The President's Assassin (42 page)

“You were the one who talked Townsend into the arrest. You can at least hear what I’ve got to say.”

“Fine. Why does she want to meet with me?”

“You tell me why.”

“I haven’t got a clue, Larry.” Though he and I both knew it was a lie.

But sometimes, Larry explained, recalcitrant witnesses soften up in the presence of people with whom they feel a strong emotional connection. I informed Larry that my emotional attachment with Jennie Margold was the same as a fish to a hook. He laughed. I don’t know why; it wasn’t a joke.

So we went back and forth for a while, Larry trying to tell me why it was a good idea, me trying to tell him to piss off.

Because on one level, I thought it was a lousy idea, and on another, more personal level, I did not want to ever see Jennie again. I still had not the vaguest idea why she did what she did. I did not want to know.

But back to that first level, whatever romantic sparks had flown between us were hot and deluded on my part, and on her part, a calculated pretense. Jennie suckered me, intellectually and emotionally—she knew it, and I knew it. I was an aching, self-pitying Lothario, Jennie would know this, and Jennie would find a way to exploit it. Putting me in a cage with her was like throwing red meat to a lioness.

Back to that second level, I recalled a warning Jennie once gave me. If you haven’t passed through the darkest forest, you cannot imagine the ghoulies and monsters that inhabit the back shelves inside people’s minds. She was right. I had prosecuted and even defended individuals whose crimes seemed to be the progeny of madness, but on closer inspection, always the roots of those sins were sunk in more ordinary, proletarian muck: greed, lust, or some other idiosyncrasy of human selfishness.

Jennie was most certainly different. For all her outward sanity, I was sure she was utterly insane, whatever that means these days. Some stew of demons had mortgaged her soul, and I did not want even a peek at them.

But Larry was persistent. He said, “Come on, Drummond. This might be our last chance.” After a moment, he added, “Incidentally, Townsend asked me to pass on that he would regard this as a huge favor to him.”

Well, what could I say? So Larry and I batted around a few ideas, and I agreed to meet with Jennie—conditionally—though not until the next morning, and only after I had had a chance to run down one small detail.

Which was how I ended up pacing in a tiny courtyard tightly enclosed in chain-link and barbed wire, experiencing a quiet claustrophobic fit. Jennie insisted that we would meet out here, or nothing. Probably she was just tired of being ogled by prying eyes through two-way mirrors. Or maybe she thought the outdoor setting would level the playing field a bit. Or maybe both. Nothing was arbitrary with this lady.

Jennie was led to the doorway by a hefty matron, who backed away and allowed her to shuffle into the courtyard alone. The day was warm, though off in the distance dark clouds were gathering, which seemed fitting somehow. She stopped about two yards from me.

We avoided each other’s faces and eyes, and the silence grew uncomfortable. I knew she was forcing me to make the first move. I said, “Would the prisoner like a cigarette?”

“The prisoner does not smoke. Neither do you.”

“Well, one acquires bad habits on death row. Never too early to get a head start.”

She ignored this barb and asked, “Are you wired?”

“No. Are you?”

“Liar.”

“Spare me, Jennie.”

She finally looked up at me. Sounding hurt and annoyed, she said, “I’m sorry...I’m having a little trouble trusting you these days. The deal, as I remember it, was you’d watch my ass.”

“The deal turned out to be too open-ended.”

“Did it? I saved your life.”

“Did you?”

Jennie reached up and grabbed my chin. She said, “Look at me. Look at what you did.”

So I did. She did look dreadful. She was dressed, appropriately, in a baggy gray hopsack muumuu with matching foot and hand manacles, and white slippers. Her hair was dirty, stringy, and matted and hung in oily clumps and strands. Dark pits were under her eyes, and her shoulders slumped with fatigue. She was still very pretty, but like a rag doll after a playdate with the family rottweiler. In an accusing tone, she said, “Now they want you to finish what you started. Right?”

“I’m here because you wanted to see me.”

She acknowledged this truth with an ambiguous shrug. “And how do you feel now that you see me? Proud? Guilty? Disgusted?”

