'If I think I’m a stud? Not really. But in this town, on a Friday night, action isn’t hard to come by. Lots of times it’ll come looking for you. How about you, Officer Friendly? I’ll bet that genuine FBI badge gets you a piece of tail now and then, doesn’t it?'
'We’re not talking about me, Bill.'
'Gosh, I’m Bill now. That’s real nice, how we’re such good pals all of a sudden. What was your name again?'
'Richard.'
'Dick. Okay, Dick. What else did you want to know about picking up babes, Dick?'
Tess glanced at another monitor, covering Michaelson and Gaines, and saw irritation flicker across Michaelson’s face. She knew he hated being called Dick. She also knew he would have no luck getting William Hayde to open up to him.
DiFranco reached the same conclusion. 'This creep isn’t gonna fall for the good-buddy act, no matter how they play it.'
'You’re right,' Tess said. 'He’s too smart.'
'Smart like our guy, you think?'
She glanced at DiFranco and noticed that the others were watching her as well. 'I want it to be him,' she said carefully. 'But…he’s sarcastic. Childish, in a way.'
'So?'
'Mobius is a lot of things, but childish isn’t one of them.'
'I don’t know. There are those postcards.'
'He has a sense of humor. But not like this.' She heard the inadequacy of her own explanation and tried to elaborate. 'I can’t define it precisely-but I have a sense of what he’s like. Of his manner, his…mien.'
'Mien?' DiFranco sounded dubious, or maybe he was just unfamiliar with the word.
'What it’s like to be around him when he’s just being himself.'
'Not a good place to be. Around him, I mean.'
'No,' she said. 'Not if you want to live.'
There was no more discussion. Tess knew they were all thinking of Angie Callahan.
Angie Callahan had been a systems analyst for a defense contractor in Marina del Rey. She drove a Porsche, she had 150 channels on her satellite TV system, and she’d recently broken up with a marketing executive based in San Francisco who flew down to LA every Tuesday and Friday on a corporate jet.
Eleven days ago, Angie had gone to a bar on Melrose Avenue populated by an upscale thirtysomething crowd. It was a meat rack, but an exceptionally high-class meat rack. According to the eyewitness accounts of the bartender and several bar patrons, the man she’d left with had been well built, with thick brown hair and strong features behind his mustache and beard. No one had heard him say his name, and he paid in cash, leaving a tip that was neither large nor small enough to cause comment.
When Angie failed to arrive at work the next morning, her colleagues tried to reach her. Phone calls to her condo went unanswered. Messages to her pager were not returned. By late afternoon, her friends had prevailed on the president of the condo association to unlock Angie’s door.
They found Angie in the bedroom, her wrists duct-taped to the headboard of her bed, her throat cut.
It was a police investigation for a few hours, until Robbery-Homicide’s nationwide database search for crimes with a similar MO turned up the Denver case code-named RAVENKIL-in reference to a bar called Raven’s Roost, where the first victim had been acquired. Then the police brought in the FBI.
Tess learned about the killing at ten o’clock, as she was turning down the bedcovers and debating which of three books to read. The phone rang, and it was Assistant Director Gerald Andrus in LA. Except for the obligatory Christmas cards, he hadn’t been in touch with her since he was transferred out of Denver a year and a half earlier.
'It’s starting again,' Andrus said without preamble.
For a moment she hadn’t trusted herself to speak. Then she’d asked Andrus why he was calling her.
'I’ve arranged for a loan-out. You’re coming to LA to be part of the task force.'
'You’ve cleared it with Cooper?' SAC Cooper was Andrus’s replacement at the Denver field office.
'I’ve cleared it with the people who will clear it with Cooper. I have friends in high places, Tess.'
Of course he did. He might very well have called the director himself.
'It’s a violation of policy,' she said for no reason except that her mind had lost the ability to focus on anything that mattered. 'I mean, I have a personal connection with the case.'
'I’m well aware of that. I want you here anyway. Be on a plane tomorrow.'
'I can leave tonight.'
'No, get your rest. You’ll need it.'
But she’d gotten no rest that night, and in the ten days since, she’d slept only when her body gave out from sheer exhaustion. Even then there was no rest. There were dreams. Dreams of the night of February 12, the bedroom door-and what lay beyond it.
She wondered, at times, what kept her going. Was it simple inertia, the inability of a body in motion to cease its forward progress even when there was nowhere to go? Or was it revenge-and if so, was that an honorable motive for someone sworn to uphold impartial justice?
Tess knew she could never be impartial in this case. She could not seek justice in its sterile, socially acceptable incarnation. Justice was the blindfolded lady with the balanced scales. She could never be that lady again. She had lost all sense of balance, and no blindfold could shut out the things she saw with her eyes closed.
Whatever drove her, she had used it as fuel to stay awake and alert and on the move, twenty hours a day, as the task force was assembled and deployed.
All the obvious avenues of investigation had been followed. Angie Callahan’s coworkers had been questioned. The bar had been staked out on the chance that the killer would return. Undercover ops were carried out in a variety of bars and nightclubs on Melrose Avenue. Linda Tyler had been the bait at one nightspot tonight. Tess, with agents Collins and Diaz, had been backing up another female agent working undercover at a different bar. So far none of the operations had yielded results-unless Hayde was their man.
Physical evidence retrieved from the victim’s body had established that Mobius had engaged in antemortem intercourse-probably consensual, as there was no sign of rape. The murder weapon had been taken, and since none of Angie’s cutlery was missing, it was believed to be a pocketknife carried by the killer. The width of the wound channel matched the cuts inflicted on the Denver victims, suggesting that Mobius was using the same knife he’d employed before.
The wound itself, like the earlier ones, said a great deal about Mobius’s mind-set. He had slit Angie Callahan’s throat with care, avoiding the carotid arteries, so that the blood trickled out, bringing on death by slow degrees.
And what had Mobius done during that long interval when Angie had felt her life bleeding away? Had he spoken to her or kissed her, or had he simply watched?
Tess turned back to face the monitors. Michaelson was asking about William Hayde’s movements throughout the evening, and Hayde was answering in his bored, contemptuous voice, his free hand tracing slow circles in the air, the pearl-and-silver cuff link still winking as if it knew a secret it would not share.
Tess wanted him to be Mobius. She wanted it so much.
Please, God, she thought. Please let this man be a monster.
Was that so much to ask?
7
'Do we tell the AD?' Jarvis asked.
'Not yet.'
'I thought he wanted to be informed-'
'We’ll inform Andrus later. Right now we’ve got higher priorities.'
