The Next Accident

  “He took lessons from O. J. Simpson,” Cro-Magnon declared.

  Rainie sighed. She appealed to Albright, who seemed to have more common sense. She was honestly surprised to realize that even smaller, less threatening guy was not convinced. What the . . . ?

  Her gaze flew to Quincy. He would not return her stare, his gaze locked somewhere on the far wall where flowers bloomed pink and lilac amid a sea of yellow. She turned to Glenda Rodman, and that agent, too, glanced away.

  The feds knew something. At least Quincy and Glenda did, but they were not yet volunteering it to the locals, which could only mean one thing. How bad could one night get? And what would Quincy do, when she told him that the same person who had murdered Bethie tonight, had most likely started by killing his daughter fourteen months ago?

  A tall, thin man appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a white doctor’s coat. The medical examiner’s assistant. “I . . . uh. We thought you should see this.”

  With gloved hands, the man held up a plastic bag. Glenda didn’t take it. Instead, Detective Albright accepted the marked evidence bag, held it up to the light, and promptly said, “Jesus Christ!” He dropped the bag on the lilac-colored rug, where it resembled a fresh pool of blood.

  “It was . . .” The medical assistant wasn’t doing so well. His face still carried a tinge of green and he was staring at the plastic bag with the horrified fascination of someone who knew he really should look away. “We found it . . . abdominal cavity . . .”

  Cro-Magnon wasn’t moving. On the bed, Quincy’s hand was gripping the floral comforter so tight, tendons stood out like ridges. Very slowly, Rainie reached down. Very slowly, she picked up the bag. She held it by the corner gingerly, as if it were a snake with the power to strike.

  It looked like a piece of Christmas wrapping paper. Bright red with swirls of white. Shiny veneer. Except . . .

  It was paper, she realized dizzily. At least it had been. Cheap, white paper, probably like the kind used in any copy machine. Except now it was soaked bloody red. And those were not pretty swirls. They were letters, forming words, written in some kind of white wax, in order to come to light as it sat, according to the assistant, in Elizabeth Quincy’s insides.

  “It’s a note,” she said.

  “Read it,” Quincy whispered.

  “No.”

  “Read it!”

  Rainie closed her eyes. She had already made out the words. “It says . . . it says, ‘You’d better hurry up, Pierce. There’s only one left.’ “

  “Kimberly,” Glenda Rodman said from the doorway.

  A strange sound came from the bed. Quincy was finally moving. His body rocked back and forth. His shoulders started to shake. And then a low, dreadful sound came from his lips. Laughter. A dry, bone-chilling chuckle spewing from his lips.

  “A message in a bottle,” he singsonged. “A message in a fucking bottle!”

  His shoulders broke. He bowed his head. The laughter turned to sobs.

  “Kimberly . . . Rainie, get me out of here.”

  She did.

  17

  Greenwich Village, New York

  They drove toward New York City in silence, Rainie at the wheel, Quincy leaning against the passenger-side window. His eyes were closed, but she knew he wasn’t asleep. They would arrive at his daughter’s apartment in about an hour. She didn’t like to think about how that conversation would go. Poor Kimberly, who had just buried her older sister. Poor Kimberly, who would now learn that her mother had been savagely murdered, and that most likely, she was next in line.

  Quincy needed to regain his composure, Rainie thought, for the clock was ticking now and in this kind of game you couldn’t afford a time-out.

  “Talk,” he said shortly.

  “We found Mandy’s SUV. I was going to call you in the morning with the news.”

  “The seat belt was tampered with.”

  “Yes. And someone else was in the vehicle at the time of the crash. We found warping on the passenger’s seat belt that proves it. In the good news department, Officer Amity recovered hairs from the cloth visor on the passenger’s side. If we can find the man, we can use the hairs to tie him to the crime.”

  “What crime? Sitting in the passenger’s seat of a sports-utility vehicle?”

