The Strategist (19 page)

“So what are we supposed to do?” Sullivan asked incredulously. “Just act like you never came in here? Act like you never mentioned Elliott Richmond’s name in connection to Julia’s death? Once something like that is out of the bag i
t doesn’t exactly go back in.”

“Detective Graham would tell you that’s exactly what you should do. According to him, it’s an insult to Elliott Richmond and the city of Denver that I would even suggest him capable of something like this. So why go forward? We don’t want Julia’s murder to insult anyone.”

Graham looked at Camille with venomous eyes. “Watch it.”

“You really should just go back to pursuing mail clerks and Chevy Impalas that play that scary ghetto music. I’m sure arresting Stephen Clemmons wouldn’t be the least bit insulting to the citizens of this fine city.” Camille began collecting the papers she had spread on the table.

“Those documents are potential evidence,” Sullivan said.

Camille shook her head as she put the last piece in the folder. “No they’re not. It’s just paper, Detective Sullivan. The real evidence is probably being fabricated as we speak.”

Graham’s hand curled up into a tight fist and he looked like he wanted to pound it against the table. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Camille put the folder in her messenger bag and stood up. “It doesn’t mean anything, Detective Graham. Just like my coming here didn’t mean anything.”

“You’re wrong about that,” Sullivan declared. “Just like you’re wrong when you say you can’t trust us with the video. All we’re interested in is finding Julia’s killer. And I personally don’t care if its Elliott Richmond or the mayor or the goddamn Duchess of York.”

“It’s good that that’s your personal opinion, Detective Sullivan. And I really do believe you feel that way. I’m just worried that yours is the minority opinion.” She turned to Graham. He looked like he wanted to hit her.

“Let us see the video so we can do our job,” he said in between clenched teeth.

Camille took a deep breath and turned to Sullivan. “I want your personal word that you meant what you said.”

“You mean about going after Elliott Richmond? You have my personal word that if there’s hard evidence to suggest he did this, I’ll go after him with everything I have.”

Camille knew she was just naïve enough to mean it.

She turned to Graham next. “What about you? Are you more concerned about insulting the mayor? Or finding Julia’s actual killer?”

Graham stared at her for what felt like a long time. She could see the wheels churning in his mind, struggling to come up with an answer that sounded better than the truth he actually felt.

“There’s only one thing that’s being insulted right now. This right here,” he said as he unclipped the badge from his waist and held it out in front of him. “You’re insulting mine, you’re insulting Detective Sullivan’s. Most importantly, you’re insulting everything it stands for. I can’t speak for my partner, but I personally don’t appreciate being insulted. So you keep your goddamn disk and everything on it. Unless you have a video of a crime taking place, which it doesn’t sound like you do, then it’s of no use anyway. So don’t trust us with it. That’s fine. But don’t you dare question my integrity.” Graham punctuated his speech with a scowl that was intended to be menacing but instead came across as overly rehearsed. “And as far as finding Julia’s actual killer? We already have.”

Camille looked at Sullivan with wide eyes. “What does that mean?”

Sullivan looked almost embarrassed as she reported the news. “An arrest warrant has been issued for Stephen Clemmons. Officers are en route to his house as we speak.”

Camille couldn’t believe what she just heard. “An arrest warrant? Based on what?”

Graham was quick to answer. “Based on eyewitness testimony that puts his car in front of Julia’s house the night she was killed, as well as her car being found near his home, and the fact that they knew each other, despite his initial denial of that fact. It’s called hard evidence, something that holds up in court a lot better than some fucking sex tape.”

Camille held Graham’s hard stare, even though every cell in her body was breaking down simultaneously.

“Can we at least talk about this Camille?” Sullivan asked.

“Apparently there’s nothing left to talk about,” Camille answered as she slung her messenger bag over her shoulder. “I appreciate your help detectives.”

With that, she walked out of the conference room and out of the Criminal Investigation Unit, confident that she wouldn’t be back for a third round of questioning. She was right to assume that she couldn’t trust Graham. It was clear that he wasn’t the least bit interested in pursuing any lead other than the complete dead end that was Stephen Clemmons. And no matter how good Detective Sullivan’s intentions were, as long as she continued to answer to him, she couldn’t be trusted either.

As it stood right now, she wasn’t sure if anybody could be trusted. Not even herself.

But it was looking more and more like she only had herself to rely on. And if Camille were being honest, she would admit that that was a hell of a lot riskier than blindly giving that disk to Graham, the mayor, or even Elliott Richmond himself.

CHAPTER 30

C
amille had actually met the Circle Killer three months before he murdered her partner and effective changed her life forever. Daniel Sykes was part of a search and rescue operation involving an Alexandria, Virginia woman named Sherrie Creswell who had gone missing two weeks earlier.

In the beginning, there was nothing to distinguish Sykes from the other eighty or so volunteers who showed up for the three day effort. In fact, there was nothing distinguishable about him at all. He was of average height and weight, with average brown hair, average brown eyes and an average handshake. Camille’s first impression of him was neither good nor bad. He was simply there. In hindsight, she realized that he was everything her extensive profile suggested he would be. But that was the problem with pegging the Circle Killer as an average-looking thirty to forty-year-old white male. The pool was quite large.

She didn’t think much of it when Sykes began asking questions. As far as Camille could tell, he was nothing more than a nervous local who had a wife and children of his own to protect. She had always found that volunteers who were also family men were the most enthusiastic about helping. They helped not only because they were concerned about the missing, they also helped out of a sense of obligation to their own families and their safety. Their search for the missing was also a search for the abductor. So when Sykes cornered Camille on the second day out and began asking a series of pointed questions about the victim and any leads the FBI may have concerning her possible abductor, Camille answered him the same way she would answer any other invested member of the community.

