“Still, she’s worried about me being all alone in Jimmy’s house, no friends. I think she wants to sleep with me, too.”
Jack choked on his coffee. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “I hope you talked her out of coming here. Three in that bed wouldn’t be good.”
“I told her I’d visit soon. She’s still in shock that Jimmy was murdered and I’m now a rich woman. She was stuttering when I told her Jimmy left me a full third of his estate. I still haven’t called my sisters, and believe me, their mother Jacqueline hasn’t called me. I want to wait to make contact until this is all resolved.”
Jack said, “I checked for any leftover reporters camping on the curb. Evidently, they decided there’ll be nothing exciting happening here, thank God.”
“Yeah, but we should keep a close watch. You never know when one of the vultures will leap out at you from behind a garbage can.”
He nodded, spooned in more oatmeal, frowned. He dropped his spoon. “Sorry, no more. I’ve tried, but it’s the same taste, bite after bite.”
“Doesn’t Cheerios taste the same bite after bite?”
“Nope. The milk softens up the little donuts at different rates, so each bite is a surprise.”
“You’re nuts,” she said, and grinned at him. “You look like such a regular guy, sitting here at the breakfast table, a bowl of oatmeal in front of you, but then I think about who you are, what you do, and what you did for four years—the Elite Crime Unit, that’s what it’s called, right?”
He nodded.
“What was that really like?”
He straightened his bowl, neatly folded his napkin, stared out the large window by the country oak kitchen table toward the lovely white gazebo in the backyard. He looked back at her. “Fact is, every single day brought new horrors, and you couldn’t escape them. They followed you everywhere, even in your dreams. My dreams aren’t so vivid and bloody now, thank God.
“There are scary people out there, Rachael, and you know what? Drugging you and tying a concrete block to your feet so after you drown you don’t come back up to the surface—that qualifies big-time.
“In the ECU, we called them monsters and evil and psychopaths, all to dehumanize them. But what I kept seeing was each of those individuals as a baby—laughing, crying, innocent, and I’d wonder every single day, why? What happened to make that baby grow up to kill and destroy and inflict unimaginable pain and horror?
“We caught a good number of them, put most of them down, no choice. We saved some lives.”
“Why did you leave the unit?”
“Because I knew something would die in me if I stayed. When I first joined the ECU, I was told the time to burnout was about five years, and they gave me a list of symptoms to look out for. One of the main symptoms was ‘feeling death inside you,’ and I knew I’d reached my limit. I only made it to four years. Savich scooped me up before I could go civilian again and return to a prosecutor’s office.”
“Are you glad you stayed in the FBI?”
“Oh yes. Savich’s unit is special, all the agents are smart as a whip, the experience level is very high, and they care. It’s a good unit—cohesive, everyone ready to cover everyone else’s back. Sure there’s the mind-numbing bureaucracy, some idiot agents who act like they should run the world, but most agents I know want to do a good job. They want to make things better. I’m sounding like a recruiting poster, sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
Jack rose from the table, carried his bowl to the sink, and washed it. He wiped his hands on a towel. “First thing this morning, let’s go to Black Rock Lake. I want to see firsthand where all this happened. I want to trace your footsteps back to your house.”
THIRTY-NINE
An hour later, they stood together at the end of the wooden dock and stared down at the blue water lapping gently against the pilings, shimmering beneath the bright sunlight. It was beautiful, and Rachael thought,
She said, “As you can see, it’s not very deep here, maybe twelve feet max.”
He looked down at the water and felt such a punch of rage he nearly lost his breath. Even though he’d seen and heard just about everything one human being could do to another, this was different. This was Rachael. He said, keeping the violence out of his voice, “Two people carried you down this dock, one had your arms, the other your legs. You said you couldn’t tell if they were male or female. Think about it a minute, try to put yourself back there, listen.”
Rachael closed her eyes. She remembered the motion, remembered how she fought to come back, to get her brain working again, remembered them speaking, but what? Who?
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Jack said, “Okay, I want you to think about the weight distribution. Can you picture them carrying you? Is one of them carrying more of your weight than the other?”
She thought about that. “Maybe,” she said, “maybe the person carrying my arms was female. I remember smelling some scent, close to me, not sweet, but not pungent enough for a man to wear it.” She shook her head. “But I can’t swear to it.”
“That’s okay. At least you were aware enough to pretend you were still unconscious. It gave you a chance.” He paused, then lightly touched his hand to her forearm. “What you did, Rachael, it was amazing. You kept your head, kept the terror away, and used your brain. I am very proud of you.”
“I didn’t think I was going to make it. The pain in your chest, it’s unimaginable. You want to open your mouth so badly, but you know it will be all over if you do. When my head cleared the surface—” She stopped, swallowed. “I knew they were still there. I could hear them talking, not ten feet from me, standing on the dock. When I got in enough air to convince myself that I was going to live, I slid back under the water and swam under the dock, and waited. I heard them walking back up the dock, heard the car engine. I came up to see the lights.”
“You couldn’t make out anything? Think back—did you see a profile? Male or female? Can you describe the shape of the car?”
“No, they were gone by the time I was getting out of the water.”
“All right. Let’s go back to that diner.”
Mel’s Diner was charming, right out of the 1950s, with windows all along the front, Formica tables covered with red-and-white-checked tablecloths, and plastic menus. All along the windows were booths, the vinyl dark brown and cracked.
“I don’t believe it,” Rachael said as they walked in the front door.
“That waitress, she’s the same woman who was here last Friday night. Business is light, people in only a few booths, like it was on Friday night. The cook, you can hear him whistling from behind the counter in the kitchen.”
“Hey,” the woman said, doing a double take when she saw Rachael. “I remember you. Last time I saw you, you looked like a drowned rat. You look fine now, all dried out again. You all right, sweetie? Is this your husband?”
“He’s my bodyguard,” Rachael said, read the woman’s name tag, and added, “Millie.”
Millie whistled. “You know kung fu or jujitsu, foreign stuff like that?”
“All of it,” Jack said. “You always gotta go with a pro.”
“I’m thinking I’d like to hire a bodyguard, a hunky one like you, to keep that rat ex-husband of mine away from me. Could you kick him in the face for me? Can you kick that high?”
“Well, maybe a kidney shot instead?” Jack asked. “That’s more in my range.”
“You could start just about anywhere, honey.”
They ordered coffee, and Rachael asked Millie about any customers she’d had last Friday night who were strangers to her. There’d been maybe a dozen tourists driving through who stopped in, but none of them had struck her as being weird or nasty.
She left to pour more coffee into a local man’s cup, then came back, a thoughtful expression on her face. “I’m thinking, I’m thinking. Last Friday,” she said. “Hmm.”
She handed Rachael some creamer she didn’t want.
“I remember this one gent, he came in to get two coffees to go, one black, one blond with three sugars. Now
