The Next Accident (8 page)

Motel 6,
Virginia

"Who is Miguel Sanchez?"
Rainie asked an hour later. She was propped up against the headboard of her mud-brown motel room, having just treated herself to a late dinner of pecan waffles at the nearby Waffle House. The Motel 6 had been highly visible from the highway and seemed as good a stopping point as any. Besides, at fifty dollars a night, no one could question her expense account.

She'd found the motel. She'd found the neighboring Waffle House. She'd eaten her waffles alone, thinking of Officer Amity's take on the accident scene and wishing she didn't have a chill. Then she'd wasted ten minutes watching other diners, burly, working-class men out with their girls. In some cases, tables crowded with entire families. She was three thousand miles away from home. Funny how nothing seemed that different.

She'd walked back to the motel knowing she should call Quincy and deliver a report on her day. Instead, she'd turned on the TV and perused the modern miracle of fifty-seven channels and still nothing to see. She told herself she didn't have much to report, anyway. Besides, she didn't want to seem anxious to hear Quincy 's voice.

She wanted to ensure that she was treating this as business, purely business. Quincy the client.

There had been nothing good on TV. She had spent the day in a strange state thinking, this is where Quincy lives, and she had been anxious to hear his voice. She'd called. And it had taken her all of one second to realize that she should've called sooner. Quincy sounded tired, nearly flat, as if he had no emotions left. She had never heard him sound like that before.

"Miguel Sanchez was my first case," he told her now. "Worked out of California in the mid-eighties, with his cousin, Richie Millos. They specialized in sadistic rape-murders of young prostitutes. Eight total. Sanchez liked to tape his work."

"Nice guy," Rainie commented. She turned off the TV and set down the remote. "So you were instrumental in catching Sanchez?"

"I formulated the strategy used by the police for Sanchez's arrest. A witness had reported seeing two men dragging the eighth victim into a white van twenty-four hours before her corpse was found mutilated alongside 1-5. At this point, we already knew we were dealing with an organized killer. As I explained to the LAPD, partnerships are rare for psychopaths, but in the few occasions we've encountered them, the partner has generally been subservient – a weak sidekick who merely fulfills the psychopath's desire for an audience. My advice, therefore, once the police had identified two likely suspects, was that they focus their attention on the weaker member of the pair. Turn Richie to give up Miguel, who was the real instigator and threat."

"I'm guessing this was easier said than done." "Yes. Richie idolized his older cousin. He was also terrified of him. For good reason. Six months after Richie handed over Miguel in return for a reduced sentence, he was found in the prison showers with his penis cut off and shoved down his throat. Miguel never believed in being subtle."

"Ah. So this fine piece of humanity called your personal line tonight?"

"Him, and forty-seven of his fellow deviants. Then I had eight calls from various prison officials, who thought I should know that my unlisted telephone number is currently being circulated in prison yards in everything from scraps of paper to packs of cigarettes. Oh, and in one prison, my number is now scratched into the shower wall."

"Quincy – "

"By my count, the forty-eight inmates represent twenty-one different correctional facilities, so I imagine I will be hearing from more prison officials in the morning."

"Quincy – "

"But don't worry," he continued, his voice no longer flat, but gaining an edge, "most corrections departments have the right to monitor an inmates calls, so I'm sure the new members of my fan club will be suitably punished. Maybe have a disciplinary ticket written up or receive ad seg – administrative segregation. You know, penalties I'm sure more than compensate for the sheer thrill a bunch of psychopathic lifers can get by toying with a federal agent."

"Change your number."

"Not yet."

" Quincy, don't be an ass!"

"I'm not. I'm being patient."

Rainie grew silent, then she got it. "You want to keep everyone calling in case you can trick one of them into revealing the original source of your phone number."

"In the morning, I will report the incident to my SAC. The Bureau takes the protection of its agents very seriously. I'm sure my line will be tapped and monitored in no time at all. Calls will be going out to the various prisons. Perhaps even a personal visit to one Miguel Sanchez. I would like that."

