The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery (16 page)

“You were at Packard’s? Are you all right?”

“I was working on getting all right when you called.” She slid into the front seat. “What’s this about, Jed? And it better be good.”

“Christ, I’m glad I got here when I did … You look nice.”

“I sure as hell didn’t put on this outfit for you. What’s this about?”

“Gary Packard could be the Beholder. That’s what. He could be the guy we’re hunting. Hell, Maddie, he could have you sized up for number three; you fit the description of his two victims.”

“Oh, yeah, sure. Big joke, partner.” She got out and slammed his car door. “On your way dimwit.”

“Maddie,” he pleaded. “I’m serious. He could be … I mean it.” He stretched across the seat so she could still see his face and closed his argument with, “No shit.”

Despite her reluctance, Maddie knew that he had to be coming from somewhere. “I can see I’m not getting rid of you until you’ve had your say.” She crossed her arms, resting them on the sill of the passenger’s window. “Let’s have it.”

A car turned the corner, the wash of its headlights splashing across Jed’s leathery face. It was a caring face but, right now, it was backing up a nose stuck in where it wasn’t wanted.

“I ran Gary Packard through the databases. Five months before he came to Phoenix, he was arrested for the knife-slaying of his wife. Multiple stab wounds in the chest, but no other disfigurement. Packard was a vice cop in Chicago. His wife’s murder is still open. The Chi-town cops liked him for it, but lacked anything hard enough to hold him. He’d been married for eight months. No kids.”

“Why did you put Gary through the paces?”

“Your mother called earlier today, said you were getting all goo-goo eyed—her description, not mine—over this guy. She’s worried. Said the ladies in what she called ‘her hood’ had suspicions about Packard and that, except around you, he was reclusive. One of her friends told her Packard rented the house furnished from month-to-month.”

Maddie didn’t have her gun, so she couldn’t shoot her partner for ruining the mood she had been in. “Go home, Jed. Don’t say anything else. I’m over-the-top pissed at you for meddling in my personal life. As for my dear mother, I’ll deal with her. But you, you know better.”

“Maddie, he’s coming on to you. Maybe that’s how he got into the homes of his first two vic—”

“Get lost. Not one more word.” She turned and headed back to Gary’s without even glancing at Jed.

Her next two hours with Gary passed very differently than she had hoped. She didn’t tell him what Jed suspected, but that out of concern for her, Jed had looked into his background.

“You’re lucky,” Gary said. “Jed’s a good friend. He cares.” Gary told Maddie about the loss of his wife, and went on to explain that a man in Chicago he had known for years, offered his vacant Phoenix rental house as a place to get away from the ugliness that shadowed him in Chicago.

“I did not kill my wife,” he said. “I am not your Beholder, if that’s what Jed’s thinking.”

When Maddie told him that while her son needed a male role model, because he would likely return to Chicago once his wife’s murder was solved, it would be best if he stayed away from Bradley. Gary’s eyes looked at his shoes. “I understand,” he said.

And she knew that he knew what she had really meant.

***

An hour after Maddie got home, still seething over Jed’s and her mother’s interference, the phone rang. She figured it was Gary. It wasn’t.

“Maddie, please don’t hate me for trying to get custody of Brad. It’s for his own good. I’m set up now to give him everything.”

Curtis was drunk.

“You scumbag bastard, I’ve got nothing to say to you. The hearing is in six weeks. Until then, we’ll communicate only through our attorneys.” She hung up. Then picked the phone back up to be sure she hadn’t broken it.

Besides, Maddie thought, I don’t need to play nice. According to Jed, the fix is in. Damn it. I shouldn’t need the fix to be in. I’m a good mother. Bradley is happy. I would have told Jed to butt out, but he hadn’t told me until after he’d done whatever it is he did.

***

In another part of town, a man dressed in black walked a sloping sidewalk the full length of a residential block. At the corner, he paused, closed his eyes and listened to the distant chatter of a child. Then an adult laugh, followed by more of the same, deciding it came from a television somewhere in the block. He bowed his head into the warm evening breeze and crossed the street, returning uphill on the opposite side.

