“Little Alex is going to come live with us. That’s the good news I promised.”
“Hooray! Hooray!” Jannie shouted, and did one of her impromptu dances. “I love little A. J.”
“That’s real good,” Damon said, and beamed approval. “I’m glad he’s coming home.”
I was, too, and I wondered how a single moment could be so joyful but also so sad. The Boy was coming to live with us, but Christine was gone. It was official now; I had told Nana Mama and the kids. I hadn’t felt so empty and alone for a long time.
Chapter 91
THE MORE DANGEROUS IT WAS, THE BETTER THE THRILL. The Mastermind already knew the truth in that maxim, and this was dangerous indeed. The money was nice, but the money wasn’t enough. It was the danger that got his adrenaline flowing and turned him on.
FBI agent James Walsh lived alone in a small rented ranch house out in Alexandria. The house was as plain and unassuming as Agent Walsh himself. It suited his personality perfectly. It was such an “honest” and “forthcoming” abode.
The Mastermind had little trouble getting into the house. Police officers could be incredibly sloppy about security systems in their own homes. Walsh was lax, or maybe he was just arrogant.
He wanted to get in and out quickly, but the Mastermind didn’t want to be careless. The floorboards creaked. He already knew that — he’d been inside the house before.
The floorboards continued to make distressing noises as he got closer and closer to James Walsh’s bedroom.
The more dangerous, the better The more outrageous, the greater the thrill.
That was how it always worked for him.
He slowly, silently pushed open the bedroom door and he started to enter, when — “Don’t move,” Walsh said from the semidarkness of the room.
He could just barely see the FBI agent across the bedroom. Walsh had positioned himself behind the bed. He had a shotgun in his hands. Walsh kept the gun under his bed, never slept without it there.
“You can see the gun, mister. It’s aimed right at your goddamn chest. I won’t miss you, I promise.”
“So I see,” the Mastermind said, and chuckled softly. “Checkmate, huh? You caught the Mastermind. How clever of you.”
Still smiling, he started to walk forward toward Walsh.
The more dangerous, the better.
“Don’t! Stop!” Walsh suddenly yelled at him. “Stop or I’ll shoot! STOP!”
“Yes, as you promised,” the Mastermind said.
He didn’t stop, didn’t slow down a step, kept coming — inexorably.
Then he heard Agent Walsh pull the trigger. The single action that was supposed to cause his death, stop his world, solve the crime spree. But nothing happened.
“Awhh, and you promised, Agent Walsh.”
He put his own handgun against the FBI agent’s forehead. With his free hand, he brushed across Walsh’s crew-cut head.
“I’m the Mastermind; you’re not. You’ve been dying to catch me, but I’ve caught you. I emptied your shotgun. I’m going to catch all of you. One by one. Agents Walsh, Doud, Cavalierre. Maybe even Detective Alex Cross. You’re all going to die.”
Chapter 92
I ARRIVED AT JAMES WALSH’S HOME in Virginia around midnight on Sunday. Several of the neighbors were circulating nervously out on the street. I heard an elderly woman mutter and sigh, “Such a nice man. What a shame, what a waste. He was an FBI agent, you know.”
I knew. I took a deep breath and then I plunged inside the modest house where Walsh had lived and died. The Bureau was there in large numbers and so were the local police. Because an agent had died, the Violent Crime Unit had been called in from Quantico.
I spotted Agent Mike Doud and I hurried over to him. Doud looked ashen and maybe close to losing it.
“I’m sorry,” I said to him. He and Walsh had been close friends. Doud lived nearby in the Virginia suburbs.
“Oh, Jesus. Jimmy never said a word to me. I was his best friend, for God’s sake.”
I nodded. “What do you know so far? What happened?”
Doud pointed toward the bedroom. “Jimmy’s in there. I guess he killed himself, Alex. He left a note. Hard to believe.”
I crossed the sparsely decorated living room. I knew from talking to him that Walsh had been divorced a couple of years ago. He had a sixteen-year-old son in prep school and another at Holy Cross, where Walsh had gone himself.
