Twice Dead - Catherine Coulter [207]
Lily thought about how tired she was, how she could simply sit down and sleep, then she smiled. “Can I have Mexican?”
THIRTEEN
Quantico, Virginia
FBI Academy
Savich was seated in his small office in the Jefferson dorm at the FBI Academy when two agents ushered in Marilyn Warluski, who’d borne a child by her cousin Tommy Tuttle, now deceased, the child’s whereabouts unknown. They’d nabbed her getting on a Greyhound bus in Bar Harbor, Maine, headed for Nova Scotia. Since she’d been designated a material witness, and Savich wanted to keep her stashed away, they’d brought her in an FBI Black Bell Jet to Quantico.
He’d never met her, but he’d seen her photo, knew she was poorly educated, and guessed that she was not very bright. He saw that she looked, oddly, even younger than in her photo, that she’d gained at least twenty pounds, and that her hair, cropped short in the photo, was longer and hung in oily hanks to her shoulders. She looked more tired than scared. No, he was wrong. What she looked was defeated, all hope quashed.
“Ms. Warluski,” he said in his deep, easy voice, waving her to a chair as he said her name. The two agents left the office, closing the door behind them. Savich gently pressed a button on the inside of the middle desk drawer, and in the next room, two profilers sitting quietly could also hear them speak.
“My name is Dillon Savich. I’m with the FBI.”
“I don’t know nothin’,” Marilyn Warluski said.
Savich smiled at her and seated himself again behind the desk.
He was silent for several moments, watched her fidget in that long silence. She said finally, her voice jumpy, high with nerves, “Just because you’re good-lookin’ doesn’t mean I’m gonna tell you anythin’, mister.”
This was a kick. “Hey, my wife thinks I’m good-looking, but I’m wondering, since you said it, if you’re trying to butter me up.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, “you’re good-lookin’ all right, and I heard one of the lady cops on the airplane say you’re a hunk. They were thinkin’ that a sexy guy will make me talk, so they got you.”
“Well,” Savich said, “maybe that’s so.” He paused a fraction of a second, then said, his voice unexpectedly hard, “Have you ever seen the Ghouls, Marilyn?”
He thought she’d keel over in her chair. So she knew about the Ghouls. She paled to a sickly white, looked ready to bolt.
“They’re not here, Marilyn.”
She shook her head back and forth, back and forth, whispering, “There’s no way you could know about the Ghouls. No way at all. Ghouls are bad, real bad.”
“Didn’t Tammy tell you that I was there in the barn, that I saw them, even shot at them?”
“No, she didn’t tell me ... I don’t know nothin’, you hear me?”
“Okay, she didn’t tell you I saw them and she didn’t tell you my name, which is interesting since she knows it. But she did tell you she wanted to have at me, didn’t she?”
Marilyn’s lips were seamed tight. She shook her head and said, “Oh, yeah, and she will. She called you that creepy FBI jerk. I don’t know why she didn’t tell me that you saw the Ghouls.”
“Maybe she doesn’t trust you.”
“Oh, yeah, Tammy trusts me. She doesn’t have anybody else now. She’ll get you, mister, she will.”
“Just so you know, Marilyn, I’m the one who shot her, the one who killed Tommy. I didn’t want to, but they left me no choice. They had two kids there, and they were going to kill them. Young boys, Marilyn, and they were terrified. Tommy and Tammy had kidnapped them, beaten them, and they were going to murder them, like they’ve murdered many young boys all across the country. Did you know that? Did you know your cousins were murderers?”
Marilyn shrugged. Savich saw a rip beneath the right arm of her brown, cracked leather jacket. “They’re my kin. I could miss Tommy—seein’ as how he’s dead now—but he killed our baby, cracked its poor little head right open, so I was really mad at him for a long time. Tommy was hard, real hard. He was always doin’ things you didn’t expect, mean things, things