Agent Out

by Francine Pascal

  I can’t say for sure what’s happened to her. I can at least take some solace in that. But the fact remains, her disappearance is the only reason I got this case. Whatever Malloy says, the lollipop investigation belongs to Gaia and Catherine, and it always will. But once I truly accept that fact, then the guilt begins to fade away again. And an even stronger resolve takes its place.

  I owe this case to them. I owe it to Gaia, and especially to Catherine, to put every ounce of my training and discipline into this thing. I owe it to them to eat, live, and breathe this case until it’s solved. I don’t just owe it to them; I owe it to the victims this bastard has already taken and the victims I’m not going to let him take.

  So it’s time to put my emotions aside and start focusing on the facts and only the facts. Organization is key. This is the pertinent information I’ve gathered thus far from the case file:

  Suspect is a male, approximately six feet, muscular build, no facial identification.

  There have been three murders to date—all of them single mothers: Ann Knight, Laurel Halliday, and Terri Barker.

  Each of them left behind a young son, and in every case the assailant gave the child a flavored lollipop at the murder scene.

  Each victim had her throat slit by a left-handed assailant.

  The murder weapon has been identified as a Yukon Bay double hunting knife, model sc-42.

  Some wool fibers have been recovered—possibly from a fisherman’s sweater, though that can’t be confirmed.

  One of the children (Sam Knight) identified the assailant as “smelling wet”—also inconclusive.

  Suspect Ned Riley, a fisherman, was brought in for questioning but was cleared of all suspicion.

  Those are all the primary facts in the file, as far as I can tell. Some of it could be interpreted as useful, I suppose. But just as Malloy suggested, the truth is that this case is getting colder every day.

  That is to say, it was getting colder. Until today.

  Perhaps now would be a good time to mention it: I started my investigation this morning … and I’ve got a lead. A serious lead. A break-in-the-case kind of lead.

  Like I said before: I’m not just stepping in to keep things status quo until Gaia returns. I’m stepping in to solve this thing. Before another woman gets murdered.

  THE PUZZLED IMPHTIENT STAGE

  “We’re changing our strategy.”

  Kim had dispensed with the knocks, helios, and any other superfluous pleasantries and simply barged into Will’s dorm room unannounced. Anything else would have wasted precious time.

  Will barely had a chance to react before Kim was leaning hard on his desk and slamming his forensic psych book shut for him.

  “Changing our strategy?” Will uttered, shifting back in his chair. “Since when?”

  “Since now,” Kim replied.

  “I didn’t even know we had a strategy. We haven’t even talked since this morning.”

  “I know,” Kim said. “Because I was busy finding us a new lead.”

  This announcement produced just the effect Kim had expected. Will’s jaw dropped slighdy open, and his body froze in position.

  “A new lead …” Will repeated. It wasn’t quite a question yet—it seemed more like a placeholder while he tried to process the information.

  A smile began to creep up at the corners of Kim’s mouth as he nodded slowly, waiting for Will to catch up. “A new lead,” he confirmed. He grabbed hold of the other chair and dragged it right next to Will’s so they were sitting knee to knee. “Just listen,” he began. Kim couldn’t contain his enthusiasm, and he began to speak in fifth gear—something he thought he’d trained himself to stop doing somewhere around the fifth grade, but this apparently would have to be an exception.

  “I wanted to catch up on the file ASAP,” he explained. “So I went down to Henderson Elementary to do my own follow-up on the Terri Barker murder—”

  “Wait,” Will interrupted. “Why didn’t you bring me with you?”

  “You had fingerprinting till two—besides, you’d already been through all this; I was just trying to get up to speed. Anyway, it was all just par for the course, you know—just confirming the basics—unwed mother, nurse’s aid, everyone adored her, all the facts were checking out, and I was packing up to head out when the school nurse—Nurse Perez—says to me, ‘God, if she’d just taught that class that night.’ Well, of course, I looked like you look right now—I just froze and stared at her. ‘What class?’ I said. We didn’t have anything in the file about her teaching a class. And then the nurse tells me, it was only once every couple of months, but Terri Barker would teach a CPR class to the lifeguards in training. Two hours, usually on a Saturday evening.”

