Pop!
There she was. Just as Sarah had pictured her before reminding herself not to make it personal. Will I ever master that rule? Do I really want to?
Lying on the floor of the trunk, bound and gagged, was a thirteen-year-old girl who had gone missing only that morning. The sun had practically turned the trunk into an oven. She was barely conscious, suffering from heatstroke.
But she was alive.
She was going to be okay. Maybe because Sarah had made it personal.
Chapter 30
THE DO NOT DISTURB sign outside Sarah’s hotel room in Tallahassee hung there a little late the following morning. Let it be, let it be.
After sleeping in, she went for a four-mile run, returned for a long shower, and then happily ate the cheesiest of cheese omelets from room service, putting back all the calories she’d burned the previous day. Bacon and toast, too. Yum.
She watched barely a minute of CNN before flipping over to VH1 Classic to check out a few videos. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that.
Most of the songs she didn’t know—or even like—but that didn’t matter. She cranked up the volume anyway, even more so when they played the old Guns N’ Roses video for “November Rain.” She absolutely loved that song. It reminded her of her teenage years in Roanoke, Virginia. Back then, a girl either had a crush on the lead guitarist, Slash, or thought he was gross. Sarah was definitely one of those who had a crush.
As for the plan for the rest of the day, that was simple. There was no plan.
Maybe she’d go lie out by the pool, do a little reading. Sarah loved biographies and had been carrying around a biography of the cartoonist Charles Schulz, which she never seemed to have the time to start. Now she did.
A whole twenty-four hours, she figured.
This was her mental health day, long overdue, and while the aftermath of nabbing Travis Kingslip involved a mountain of paperwork, she had no intention of tackling any of it right away. Not a chance.
Tomorrow, Agent Brubaker would return to work at Quantico. Today, Sarah Brubaker was playing hooky.
And it felt positively fantastic. All the way up until she spread her towel on a chaise lounge by the pool, stretched out, and turned to page 1 of the Schulz biography.
That’s when her cell rang.
Oh, no. Please, no…
It wasn’t her personal phone. That she could’ve ignored. This was her satellite-encrypted work phone, property of the FBI.
On the other end was her boss, Dan Driesen, and he wasn’t calling just to say hi. He’d already sent his congratulatory e-mail for the Kingslip capture. This was something else.
“Sarah. Need you back here for a briefing,” he said. “Fast. Today.”
In person, Driesen was relatively easygoing and patient. On certain subjects—government bureaucracy, fly fishing, or classic cars, for instance—he could even talk your ear off.
But on the phone, he was like a talking telegram.
“Three homicides submitted to ViCAP from three different states,” he continued. “All pointing toward a lone serial killer on the move.”
ViCAP stood for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, the FBI’s national inventory of every violent crime committed in the United States.
“Over what time period are we talking?” asked Sarah.
“Two weeks.”
“That’s fast.”
“Superfast.”
“Three murders?”
“Yep.”
“Three different states?”
“So far,” said Driesen.
“What’s the connection?”
“The victims,” he answered. “They all have the same name. O’Hara. Damndest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Chapter 31
THE SANDWICHES WERE a dead giveaway.
Sarah had attended countless briefings conducted by Dan Driesen, and not once had he provided anything remotely edible for the occasion. No muffins or bagels, no cookies or anything else to snack on. Certainly no sandwiches, not ever. It just wasn’t his style. You want catered briefings? Go work for Martha Stewart.
Yet there they were. Sandwiches in the center of the conference room table.
After catching the first flight back from Tallahassee, grabbing a cab straight from Reagan National to Quantico, dropping off her suitcase in her office, and making a beeline for the conference room with only seconds to spare before Driesen’s four o’clock briefing, it was the first thing she noticed. A platter of sandwiches. Never had assorted cold cuts carried so much subtext.
This was not your average briefing.
More to the point, Driesen wasn’t completely calling the shots. He was catering to someone else.
Sarah figured she’d know soon enough. Driesen hadn’t arrived yet.
In the meantime, she accepted congratulations for her work in Tallahassee from the rest of the room—a mix of agents and analysts, heavy on the analysts. The BAU, or Behavioral Analysis Unit, was first and foremost about the gathering and interpretation of information. For every agent in the field, there were three analysts back home in Quantico.
“So what’s the story?” asked Ty Agosta, the unit’s criminal psychiatrist and perhaps the last man on the planet who routinely wore corduroy jackets with elbow patches. Not only did he wear them, he made them work.
“I was hoping you knew,” said Sarah.
“Driesen’s been locked in his office for the past hour,” said Agosta. “That’s all I know.”
“With whom?”
He nodded toward the door. That’s who.
Sarah turned to see Dan Driesen walking into the room with his typical long strides. Accompanying him were three men in dark suits, sporting visitor badges and the rigid posture that usually came with wearing a shoulder holster all day long.
One of them looked familiar. Sarah had seen him before, but couldn’t quite place the face. Surely Driesen would introduce him, as well as his two cohorts, to the room.
Only he didn’t. Instead, Driesen simply started the briefing. The three men, as if they were only on hand to observe, took seats in the row of chairs along the perimeter of the room.
