spoke, her voice carried the edge of someone teetering on the brink of a dark place. He would bet she hadn’t let herself cry. That was a bad sign. Sometimes you had to cry after autopsies. It was the only way to release the pain.
“Writing up the report?” he asked neutrally.
“Nope. Writing up a list. What do you think of the mysterious man in black?”
“Pardon?”
“The man in black, the figure various kids reported seeing at the school. Fact or fiction?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if he exists? Could a stranger be involved in shooting up a school?”
“You would be amazed at the things a stranger can do,” Quincy said slowly, “even one met over the Internet. Witness all the young kids currently being lured from chat rooms into real-life meetings with pedo-philes.”
“Fine.” She scribbled furiously. “Man in black. Connection to Danny through the Internet, then tries to cover tracks by erasing the hard drives of the machines. Except then we’re back to Melissa Avalon. Why one precise gunshot to her head? I hate that fucking wound.” Rainie caught herself, blew out a breath of air, and briskly started writing again. “We can work on that angle later. Next up, school counselor Richard Mann.”
“What about Richard Mann?”
“He’s young, thirty-three according to his file, though he doesn’t look a day older than fifteen if you ask me. If we go back to assuming that Melissa Avalon was the intended target, he could have motive. Maybe he had a thing for Melissa Avalon and didn’t like learning about her private staff meetings with VanderZanden. Plus, as a counselor, he’d know what buttons to push to drive Danny over the edge. That takes care of means.”
Quincy finally got it. “You’re working on a list of other possible suspects.”
“Yes, the fed can be taught.”
Quincy arched a brow. She wasn’t just edgy this afternoon, she was brutally cutting.
“May I ask who you have listed?”
“Charlie Kenyon, Principal VanderZanden, the mysterious man in black, and now Richard Mann.”
“I thought the principal had an alibi.”
“At first glance, but you never really know until you start applying pressure.”
“Charlie Kenyon makes sense,” Quincy mused after a moment, deciding it would be most productive to play along. “An older, influential kid. We already know he has trouble with authority and likes to hang around the school. I’m less convinced about the principal. Even if it was a love affair gone awry, I have a hard time seeing him shooting two students and an even more difficult time seeing him coerce Danny into taking the blame.”
“Strong authority figure. Danny can’t stand up to his own father, so why should he be able to stand up to the school principal? Plus, you heard his last words in the interview. The kid’s scared. When you’re in elementary school, who seems more all-powerful and all-knowing than your principal?”
Her logic wasn’t bad. “But then there is Vander-Zanden’s reaction to consider. He appears genuinely grief-stricken.”
Rainie granted that. Then her eyes lit up. “What about his
wife
?”
Quincy exhaled slowly and watched her scribble it down. Her movements were feverish. She was trying too hard.
“Rainie, why are you making this list?”
“Focus. This investigation lacks focus.”
“You already have a suspect in custody. That appears very focused to me.”
“Yes, but we don’t know if he’s the right suspect.”
“His fingerprints on the casings haven’t con-vinced you?”
“They didn’t convince you.”
“I’m paid more to be skeptical.”
Rainie set down her pen. She paused long enough to look him in the eye, and Quincy was startled by the sight of her pale skin stretched taut over her gaunt face. Apparently she was forgoing food as well as sleep. It was only a matter of time, then, until she crashed.
“Shep visited me last night,” she said abruptly.
“Ah,” Quincy said. Things became much clearer for him. “Laid on the personal guilt.”
“Of course. What are friends for? Even better, he contacted the crime lab himself through a friend. Turns out Abe Sanders has been holding out on us.”
“I can hardly wait.”
“There’s a problem with one of the .38 shell casings. Not only does it completely lack prints or smudges—as in it appears to have been wiped clean—but ballistics found something strange about it. When I followed up this morning, I learned that it had some kind of residue inside, probably a polymer.”
“Plastic? As in perhaps threads of polyester fabric?”
“Who knows? But
inside
a shell casing is a weird place to find traces of fabric, plus Danny was wearing one hundred percent cotton when I brought him in. They’re conducting further tests, of course, but we’re back to having more questions than answers.”
“You’re going to kill Detective Sanders, aren’t you?”
“Yes. At three this afternoon. You’re welcome to watch.” Rainie smiled tightly. “Then I had the most fascinating chat with the ME at seven this morning. She conducted Avalon’s autopsy late last night so we could get straight to the girls this morning. Lucky me. And get this: the .22 slug that killed Melissa Avalon was not deformed. In fact, the damn thing traveled in a nice straight line through the center of her brain and stopped at the base of her skull. No ricocheting. Nice, recoverable slug with an intact base. Should yield plenty of rifling marks for ballistics. Except it has none.”
“No rifling marks? Is the ME thinking a smooth-bore gun?”
“I don’t know what the hell Nancy Jenkins is thinking. The woman is definitely intrigued and, unfortunately for me, coy. Let me see if I can get her exact words right. Something like ‘The slug would appear to have come from a .22, but I don’t think it has.’”
“She doesn’t think it has?”
“Turns out Nancy Jenkins is a gun buff. She’s not commenting officially until she gets the ballistics report back, but there’s something funny about the slug that killed Melissa Avalon. And she’s pretty clear it’s not your average funny. It’s your smart, clever funny.”
“Too smart and clever for a thirteen-year-old boy?”
“Now you’re getting it.”
“And the bullet came to rest at the base of Avalon’s skull?”
“Exactly. At the base of the skull. As in a downward trajectory. As in how can a four-foot-ten boy shoot down at a five-foot-six woman?”
“Who was not on her knees,” Quincy filled in for her, “considering how the body fell.”
Rainie nodded angrily. “So there you have it. At this point it looks like there’s something rotten in Denmark. At the very least, it’s doubtful that Danny killed Melissa Avalon, which also raises questions about Sally and Alice.”
“There was probably someone else present and a murder weapon we have yet to identify.”
“Yep. A murder weapon we have yet to identify and a motive. Why Melissa Avalon? I can’t get it out of my head. Why young, beautiful Miss Avalon?”
“And now you’re building the new theory of the case.”