The line went dead. Victor Hobson hung up the phone and leaned back in his chair. When he was younger, his cold gray eyes and craggy features had made him seem dangerous. Now, in his early sixties, he was still a hard- looking man, but his gray hair was thinning, he had developed a paunch, and he took pills to control high blood pressure. With bank robberies, drugs, and all his other federal criminal concerns he really didn’t need the additional stress of having Carl Rice reappear; but Lost Lake was one of the more curious occurrences in a very eventful life, and Vanessa was a seriously disturbed woman, who was either a murderer or the key to a mystery.
Hobson ordered an agent to pick up Sam Cutler and bring him downtown. He did not believe that Cutler was in any danger, but Vanessa’s friend might know where she was going. As soon as the agent was on her way, Hobson swiveled his chair until his back was to his desk. It was a sunny morning in Washington. From his window in the FBI building he watched the hustle and bustle on the street as he thought back to the last time he had spoken to Vanessa. It had been in the late 1980s, more than a year after she had been discovered wandering in a daze outside the summer home of Eric Glass and three months after she had been released from Serenity Manor, the private sanatorium where she had been living since her father, General Morris Wingate, had spirited her away from the hospital at Lost Lake. Hobson had not known it at the time, but he now believed that his assignment to investigate the murder of Congressman Glass had been the turning point in his career.
The Shenandoah apartments in Chevy Chase, Maryland, were expensive and secure. The three buildings were set back from the street. A buffer of manicured lawn separated them from the spear-tipped wrought-iron fence that surrounded the property.Entry was gained only by satisfying the guard at the sentry box that you had business with the United States senators, federal judges, movie stars, and other members of the elite who resided in the gated complex.
Serenity Manor had refused to give Victor Hobson Vanessa’s address without a subpoena. General Morris Wingate had toldHobson that he did not want his daughter disturbed. He also said that Vanessa had serious mental problems and would not be a reliable witness. It had taken a favor from a friend at the telephone company to run down Vanessa’s location and his FBI credentials, plus a not too subtle threat, to get by the doorman and the security guard at the reception desk in the wood-paneled lobby. As he rode the elevator to the twentieth floor, Hobson wondered what the Wingates were hiding. Their actions had always been suspicious, if explainable. Vanessa’s father had taken her out of the hospital in Lost Lake by the time Hobson had arrived in town, supposedly to give her the superior care that Serenity Manor provided. All requests for interviews at the psychiatric hospital had been denied, allegedly for the protection of the patient. It would be too traumatic for such a fragile individual to have to relive the horrors of Lost Lake, he had been told.
“Who is it?” Vanessa asked nervously moments after Hobson rang her doorbell. He had come up unannounced. The doorman and the security guard knew that there would be consequences if they called ahead.
“Federal Agent Victor Hobson,” he answered, holding his identification up to the peephole. “May I come in, Miss Wingate?”
“What is this about?”
“I’d rather not say out here in the hall where the neighbors can hear us.”
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
Hobson played his trump card. “Carl Rice has killed again, Miss Wingate. I don’t want him to hurt anyone else, including you.”
There was no sound on the other side of the door. Hobson wondered if Vanessa was still standing there. Then locks snapped, chains rattled, the door opened, and Vanessa Wingate eyed him warily as she stepped aside to let him in.
Hobson thought General Wingate’s daughter looked hyper-alert and scared. She was pale and drawn. Her clothes hung from her. The dark circles under her eyes told him that she did not sleep easily.
“Thank you for letting me in, Miss Wingate.”
“It’s Kohler,” she said. “I no longer use my father’s name.”
Hobson remembered that Charlotte Kohler was Vanessa’s mother. She had died in a car accident when her daughter was in middle school.
Vanessa shut the door and turned her back to Hobson as she led him into a spacious living room. A cigarette was smoldering in an ashtray on a polished mahogany end table. Vanessa sat on the sofa and picked up the cigarette. She hunched her shoulders as if it was cold, but there was a fire blazing in a marble fireplace and the temperature in the apartment must have been in the seventies.
“I had a hard time finding you,” Hobson said. “I thought you’d be staying at your home in California, but your father said you moved out.”
“I want nothing to do with him,” Vanessa answered, her anger boiling up. “I don’t communicate with him. He had me locked up.”
“I was told that you needed psychiatric care because you were traumatized by your experience at Lost Lake.”
Vanessa smiled coldly. “That’s the party line, and the quacks at Serenity Manor were paid a lot of money to spout it.”
“I tried to talk to you while you were in the hospital. The doctors wouldn’t let me see you.”
“I wouldn’t have been much use to you,” she answered quietly. “They kept me drugged most of the time. The whole year is a blur.”
“Do you remember what happened at the lake?” Hobson asked softly. He could see how skittish she was, and he was afraid of spooking her. Vanessa did not answer right away. She took a drag on her cigarette and stared into the distance.
“Miss Kohler?” he said, remembering to use her new name.
“I heard you. I’m just not sure I want to talk about that.”
“It’s important. Especially now that someone else is dead.”
That got her attention. “Who did Carl…?”
“General Peter Rivera.”
Vanessa’s brow furrowed. “I’ve never heard of him.”
“He’s a short man, stocky, with a dark complexion and a scar on his forehead.”
She shook her head. “No. What makes you think that Carl killed him?”
“He was tortured and murdered in much the same way as Congressman Glass.” Vanessa blanched. “And there’s other evidence connecting him to the scene.”
Vanessa smoked quietly. Hobson let her think.
“I was asleep in the guest room,” Vanessa said without preliminaries. She was staring at the fire, not looking at Hobson at all. “It was on the second floor. I woke up and heard voices. That surprised me. I thought that we were alone in the house.”
“Just you and the congressman?” Hobson asked.
She turned toward him. “It’s not what you think. He’d been to the mansion in California to meet with my father. Eric was on the intelligence committee and my father was the head of the Agency for Intelligence Data Coordination. I had lunch with them once and dinner another time. When I started graduate school I interviewed for a job.”
“He was your employer?”
She nodded. “We were just friends.”
“Then why were you there, alone, at his house?”
Vanessa looked down. “It’s personal. I don’t want to discuss it.” She sounded frightened. Hobson decided not to push.
“So you heard voices and…”
“Eric said something. I couldn’t hear what he said but it sounded odd.”