James Walsh was waiting for me in the bathroom connected to the bedroom. He was curled up on the off-white tile floor, which was flooded with a lot of his blood. I could see what was left of the back of his head as I entered the room.
Doud came up behind me. He held out the suicide note, which had been placed in a plastic evidence bag. I read it without removing the plastic. The note was to Walsh’s two sons.
It finally got to be too much for me.
This job; this case; everything else.
Andrew, Peter, I’m truly sorry about this.
Love,
your dad
A cell phone sounded and it startled me. It was Doud’s phone. He answered but then handed it to me. “It’s Betsey,” he said.
“I’m on my way to the airport. Oh, Alex, why would he do such a thing?” I heard her voice. She was obviously still in New York. “Oh, poor Jim. Poor Jim. Why would he kill himself? I don’t believe it. He’s not the type.”
Then she sobbed loudly into the phone, and though she was far away, I had never felt closer to her.
I didn’t say what I was thinking. I held it inside and it chilled me a little. Maybe Betsey’s gut reaction was right. Maybe James Walsh didn’t kill himself.
Chapter 93
I RETURNED TO NEW YORK CITY early on Monday morning. There was a nine o’clock briefing at FBI headquarters in Manhattan, and I made it just in time. I was holding a lot inside, holding it tight, trying not to look like anything was wrong.
I walked into a formal conference room wearing sunglasses. Betsey must have sensed I was there. She looked up from a mountain of paperwork and she nodded solemnly. I could tell she’d spent a good part of the night thinking about Walsh. So had I.
I took one of the empty seats just as a lawyer from the Justice Department was beginning to address the group. He looked to be in his fifties, rigid and solemn, nearly without affect. He wore a shiny charcoal gray suit that had narrow lapels and looked at least twenty years old.
“An arrangement has been made with Brian Macdougall,” he announced to the assembled group.
I looked over at Betsey and she shook her head, rolled her eyes. She already knew.
I couldn’t believe it. I listened closely to every word out of the Justice lawyer’s mouth.
“You are not to speak about anything discussed in this room. We’re releasing nothing to the press. Detective Macdougall has agreed to talk to investigators about the overall plan, and the execution of it in the MetroHartford kidnapping. He has valuable information that could lead to the capture of an extremely important UNSUB, the so-called Mastermind.”
I was completely shell-shocked, undermined, and I felt totally fucked with. Goddamn Justice had made the deal over the weekend, and I would have bet anything that Macdougall got exactly what he had asked for. It made me physically sick, but that was the way Justice had been working ever since I became a cop.
Brian Macdougall had known exactly what kind of deal he could get from them. Now the only relevant question was, could he give us the Mastermind? How much did he know? Did he know a goddamn thing?
I would find out soon. I got to interview star-witness Detective Macdougall late that morning at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. Detective Harry Weiss was there for the NYPD. Betsey Cavalierre represented the FBI during the session.
Macdougall had two lawyers present. Neither of them wore twenty-year-old suits. They looked slick, very expensive, smart. The detective glanced up as we entered a small booking room where the meeting was to be held. “This stinks, right?” he
said. “I happen to agree. But that’s the system.”
Macdougall the Philosopher sat down between his lawyers, and the session began.
Betsey leaned into me. She whispered, “This ought to be good. Now we get to see what Justice bought.”
Chapter 94
THE MEETING started out very badly. Detective Weiss from NYPD Internal Affairs took it upon himself to speak for the rest of us. Weiss found it necessary to start at the beginning and methodically go over Macdougall’s previous statement sentence by sentence.
It was excruciating. I badly wanted to interrupt him, but I didn’t. Every time Weiss asked another question or launched into a senseless diatribe criticizing Macdougall, I nudged Betsey’s foot under the table. To punctuate a couple of embarrassing exchanges she kicked me in the shins.
Macdougall finally had enough of it, too. “You fucking suck!” he blew up at Weiss. “You people are a joke. It’s about your gut, Weiss, not covering your fat ass. You’re wasting my time. Let somebody else ask the questions.”