After they each grabbed a sandwich, that is.
“Nevada, Arizona, and Utah,” began Driesen, the room lights dimming courtesy of Stan, the audio/video technician, who worked all the feeds to the monitors at the front of the room.
The largest of the flat screens illuminated behind Driesen as he continued, the specifics of the top-line summary he’d given Sarah over the phone that morning appearing as bullet points.
Three different states.
Three dead men.
All within a two-week span.
And all with the same first and last name.
The screen wiped clean as the final bullet point shot up in large type behind Driesen.
THE JOHN O’HARA KILLER, it read.
Chapter 32
“JESUS, THERE MUST be hundreds of John O’Haras out there,” said Eric Ladum, a technical analyst sitting across from Sarah. Whenever he was away from his keyboard, he was always twirling a pen just to keep his fingers busy.
“More like a thousand,” responded Driesen. “Give or take.”
Sarah turned to the Gang of Three sitting along the opposite wall. They hadn’t said a word. They hadn’t even been introduced. But Sarah now knew why they were in the room. She knew who they were.
Driesen continued, detailing the police investigations for the first two victims. Both were killed with two shots from a .38. One through the head, the other through the chest. There were no suspects or solid leads, and the bodies were all “clean,” meaning there was no evidence, trace or otherwise, left behind.
“Now comes the third O’Hara,” said Driesen. “A ski instructor living in Park City, Utah. He was found yesterday morning on the patio behind his house.”
Then the crime-scene photos of the guy appeared on the screen. He was lying faceup—that is, with what was left of his f
ace looking at the sky—in a pool of dried blood, the edges of which had the splattered appearance of a close-range shot. It would be a closed casket for sure.
During her first year with the unit, when the gory handiwork of serial killers flashed up on a screen during briefings, Sarah would always turn away in disgust for a second or two. It was instinct. A coping mechanism. The way her mind reacted to seeing something so unsettling and out of the norm.
Now, for better or worse, Sarah barely blinked.
“In the right pocket of a Windbreaker worn by the victim there was a paperback copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses,” said Driesen. He paused for a moment as if fishing for questions. Eric Ladum, still twirling his pen, was more than happy to bite.
“You think it was placed by the killer?” the analyst asked.
Driesen nodded. “I do.”
“Was anything highlighted? A passage? Some words?” asked Ladum.
“No,” said Driesen. “Every page intact. Not even a dog-ear.”
“Wait, hold on a second,” said Sarah, chiming in. “We’re talking about a guy named O’Hara, right? Ulysses is practically a second Bible for the Irish.”
“That’s true, but this O’Hara lives in Utah and the book came from Bakersfield, California,” said Driesen. “It’s a library book.”
“Was it checked out?” she asked.
“No such luck.”
“Have we contacted the library to see—”
Driesen cut her off. “Yes, the library has one copy that’s unaccounted for.”
“Since when?”
“Since—”
“Congratulations!” came a voice from the side of the room, cutting them both off. It belonged to one of the Gang of Three, the one Sarah couldn’t quite place. With only a single word he’d managed to convey an annoying trifecta of impatience, arrogance, and sarcasm.
As everyone turned to him, he stood up. “Not only do we have this guy on three murders, but we can also nail him on a stolen library book. Well done, people! Just marvelous.”
Ty Agosta leaned forward, placing his elbow patches on the table. The criminal psychiatrist figured there was no crime in asking a simple question.
“I’m sorry, who are you?” he asked.
But it was as if Agosta had never opened his mouth or been in the room, for that matter. He was flat-out ignored.
“Listen, maybe the killer is trying to tell us something or maybe he isn’t,” said the mystery guest. “What I need you to tell me, though, is how you plan on catching this psycho.”
And just like that, two bells went off in Sarah’s head.
The first was the guy’s name. Jason Hawthorne. He was deputy director of the Secret Service. He wasn’t there on behalf of his boss, or even his boss’s boss, the secretary of Homeland Security.
The reason Jason Hawthorne and his sandwich-eating entourage were in the room was due to everyone’s boss.
The president.
That was the second bell that went off in Sarah’s head.
The president’s brother-in-law was named John O’Hara.
Chapter 33
“SARAH, CAN I see you in my office?” asked Driesen as the conference room emptied after the briefing. He was in the middle of a good-bye handshake with Hawthorne, which was clearly not a mutual-admiration moment.
“Sure,” Sarah answered, as if it were no big deal. But it was a very big deal.
There were two levels of briefings that took place at the BAU. Both were classified, but only one was completely unfiltered. That briefing was the one that took place in Driesen’s office. Like the original Lucky Strike cigarettes, Driesen gave it to you straight.
With Hawthorne gone, Sarah followed Driesen past his secretary, Allison, and into his corner office, which looked out over a large marine training field.
“Close the door behind you,” he said, heading behind his desk.
She did, then sat down in one of the two chairs facing him. He stared at her for a moment. Then, of all things, he let go with a chuckle.
Sarah did the same.
