Oh, and she was also fluent in Spanish and could supposedly play “Hava Nagila” on the clarinet.
Montgomery won the presidency by twenty-eight electoral votes. The total number of electoral votes he won by taking Florida? Twenty-nine.
“Everyone, I want you to meet FBI agent Sarah Brubaker,” said President Montgomery, who was sitting at the Resolute desk signing a flurry of documents. His jawline was even stronger in person than it was on TV. He hadn’t even glanced up at her yet. “Two nights ago, she had drinks with a serial killer who tried to run her over afterward in the parking lot. Isn’t that correct, Agent Brubaker?”
“Uh, yes, I guess it is, Mr. President,” she said.
President Montgomery finally looked up and stared right at Sarah for the longest five seconds of her life.
Then he cracked a smile. Just as he did whenever he scored a point against his opponent during the debates. Just as he did when he posed for his campaign poster.
“And I thought I’d had some bad first dates,” he said. “Take a load off your feet, Sarah.”
Chapter 61
THE BRIEFING ITSELF was actually the easy part. The president listened intently while throwing in the occasional nod. Not once did he interrupt her. Sarah was clear, concise, and in full command of the facts. Not fazed at all. Go figure, she thought. Maybe this man is just easy to talk to, a good listener.
Then came the Q and A.
Sitting in an armchair that was clearly “his chair,” the president was joined by his chief of staff, Conrad Gilmartin, and his press secretary, Amanda Kyle, who actually—and ironically—looked a bit like C.J. from The West Wing. Given the practiced way in which they both took their seats on the couch to the president’s left, these were clearly “their seats.”
That left the opposite couch. Driesen sat on one end; Jason Hawthorne, the deputy director of the Secret Service, sat on the other. Squeezed in between them with all the comfort of the middle seat on an airplane was Sarah.
Just one big cozy gathering.
The president cleared his throat, firing his first question at Sarah. “Do you have any reason to believe that my brother-in-law would be a target of this killer?”
“Do you mean, sir, more of a target than anyone else named John O’Hara?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s what I mean.”
“The short answer is I don’t know yet.”
The president shook his head slowly. The room suddenly didn’t feel so cozy to Sarah.
“I can get that answer from anyone, Agent Brubaker,” he said. “Are you just anyone?”
Ouch.
Driesen was about to throw her a life preserver and intercede when Montgomery motioned with his hand for him to hold off. The gesture was subtle yet unmistakable.
The president stared at Sarah, waiting. She knew this time there was no smile and punch line in the offing.
Keep it together, Brubaker! Better yet, tell him what you really think.
“You’re right, Mr. President. Let me try that again,” she said finally. “The killer’s motivation has absolutely nothing to do with your brother-in-law. That’s what I believe.”
The rest of the room, save for Driesen, did everything they could not to blurt out their objections. That’s ridiculous! How could you be so sure at this point?
But they didn’t want to step all over their boss. They bit their tongues.
As for the president, he simply leaned back in his armchair, intrigued.
“Go on,” he said. “Convince me.”
Chapter 62
THE ROOM WAS so quiet Sarah thought she could actually hear herself blink.
“Mr. President, I’d like you to consider what would attract the killer to a specific John O’Hara out there, whether it be your brother-in-law or someone else,” she began. “Maybe they were classmates, maybe they had business dealings—in theory, it could be anything. Whatever the connection, though, the killer’s reaction to knowing this John O’Hara would have to be so strong, so violent, that it manifested itself as a need to kill basically anyone named John O’Hara.”
“Are you saying that’s not possible?” asked the president.
“No. Quite the opposite, sir. It’s very possible,” she said. “I’m convinced the killer has a specific John O’Hara in mind.”
“But just not my brother-in-law.”
“Exactly.”
“Why not? Lord knows he’s probably got some enemies out there.”
“I’m sure he does,” Sarah said, a little too casually. The second the words left her mouth she wanted to take them back. “I’m sorry, I meant no disrespect to him.”
