BEFORE HE NEEDS

by Blake Pierce

  About halfway down the sheet, she saw where Alexa had marked through a set of names with a black marker.

  “What’s this name right here?” she asked, pointing to the crossed-out listing.

  “The O’Learys,” Alexa said. “Nice enough people but there’s been a rumor circulating that Devin, the husband, has HIV. I wanted to get the news for myself, so I tried getting in touch with them. But he’s not taking my calls or answering my emails.”

  “And what about the wife?”

  “Well, according to the rumors, she left him. He contracted HIV through an affair. I can’t stress enough that these are rumors. But I kept his name on there, just in case. But then about a week ago, he finally answered one of my emails.”

  “So these were just rumors?”

  “At first, yes…that was what I thought.”

  “How well do you know your members?”

  “As well as I can. Keep in mind…I didn’t always have this role. I was a member, too. But the couple that organized it split ways. Shortly before they separated, the wife asked me to take over. I was happy to do it.”

  “And what was her name?”

  “Tanya Rose.”

  Mackenzie typed the name down on her note app on her phone. “So back to the HIV rumors,” she said.

  “Well, in the email I sent Devin O’Leary, I had asked if the rumors were true and all he replied with was…well, here…I’ll just show you.”

  Alexa pulled out her phone, opened up her email client, and scrolled to a particular email. Mackenzie read it, thinking that each word of the brief exchange painted a picture for motive. Of course, the timelines might not line up exactly; they’d have to look into it.

  In the email exchange, Alexa wrote: “I’m hearing some terrible rumors about you and wanted to touch base with you before I confirm your attendance on the cruise. Of course if these rumors are true, I can’t allow you to participate. I also hear that Janelle has left you as a result of the topic of these rumors. Could you please send along her contact information so I can get in touch with her as well?

  The response from Devin O’Leary came three days later, exactly six days ago. “Rumors are none of your business. And no, you can’t have Janelle’s contact info. Fuck you and your slutty event.”

  Mackenzie handed the phone back to Alexa. “Has he been a problem before?”

  “No. Not at all. Which is why I assume the HIV rumor is true. The affair, too. It’s been quite a shock.”

  “And do the others that planned on coming to the event know about the rumors?”

  “Yes,” Alexa said. “That’s how I originally heard about it.”

  Mackenzie leaned over to Rodriguez and whispered into his ear. “Can you make a call to see what your guys at the precinct can do to pull records on Devin O’Leary?”

  Rodriguez nodded. As he pulled his phone out to the make the call, Hudson reclined back in his chair, arching his back. “Okay, so here we go,” he said.

  All eyes turned to the color monitors installed within a wooden panel. Only three were in use, all showing the separate arms of the third floor hallway.

  “Right here,” Hudson said as people trickled in and out of the cameras, “we can see the Springses go into their room.”

  He pointed to a couple pulling two suitcases behind them. The hallway was filled with others that were filing into their own rooms. But as Jack Springs turned toward the door to room 341 and reached for his keycard, Mackenzie could see his face quite clearly. They all watched as Jack and Vanessa walked into the room, the door closing behind them.

  Hudson then sped the footage up a bit, but not so fast as to miss if anyone entered the room. They watched for roughly two minutes as people came and went in a fast-forwarded motion. They never saw anyone leave or enter the Springses’ room.

  “We’re now coming up on the call for the safety briefing,” Hudson said. “The announcement was made over the ship’s broadcast system at ten o’clock on the dot.”

  Here, the hallways were not as hectic. Only a few people milled around. The counter in the corner of the screen showed that the footage they were watching was recorded at 10 p.m. Within a few seconds, people started to come out of their rooms to attend the briefing. A great many of them were already dressed in bikinis and bathing suits.

  As the foot traffic within the hallways started to thicken, Mackenzie spotted a single person walking against the flow of traffic. They were headed in the direction of room 341 and they walked with their head down. It was pretty clear that this person did not have any interest in making eye contact with anyone else. They all watched as this figure approached room 341 and knocked.