  Will still looked unpleasantly puzzled. “Yeah, so … ?” His shoulders rose with a half shrug. “So she taught a CPR class. Was one of the students a fisherman or something?”

  “No.” Kim groaned with frustration. “You’ve got to let me finish. The point is, on the night she was murdered, she didn’t teach the class. She asked Nurse Perez to fill in for her.”

  Will still looked somewhat nonplused. “Okay … ?”

  Kim squinted at Will. “Okay? That’s all you have to say? Okay?”

  “What am I missing here?”

  Kim poked his finger at the side of Will’s head. “Where are you today, man? Wake up. Terri Barker bagged on her class the night she was murdered. She asked Nurse Perez to fill in for her. She canceled. People always cancel for a reason. Why do you think she canceled?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Kim leaned closer to Will and lowered his voice for dramatic effect. “Because she had a date that night. A blind date.” He let this gigantic piece of new information linger in the ensuing silence.

  Will’s expression finally began to shift. Slowly but surely his pursed lips passed through the puzzled impatient stage and opened into a cautious smile. “A blind date? How the hell did we miss a blind date?”

  “Because she didn’t tell anyone it was that night,” Kim explained, relieved to see Will finally getting on board with this blockbuster. “Apparently she’d only mentioned to one of the kids at school that she might be going on a blind date that weekend. But she didn’t actually tell anyone the night she went. So I did a little asking around, and I checked with her favorite restaurant, and they confirmed. She was at the restaurant that night with some guy no one had ever seen before.”

  “Jeee-zuss.” Will unleashed a full dose of his Southern drawl.

  “We’ve got to find this guy,” Kim declared. “Forget trying to go through the knife for now; forget the lollipops, too. New strategy. Find Mr. Blind Date. We find him and this thing is over. Do you concur or what? What do you think?”

  Will looked at Kim and shook his head slowly. “Jeee-zuss,” he repeated, shooting out of his chair and grabbing his coat and keys. “I think, what the hell are we still doing here?”

  Gaia

  Time Stamp: 11:42 p.m.

  [Recorder on] Agent Gaia Moore recording, field log, additional. No case number, like I said before.

  I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be sitting at this plastic table, in this moldy room, looking at cigarette burns on the walls. I don’t think anyone in a right frame of mind would want to be stuck in a room at the Clavarak Motel.

  [Pause] I’m pissed. I’m pissed at myself for stopping, even if it’s only for a cold shower and another slug of gas station coffee and a chance to breathe. I want to be back out there. I want to be on the road, tracking her down. I want to go back to that dungeon of a basement and find James Rossiter and beat the truth out of him. I want to just keep pounding and pounding until he tells me what he did with Catherine—where she is now, who’s got her if someone else does, why they took her. If this is just about some backwoods pervert who found himself a pretty girl, then I swear to God …

  But that kind of thinking won’t get me anywhere. Jesus, if I haven’t learned that, then all this training re
ally has been for nothing. That was how Gaia, the lost girl, dealt with a problem: pounding despicable men’s faces in and getting absolutely nowhere. The fact is, it doesn’t matter how much I care about Catherine. It doesn’t matter how desperate I am to find her. That’s what you would say, Agent Bishop, and I know you’re right. I’m not just some pissed-off girl looking for her friend. I am a federal agent conducting an investigation. And if I lose sight of that, then I know I’ll lose her.

  I’ve heard you say it so many times, Agent Bishop, but I’m finally starting to understand it: “An investigation is never about wants. It’s about needs. We want to punish the bad guys. We want to save all the victims—we want to save the world. But what we need are facts. And a focused mind to collect them.”

  I needed to take this breather and I needed this shower. I can’t help Catherine if I’m a goddamn zombie. [Pause] And I think I need Marsh. As much as I’d love to trust no one but myself in this investigation, the simple fact is that I’d be shooting myself in the foot trying to do it alone. The one thing I do know about Marsh is that we both want the same thing. We want to find Catherine and bring her home. He’s been on her trail longer than I have, and I need to pick his brain until I know everything he knows.