  “We’ll work on it, Quincy. Officer Amity is a good guy; he can build a case. Now tell me this: Why did you go to your ex-wife’s house on tonight of all nights?”

  “I was worried. Elizabeth . . . Bethie never went out much. It was unusual not to be able to reach her all day.”

  “I wonder if he knew that.”

  “Probably.” Quincy finally turned in his seat. His face bore the stamp of freshly etched lines. In a matter of hours, his dark pepper hair seemed to have gained more salt at the temples. He was an experienced FBI agent, a man who made his living seeing the most horrible of horrors. Rainie wondered if that helped at a time like now, when he was desperate to save his remaining daughter, or if the intimate knowledge of what men could do only made things worse.

  “It’s obvious this Tristan Shandling is trying to frame you,” she said quietly. “The car purchase in your name. Disguising himself to look like you when he showed up at Bethie’s house. And there’s more, isn’t there? Things you and Dour Chic have already picked up on, but aren’t volunteering to the local boys.”

  “The scene was staged. When the crime-scene techs examine the broken bathroom window, they’ll discover it was broken from the inside out.”

  “But the broken glass was on the inside of the house, on the bathroom floor.”

  “True. But if you fit one of the broken shards back into the window, the angle of the break reveals the blow came from the inside. Moving glass is easy. You can’t, however, disguise the fragments. The UNSUB was already inside the house when he broke the window. And I’m sure when the police get the report back from the alarm company, they’ll find it was properly disarmed.”

  “He entered with Elizabeth,” Rainie murmured. “The man fitting your description the neighbor saw at ten.”

  “That would be my guess. Then there is the crime scene itself. The level of destruction is out of proportion with the crime. Each room appears destroyed, but the blood trail is actually extremely contained. My guess is the initial struggle was fast, focused. The rest of the damage occurred postmortem.”

  “He wanted it to look bad?”

  “He wanted it to look horrific, terrifying, demoralizing. He’s very good at what he does.”

  “The body,” Rainie whispered.

  “The body,” Quincy repeated, his voice detached again, overly analytical. “When the medical examiner finishes with the autopsy, he’ll know the victim was killed fairly quickly—at least on a relative scale. There won’t be any evidence of rape, despite how he posed the body. There aren’t any abrasions on the wrists and ankles, indicating that hog-tying occurred postmortem. I suspect the disembowelment and other mutilation occurred postmortem as well.”

  “But why?”

  “To make it look like a sexual-sadist attack. But a posed sexual-sadist attack. Such as what an expert in violent crimes might do to try and cover the cold-blooded murder of his ex-wife.”

  “Parlor tricks,” Rainie said. “The police will see through them soon enough.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

  “There’s still the fact the police saw you hours after the murder without a trace of blood or bruising on your body.”

  “They’ll simply argue that the crime was more controlled than it originally appeared to be. They’ll find traces of blood in the sink pipes, indicating the murderer cleaned up afterwards. As knowledgeable as our UNSUB has been, I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t follow washing his hands by pouring a sample of blood that is the same type as mine into the sink. Or maybe he has the same blood type as me. At this point, how would I know?” His voice started out cool, but ended bitter.

  “There’s still the note,” Rainie persiste
d. “That proves it was done by somebody out to get you.”

  “The note’s not going to help me.”

  “Sure it will.”

  “No.” Quincy shook his head. An odd smile curved his lips. “The note . . . the handwriting. Rainie, it’s mine. I don’t know how, but it’s as if this man . . . it’s as if he’s really me.”

  Kimberly was sitting at the battered kitchen table, sipping a cup of coffee and trying to figure out what to do with her second day off, when the buzzer rang. Her roommate, Bobby, after announcing that he would stay tonight at his girlfriend’s, had left for work. That left Kimberly with a whole day to kill and a whole apartment to kill it in. She should take a long nap. Exercise. Eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. Screw her head on straight.

  Kimberly sipped black coffee, felt the weight of another sleepless night on her shoulders, and wondered how many city blocks she’d have to run to feel human again.

