Stalked

“Suzanne said you didn’t share anything with the reporter.”

“I told her to leave me out of it. My involvement was never supposed to be public.”

“Suzanne is tracking down how Weber got your name, but the case wasn’t classified. She could have learned of your involvement fairly easily.”

Lucy bit her lip. She didn’t want anything she did to be in the public eye. She needed her anonymity.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“About what?”

“What’s bothering you.”

“I don’t know.” She did, but how did she tell Tony that she was worried her past would haunt her for the rest of her life? She’d believed time would erase her history, but it only made it permanent. “Did you know Weber?”

He nodded. “She wrote her first book while she was a crime reporter in Newark. It was one of my cases. A screwed-up case from the beginning, a true tragedy. Eleven-year-old girl kidnapped from her bedroom, raped and murdered. The parents lied about nearly everything, until we had enough evidence to catch them in their lies.”

As he spoke, his voice deepened and he held the edge of his desk, knuckles white, anger about the old case still evident.

Kidnapped from her bedroom.

In a low, emotion-filled voice, Tony said, “It was one of those cases that stay with you because it was senseless and so many lives were ruined.”

“Did you catch the killer?”

“Benjamin John Kreig. He’s serving life without parole.” Tony rolled his shoulders and leaned back in his chair, purposefully relaxing. Lucy had often done the same thing. If she could relax her body, she could relax her mind.

But Lucy was focused on what Tony had said.

Kidnapped from her bedroom and murdered.

“Lucy?” Tony prodded.

“You know my nephew was killed when I was seven.”

By Tony’s expression, he had known. Lucy didn’t expect that her life was private, however much she tried to keep her past to herself. Just one more reminder that she’d never escape.

Lucy continued, “Justin was a few days younger than me, and sometimes I made him call me Aunt Lucy just to tease him. I was closer to him than my brothers and sisters, who were all older than me. My sister, Justin’s mom, grieved so long, she couldn’t stay in San Diego. She moved to Idaho and became a hermit for more than a decade. She called our mom once a week, but Mom was always so sad afterwards, because Nelia wasn’t really living. Justin’s murder changed all of us. Dillon, for example, changed his focus from sports medicine to forensic psychiatry. When I asked him why, he said he wanted to understand what happened to Justin.”

“Is that what drives you? Answers?”

“Maybe.” No.

“Justice?”

Maybe. “I can’t sit by and let bad things happen.”

“If we can save one, we have succeeded.”

But there would always be evil in the world, and there would always be victims. “If it was just saving one person, I don’t think I would be here,” Lucy said truthfully. “Putting killers and rapists in prison saves all their potential victims. It’s not so much justice I crave as protecting innocents.”

Lucy asked, “Did you talk to Weber about your case?”

“No. She wrote most of the articles about the investigation and trial, and I didn’t like how she sensationalized the tragedy. The parents deserved to be exposed, but they had lost their daughter, and they realized they were culpable.”

Her stomach turned at all the awful possibilities of parental involvement in the girl’s death. “How so?”

“The McMahons were swingers. They had a party the night their daughter Rachel was killed. They lied about the nature of the party. The critical hours that Rachel was missing immediately after she was abducted were wasted because they misled first the responding officer, then the FBI. Their nine-year-old son was the one who finally told me about the party.”

Lucy frowned. “He knew what was going on?”

“Unfortunately. Once we confronted the parents and interviewed witnesses, we learned that Krieg hadn’t been invited to the party but two guests saw him. At first he denied being there, so it was easy to bring him in for questioning. It took sixteen hours to break him, but he eventually led us to her body. Six days after he killed her.”

Lucy absorbed the information with both revulsion and interest. “And Weber wrote a book?”

“She focused on the sensational-the swinger parties, the history between Aaron and Pilar McMahon, the guests at the parties-and the worst was that, as far as I was concerned, she kept bringing it back to Rachel being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which was just asinine considering she was in her own bedroom in the middle of the night.”

Tony pounded his fist once on the desk, then looked at his clenched fingers and slowly stretched them. “I refused to help her after reading her articles,” he said, “but the FBI assigned a liaison, who worked with her to get her facts straight.”

“Do you think her murder has to do with one of her books?”

“More likely, whatever she’s researching now.”

“You mean the Cinderella Strangler case.”

“Maybe. She might have been working on more than one. I’ll find out. What specifically did she ask you?”

“She thought the whole case was ‘sexy’-her word, not mine. Teenage prostitutes being suffocated at underground raves, all connecting back to an online chat room. She wanted to drag the Barnetts through the dirt again, and they’re just reclaiming their life.”

“Barnett?”

“A wealthy family in New York. They were the subject of the killer’s obsession, and Weber said it made a good story. It wasn’t a story; these were people’s lives. Four girls died horrible deaths because of that psychopath. I wasn’t about to help Weber with any of it.”

“I hear a but.”

“No buts, I would never have spoken to her.”

Tony looked at her pointedly. “But?”

“She asked me too many questions. I felt-she was digging around, trying to find out why I had been in New York, what my history was. And while much of my file is sealed, there’s enough that’s public.” She bit her lip.

“You were afraid she’d end up writing about you.”

Lucy took a deep breath and nodded. She had faced her past and survived, but exposing what had happened seven years ago to the public, in the media, would destroy the life she’d built.

“There are laws to protect you from that kind of disclosure.”

“I told her to go to Hell and hung up.”

Tony almost smiled, then grew serious. “Suzanne asked if I could come up to New York for a day or two, since I’m familiar with Weber’s work. While I’m there, I’ll dig around her files, see what I find. I don’t think she had anything on your past, because Suzanne would have told you. But I’ll make sure.”

“I appreciate that.”

Tony opened his bottom drawer, rummaged through some folders, and pulled one out. “Read this. It’s the McMahon case, the one Weber wrote about in her first book. It’ll give you all the background and information you need. It’s my personal file, so it’s not complete, but it includes my notes.”

“Those are probably enlightening.”

“I should have been more careful about what I wrote down. Notes can become part of the official record.”

She took the file.

Tony leaned back and looked over her head, contemplative. “I always wondered what happened to the boy,