At this point, Suzanne didn’t think she was needed.
“What is it?” Tony asked.
“You’ve taken over my case.” That sounded ridiculous. “I mean, you’re probably right, you have the experience, but you’re leading.”
He shook his head. “I’ll do this part. This will help me come up with a profile that you can work with. You are tenacious, Suzanne. You know who’s lying and you get answers. I have no doubt that you’ll find who did this through smart police work. And the best way to do it is gain the advantage by understanding the psychology of the killer.”
“And do you have anything yet?”
“If I’m right, the killer is patient, meticulous, and driven by a higher purpose. Rosemary Weber was not his first victim, nor will she be his last.” Tony picked up two of the boxes and motioned for Suzanne to pick up the others. “I want to brief the analyst who will be going through these about what to look for; then I have a flight to catch. Something has been bugging me, and I’m hoping after Lucy and I go through my notes I’ll figure it out.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FBI Academy
Lucy wanted to shower after she finished reading
Peter would have been fourteen when this book came out, a difficult age for anyone, but that year he’d also lost his grandmother. Even if he’d changed his name to Peter Gray and didn’t live in the same state, he might not have been able to escape his past. And even if no one knew who he was, he did. In his heart, he knew that he was that crying child, that his family had been deeply flawed, and that his sister had been raped and murdered.
There was no way of knowing if Peter had gotten help as a child, if he grew up with any semblance of normality, or if he had become twisted and vengeful over the years. She sent Sean an e-mail, hoping he had some news for her about Peter. Sean responded immediately.
I confirmed what you already knew or suspected. And it appears that while he never legally changed his name to Peter Gray, he used that name when he registered as a freshman at a Newark high school. He moved back in with his mother when his grandmother died, but ran away a year later. Pilar McMahon remarried and relocated to Houston, Texas. Aaron McMahon has lived in Seattle from one month after Kreig was convicted. That’s all I have now-still working on it.
Lucy had a list of every person mentioned in the book and how they were portrayed. The parents, Aaron and Pilar McMahon, would likely be the most upset by what Weber had written. It would be easy enough for the authorities to find out if one or both of them were in New York when Weber was murdered.
Still, why now, ten years after the book was published? Lucy had checked the publisher’s Web site and while the book was still in print, there was no new version or reissue.
Weber had both condemned and commended the police investigation by being critical of how the local police first responded to the missing-person call, and because they did not immediately question the parents’ story when they found evidence of a party at the house, but she also highlighted the methodical police work that went into disproving the McMahons’ statements and gathering physical evidence from Rachel’s bedroom. Fifteen years ago, forensics had seen a surge in importance, and the FBI used all their available resources to help local police figure out what had happened. A rookie cop, Bob Stokes, had been the first to the scene after the 911 call, and Weber had written that his concerns about the McMahons had been “dismissed” by his superiors until the FBI arrived.
Tony had been mentioned throughout the book because he was the lead agent, but he was never directly quoted. All FBI quotes were attributed to the media information officer, Dominic Theissen.
It was obvious to Lucy, after reading Tony’s notes, the reports, and the book, that any delay in finding Rachel’s murderer was directly related to the misinformation the McMahons had given police in the first critical twenty-four hours. However, evidence later proved that none of that mattered-Rachel had been killed hours after she was taken from her bedroom, likely before anyone in the house woke up.
Except Peter McMahon.
If Peter knew the facts of the case, he knew that his sister was alive when he didn’t find her in her bedroom at three in the morning. But every way Lucy thought about how the investigation could have gone even if the police were notified at 3:00 a.m., she didn’t see how they would have figured out Benjamin Kreig had kidnapped her or where he was holding her until after he’d taken her to the woods and killed her.
But did Peter know that? Did he harbor guilt because he didn’t wake up his parents when he couldn’t find his sister? She hoped not; that kind of psychological self-torment could severely damage anyone, especially a kid who had grown up as Peter McMahon had.
There were other people who might have reason to hate Rosemary Weber. She’d named several of the people who had been at the McMahon house that night and exposed their sex lives for their friends and family to read. Benjamin Kreig was still in prison, and he had family who claimed to have distanced themselves from him, but what if they had been ostracized in their towns because of how Weber portrayed them? She’d written that Kreig’s mother was “demanding and critical of everything Kreig did” and his father was an “alcoholic, known to pick up prostitutes.” In fact, Weber revealed that Kreig’s father had hired a prostitute for his son’s eighteenth birthday when he learned his son was still a virgin.
One dysfunctional family after another.
Lucy thanked God that she’d had two parents who loved her and her brothers and sisters. The Kincaids weren’t perfect, but they were family in the truest sense. Her oldest brother, Jack, had been the closest to their dad, both Army, until something happened and the two didn’t speak for twenty years. Their relationship was still strained, but at least now they were talking. And after Justin was killed when he and Lucy were seven, Lucy’s sister Nelia had stopped speaking to her. Though she’d come back to the family, Nelia still avoided Lucy for reasons Lucy didn’t understand. While her psychologist mind told her Nelia grieved for Justin and unconsciously wished Lucy had died instead of her own son, Lucy didn’t understand why even now Nelia couldn’t overcome the pain. Guilt for her feelings? Pain when she saw Lucy?
What if that was how Peter had been treated? What if his parents looked at him and he thought they’d rather have had him die than their daughter? If his parents blamed him in some way, verbally or not, a young boy would pick up on unspoken accusations born from grief and guilt.
It was hard to assess the parents based on what she’d read, instead of watching them at each point in the investigation, but it was clear that they’d stymied the investigation and then come clean. What if they turned that self-loathing against their son? Blaming him for not speaking out at three in the morning? Had he harbored that pain all these years? What was he like today?
Lucy had always had the nagging feeling that if only she’d done something different, Justin would still be alive. She’d often spent the night with her nephew, or when his parents worked late he came over to her house. But that week, she’d been sick. She didn’t remember why, but she hadn’t gone to school for three days. She wanted Justin to come and play with her because she was bored, but Nelia said no, she didn’t want Justin getting sick.
Lucy’s cell phone rang and she grabbed it. It was Tony. “I’m in my office,” he said. “Are you done?”
“Yes. I’ll be right there.”
She grabbed the McMahon file and left.
Several new agents were in the downstairs lounge watching different baseball games on the two televisions-one showed a game with the San Diego Padres, Lucy’s home team.
Carter and Eddie were studying in the corner, one eye on the game. Carter whistled. “Kincaid! I thought you were a diehard fan.”
“I had work to do.”
“So do we.” Carter held up his book.
