The Fregoli Delusion (27 page)

“May I?”

“Yes, but I don't see what this
has to do with anything.”

Karen opened the file and sorted
through the documents, which included several letters, forms, and receipts. She
noticed a report from a psychiatrist named Dr. Miles Fort, dated March 3, 1990.
It stated that Richard had been diagnosed with narcissistic personality
disorder “as defined by the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders,
because he displays a pervasive pattern of grandiosity and a
need for admiration, along with an exaggerated sense of self-importance, a
preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success and power, a sense of
entitlement, a pronounced tendency to be exploitive of others, and a distinct
lack of empathy for others.”

“Well, well,” Karen said.

“I didn't believe a word of it,”
Mary said, “and I still don't. It was a waste of money. I'm a nurse, I know
what the
DSM
is. If I could’ve afforded it, I would’ve paid for a second
opinion.”

“It was copied to the headmaster
of Jesper Logan,” Karen said, tapping the report with her pen.

“I didn’t have a choice. They were
going to expel him. I had to do it to keep him there so he could finish his
senior year and graduate. He saw the doctor a few times, then we dropped him when
Richard graduated.”

“You had to pay for it yourself? Jarrett
wouldn’t foot the bill, when he was already paying for tuition?”

“Herb didn't know about it. I kept
it quiet. I didn't want it to hurt Richard's future, because it was so untrue.”

Karen looked at Hank.

“Mrs. Holland,” Hank said, “we're
going to want to look through the rest of the house. Since your gun’s
unaccounted for, and because it may match the type of weapon used to kill Mr.
Jarrett, we need to verify whether it's here or somewhere else.”

“I don't think I want you doing
that.”

“We’ll have a warrant within an
hour. It would be simpler if you'd just give us permission, as you did with
your husband's desk.”

“I want to talk to my lawyer,
first. I can do that, can't I?”

“Of course, if you think it's
necessary.”

“I do. The telephone's in the
hall. I’d like some privacy.”

“We'll be right here, Mrs.
Holland.”

“I'll just be a minute.”

As soon as she left the room Hank
took out his cell and speed-dialed Truly. When she answered, he said without
preamble, “Maureen, I want a search warrant on the residence of Mrs. Mary Holland.”
He recited the address, gave her a description of the home, ran through the
grounds for probable cause, and told her to include everything on the other
search warrants they'd already executed.

“Right away,” Truly said. “By the
way, I just got off the phone with Detective Brannigan in TIU.”

“Brannigan? What did he have for
us?”

“No silver sports cars,
unfortunately. No Ferraris, no McLarens. Sorry.”

“Neither one?”

“No. He said he'd have a complete
list for us later tonight, but they drew a blank on the vehicles you'd
mentioned.”

“Damn. All right, Maureen.
Thanks.”

He put away the phone and looked
at Karen. “No joy.”

“He must have gone a different
way, missed their cameras.”

“Or it was unrelated.”

“Not a chance, Lou. It had to be
him.”

Hank turned suddenly, realizing he
hadn't heard the sound of Mary Holland's voice on the telephone through the
open doorway. He hurried out into the hall, Karen right behind him.

The front door stood open. There
was no sign of Mary.

“Jesus Christ, Lou,” Karen said.
“She’s dusted on us!”

32

They searched the rest of the tiny
bungalow without finding her. They ran out onto the sidewalk, but no one was
visible in either direction. They looked behind the house. Nothing. They went
back out front. As Hank called for backup, Karen trotted down the street to the
nearest intersection, looked around, and trotted back. They met at the end of
Mary Holland’s cracked driveway.

“No sign, Lou. Want me to check
the other way?”

Hank shook his head. “Backup’s
coming.” He turned around and looked at the garage door. “Was there a car in
there? Or is she on foot?”

Karen shook her head. “It’s full
of boxes and junk. No room for a car.”

He frowned at the driveway. “It’s
too short to park a car here, it’d block the sidewalk. Maybe she parked on the
street. They’re running her name through DMV.” He turned around. “What was out
here?”

Karen ran her eyes up and down the
street, looking at a battered green Ford Escape SUV in front of the Holland
house, the Crown Vic in front of the house next door where she’d parked it, a
rusty red Dodge Caravan down toward the corner, a dark-colored Malibu hatchback
and a gray Honda Civic across the street, and a Jeep Liberty down near the
corner on the other side. Her eyes came back to an empty spot across the road
from them.

“Sunfire, dark blue or black,
about a ninety-eight or so,” she said. “Maryland tag, first two letters alpha
golf. That’s all I got, Lou.”

A police cruiser braked to a stop
at the end of the driveway. The passenger window hummed down and a sergeant whose
name was Cheriski looked out at them. “Evening, folks. Out for a stroll?”

Hank squatted down. “Working late,
Sarge?”

