back into the sink. She drained the red, murky water, tossed in more detergent and ran fresh water over the fabric. When she looked up in the mirror, Gwen was standing behind her, watching.
“If you’re hurt, please don’t try to take care of it yourself,” Gwen said in a soft but stern voice.
Maggie met her friend’s eyes in the mirror and knew that she was referring to the cut Albert Stucky had sliced into her abdomen. Maggie had slipped away into the night, after all the commotion had ended, and tried to discreetly dress her own wound. But an infection had landed her in the emergency room a few days later.
“It’s nothing, Gwen. My neighbor’s dog was injured. I helped take it to the vet. This is the dog’s blood. Not mine.”
“You’re kidding.” It took a minute for relief to wash over Gwen’s face. “Jesus, Maggie, you just can’t keep your nose out of anything that involves blood, can you?”
Maggie smiled. “I’ll tell you about it later. We need to eat, because I am starving.”
“That’s new and different.”
Maggie grabbed a towel, wiped her hands and led the way back downstairs.
“You know,” Gwen said from behind her, “you need to put on some weight. Do you ever eat regular meals anymore?”
“I hope this isn’t going to be a lecture on nutrition.”
She heard Gwen sigh, but knew she wouldn’t push it. They went into the kitchen, and Maggie pulled out paper plates and napkins from a carton on the counter. Each grabbed a cold bottle of beer and returned to the living-room floor. Already Gwen had kicked out of her expensive black pumps and thrown her suit jacket over the arm of the recliner. Maggie scooped up pizza as she noticed Gwen examining the open carton next to the rolltop desk.
“This is Stucky’s, isn’t it?”
“Are you going to rat me out to Cunningham?”
“Of course not. You know me better than that. But I am concerned about you obsessing over him.”
“I’m not obsessing.”
“Really? Then what would you call it?”
Maggie took a bite of pizza. She didn’t want to think about Stucky, or her appetite would be ruined again. Yet that was one of the reasons Gwen was here.
“I simply want him caught,” Maggie finally said. She could feel Gwen’s eyes examining her, looking for signs, watching for underlying tones. Maggie hated it when her friend tried psychoanalyzing her, but she knew it was a simple instinct with Gwen.
“And only you can catch him? Is that it?”
“I know him best.”
Gwen stared at her a few more moments then picked up her bottle by its neck and twisted off the cap. She took a sip and put the drink aside.
“I did some checking.” She reached for a slice of pizza, and Maggie tried not to show her eagerness. She had asked Gwen to use her connections to find out where the Stucky case was stalled. When Assistant Director Cunningham exiled Maggie to the teaching circuit, he had also made it impossible for her to find out any information about the investigation.
Gwen took her time chewing. Another sip while Maggie waited. She wondered if Gwen had called Cunningham directly. No, that would have been too obvious. He knew the two of them were close friends.
“And?” She couldn’t stand it any longer.
“Cunningham has brought in a new profiler, but the task force has been dismantled.”
“Why the hell would he do that?”
“Because he has nothing, Maggie. It’s been, what? Over five months? There’s no sign of Albert Stucky. It’s like he’s fallen off the face of the earth.”
“I know. I’ve been checking VICAP almost weekly.” Initiated by the FBI, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program recorded violent crimes across the country, categorizing them by distinguishing features. Nothing close to Stucky’s M.O. had shown up. “What about in Europe? Stucky has enough money stashed. He could go anywhere.”
“I checked my sources at Interpol.” Gwen paused for another sip. “There’s been nothing that looks like Stucky.”
“Maybe he’s changed his M.O.”
“Maybe he’s stopped, Maggie. Sometimes serial killers do that. They just stop. No one can explain it, but you know it happens.”
“Not Stucky.”
“Don’t you think he’d be in touch with you? Try to start his sick game all over again? After all, you’re the one who got him thrown in jail. If nothing else, he’d be mad as hell.”
Maggie had been the one who had finally identified the madman the FBI had nicknamed The Collector. Her profile, and a lucky discovery of an almost indistinguishable set of fingerprints—arrogantly and recklessly left behind at a crime scene—were what led to the unveiling of The Collector as a man named Albert Stucky, a self-made millionaire from Massachusetts.
Like most serial killers, Stucky seemed pleased by the exposure, enjoying the attention and wanting to take the credit. When his obsession turned to Maggie, no one was really surprised. But the game that followed was anything but ordinary. A game that included clues to catch him, only the clues came as personal notes with a token finger, a dissected birthmark, and once, a severed nipple slipped into an envelope.
That was about eight or nine months ago. Almost a year had passed and Maggie still struggled to remember what her life had been like before the game. She couldn’t remember sleep without nightmares. She couldn’t remember not feeling the constant need to look over her shoulder. She had nearly lost her life capturing Albert Stucky, and he had escaped before she could remember what feeling safe felt like.
Gwen reached over and pulled a stack of crime scene photos from the box. She laid them out while she continued eating her pizza. She was one of the few people Maggie knew who wasn’t a member of the FBI and who was able to eat and look at crime scene photos at the same time. Without looking up, she said, “You need to let this go, Maggie. He’s chopping away pieces of you, and he isn’t even around.”
The images from the scattered photos stared out at Maggie, just as horrific in black and white as they had been in color. There were close-ups of slashed throats, chewed-off nipples, mutilated vaginas and an assortment of extracted organs. Earlier, with only a glance, she had discovered how many of the reports she still knew by heart. God, that was annoying.
Greg had recently accused her of remembering more details about entry wounds and killers’ signatures than she remembered about the events and anniversaries in their life together. There had been no point in arguing with him. She knew he was right. Perhaps she didn’t deserve a husband or a family or a life. How could any female FBI agent expect a man to understand her job, let alone something like this…this obsession? Was it an obsession? Was Gwen right?
She set the pizza aside and realized that her hands had a slight tremble. When she looked up, she saw that Gwen noticed the tremor, too.
“When was the last time you slept through the night?” Her friend’s brow crinkled with concern.
She chose to ignore the question and avoided Gwen’s green Irish eyes as well. “Just because there hasn’t been a murder doesn’t mean he hasn’t started his collection again.”
“And if he has, Kyle will be watching.” Gwen rarely slipped, using Assistant Director Cunningham’s first name, except times like now, when she seemed genuinely concerned and worried. “Let it go, Maggie. Let it go before it destroys you.”
“It’s not going to destroy me. I’m pretty damn tough, remember?” But she couldn’t meet her friend’s eyes for fear that Gwen would see the lie.
“Ah, tough,” Gwen said, sitting back. “So that’s why you’re walking around your own home with a gun stashed in the back of your pants.”
Maggie winced. Gwen caught it and smiled.
“Now, see, instead of tough,” she told Maggie, “I think I would have called it stubborn.”