There was nothing funny about a serial killer and the fact that there were three innocent people dead, but sometimes battlefield humor was the only way to stay sane. In this case, the implied joke was about the president. Specifically, what he might have been thinking in the far—and definitely off-the-record—reaches of his mind when he was first briefed about the John O’Hara Killer.
I’ve got one target you can have for free, buddy. Take him, he’s yours.
John O’Hara, the president’s brother-in-law, was a major-league screwup. If he wasn’t being caught by the TMZ cameras stumbling out of a Manhattan bar at 3:00 a.m., he was on cable television—at about the same time—starring in his own infomercial selling “authentic” presidential sheets and pillowcases. “Just like they have in the Lincoln Bedroom!”
Probably because he’d stolen them.
The guy was a Billy Carter–size embarrassment. And a late-night comedian’s dream come true.
“Do you think it’s somehow connected to him?” asked Sarah. “I can’t imagine…”
Driesen shrugged. “It wouldn’t make much sense. Then again, going around killing people with the same name doesn’t exactly scream ‘logical,’ now, does it?”
“But of all names to choose…”
“I know. Hawthorne, as you saw, is already at DEFCON 1. He placed a detail on the brother-in-law starting last night.”
“Was O’Hara told why he was getting protection?” Sarah asked. She thought she already knew the answer.
“No. That’s the other tricky thing about this,” said Driesen. “O’Hara’s big mouth aside, this can’t go public. We can’t have a nationwide panic involving every poor son of a bitch out there named John O’Hara, at least not yet.”
“Is that why Hawthorne was here and not Samuelson?” asked Sarah.
Driesen smiled as if to say, “Good for you.” He appreciated that his young agent had grown quite adept at recognizing political implications. Cliff Samuelson, Hawthorne’s boss, was director of the Secret Service.
“I didn’t ask, but it’s safe to assume. They need as much separation from the president as they can get,” said Driesen.
“God, I can see the headline already: PRESIDENT PROTECTS BROTHER-IN-LAW O’HARA BUT NONE OF THE OTHERS.”
“Needless to say, that headline can never be written.”
“But at some point—”
“Yes, at some point we’ll have to go public with the killings, blast it from every rooftop. But between the first and third dead O’Hara, there are over forty John O’Haras on the map that the killer didn’t kill. The point being we can’t pretend to think we can protect them all.”
“So in the meantime?”
“That only makes your job harder,” he said.
Sarah cocked her head. “My job?”
“You didn’t think you were in here to hear about my fly fishing plans for the weekend, did you? You leave tomorrow morning.”
Sarah didn’t need to ask where he was sending her. The first rule of catching serial killers? Always start with the warmest dead body.
“I hear Park City’s nice this time of year,” she deadpanned.
He smiled. “Listen, I realize you’re just back from Florida and that your suitcase is sitting in your office. So take the night off, will you? And by that I don’t mean go home and do laundry.”
“Okay, no laundry,” she said with a chuckle.
“I’m serious,” he retorted. “Go do something fun, kick up your heels. Lord knows you probably need it.”
He was right about that.
“Any suggestions?” she asked.
“No, but I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
Chapter 34
SARAH RANG THE doorbell to Ted’s penthouse apartment for a second time, waiting in the hallway of the Piermont Residences in downtown Fairfax and wondering why he wasn’t answering. She knew he was there.
Only m
inutes earlier, she’d called his number from her own apartment four floors below, dialing *67 first to block her name from coming up on his caller ID.
It was all pretty funny, she thought, worthy of a giggle. The last time she called a boy and hung up as soon as he answered, she was probably in junior high school, listening to Bananarama on her Sony Walkman and wearing acid-washed Guess jeans.
Now here she was listening for Ted behind his door while wearing a long navy blue raincoat. And nothing else. Not a stitch underneath.
Kick up my heels? Go and have fun? If only Driesen could see me now. On second thought, that’s probably not a good idea.
If only Ted would answer the door. C’mon, honey, I’m starting to feel a draft underneath this coat. Not to mention the fact that I’m a tad bit embarrassed.
They’d only been dating for five months, after all. Then again, that was two months longer than her last relationship, and three months longer than the one before that.
With Ted, things seemed to be different, though. And much, much better. He was a successful D.C. attorney, “high-powered and even higher-charging,” according to a profile of him in the Washington Post. He knew all about the long hours and the strains of a professional career. Sure, maybe he had one too many macho photos of himself hanging in the apartment—white-water rafting, skiing the back bowls of Vail—but Sarah was willing to overlook a touch of vanity. He wasn’t the possessive type; he didn’t need to own her. That was nice; very nice.
Of course, the fact that he was totally smokin’ hot was a bonus.
Sarah pressed her ear tight against the door. She thought she could hear music coming from inside the apartment, but it didn’t seem loud enough to cover up the sound of the doorbell.
Then it dawned on her. It was just a hunch, but her hunches had been pretty good of late. Turning around, Sarah reached under the fire-hose cabinet attached to the wall opposite Ted’s door, her hand blindly feeling for a small magnetic box.
The definition of trust in a fledgling relationship? When he tells you where he keeps his spare key.
Maybe after tonight, she’d tell him where she kept hers.
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