“Are you surprised by how it turned out?’
“No. It makes sense the way it turned out: Grueman's predicament is somewhat similar to your own. He gets a fax from Jennifer Deighton and it looks suspicious just as it looks suspicious that your prints were found on an envelope in Susan's dresser drawer. When violence hits close to you, you get splashed. You get dirty.”
“I'm more than splashed. I feel as if I'm about to drown.”
“At the moment, it seems that way. Maybe you ought to be talking to Grueman about that “ I did not reply.
“I'd want him on my side.”
“I wasn't aware that you knew him.”
Ice rattled quietly as Wesley sipped his drink. Brass on the hearth gleamed in the firelight Wood popped, sending sparks swarming up the chimney.
“I know about Grueman,” he said. “I know that he graduated number one from Harvard Law School, was the editor of the Law Review, and was offered a teaching position there but turned it down. That broke his heart. But his wife, Beverly, did not want to move from the D.C. area. Apparently, she had a lot of problems, not the least of which was a young daughter, from a first marriage who was institutionalized at Saint Elizabeths at the time Grueman and Beverly met. He moved to D.C. The daughter died several years later.”
“You've been running a background check on him,” I said.
“Sort of”
“Since when?”
“Since I learned he had received a fax from Jennifer Deighton. By all accounts, it appears he’s Mr. Clean, but someone still had to talk to him.”
“That's not the only reason you suggested it to me, is it?”
“An important reason but not the only one. I thought you should go back there.”
I took a deep breath. “Thank you, Benton. You are good man with the best of intentions.”
He lifted his glass to his lips and stared into the fire.
“Please don't interfere,” I added.
“It's not my style.”
“Of course it is. You're a pro at it. If you want to quietly steer, propel, or unplug someone from behind the scenes, you know how to do it. You know how to throw up so many obstacles and blow out so many bridges that someone like me would be lucky to find her way home.”
“Marino and I are very involved in all this, Kay. Richmond P.D. is involved. The Bureau's involved. Either we've got a psychopath out there who should have been executed or we've got somebody else who seems intent on making us think someone is out there who should have been executed.”
“Marino doesn't want me involved at all,” I said.
“He's in an impossible situation. He's the chief homicide investigator for the city and a member of a Bureau VICAP team, yet he's your colleague and friend. He's supposed to find out everything he can about you and what's gone on in your office. Yet his inclination is to protect you. Try to put yourself in his position.”
“I will. But he needs to put himself in mine.”
“That's only fair.”
“The way he talks, Benton, you would think half the world has a vendetta against me and would love to see me go up in flames.”
“Maybe not half the world, but there are people other than Ben Stevens who are standing around with boxes of matches and gasoline.”
“Who else?”
“I can't give you names because I don't know. And I'm not going to claim that ruining you professionally is the major mission for whoever is behind all this. But I suspect it's on the agenda, if for no other reason than that the cases would be severely compromised if it appears that all evidence routed through your office is tainted. Not to mention, without you, the Commonwealth loses one of its most potent expert witnesses.”
He met my eyes. “You need to consider what your testimony would be worth right now. If you took the stand this minute, would you be helping or hurting Eddie Heath?”
The remark cut to the bone.
“Right this minute, I would not be helping him much. But if I default, how much will that help him or anyone?”
“That's a good question. Marino doesn't want you hurt further, Kay.”
“Then perhaps you can impress upon him that the only reasonable response to such an unreasonable situation is for me to allow him to do his job while he allows me to do mine.”
“Can I refresh that?”
Getting up, he returned with the bottle. We didn't bother with ice.
“Benton, let's talk about the killer. In light of what's happened to Donahue, what are you thinking now?”
He set down the bottle and stirred the fire. For moment, he stood before the fireplace, his back to ;a hands in his pockets. Then he sat on the edge of hearth, his forearms on his knees. Wesley was more rev less than I had seen him in a very long time.
“If you want to know the truth, Kay, this animal scares the hell out of me.”
“How is he different from other killers you have p sued?”
“I think he started out with one set of rules and then decided to change them.”
“His rules or someone else's?”
“I think the rules were not his at first. Whoever behind the conspiracy to free Waddell first made the decisions. But this guy's got his own rules now. Or maybe would be better to say that there are no rules now. He is cunning and he's careful. So far, he's in control.”
“What about motive?” I asked.