  And I could pound Rossiter’s face until every bone in his skull was shattered—that doesn’t mean I’d get any closer to the truth. Besides … after our unfortunate run-in in that basement, I’m sure he’s made himself scarce. No, I don’t need to pound James Rossiter. I need to investigate him. I’m sitting here in the middle of freaking nowhere and I need help. And I’m not going waste any more precious time feeling too proud or embarrassed to say it. [Pause] I need Will.

  Phone calls are out of the question. Even a cell phone call could be traced. So how, then? How the hell can I talk to him? [Recorder off]

  NO CHEMISTRY

  It was Kim’s first time in the Quantico sheriff’s office interrogation room. Will, obviously, knew his way around—he had waved casually at the local cops and the town’s two plainclothes detectives on the way in and showed Kim where to get coffee and where he could hang his jacket. Will hadn’t been running the lollipop killer investigation very long, but he’d already developed an easy rapport with Sheriff Gus Parker’s Quantico police. Kim tried not to smile as he watched Will deploy some of his patented Southern charm, smiling easily at the female secretaries before leading Kim into this interrogation room.

  Showtime, Kim thought excitedly. Now that he was actually doing it—participating in an investigation—he was absurdly pleased. He wanted to call his mother and gush, starting with the cliché of “Guess where I am?” and finishing with a breathless description of the windowless interrogation room: its metal tables and foam-tiled walls, just like in the movies. He wasn’t dressed in his nicest suit—that was only for really special occasions—but in one of his nicer ones, cut in such a way that the shoulder holster didn’t interfere with the suit’s lines. He was planning on letting Will take the lead in the interrogation, but he was ready to jump in at a moment’s notice.

  “Bill, it’s Agent Taylor,” Will was saying into the intercom phone. “Would you send Mr. Dix in?”

  Kim followed Will’s example, pulling out one of the metal folding chairs, undoing his jacket’s top button, sitting with his hands folded on the table. Will glanced over at him, smiling reassuringly, before turning a bland implacable gaze on the door.

  He must have practiced that look, Kim thought. He was impressed—Will seemed to imitating Special Agent Malloy’s icecold facial expression.

  The door opened, and Jason Dix entered the room.

  Kim’s first impression was that the man overwhelmingly wanted to be somewhere else. It was clear from his posture, the way he held the doorknob, his embarrassed look, the perspiration stains on his shirt, and the obvious fact that he’d wetted and finger-combed his thinning brown hair just before coming in. Which meant a visit to the sheriff’s station men’s room, which meant a nervous bladder, which meant—

  Okay, give it a rest, Sherlock Holmes, Kim reminded himself. Here he was, already willing to convict Mr. Dix as the killer before he’d even had a chance to sit down. He had to relax—relax and keep his eyes open.

  “Jason Dix?” Will was asking.

  “Yes.”

  The man was small and round-shouldered, with a pleasant, plain face and puffy eyes. He wore a blue dress shirt and full-cut, off-the-rack pleated khaki pants.

  Worried about his waistline, Kim thought.

  “Thank you for coming in, sir. I’m Special Agent Taylor; this is Special Agent Lau—Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Will gestured toward the opposite metal chair. “Have a seat.”

  “Um—thank you,” Dix said. The metal chair scraped as he pulled it out.

  Will took his time opening a file folder, gazing down at the pages inside before turning his eyes back to Jason Dix. It was a good technique—give the man time to stew.

  “Do you know why you’re here, Mr. Dix?”

  Excellent first question, Kim thought. Will was cutting right to the heart of the matter—that this was a murder investigation—but at the same time he was making Dix do all the work: broaching the subject, finding the right words, figuring out how much detail they wanted to hear.

  “Well—yeah,” Dix said quietly. “It’s because Terri got—got killed.”

  “You knew Ms. Barker?”

  “Yes. No. I mean—I mean, I’d just met her.”

  “But you are aware that she was murdered?”

