CHAPTER FOUR
Lucy sulked in her room after her shower. Between the humiliation of the pull-ups and the call from Suzanne about Lucy’s name being part of the Rosemary Weber murder investigation, she thought she was entitled to a bout of self-concern. She’d been so preoccupied with the events of the day that she’d performed poorly on the PT drill after she’d returned from Suzanne’s call. It went from bad to worse when Lucy noticed both SSA Kean and field counselor Special Agent Laughlin had observed her failure.
“Agent Kean was watching everyone,” she mumbled to herself. That was the class supervisor’s job, to assess all new agents from day one through graduation. More than ten percent of new agents at Quantico dropped out or were expelled for a variety of reasons. The odds were with Lucy to make it, but because of the difficulty in getting here in the first place she had to be better than everyone else.
But Laughlin was a different problem. Every new-agent class was assigned two field counselors—mentors—not only to observe but also help the new agents with their studies, questions, and any concerns. From the beginning, Lucy had felt uneasy around Laughlin and suspected he disliked her. Which was silly because they’d never met, he’d never specifically said anything to her, and she couldn’t think of a reason he would have an issue with her. That he had been watching her so closely made her doubly nervous.
But she wanted to talk to Sean about Rosemary Weber; unfortunately, he was on a commercial flight from Sacramento and wouldn’t be landing until late tonight. Lucy considered calling Hans Vigo but immediately dismissed that idea. Now that Assistant Director Vigo was liaison between Quantico and headquarters, she didn’t want to use her connections for information.
She tried Suzanne, wanting to talk to her without the ear of Kean, but she didn’t answer her phone. Running out of options of who she could talk to, Lucy wondered if Kate was still on campus. Her sister-in-law was the cybercrimes instructor at Quantico and one of the few people Lucy trusted.
Lucy called Margo and told her she’d meet up with her and the others at the cafeteria, then went to find Kate. She crossed the campus to the Classroom Building, where Kate’s long, narrow office had more computer equipment than airspace. Lucy knocked but didn’t wait for an answer before opening the door.
Lucy came face-to-face with the back of a broad-shouldered man, standing right in front of Kate’s desk. Kate was facing him, the backs of her thighs against the edge. She was saying through clenched teeth, “I’m not going to forget.” Kate’s eyes widened when she saw Lucy, and she sidestepped the man in front of her. Her mouth was a tight, thin line. “Lucy.”
Lucy processed what she’d walked into. While she hadn’t seen them in a compromising position, it was obvious that Kate knew the man standing much too close to her—and knew him well.
“Excuse me.” Lucy’s voice was quiet; she was surprised she could say anything at all.
The man turned. Reva had called Special Agent Rich Laughlin “Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome,” but Lucy didn’t see it. Right now all she saw in his pale eyes was hatred.
“Kincaid.” Irritation laced his voice.
Her skin crawled, and she considered that Kate’s meeting might not have been friendly. She was actually relieved, because for a brief moment she’d thought the worst—that Kate was cheating on Dillon. Of course that wasn’t the case, and that Lucy had even thought it for a second made her feel guilty.
She straightened. “Sorry, sir.”
“You should wait for a response before entering a room,” Kate snapped. “What is it?”
“It’s not important. I’ll talk to you later.”
She left Kate’s office, heart racing, wondering what had just happened. She’d known Kate for seven years, had lived with her and Dillon for most of that time, and was closer to her than she was to her own two sisters. Kate could be sharp and abrasive, but Lucy had never heard that tone directed at her.
Lucy needed to talk to Kate, but not while Agent Laughlin was anywhere around. She was too upset to meet her friends for dinner, so made a detour to Supervisory Special Agent Tony Presidio’s office.
The basement was a fully self-contained two-story bomb shelter designed and built in the Hoover years so the FBI could continue operating in the event of a major national disaster. Though the Behavioral Science Unit and most other divisions had moved to off-site facilities or elsewhere on campus, there were still people, including Tony, who worked in the windowless offices and would until renovations and additions were complete.
Tony taught criminal psychology and Lucy had liked him from day one. He hadn’t been teaching at Quantico long—Class 12-14 was his third. He’d come from the Hostage Rescue Team and was unusually calm and even tempered. While many of her classmates found Tony intimidating and unapproachable, Lucy had developed a kinship with him over the three weeks she’d been here. Lucy enjoyed listening to his stories and asking questions, and she suspected he appreciated the genuine interest she showed in his experience.
Lucy was about to knock on Tony’s partly opened door but noticed him hunched over his desk, head in one hand, reading a thick file. He was one of the older agents, in his early fifties and nearing mandatory retirement, but he was physically fit and Lucy ran with him several days a week.
She turned to leave, not wanting to disturb him with something trivial. In fact, she’d almost forgotten why she’d sought him out in the first place.
