Waiting (The Making of Riley Paige—Book 2)

by Blake Pierce

  Did solving a murder offer any satisfaction, any closure?

  Or was this like some kind of sick addiction?

  She touched her cell phone in her pocket and thought …

  I wish Crivaro would call.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Still sitting in the front row of the auditorium, Riley was struggling with her own indecision. Agent Flack was gathering his notes and getting ready to leave, so she had to make up her mind right now. Should she ask him the awful question that was lurking in her mind—the question of whether killers and their pursuers shared the same kind of dissatisfaction?

  She finally made up her mind. Yes, I’m going to do it.

  But before she could get out of her chair, she felt a hand on her arm.

  It was John Welch. In her fascination with the lecture, she’d forgotten that he was sitting beside her.

  “Come on, Riley,” he said. “You’ve got to talk to me. I’m dying to hear what’s been going on.”

  Riley glanced back at Agent Flack and saw that other students were already clustering around him. She’d have to wait in line. Worse, she’d have to discuss her question with other people listening.

  She looked back at John. He seemed eager and anxious to talk to her.

  “OK, let’s go,” she said.

  As the two of them left the auditorium, Riley felt a pang of regret about what she might be missing. But she’d lost her nerve, and besides, she didn’t want to be rude to John.

  The truth was, she kind of liked him. Glancing at his athletic figure as they walked, she thought …

  Maybe I like him a little more than I should.

  When they got out into the hall, John was fairly bouncing around from excitement.

  “So tell me all about it!” he said. “Is it true what I’ve been hearing?”

  “I don’t know,” Riley said. “What have you been hearing?”

  “That you’ve been working on the Clown Killer case with Crivaro and McCune.”

  Riley nodded shyly.

  John gasped.

  “Wow!” he said. “How did you score something like that? The rest of us are stuck in workshops and seminars.”

  Riley didn’t know what to say. The truth was, she wasn’t sure just why Crivaro had brought her onto the case.

  She recalled what Crivaro had said to the medical examiner after Riley sensed that the killer had frightened his victim to death.

  “It’s what she does. It’s why she’s here.”

  But where was Crivaro now?

  Had he lost confidence in her?

  John said, “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, you’re the only intern who came into the program with actual hands-on experience. Of course you’re going to get a head start on the rest of us. But you’ve got to tell me—what was it like, working in the field? What all did you do?”

  Yesterday flashed through Riley’s mind—the early morning call from Crivaro, going to see the grotesquely clad and made-up corpse in the field, the smells and eerie light in the darkroom, the visit to the costume shop, the arrest and questioning of Gregory Wertz, and finally the visit to Margo’s parents, where she got such a powerful hit on how the young woman was abducted.

  Riley could hardly believe it all had happened in one day.

  How do I begin? she wondered.

  Or maybe the more important question was …

  Should I even talk about it?

  Crivaro hadn’t said anything about what she could or couldn’t talk about. Was he counting on her to use good common sense? What would that even mean?

  “OK, just tell me one thing,” John finally said. “Is it true that there’s a surefire suspect in custody? I mean, did you really get the guy? There’s nothing in the news media about it yet, but word gets around in this place.”

  Riley was jolted by the question. She didn’t think that Gregory Wertz was really the killer but …

  Crivaro?

  She had no idea whether Crivaro thought the suspect was guilty of anything more than planning a bank robbery.

  Riley said haltingly …

  “John, I … I think maybe I just shouldn’t get into it.”

  John just stared at her.

  “I’m really sorry,” Riley added.

  John flashed a delighted grin.

  “Hey, don’t be sorry,” he said. “You’re not at liberty to discuss it. That’s even cooler!”

  Riley was relieved at being let off the hook.

  “So where are you headed next?” she asked him.

  “I’ve got a workshop about computers,” John said. “What about you?”

  Riley shrugged and said, “I guess I don’t have anything right now.”

  “Why don’t you come along?” John asked. “I’m sure you’ll be welcome.”

  “That would be nice,” she said. But as they headed toward the lab where the workshop was going to be held, Riley found herself wondering …

  Is this going to be over my head?

  She didn’t even own a computer. Back at Lanton, Riley had sometimes used the school’s computers or Ryan’s—but neither of them very much. Old-fashioned textbooks were more her style. She found computers rather intimidating, and the Internet struck her as vast and confusing.

  Was she in for a lot of high-tech talk about coding and programming?

  She was relieved to see that the lab was full of ordinary desktop computers and modems just like what Ryan used back at the apartment. The instructor’s topic of the day was recent developments in Internet search engines, and how they could be used in criminal investigations.

  Riley became fascinated as she logged onto the Internet and participated in several exercises. She quickly learned to use search terms to find long lists of information that she then had to winnow down to useful and pertinent items of interest.

  What Riley found most amazing was the fact that this technology wasn’t really the least bit out of the ordinary—certainly not just for elite experts in computer science.

  Anybody can do this, she realized.

