The 7th Victim - Alan Jacobson [155]
Del Monaco shook his head. “More like he had done what he needed to do, what he’d fantasized about doing, for the fifteen big ones he’d done in the slammer. He got out and bang, he saw women who reminded him of Linwood when she was younger, the way he remembered her the last time he’d seen her. Even though he may not have consciously been aware of it, he killed them because he was killing her, over and over again.”
“Then he somehow found her. Found Linwood. And he went after her.”
“What’s the COD?” Sinclair asked, walking into the room.
Del Monaco answered: “Gunshot wound to the forehead. Lots of stippling on the face. Close range, an old thirty-eight. Gun’s still in his hand. Looks like a suicide.”
“How long ago?”
“Just a guess, but I’d say a day, maybe a little less.”
“Let’s get a powder residue, just to be sure,” Sinclair said.
“Karen,” Bledsoe called, “you should see this.”
She rose and followed his voice up the stairs to the bedroom. Five left hands hung from the ceiling with thin fishing line. In the lighting, they appeared to be floating in mid-air. “Five . . . tell the lab we need to know which one’s missing.”
Bledsoe nodded. “Then there’s this.” He led her down the hall into the bathroom. Scrawled on the mirror in lipstick were the words “It’s in the blood.”
Vail sighed deeply. She looked around the old bathroom, the toilet the kind that had a wall-mounted water tank and a pull-chain flush mechanism.
“Looks like we got our man,” Bledsoe said.
Vail nodded. “Yeah.”
“You okay?”
She pouted her lips. “I thought I might feel something, like I’d been here before. Because I have, I must have been. I was an infant here, till Linwood had the sense to get the hell out.” Her eyes bounced around the bathroom and into the hallway. “But I don’t feel anything.”
“You were a baby. What do you expect?”
“I don’t know, Bledsoe. I just thought I’d feel something. Then again, there aren’t that many things that move me these days.”
Just then, she noticed Robby standing in the doorway. “I’ll move you,” he said, taking her hand.
She followed him out of the bathroom and whispered up toward his ear, “You already have, Robby. You already have.”
seventy-three
Gifford stood at the head of the conference room, addressing the profiling unit, Vail at his side. “I think we all owe Agent Vail sincere thanks for a damn fine job in helping break the Dead Eyes case. And for standing by her convictions. I know we all doubted her at various times in the past eighteen-plus months. I’m as guilty as anyone else, and for that I apologize.” He looked over at Vail, who felt that Gifford was genuine in his apology.
“Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.”
Applause broke out for a brief moment but stopped at Gifford’s raised hand. “Let’s all get back to work.” He leaned over and whispered into her ear. “Meet me in my office in ten minutes.”
THE MANNER IN WHICH GIFFORD had approached this morning’s recognition of her efforts, in front of the entire unit, was completely unexpected—and was thus something Vail had been unprepared for. Though it meant a great deal to her, she could not fully appreciate it because both her body and mind were in fairly rotten shape. She felt as if she had been run over by a truck and wanted nothing more than to crawl back into bed and sleep for several days.
Following the episode at the Farwell ranch, Vail had been airlifted off the property by a county chopper and taken to a waiting cruiser at the Fairfax County Police Department’s Mason District Station. She then had been driven back to Robby’s house, where she took another two Tylenols and fell asleep in bed, without even changing out of her dirty clothing. She had awakened to a call at 9 A.M. from Gifford’s secretary, asking her to report to work in one hour.
Now, as she sat in Gifford’s office, the haze of the past forty-eight hours still hovered over her like a thick fog. What did he want to talk to her about? Reinstatement? Not possible with the charges