“That's hard. Maybe it would be better for me phrase it in terms of mission or assignment. I suspect there's some method to his madness, but the madness what turns him on. He gets off on playing with people minds. Waddell was locked up for ten years, then, suddenly the nightmare of his original crime is revisited. On the night of his execution, a boy is murdered in a sexually sadistic fashion that is reminiscent of Robin Naismith's case. Other, people start dying, and all of them are in some way connected to Waddell. Jennifer Deighton was his friend. Susan was it appears, involved, at least tangentially, in whatever this conspiracy is. Frank Donahue was the prison warden and would have supervised the execution that occurred on the night of December thirteenth. And what is this doing to everybody else, to the other players?”
“I should think that anyone who has had any association with Ronnie Waddell, either legitimately or otherwise, would feel very threatened,” I replied. .
“Right. If a cop killer is on the loose and you are a cop, you know you may be next. I could walk out your door tonight and this guy's waiting in the shadows to gun me down. He could be out in his car somewhere, looking for Marino or trying to find my house: He could be fantasizing about taking out Grueman.”
“Or me.”
Wesley got up and began rearranging the fire again.
“Do you think it would be wise for me to send Lucy back to Miami?” I asked.
“Christ, Kay, I don't know what to tell you. She doesn't want to go home. That comes across loud and clear. You might feel better if she returned to Miami tonight. For that matter, I might feel better if you went with her. In fact, everybody - you, Marino, Grueman, Vander, Connie, Michele, me - would probably feel better if all of us left town. But then who would be left?”
“He would.” I said. “Whoever he is.”
Wesley .glanced at his watch and set his .glass on the coffee table. “None of us should interfere with each other,” he said. “We can't afford to.”
“Benton, I have to clear my name.”
“It is exactly what I would do. Where do you want to start?”
“With a feather.”
“Please explain.”
“It's possible that this killer went out and bought some specialty item filled with eiderdown, but I'd say there's a good chance he stole it.”
“That's a plausible theory.”
“We can't trace the item unless we have its label or some other piece to trace back to a manufacturer, but there may be another way. Maybe something could appear in the newspaper.”
“I don't think we want the killer to know he's leaking feathers everywher
e. He's sure to get rid of the item in question.”
“I agree. But that doesn't preclude your getting one of your journalist sources to run some trumped-up little feature about the eider duck and its prized down, and how items filled with it are so expensive that they've become a hot commodity for thieves. Maybe this could be-tied in with the ski season or something.”
“What? In hopes someone out there will call and say that his car was broken into and his down-filled jacket was stolen?”
“Yes. If the reporter quotes some detective who supposedly has been assigned to the thefts; this gives readers someone they can call. You know, people read a story and say ‘The same thing happened to me.’ Their impulse is to help. They warn to feels important. So they pick up the phone”.
“I'll have to give it some thought.”
'Admittedly it's a long shot.”
We began walking to the door. “I spoke briefly with Michele before leaving the Homestead,” Wesley said. “She and Lucy have already been conferring. Michele says your niece is quite frightening.”
“She's been a holy terror since the day she was born”
He smiled. “Michele didn't mean it like that: She says that Lucy's intellect is frightening.”
“Sometimes I worry that it's too much wattage for such a fragile vessel.”
“I'm not certain she's all that fragile. Remember, I just spent the better part of two days with her. I’m very impressed with Lucy on many fronts.”
“Don't you go trying to recruit her for the Bureau.”
“I'll wait until she finishes college` That will take her, what? All of a year?”
Lucy did not emerge from my study, until Wesley had driven off and I was carrying our glasses into the kitchen.
“Did you enjoy yourself?” I asked her.
“Well, I hear you got along famously with the Wesleys.”
I turned off the faucet and sat at the, table where I’d left my legal pad.
“They're nice people.” “
Rumor has it they think you're nice, too.”
She opened the refrigerator door and idly stared; inside. “Why was Pete here earlier?”
It seemed odd to hear Marino referred to by his first name. I supposed he and Lucy had moved from a state of cold war to détente when he had taken her shooting”
“What makes you think he was here?” I asked.
“I smelled cigarettes when I came in the house. I assume he was here unless you're smoking again.”
She shut the refrigerator door and came over to the table.
“I'm not smoking again, and Marino was here briefly.”
“What did he want?”
“He wanted to ask me a lot of questions,” I said.
“About what?”
“Why do you need to know the details?”
Her eyes moved from my face to the stack of financial files to the legal pad filled with my indecipherable penmanship. “It doesn't matter why since you obviously don't want to tell me.”