  The instructor said that this technology was getting faster and more powerful by the day. Riley wondered what that might mean for the future. Was it going to completely transform the nature of investigative work? Were ordinary civilians going to be able to track down bad guys without leaving their homes—like real-life “armchair detectives”?

  The possibilities boggled her mind.

  When the workshop was over, Riley and John went to the cafeteria for lunch. As he talked a bit about himself—about his privileged childhood and his idealistic dreams for the future—Riley found herself liking him more and more.

  As for whether he was flirting with her or not—well, she wasn’t altogether sure today. But at least she’d been clear with him that she was engaged, so she felt confident that she wasn’t sending him confusing signals. As far as she could tell, he was just being friendly. And it was nice to finally have a friend here in DC.

  Riley talked a little about her own life, but there were still some details she didn’t discuss. She steered clear of her mother’s murder and played down her father’s ill temper. And she still didn’t mention that she was pregnant. She wasn’t sure just why. The truth was, Riley couldn’t remember having told anybody about that yet except Ryan, and she didn’t think Ryan had talked about it either.

  Had he even told his parents?

  If he had, he’d never mentioned it. Why were they both being so secretive?

  Riley really didn’t know.

  Interrupting her thoughts, John stood up from the table and said, “My group is scheduled to visit another lab. Come on with me.”

  Riley thought she might as well since she’d still heard nothing from Crivaro. As she walked down the hallway next to John, she tried to ignore curious glances from other interns in his group. She kept her head down and followed him through a doorway.

  Inside the room, a man wearing lab clothes greeted them. He introduced himself as a forensic pathologist
and then pulled back the cover on a table in front of him.

  There was the actual corpse of a teenage boy, his eyes wide open, his body marred by four gaping bullet wounds.

  We’re in the morgue, Riley then realized.

  The pathologist explained that this was a seventeen-year-old male who had been killed in an episode of gang violence.

  Riley felt a pang of sadness at the thought of a life cut so terribly short.

  Several of the other interns gasped or gagged, and three of them ran out of the room.

  One of those three students was John.

  She figured it might be the first time that he and most of the interns had ever seen a dead body, much less someone who had been murdered. As for Riley, this was the fourth body of a murder victim she’d seen in her short life.

  The most recent had been Janet Davis, lying in that field just yesterday.

  Just a few weeks ago at Lanton she had found two bodies with their throats slashed open. Both girls had been her friends—one had been her best friend and roommate.

  And of course, Riley had seen her own mother lying dead at her feet when she’d been just a little girl.

  She had to wonder …

  Am I getting numb to the horror?

  As she listened to the pathologist’s lecture, “numb” didn’t seem to be the right word for what she was feeling.

  Curiosity was more like it.

  As the man spoke, she learned things she hadn’t known about guns and bullet wounds—for example, that a typical bullet travels at 1,126 feet per second. And few people knew the horrendous damage a bullet caused to the human body.

  The pathologist pointed to where one bullet had entered the victim’s shoulder.

  “You might guess that a bullet wound to the shoulder wouldn’t be too severe,” he said. “That’s not true. When this bullet hit the shoulder blade, it burst into fragments, each fragment ricocheting through his flesh and causing its own share of damage to nerves, muscles, and blood vessels. Each of those fragments felt like a hot coal under the victim’s flesh.”

  Indicating another wound, he added, “The same is true of this one, which looks like it hit his pelvis.”

  He pointed to another wound in the victim’s belly.

  “This one was even more painful,” he said. “It must have either shredded his intestines or ripped the stomach wide open. This wasn’t the wound he died from, though.”

  He pointed to a wound in the victim’s thigh.

  “This one was fatal,” he said. “It hit the femoral artery, and nobody was around to help him by stopping the bleeding. But it must have seemed like forever before he lost consciousness from blood loss.”

  The pathologist looked up at the interns and added, “As you can see, getting shot is nothing like what’s on television. The pain is beyond imagining. And if you survive, you’re likely to carry some physical damage for the rest of your life. And psychological damage as well. People who have been shot often undergo deep and permanent personality changes, becoming depressive, angry, and paranoid.”

  He paused to look over the body and said, “Of course, if you’re lucky, you’ll take a bullet to the brain or the heart, and you’re likely to die instantly. If not, you’ll probably wish you were dead. And that feeling just might never go away for the rest of your life.”

  As the lecture continued, Riley noticed that two of the interns who had fled the room had come back—but not John. When the workshop ended, Riley went out into the hallway and looked around. She didn’t see him anywhere.

  She wondered … was he embarrassed at how he’d reacted at the sight of a murder victim?

  Riley hoped not. She knew that his reaction had been perfectly natural. And this particular lecturer had been unduly blunt with the interns.

  As she remembered her own rapt curiosity, she wondered …

  Was my reaction perfectly natural?

  As she wandered aimlessly down the hallway, she felt her frustration rising again.

  When is Crivaro going to call?

  Is he ever going to call?

