The Maze (5 page)

“Good summary, Savich,” said Dubrosky.

“Bear with me, Detective.” He took another drink of coffee. “This stuff is so potent, I bet it breeds little cups of coffee.”

There was one small smile, from Sherlock.

Savich said, “You guys have done hours of legwork here and you did it immediately. You've proven that there wasn't a repairperson or a salesman or even a guy whose car broke down and wanted to phone a garage near the Lansky house. So then we come back to the basic question. How then did he get into the Lansky house? Into the kitchen specifically so he could make certain they had all the props he needed?”

Dubrosky made a big show of looking at his watch. “Look, Savich, we thought of all that. We found out that all the houses were older, not just here, but also in Des Moines and St. Louis. To me it means that chances are excellent that you'd have a big low gas oven in the kitchens. And who the hell wouldn't have a toaster? This is all nonsense. Our perp is a transient. He's nuts. None of the shrinks agree on why he did this. Maybe God told him to strangle every mother with the toaster cord. Maybe God told him that kids are evil, that he was the evil witch out of Hansel and Gretel. Who the hell knows why he's whacking families? Like I said, the fucker's crazy and he's traveling across the U.S., probably killing at whim, no rhyme or reason.”

Mason said, “Buck's right. We don't know why no one saw him in the Lansky neighborhood, why a single dog didn't bark, but maybe he disguised himself as the postman or as that old woman who lives across the street from the Lanskys. In any case, he got lucky. But we'll find him, we've got to. Of course with our luck, the bastard's long gone from
Chicago. We'll hear about him again when he murders someone in Kansas.”

And that was truly what they believed, Sherlock thought. It was clear on all their faces. They believed the guy was long gone from Chicago, that they didn't have a prayer of ever getting him.

“Let me tell you about the magic of computers, gentlemen,” Savich said and smiled. “They do things a whole lot faster than we can. But what's important is what you put into them. It's a matter of picking the right data to go into the mixer before you turn it on to do its thing.” He leaned down and picked up his laptop and turned it on. He hit buttons, made the little machine bleep, all in all, ignored the rest of them.

“I've got to go home, Captain,” Dubrosky said. “I've got gas, I need a shower or my wife won't even kiss me, and my kids have forgotten what I look like.”

“We're all bushed, Buck. Just be patient. Let's see what Agent Savich's got.”

Lacey realized then that Savich was just putting on a little show for them. He had the pages he wanted to show them in his briefcase. But he was going to call up neat-looking stuff on the screen and make them all look at it before he gave them any hard copy. In the next minute, Savich turned the computer around and said, “Take a look at this, Detectives, Captain Brady.”

6

T
HE THREE
men crowded around the small laptop. It was Detective Dubrosky who said suddenly, “Nah, I don't believe this. It doesn't make any sense.”

“Yes, it does.” Savich handed out a piece of paper to each of them. Sherlock didn't even glance at the paper. She knew what was on it. In that moment, Savich looked over at her. He grinned. He didn't know how she knew, but he knew that she'd figured it out.

“You tell them, Sherlock.”

They were all staring at her now. He'd put her on the spot. But he'd seen the knowledge in her eyes. How, she didn't know. He was giving her a chance to shine.

Lacey cleared her throat. “The FBI Profilers were right. It's a local neighborhood guy who hated the Lansky family. He killed the families in Des Moines and St. Louis because he wanted to practice before he killed the people he hated. He wanted to get it perfect when it most mattered to him. So, the families in Des Moines and St. Louis were random choices. He undoubtedly drove around until he found the family that met his requirements. Then he killed them.”

Captain Brady whistled. “My God, you think the profile is correct, but it was meant only for the Lanskys?”

“That's right,” Savich said. “The other two families were his dress rehearsal.” He turned to Dubrosky and Mason. “I wanted you to be completely certain that there was no stranger around the Lansky household before the killings. Are you both certain?”

“Yes,” Mason said. “As certain as we can be.”

“Then we go to the Lansky neighborhood and pick up the guy who will fit the profile. He screwed up and now we'll nail him. The computer hit on three possibles, all within walking distance of the Lanskys' house. My money's on Russell Bent. He fits the profile better than the others. Given how well the profile fits this guy and given no strangers, the chances are really good that this wasn't just another dress rehearsal. Also, Russell Bent lives with his sister and her husband. She is exactly two years older than he is.”