At the home his sojourn had been all about, a woman sat between a lamp and the curtain, her silhouette outlined on the window covering. He imagined her working at a computer. A wedge of light sneaking around the edge of the curtain suggested he might see her if he got close to the wall beside the window. But he didn’t wish to risk some busybody watching from one of nearby houses. He recalled the woman from her picture in the paper. Her lovely face, her plump breasts, he wanted her now, tonight. Not Thursday.

He didn’t want to wait.

He had to wait.

He fought down his desire and walked back to his car.

He got into his dark sedan, having fixed the dome light so it would not come on. He sat there for several minutes continuing his internal struggle. He lusted to again see his mother’s eyes bulge in fear. To hear her last garbled gasp. Eventually the need to wait prevailed. If he were to control the city’s psychic, he had to continue to establish Thursdays as his night.

He pulled the parking brake free and let the slight incline draw his car from the curb, silently other than the crinkling sound of free-rolling tires on blacktop. At the intersection he turned the ignition key once. The engine purred and the headlights crushed against the house across the street.

He had learned what he came to find out. He could go home, take the stolen license plate off his car, and spend the evening with his private collection. He would return on Thursday.

Chapter 23

Maddie walked through the sweet smell of hot cinnamon rolls that crowded the air in the food court at Sky Harbor Airport. The sounds of jets screaming at the sky, the mixed smells of ethnic foods, and the energy released from so many people struggling with so much luggage always made her hungry. After glancing at her watch to confirm she had a few minutes, she stopped at a newsstand to look around the way lingering travelers do. With the word diet on the can providing a sufficient sense of restraint, she bought a soda and a bag of chips for a price that would have bought a six pack and a giant bag of chips at a supermarket.

She watched people going through security taking off their belts and shoes, and emptying their pockets of any metal. All this went onto a conveyer belt, along with coats and laptop computers for delivery to the prying eyes of scanning machines tirelessly searching for explosives and other contraband currently disallowed on planes. After temporarily surrendering their possessions, the people walked without their shoes through a contraption that also checked their bodies for inappropriate items. Fortunately, the machines did not judge inappropriate in terms of outfits or body shapes. Off to one side, travelers who had somehow offended the machines stood like scarecrows while security personnel moved a dark rod along their bodies. This was called a hand wand by most. Jed called it the airport hand job.

Maddie found it incredulous that terrorists hiding in caves halfway around the world could change how the airline industry did business and how Americans traveled.

At the airport security office, she flashed her creds, and turned in her gun. After it had been confirmed that FBI agent Lincoln Rogers was on the flight from the east, Maddie was given permission to meet him at the gate.

Linc was maybe ten years older than Maddie, but he surely didn’t look it. The word around Quantico was that half the unattached women in D.C. had been with Linc. Maddie didn’t want to be just another notch in his gun, but the gossip included no claims of product recalls.

She studied him as he came down the Jetway. His face had character lines that made him more alluring than younger men. On women, these lines were called wrinkles. It’s unfair, she thought, but what’s a girl to do. The loose waves of his coal-black hair were dusted with the color of soft ashes coating a late-burning fireplace. The gravitational pull of his limpid blue eyes held hers as he moved closer.

He approached without saying a word, dropped his carry bag, and lifted her off the ground with a hug that went well beyond the standard FBI greeting. At six-three and about two-twenty, his height left her feet dangled in the air.

“It’s great to see you again,” he whispered before putting her down and extending his hand. “It’s a pleasure to see you again, Sergeant Richards.” He grinned.

“The pleasure is all mine, Special Agent Rogers,” Maddie said, lightly running the tips of her fingernails just inside the vee of her mauve blouse. “Thank you for coming.”

He had brought only the carry-on bag, so they headed straight to Maddie’s car, pulled out of the airport and angled onto I-17. On the way to Folami’s apartment, Maddie told him about the sketchy Beholder’s profile she had developed, and was pleased when Linc agreed the killer was likely very intelligent and highly organized. She was intrigued when he told her that such serial killers usually drove dark colored sedans. As always, Linc was a mine for that kind of esoteric information.