I knew she was trying to put me on the defensive, and if I let her, I knew I’d never get out of the pit. “I feel sorry for you.”

She laughed. “You should. I’m innocent.”

I replied, truthfully, “In a way, Jennie, I believe you are.”

She looked a little surprised by this admission, and I was sure she wondered why I felt this way. In an irony run amok, the profilers at Quantico had taken a deep and incisive look at the woman who had walked among them not so long ago, one of their top guns. Employing their queer skills, they had cast a net far and wide into her past and dragged back a number of revelations that in hindsight were illuminating, breathtaking, and, mostly, quite saddening.

In preparation for this meeting, I had been provided that file, which I read closely.

As Jennie once told me, she was an only child, and in fact, her parents did die when she was only thirteen, though not in a car crash, as she expressed; they were roasted in a fast-burning house fire in the middle of the night. The neighbors told the investigating officer that Mr. Terry Margold was a heavy drinker, a brown-fingered chain-smoker, an abusive husband, and a father whose cruelty was nearly boundless. Jennie’s mother, Mrs. Anne Margold, was meek, timid, and overpowered, or as a neighbor described to a police officer after the fire, “Old man Margold ruled that house and beat the...well, the dickens outta everybody. You’d always hear howls and screams comin’ from that place. I got chills just walkin’ past it. Good riddance to ’em, I say. Nicer neighborhood now.”

And from other neighbors, more of the same. Essentially, people who knew Jennie and her family in those early years universally recalled a monstrous man, and a childhood of Dickensian horror, a poor little girl born into pathetically harsh circumstances, molded by brutality and terror.

A few pages later I found this interview, conducted with Mrs. Jessica Parker, Jennie’s eighth-grade English comp teacher: “She was an odd girl, brilliant, highly competitive, though I thought, insular and utterly stressed. I...actually, several of us...we often saw horrible bruises, and scrapes, and scabs. Once she had a cast on her leg. Several times I asked how she got these wounds. She claimed through roughhousing on the playground. She would even make up elaborate alibis about her wounds. She could be terribly deceptive and utterly convincing. I knew she lived in mortal dread of her father. Really—I felt awfully sorry for her.”

I recalled the scars and burns on Jennie’s body, and I understood, as I suspected Jessica Parker had understood, that some scars go more than skin-deep, straight to the soul.

On the night of her parents’ roast, according to the police report, Jennie had had the rare good fortune to be at a sleepover at a friend’s house, only three blocks and a short walk through the woods from her own home. No arson inspectors were brought in to sift through the ashes, as there was no evident cause for suspicion, the house was small and wooden, and the local fire department found traces of cigarette butts sprinkled around the bed of Terry Margold, a known drunk and careless slob.

Beyond the age of adoption, Jennie was shuttled into the foster home system. Twice, she had to be relocated after accusations of sexual abuse that were never proven, though a medical examination—conducted when she was only thirteen and first entered the child welfare system—revealed that Jennie’s virginity was a long and distant memory. Her cervix was unnaturally enlarged with unusual erosion, indicating extensive and painful sexual activity with adult-sized male organs.

Reading through the thick ream of reports from various Ohio State Child Welfare Agency officials, over the years Jennie displayed none of the classic symptoms of abused childhoods—she remained well behaved, no trouble with the authorities, no truancy, no drugs, no alcohol, and no transparent personality disorders. Jennie Margold, in fact, was regarded as a shining exemplar of the welfare system’s healing vitality and success. She remained a top student, popular, brilliant, talented, and driven.

I wasn’t judging the hardworking welfare officials of that very fine state, nor did I doubt Jennie’s precocious flair for deception. Yet somebody should have had enough sense to know that, contrary to all outward appearances, no child spawned in such a shower of horrors could emerge internally intact. In effect, the more normal she appeared the less normal she probably was.

In an analysis of possible motives regarding the recent murders, some anonymous investigator wrote:

Jennifer Margold would benefit from the administration murders in two very striking ways. She would exploit her knowledge to humiliate and professionally eliminate George Meany and maneuver herself into position as his replacement. She would also end up with a private fortune, estimated at some twelve and a half million dollars.