“Short-staffed and short-tempered.
Good job I love the shift work. Sorry, Lou, I could only manage two cars right
away, including this one.” He glanced in the side mirror as a second cruiser
pulled up to a stop behind them. “Officer Delany will assist in your search of
the premises.”

It was departmental standard
operating procedure that a uniformed officer from the district be present during
the execution of all search warrants.

“I’d rather have him out working
the grid. We need to find this woman ASAP.”

“I hear you, Lieutenant. Remind me
to rewrite the SOP for you tomorrow in my spare time. In the meanwhile, if
she’s moving on foot, Wiesboski and I should be able to spot her.”

“She may be driving. Dark Sunfire,
about a ninety-eight, Maryland plate beginning alpha golf.”

Cheriski called it in. In a moment
they heard the confirmation that a black 1998 Pontiac Sunfire, Maryland tag
alpha golf bravo six four nine, was registered to Mary Holland, residing at this
address. Chereski glanced at Hank and requested a BOLO on it. The Be On The
Lookout call went out across the channel moments later.

“See ya,” Cheriski said. He raised
the window and the cruiser rolled away.

“She moves fast for an old broad,”
Karen said, as Hank stood up. “Out the door, across the street, into the car
and out of sight while we were standing there like boobs.”

“We had to check the house first.
It gave her just enough time.”

“Sure. That makes me feel a lot
better. It really does.”

“We need to run her car past Brannigan.”

Karen stared at him. “Shit, Lou,
you’re right. They may have caught it on one of the cameras. There’s a
curveball for you. Maybe Holland used it instead of his precious Ferrari.”

“Or Mary Holland might have done
it herself.”

“Hmm. I’ll chew on it.”

Hank called Truly and told her to
call Detective Brannigan back with the particulars of Mary Holland’s vehicle.
He should run it immediately against the list of vehicles captured by the
traffic cameras in the vicinity of Brett Parris’s hit-and-run accident.

Crime scene technicians Jon
Beverley and June Allenson arrived to conduct the search of the house. Beverley
parked the van in Mary Holland’s tiny driveway. It blocked the sidewalk
completely, proving Hank’s point that it was too short to accommodate Mary’s
car. A moment later, Truly parked her Land Cruiser in the spot vacated by the
Sunfire and walked across the street with their search warrant in her hand.

They went through the desk again,
more thoroughly, photographing and printing as they went. No gun, and no
ammunition. They processed the other rooms in the house in turn, with the same
results. June Allenson went through the kitchen door down the three wooden
steps into the garage while Beverley went back out to the van for a stepladder
so that he could poke his head through a trapdoor in the bathroom ceiling.

Hank leaned through the door into
the garage. “How’s it going, Butternut?”

The technician glanced up.
“Photographed, but not dusted,” she reminded him. “Look, but don’t touch.” Her
nickname had been given to her by her husband, a carpenter, in tribute to her
shoulder-length hair, which was the color of his favorite wood. Hank couldn’t
recall anyone ever calling her by her given name.

“Jesus Christ!” They heard
Beverley bellow from the bathroom.

Karen walked into the kitchen,
grinning. “Bats.”

“I hate bats!” Beverley yelled
after her. “I hate them!”

Hank and Karen joined Butternut in
the garage, the center of which was filled with stacked cardboard cartons and
plastic storage bins. She showed them an open carton filled with sports
magazines dating back to 1996.

“The subscription labels have them
going to Richard Holland at an address in New Haven. There are others showing
his current address. There’s baseball cards, science fiction paperbacks, other
stuff like that.”

“He was using his mother’s garage
as a storage dump for his old stuff,” Karen said.

“Looks like.” Butternut sighed.
“It’ll take all night to go through everything.”

Karen wandered down the wall,
looking at a workbench cluttered with tools. Next to the workbench was a
shelving unit that held a small collection of Bakelite radios, mantel clocks,
and old cameras. She looked at a Brownie Target box camera, a Brownie Hawkeye
with attached flash, and an Olympus thirty-five millimeter camera. Next to the
Olympus was a very new-looking Nikon camera.

“Hold the phone,” Karen said.
“Come here.”

Butternut joined her. “Wait. Let
me shoot it first.”

Karen moved aside, pulling out her
notebook. Butternut took a series of photographs of the camera. Karen found the
page she was looking for in her notebook. “Brett’s camera is a Nikon D4. That’s
a D4. Could Holland be this dumb?”

“Mm hmm.” Butternut gingerly
tipped the camera back and stooped down so that she could read the laser-etched
plate on the bottom of the camera. She recited the serial number.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Karen
said, “we have a winner.”

Butternut gently moved the camera
around and popped the hinged flap on the right side. “There are two memory card
slots on this thing,” she said, pointing, “a CF slot and an XQD slot.”

“Like I know what that means.”

“Almost nobody uses the XQD, but
the card’s here, anyway. See? In this slot. And here’s his CF card. I have to
dust for prints first, then it’ll be interesting to see if Holland deleted the
photos on it.”

