'If he hadn't, then I probably would have,' Lacey said. 'Sorry, sir, but there it is. Anything to give us another shot at Marlin Jones.'
'Well, good morning to all you good law enforcement representatives,' Big John Bullock said, walking into the immense walnut-paneled conference room in his law offices. He homed in immediately on Sherlock. 'Good to see you again,' he said.
She smiled at him. 'I must say you're looking a bit more fit than the last time I saw you. Marlin sure did a number on your head, didn't he?'
'Poor boy, he was frantic to get out of that torture chamber. Shall we get down to business now?'
'That's fine with us,' Savich said, all calm and cool, in that FBI voice of his.
'Do tell us exactly what you want,' Georgina Simms, the attorney for the Justice Department said, sitting forward. 'This is on the unusual side. But we certainly want to cooperate all we can.'
'Well, I really wanted to know what Agent Sherlock has to say about all her unethical behavior in the case to date.'
Savich rose. He walked slowly up to Big John and said not two inches from his face, 'Agent Sherlock doesn't have anything to say. Now, if you can't come up with something worth our while, then we're out of here. You heard Ms. Simms. We've got a murderer to catch. Maybe you think it's funny that at least eight women were brutally murdered and a doctor is hanging on for his life as we speak, but we don't.'
Big John sobered immediately, nodding to the stenographer to begin as he sat down and opened a thick file. 'All right, then. Agent Sherlock, here's the problem you've created for the state. Your sister is one of the women allegedly killed by my client. Is this true?'
'Yes.'
'So the reason you became an FBI agent was to get in on the inside so you'd have a better chance of catching him?'
'Yes, initially.'
'Was it your idea, your plan, that resulted in the capture of Marlin Jones?'
'It was a plan developed by the local BPD and the FBI. It was also a plan approved by the local BPD and the FBI. I was merely the bait.'
'Why?'
'Because I knew his profile very well. I knew better than any other female officer or agent exactly how to play him, how to work him. I was simple bait, Mr. Bullock. All he had to do was ignore me. There was no entrapment.'
'That will be up to the judge, won't it?'
Georgina Simms, said, her voice easy and slow, 'This is all a waste of time, Mr. Bullock. If you have a point, make it now or we're leaving.'
'My point is, just exactly how did you know how to 'play' Marlin Jones so well, Agent Sherlock?'
She didn't pause. She saw Dillon tense up, then consciously relax. He was worried. Well, she wasn't. She'd thought about this a whole lot. 'I've studied everything about the killer for the past seven years, Mr. Bullock. I felt that I knew him. He cut out the women's tongues, thus it was assumed that the women he'd picked to walk the walk through his maze needed to be punished in his mind. His first marker was cursing. If he heard a woman using language unbecoming to a woman- and of course he was the judge of how bad the language was- that was half of his decision. The other half was whether or not she bad-mouthed her husband. This one was more iffy, but again, I felt I knew Marlin Jones, I'd studied him so closely for seven years and through my course work in undergraduate and in graduate school. As you know, he's now claimed that he slept with most of the women he murdered, though we don't have any confirmation on that. It's really very straightforward. That's all there is to it, Mr. Bullock.'
'So your sister cursed and bad-mouthed her husband. Did your sister also sleep with her killer, Agent Sherlock?'
'Since she's been dead for seven years, stabbed many times, her tongue cut out, I don't think we have much hope of getting the answer.'
Savich could have kissed her. It had been a question meant to inflame, meant to incite rage and thus to gain an untempered response. She'd held firm. He could tell that Jimmy Maitland was impressed as well.
'That sounded all rehearsed, Agent Sherlock.' She merely shrugged.
Big John said, 'It sounds to me like you're one obsessed little lady, excuse me, one obsessed little Special Agent. I would have thought that the FBI interviewers and psychologists would have spotted all this and not given you the time of day. That's scary.'
'No, sir, what's scary is a judge who presents Marlin Jones, a vicious murderer, with a perfect chance to escape.' She sat forward in her chair. 'And you're scary, Mr. Bullock. You're doing this all to enhance your career-in other words, for fame and profit. If I am obsessed or have ever been obsessed, sir, then you are unethical, another word for basic slime.'
Big John roared to his feet. 'You can't talk to me like that, Agent Sherlock.' 'Why not, sir?'
Georgina Simms just smiled. 'It's a good question, an excellent point actually, but we'll let it go. Anything else you wanted to know, Mr. Bullock?'
'No judge is going to accept that she was just another well-trained agent doing a job. She taints the case. She's a self-interested participant, not an objective law officer.'
'We're gone,' Savich said, rose, and nodded to Lacey. 'See you in court, Mr. Bullock, if the cops can't manage to bring down Marlin when he resists arrest, which you know he will.'
Lacey smiled over her shoulder at him. 'Perhaps you shouldn't be spending so much time on Marlin Jones now, Mr. Bullock. You know Agent Savich is right. Marlin will resist arrest. The chance of your getting to eviscerate the law with your tactics isn't likely to happen. Seems to me you're wasting your time, which is worth lots of money, right?'
She felt Savich's palm beneath her elbow. He said close to her ear, 'We're out of here. You did well.'
'We'll go out the back way,' Jimmy Maitland said in the elevator. 'I've already scoped it out.'
'That was interesting, Agent Sherlock,' Georgina Simms said. 'I don't understand either how you got into the FBI in the first place.'
'Actually, Ms. Simms, I was surprised too. Don't get me wrong, finding Marlin Jones was a big part of my motivation for joining, but then I realized that this was what I wanted to do with my life. You know, before Mr. Savich brought me to his new unit, I could have ended up chasing bank robbers in Los Angeles. And that was the bottom line. I would have caught as many bank robbers as I could.'
'I rather think a judge might buy that,' Georgjna Simms said. 'But as I said, however did you manage to even get accepted with this in your background?''
'I guess nobody made a big deal out of it.'
'I guess not.'
Before they all parted in the underground parking lot, Jimmy Maitland said to Savich, 'Simms buys it because it sounds good and it is true, for the most part. However, what she doesn't know is that you've got the hots for Sherlock.
What are you going to do about that? Are you two going to get married, or what?'
'Yes, but as they say, timing is everything '
'But the point is, why did you ask for her for the Criminal Apprehension Unit in the first place?'
Savich didn't hesitate. 'Because she was so damned good in Hogan's Alley. No, I didn't have the hots for her then, sir. I just thought that she'd be one of the best I could get myhands on. I found out she'd turned down profiling because she said she couldn't stomach it, but she had all this great training and knowledge in forensics. No, sir, at that time, there was no lust scrambling my brains.'
Jimmy Maitland grunted. 'Timing,' he said. 'You're right. All of this will have to be controlled very tightly. You took care of the leak out of your unit?'
'All gone,' Savich said.
'I don't suppose you're going to tell me about it?'
'I would appreciate your not asking, sir, since there's no solid proof.'
31
THEY SPENT THE REST OF the day with the local Bureau and police, seeing exactly what was going on with the manhunt. 'It looks like everything's being done right,'' Savich said to one of the cops on the newly formed task