  From the angle of the camera, it was evident that the person knocking on the door was male. But it was hard to see any real features in his face. He was wearing a backpack over his right shoulder and it appeared to not have much packed inside of it.

  “Alexa,” Mackenzie said, “I don’t suppose you can tell from this angle if that happens to be Devin O’Leary, can you?”

  Alexa squinted at the screen and, after a few moments, shook her head. “It’s impossible to tell. It could be. Looks to be around the same height.”

  The door was answered. The man stood there for a moment and then was allowed in. After that, the door closed.

  Hudson let the footage play at the heightened speed once again. Mackenzie kept her eyes on the counter at the bottom of the screen. When the door opened and the same man once again appeared in the screen, four minutes and nine seconds had passed. The man looked to the left, then to the right, and then walked to the end of the hallway. There, he took the elevator.

  “Now, if we look at the single camera footage from the entrance and exits down below,” Hudson said, “we see this same figure eighty seconds later, getting off of the boat.”

  They watched as the man showed up on the mentioned footage. He walked briskly, spoke to the two people manning the check-in and passenger service kiosks, and then exited the ship.

  “Damn,” Ellington said.

  Mackenzie felt the same frustration. She had worked on the assumption that the suspect had managed to get off of the ship before it started its journey, but held a small hope that he had remained. Until now.

  “Mr. Hudson, I need to speak with those two employees,” she said, pointing to the two people the suspect had just spoken to.

  “That’s doable,” Hudson said. “But they aren’t on the ship. They only work out of the offices, I believe. Still, I can find out who was on the schedule and get you their information.”

  “Alexa, do you have an address for Devin O’Leary?” Mackenzie asked.

  “No, sorry. Just a phone number and email address.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Rodriguez said. “I can have someone at the station pull it for you within a few minutes.”

  “That’ll work,” Mackenzie said. She then turned to look at Alexa. “In any of the footage you saw, are you sure you can’t pinpoint it as being Devin O’Leary?”

  “Nothing concrete, no. Like I said…the build appears to be the same.”

  Mackenzie, Ellington, and Rodriguez shared an uncomfortable glance. “That’s not enough to go on, is it?” Rodriguez asked.

  “No, it’s not enough to bring him in,” Mackenzie said. “But I think it’s more than enough to warrant waking him up very early in the morning.”

  “Want some of my men to head out with you?” Rodriguez asked.

  “No,” Mackenzie said, already heading for the door. “Just make sure we’ve got an open interrogation room.”

  She took her leave without giving so much as a single goodbye or thank you to Hudson, Alexa, and Rodriguez. Ellington caught up with her as she made her way to the ship’s exit and gave her a curious look.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “This guy is brave and crafty. And worse than that, I keep feeling like I’m going around in circles on this.”

  “No, we’re making progress,” E
llington said. “This Devin O’Leary guys seems like a legit lead. While we’re on the way to grab him, I’ll make some calls to see if he can be linked to Tidal Hills or DCM.”

  She nodded, once again feeling herself slip out of control just as she had while interrogating Samuel Netti. The elusiveness of this case—complete with a man who seemed to be coming and going as he pleased while killing his victims—bore too much similarity to her father’s case. And she hated the fact that it was getting under her skin so easily.

  They were back in their car at 1:40. Mackenzie was quiet and brooding when she got back behind the wheel. The late hour no longer bothered her. The idea of fatigue was far away from her mind now. All she could see were those freshly bloodstained sheets in the Springses’ room and the looming figure at their door in the security footage.

  She knew that they had not been able to see his face, but she still felt like the bastard had been smiling at her, taunting her and a history that continued to haunt her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Devin O’Leary lived in a quaint little two-story house in the less ritzy part of Golden Beach. The neighborhood was dark and quiet as Mackenzie pulled her rental car up alongside the address that Rodriguez had texted her shortly after leaving the cruise ship. As she and Ellington started up O’Leary’s sidewalk, she went over the other information that Rodriguez had sent her—information that the Miami PD had quickly and efficiently put together for her.