“I don't understand, Agent Savich,” Captain Brady said, sitting forward. “What do you mean she's two years older?”

“The boy and girl in all three families,” Lacey said. “The girl was twelve and the boy was ten.”

“Jesus,” Captain Brady said.

“Why didn't you just tell us?” Dubrosky was mad. He felt that Savich had made him look like a fool.

“As I said,” Savich said as he rose from his chair, “I wanted you to be certain that no stranger had been near the Lansky home. It was always possible that the guy was having a third dress rehearsal. But he wasn't. This time it was the real thing for him. I wasn't really holding out on you. I just got everything in the computer this morning, once Captain Brady had sent me all your reports. Without the reports I wouldn't have gotten a thing. You would have come back to this. It's just that I always believed the profile and I had the computer.”

 

Russell Bent lived six houses away from the Lanskys' with his sister and her husband and one young son. Bent was twenty-seven years old, didn't date, didn't have many friends, but was pleasant to everyone. He worked as a maintenance man at a large office on Milwaukee Avenue. His only passion was coaching Little League.

The detectives had already spoken to Russell Bent, his sister, and her husband as part of their neighborhood canvassing. They'd never considered him a possible suspect. They were looking for a transient, a serial killer, some hot-eyed madman, not a local, certainly not a shy young guy who was really polite to them.

“One hundred dollars, Sherlock, says they'll break him in
twenty minutes,” Savich said, grinning down at her.

“It's for certain that none of them looks the least bit tired now,” she said. “Do we watch them?”

“No, let's go to Captain Brady's office. I don't want to cramp their style. You know, I bet you that Bent would have killed one more family, in another state, just to confuse everyone thoroughly. Then he wouldn't have killed again.”

“You know, I've been wondering why he had to kill the kids like that.”

“Well, I've given it a lot of thought, talked to the Profilers and a couple of shrinks. Why did Bent murder these families with two kids, specifically a boy and a girl, and in each case, the kids were two years apart, no more, no less? I guess he was killing himself and his sister.”

She stared at him, shivering. “But why? No, don't tell me. You did some checking on Mr. Bent.”

“Yep. I told Dubrosky and Mason all about it in the john. They're going to show off now in front of Captain Brady.”

“I wish I could have been there.”

“Well, probably not. Mason got so excited that he puked. He hadn't eaten anything all day and he'd drunk a gallon of that atomic bomb coffee.”

She raised her hand. “No, don't tell me. Let me think about this, sir.”

She followed him down the hall and into Captain Brady's office. He lay down on the sofa. It was too short and hard as a rock, but he wouldn't have traded it for anything at the moment. He was coming down. He closed his eyes and saw that pathetic Russell Bent. They'd gotten him. They'd won this time. For the moment it made him forget about the monsters who were still out there killing, the monsters that he and his people had spent hours trying to find, and had failed. But this time they'd gotten the monster. They'd won.

“The mother must have done something.”

He cocked open an eye. Sherlock was standing over him, a shock of her red hair falling over to cover the side of her face. He watched her tuck the swatch of hair behind her ear. Nice hair and lots of it. Her eyes were green, a pretty color, kind of mossy and soft. No, her hair wasn't really red, but more red than anything else. There was some brown and a dash of
cinnamon color as well. He guessed it was auburn. That's what he'd thought the first time he'd seen her. “Yes,” he said, “Mrs. Bent definitely did something.”

“I don't think Mr. Bent did anything. The three fathers Russell Bent shot were clean kills. No, wait, after they were dead, Bent shot them in the stomach.”

“The quick death was probably because to Bent, the father didn't count, he wasn't an object of the bone-deep hatred. The belly shot was probably because he thought the father was weak, he was ineffectual, he wasn't a man.”

“What did Mrs. Bent do to Russell and his sister?”

“To punish Russell and his sister, or more likely, just for the kicks it gave her, Mrs. Bent gagged them both, tied their arms behind them and locked them in the trunk of the car or in a closet or other terrifying closed-in places. Once they nearly died from carbon monoxide poisoning. The mother didn't take care of them, obviously, she left them to scrounge food for themselves. Social Services didn't get them away from her until they were ten and twelve years old. Some timing, huh?”

“How did you find out this stuff so quickly?”

“I got on the phone before we left to pick up Russell Bent. I even got Social Services down to check their files. It was all there.”

“So the toaster cord is a sort of a payback for what she didn't do? Beating her face was retribution?”

