Nora said, “Not to Maggie O’Dell.”
Duke raised his eyebrow and Sanger was about to speak, but Nora put her hand up. “Bear with me a minute. I might be making a stretch, but if we believe what Cole said yesterday, Anya was calling it quits with BLF. She was highly distraught when she heard about Dr. Payne, and at the time she thought it was an accident.
Maggie didn’t want them to quit, but she couldn’t trust that they’d keep quiet.”
“So she poisons them?”
“Convenient. Take out all three witnesses. Maybe she thought Cole would expose her.”
“He did,” Sanger pointed out. “Last night.”
“He was the only other witness to her involvement in the arsons,” Nora said. “A good attorney could block his statements without the ability to cross-examine.”
“What if she was angry?” Duke motioned toward the corner of the bedroom where Cole’s computer monitor was shattered, a deep gouge in the wall.
“Angry at Cole?” Nora said.
“For talking to us last night?” Sanger asked. “How would she know?”
“Could she have followed him?”
“I would have noticed someone following me,” Sanger said defensively.
One of the deputies walked in with a clear bag of evidence. A wet gob of multicolored hairs. “This came from the shower drain and tested positive for blood. Bloody female clothes were found in the bathroom.”
“She came prepared,” Nora said.
“Why didn’t she take the clothes with her?” Sanger asked.
“I think she’s deranged,” Coffey mumbled.
He might be right. Nora couldn’t reconcile the methodical, vicious way Maggie O’Dell had killed her friends and a man Nora doubted she even knew, Jonah Payne. “She’s young,” Nora said. “Early twenties. Impulsive.”
“She’s going to be caught.”
“Either she doesn’t care or she doesn’t think we’ll find her. She’s an anarchist-we know that from BLF activities. She’s learned to be sly, sneaky, live off the grid. She was probably raised that way.” The similarity to Nora’s upbringing was unsettling.
“Why these people? Why now?” Sanger asked.
Nora had been wondering the same thing. “Maggie left for nearly a year, dropped out of college and disappeared, then came back. What was she doing during that time?”
She glanced at Pete. He said, “I know what you want. I’m on it.”
“You need her college transcripts. We have to know who she is. Maggie O’Dell isn’t popping up anywhere we’ve looked. If we had an address or financial aid information,
Pete was already on the phone with Rachel as he left the crime scene.
Another deputy came in. “We have footprints coming to and from the house, leading across the field. We lost them in the grass meadow, but there’s a street only a quarter mile from here. I sent two men to check it out and canvass the neighbors.”
There was something else they weren’t seeing. Nora glanced at the broken monitor, then at the chair. “She was enraged about something. Look-she stabbed the chair. Not Cole-she has some control-but the chair has three … five, six holes.”
One of Steve Donovan’s ERT, Agent Chow, stepped in. “The killer got in through the garage door. The kitchen door was unlocked, but the garage door leading to the back has a flimsy lock. Someone jimmied it. A novice might take five minutes, an expert five seconds.”
“She needed help with Payne because she moved the body, but not with Professor Cole,” Nora said. “If he was drugged he might have passed out. Or maybe he wasn’t drugged, and just drunk.”
Coffey said, “I’ll rush the tox screens and alcohol test.”
“You’re on the right path,” Duke said. “Only, there has to be something else in common between Payne and Cole. Another reason they were targeted.”
“They did something to Maggie.”
“What?” Sanger said, irritated. “You think they did something to her? Like what?”
“Something personal. They probably didn’t even know what. She was slighted, and she made them pay in the only way she knew how.”
“But she’s so young,” Duke said in disbelief.
“They start younger and younger,” Nora said. “Duke, do you have the background check on the three kids?”
“It should be done by now,” he said.
“Let’s go back to headquarters and take a look. There is a common factor between all these victims. We just have to find it.”
As they walked out, Duke whispered, “I could find out about Maggie O’Dell faster.”
Nora was very tempted. “Let’s give Rachel one more hour to get the warrant. I don’t want this case thrown out because of a technicality.”
Duke stood in front of the driver’s door of Nora’s car with a concerned expression. “You want to drive?” she asked.
“You said something inside-that maybe Maggie O’Dell grew up off the grid.”
“It explains why we’re having a hard time getting any information on her. No license, no-”
He interrupted. “You grew up the same way.”
Nora shifted uneasily on her feet. “Your point?”
“What if she’s targeting you because she sees you as a traitor?”
“Our analysts are going through all my cases, looking for a possible connection. Maybe a relative or friend-”
“She doesn’t seem to need much of a reason to kill,” Duke said hotly. “It could be as simple as you being raised the ‘right’ way in her mind-fighting the ‘Establishment’-and then doing a complete one-eighty and becoming a cop.”
“That was my mother’s fight, not mine,” Nora snapped. She didn’t want to talk about her upbringing here.
“Maggie doesn’t know that. She could think that you’d infiltrated the anarchy movement because you had personal knowledge of them and could pass for one, then you had them all arrested. Maybe she’s targeting you because of your job, and she doesn’t even know you from Adam.”
“I’m a hypocrite,” Nora said.
“No!” Duke said emphatically. He reached for her, glanced at the cops all over the place, and barely grazed her arm before running his hand over his head. “I didn’t mean that, I don’t think-”
“Not you, but Maggie. Hypocrite or traitor, they’re one and the same to people like her. But you’re right about one thing. She is deranged, and if she can set her sites on Dr. Payne, Professor Cole, her best friend, and an FBI agent because of perceived slights against her personally, or a political cause, she can justify killing anyone. We have to find her damn quick or anyone who gets on her bad side is at risk.”
They didn’t have to wait an hour. Thirty minutes later, Duke and Nora were back at FBI headquarters, and Rachel followed five minutes later, breathless.
“I got Maggie O’Dell’s file!”
They brought the surprisingly thin college transcript file to the conference room. Nora opened it.
There was no photograph; there were just admissions records, grades, and a disciplinary report. There was an emergency card.
Margaret Love O’Dell. Nora had to look twice at her middle name, but it was clearly “Love.” Her birthplace was Paso Robles, a little town near San Luis Obispo on the central coast.
Nora had lived in SLO during the year before she turned FBI informant against her mother. It was where Lorraine had met Cameron Lovitz. A chill ran through her, as if her life was coming full circle. She hadn’t spoken to her mother in nearly twenty years, since the trial. She was in prison, and because a federal agent died during Lorraine’s terrorist act, she would be in prison the rest of her life.