President Montgomery let go with a slight chuckle. “That’s quite all right. If Letterman and Leno can rank on him, so can you,” he said. “I do it myself.” He looked across the room. “We all do.”
“What I meant,” she continued, “is that on the surface it would make sense that the killings had something to do with your brother-in-law, given his…well, let’s just say his notoriety. But that idea changed for me.”
“Once you met the killer.”
“Yes,” said Sarah. “I realized that this guy could’ve killed me if he wanted to. Rather easily, too. But he didn’t. Why? And why would he reveal himself to me in that manner?”
The president’s couch consiglieri couldn’t restrain themselves any longer. They needed in on the conversation.
“Because it’s a game to him, right? He’s playing with you,” said Gilmartin, the chief of staff.
“Yes, but it goes deeper than that,” said Sarah. “He wants me to be scared, to live in fear, and I can’t do that once I’m dead. Neither can the real John O’Hara.”
Amanda Kyle, the press secretary, looked like she’d just solved the puzzle on Wheel of Fortune. “So that’s why he kills a bunch of John O’Haras, because he wants the real one to live in fear.”
“That’s what I believe,” said Sarah. “It’s also why I think the John O’Haras who are no longer alive—the well-known author, for instance—are irrelevant. These aren’t tribute killings. There are no shades of John Hinckley here.”
“But this hasn’t gone public,” said Hawthorne, the deputy director of the Secret Service. “Whoever the ‘real’ John O’Hara is, he doesn’t know anything.”
“I’m afraid he’s about to,” said the president. “The whole country is.”
“We could still wait, sir,” said Hawthorne. “God knows how many John O’Haras are out there, not to mention all their family members. Think of the panic.”
“Up until this morning I was,” said the president. “But if another John O’Hara turns up dead and it gets out we were aware of the threat and didn’t warn anyone, we’ll all be eating from a big bowl of shit stew.”
Sarah looked around the room. There was clearly something final about the president cursing, because that was the end of the discussion. Period.
“Shall I start preparing a statement, sir?” asked Kyle, already jotting some notes on the yellow legal pad in her lap.
“Yes,” he said. “But I’m still missing something.” He turned to Sarah. “I still don’t know why my brother-in-law couldn’t be, as you say, the real John O’Hara.”
“If I may, I’ll pose it to you this way,” she said. “If you were to tell your brother-in-law that he’d somehow managed to inspire a serial killer, no less one who was bent on killing not just him but anyone named John O’Hara, what would be his first reaction?”
The president rolled his eyes. He got it. “Funny, the word fear doesn’t come to mind, does it?” he said. “It would be the biggest thing he’d ever done in his life. He’d be over the moon. Everyone knows that about him.”
Sarah nodded. “Including our serial killer.”
No one else said anything. No one needed to. Except the president.
“Nice work, Agent Brubaker. I like the way you think.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Actually, you should be thanking
your boss, Dan, here,” he said. “He’s the one who insisted on bringing you here this morning.”
Sarah turned to Driesen, who’d barely said a word the entire time. She couldn’t believe it. He’d told her the president liked being briefed from the “front lines,” that he had specifically requested her being there.
In other words, he’d lied to her.
And she couldn’t thank him enough.
Chapter 63
HALF KIDDING, DAN warned her about it on the ride back from the White House. “Look out for the letdown,” he said.
“The what?” asked Sarah.
“The letdown,” he repeated. “Just wait.”
She didn’t have to wait long. Within a minute of landing behind her desk at Quantico, she felt it. She’d been flying high, mixing it up in the Oval Office with the commander in chief. POTUS. The prez. And now what? She was back to, well, being herself. Just another FBI agent.
Hanging over Montgomery’s shoulder, she’d noticed, was the original of Norman Rockwell’s Working on the Statue of Liberty. Sitting atop the credenza was Frederic Remington’s iconic sculpture The Bronco Buster. Both were courtesy of the greatest interior designer of them all: the Smithsonian.