“Yeah, maybe. A payback for all eternity.”

“And he must have come to believe that even though his mother was a dreadful person, he and his sister still deserved death, only they hadn't died, they'd survived, so it had to be other children just like them?”

“That doesn't make much sense, does it? But it's got to have something to do with Russell Bent feeling worthless, like he didn't deserve to live.”

“But why did he pick the Lansky family?”

“I don't know. No one reported any gossip about the family, nothing about physical abuse, or the mother neglecting the children. No unexplained injuries with the kids winding up in the emergency room. But you can take it to the bank that Russell Bent thought the two Lansky kids were enough like
him and his sister to merit dying. He thought the mother was enough like his own mother to deserve death. Why exactly did he have to gas the children? God only knows. Your explanation is as good as any. Brady will find out, though, with the help of the psychiatrists.”

“Russell Bent coached Little League. The Lansky boy was in Little League. Maybe the Lansky boy got close to Bent, just maybe the Lansky boy told Russell that his mother was horrible.” She shrugged. “It really won't matter. You know what they'll do, sir. They'll dress it all up in psychobabble. Do you know what happened to the Bents' parents?”

“Yes,” he said. “I know. Sherlock, call me anything but ‘sir.' I'm only thirty-four. I just turned thirty-four last month, on the sixth. ‘Sir' makes me feel ancient.”

The three cops erupted into the office. Captain Brady was rubbing his hands together. There was a bounce to his step. There would be a press conference at midnight. Mason and Dubrosky kept giving each other high fives. Brady had to call the mayor, the police commissioner—the list went on and on. He had to get busy.

It took the CPD only two hours to prove that Bent had traveled to Des Moines and to St. Louis exactly a week before each of those murders had been committed there and back on the exact dates of the murders.

Unfortunately, at least in Lacey's view, Bent was so crazy, he wouldn't even go to trial. He wouldn't get the death penalty. He would be committed. Would he ever be let out? The last thing she heard as they were leaving the Jefferson Park precinct station was his sobs and the soft, soothing voice of his sister, telling him over and over that it would be all right, that they were in this together. She would take care of him. She had been two years older and she hadn't protected him from their mother. She wondered if the sister was really lucky that her brother hadn't gassed her.

They took a late-morning flight back to Washington, D.C. It didn't occur to Savich until they were already in the air that Sherlock might not have a place to stay.

“I'm staying at the Watergate,” she said. “I'm comfortable. I'll stay there until I find an apartment.” She smiled at
him. “You did very well. You got him. You didn't even need the police. Why didn't you just call Captain Brady and tell him about Bent? Why did you want to go to Chicago?”

“I lied to Brady. I'm a glory hound—even if it's just a crumb, I'm happy. I love praise. Who doesn't?”

“But that's not even part of why you went.”

“All right, Sherlock. I wanted to be in at the kill. I wanted to see this guy. If I hadn't seen him, then it would never be finished in my mind. Too, this was your first day. It was important for you to see how I work, how I deal with local cops. Okay, it was a bit of a show. I think I deserved it. You're new. You haven't seen any disappointments yet, you haven't lived through the endless frustration, the wrong turns our unit has suffered since the first murders in Des Moines. You didn't hear all the crap we got about the profile being wrong. All you saw was the victory dance. This has been only the third real score I've gotten since the FBI started the unit up.

“But I can't ever forget that there was Des Moines and St. Louis and twelve people died because we didn't figure things out quickly enough. Of course Chicago was the key, since that was his focus. As soon as I realized that the neighbors knew one another and watched out for one another, and there hadn't been any strangers at the Lansky house, then I knew our guy lived there. He had to. There wasn't any other answer.”

Savich added in a tired voice, “You did just fine, Sherlock.”

For the first time in years, she felt something positive, something that made her feel really good wash through her. “Thanks,” she said, and stretched out in her seat. “What if I hadn't known the answer when you asked me to explain it?”

“Oh, it was easy to see that you did know. You were about to burst out of your skin. You looked about ready to fly. Yeah, you really did fine.”

“Will you tell me about your first big score sometime? Maybe even the second one?”

She thought he must be asleep. Then he said in a slow, slurred voice, “Her name was Joyce Hendricks. She was seventeen and I was fifteen. I'd never seen real live breasts before. She was something. All the guys thought I was the stud of the high school, for at least three days.”