“I’m serious. I’m meeting Santos in less than an hour.”
“You want me to talk to her?”
“No. It’s my mess. I’ll fix it.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say. I know you’re short on time, but it would help if you could get a handle on how this leaked.”
“I’ll call Kessler.”
“Good. But be careful with him.”
“How do you mean?”
“I get along fine with him, but not everybody does. Back in my days with the department, people used to say he’s perfectly balanced. Got a chip on both shoulders.”
“Now you tell me.”
“Hey, if anybody can dust off his shoulders, it’s you.”
“Thanks, boss,” she said, then hung up. Morning traffic on the interstate was getting heavier by the minute. With one eye on the road, she dug Kessler’s business card out of her purse and dialed him at home. His wife answered and said he was in the shower.
“Can you get him, please? This is extremely important.”
Andie cut off a van as she veered toward the airport exit. Finally, Kessler came to the phone. “He-low,” he said, a bit like a bumpkin.
“Dick, I don’t mean to level any accusations, but how did the sum and substance of our conversation last night in the autopsy room make it into this morning’s newspaper?”
“I called them.”
“Without telling me?”
“I’m a firm believer in using the media to help solve crimes. Victoria Santos is, too. I’ve heard her lectures.”
“I don’t argue with the concept,” said Andie. “But floating an untested theory might just put ideas in some whacko’s head and make it come true. Hell, even you didn’t buy the theory when I first suggested it.”
“The more I thought about it, the more sense it made.”
“We should have at least run it by Agent Santos.”
“It’s too damn late for that now. FBI politics is your problem, not mine.”
“That’s true,” said Andie. “I was just hoping we all could get off to a little better start than this.”
“Should have thought of that before you started making smartass remarks about who does the grocery shopping in my family.”
“Come on, Dick. Let’s not get petty, all right?”
“I’m not being petty. I’m actually doing you a favor. This press leak gives you the perfect opportunity to find out right from the get-go whether the rumors are true.”
“What rumors?”
“From what I hear, Santos has one trait that overshadows even her brilliance.”
“Her patience?” Andie said hopefully.
“Her ego. Best of luck, kid. Call me when her royal majesty is ready to meet.”
Andie tossed the phone onto the passenger seat and checked herself in the rearview mirror. “Breathe,” she said as she approached the airport.
Eight
Morgan was dressed in her plaid jumper and knee socks, ready for school, asleep on the couch in Gus’s office. Gus had gotten her up much earlier than usual, dressed her in her elementary school uniform, and taken her to work with him. She’d been out cold since they’d arrived downtown more than two hours ago, before dawn. He’d managed not to wake her as he held her in the elevator and carried her to the couch. She didn’t have to be at school till nine, but he had to be at the office before seven. He arrived on time, sleepy kid in tow.
At eight-fifteen the eyes blinked open, and she began to stir. Gus looked up from the paperwork spread across his desk. He had never watched Morgan wake before, at least not the whole adorable process. It was such a contrast to the adult world of buzzing jolts from alarm clocks. He thought of those time-released films of flowers in bloom. She yawned like a bear cub shaking off hibernation, fending off the sunlight streaming through the east window of the big corner office.
She slid off the couch and went straight to the window, struck by the view from the forty-ninth floor. “Wow. This is like the Space Needle.”
Her nose was pressed against the glass as she gazed toward snow-capped Mt. Rainier. Gus smiled wanly, then shrank inside. Six years old, and Morgan had never been to her father’s office.
“No wonder you live here.” The window fogged as she spoke into it.
“This is just an office, sweetheart. Daddy doesn’t live here.”
“Mommy says you do.”
The words cut to the core. No point debating it.
Morgan stepped away from the window. The colorful collection of carved wooden horses on the end table had caught her attention. She took one. Gus jumped up before she could grab the others. “Those aren’t toys, honey.”
“They look like toys.”
“That’s because they were, once. But now they’re antiques. Expensive antiques.” He took the carved thorough-bred and put it back on the table by the others.
“Are you going to take me to school today?”
“Sort of.”
A young man appeared in the open doorway. “Ready, Mr. Wheatley?”
Morgan glanced up, as if to ask, “Who’s that?”
Gus got down on one knee so they could speak eye to eye. “Morgan, this is Jeremy. He’s very nice. He works in the mail room. He’s going to take Daddy’s car and drive you to school.”
“Why don’t you take me?”
“I can’t. Not today.”
“Why can’t Mommy take me?”
“It’s like I said last night. Mommy is taking some time away.”
She frowned. “Will she pick me up?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see.”
Morgan lowered her head in silence. Gus wasn’t sure if he should say something, maybe give her a hug. He rose and gave Jeremy the car keys. “She goes to Bertschi.”
“To what?”
Jeremy wasn’t the kind of kid who’d know the way to a grade school with a five-figure annual tuition. Gus quickly sketched a map on his legal pad. “It’s on Tenth Avenue. Easy to find. Drive carefully. And be sure she rides in the backseat.”
“No problem.”