He glanced up as she turned away. “Kincaid?”
“Sorry to bother you. I was on my way to the cafeteria—”
His eyebrows arched up and amusement lit his face. “By way of the basement?”
“It’s nothing.”
He waved her in. “I was going to call you anyway. Sit down.”
“What about?” She took the chair across from him.
He closed the file he was reading and put it aside.
“Special Agent Madeaux called me. Told me she’d spoken to you about Rosemary Weber’s murder.”
“Yes.” All thoughts of Laughlin and Kate vanished. “She’d called me about the book she was writing.”
“Suzanne said you didn’t share anything with the reporter.”
“I told her to leave me out of it. My involvement was never supposed to be public.”
“Suzanne is tracking down how Weber got your name, but the case wasn’t classified. She could have learned of your involvement fairly easily.”
Lucy bit her lip. She didn’t want anything she did to be in the public eye. She needed her anonymity.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“About what?”
“What’s bothering you.”
“I don’t know.” She did, but how did she tell Tony that she was worried her past would haunt her for the rest of her life? She’d believed time would erase her history, but it only made it permanent. “Did you know Weber?”
He nodded. “She wrote her first book while she was a crime reporter in Newark. It was one of my cases. A screwed-up case from the beginning, a true tragedy. Eleven-year-old girl kidnapped from her bedroom, raped and murdered. The parents lied about nearly everything, until we had enough evidence to catch them in their lies.”
As he spoke, his voice deepened and he held the edge of his desk, knuckles white, anger about the old case still evident.
Kidnapped from her bedroom.
In a low, emotion-filled voice, Tony said, “It was one of those cases that stay with you because it was senseless and so many lives were ruined.”
“Did you catch the killer?”
“Benjamin John Kreig. He’s serving life without parole.” Tony rolled his shoulders and leaned back in his chair, purposefully relaxing. Lucy had often done the same thing. If she could relax her body, she could relax her mind.
But Lucy was focused on what Tony had said.
Kidnapped from her bedroom and murdered.
“Lucy?” Tony prodded.
“You know my nephew was killed when I was seven.”
By Tony’s expression, he had known. Lucy didn’t expect that her life was private, however much she tried to keep her past to herself. Just one more reminder that she’d never escape.
Lucy continued, “Justin was a few days younger than me, and sometimes I made him call me Aunt Lucy just to tease him. I was closer to him than my brothers and sisters, who were all older than me. My sister, Justin’s mom, grieved so long, she couldn’t stay in San Diego. She moved to Idaho and became a hermit for more than a decade. She called our mom once a week, but Mom was always so sad afterwards, because Nelia wasn’t really living. Justin’s murder changed all of us. Dillon, for example, changed his focus from sports medicine to forensic psychiatry. When I asked him why, he said he wanted to understand what happened to Justin.”
“Is that what drives you? Answers?”
“Maybe.” No.
“Justice?”
Maybe. “I can’t sit by and let bad things happen.”
“If we can save one, we have succeeded.”
But there would always be evil in the world, and there would always be victims. “If it was just saving one person, I don’t think I would be here,” Lucy said truthfully. “Putting killers and rapists in prison saves all their potential victims. It’s not so much justice I crave as protecting innocents.”
Lucy asked, “Did you talk to Weber about your case?”
“No. She wrote most of the articles about the investigation and trial, and I didn’t like how she sensationalized the tragedy. The parents deserved to be exposed, but they had lost their daughter, and they realized they were culpable.”
Her stomach turned at all the awful possibilities of parental involvement in the girl’s death. “How so?”
“The McMahons were swingers. They had a party the night their daughter Rachel was killed. They lied about the nature of the party. The critical hours that Rachel was missing immediately after she was abducted were wasted because they misled first the responding officer, then the FBI. Their nine-year-old son was the one who finally told me about the party.”
Lucy frowned. “He knew what was going on?”
“Unfortunately. Once we confronted the parents and interviewed witnesses, we learned that Krieg hadn’t been invited to the party but two guests saw him. At first he denied being there, so it was easy to bring him in for questioning. It took sixteen hours to break him, but he eventually led us to her body. Six days after he killed her.”
Lucy absorbed the information with both revulsion and interest. “And Weber wrote a book?”
“She focused on the sensational—the swinger parties, the history between Aaron and Pilar McMahon, the guests at the parties—and the worst was that, as far as I was concerned, she kept bringing it back to Rachel being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which was just asinine considering she was in her own bedroom in the middle of the night.”
Tony pounded his fist once on the desk, then looked at his clenched fingers and slowly stretched them. “I refused to help her after reading her articles,” he said, “but the FBI assigned a liaison, who worked with her to get her facts straight.”
“Do you think her murder has to do with one of her books?”
“More likely, whatever she’s researching now.”
“You mean the Cinderella Strangler case.”
