Tears rolled down Richard’s face.
“Excuse me for being blunt, but if we’re right she’s going to do it again.” Max wasn’t sorry. She needed information and Richard was playing the woe-is-me card and stonewalling them.
Lucy looked at Max with a flash of anger Max hadn’t seen in the cop before. Then Lucy turned to Richard. “Danielle blames you for Matthew’s death, but she hates herself more. She’s stuck in this violent cycle, and she will continue until we stop her. You can help. Do you know where she is?”
He shook his head. “I really don’t. The phone she calls me on is blocked.”
“That’s okay. If you have a record of the calls, I can get a warrant for your phone records.”
“I’ll give them to you. If you’re right—if Danielle—I don’t believe it, but … I thought if anything she would come after me. Or maybe she was suicidal. The first time she called, she was so hysterical I really thought she was going to kill herself. I talked to her because I didn’t want her to die, I wanted her to get help. I thought I calmed her down. She didn’t call for a long time after.”
“We need a warrant to build a case against her, but you can certainly help expedite it,” Lucy said. “Do you have those voice mails?”
He pulled his phone from his pocket.
“May I record them as they play?”
He nodded.
Lucy took out her own phone and pressed a record button, then Richard played his messages.
“I miss Matthew,” a faint female voice whispered. “I miss him so much.”
Then nothing, but the call wasn’t terminated. Thirty seconds later it beeped and the message was over.
“That’s it?” Max said.
Richard shook his head and pressed the next saved message.
“I hate you!” The voice sounded completely different than the pained voice before it. It disconnected immediately.
“How long between calls?” Lucy asked. “What day?”
“On Thursday. Two minutes, according to my phone.”
Lucy frowned. “Next, please.”
“There was a series of six calls that night where she didn’t leave a message—hung up before voice mail.”
Lucy nodded. “Same day as those two?”
“Yes. And then this on Friday night, late.” He looked at the phone. “Two A.M. Saturday morning. I was asleep, I turn my phone off at night.”
“Play it.”
He hesitated, then pressed Play.
The recording started in the middle of a sentence, as if Danielle had been talking as soon as she hit Send.
“—fucking bitch. Liar! Just like her husband. Just like you. I loved you, and you fucked around. How many, Richard? How many were there before Marlena. How many? How many times have you cheated on Patricia? Or maybe she’s cheating on you. Ha! Serves you right. Why even have children? Why can’t people just do what they promised? They’ll suffer, I hope they suffer as much as you, I hope they—” Beep. The voice mail ended.
“Every day?” Lucy said.
He nodded. “And last night—again, late, my phone says the first three calls came in at two oh-two, two oh-five, and two thirteen. But there’s nothing there. You can hear her moving around or moving things around, but she doesn’t say anything. Until the call at two thirty-five.”
He pressed Play. The first five seconds were silence. Then: “While you were with your whore, a pervert walked into Matthew’s bedroom and carried him off to do awful, awful things to him. He suffered, Richard. He was so hurt. Broken … no child should suffer like that. They don’t deserve him. They don’t care. They’re never home. I hate you. I hate you!” The harsh sound of breaking glass, then the call was cut off.
“Is that the last one?” Lucy asked.
“Yes.”
“She’s going to call again tonight. You’re going to need to answer it.”
“I—I can’t. You don’t understand.”
“I’m going to call the local FBI office and have them here. I want them to see if they can trace the call. She may not stay on the phone long enough, but they might be able to get the area she’s calling from. Even a general region will help us.”
“She sounded drunk,” Max said.
“Possibly. It’s the weekend, she doesn’t have to keep herself together on the weekends,” Lucy said. “Richard, listen to me. This is important. Do you remember the months and years she called you in the past.”
“I do,” Patricia said as she walked in.
Richard jumped up and went to his wife. “Honey—”
“Richard, you tried to protect me, but I know you’ve talked to her. I didn’t want to say anything, but I could tell by how depressed you got.” Patricia turned to Lucy and handed her a piece of paper. “I was really scared for a while that Danielle was going to try and hurt Richard. Physically hurt him. The first time was twenty years ago.”
“Are you sure?” Lucy asked.
“June—so nineteen and a half years I guess. I know because my husband died June fifteenth and our anniversary had been June twenty-ninth, so it’s always been a really hard month for me. I hadn’t been to the grief group in a while, and I went then and Richard talked about the calls. He was shaken.”
Lucy stared at the paper, then handed it to Max.
The pattern was clear. Every four to five years, Danielle called her husband for a week to ten days in a row, then stopped. Three of the four time periods matched perfectly with the three murders they were certain Danielle had committed.
And now she was calling again.
“What does this mean?” Patricia asked.
“It means that Danielle has found another cheating spouse and is making plans to kill his son,” Max said.
“Why would she do this? Why would she kill an innocent child?” Richard said. He sank down onto the couch.
Lucy said, “She saw how much you suffered after Matthew’s death; she wants others to suffer the same way. She blames you, but she mostly blames herself because she wasn’t there, either.”
“Dear Lord, how are you going to find her?” Richard asked.
“With your help. Please.”
“Anything. Anything you need.”
*
Lucy asked Max to wait with the driver while she went into the local FBI headquarters. Max didn’t want to—in fact, she was more than a little angry to be kept out of it—but Lucy persuaded her that it would be easier for everyone if she didn’t have to explain why she had a reporter interviewing a potential witness.
This was the point of no return, Lucy realized. She presented the information to the local office and the request to work with Richard Collins to obtain his phone records and trace any calls coming from a blocked number for the next week. Lucy didn’t have to work hard to get them to cooperate—she simply dropped some names. Then she called the San Diego FBI office and spoke to the SSA, Ken Swan, who she’d worked with in the past. It took her a while to get through to him—he wasn’t on call—but when she did, he listened with minimal questions until the end.
“How certain are you that this woman is going to kill in the immediate future?”
“I’m positive.”
“When are you going to be back in San Diego?”