  The buzzer repeated its whine. She finally got up and pressed the intercom button. “What?”

  “Kimberly, it’s your dad.”

  Oh no, she thought instantly. She hit the front-door button and let him in.

  The old, eight-story apartment building didn’t offer an elevator. It would take her father a few minutes to mount the stairs. She should do something. Gain ten pounds. Sleep four days straight. Down a bottle of vitamins to get some luster back in her too-long, too-dirty blond hair. Her old FBI sweats bagged on her frame. Her threadbare T-shirt hung low enough to reveal the gaunt line of her collarbone.

  She stood trapped in the middle of the tiny kitchen until her father finally rapped on the door. She didn’t want to answer it. She couldn’t explain why. But she didn’t want to open that door.

  A second round of knocking. Her heart was pounding too hard in her chest. She slowly crossed the kitchen. She slowly opened her apartment door. Her father stood gravely in front of her, accompanied by some woman Kimberly had never seen before.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said hoarsely.

  He took her in his arms. She started to cry and she didn’t even know what bad thing had happened yet.

  Thirty minutes later they sat in the TV room, Kimberly Indian-style on the floor, her father and his friend, Rainie Conner, on the sofa. Kimberly had gone through the first box of Kleenex. Somewhere in the middle of her crying jag, things had gone from unbearable to horrible to simply numb. Now she sat, staring at the worn blue berber carpet and struggling to get the words to make sense in her head.

  Your mother is dead.

  Your mother has been murdered.

  Someone is stalking our family. He’s killed Mandy. He’s killed Bethie. He will most likely come after you next.

  “You don’t . . . you don’t know who’s doing this?” she asked finally, working on forming the words, working on getting herself to think, working on keeping herself from splintering apart. She was the strong one. Her mother had always said so.

  Your mother is dead.

  Your mother has been murdered.

  Someone is stalking our family. He’s killed Mandy. He’s killed Bethie. He will most likely come after you next.

  “No,” her father answered quietly. “But we’re working on it.”

  “It’s probably someone from an old case, right? Someone you caught, or nearly caught, or you caught his dad, his son, his brother.”

  “Probably.”

  “Then you build a database! You build a database and you fill it with all the old names, and then . . . then you figure out who got out from jail when and you arrest his ass! Process of elimination, then arrest his ass!” Her voice was high, she didn’t sound anything like herself.

  Her father repeated, “We’re working on it.”

  “I don’t understand.” Her voice broke. She was close to weeping again. “Mandy . . . Mandy was always attracted to the wrong sort of men. But Mom . . . Mom was careful. She didn’t talk to strangers, she wouldn’t let some guy sweet-talk her into entering her home. She was too smart for that.”

  “Had you spoken to your mother recently?”

  “No. I’ve been . . . busy.” Kimberly bowed her head.

  “She called me two days ago. She was worried about you.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve been worried about you, too.”

  “I know.”

  He waited. An expert pause, she’d always thought. But she’d been studying and learning things, too. That was the hard part of following in her father’s footsteps. Once he’d seemed almost God-like to her. Lately, however, no longer a neophyte, she watched him perform the old tricks and could see him pulling the strings. The first time it had happened, she’d been proud of her new insight. After Mandy’s funeral, however, it only left her feeling empty.

  He got off the sofa. Paced the room the way he did when he was tense or working on a particularly baffling case. He was pale, she realized. Thinner, nearly gaunt. Then it hit her. He looked like her. She nearly started crying again.

  Her mother, yelling: “You’re just like your father!”

  Herself, yelling back: “I know, Mom, and Mandy’s just like you!”

  “Why don’t we walk through this from the beginning,” the chestnut-haired woman said from the sofa. Her father turned and frowned at her, his favorite intimidating look. The woman, however, wasn’t impressed. “Quincy, she’s part of this now. She might as well know as much as we know. Information may be the only defense we have left.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Yes!” Kimberly interrupted from the floor. “I am part of this. I need to know. . . . There has to be something we can do.”

