Heart of a Killer (17 page)

“Those last few months, Charlie would brag about these new people he was working with. He was really proud of it, like he was on the inside of something, and how it was going to make him rich.

“One night, when he was drunk and hit me, he told me that he could have me killed, that he could tell his people, that’s how he put it, ‘tell my people,’ and he could have anyone killed.”

As I listened to her say this, it made me want to resurrect Charlie and slit his throat myself. But Novack just nodded encouragement; there was no way he was going to say anything and interrupt the flow.

“Then it seemed to change. A couple of times he referred to them as stupid, and if he was in charge things would be better all around. It was typical Charlie, thinking he was more than he was, and everybody else was less. Well, these people were more than he could handle.

“There’s a man … his name is Hennessey … he doesn’t know I know his name. He came to our house that day, to talk to Charlie. He was much bigger than Charlie; I could tell that Charlie was afraid of him.

“I left them alone and was upstairs in the bedroom when Hennessey came in. He raped me, and then he brought me downstairs to the den. Charlie was lying on the couch, and there was blood everywhere. Then he picked up the knife and put it in my hand, so my fingerprints would be on it.

“He told me that with my history, and with me being in the room with Charlie, and my prints on the knife, the police would know that I did it. That nothing I could say could ever convince anyone otherwise. But if I denied it, or told anyone about him…”

She took a few moments to compose herself, then took a deep breath and continued. “… then he would do to Karen what he did to me, and then he would do to her what he did to Charlie. But that if I did what I was told, he wouldn’t hurt her, and she would have plenty of money to live.”

I couldn’t resist jumping in. “He gave you money?”

She nodded. “My mother gets money every month. It’s the only way she and Karen have survived.”

“We’re going to have to talk to your mother,” Novack said. “And we’re going to need your help identifying Hennessey.”

“You said you’d protect Karen.”

Novack nodded. “And we will. It will be the first call I make when I leave here.”

“Then leave here now,” she said.

He did, and I stayed behind to talk to her. “I know, Harvard, I should have told you earlier.”

“It took a lot of courage to tell us now.”

She smiled. “You know, I think I might double your fee.”

“I’m worth it.”

One hand was handcuffed to the table, but she grabbed my arm with the other. To my recollection, it was the first time she had ever touched me, or I her. “I’m scared, Harvard,” she said. “Isn’t that ridiculous? I’m trying to die, and I’m scared.”

I put my arm around her to comfort her, and I have no idea how this happened, but I kissed her. Or she kissed me; I’m still not sure. It was brief, but it wasn’t a kiss of understanding, or friendship, or compassion, or pity.

We broke it off quickly, and just looked at each other, not knowing what to say. She thought of something first, which was just as well, since it would have taken me years to come up with something.

“You going to invite me to the senior prom?” she asked.

The call came in to Agent Charlie Ammerman in the Charlotte Bureau office. Ammerman was assigned to the task force, working under Mike Janssen on the plane crash investigation. On the line was the receptionist, Judy Clifford.

“Charlie, I’ve got a bit of a weird call on the line. It’s a little girl, asking to speak to Mike Janssen.”

Ammerman literally jumped out of his chair, walking with the cordless phone toward Janssen’s office as he continued to talk. “What’s her name?”

“Tammy. She said she has to talk to Janssen, or people will die. Then she said, ‘Just like on that plane.’”

So closely guarded was the Tammy secret that there was no way that even a receptionist in the Bureau office would be aware of it, but Ammerman knew it all too well. “Tell her you’re trying to find Agent Janssen, but that he’ll be right with her.”

“She’s pretty insistent,” Clifford said. “She’s getting upset.”

“Just don’t lose her. If you think she might hang up, tell her you’re putting it through, and do so.”

Ammerman went past Janssen’s assistant’s desk without pausing, opened the door, and entered the office. Janssen was in a meeting with four other agents, and they looked up, surprised at the unusual interruption.

