Capitol Murder (11 page)

She tried to smile, but she was too tense. Then she remembered that they were going to be together forever. She imagined palm trees, a warm, gentle breeze, a pearl white beach, and a sea so blue that the scene looked like a picture postcard. Then the choke hold tightened and she panicked.

Millie tried to speak but her larynx was being crushed. She clawed at her true love’s arms, but the hold didn’t ease. Fear flashed through her.
Have I made a terrible mistake?
Millie thought, moments before she died.

Chapter Sixteen

E
very day on death row was mind-numbingly similar. The lack of intellectual stimulation had been torture for a man with Clarence Little’s IQ, so Clarence had distracted himself for large parts of each day with mental reenactments of the slow torture and ultimate death of his playthings. Clarence never thought of the women he killed as victims. Victims were human beings. He thought of Winona Bedford, Carol Poole, and the other women as toys he used to act out his sexual fantasies.

Clarence had felt intense pleasure and an explosive sexual release whenever his playthings screamed or pleaded for mercy or died. Strangely he did not experience sexual pleasure while he was strangling Millie Reston. Maybe that was because he found her repulsive. He actually wondered if putting Millie down wasn’t a humanitarian act. The poor simpleton had no life and had been so easy to manipulate. He didn’t even have to waste a bullet on her. He shook his head in wonder. She was really like a cow in a slaughterhouse, following instructions without a thought as she was led to the abattoir.

Clarence marveled at the fact that she was so blinded by love that she hadn’t thought about how she was going to explain the gun. Millie had to have known that Clarence would be searched thoroughly before he was brought to court. She was the only person who could have smuggled the gun into the courthouse. She would have been asked to take a lie detector test, which she would have failed. If she had refused to take the test, her refusal would have confirmed the suspicions of the police. And Millie was weak. Eventually she would have cracked. Then she would have been arrested, disbarred, and put in prison. Clarence honestly believed that putting an end to Millie’s pathetic existence had been one of the few good deeds he had ever performed.

Clarence opened the elevator door and stepped out into the alcove on the fifth floor. Then he peeked into the back hall. There were a few people in it, but he didn’t think he would attract attention in a business suit, carrying Millie’s attaché case.

Next to the alcove was a little-used set of stairs. Clarence didn’t meet anyone on the way down, but he discovered that the stairs were blocked off below the second floor. He nudged open the door to the second floor. His luck held. There were very few people in the corridor. Clarence walked to the end of the rear hallway and turned right into the corridor that ran parallel to Salmon Street. Then he turned right again and headed down the marble stairs to the courthouse lobby. He was in luck again. Most people took the elevator, so there were few people using the stairs. They were either engaged in conversation or focused on their own problems, and no one gave him a second look.

The front door came into view. Clarence headed for it, keeping his head down so it would be difficult to see his face. Seconds later, Clarence Little was breathing fresh air for the first time in a long time.

Millie’s car was exactly where the map said it would be. Clarence slid behind the wheel and breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn’t home free, but he was damn close. He left the parking spot and headed for the I–5 bridge that crossed the Columbia River into Washington.

Clarence assumed there would soon be an APB out for Millie’s vehicle. Just before he reached the bridge, he drove off I–5 into the Jantzen Beach shopping center and parked in the middle of a crowded row in the center of the large lot. Until someone discovered that the car was abandoned, the police would believe he was driving it.

Two large SUVs flanked Millie’s vehicle and shielded him from view. He took the clothes Millie had bought for him out of the trunk. They were on a wire hanger, and there was $1,000 in cash in a wallet in one of the pockets. He changed into jeans, a flannel shirt, and a leather jacket before donning a Seattle Mariners baseball cap. He pulled the bill down before wandering around the parking lot until he found a car to steal. He used the wire hanger to break in and was back on the road to Seattle twenty minutes after he’d turned off the highway.