Morgan was still visibly upset. With one finger Gus lifted her chin from her chest. “Hey, no long faces, okay? I promise, if your mother doesn’t pick you up this afternoon, I’ll pick you up myself. Is that a deal?”
She clutched her nylon book bag, saying nothing.
He gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Can Daddy have a hug?”
Her arms never left her side. He hugged her anyway, but she didn’t hug back. He rose, somewhat embarrassed in front of Jeremy. “You better get going. She has to be there by nine.”
Jeremy guided Morgan to the door. Gus watched as they passed the secretarial pod outside his office and started down the hall. Instinct told him to act normal around Morgan until he heard from the police, not to say anything that might scare her. Problem was, he had very little sense of what was “normal” between him and Morgan.
He closed the door and started back toward his desk. He stopped in mid-step. The end table caught his attention, his collection of antique horses. One of them was missing. The one Morgan had been playing with.
He checked first under the table. Nothing. He searched the couch where she’d been sitting, shoving his hand between all the seat cushions. A couple of pens emerged, a lost nickel. But no carved horse.
He glanced out the window, focusing on the waist-high palm prints Morgan had left on the glass. An unsettling feeling slowly washed over him, but the conclusion was inescapable.
His own daughter had just shoplifted.
Andie entered the main terminal through the American Airlines entrance. The sun had yet to rise, but the airport was bustling. The hour before dawn was like yin and yang at SEA-TAC. Half the people were full of energy, hurrying toward flights that marked the start of their day. The other half were like zombies, arriving from some faraway place after a long night of travel. Andie was somewhere between the extremes, excited about her new assignment yet sickened by the shaky start. She
hadn’t decided exactly what to tell Victoria Santos about the press leak, but she had to think of something fast. Throughout the terminal, it seemed like every fifty feet there was another newsstand blasting the premature headlines about a serial killer. She tucked a copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer under her arm and moved with the crowd toward the baggage carousels.
At the turnstile she stopped short. Just ahead was Victoria Santos.
She was dressed comfortably for the long flight, slacks and a sweater, but Andie recognized her instantly. Santos was a bit of an FBI legend, especially among female agents. Years ago she had made a name for herself with the Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit. It was her profiling and hard work that had cracked the famous “tongue murder” case, a nationwide string of bizarre murders that were connected only by the killer’s gruesome signature—the extraction of each victim’s tongue. It was the first of many success stories. She was well established as a supervisory special agent by the time Andie had met her for the first and only time, at a training course Santos taught at the academy.
She was slightly taller than Andie, with eyes every bit as intense as Andie had remembered. Up until a month ago, her long, dark hair had been one of her more striking features. Rumor had it that she’d cut it to shoulder length on her forty-fifth birthday, that she hadn’t gone to some expensive hair stylist, just grabbed the scissors from her desk drawer and whacked it off.
It was no secret that criminal profilers had one of the highest burnout rates in the bureau. Some said Victoria was approaching the point in her career where she’d crawled inside the head of too many psychopaths, that she’d looked into the eyes of too many lifeless victims. Others thought she was still steaming over the inexplicable decision to derail her promotion to unit chief at CASKU by transferring her to the Investigative Support Unit. Her supporters said she was extremely aggressive. Her detractors said she was extremely aggressive. Bureau politics being what they were, you didn’t have to be the highest-ranking woman in a predominantly male unit to get stabbed in the back.
“Ms. Santos?” Andie extended her hand. “I’m Agent Henning. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Actually, it’s an honor.”
Andie cringed at the “honor” bit, concerned that she was sounding like a kiss-ass.
“I hope you’re not too honored to call me Victoria,” she said as they shook hands.
“Okay, Victoria.”
They exchanged smiles, but Victoria looked understandably tired. She’d just flown coast to coast on the red-eye, having left her home in Virginia some time after midnight. Andie glanced at the two bags at her side.
“I see you already got your luggage.”
“Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”
Andie and Victoria reached for the same suitcase at the same instant. They knocked heads. Andie backed away, startled. The rolled-up copy of the Post-Intelligencer slid from under her arm and fell to the floor. The page-one story was right at their feet. Victoria rubbed her forehead where Andie had butted her. She did a double-take at the catchy headline, then picked up the paper and gave it a quick read.
“A serial killer slaying in pairs? Where did this come from?”
Andie cringed as she replied. “It’s a theory.”
“Who’s theory?”
“Mine,” she said, shrinking.
“What’s it doing in the newspaper?”
“The local police leaked it.”
She glowered. “I’d better read this,” she said as she snapped open the newspaper.
“I think so, too,” Andie said.
Victoria walked as she read. Andie followed behind, toting her bags. Andie said not a word all the way to the car, just trying to gauge Victoria’s reaction to the article. Victoria opened the passenger door and got in. Andie tossed the bags in the backseat, got behind the wheel, and drove out of the garage.
Victoria folded the newspaper and laid it on the dashboard.
Andie was bracing herself for a shakedown, but Victoria simply popped open her briefcase and buried her nose in a notepad as Andie maneuvered out of the airport. For ten minutes, Andie endured the silent treatment. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. “Excuse me, but aren’t you going to say anything?”