“Tammy’s on the phone,” Ammerman said, and the group sprung into action, going to their respective work areas, from where they would each monitor the call. A trace was put on the call, though based on their last experience with Tammy, no one had any real hope it would yield useful information.

Before Ammerman could tell the receptionist to put the call through, she did so. That likely meant that she thought Tammy was getting upset to the point that she might hang up.

“This is Janssen,” he said as he picked up the phone.

“This is Tammy. Hi.” Nolan Murray sat in his office, his two colleagues watching and listening, and loving every minute of it. One of them, Peter Lampley, sat in front of his computer, ready to execute the plan.

Even though Janssen knew exactly what the voice would sound like from listening to the air controller’s conversation, it was still jarring and incongruous to hear it.

“What can I do for you, Tammy?”

“Give me two million dollars.”

“Only if you stop hurting people.”

She laughed a little girl’s laugh. “They were more than hurt.”

“Let’s meet and talk about it,” he said.

“Can I have my money?”

“If we meet.”

“I think you’re trying to fool me,” she said. “So I’ll just crash a train instead.” Nolan Murray was having a great time with this; the feeling of power at being able to humiliate so powerful an entity as the FBI, as the U.S. government, was intoxicating.

“There’s no reason for you to do that. We can get you the money.”

“You’re trying to fool me. My mommy was right.”

Janssen was growing more and more furious, but kept himself under control. “How can we get you the money?” He had neither the intention nor the authority to pay any money. He just wanted to keep the conversation going, trying to find an opening or goad Tammy into a verbal mistake.

“Never mind, I’m going to crash a train. Good-bye.”

“Wait!” Janssen yelled. “Where is the train?”

“Oops.” Tammy giggled. “Los Angeles.”

The agents came back into Janssen’s office the moment that Tammy hung up the phone. There had been plenty of time to trace the call, and it showed that it had originated in Omaha, Nebraska. Agents were quickly sent to the location, but Janssen knew there was no possibility of it paying off.

Ammerman had spent the time that Janssen was on the phone alerting Homeland Security to an impending emergency, and the assistant director, Cody Schumacher, was on the phone with Janssen within seconds after Tammy’s call.

“We need to stop every train in southern California, right now,” Janssen said.

“I need to understand the situation before I can order that,” Schumacher said.

“Here’s the situation. A train is going to crash in the Los Angeles area; it could be crashing while we’re talking. If a train is stopped, it can’t crash. So stop the fucking trains, or don’t and send a truckload of body bags to L.A.”

Homeland Security has awesome power in an emergency, and is well set up to communicate with and direct local agencies when an extraordinary event has taken place or is about to. The rail system fits very comfortably into their domain; trains have long been considered likely targets of attacks, as they have been in Europe.

So remarkably, within ten minutes, every train in southern California was stopped, literally, in its tracks. Passengers were told over loudspeakers that there was nothing to worry about, just a mechanical failure that would soon be corrected. The people talking on those loudspeakers did not have the slightest idea why they were directed to stop.

Communications in the form of an open, secure line were set up between Janssen, Schumacher, the FBI director, the secretary of transportation, and the White House chief of staff. All except Janssen were relieved when Schumacher reported that the trains were by then halted and “no incidents of any kind have been reported.”

Attention turned to how to now deal with the stationary trains; since they were packed with people, they could not sit there for any great length of time.

Janssen was adamant. “Get the people off the trains,” he said. “Bring buses in; I don’t care what you have to do. But this was no false alarm.”

The transportation secretary was uneasy with this. “It will be a mess. L.A. is a mess on a normal day.”

“People will be inconvenienced,” Janssen said. “Take a poll. Ask them if they would rather be inconvenienced or dead.”

No one on the call wanted to be responsible for the carnage that Janssen was envisaging, so the decision was made to get the people off the trains and do intense inspections on each. No train would be put back into service until it was cleared, which meant that the next day’s morning commute would be a nightmare, even by L.A. standards.