What she didn’t learn until much later was that Sykes was not a member of the community at all. During an appearance on
Nightline
shortly after Sykes’ arrest and subsequent confession, his estranged wife claimed that he had never spent any significant time there. But he was there long enough to rape and murder Sherrie Creswell and dump her mutilated body into a ravine one hundred and fifty miles away from the search area he so dutifully helped Camille comb through.

She had completely forgotten about the encounter in Alexandria until Sykes reminded her of it during their third and final interrogation session.

“Of all the risks I ever took, approaching you was definitely the riskiest,” he had said to her from across a bolted down steel table that he was handcuffed and shackled to. “Truth be told, I thought you were going to arrest me the moment you saw me. I suppose if one took the time to psychoanalyze me, they’d probably get me to admit that I actually wanted to get caught at that point. Funny how that works, huh? Wanting to get caught. Anyway, when I saw you, you had this look in your eyes, and I said to myself, ‘Yep Dan, she’s the one to do it. Talk to her, she’ll peg your ass in two seconds flat.’ But it didn’t quite work out that way. Guess I watch too many movies. You guys aren’t nearly as smart as you’re portrayed in the movies.”

At that point, the encounter in Alexandria instantly came back to her; every sickening detail of it.

The fact that she had spent two and a half days rubbing shoulders with the very killer she had spent the previous three years trying to capture was difficult enough to swallow. The fact that he managed to kill six more people after their meeting was entirely too much to handle, and it made her understand for the first time in her life what genuine self-loathing felt like. Prior to that, the word ‘suicide’ had never even entered her vocabulary.

Two weeks after her last interrogation of Sykes, an interrogation that abruptly ended after he personally thanked her for giving him the time to meet those two lovely co-eds who would turn out to be his last, and most satisfying victims, the word suicide became much more than a part of her vocabulary.

It became the only feasible solution.

One morning after her customary six a.m. cup of coffee, she filled her bathtub to shoulder level, opened up the straight-edged razor she had bought the night before, and pressed hard against her left wrist. When she saw the first trickle of blood, she promptly stopped. She may have been a coward, but she wasn’t a selfish coward. The thought of leaving the people she loved the most in the world, namely her father and Julia, made her sad in a way she didn’t think was possible, as did the thought of spending the rest of eternity apologizing to her mother.

So Camille drained the bathtub, wrapped the razor in three inches of duct tape and put it in the trash, then called her father and Julia to tell them she would be leaving the Bureau and coming home.

But she was hanging on by the thinnest of threads; clinging to the fallacy that a change in scenery would bring about a change in fortune. Daniel Sykes and all the terrible memories he created existed in a world that Camille no longer knew she could be a part of. And she naively thought that if she ran far enough, she would eventually be able to escape that world.

But what she realized during her taxi ride home from police headquarters was that she hadn’t run far enough. Her memories of the world she tried to flee were dangerously fresh, the self-loathing born from her failure in Alexandria was still there, and with Julia’s death, her desire to reclaim even a basic sense of trust in herself had all but been obliterated.

For the second time in as many months, someone extraordinarily close to her had been murdered. And for the second time, Camille blamed herself.

She let Agent Sheridan go into Sykes’ house without backup because the discovery of a freshly severed head in his backyard had nearly made her faint. She heard the first gunshot in the house, but could not get her wobbly legs to move fast enough to prevent the next eight. Six of those gunshots killed the two teenagers Sykes had held captive in his basement. Three of them killed her partner.

And now there was Julia.

There will be plenty of people who will try to convince Camille that she could not have prevented Julia’s death, just like she could not have prevented Agent Sheridan’s death. But they were wrong then and they would be wrong now. Camille may not have heard the gunshots this time, but she failed to act just the same.

And now all she wanted to do was unwrap that razor and use it the way she originally intended to.

But self-loathing was a craving that she no longer had the time to indulge. Right now Julia didn’t expect her to feel sorry for herself. Julia expected her to fight.

So Camille was left with a choice: continue to run until she found the safe hiding place that had thus far eluded her, or trust herself enough to finally stand up and fight. She already knew what choice she had to make, even before she saw Detectives Graham and Sullivan. She tried to tell herself that asking them for help was the right thing to do, but she realized now that the act was merely a way of buying time until she could summon the courage to do what Julia ulti
mately expected her to do.

Unfortunately she had yet to summon anything resembling courage, and the luxury of buying time no longer existed.

As the taxi dropped her off in front of her father’s house, she finally understood that it wasn’t about summoning courage. It was about pushing forward whether the courage was there or not. Elliott Richmond was responsible for Julia’s murder. And so far, Camille was the only person alive willing to believe that. It also made her the only person capable of actually doing something about it.

And she was capable, despite the memories that continued to haunt her, despite the demons that refused to stop whispering
failure
in her ear. 

Now was the time that she would finally stand up to fight. She still wasn’t sure if she trusted herself not to fall again. But it didn’t matter if she did. Avenging Julia’s death would be all the motivation she would ever need to pick herself back up.

The pity parade is over
, she thought as she saw her father standing in the driveway.

Suddenly, Daniel Sykes’ face began to fade and the demons whispering in her ear were barely audible. Camille wasn’t sure how long she could keep them at bay, but right now she didn’t care.

It just felt good to finally stop running.