Victoria glanced up from her notes. “I’m not going to chew you out, Andie. What’s done is done. But if you’re looking for me to say everything’s okay, it’s not.”
“I wasn’t trying to upstage you or impress you. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. It was just a theory.”
“And I’m not saying your theory is necessarily a bad one. The real damage is that once any theory hits the press and gets ingrained in the heads of the local police, it’s hard to get them to come off it. Makes my job a lot harder than it needs to be.”
“But I wasn’t the one who leaked it. It was a detective named Kessler.”
“That’s no excuse. It’s your job as coordinator to gain the respect of the locals. If you have their respect, nine times out of ten they’ll listen to you if you ask them to keep something out of the press.”
Andie felt a pang in her gut, realizing she’d never expressly asked Kessler to keep the theory out of the papers. “You’re right. For that I apologize.”
Again, there was only silence.
Andie said, “I don’t mean to be pushy, but it would make me feel a lot better if you were to say something. Like ‘Apology accepted.’”
Andie kept her eyes on the road, waiting for a reply. Finally, she glanced over and caught Victoria’s eye. It wasn’t the disapproving glare Andie had expected. Quite the opposite. It was as if Victoria had warmed to her fight.
“Apology accepted,” Victoria said. “And don’t worry about it. Happens to all of us.”
Andie was only half-relieved. “Somehow I don’t think anything like this ever happened to you.”
“Actually, it did.”
“Serious?”
“Long time ago. My first year in Quantico. We had a geographically transient serial killer. The only lead was an anonymous newspaper informant who had an uncanny ability to predict each murder, time, place, victim. My unit chief was convinced the informant was himself the killer. I wasn’t. I went over his head, straight to the assistant director of the Criminal Division. Laid my reputation on the line.”
“How did your unit chief feel about that?”
“About the way you’d expect. He was madder than hell.”
“How did you smooth things out?”
“Sometimes, things have a way of smoothing themselves out.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s simple, really. Now that your theory is printed in black and white all over Seattle, you just have to hope for one thing.”
“What?”
“That you’re right.”
Andie started to smile, then realized that Victoria wasn’t kidding. She cranked up the heater and merged into rush hour on the crowded interstate.
Nine
Gus went back to work after Morgan left, but he couldn’t focus on the documents spread across the leather desktop. At eleven A.M. he and three of his department heads were scheduled to pitch their services to a Japanese manufacturer seeking Seattle counsel. “Beauty pageants” lawyers call them, where every major law firm in the city trots out its finest lawyers to win the hearts and wallets of major corporations. The analogy had its limits. In Gus’s experience, not a single contestant had ever vowed to feed starving children or promote world peace, and never did the runners-up smile and congratulate the winner.
This morning his thoughts were entirely on Beth, swinging from one troubling extreme to the other. One minute he was sure she was safe but had left him. The next, he imagined she was dead. The shoplifting incident had only confused him further. Morgan probably sensed something was wrong and was acting out for attention. Or perhaps it was a symptom of long-standing psychological problems of which Gus had been unaware till now. Maybe even Beth had blamed herself, saw herself as a failure, and in a momen
t of weakness had run away in despair. Whatever the answer, Gus needed to prepare himself better to deal with Morgan. He could call on professionals for guidance, but it was never his practice to consult anyone cold. Surely there were articles on the Internet about the psychological effects on children who had lost a parent. He pulled up his chair and switched on the computer.
The screen brightened and prompted a message. “Your password is about to expire. Please enter a new code.”
For security reasons, the firm required its attorneys to change passwords every ninety days. Gus tried to conjure up a new four-digit number. He usually used dates. The date he was graduated from Stanford. The day he was elected managing partner. This morning, however, he was feeling a little sentimental. He started to type in his wedding anniversary. He entered the month—09—then drew a blank on the exact day. It was either the fourteenth or fifteenth of September. He wasn’t sure. It was definitely a Saturday.
Of course it was a Saturday, you idiot.
A reprieve came with a knock on the door. It opened before he could say “come in,” which meant it was either the president of the United States or Martha.
“Need a friend?” It wasn’t the chief executive.
“Come on in.”
Martha had the look of a concerned friend, entering quietly and closing the door behind her. She sat on the edge of the couch, anxious. “Any word on Beth?”
“Just a waiting game now. Police don’t really seem to know anything. I’m just trying to stay focused.”
“I think that’s wise. I wouldn’t read too much into what the papers say.”
“Papers? What do you mean?”
“You haven’t seen this morning’s P-I?”
“No. I’ve been so busy, I didn’t even have time to check. Is there something about Beth?”
“I’m sorry. Don’t be alarmed.”
“What is it?” he said with urgency.
“They don’t mention her by name. It’s just a story about a possible serial killer who is killing his victims in matching pairs. Two men were the first victims. Now they found a woman. They don’t come out and say it, but from the physical description, it sounds like Beth.”
Under Cover of Darkness Page 6