"Do you have a theory of who did this? It has to be somebody who knows you."

"Maybe. Then again, it could be some bored college flunkie who hacked into the telephone company's records in order to have a little fun."

"But you don't think so."

"No. I think it's personal. And I think the mysterious practical joker gave out more than just my private number, Rainie. Think of what Mr. Sanchez said. That he wanted to fuck my daughter in her fucking grave with a white fucking cross. Why a white cross? What's the first thing you think of when you picture a white cross?"

Rainie closed her eyes. She pictured a white cross, and her stomach went hollow. She shouldn't be at this stupid motel, she realized. She shouldn't be sitting here pretending that business was just business. She should be at Quincy 's home. She should be holding him the way he had once so kindly held her. And she should be putting her hands over his ears to spare him from what she knew he would say next. He had always been too brutally clever.

" Arlington," Quincy continued relentlessly. "The instigator didn't just give out my home telephone number. He told at least one convicted sadist where to find my daughter's grave. The son of a bitch." His voice finally cracked. "He gave away Mandy."

Rainie waited. On the other end of the phone, the sound of Quincy's breathing grew less ragged. She could feel him pulling himself back together, becoming once more the cool, composed federal agent he so prided himself on being. He needed his masks, she thought, just as she needed hers. It surprised her how much that realization hurt her.

For no good reason, she was thinking about the baby elephant again, his desperate run across the desert. Kicked down, getting back up. And still the jackals shredded him in the end.

"Do you think they're connected?" she asked him shortly.

"What?"

"The phone calls. With Mandy's accident. Seems rather interesting that you've no sooner hired someone to investigate Mandy's death, than you're getting a bunch of threatening calls."

"I don't know, Rainie. It could simply be opportunity. There are enough people out there who have nothing better to do than hate me. Maybe they heard about my daughter's funeral and decided it was their chance to have some fun. We've had incidents in the past where someone has gotten an agent's personal information. Nothing on this big of a scale, but then again, we're now in the computer age."

"I don't like it," Rainie said flatly. "Plus the fact that Sanchez evoked Mandy in the phone call… Seems a rather pointed message."

"I… I don't know." Quincy sounded tired again. "I think they must be connected. Then I think I'm paranoid. Then I think I'm merely being diligent. I don't… I'm not myself at the moment."

Rainie fell silent. She kept thinking there was something comforting she should say. She had not grown up in a house big on comfort. Thirty-two years old. It was kind of funny all the things she didn't know how to do.

"I spoke with the investigating officer," she said, since like Quincy, business was what she handled best. "He did a good job at the scene. I couldn't find anything he'd overlooked."

"What about the seat belt?"

"The driver…" She stuttered immediately, shocked by her coldness at using that impersonal word.

Quincy didn't say anything and the silence loomed huge this time, a giant black void between them. They couldn't get this right, Rainie thought suddenly, desperately. Even when they were trying, they couldn't get this right.

"Mandy reported the seat belt broken a month before the accident," she tried again, her voice meek now, humbled by her mistake. "She made an appointment with the garage that serviced her vehicle, then canceled at the last minute."

"She'd been driving without a working seat belt for a month?"

"It would appear so."

"Why didn't someone pull her over? I thought there were seat belt laws in this state!"

Rainie didn't reply to his outburst. She knew he didn't expect her to.

"What had happened to the seat belt?" he redirected his line of questioning. "How did it break?"

"We don't know yet. Officer Amity is helping me locate the vehicle so I can examine it, but fourteen months later makes things difficult. Most likely the Explorer has already been broken down for parts at some salvage yard."

"I want to know what happened to the seat belt."

"I'll find it, Quincy. You know I'll find it."

"And the man, the one she was supposedly seeing?"

"First thing tomorrow morning, I meet with Mary Olsen. Hopefully she can point me in his direction. I'll also check in with Mandy's local AA group. They probably know more about her personal life."