“It's complicated, Lucy.”
“You always say something's complicated when you want to shut me out,” she said as she turned and walked away.
I felt as if my world were falling apart, the people in it scattering like dry seeds in the wind. When I watched parents with their children, I marveled over the gracefulness of their interactions and secretly feared I lacked an instinct that couldn't be learned: I found my niece in my study sitting before the computer. Columns of numbers combined with letters of the alphabet were on the screen, and embedded here and there were fragments of what I assumed were data. She was making computations with a pencil on graph paper, and did not look up as I moved next to her.
“Lucy, your mother has had many men in and out of your house; and I am well aware of how that has made you feel. But this is not your house and I am not your mother. It is not necessary for you to feel threatened by my male colleagues and friends. It is not necessary for you to constantly be looking for evidence that some man was here, and it is unfounded for you to be suspicious of my relationship with Marino or Wesley or anyone else.”
She did not respond.
I placed my hand on her shoulder. “I may not be the constant presence in your life that I wish I could be, but you are very important to me.”
Erasing a number and brushing rubber particles off the paper, she said, “Are you going to get charged with a crime?”
“Of course not. I haven't committed any crimes.”
I leaned closer to the monitor.
“What you're looking at is a hex dump,” she said.
“You were right. It's hieroglyphics.”
Placing her fingers on the keyboard, Lucy began moving the cursor as she explained, “What I'm doing here is trying to get the exact position of the SID number. That's the State Identification Number, which is the unique identifier. Every person in the system has a SID nun including you, since your prints are in AFIS, too. Fourth generation language, like SQL, I could a query by a column name. But in hexadecimal the language is technical and mathematical. There are no column names, only positions in the record layout. In other words, if I wanted to go to Miami, in SQL I would simply tell the computer I want to go to Miami. But in hexadecimal, I would have to say that I want to go position that is this many degrees north of the, equator and this many degrees east of the prime meridian. “So to extend the geographical analogy, I'm figuring out the longitude and latitude of the SID number also of the number that indicates the record type. Then I can write a program to search for any SID number wheel the record is a type two, which means a deletion, or y type three, which is an update. I'll run this program through each journal tape.”
“You're, assuming that if a record has been tampered with, then, what was changed was the SID?” I asked.
“Let's just say it would be a whole lot easier to with the SID number than it would be to mess with the actual fingerprint images on the optical disk record, that's really all you've got in AFIS - the SID number the corresponding prints. The person's name, his and other personal information are in his CCH, Computerized Criminal History, which resides at CCRE, or the Central Criminal Records Exchange:”
“As I understand it the records in CCRE are linked to the prints in AFIS by the SID numbers,” I said.
“Exactly.”
Lucy was still working when I went to bed I fell right to sleep, only to awaken at two A.M. I did not drift off again until five, and my alarm roused me less than an hour later. I drove downtown in the dark and listened as one of the local radio announcers gave a news update. He reported that police had questioned me, and I had refused to disclose information pertaining to my financial records. He went on to remind everyone that Susan Story had deposited thirty five hundred dollars in her checking account just weeks before her murder.
When I got to the office, I had barely taken off my coat when Marino called.
“The damn major can't keep his mouth shut,” he said right off.
“Obviously.”
“Shit, I'm sorry.”
“It's not your fault. I know you have to report to him.”
Marino hesitated. “I need to ask you about your guns. You don't own a twenty-two, right?”
“You know all about my handguns. I. have a Ruger and a Smith and Wesson. And if you pass that along to Major Cunningham, I'm sure I'll hear about it on the radio within the hour.”
“Doc, he wants them submitted to the firearms lab.”
For an instant, I thought Marino was joking..
“He thinks you should be willing to submit them for examination,” he added. “He thinks it's a good idea to show right away that the bullets recovered from Susan, the Heath kid, and Donahue couldn't have been fired from your guns.”
“Did you tell the major that the revolvers I have are thirty-eights?” I asked, incensed.
“Yes.”
“And he knows that twenty-two slugs were recovered from the bodies?”
“Yeah. I went round and roun
d with him about it.
“Well, ask him for me if he knows of an adapter that would make it possible to use twenty-two rim fire cartridges in a thirty-eight revolver. If he does, tell him he ought to present a paper on it at the next American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting.”
“I really don't think you want me to tell him that.”
'This is nothing but politics, publicity ploys. It's not even rational.”