It took a little under three hours to drive from Portland to Seattle. Once he was in the city, Clarence planned to ditch the stolen car and get a room in a cheap motel. Then he would withdraw the money he kept in several Seattle banks in accounts he had set up under aliases. He hadn’t lied to Millie about the money. He was well off financially. There had been an inheritance, and his engineering firm had done well. He also had several passports under different names in a safe-deposit box. He would lie low until the initial furor died down. Then it was off to South America to visit a plastic surgeon who asked no questions if you could pay his fee. And then . . . ? Then there would be a world of possibilities. His priority after he was sure he was safe would be to buy an isolated house. In it he would construct a secret room where he could entertain. Spanish was a more melodious language than English, and Clarence wondered if the screams of Latin women would sound different from the screams of his American pets. He smiled as he contemplated answering that question.

Chapter Seventeen

K
eith Evans had been born and raised in Nebraska and probably would have spent his life there if it hadn’t been for a lucky break. He was a twenty-eight-year-old detective on the Omaha police force when he arrested a serial killer who had run circles around an FBI task force. The agent-in-charge had been so impressed by the deductions that had led the young detective to discover the killer’s identity that he convinced Keith to apply to become an FBI agent.

Keith saw a whole new world opening up to him when he started the course at Quantico, but he never duplicated the Sherlockian performance that had led him to the FBI. His subsequent successes were achieved with old-fashioned police work that involved long hours at the office or in the field and large blocks of time away from his wife. Four years after he became an agent, Keith’s wife filed for divorce, and he found himself living alone in a sterile apartment in Maryland.

One morning, Keith looked in the mirror and found a forty-year-old man staring back. He was still six two, but he had to wear reading glasses, there were gray hairs among the blond, and ten extra pounds surrounded his midsection. Evans’s career had been stagnating until he became the public face of the D.C. Ripper task force and played a part in bringing down President Christopher Farrington. His involvement in another case involving U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felicia Moss had given his career another boost. But his personal life was still bleak. There had been a few women since his divorce, but none of them had put up with his all-too-frequent absences any better than his ex-wife. He didn’t blame the women for the failed relationships. He couldn’t discuss his work, he had to break dates on a regular basis, and the things he experienced led him to be emotionally cold at times.

Half an hour ago, Keith had read a bulletin that affected two of the few people he counted as friends. He felt uneasy about having to break the bad news but not as uneasy as he felt sitting beside his partner, Special Agent Maggie Sparks.

Maggie was a slim, athletic woman in her early thirties. Her DNA was a hodgepodge inherited from Cherokee, Spanish, Romanian, and Danish ancestors that conspired to create a very attractive woman with glossy black hair, high cheekbones, and a dark complexion. The only blemish on her beauty was a faint scar on her cheek, the product of a gunfight during the Farrington investigation. Maggie still maintained a wry sense of humor and a positive outlook on life despite the horrors she encountered on the job, and Keith always felt his spirits rise when he was with her.

Keith’s attraction to Maggie had grown over the years, but he had never gotten up the nerve to ask her out because he wasn’t certain how Maggie felt about him and he was terrified that any overtures he made to her would destroy their working relationship.

“How do you think they’ll take the news?” Maggie asked as they climbed the steps to Brad and Ginny’s apartment.

“I don’t know. I never talked that much to Brad about Clarence Little. We went over the similarities in his case and the Ripper case, but he never talked about how he got along with the guy.”

Keith was breathing a little unevenly when he got to the third-floor landing. If Maggie was experiencing any physical stress, Keith couldn’t see it.

“This is it,” he said, stopping at the second apartment. He knocked, and the door opened a few seconds later, revealing a smiling Brad Miller clad in sweatpants and a New York Jets T-shirt.

“Hey, guys, come in,” Brad said, stepping aside to let the agents into his apartment.

“Thanks,” Keith said.

“Hi, Keith, Maggie,” Ginny said. She was also wearing sweats and a T-shirt, only her team of choice was the Kansas City Chiefs.

Brad took a closer look at Keith and Maggie, and he stopped smiling.