Sarah sighed. Here she was, all alone now in her tiny office decorated by the weekly circular from Staples. The only thing hanging on her wall was a scuffed-up dry-erase board, and the closest thing she had to a sculpture was a little magnetic porcupine on her desk that held her paper clips.
In other words, the letdown.
There was something else, too. In front of Sarah, practically taunting her, was the case file on the John O’Hara Killer. On the outside it looked like every other file in her office—an overstuffed manila folder. But on the inside…
There was no escaping the fact that this case felt different, a little more personal. She’d met him face-to-face, shook his hand. Stared him straight in the eyes. They were slate gray. And they were still looking at her, daring her.
Sarah opened the file. For the umpteenth time, she pored over the various police reports and available autopsies. She reread her notes. She logged on to her computer, searching again for anything and everything she could find on Ulysses and You’ve Got Mail.
Next, she worked the phone. She spoke with the manager of Brewer’s supermarket back in Candle Lake. There was no security camera near the Movie Hut. In fact, there were no security cameras at all in the market. “Shoplifting isn’t much of an issue around here,” the manager explained.
She called Canteena’s and spoke with the bartender who had served “Jared” his first beer, the one he had before he conveniently drank from hers.
“Any chance he paid for it with a credit card?” she asked.
She knew that chance fell on the far side of slim to none, but she didn’t care. Sometimes the only way to catch a break is to chase down the long shots.
Speaking of which…isn’t there someone who was supposed to call me back?
Sarah grabbed her phone log and the list of people for whom she’d previously left messages. A sheriff in Winnemucca, Nevada. A detective in Flagstaff, Arizona. The head librarian from the Kern County Library in Bakersfield, California. Everyone had gotten back to her.
Except one.
In the past year, there’d been a total of sixteen escapes from all domestic prisons and mental institutions, this according to the FBI crime database. Of those sixteen escapees, only two remained at large. One was an inmate from state prison in Montgomery, Alabama; the other a patient at Eagle Mountain Psychiatric Hospital in Los Angeles.
The photo accompanying the Alabama inmate’s file ruled him out as the killer. Not unless the “Jared Sullivan” Sarah had met had somehow managed, among other things, to lose two hundred pounds, not to mention the two tattoos of daggers on either side of his face.
The psychiatric patient from L.A., though, was another story. Or, more accurately, no story at all. Sarah had requested a copy of the police report made after his escape, but it hadn’t reached her desk yet. Other than that, the Bureau didn’t have anything on him, which wasn’t too big of a surprise. Most states, California in particular, had a litany of rules and regulations regarding patient privacy.
The best way to cut through them? A good old-fashioned phone call.
Assuming you could get someone to call you back.
Sarah had left two messages for Lee McConnell, chief administrator at Eagle Mountain. Of course, this guy would probably sooner get a root canal than have to discuss a patient who escaped on his watch.
“Round three,” mumbled Sarah as she started dialing.
She couldn’t be sure, but the woman who answered seemed to be different from the one she’d spoken to the previous two times. A temp, maybe? That would certainly explain her announcing chipperly that “Mr. McConnell just walked in; let me patch you through.” What followed was easily ten seconds of dead air, during which McConnell was probably busy chewing out the poor woman for not checking with him first. Finally, he picked up.
“Agent Brubaker? Lee McConnell,” he said. “Talk about timing. I was just about to call you back.”
Yeah, right. And I was just about to elope with Johnny Depp.
Sarah riffled through her notes, checking for the name she’d scribbled down. McConnell’s patient. Or former patient, as it were.
She found it.
“So what can you tell me about Ned Sinclair?” she asked.
Chapter 64
THERE WAS A hitch in McConnell’s voice. Not a stutter or stammer but, weirdly, something more like a swallow, a sort of dyspeptic reflex, as if the pastrami-on-rye sandwich he had for lunch was repeating on him. The result was that he randomly accentuated words for no reason.