"AA has policies about giving out information."

"Then I'll just have to turn on my charm again."

"Rainie – "

"I'm on top of the case, Quincy. Things are beginning to happen and I know you need answers. Ill get them."

His silence was subdued now, a long soft spell where they both sat not too many miles apart and yet still too far away. She wondered if he was sitting in a darkened room. She wondered if he'd skipped dinner again, the way he'd probably skipped lunch before that and breakfast before that. She wondered how many hours he'd pace before finally falling in a restless, exhausted sleep. And then she wondered how they could know each other so well, and still have this chasm between them.

"I should go," Quincy said. "I want to speak to Everett first thing in the morning."

" Everett?"

"Special Agent in Charge. He'll want to know about the phone calls, assuming he doesn't already. Plus, I need to type up this list of names."

Rainie glanced at the clock. It was now after midnight.

" Quincy," she began.

"I'm fine."

"I'm not that far away. One hour tops, I can be at your front door."

"And then what, Rainie? Then everything's all right, because now I'm
your
charity case?"

"Hey, it's not like that at all!"

"Yes? And what do you think it is I've been trying to say? Understanding is not pity. Oh, but excuse me, in your world it is."

" Quincy…"

"Thank you for the update, Investigator Conner. Good night."

The phone punctuated his sharp sentence with a click. Rainie thinned her lips, shook her head, and replaced her own receiver much more slowly.

"But my case was different," she muttered. Her motel room remained silent. She figured that was an appropriate enough reply.

Later, six hours later, the motel alarm clock beeped to life and Rainie crawled blearily out of bed. Jet lag had caught up with her. She gulped down twelve ounces of Coke for breakfast and still felt half dead.

She hit the four-lane street, running for thirty minutes through the concrete maze of a seemingly endless strip mall tucked conveniently off Interstate 95. Middle-aged men in rumpled suits poured out of the motel. A line of cars sat impatiently at a McDonald's drive-through.

Rainie ran through parking lot after parking lot, dodging reckless cars and people already fed up with their morning commute. Tall maple trees and dark waxy magnolias beckoned lushly in the distance. Wild honeysuckle grabbed at cement barriers lining the parking lots as if the vine would reclaim the urban jungle as its own. Rainie coughed on diesel fumes from spewing trucks and fought her way back to Motel 6, wishing the green landscape didn't make her think of Bakersville again and long for the feel of salty ocean air upon her face.

She took a five-minute shower, towel-dried her hair, and combed in mousse. Expecting another long day, she donned a pair of worn jeans and a clean white T-shirt, the official uniform of the aspiring PI. She checked her phone messages on her home answering machine while lacing up her shoes. The weather was already brutally hot outside. Man, what she would give to wear sandals and shorts.

She blew the thought aside while hearing that she had six new messages, a personal record. She grabbed the motel pen and pad of paper.

First two messages were from clients wanting updates. She really should do that. The next three messages were all hang ups, received in hourly intervals. If the person couldn't be bothered to leave a message, she decided, she couldn't be bothered to wonder about who they were. The final message was from some lawyer she'd never heard of, requesting a basic information packet.

She eyed the clock, judged it to be four A.M. Pacific Coast time, and shrewdly called back the law firm to tell the lawyer that her secretary would send him something in the mail. Then she left her number at Motel 6, just in case the lawyer wanted a more immediate reply. She now felt industrious and exceedingly clever and it was not even noon.

Rainie finished lacing her shoes. After a moment's hesitation, she slid her Glock.40 into a shoulder holster. A simple black jacket covered the bulge.

Seven A.M., she picked up her notes and headed out the door. The sun glared harsh white, causing her to blink. Her tiny rental car felt like it was two hundred degrees inside. Damn, she thought. It was going to be a killer of a day.