“What’s up?” he asked cautiously.

“Something happened in Oregon we thought you’d want to know about,” Keith said. “Clarence Little was in Portland for a court appearance. He killed two guards and his female attorney in the jail elevator while they were going from the jail to the courtroom.”

“He killed Millie Reston?” Brad asked, shocked.

“Did you know her?” Maggie asked.

“Not really, but she called me a little while ago to talk about Clarence’s case. That’s the only time I talked to her.”

“How did he kill the guards?” Ginny asked.

“The authorities in Portland reviewed tapes of Reston’s visits to the jail, and they think she may have fallen for Little. They’re pretty certain Reston smuggled a gun into the courthouse.”

“The poor sap,” Brad said.

“Is there anything you can tell me that might help catch Little, any favorite places, friends, relatives?” Keith asked.

Everyone looked at Brad, who flushed and couldn’t meet anyone’s eye.

“I can’t remember anything like that, but something happened that I never told you, Ginny.”

“About Clarence Little?” she asked.

Brad nodded. “He sent me two letters.”

“What kind of letters?” Ginny pressed.

“They were creepy, but there weren’t any threats in them. I didn’t tell you about them because I didn’t want to worry you.”

“When did you get them?” Maggie asked.

“The first one was slipped under the door of our apartment in Portland on the evening of the presidential election. I found it when we came back from the election-night parties. The second one was sent to my office in the Senate right after Clarence’s cases were sent back for new trials.”

“Do you have them?” Keith asked.

“I threw out the first one. I figured Clarence was just playing one of his mind games, and I didn’t want to buy into it. He was on death row, anyway, and I didn’t think of him as a threat. I kept the second one. It’s in my desk at the office. I can give it to you.”

“I’ll have someone from the lab pick it up,” Keith said.

“Neither letter was mailed from the prison. The first one wasn’t mailed at all, and the second was sent from Portland. They contained some personal details that Clarence shouldn’t have known about. Not anything secret. Anyone who knows us would have known about them. The first one mentioned Ginny, and I never discussed anything about my personal life with Clarence. So I figured he had an accomplice. For what it’s worth, I think Millie Reston helped him. I confronted her about the letters when she called, and she was very evasive and sounded nervous.”

“I’ll give this information to the people who are looking for Little,” Keith said. “Someone will get in touch with you.”

“Why did you hurry over to tell us about the escape? Do you think we’re in danger?” Ginny asked.

“I have no idea,” Keith said. He looked at Brad. “Would Little have any reason to hurt you?”

“Ginny and I talked about this when we learned his cases had been reversed. Clarence and I got along pretty well but—as Ginny pointed out—a psychotic serial killer doesn’t think like a normal human being. I’m not that worried, though. Clarence has no logical reason to want to hurt me. He’ll be trying to hide or get out of the country. I doubt he’ll come all the way to D.C. to get to me or Ginny.”

Chapter Eighteen

I
t was general knowledge among the members of Senator Carson’s staff that Brad had represented Clarence Little. The morning after Little’s escape made the front page of every newspaper and led every television newscast in the D.C. area, the escaped serial killer became a constant topic of conversation in the senator’s office.

Bonnie Berliner was the legislative correspondent with the cubicle outside Brad’s office. An attractive brunette with a cheerful manner and a bright smile, she had just graduated from Oregon State with honors and a degree in government. Her father was a big contributor to Carson’s campaign, but she probably would have been hired on merit. Bonnie was answering e-mails about health care issues when Brad walked by. She swiveled away from her monitor.

“Mr. Sharp wants to see you,” Bonnie said.

“About what?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Okay. I’ll just get rid of my stuff.”

Brad expected Bonnie to go back to her computer. Instead, she looked him over.

“Are you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You know, Little.”

Brad had been reassuring every workmate he had passed, starting with the receptionists, and he had his patter down pat.

“Mr. Little and I got on fine. Anyway, he’s probably in Mexico by now.”