Talk about a Monty Python skit, she thought. Paging John Cleese…
“Ned Sinclair, huh? What…would…you like to know about him?” he asked.
Sarah suppressed a laugh and asked her first question, a no-brainer. “What’s his race? Is he white, black, Hispanic?”
If Ned Sinclair wasn’t white, this was going to be a very short conversation.
“He’s white,” said McConnell. “I’m afraid I don’t have his file…in…front of me, so I can’t give you height and weight, or even exactly how old he is.”
“Can you ballpark his age?”
“I’d say thirtyish, maybe a bit older. I didn’t have much interaction with him; in fact, no one here…really…did. Ned Sinclair barely spoke.”
The age, thirtyish, was a possible match, but the part about his not speaking couldn’t be any more different from the guy back at Canteena’s. Jared Sullivan was definitely a talker, a very smooth talker.
“What else can you tell me about him?” she asked.
“The guy you’d probably want to speak with is the admitting psychiatrist. Ned was his patient for some time, but I don’t know his name offhand,” he said. “Let me actually…grab…the file. Hold on a second, okay?”
Before Sarah could even respond, she was listening to a trombone-heavy Muzak version of the Beatles’ “The Long and Winding Road.” Not an appropriate song title when you’ve been put on hold.
If only to kill a few seconds, she quickly checked her e-mails. Make that singular. There was only one new message since she last checked after leaving the Oval Office. An invitation to the next state dinner? A seat at the president’s table?
Sarah smiled. A girl could always dream…
She looked at the sender’s name. Who? She didn’t recognize it at first. Then it came to her.
Mark Campbell. From her call log.
He was the sheriff from Winnemucca, Nevada, the town where the first John O’Hara victim lived.
Sarah’s eyes slid over to the subject heading and immediately lit up.
FOUND SOMETHING, it read.
Chapter 65
SARAH QUICKLY CLICKED on the e-mail, the promise of “found something” edging her closer to the screen. The message couldn’t load fast enough.
Meanwhile, she was still on hold with McConnell. Where did he go for Ned Sinclair’s file? Cleveland?
She’d originally spoken to Sheriff Campbell in Winnemucca before heading out to Park City. The thinking was simple. If the John O’Hara Killer had indeed left behind that copy of Ulysses, perhaps he’d also left something behind with his first victim. A clue that hadn’t been found yet.
She wanted Campbell to reexamine the crime scene, every last inch of it, paying particular attention to the victim himself.
“Check all the clothing again,” she’d told him. “Socks, underwear…everything.”
Sarah knew she was being a pain in the ass, but it had to be done, simple as that. Sometimes the only way to catch a break is to chase down the long shots.
Campbell’s e-mail popped open at the exact moment McConnell got back on the line. Figured.
“Sorry about that,” said McConnell. “Couldn’t find it at first, but I’ve got it now.”
Curiously, he didn’t seem to be emphasizing random words in his sentences anymore, or maybe that was because Sarah was barely listening to him. Her ears had given way to her eyes as she began reading Campbell’s message.
“You were right,” it began.
Campbell described how his men had overlooked the cuffed hems that the first John O’Hara victim had on his khaki slacks. Peeling them back, the sheriff found a small, crumpled piece of paper, a note that was jammed into the fold of the right cuff, as if it were a prayer stuffed into the Western Wall. On it were two handwritten lines.
Sleep now little children who hear the monster roar.
Make me a witness of what he has in store.
Sarah’s first thought was that it came from an old children’s book, albeit one she didn’t know. She read the lines again. Maybe it was from a poem. Or maybe it wasn’t from anything—except the killer’s own mind.
She brought up Google while McConnell continued talking. He was reciting the highlights from Ned Sinclair’s file in bullet-point fashion. “Mathematics PhD…professor at UCLA…fired nearly four years ago…”