He glared at Weiss, who still seemed not to get it.
“You’re asking all the wrong fucking questions, asshole,” Macdougall finally stood up and shouted at the top of his voice. “You’re godawful at your job, you suck, you’re wasting everybody’s time!”
Macdougall then stomped over to a grimy window that was covered by a heavy metal screen and bars. His lawyers trailed after him. He said something, and they all laughed. Ho, ho, ho. What a crack-up Brian Macdougall was.
The rest of us sat at the conference table and watched them. Betsey consoled Weiss, tried to keep up a united front.
“Fuck him,” Weiss said with unusual clarity and brevity. “I can ask him anything I want to. We bought that son of a bitch.”
Betsey nodded at Weiss. “You’re right, Harry. He’s arrogant and he’s wrong. Typical detective,” she said. “Maybe he would respond to Detective Cross. He doesn’t seem to like IAD.”
Weiss shook his head at first, but then he relented. “Fine, whatever it takes. Whatever works with this asshole. I’m a team player.”
“We’re all team players,” she said, and lightly patted Weiss’s arm. She was good. “Thanks for being open to the suggestion.”
Macdougall came back to the table and he seemed calmer. He even apologized to Weiss. “I’m sorry. Nerves are a little frayed, you know.”
I waited a couple of seconds for his apology to be accepted by Weiss, but the IAD man never said a word. I finally began. “Detective Macdougall, why don’t you tell us what you have that’s important. You know what you have to tell. You also know what we want to hear.”
Macdougall looked at both of his lawyers. He finally smiled.
Chapter 95
“ALL RIGHT, LET’S TRY THAT APPROACH,” said Macdougall. “Simple questions and simple answers. I met with the so-called Mastermind three times. Always down in Washington. Each time I saw him, he gave us what he called ‘traveling expenses.’ That was fifty grand a trip, which made it well worth our while, and also caught our attention, piqued our interest.
“He was very, very buttoned-up. Thought everything through. Knew all the angles. Knew what he was talking about. And — he told us right off that our cut of the action would be fifteen million dollars. He was very credible when he talked about MetroHartford. He had a concept and a plan that was extremely detailed. We felt it was workable, and it was.”
“How did he know about you?” I asked. “How did he contact you?”
Macdougall liked the questions, or made it seem as if he did. “There’s a lawyer we use sometimes.” He looked at the lawyers on either side of him. “Not these two gentlemen. He contacted our other lawyer. We don’t know exactly how he knew about us, but he knew what we did, how we worked. That’s useful information, Detective Weiss. Make yourself a note. Who would know about us? Somebody in law enforcement? A cop? One of ours, Detective Weiss? An agent with the FBI? A cop from D.C.? Maybe somebody in this room? It could be anybody.”
Weiss couldn’t control himself. His face was red. The collar of his button-down white shirt looked a couple of sizes too small. “But you already know who it is, Macdougall? Isn’t that right?”
Macdougall looked at Betsey and me. He shook his head. He couldn’t believe Weiss, either. “I’m coming to that, to what I know, and what I don’t know. Don’t underestimate the information that he knew about us. He knew about Detective Cross. And about Agent Cavalierre. He knew everything. That’s important.”
“I agree with you,” I said. “Go on, please.”
“All right. Before we agreed to the second meeting, we were doing our best to find out who the hell this so-called Mastermind was. We even talked to the FBI about him. We made whatever contacts we could make. We found out nothing. He left no trail.
“So we get to meeting number two and he still doesn’t commit. Bobby Shaw tries to follow him after he leaves the hotel. Shaw loses him.”
“Which makes you think he might be some kind of cop?” I asked.
Macdougall shrugged. “It definitely crosses our minds. Meeting number three is about whether we were in or out. Half of thirty million dollars — we already know we’re in. He knows we’re in. We try to negotiate a better cut. He laughs, says absolutely not. We agree to his terms. It’s his way or we’re out.