The Stowe neighborhood was depressing in the light of full day. Maddie opened the door to Folami’s apartment, and mentioned the obvious. “Stowe had a cat.” Then she added something that wasn’t obvious. “The cat was gone when the victim’s body was found by her boyfriend.”

“And the cat has not been seen since?”

“No.”

“Did the second victim have a cat?”

“No.”

“Any other pets?”

“No.”

“Then the pet angle likely means nothing.” As soon as he said it, Maddie realized it had been something she had not even considered.

He said very little while they slowly walked through Folami Stowe’s apartment. When they got back to her car, she asked, “Any comments?”

“Let’s hold off the discussion until after we visit the scene of the second victim.”

On the way to the Knight home, they stopped for lunch at P.F. Changs in Scottsdale.

“Who leaked the hold backs about the Knight murder to that TV reporter?”

“The chief has his thumb on my forehead,” Maddie said. “He suspects me because Katie Carson and I have known each other since grade school. As if I had anything to gain. KC will do most anything I ask, so I’d get nothing back by leaking to her.”

“The friendships that help sustain us through puberty are always among the strongest,” Linc said.

Maddie ordered egg rolls and Linc told the waiter to bring a double order. “Along with some of your hot dipping sauce,” he added.

While waiting for their food, they did some personal catching up. His parents, Maddie’s son, her mother, stuff like that. Linc had never married. He claimed it was the job, but Maddie believed he was a dedicated player of the field.

“I want to apologize again for my ex-husband’s behavior back in Quantico,” she told him.

“Weren’t your doing. He’d been drinking and acted like an ass.”

“It was the class graduation dinner, for Christ’s sake. Everyone was there,” she added after the waiter had brought their order and left. “The others must have thought they had pulled a domestic disturbance beef.”

“Don’t sweat it. They were all experienced detectives so they sized up the situation just like you would have had it happened to one of them.” He dipped an egg roll in the mustard sauce, bit off the end, and fanned his open mouth. “Whew!”

“You think so?” She said, opting for the milder sweet and sour.

“Sure. The guy was feeling sorry for himself because you’d outgrown him. The only part of his behavior I could relate to was his being crazy about you. The two of you will always be connected because you have a son. Maintain a civil relationship. Except for that, don’t sweat the guy.”

Maddie reached over and squeezed his forearm. She had liked Linc from the first time she saw him and had always thought of him as passion in hibernation. “Thanks, but I’m still sorry it happened.”

“So you’ve got some history. Which of us don’t? My advice, deal with the guy like a horse deals with a fly on its rump.”

“That isn’t a backhanded remark about the size of my rump is it?”

“Hey, if horses had rumps like yours, I’d be a cowboy, not an FBI agent.”

They laughed, and Maddie wondered if Linc might be one of those good guys that Jed had claimed were out there.

***

When Maddie slowed in front of the Knight’s estate, Linc took off his sunglasses. “Wow,” he said. “I didn’t expect this. Not after where the first one lived.”

Inside, he made one of those breathy whistles while looking up at the stairwell portrait of Abigail Knight. “That her?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever see the film noir movie, Laura?” Linc asked.

“No, but I know the song, Laura.”

“The song’s from the move. If you ever get a chance, watch it. There’s a picture of Laura on the stairs much like that one up there. A local melancholy detective fixates on her as much as he does on solving her murder.”

Forensics had finished their work days ago so after looking around for an hour, they sat down in the living room.

“You know,” Linc began, “back in the 1960s about ninety percent of all homicides in America were solved. Now even with forensics, profiling, and all our computer stuff, law enforcement struggles to stay above fifty. More and more Americans are murdered by strangers. Serial killers provide none of the traditional motives like anger, greed, jealousy, and revenge directed toward a specific person within the killer’s own circle of living. Instead, until the police get a handle on his selection criteria, the victims appear to have been selected at random.”

“I remember your making that point in Quantico.”

“The great fear of all teaching experts, having what they said remembered, but in this case it’s true. Serial killers learn from doing and get better through the experience.”