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Riley felt stranded. She stood there in the hallway, wondering when or if Crivaro was going to call. After two days of such intense activity, it felt positively unbearable to have no place to go and nothing to do.

  She found herself wondering …

  Am I getting addicted to this kind of work?

  Already, after just two days?

  It was a scary thought. This case didn’t involve her directly, like the murders when she was in college. But she could feel herself being drawn to it—to trying to solve a deadly mystery.

  She had to do something to let off steam.

  Maybe a good physical workout would help.

  She went to the interns’ locker room and used the restroom to change into her gym workout clothes. Then she headed for the FBI’s exercise room. She was glad to see that the room was very well-equipped. It even included a hanging punching bag.

  After using her one lesson in Krav Maga to fend off a would-be rapist, she’d spent some time in the Lanton gym learning some basic sparring tactics from a graduate assistant in phys ed. So she knew how to work out with a bag like this.

  She started slow, keeping her hands in a defensive position and throwing only a few mild punches. She felt her aggression mount as she attacked harder and harder with jabs, uppercuts, body shots, and hooks. But even when she added kicks to her attacks, she didn’t feel the release she yearned for.

  She pushed the bag so that it swayed and turned about, trying harder to pretend that it was a real opponent. Dodging and moving around the bag, she ducked, shuffled, bobbed, lunged, and pivoted, trying to catch her imaginary nemesis off guard. Her attacks became more and more brutal but …

  Something is missing, she realized.

  And that something was a real opponent, someone who genuinely wanted to hurt or even kill Riley, someone she had to fight desperately for her very life …

  I want that bag to be him.

  She wanted the dumb, heavy object to be the killer himself.

  But it wasn’t.

  She didn’t even have any idea what the man looked like.

  He was strong, apparently—at least strong enough to subdue and abduct two women by force.

  He was also deeply sadistic—Riley had gotten that sense of him more than once now.

  But what did he look like?

  Did he look like a clown himself, made up and costumed?

  Or was he just an ordinary person she might pass by on the street without even noticing him?

  What would it be like to stare into his very eyes?

  Would she see a world of evil there?

  What would it be like to be locked in a fight to the death with him?

  At last Riley backed away from the bag and stood bent over with hands on her knees, gasping for breath as her heart pounded and sweated coated her body.

  It’s no good, she thought.

  Bashing away at the bag was too much like the old-time movie serials, always promising some gratification that never came through.

  Riley felt like she was going crazy with frustration.

  But what on earth could she do about it?

  As her heartbeat slowed and her breathing settled down, a possibility started to dawn on her—something that would at least give her the feeling of doing something. And it was something she could do all alone,

  Would Crivaro approve of her idea?

  She doubted it very much.

  But she really didn’t care.

  She headed back to the locker room and took a shower and changed into her regular clothes. Then she looked at the metro map on the locker room wall and figured out which train to take to get to Lady Bird Johnson Park. Attached to the metro map were batches of free maps of DC. She found the one that showed the park in the most detail, and she took it with her.

  Then she left the building, went to the subway station, and caught the next train. It was
a forty-five-minute trip to Lady Bird Johnson Park, so she had plenty of time to consider what she was about to do.

  That park was where Janet Davis had been abducted while taking photographs at dusk. The local cops, of course, had gone over the place and found the camera that had been knocked out of Janet’s hands at the moment of her capture. Riley had seen the telling images from that. But according to the reports, the police hadn’t found any other clues.

  Riley knew there would be no signs left from what had happened there. But she remembered that powerful sense of connection with the killer she’d gotten in Margo Birch’s back yard. Could she get a similar connection at the park?

  I might even learn something important.

  Something nobody else has figured out.

  Of course, she knew that her plan might have its flaws.

  Riley hadn’t been to that crime scene yet, and as of yesterday neither had Crivaro and McCune. Surely the two agents would check out the park sometime today

  She didn’t want to run into them there. Crivaro might blow a fuse about her not minding her own business. But they’d probably already been there and left.

  To her surprise, Riley realized that she didn’t much care one way or the other. She didn’t like being shut out today, and she wasn’t going to put up with it.

  When she got off the train and walked the rest of the way to the park, she saw that the sky was overcast and threatening rain. She wasn’t dressed for rain and didn’t have an umbrella. But the risk of getting caught in a downpour and getting soaked to the skin didn’t worry her much.

  She soon recognized the footbridge that led across a small channel of water to Columbia Island, where the park was located. She’d seen the bridge in the first of Janet’s black-and-white photos. It wasn’t yet dusk, but as Riley walked across the bridge, the overcast sky made everything eerily like the photo, with the same soft shadows and muted surfaces.

  When she reached the island, she unfolded the map to look for familiar locations. First she walked to the statue she’d seen in one of the photos—a cresting wave forged from aluminum, topped by several seagulls that seemed to be uncannily frozen in flight. According to the map, it was the Navy-Merchant Marine Memorial.