  O’Leary didn’t have much of a record at all. A few parking tickets and a drunk-and-disorderly from back in his college days. Other than that, he appeared to be clean.

  Other than debaucherous involvement in a swinging club, Mackenzie thought as she and Ellington climbed up his porch steps.

  She hammered on the door hard and then pressed the doorbell a few times. She could hear it chiming in the house, muted through the walls. She let ten seconds pass and then started up again.

  From inside, she got an understandably cranky response. “Who the fuck is that? Janelle, is that you?”

  That backs up the rumor about his wife leaving him, Mackenzie thought.

  When Devin O’Leary opened the door, he went through a wide range of emotions in a handful of seconds. First there was anger, then confusion, then alarm. He studied them with clearly sleepy eyes, unable to form any words just yet.

  “Are you Devin O’Leary?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Yeah. Who the hell are you?”

  “Agents White and Ellington with the FBI,” she said. “I do apologize for the late hour, but there’s an extremely pressing matter we feel you may be able to assist us with.”

  He was either still partly asleep or confused beyond words because all he could manage to get out were a few garbled stutters. Finally, he seemed to come around and asked: “What is this about?”

  “We need to know where you were earlier tonight, specifically between the hours of eight and eleven,” Ellington said.

  “I was here.”

  “Doing what?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Drinking my ass off, if you must know,” O’Leary said.

  “You got anyone that can prove it?”

  “No, but I have a shitload of empty bottles in here. Look…what the hell is this? Did Janelle put you up to this?”

  “That’s your wife, right?” Mackenzie asked. “She left you?”

  A wretched look passed across O’Leary’s face. He looked like he might reach out and punch Mackenzie at any moment.

  “She did,” he said. “And why does that warrant two FBI creeps knocking on my door at two in the morning?”

  “We’re here for something very different,” Mackenzie said. “Mr. O’Leary, do you know a couple by the name of Jack and Vanessa Springs?”

  O’Leary’s eyes wandered a bit and he nodded slowly. “Swinging. Seriously? Is that what this is about? It couldn’t have waited until morning? I’m not stupid. Swinging is not illegal.”

  “No, but murder is,” Mackenzie said. “The Springses were found dead in a bed on a cruise ship tonight. A cruise ship that I have it on good authority you were scheduled to be on.”

  “Yeah,” he said absently, still apparently processing the news that the Springses were dead. “But that didn’t quite work out.”

  “There are rumors going around,” Mackenzie said.

  “About my health.”

  Mackenzie only nodded to confirm. She could tell that he was processing a lot in that moment. He was tired, in shock, and, if he was to be believed, drunk.

  “How well did you know the Springses?” Mackenzie asked.

  He shook his head. “I’m not talking about this. Not right now. I can’t. I had too much to drink, I’ve been dealt some shitty news recently, and I…damn. I just can’t—”

  And then something unexpected happened. Devin O’Leary started sobbing. He covered his face with his hands and sank to his knees. He leaned against the frame of the opened door and wailed.

  “Just take me,” he said through tears. “Take me in. I don’t care. I just…I’m done. I can’t do this. I fucked up. Bad…”

  Mackenzie and Ellington shared a look over his head. Mackenzie gave Ellington a nod of acknowledgment, a look that said: You cuff him.

  Ellington started to do exactly that as Mackenzie stepped past O’Leary and into his home. She heard Ellington behind her, trying to approach the odd scenario with as much professionalism and care as possible.

  “Come on, Mr. O’Leary,” he was saying. “Let’s get you down to the station. We’ll get you some coffee and sort this all out.”