“He leaves the hotel after the meet. We’ve got two men following him this time. He’s tall, heavy, dark beard — but we think it’s probably a disguise. Our two guys almost lose him again.
“But they don’t lose him. They’re very lucky. They see him go into the Hazelwood Veterans Hospital in D.C. He doesn’t come out again. We don’t know what he looks like, but the Mastermind went in there and he stayed. He didn’t come out.”
Macdougall stopped talking. He let his eyes go slowly down the line from Weiss to Betsey to me.
“He’s a mental patient, guys and girl. He’s at Hazelwood Veterans Hospital in Washington. He’s on the mental health ward. You just have to find him in there.”
Chapter 96
FBI AGENTS were immediately dispatched to Hazelwood Veterans Hospital. Files on every current patient, and also the staff, were being pulled and would be evaluated. The Veterans Administration was blocking access to the patients themselves, but that wouldn’t last very long.
I spent the rest of a very long day cross-checking copies of files on employees and customers of MetroHartford against patient records as they became available from Hazelwood. Thank God for computers. Even if the Mastermind was at the hospital, no one knew exactly what he looked like. His half of the thirty million dollars was still missing. But we were closer to him than we’d ever been. We had recovered nearly all the money from the New York detectives. Only a couple hundred thousand was still missing. All the detectives were trying to play “let’s make a deal.”
That night around nine-thirty, Betsey and I had dinner in New York at a restaurant called Ecco. She wore a yellow smock, gold earrings and bracelets. It looked good in contrast with her black hair and the tan she still had. I think she knew that she looked good, too. Very, very feminine.
“Is this, like, a date?” she asked once we were seated at a table in the cozy but noisy Manhattan restaurant.
I smiled. “I would say this might qualify as a date, especially if we don’t talk about work too much.”
“You have my word on it. Not even if the Mastermind walks in here and sits down at our table.”
“I’m sorry about Jim Walsh,” I told her. We hadn’t gotten a chance to talk about it much.
“I know you are, Alex. Me too. He was a really good guy.”
“Did it surprise you? That he killed himself?”
She put her hand on top of mine.
“It did — totally. Not tonight. Okay?”
For the first time, she opened up and told me a little about herself. She had gone to John Carroll High School in D.C. and been brought up a Catholic. She said that her background was “strict, strict, and more
strict. Lots of discipline.” Her mother was a homemaker until she died, when Betsey was sixteen. Her father had been a sergeant in the army, then a fireman.
“I used to go out with a girl from John Carroll,” I told her. “Cute little uniform.”
“Recently?” she asked. Her brown eyes twinkled. She was funny. She said the sense of humor came from her old neighborhood in D.C., and also the atmosphere in her parents’ house. “If you were a boy in our neighborhood, you had to be funny or you got into lots of fights. My father wanted a boy but got me instead. He was a tough guy but funny, always had a joke. Daddy died of a heart attack on the job. I think that’s why I work out every day like such a possessed little maniac.”
I told her that my mother and father had both died before I was ten and that my grandmother had raised me. “I work out a lot, too,” I said.
“You went to Georgetown, then Johns Hopkins, right?” she asked.
I rolled my eyes, but I was laughing. “You prepared for the meeting. Yes, I have a doctorate in psychology from Hopkins. I’m overqualified for my job.”
She laughed. “I went to Georgetown. I was way behind you, though.”
“Four years. Only four short years, Agent Cavalierre. You were a very good lacrosse player there.”
She crinkled up her nose and mouth. “Oohhh. Somebody else has been prepping for tonight.”
I laughed. “No, no. I actually saw you play once.”
“You remember?” she asked with mild astonishment.
“I remember you. You glided when you ran. I didn’t put it all together at first, but I remember it now.”
Betsey asked about my Johns Hopkins training in psych, then my three years in private practice. “But you like being a homicide detective better?” she asked.
“I do. I love the action.”
She admitted that she did, too.
We talked a little about people who had been important in our lives. I told her about Maria, my wife, who’d been killed. I showed off pictures of Damon and Jannie from my wallet.