Quantico
, Virginia

"The first call
arrived at two thirty-two P.M., Tuesday afternoon." Back in the bowels of the earth, Quincy reported last night's events in his crispest voice to Special Agent in Charge Chad Everett, while the SAC nodded attentively and a fluorescent bulb buzzed ominously overhead. "At ten-eighteen P.M., I personally handled a call from Miguel Sanchez. There have been more calls since; given the circumstances, I've been letting the machine pick up." Quincy handed over copies of the freshly made case file to the assembled agents. They accepted the information while continuing to regard him gravely.

"Enclosed you will find a complete list of caller activity and the corrections departments currently involved in the situation," he continued. "Eight officers checked in with me, which you will see noted. In some cases, they reported my personal information being passed along from inmate to inmate in the yard. More interesting, however, is the last two officers, who identified the source of the information as being an ad currently running in their local prison newsletters. In one newsletter, I'm a producer looking to interview inmates for an upcoming documentary on prison life. Interested parties are encouraged to contact me directly at the number listed below. In another newsletter, I'm eagerly seeking a prison pen pal, again, please contact me at the number listed below."

Quincy smiled tightly. "I'm still waiting to hear back from a few sources, but it would appear that similar ads just appeared in at least six other newsletters, including
Cellpals, Freedom Now,
and my personal favorite,
Prison Legal News,
which has a monthly circulation of over three thousand. Then there are the Web sites, such as PrisonPenPals.com, which apparently has been paid to e-mail my ad to dozens of prisoners 'seeking a new friend.' Look at me. I'm a groupie."

Quincy shut the case file and sat down grimly. All eyes were still on him, but he had nothing more to add. This was his life. Now it had been violated. Phone call after phone call, message after message promising a slow, tortured death. He could not remember the last time he had slept.

At least the Bureau was taking the situation seriously. A small case team had been assembled in Everett 's office. A younger man with a mop of sandy brown hair, Special Agent Randy Jackson, represented the Technical Services Division, in charge of wiretapping. From NCAVC were Special Agent Glenda Rodman, an older woman with a penchant for severe gray suits, and Special Agent Albert Montgomery, whose bloodshot eyes and hound-dog face already made Quincy uncomfortable. The agent had either taken a red-eye flight last night, or he'd been drinking heavily. Perhaps both. Then again, who was Quincy, with his own wan features, to judge?

"For the record, who has access to your personal telephone number?" Everett asked, while Special Agent Rodman sat up straighter and positioned her pen over her yellow legal pad of notes.

"My family," Quincy replied immediately. "Some professionals, including fellow agents and members of law enforcement. Some friends. I've included as complete a list as possible in my notes. In all honesty, I've had that number for the past five years, and even I was surprised by how many people now have it."

"You've worked over two hundred and ninety-six active cases," Glenda spoke up.

Quincy nodded. Frankly, he was surprised the number was not higher. As profilers served a consulting role, each routinely juggled over one hundred cases at a time.

"That's a lot of people who may feel they have the right to be unhappy with you."

"Assuming they ever knew I was involved." Quincy shrugged. "Be honest, Glenda. For a fair amount of our cases, we receive a request by phone, get the case file by mail, and return our report via fax or FedEx. In those incidents, I have a hard time believing, the perpetrator's focus ever leaves the local homicide detectives who actively work the case."

"So weeding out those cases…" she prodded.

Quincy did the math in his head. "Maybe fifty-six convicted inmates."

"What about open cases?"

Quincy shook his head. "I haven't worked an active case in six years."

"Last year," she began.

He said quietly, "Henry Hawkins is dead."

Montgomery leaned forward, his elbows resting on the knees of his rumpled pants. The fluorescent light flickered, jaundicing his jowls, and Quincy found himself pondering the agent's presence once again. Montgomery 's expression was sullen, almost as if he was here against his will, and yet what kind of agent begrudged helping a fellow agent in trouble? That hardly boded well.

"Aren't we putting the cart before the horse?" Montgomery grumbled. "You got a bunch of calls. Whoopdee doo."

Special Agent in Charge Everett replied sternly, "The fact that an agent's personal telephone number was disseminated to over twenty correctional facilities is whoopdee doo. We don't need any more whoopdee doo than that."