While the others on the call were worrying about outraged commuters, meaning outraged voters, all but Janssen thought they had successfully dodged a terrorist bullet. He didn’t know where it was coming from, or why it hadn’t been fired already, but he believed they still were in the crosshairs.

One of the many trains in southern California that was stopped was Rolling Thunder, the wild railroad ride at Disneyland. The only difference between that and the others was that Homeland Security had nothing to do with stopping it; that task was accomplished by Peter Lampley, at the direction of Nolan Murray.

The twenty-eight passengers on the stopped train looked around in vain for someone to help them. There were no small children on the ride, since the high speed and sharp turns dictated a height requirement. So they were mostly teenagers and adults, and they calmly waited for the ride to start up again.

That particular ride has two trains, and they run one minute and ten seconds apart. At that moment, the passengers on the second train were having a very different experience. They were traveling at an incredible speed, such that if they were not securely belted in, they would be thrown from the train. Those who had been on the ride previously knew that something was wrong; it was not meant to travel this fast. Everyone, whether a frequent rider or a first-timer, was panicked by what they were experiencing.

Under Lampley’s computer direction, the second car rammed into the stationary one. Nineteen people were killed, seventeen critically injured, and many others badly hurt.

Tammy had crashed her train, just like she promised.

I did not want to have dinner with my parents. That would be a true statement pretty much every day since I was six years old, but on this particular night I was dreading it even more than usual.

They live less than forty-five minutes from the city, and are there all the time, but once a month they have what they call their “New York vacation weekend.” That consists of checking into an exclusive hotel, they rotate among six of them, and doing New York things like taking in a show, going to fine restaurants, et cetera. All the things that they do almost every weekend, but this somehow feels different to them.

Whenever we are going to have dinner, I invite them to my place so that I can cook a meal for them. I do this even though there is never the slightest chance that they would ever accept, or that I would ever want them to. But by making the offer, I’m able to amuse myself by imagining them working their way up my elevator-less building to my third-floor apartment.

My mother once again declined the invitation, chuckling slightly at the prospect. Instead she chose Le Bernardin, a Midtown French restaurant specializing in seafood. It is widely considered among the best restaurants in New York, in fact in the world. And it is priced accordingly; four people could have dinner there with one of the better bottles of wine, or they could use that money to buy something with bucket seats.

Restaurants like it are said to cater to the rich and famous, though I’d been there four times without actually seeing anyone I recognized. Then the weird realization hit me that to most Americans, I was the most famous person in the place.

Once we were finished with the obligatory chitchat about what was going on in their lives, their work, their charities, and their friends, it was my turn. “Tell us all about this exciting case,” my mother said.

I had absolutely no desire to do that. “I really can’t talk about it; it’s confidential.” When my mother looked wounded, I said, “Attorney-client privilege. Pretty much all I can say is what’s being reported in the press.”

“Is your firm willing to lose you for this long?” my father asked.

“I think they’ll get by.”

It was Mom’s turn. “I think this could be good for your career, especially if you win. Though I have to say, based on the people I have spoken with, it seems as if you’re in a difficult legal position.”

I nodded. “Very difficult.”

They asked me to tell them what Sheryl was like, and I said that she was the strongest woman, actually the strongest person, I’d ever met.

“But she committed a murder,” my mother pointed out, and I didn’t correct her.

For some reason I was interested in knowing their opinion. “If you were in charge,” I said, “if you could make a ruling and that would be the end of it, would you let her give her heart to her daughter?”

“I would,” my mother said instantly, surprising the hell out of me. “She’s stuck in that prison, and her daughter has a whole life that could be ahead of her. It’s her body, it’s her choice, and I think she should be allowed to make it.”

“I would tend to agree,” my father said. “But as a doctor I would never participate in it, and I doubt you’d find a doctor who would.”

“But once she had died, even by suicide, there are doctors that would perform the transplant. Right?”