Chapter 77
ALL OF A SUDDEN, Sarah was calling out again, only her call wasn’t aimed at me.
“Don’t move!” I heard her yell.
I immediately reached for my shin holster and raced out of the room, flying down the stairs. Landing with a thud in the foyer, I saw him from behind, his hands up. Sinclair? Really? No, it couldn’t be!
Instinctively, he turned around at the sound of me, his eyes popping wide with terror as he realized his predicament. Sarah was in front of him; I was at his back.
“Who are you?” demanded Sarah.
He turned to face her. Every nervous word tripped over his tongue. “I’m…uh, I’m…my name is Dr. Bruce Drummond. I’m…um, a psychiatrist.”
“Why are you here?” she asked—no, demanded.
“The news,” he said. “When I…uh…got home from work, I saw it on the news.”
Sarah and I both lowered our guns at the same time. Just like that, we’d already filled in the blanks.
“You treated Ned Sinclair?” she asked.
“Yes, for a year,” he answered, breathing for the first time. “Are you the police? I hope you’re the police.”
“FBI,” she said, flashing her badge. “I’m Agent Sarah Brubaker and that’s my partner, John.”
Cleverly, she avoided saying my last name. That would’ve surely confused the already shaky psychiatrist. As it was, he had more pressing concerns.
“Can I put my hands down now?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Sarah. “In fact, you can do a heck of a lot more than that. You can help us.”
We walked into Ned’s living room, where the theme of “sparsely furnished” had been carried even further. There was one couch, one armchair. That was it. The idea of a coffee table had apparently been deemed superfluous.
Not that we were offering Dr. Bruce Drummond any coffee. No drinks or hors d’oeuvres, either. Ixnay on the cocktail weenies, too—all we wanted to do was pump him for information.
“To start with, why are you here?” asked Sarah. “Have you been in contact with Ned?”
“Not for a couple of years,” he explained. “On the off chance that he was here, though, I was hoping to get him to surrender. The door was open when I arrived.”
“You didn’t think of first going to the police?” I asked.
Drummond folded his legs. “Ned never would have surrendered to the police,” he said matter-of-factly. He was calmer now, more composed; his scholarly aura began to assert itself.
Sarah clearly picked up on this and softened her tone. Smart cookie: she wanted to make Drummond feel appreciated for what he’d been trying to do. That was the best way to get him to open up about Ned.
“It’s understandable you would care about his well-being,” she said. “How long ago were you his psychiatrist?”
“He became my patient about five years ago, right after his sister was killed. The chair of the math department at UCLA, a friend of mine, had suggested that Ned see me.”
“For grief counseling?” I asked. I certainly had a little experience in that area.
“Yes, he was very close with his sister,” said Drummond. Then he tacked on something under his breath, almost by accident. “Too close.”
If there was ever a line that begged for a follow-up question, that was it. “What does that mean?” I asked.
Drummond hesitated. “Have you seen Ned’s personnel file from the university? Do you know why he left?”
“Yes,” said Sarah. “It said he was fired based on consistently poor student feedback.”
“That figures,” said Drummond. “It would’ve been a PR nightmare otherwise.”
“What would have?” I asked.
“The truth,” he said.
Chapter 78
I’LL GIVE THE doctor this: he certainly had our full attention.
Drummond leaned forward in the armchair, clasping his hands. “Ned was caught in his office on campus masturbating to a picture of a young woman,” he explained.
Sarah barely batted an eyelash. “One of his students?” she asked.
“Worse, if you can imagine,” he said. “It was a picture of Nora.”
Okay, that’s a different story. We just took a right turn onto Weird Avenue. And depending on what picture it was, I might have to go wash my hands.
Drummond continued, “It’s called a psychosexual fixation disorder. It’s rare among siblings, but it does happen.”
“And you continued to counsel him after the incident?” Sarah asked.
“Yes. At least I tried to,” he said. “The fact that Nora was dead, though, made it more difficult. Not only was he fixated on her but, as you might imagine, he also became obsessed with the question of who killed her. He claimed he knew who it was.”
“Did he actually give you a name?” I asked.
“No, and that was the worst part,” he said. “He kept insisting that he was going to take care of it himself.”
“It?” repeated Sarah. “Like he was planning to kill the guy?”
“That’s the impression I got,” he said. “Of course, without a name it wasn’t exactly a Tarasoff situation.”
“Still, you thought he was a threat to somebody,” said Sarah. “So you had him admitted to Eagle Mountain, right?”
“Almost a year to the day after he became my patient, yes.”
I raised my hand. “Tarasoff?”
“The court case,” said Sarah. “Tarasoff versus Regents of the University of California. The ruling obliges a therapist to breach confidentiality with his patient if he knows a third party is in danger.”
I shot her a sideways look. “Show-off.”
She smiled before turning again to Drummond. “Here’s what I don’t get, though,” she said. “Ned goes to Eagle Mountain and stays there for over three years without incident. Then one day, out of the blue, he decides to escape. He violently murders a nurse and goes on a killing spree, all the victims having the same name.”