Montgomery turned to the SAC. Quincy thought the disheveled agent would quit while he was ahead; he was wrong. "Bullshit," Montgomery snapped, making them all blink. "If this was something personal, if this was someone
serious,
the instigator would do more than pass along a private number to a bunch of schmucks behind bars. He'd visit the house. Or he'd arrange for someone else to visit the house. Phone calls? This is fucking child's play."

Everett 's face darkened. A thirty-year veteran of the Bureau, he was a throwback to the days when an FBI agent dressed, spoke, and carried himself a certain way. Agents were the good guys, the last bastion of protection against gangsters, bank robbers, and child moles-ters. Agents did not arrive on the job in wrinkled suits and they did not go around saying things like "fucking child's play."

"Special Agent Montgomery – "

"Wait a minute." Quincy surprised them all by raising his hand and saving Montgomery from a lecture that wouldn't be career-building. "Say that one more time."

"Phone calls," Montgomery drawled as if they were all daft. "The question is not who, but
why
phone calls."

Glenda Rodman sat back. She was nodding her head now. Randy Jackson yawned.

" Montgomery 's right," the techie agreed. "If it's a hacker, guy could get your home address from the phone company just as easily as your unlisted number. If it's just some person who happened to snag your number, they could still call information and get your street address from a reverse directory. Either way, home phone number equals home address."

"Wonderful," Quincy said. Somehow, he hadn't put those pieces together, another sure sign he was not himself these days. The dull ache was back in his temples. Morning, noon, and night. Grief was like a hangover he couldn't shake.

Why phone calls?
The obvious answer was that someone was out to get him. Probably someone from an old case. Psychopaths were like sharks. They probably viewed his daughter's death as blood in the water and now they were moving in for the kill. So why not keep it simple? Move in. Attack. Finish him off. Hell, he definitely wasn't in any kind of shape for a fight.

Was that why he had gone to Rainie? Because he knew he was becoming too isolated? Or because he wanted to remember how to fight the good fight? Rainie never gave an inch, not even when backed into a corner. Not even when she should.

Focus, Quincy. Why phone calls?

"This is serious," Everett pronounced. "I want an immediate follow-up with the newsletters and Web sites involved to determine the origin of these ads. Furthermore, we need to figure out just how many inmates now have this information. We ought to be able to trace something."

Quincy closed his eyes. "So many grassroots newsletters," he murmured. "Big ones, little ones, and for all we know, he placed ads in all of them, which is a lot of work. So why…" His eyes popped open. He had it. Dammit, he should've thought of this last night. "Cover," he said.

"What's that, Agent?"

"Cover," Montgomery repeated for him, then grunted. He stared at Quincy with red-rimmed eyes that appeared reluctantly impressed. "Yeah, probably. Let's say this guy has your home address right now – which, by the way, he probably does. He goes after you tomorrow, we can hunt him down through process of elimination. But he spreads that info to dozens of prisons where the inmates will pass it along to dozens more… Now we gotta look at superfelons A, B, and C, their pals on the outside, and the pals of their pals on the outside. It's like a fucking criminal spider web. Well be tracking down nasties for years after your funeral."

"Why thank you," Quincy said evenly.

"It's true," Glenda chimed in, though she had the courtesy to look at him with more concern than Montgomery. "If something had happened to you yesterday, standard procedure would have been to investigate personal acquaintances as well as people from prior cases. Not an easy feat, but certainly a manageable one. Now, however, entire prison populations have your personal information. You could be targeted by any neo-Nazi who hates federal agents, any gangster looking to build a rep, or any psychopath who's simply bored. If something should happen to you now… The playing field is wide open. No matter how many agents were assigned to the task, we'd never wrap our arms around a suspect list this big. Frankly, it's a brilliant strategy."

"This is serious," Everett pronounced again.

As the one who was being targeted by some unknown stalker, Quincy thought he already knew that.

