by Lis Wiehl
Allison and Nicole looked at each other, wide-eyed.
“Why would someone pull a trigger with his middle finger?” Allison squinted at the screen. “It certainly wouldn’t come naturally.”
Leif held out his hand and moved his index and then his middle finger experimentally. “It looks like there’s something wrong with his index finger.”
“That might be enough for us to find the second man,” Nicole said. “And if we can find him, then we can find the man who murdered Cassidy and Lindsay.”
CHAPTER 32
At three in the morning Ophelia got up to use the bathroom. Padding down the hall, she heard hitching breaths coming from behind the guest room door. Allison. Quietly sobbing.
Should she ignore it? But that seemed cruel. However, she wasn’t certain how to respond. Finally she went to the bathroom and then came back to Allison’s door with a pill bottle in her hand. She knocked softly.
The sounds stopped. Ophelia wondered if Allison would simply sit in silence until she eventually went away. It was how she herself might act, but she wasn’t a neurotypical.
Finally, just as Ophelia was turning to go back to her room, Allison called softly, “Come in.”
She was sitting on the end of the bed, the sheets twisted and tangled behind her. Only now did Ophelia realize she should have offered her some different clothing to sleep in. As her pupils adjusted to light, she could see that Allison’s eyes were swollen from weeping.
“Would you like a sleeping pill?” She held out the bottle. She used them herself on the nights she woke from nightmares about her stepfather.
“No.” Allison shook her head. “I’ll be okay.” Her voice was not at all convincing.
“I have a pill cutter,” Ophelia offered. “You could try just taking half.”
Allison put one hand across her belly. “I don’t think I should.”
Ophelia had forgotten about the baby. The thought of being pregnant had always unnerved her. Something with a life of its own growing inside you? It reminded her too much of the sci-fi movie Alien, the look of horror on that one character’s face as the monster burst from his abdominal cavity.
What would a neurotypical do in this situation? She steeled herself. “Would a hug help?”
Allison was silent for a long moment. Ophelia was just beginning to relax when she answered. “Yes, I think it would.”
Ophelia sat down, turned toward her, and slowly reached out, tentatively putting her hands on the other woman’s shoulder blades. Suddenly she was locked in a tight embrace, with Allison’s warm, wet face on her neck. Ophelia stiffened, although she tried not to show it.
“I just can’t believe she’s gone,” Allison mumbled. “My little sister. And she died because of me.”
Ophelia pulled back until she could see the other woman’s face, contorted with grief.
“Not because of you.” It wasn’t logical to blame oneself for someone else’s deeds. “It’s because an evil man decided to target you.”
“So? I’m the one who chose to be a prosecutor. I’m the one who put myself in daily contact with criminals. I’m the one who made myself a target.”
“From what I understand, your sister used to have a much more risky lifestyle than you have ever had,” Ophelia said reasonably. “And if it weren’t for people like you, even more criminals would be out on the street. You do good things, Allison. It’s not your fault that other people choose to do evil.”
“I know you’re right.” Allison took a shaky breath. “I know that. I can’t let my emotions get the better of me. Not when we’re so close to catching this guy.”
“You can’t change the past.” Ophelia spoke from personal experience. “No matter how much you might wish that things had been different, you can’t go back. All you can do is go forward. And maybe try to make things better for the future.”
“Thank you.” Allison squeezed her hand, then, to Ophelia’s relief, released it. The two women sat side by side in silence for several more minutes, until Ophelia judged it would be okay to return to her room.
In the morning the house was silent, the door to the guest room closed. Ophelia could almost pretend it was a normal day, one she would spend quietly in her office, with the occasional cat jumping on her lap or desk.
She began writing a computer program that she could send slipping through back doors to examine and compare online databases. While it would leave no trace and alter nothing, it might give her the information they needed to catch the man who had killed Cassidy Shaw and Lindsay Mitchell.
First she generated a list of the 356 people whose crimes had been investigated by Nicole and prosecuted by Allison. Since every witness had reported the suspect as male, the next step was eliminating the 59 convicted female felons from the list. She identified 6 men who had died since they had been sentenced.