  Mackenzie, meanwhile, walked further into O’Leary’s house to see if his story checked out. In the kitchen, she found that eight empty beer bottles were piled on top of a close-to-overflowing trashcan. A shot glass sat on the edge of the sink. She sniffed at it and smelled whiskey.

  She ventured into the bedroom and found a pair of jeans and a T-shirt balled up at the foot of the bed. She fished through the pockets of the jeans and found a handful of coins along with a crumpled receipt. It showed that O’Leary had been telling the truth. He’d purchased a case of beer at a local convenience store at 7:56 that afternoon. For him to have done that, gone to the ship, murdered two people, then get back home and get as drunk as he could…that was impossible.

  But there’s definitely something going on with him, she thought as she made her way back through his house. She closed the door behind her, thinking that the fact he had known the Springses was worth looking into anyway.

  She joined Ellington out at the car as he was closing the rear passenger door. “Everything good in there?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “He’s not our guy, but—”

  “But yeah,” Ellington said. “Something’s going on with him.”

  They pulled away from the sidewalk with O’Leary still sobbing quietly in the back seat. As they made their way back to the precinct, Mackenzie started looking out in the direction of the sea. It was back there somewhere, but was hidden by the buildings and the night. Even the palm trees seemed menacing, like looming giants trying to stomp down on her as they carried Devin O’Leary to the station.

  ***

  Maybe it had been listening to O’Leary weeping the entire way from his house to the precinct…or maybe it was just biology. Whatever it was, Mackenzie found that she could no longer fight off the tiredness. She felt fatigue speeding in on at her like a bullet as she sat down across from O’Leary in the interrogation room. Although she had been in this room less than seven hours after interrogating Samuel Netti, it seemed like a new foreign place.

  “On your porch, you said you’d done something bad,” Mackenzie said. “And then you seemed to just break. I know this is not a church and I am a far cry from a pastor or priest, but is there anything you want to tell us? If you keep it in, we’ll just dig. You pretty much gave us plenty of reason to do so on your porch.”

  “It’s fine,” he said. He looked very sad but was no longer crying. His earlier outburst had w
orn him out. He looked hollow and exhausted.

  She could tell that O’Leary was a beaten man. She supposed there was only so much a man could take. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like to receive the news that you had a disease that could very well kill you.

  “My wife and I have been swinging for years now. I was never into porno so when things started to get dry in the bedroom, we checked out swinging. I know it sounds dumb and backwards, but it helped. I don’t know. Never cared about the psychology of it all. But last year, we swung with this couple and…I don’t know. The wife and I sort of hit it off. We started to see each other regularly. A full-blown affair…different than the swinging, you know.”

  “And who was this other couple?” Mackenzie asked, wondering if it might be one of the four couples she’d recently seen deceased.

  “The Bryants,” he said. “I wish…man, I just wish things could have been different. It’s just all a mess. I found out three months ago that I wasn’t the only guy she was seeing on the side. And by then, I had already started to get sick. I got the diagnosis three weeks ago. I told my wife everything. HIV. Affair. Everything. I’m so scared I gave it to Janelle, you know? But…shit. I was so fucking scared, you know? Scared. Mad. So I—”

  He started to lose it here and although Mackenzie was already sure she knew where he was going with it, her tendency to try to find the best in everyone fought against the concept. But the words he spoke next confirmed it all.

  Through sobs, he went on. Mackenzie was currently alone in the room with him but she could pretty much feel the tension within the observation room as Ellington and Rodriguez listened in.

  “I slept with two other women after I got the diagnosis. I was…like a monster. I wanted to spread it. It felt like justice…it felt like…like I was getting even with the whole world.”

  My God, Mackenzie thought.

  She felt herself trembling with anger and something that felt like sadness.

  She got up from her chair and suddenly found it next to impossible to look at Devin O’Leary. She made fists of her hands, tightening them as much as she could to suppress the trembling. She was swallowing down disgusting retorts and accusations that would be entirely unprofessional. She was tired, she was pissed off, and everything felt like it was slipping away.