Glenda flipped through the file Quincy had put together. "In the good news department," she reported, "some of these newsletters are more reputable than others. If they ran an ad, it was because they received specs and payment by mail. If they've kept the original letter and envelope, we're in luck. We can trace the postmark back to city of origin, test the envelope for DNA and fingerprints, plus test the whole package for chemical residues, dirt, debris. On the other hand…" She hesitated, glancing at Quincy apologetically. "Prison newsletters are mostly grassroots journalism. It could take us weeks simply to track down every publication carrying the ad. And even then…"

She didn't have to say the rest. They all knew. Not all prison newsletters were really about journalism and not all were reputable. In the sixties, information was smuggled into prisons in packs of cigarettes. When the drug problem grew too big, however, correction departments across the country cracked down on all contraband by universally banning outside packages, including ones bearing tobacco products. Prisoners were allowed to receive only money, which they could then use to purchase cigarettes from the prison commissary. While it was unknown if this policy truly limited the drug problem, it did cut off the information flow.

Which brought the underground information network into the nineties and the miracles of constitutionally protected free speech. Prisons got computers, complete with desktop publishing software, and prison newsletters sprang up across the country. While some were small, many garnered national distribution. And the coded ad was born. Got some information you want to disseminate? Disguise it as a request for a pen pal, and pay five, ten, one hundred bucks to bring your message to the masses. Financially constrained? Some Web sites would now run pen pal ads and even build personal Web sites for inmates, free of charge. Just because you murdered eight people doesn't mean you shouldn't have a voice in society. Or a pretty blond writing correspondent named Candi
.

"A lot of these newsletters probably didn't require much in the way of payment," Quincy filled in for Glenda. "And most of them probably did destroy the original letter of request, as a matter of protocol."

"Prison Legal News
is a good one," she offered. "We can focus our efforts there."

"Good." Everett nodded approvingly.

"I can call the phone company," Jackson volunteered. "See if Verizon has had any breaches of security lately. You know, that they'll admit to."

Everett nodded again, looking pleased. Quincy, however, rubbed his temples. "I doubt you'll find the original letter and envelope," he said quietly. "And even if we do, there won't be any DNA evidence. There won't be fingerprints. Nobody takes the time to think of such an elaborate ruse, then forgets something as simple as fingerprints on the envelope and saliva on the seal. Whoever we're looking for, he's smarter than that."

"You think it's personal," Glenda said.

Quincy gave her a look. "What kind of stranger would bother?"

"We got another strategy," Montgomery spoke up. He threw out baldly, "Monitor the grave."

"No!" Immediately, Quincy was out of his chair.

"It's standard procedure – " Montgomery began.

"Fuck procedure!" Quincy told him coldly, the second time in as many days he'd been driven to swear. "It's my daughter. You are not using my daughter!"

Montgomery lumbered to his feet. His eyes were small and dark in the folds of his face. They reminded Quincy of the eyes of a bird, and he suddenly wondered if this was how he, too, appeared to victims' families.

Not as a man, but as some bird of prey, swooping down after the kill.

"You said Sanchez implied he knew where your daughter was buried," Montgomery said flatly.

"I was wrong."

"Wrong my ass. He
knew.
Which means the UNSUB thought to look up where your daughter was buried, which means he's been considering her grave for quite some time. Guy's gotta know by now we'll be watching your house. So if he wants to feel close to you… have a private little laugh…"

"I do not want cameras at my daughter's grave. I do not give permission!"

But Glenda was nodding now, Jackson, as well. Quincy turned slowly toward Everett. The SAC's face was kind, sympathetic. But he was nodding, too.

Time spun away from Quincy. He was remembering an afternoon he hadn't thought of in years. At the state fair, Mandy and Kimberly in tow. Father-daughter day, he'd promised them, and taken them on as many rides as their young stomachs could handle. Then, right after buying them cotton candy, he'd turned and seen a man snapping photo after photo of children on the kiddy rides.