Next she looked for inmates who had already served their time, and who would thus be free to cause mischief. That was still a substantial number: 78. And of course she couldn’t be sure that the killer wasn’t someone acting on another criminal’s behalf.
But if he was one of the 78, it would help to have the name of the man with the damaged finger. Then she would be able to create a list of men who had been investigated by Nicole, prosecuted by Allison, and incarcerated with the man with the damaged finger. Her working hypothesis was that the killer and the second bank robber had met in prison. Once she had the name of the second man, she could start work on proving—or disproving—the hypothesis.
Ophelia worked until lunch, when she ate what she always did—a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich on whole wheat bread, accompanied by a banana. It was healthy and filling, and she saw no need to vary it. After some thought, she made a second sandwich and covered it with plastic wrap.
Despite the near constant whoosh of the central air-conditioning, the air inside the house felt heavy and muggy. In Oregon, so much humidity meant only one thing: a storm was coming. The three cats—Maizy, Amber, and Cinders—sprawled on different platforms of their cat tree, lazy in the heat.
Ophelia was just finishing the last bite of her sandwich when Allison walked into the dining room.
“Good morn—” Ophelia looked at her watch. “Good afternoon. I figured you needed your sleep.”
“Thanks.” Allison’s eyes were so shadowed they looked bruised. “Thanks for letting me sleep. And thanks for talking to me last night. I was just feeling so overwhelmed.”
Ophelia’s cell phone rang, saving her from another awkward discussion of Allison’s feelings. It was Nicole, calling with a possible match for the bank robber with a damaged finger: a recently released con named Denny Elliot.
And the news got even better. Not only had Elliot just gotten out of prison for bank robbery, but they had his cell phone number and should be able to figure out where he was through either cell phone tower triangulation or, if it was a more modern phone, GPS. And with luck, where Elliot was, there would the killer be also.
But of course they couldn’t count on that. Ophelia wrote a new program that compared where Elliot had been imprisoned with the incarceration records of the 78 former prisoners she had previously identified. That cut the number down somewhat, but 33 people were still too many to consider them all viable suspects.
She needed a new angle. She went back into the dining room, where Allison sat with her sandwich. She had taken only a single bite. Ophelia hoped she wasn’t allergic to peanut butter. She should have asked.
“Would you like something different to eat?” she said.
“What?” Allison gave her head a little shake, as if she had been someplace far away. “Oh no, I’m fine. I’m just not very hungry.”
“Oh. Okay. So, I’ve got it down to 33 possibilities from 356. All of them are men sentenced in cases that involved you and Nicole and who are currently out of prison.”
“Wow—that’s pretty impressive.”
Ophelia felt a warm glow of pride. “It still is higher th
an I would like. I was wondering if you remembered anyone who particularly threatened you and Nicole during their case.”
“We get a lot of dirty looks,” Allison said, “but threats are pretty rare. People usually manage to hold it together. There are only two people I can think of: Doug Halvorsen and this guy named MT Young. Both of them had to be removed by the U.S. marshals because they wouldn’t stop screaming at us. The Young guy even made a run at us, but he got tackled.”
“Young and Halvorsen,” Ophelia said. “I’ll check them out.” But two minutes later she had learned that neither of them had been released and nothing had recently changed about their status.
The day dragged itself forward as they waited for further word from Nicole. Ophelia made a print-out of the remaining 33 names and then ran them past Allison.
“Jayson Forrester.”
Allison looked up, remembering. “Worker safety issues. His company was going down the tubes, so he started cutting corners—and as a result two people were injured and one was killed. But he was over sixty and frail when he was sentenced five years ago—he’s certainly not the guy who shot Lindsay.”
Ophelia ran a line through Forrester’s name. “How about Freddie Riding?”
“Freddie Riding. Freddie Riding,” Allison repeated. “Oh yeah, mail fraud. He cried when he was found guilty. Sobbed, actually. Prison might have toughened him up, but not to the point where he became a stone-cold killer.”