“Maybe. She might have been working on more than one. I’ll find out. What specifically did she ask you?”
“She thought the whole case was ‘sexy’—her word, not mine. Teenage prostitutes being suffocated at underground raves, all connecting back to an online chat room. She wanted to drag the Barnetts through the dirt again, and they’re just reclaiming their life.”
“Barnett?”
“A wealthy family in New York. They were the subject of the killer’s obsession, and Weber said it made a good story. It wasn’t a story; these were people’s lives. Four girls died horrible deaths because of that psychopath. I wasn’t about to help Weber with any of it.”
“I hear a but.”
“No buts, I would never have spoken to her.”
Tony looked at her pointedly. “But?”
“She asked me too many questions. I felt—she was digging around, trying to find out why I had been in New York, what my history was. And while much of my file is sealed, there’s enough that’s public.” She bit her lip.
“You were afraid she’d end up writing about you.”
Lucy took a deep breath and nodded. She had faced her past and survived, but exposing what had happened seven years ago to the public, in the media, would destroy the life she’d built.
“There are laws to protect you from that kind of disclosure.”
“I told her to go to Hell and hung up.”
Tony almost smiled, then grew serious. “Suzanne asked if I could come up to New York for a day or two, since I’m familiar with Weber’s work. While I’m there, I’ll dig around her files, see what I find. I don’t think she had anything on your past, because Suzanne would have told you. But I’ll make sure.”
“I appreciate that.”
Tony opened his bottom drawer, rummaged through some folders, and pulled one out. “Read this. It’s the McMahon case, the one Weber wrote about in her first book. It’ll give you all the background and information you need. It’s my personal file, so it’s not complete, but it includes my notes.”
“Those are probably enlightening.”
“I should have been more careful about what I wrote down. Notes can become part of the official record.”
She took the file.
Tony leaned back and looked over her head, contemplative. “I always wondered what happened to the boy, Peter McMahon. Rachel’s brother.”
“You don’t know?”
“The case was fifteen years ago. He’s twenty-four now, a grown man. I know he went to live with his grandmother in Florida shortly after the murder. He was a brave kid, telling me what his parents were really doing at the party. Turned the case wide open.”
“Maybe I can track him down for you.”
“If it’s not too much trouble. Find out where he’s living, what he’s doing with his life. Make sure he’s okay.”
“Do you think he could be responsible for Rosemary Weber’s murder?”
“No,” Tony said, too quickly. He backtracked a bit. “I doubt it. The book about his sister came out ten years ago. Why now?”
“Because he was fourteen when the book came out and couldn’t do anything about it?”
“There had to be another reason,” Tony said. “But maybe if you find him, we’ll have the answers.”
Lucy wondered why Tony didn’t use FBI resources to track down Peter McMahon, but before she could ask he said, “You should read Weber’s books. Start with the book about the McMahon investigation and go from there. According to the FBI Media Office, they were vetted for accuracy.
“Now,” he continued, “you came down here because you wanted to talk to me about something.”
She’d almost forgotten about Laughlin. “It’s not important.”
Tony didn’t say anything, but his expression told her he expected her to talk.
“It really isn’t important,” she repeated. “Rather junior high.”
“Try me.”
“I just have this sense that Agent Laughlin doesn’t like me.” She smiled sheepishly. “See? Junior high.”
“If it was someone else, I might think that, but your instincts are usually good. Was it something specific, or a vague feeling?”
Lucy considered how to answer. “I suppose there was an undercurrent of veiled hostility from the beginning—which I dismissed because I was nervous.”
“Nervous about what?”
“Where do I start?” She shrugged. “You’ve read my file, I know all the instructors have, and the hoops I jumped through to get here.”
“Some people might wonder why you were willing to jump through the hoops, considering you have many career options. Is that what you’re thinking?”
“What if someone thought I wanted this too much, and questioned why. I’ve thought the same thing. But if the last few months have taught me anything, I let my goals define me for too long. Had my application been denied, I’d have been disappointed, but I would have been okay. But people see what’s on the surface.”
“You suspect he doesn’t trust you.”
Lucy hadn’t said that, but immediately she realized Tony was right. “He’s been professional, but there’s a different subtext when he’s with others. Some of my friends have noticed it, too. I don’t have the same feeling about the other field counselors.”
“Trust your instincts, Lucy. Continue to perform well and there’s nothing he can do. Training is just as much a mind game as it is learning the rules and regs and working as a team. You’ll be dealing with agents like Laughlin across all agencies. Consider this a test.”
It was the answer she’d expected, though she didn’t like it. She was tired of being tested when she couldn’t prepare, when she didn’t even know what she was being tested on.
“And,” Tony continued, “if he goes too far, let me know.” She opened her mouth to object but he raised his hand. “Only if it becomes serious. I think you’ll be fine.”