  “Dammit, you’re my daughter—”

  “And I’m his target.”

  “You’re only twenty-one—”

  “I’ve been trained in martial arts and firearms. I am not helpless!”

  “I never wanted this. If there was anything I could do . . .”

  “I know.” Her voice quieted. She said more sincerely, “I know. But here we are. There must be something I can do.”

  Her father closed his eyes. For a moment, she thought she might have glimpsed tears in them. Then he sighed, returned to the sofa, and sat down. When he spoke again, he sounded cool, composed, like an FBI agent instead of a father. She wasn’t sure why that comforted her.

  “We’ll start at the beginning,” Quincy said. “It would appear that someone is seeking revenge against me for some perceived wrong. We don’t know who, but as you suggested, Kimberly, process of elimination should be able to tell us more. For now, what we do know is that this person has been planning this for a long time. At least a year and a half, more likely two years.”

  “Eighteen to twenty-four months?” Kimberly was genuinely shocked.

  “We think he started with Mandy,” Rainie said. “Maybe targeted her through an AA meeting. Things progressed from there.”

  “Her new boyfriend,” Kimberly filled in. “She mentioned something once, but I didn’t pay much attention. Boyfriends . . . There were a lot of them.”

  “It would seem that he positioned himself to be someone very special,” Quincy agreed. “They dated for months. Mandy trusted him. Maybe she even fell in love.”

  “But the accident,” Kimberly protested. “She’d been drinking, she was behind the wheel. She’d done that kind of thing before. What did it have to do with him?”

  Rainie spoke up. “We think he was with her that night. According to one friend, Mandy may have started drinking early in the evening. I’m not sure I trust the ‘friend,’ however, so Mandy may have still been sober when she met up with her boyfriend, and he was the one who got her intoxicated. Either way, our mystery man tampered with her seat belt so it wouldn’t work. Then, he got in the vehicle with her, strapped himself in so he’d be all right, and . . . and either let nature run its course or physically helped her hit the telephone pole.”

  “He was with her when she crashed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh my God,
he killed that old man!” Kimberly slapped a hand over her mouth in horror. She didn’t know why, but somehow that was worse. Mandy was Mandy. She’d built an entire lifestyle on poor decisions and high-risk behavior. When her mother had called her the morning after the accident, Kimberly hadn’t even been surprised. Instead, she remembered thinking, finally, as if part of her had been waiting for that phone call for years. Mandy was always on a course for heartbreak and disaster. That poor old man, however, had just been out walking his dog.

  “She didn’t die, though,” Kimberly said after a moment, pulling herself together. “Mandy didn’t actually die. Not then. Shouldn’t that have panicked him?”

  “Even if she came out of the coma, what would she know? What would she remember?” Rainie shrugged. “Her body might have recovered, but her brain . . .”

  “So he was safe.”

  “I think things pretty much went as he planned.”

  “But what about Mom? I can see Mandy being sweet-talked, but not Mom. Definitely not Mom.”

  “Think of the circumstances,” Rainie countered. “Bethie’s just buried her older daughter. She’s feeling lonely, struggling to cope. Then we have this man, Tristan Shandling, who dated your sister for months. Consider all the things he could have learned about your mother from Mandy in that amount of time. Her taste in music, food, clothes. Likes, dislikes. It becomes a pretty simple equation. Vulnerable, grieving mother. Well-informed, charming man. I doubt she had a chance.”

  “I think he went a step further to gain Bethie’s trust,” Quincy said. “I think . . . I think he might have pretended to have received an organ transplant. From Mandy.”

  “What?” Both Rainie and Kimberly stared at him.

  “The last time I spoke with Bethie, she asked me about organ donation. Was there any chance the recipient received more than just tissue? Couldn’t he maybe get some of the person’s habits or feelings or soul? At the time, I dismissed it. It was only today when I had to wonder why she asked.”