Ophelia crossed his name off. And so it went.
Jed Bitton.
A definite no.
Noe Crossley.
So scared he had begged the judge at his sentencing.
Two or three times Ophelia mentioned a name Allison thought was slightly more likely to have turned killer than others, but none of them made her straighten up and say, “That’s him!”
Ophelia was starting to think they had come to a dead end. Where had she gone wrong?
“Who’s next?” Allison asked, drumming her fingers on the arm of the couch.
“That’s it. There aren’t any more.”
“Then what are we going to do? We have to find that guy before he kills Nicole. We have to.”
It was worse than that, Ophelia thought. If she failed, not only would Nicole die, but it seemed likely that Allison would too.
CHAPTER 33
Dressed as a housekeeper, Nic stood in front of Room 16 at the Castaways Motel. From behind the door came muffled conversation and the low thump of music. A woman laughed. One of the men’s voices, Nic realized, must belong to the guy who had killed Cassidy and Lindsay.
He was partying with his buddies and whoever else they had picked up along the way. Celebrating the taking of $8,720 and a woman’s life.
The hair rose on the back of her neck.
After leaving Ophelia’s the night before, Nic and Leif had gone back to the field office to track down the lead about the finger. The best photos of the two masked men captured from the surveillance video had been sent to law enforcement agencies across the country, along with information about the crime, the probability that the shorter suspect had a damaged or missing index finger, and a request for ID.
Late this afternoon their efforts had paid off. The FBI had gotten a call from a corrections officer at Lompoc. He thought the short plump bank robber was quite possibly Denny Elliot, a con originally from the Portland area who had been released from federal prison a month ago. While Elliot was in Lompoc, another inmate had bit off the top third of his index finger in the exercise yard. The gloves he had worn at the bank had helped camouflage the missing finger.
Had Elliot taken part in Cassidy’s killing? But Nicole hadn’t investigated his crimes, and when she asked Ophelia to check the database, it showed that Allison hadn’t ever prosecuted him. It seemed likely that the killer was acting on his own, and had enlisted Elliot to help him cover his tracks as he picked off the three women one by one.
Elliot’s parole officer said he was staying with his sister. The sister said she hadn’t seen him for a couple of days, but she did have his cell phone number. An hour ago the cell phone had been tracked to this motel. The GPS records showed that it had been in the same location since midnight. A plan was quickly pulled together.
Now Nic rapped again on the peeling white paint of the door, hard enough that her knuckles stung. The sun pressed between her shoulder blades like a brand. Even though it was nearly six o’clock, the heat showed no signs of abating. The air felt thick, and dark clouds were massing on the horizon. A storm was coming. It couldn’t come fast enough for Nic.
“Housekeeping!” she repeated. Loud enough that they should be able to hear her. But the noise didn’t falter. They must be too drunk or too high to care.
When someone finally did look out the peephole, all they would see was a housekeeper standing in front of a laundry cart. Nic looked the part, what with her dark skin and her borrowed uniform of a pink short-sleeved polyester shirt and maroon elastic-waist pants. What wouldn’t be seen through the peephole was the Kevlar vest she wore underneath the shirt, or the Glock tucked in the back of the waistband of her pants. The person on the other side of the door also wouldn’t see Leif pressed against the wall on one side of Nic and Karl Zehner on the other. Or the dozen other agents scattered throughout the complex, all ready to rush in.
In private Leif had argued with the plan. “You should not be the one going to the door,” he had told her after pulling her into the copy room. “What if he makes you? You might as well be wearing a sign around your neck that says ‘I’m Nicole Hedges, go ahead and shoot me.’ ”
“Who else are we going to send to get these guys to open the door, Leif? It’s going to be hard enough not to spook them, having someone show up at this hour. A housekeeper is the best option we have.”
“We can get Manny to put on a uniform shirt and pose as a maintenance worker.”