  “Yeah. I saw it in the paper.”

  “And when you saw it in the paper,” Kim asked, speaking for the first time, “did you happen to notice the time and date of the murder?”

  “Um—I mean—I’m not sure. I think so.”

  He’s sweating, Kim noticed.

  “You ‘think’ you noticed,” Will said. “Sir, the murder was reported on page twelve of the Quantico Gazette the day after it occurred—August 20. The news item makes clear that Ms. Barker was killed the previous night.”

  “That’s—” Dix was squinting, puzzled. “Yes.”

  “How did you meet her?” Kim asked, leaning forward against the metal table.

  Dix looked at Kim straight on for the first time. He had pale blue eyes that reflected the room’s fluorescent overhead lights. An unusual color, Kim noticed.

  “It was a blind date,” Dix said quietly. He coughed to clear his throat.

  “When?”

  “The night before. I mean—the night before the newspaper article.”

  Will raised his eyebrows. It was perfect—he looked for all the world like this was the first time he’d ever heard anything about a blind date. “You went on a date with Terri Barker the night she was murdered?”

  “Well, yes—”

  “So when you saw the newspaper article,” Kim cut in, “what was your reaction?”

  Dix turned his blue eyes back to Kim. He was definitely perspiring—there was no question about it. His hands were leaving visible prints on the metal table.

  “I was—I was shocked. I was surprised. It was very strange. I didn’t know how to react.”

  “Did you consider contacting the police?” Will asked the question as if he had no idea whether Dix had done so or not.

  “You mean, like helping them solve the crime? Yeah.”

  “But you didn’t do it,” Will said. “Why not?”

  Dix rubbed his fingers over his upper lip. “Honestly? I thought about it. But I chickened out. I just—I thought it would look weird, I guess.”

  “What do you do, Mr. Dix?” Will seemed to be changing tactics.

  “I work at the shoe store,” Dix said. “Digby Shoes? Down on Marlin Street. I’ve been there about four years.”

  “Do you like working there?” Kim put in. He wasn’t wild about the line of questioning, but he followed Will’s lead.

  “Sure, I guess.”

  “Who arranged the date?” Kim went on. He wasn’t sure w
here he was going with the questioning, but he knew from his classroom experience that it was important to move around the subject matter in unpredictable patterns.

  “It wasn’t—it’s an online service,” Dix said, blushing a bit. “This local Web site? It’s called SecondChanceVA.com—I saw the ad and decided to try them out.”

  “This was your first time using that service?” Will asked in a bored tone.

  A Web site, Kim was thinking. Wait a minute—that could be a huge lead.

  “Yeah—I’d never had the guts before,” Dix said, coughing. “Anyway, I filled out their form and a few days later I got an email back and I was set up with—with Terri. We made plans to meet that night.”

  “To meet where?” Kim asked.

  “La Croix,” Dix said. “Expensive place. I wanted to go to Montano’s Steak House, but she kind of insisted. La Croix is like her favorite place—everyone knew her there. Was her favorite place.”

  “Did you have a nice dinner?”

  “Sure. It was fine,” Dix said. “No big deal. We talked about her job, my job, what kind of music we liked—you know. Usual first date stuff.”

  “Did you like her?” Will asked.

  “Honestly, not so much. There wasn’t much of a spark there. By the time we got to dessert, I was thinking I probably wouldn’t call her again.”

  “And what time did you leave the restaurant?” Kim asked. He already knew the answer—8:07 p.m., plus or minus two minutes, according to the MasterCard receipt and the La Croix coat check attendant’s story.

  “I think around eight?” Dix said, squinting. “I’m not sure.”

  “And then?” Will asked. Kim realized that he wasn’t imagining it—Will was genuinely disinterested, as if he’d already given up on Jason Dix and his story.

  “I drove her back to her car,” Dix said. “I remember I was wondering if we were going to get another drink somewhere else, you know, after the date, but it was pretty clear that neither of us was interested. It was pleasant enough between us, just, you know, no chemistry. Anyway, she said she’d left her car downtown, and could I drop her off. I said sure.”