“Obviously he blames someone named John O’Hara for his sister’s death,” said Drummond. “I mean, he really blames him.”
“Yes,” said Sarah. “But why act on it now? Why did he wait?”
“Think of his fixation disorder as a cancer,” he said. “Ned was in remission. He was on medication, and whatever urges he had, they were under control. In check.”
“So that’s my question. What happened to change that?” she asked.
“I had the same question,” said Drummond. “That’s why before I came here I paid a visit to Eagle Mountain. It turns out a new nurse had been assigned to Ned’s floor.”
“What did she have to do with anything?” I asked.
“You mean what did he have to do with anything,” he said. “He was a male nurse.”
“Is that the one Ned killed?” asked Sarah.
“Yes. His nickname was Ace.”
I shrugged. “So?”
Drummond leaned back in the armchair. “So now ask me what his real name was.”
Chapter 79
SCORES OF MILES of driving, thousands of miles in the air, multiple time zones, and all within twenty-four hours, thanks to a red-eye flight from LAX that we just made with only seconds to spare.
Sarah and I were back in New York and in my car, pulling out of the short-term parking lot at Kennedy Airport.
“Do you smell that?” I asked, fidgeting with the vent. “What’s that smell?”
Sarah laughed. “I think it’s us.”
I sniffed down at my shirt, then recoiled. “Wow—maybe it’s just me. Sorry about that.”
“It’s us, John. Now we have something else in common. We stink to high heaven.”
Showers were in our near future, that much we knew. The agreement before we landed was that we’d drive to my house in Riverside and clean up. The fact that Sarah’s rental car was there made the decision a no-brainer.
The disagreement, however, was about what would happen next.
For
the umpteenth time I argued that we should camp out at my house and simply wait for Ned Sinclair to show up.
“It’s not too late to change your mind,” I said as we pulled onto the Van Wyck Expressway, heading toward Connecticut.
And for the umpteenth time she shut me down.
“It’s not my call,” she said. “And speaking of calls, if I don’t make one soon to my boss, I’m going to be in big trouble. Seriously.”
I was pretty familiar with Dan Driesen, her boss, albeit only by reputation—a stellar reputation, I might add.
Quick, name a serial killer active within the last ten years who’s still at large.
Enough said.
“What are you going to tell him?” I asked.
“That it took a while to track you down, but I finally found you,” she said.
“Then what happens?”
“Like I said, you go somewhere safe. And that won’t be your house in Connecticut.”
“The Bureau Hotel, huh?”
“Now with free HBO,” she said jokingly.
“Very funny. Well, kind of funny. No, actually, not funny at all.”
The Bureau Hotel was what agents called the various safe houses across the country that the FBI used. They were mainly for trial witnesses who needed protection, but sometimes, as in my case, an agent was forced to check in.
“Seriously, though, you should decide what you want to do about your boys,” she said.
“I already have,” I said. “If someone’s trying to kill me, I hardly want them at my side, no matter where I’m being stashed.”
“Should they still be at camp, though?”
“Yes—but they’re about to get two new counselors, if you know what I mean.”
She did. “I’ll make the arrangements from your house,” she said.
I thought for a moment about Director Barliss and his perfectly aligned pushpins up at Camp Wilderlocke. I tried to imagine someone telling him that he was about to have two young FBI agents joining his staff for a bit. Other than that, though, there wasn’t much to smile about.
If only to take my mind off everything, I turned on the radio to get the traffic report for the approaching Whitestone Bridge. The station was 1010 WINS—“All news, all the time.”
Amazingly, my timing couldn’t have been any better.
If I didn’t kill us first, that is.
“Look out!” yelled Sarah.
I whipped my head up from the radio to see the back of a Poland Spring delivery truck filling up my entire windshield. Had I been a nanosecond later on the brakes, we would’ve rear-ended it for sure. Boom, smash, air bag city.
And all I could say to her, pointing at the radio, was, “Did you hear that?”
Chapter 80
I CRANKED UP the volume, all the way to eleven. It was a news story about the murder of a young couple.
Killed on their honeymoon.
First came Ethan and Abigail Breslow, then Scott and Annabelle Pierce. So much for coincidences.
Two’s company; three’s a serial killer.
My head was spinning. Sarah and I both officially had one now. A his-and-hers set, like washcloths—that is, if washcloths went around murdering people.
“Reporting from Long Island is Bianca Turner with more on this story…”
Parker and Samantha Keller were avid sailors, leaving Southampton two Sundays ago aboard their forty-two-foot schooner, heading for Saint Barts. On their way back they’d spent a night docked in Bermuda, meeting up with friends and shopping for additional supplies. An hour out of port the following morning, the boat apparently suffered some type of explosion, killing them both.
“At this time, the Coast Guard has no comment on the nature of the explosion or what might have caused it.”
“Try who might have caused it,” I said, only to be shushed by Sarah, who wanted to hear the rest.
“Friends said Parker and Samantha Keller had delayed their honeymoon until after their law school graduations. They were married this past April in Sag Harbor, New York.”