“Yeah, and how many times do you think a maintenance guy knocks on the door at that place? No one has done any maintenance there since the 1950s. Let’s face it, I’m the only female agent of color we have right now in the field office, and a dark-skinned housekeeper is going to be the only person they might open the door to at six p.m. And don’t worry, I won’t look anything like Nicole Hedges.”
Nic had watched the film of Lindsay being shot over and over. She knew the killer wouldn’t hesitate to do the same to her—if he recognized her. Which was why she was wearing a bandana over her hair and clear glasses over her eyes. To disguise the shape of her face, she had stuffed a wad of cotton in each cheek. With makeup she had added shadows under her eyes and hollowed out her face. Now she looked two decades older, a woman who had a close relationship with hard work and hard times.
And hard times were what the motels along this stretch of North Interstate Avenue were all about. They catered to people who weren’t too choosy—hookers, parolees, people one step up from homeless. The Castaways was a perfect place for three bank robbers to go to ground, count their money, and maybe invite a girl or two over to celebrate with them.
The manager had sketched the layout of the room for them. Once Nic was inside, she would find an open alcove with a sink to her immediate right. Past that lay a small bathroom with another sink, a toilet, and a shower. Straight back from the door and again to the right, half hidden by the wall behind the alcove and the bathroom, she would see two beds.
The room on one side hadn’t been rented. The room on the other was occupied by a couple, but the manager had called them three times and gotten no answer. If they came back while the arrests were still going down, the perimeter team would snag them before they could get too close. The remaining guests—there weren’t many—had been contacted by phone and warned to stay in their rooms.
“Housekeeping!” Nic called again. She rapped so hard her knuckles felt bruised. The conversation didn’t pause. The music kept thumping. The woman laughed again, setting Nic’s teeth on edge. At least they were probably too wasted to pose a threat
.
At a nod from Leif, Nic slipped the card key in the slot, her sweaty fingers sliding on the plastic. The light under the handle turned green, followed by a faint beep. She threw the door open at the same time as she grabbed her gun and entered the darkened room. Immediately, she stepped to the side so she wasn’t silhouetted against the bright light of the day. The FBI had a name for entryways—vertical coffins.
“FBI—freeze!” Gun in hand, Nic blinked in the sudden darkness. Leif and Karl darted in behind her, their guns also at the ready. Nic narrowed her eyes to slits, trying to force them to adjust to the dimness. She saw no one, just the bottom halves of the two unmade beds and a dozen empty beer bottles scattered across the threadbare carpet.
But she could still hear music, still hear people talking in voices too quiet to understand. The woman laughed again. Some part of Nic had already known the woman was going to laugh.
Her eyes found the source of the party sounds. She could just see the corner of an open laptop sitting on the cheap dresser between the two beds. The computer was broadcasting in an endless loop. The party sounds weren’t real at all.
Nic still saw no one.
But the air was heavy and hot with the scent of blood.
All this took only a second or two to process. More agents were crowding in. Leif kicked open the bathroom door. Karl crouched low and then burst around the corner and into the main section of the room.
And a second later they all knew where the stink of carnage was coming from.
The plump man Nic recognized from his mug shots as Denny Elliot lay sprawled in the bathtub with a slug in his heart. In the sleeping area, between one of the beds and a wall, lay a redheaded man she didn’t recognize.
The reason Nic didn’t recognize him might have had something to do with the fact that he had been shot in the face. Still, even if he had been bald, he was too heavily muscled to be the man who had killed Lindsay.
The room was no longer a criminals’ hideout. It was a crime scene. As the team leader for the FBI’s Evidence Recovery Team, Leif arranged for two agents to guard the room and dismissed everyone else who wasn’t part of the team. Then Leif, Nic, and the other ERT members went back to their cars in the parking lot to put on shoe coverings, hairnets, and white Tyvek suits. The lookie-loos were already gathering at the yellow perimeter tape—informally known as flypaper for its ability to snag gawkers. Nic paid them no mind as she pulled the wads of cotton from her mouth, then covered her hair and pulled on rubber gloves. She tried not to think about how hot it was.