No kidding. These were the correct rational motives, but reason and logic had nothing to do with why Jennie killed.

Near the back of the report I found an attachment from a profiler named Terry Higgens with this more insightful description:

Serial killers are either internalizers or externalizers. The internalizer likes distance, likes to create separation between him/herself and the victim, and conceivably the crime. Most internalizers are predatory bombers or arsonists. Internalizers are cowardly and normally choose victims who are smaller or weaker, as a fair match is the last thing they want. There are exceptions, however. And when they tackle larger, more powerful victims they unleash a frenzied assault, a blitzkrieg of ferocity in an attempt to overwhelm and neutralize the victim.

It wasn’t hard to see what led Terry Higgens to lump Jennie in this particular pool. In all likelihood, Jennie’s first crime was murder through arson, and her MO in these more recent murders was a variation on the theme, killing anonymously, from a distance, through surrogates. Also, no prey is more powerful than the United States government. Just as Terry Higgens diagnosed, Jennie had unleashed an assault that was fierce, unrelenting, and punishing, a frenzy of killing with such centrifugal impact it squashed our ability to react. Her diagnosis went on to say:

It should be further noted that many sociopathic individuals, particularly psychopathic serial killers, have a perverse fascination with police work. They attempt to get and stay near the police, hanging around cop bars, shooting ranges, places where the police tend to congregate. In fact, some have been known to attempt to become police.

As a final note, we would point out that pyschopaths are lifelong killers. They start with small crimes, they improve through experience, and they evolve higher-level skills. Recurring success breeds a psychosexual need to escalate their violence and achieve satisfaction by committing ever more heinous crimes.

I thought these observations sounded too clinical and detached to put any human face on. Certainly they did not sound like the Jennie I knew. I had never observed her revealing even a twinge of satisfaction or pleasure at the sight of her victims. Like the rest of us, Jennie appeared horrified and appalled, though it was now clear that the Jennie you saw and the Jennie you got were very different species.

But as I thought about it, the ingredients of this foul casserole—an internalizer, a psychopath, a need to escalate the violence—clearly linked the perpetrator to the crime, nor was there the slightest doubt who choreographed this carnival of slaughter. Still, there’s a wide gap between knowing it and proving it beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

Likewise, I thought Jennie’s background and Terry Higgens’s prognosis explained
why
Jennie plucked poor Jason Barnes from the immense and varied pool of government servants undergoing background checks. Essentially, Jennie hunted for herself, at least a reasonable mirror of herself, a psychological doppelganger she could knowingly bring into sharp focus for the rest of us, because, really, Jennie was describing someone she knew intimately: herself.

Ergo, Jennie was self-aware enough to know who she was, and how she got there. I knew that if I talked with psychiatrists they would tell me that for most, self-knowledge is the first step on the road to salvation and self-perfection. Yet for others, I think, it is the direct path to self-resignation. For whatever reasons, Jennie chose not to fight her inner demons; she chose to feed their terrible urges.

Perversely, it was probably this same self-awareness that drew Jennie to the study of psychology—as girls of the sixties used to say, to
find
herself—just as it gave her the extraordinary acuity to understand other twisted minds. Recalling her words when we discussed Jason, she insisted that he was a victim of his past, that predestination grasped and led him, just as it guides us all. I think, looking back on it, that Jennie wasn’t talking about Jason; she was offering me her Jungian rationalization for her own state of being.

But crazy as she might be, an insanity plea was out of the question. She knew right from wrong, and she knew that what she had done was in every moral sense wrong, because she went to such fierce and imaginative lengths to escape detection.

In fact, Jason was a shadow of her own sad history in almost every way, except one—Jason eluded the conscription of fate. Jennie did not.

But in Larry’s words, the Bureau now had a problem of Holy Shit proportions flopping around its plate. The scale, sophistication, and difficulty of the recent murders suggested a killer with long practice and varied experience. There
had
to be a long treadmill of escalation in Jennie’s past. The Behavioral Science Unit now had to sift through every case Jennie ever worked—particularly her most notable successes—to determine whether the investigator might also have been the predator. Scary thought. But I had my own big problem.