Sarah suddenly screamed so loud I nearly rear-ended another truck. “Oh, my God, that’s the couple!”
“What couple?”
“I read about them in the Times,” she said. “I can’t believe it! They were the Vows couple.”
She’d lost me after “I can’t believe it.” I looked at her blankly.
“The Vows couple,” she repeated. “Every week in the wedding section they highlight one couple and tell an in-depth story of how they first met and stuff like that. You’ve never seen it?”
I wanted to explain that until they started printing the sports section in the middle of the wedding section, the odds were pretty slim that I was ever going to come across any “Vows couple.”
Instead, I simply shook my head. “No. I’ve never seen it,” I said.
By then, though, Sarah wasn’t even looking at me. She had her head buried in her BlackBerry.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Checking something,” she answered. “A hunch.”
With one eye on the road, my other eye was watching her thumbs jab away at the phone. She was typing something. Furiously.
Then she stopped. She was staring at the screen, waiting.
Waiting some more.
“C’mon…c’mon,” she muttered impatiently. Finally, she slapped the dashboard. “I knew it!”
There was something in her voice, a sense that whatever plan we had was all about to change.
“I’m not even going to get my shower, am I?” I asked.
“Not quite yet,” she said, looking over her shoulder. She was checking out the traffic heading in the other direction.
“Okay, lay it on me. Where are you taking us?”
“Manhattan,” she answered. “We need to get off at the next exit and turn around.”
I glanced over at Sarah, smiling at the way her hunch—whatever it might be—was like a shot of pure adrenaline. Not just to her, but to the both of us.
I grabbed the wheel at twelve o’clock, then spun it like a top as we jumped the median into the southbound lanes. Then I straightened out the wheel and hit the gas like I was stomping out a fire.
“So where in Manhattan would you like to go?” I asked calmly.
Chapter 81
WITH BARELY ONE foot in the door, you couldn’t just hear the hum of the New York Times building. You could feel it.
Sarah and I walked quickly through the cavernous lobby, looking at the hundreds of small screens hanging from wires that were showcasing snippets of the news, the type flipping and scrolling in a seemingly synchronized dance.
After stepping off the elevator on the twenty-second floor, Sarah gave her name to a fresh-faced young woman wearing tortoiseshell glasses and a white cardigan. It was a pretty safe bet that she was the only receptionist in Manhattan who was reading Proust behind her desk.
“Ms. LaSalle is expecting you,” she said. “One moment.”
She buzzed the editor’s office, and within seconds we were following another fresh-faced young woman through a busy hallway, its walls lined with photographs of some of the paper’s more than one hundred Pulitzer Prize winners.
“By the way, I’m Ms. LaSalle’s personal assistant,” she announced over her shoulder.
The tone was confident, but it was also a false front. Her walking-on-eggshells body language as we approached the corner office left little doubt that she was thoroughly intimidated by her boss.
It was easy to see why.
Emily LaSalle, editor of the New York Times wedding section and doyenne of Manhattan high society, was an unsettling one-two punch of prim and proper. Her hair, her makeup, her outfit—complete with a double strand of white pearls—seemed composed. In control.
That is, she seemed in control right up until her personal assistant closed the door and left us alone. That’s when Ms. Prim and Proper basically turned into a puddle.
“I feel so responsible,??
? she said, tears suddenly streaming down her high cheekbones. “I chose those couples.”
That was silly, of course. It was hardly her fault. Still, I could understand her being distraught. A serial killer was knocking off people on their honeymoons, people who had just one thing in common—they had all been featured in the Vows column.
“You can’t blame yourself,” said Sarah, sounding like her best friend. “What you can do, though, is help us.”
“How?” she asked.
“The past two weekends featured the Pierce and Breslow couples. But the Kellers, the latest ones, actually appeared nearly two months ago,” I said.
“Yes, I remember,” said LaSalle. “They were delaying their honeymoon. Law school graduation, right?”
“Exactly,” said Sarah. “That means there’s a five-week gap between victims. We counted.”
“Or, to put it another way, five weeks of other Vows couples who are still alive,” I said.
“Why do you think they’ve been spared?” asked LaSalle.
“I don’t know. But first, we actually have to make sure that’s the case,” I explained. “At least one of those couples could still be on their honeymoon.”
“Oh, God,” said LaSalle, the reality sinking in.
There was only one thing worse than three dead Vows couples.
Four dead Vows couples.
Chapter 82
“I’VE NEVER SEEN anything so beautiful,” said Melissa Cosmer, approaching the top of Makahiku Falls in Maui’s Haleakalā National Park.
“Me, neither,” said her husband, Charlie Cosmer.
Only he wasn’t looking at the majestic two-hundred-foot waterfall. He was admiring his new bride of barely a week. He’d never felt so lucky, and in love, in his entire life. Melissa was his sun, moon, and stars all in one.
A gift from the heavens, he called her when they were interviewed for the Vows column in the Times.
Charlie’s only regret was that his parents, who had died in a plane crash five years earlier, never got to meet her. A real keeper, his dad would’ve called her. Charlie was sure of it.