“Oh man, don’t say that. Tell me
he didn’t delete them.”

Butternut smiled at her. “Relax.
Doesn’t matter. People think that deleting pictures from their memory card
destroys them, but it doesn’t. It only marks that space on the card as
available for overwriting with future photos. So even if he did delete them, I
doubt very much he took any other pictures after taking the camera, so your
witness’s photos will still be on here. Mickey’ll get them for you.”

Karen turned around, grinning at
Hank. “Hot diggety damn. We’ve got him!”

33

Maureen Truly pulled up a chair
and sat down next to Mickey Marcotte. Despite the lateness of the hour the lab
was bustling, as evidence from Mary Holland’s residence went to the top of the
queue for immediate processing. Truly set down a cup of coffee from the
cafeteria next to Mickey’s laptop and took a sip from hers. It was putrid, but
hot. Her coffee had to be hot. Mickey reached out for his without taking his
eyes from the laptop’s screen. She admired the peripheral vision involved in
finding the cup and getting it to his lips without ever looking at it.

“How’s it going?” she ventured.

“Almost done. Piece of cake.”
Mickey slurped. “‘Scuse me. I needed that. Callbacks are a bitch, but the OT
check’s sweet.”

Truly looked at Brett Parris’s
camera, which was connected to Mickey’s laptop by a USB cable. “Will you be
able to restore the pictures?”

“Are you kidding?” He grinned at
her. “This software could find an octet string in a SPARC server in no time at
all. Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s good stuff. The scan’s
almost done. What it does is retrieve the file and copy it onto the hard drive
of my MacBaby, here. That’s what I call her. See?” He pointed at a list of file
names on the screen. “That’s what we’ve recovered so far, and we’re at
ninety-one percent complete. I think we’ve got it all, but we’ll find out in a
minute.”

“Great,” Truly said. “Detective
Stainer will be very happy.”

“She’s something else, isn’t she?
Scary lady.”

“She’s an incredible detective,”
Truly replied, with feeling.

Mickey said nothing, looking at
the screen. Then he shifted in his chair. “Look, when we’re done, you want to
go out for breakfast or something?”

The lab was silent for a
ten-count.

“I don’t think
.
 
.
 
.
I don’t,” Truly said. “Sorry.”

“Sure. Okay. No problem,” Mickey said.
“I’m not married, in case you thought that. I’m divorced. She used to beat me.”
He grimaced. “Too much information. Sorry.”

Truly frowned. “Are you serious?”

Mickey kept his eyes on the screen.
Finally, he sighed. “She had this collapsible umbrella. You know, about the
size of a nightstick? She used to hit me with it whenever she got mad. Which
was pretty much all the time. Once she broke my wrist, and another time a
finger when I was trying to fend her off. Eventually, I’d had enough. It’s a
pretty lame story. I don’t know why I said anything. I’m tired, I guess.” He
took a long pull at his coffee.

“I was kidnapped once,” Truly
said.

His eyes widened. “What? You
were?”

“Yes. I was a freshman at Harvard.
He was twenty-eight, just some guy with a low IQ, no job. I was carrying
groceries back to my apartment and he caught me off-guard. Kept me for three
days tied up in his bedroom. Didn’t hurt me, except when he tried to have sex.
He didn’t know what to do. Anyway, I got away. He’s in an institution now. I
think he’s still there. Hopefully.”

“That’s terrible,” Mickey said.

“It was at the time. It changed my
life.”

“I can imagine it would.”

“Anyway, I
.
 
.
 
.
”

“Sure. I understand.”

“It’s nothing,” she said, “nothing
at all to do with you.”

“No, I understand.” He stared at
the screen, then glanced at her. “What was your major at Harvard?”

“I was going to major in biochem,”
she said, “because my mother’s an MD in Baltimore. That’s where I’m from. So I
was going to become a doctor, like her. I had a full scholarship, but I
withdrew. Later, I came here to State and majored in criminal justice instead.”

“Not surprising,” Mickey said.

“I guess not. Anyway—”

“Here we go,” said Mickey. “Now,
let’s look at these files in thumbnail view. There. Trees, bike path, a nice
bed of irises, more trees. Jesus. Look at that.”

Truly stood up and leaned over his
shoulder. “My God.”

“And this one. Here, let me open
it up. Look, it’s a close-up. There’s the gun.”

“A Ruger, all right,” Truly said.

“Hot stuff.”

“Yes,” Truly said. “It is.” She
took out her cell phone. “I’ll call the lieutenant and let him know.”

“They’re going to be so happy.”

She touched him lightly on the
shoulder. “Good job, Mickey.”

“It’s all in the software,” he
said, turning around to grin at her.

“When we’re done,” Truly said, “we
could maybe get some pancakes down the street.”

His grin faded. “You sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said.

Her eyes drifted from his to the
laptop screen, where Richard Holland stared at her, brandishing a Ruger Mark I
pistol with an angry, half-crazed expression on his face.