Secret of the Seventh Son (3 page)

W
ill assumed she'd still be gone, and his suspicions were confirmed the second he opened the door and dropped his roller bag and briefcase.

The apartment remained in its pre-Jennifer state. The scented candles. Gone. The place mats on the dining room table. Gone. The frilly throw pillows. Gone. Her clothes, shoes, cosmetics, toothbrush. Gone. He finished his whirlwind tour of the one bedroom layout and opened the refrigerator door. Even those stupid bottles of vitamin water. Gone.

He had completed a two-day out-of-town course in sensitivity training mandated at his last performance review. If she had unexpectedly returned, he would have tried out some new techniques on her, but Jennifer was still--gone.

He loosened his tie, kicked off his shoes, and opened the small liquor cabinet under the TV set. Her envelope was tucked under his bottle of Johnnie Walker Black, the same place he had found it the day she did a runner on him. On it, she had written
Fuck You
in her distinctive feminine scrawl. He poured a large one, propped his feet on the coffee table, and for old times' sake reread the letter that revealed things about himself he already knew. A clatter distracted him midway through, a framed picture toppled by his big toe. Zeckendorf had sent it: the freshman roommates at their reunion the previous summer. Another year--gone.

An hour later, hazy with booze, he was flooded with one of Jennifer's sentiments: you are flawed beyond repair.

Flawed beyond repair, he thought. An interesting concept. Unfixable. Unredeemable. No chance for rehabilitation or meaningful improvement.

He switched on the Mets game and fell asleep on the sofa.

Flawed or not, he was at his desk by 8:00
A.M.
the next morning, digging through his Outlook in-box. He banged out a few replies then sent an e-mail to his supervisor, Sue Sanchez, thanking her for having the managerial prowess and foresight to recommend him for the seminar he had just attended. His sensitivity had increased about forty-seven percent, he reckoned, and he expected she would see immediate and measurable results. He signed it,
Sensitively, Will
, and clicked Send.

In thirty seconds his phone rang. Sanchez's line.

"Welcome home, Will," she said, oozing treacle.

"Great to be back, Susan," he said, his southern accent flattened by all the years spent away from the Florida panhandle.

"Why don't you come and see me, okay?"

"When would be good for you, Susan?" he asked earnestly.

"Now!" She hung up.

She was sitting behind his old desk in his old office, which had a nice view of the Statue of Liberty thanks to Mohammed Atta, but that didn't irritate him as much as the puckered expression on her taut olive face. Sanchez was an obsessive exerciser who read service manuals and management self-help books while she worked out. She always appealed to him physically, but that sour mug and nasal officious tone with its Latina twang doused his interest.

Hastily, she said, "Sit. We need to have a chat, Will."

"Susan, if you're planning on chewing me out, I'm prepared to handle it professionally. Rule number six--or was it number four?: 'when you feel you are being provoked, do not act precipitously. Stop and consider the consequences of your actions, then choose your words carefully, respectful of the reactions of the person or persons who have challenged you.' Pretty good, huh? I got a certificate." He smiled and folded his hands across his nascent paunch.

"I'm so not in the mood for your BS today," she said wearily. "I've got a problem and I need you to help me solve it." Management-speak for: you're about to get shafted.

"For you? Anything. As long as it doesn't involve nudity or mess up my last fourteen months."

She sighed, then paused, giving Will the impression she was taking rule number four or six to heart. He was aware that she considered him her number one problem child. Everyone in the office knew the score:

Will Piper. Forty-eight, nine years Sanchez's senior. Formerly her boss, before getting busted from his management grade back to Special Agent. Formerly breath-catchingly handsome, a six-plus-footer with I-beam shoulders, electric-blue eyes, and boyishly rumpled sandy hair, before alcohol and inactivity gave his flesh the consistency and pallor of rising bread dough. Formerly a hotshot, before becoming a glib pain-in-the-ass clock-watcher.

She just spat it out. "John Mueller had a stroke two days ago. The doctors say he's going to recover but he'll be on medical leave. His absence, particularly now, is a problem for the office. Benjamin, Ronald, and I have discussed this."

Will marveled at the news. "Mueller? He's younger than you are! Fricking marathon runner. How the hell did
he
have a stroke?"

"He had a hole in his heart no one picked up before," she said. "A small blood clot from his leg floated through and went up to his brain. That's what I was told. Pretty scary how that could happen."

Will loathed Mueller. Smug, wiry shithead. Everything by the book. Totally insufferable, the SOB still made snarky comments to his face about his blow-up--insulated, the bastard supposed, by his leper status. Hope he walks and talks like a retard for the rest of his life, was the first notion that came to mind. "Christ, that's too bad," he said instead.

"We need you to take the Doomsday case."

It took almost supernatural strength to prevent himself from telling her to screw herself.

It should have been his case from the start. In fact it was nothing short of outrageous that it hadn't been offered to him the day it hit the office. Here he was, one of the most accomplished serial killing experts in the Bureau's recent history, passed over for a marquee case right in his jurisdiction. It was a measure of how damaged his career was, he supposed. At the time, the snub stung like hell, but he'd gotten over it quickly enough and come to believe he had dodged a bullet.

He was on the homestretch. Retirement was like a glistening watery mirage in the desert, just out of reach. He was done with ambition and striving, he was done with office politics, he was done with murders and death. He was tired and lonely and stuck in a city he disliked. He wanted to go home. With a pension.

He chewed on the bad piece of news. Doomsday had rapidly become the office's highest profile case, the kind that demanded an intensity he hadn't brought to the table in years. Long days and blown weekends weren't the issue. Thanks to Jennifer, he had all the time in the world. The problem was in the mirror, because--as he would tell anyone who asked--he simply no longer gave a damn. You needed raging ambition to solve a serial killing case, and that flame had long ago sputtered and died. Luck was important too, but in his experience, you succeeded by busting your hump and creating the environment for luck to do its capricious thing.

Beyond that, Mueller's partner was a young Special Agent, only three years out of Quantico, who was so imbued with devout ambition and agency rectitude that he likened her to a religious fanatic. He had observed her hustling around the twenty-third floor, speed-walking through the corridors, profoundly humorless and sanctimonious, taking herself so seriously it made him ill.

He leaned forward, almost ashen. "Look, Susan," he began, his voice rising, "this is not a good idea. That ship has sailed. You should have asked me to do the case a few weeks ago, but you know what? It was the right call. At this point, it's not good for me, it's not good for Nancy, it's not good for the office, the Bureau, the taxpayers, the victims, and the goddamned future victims! You know it and I know it!"

She got up to shut the door then sat back in her chair and crossed her legs. The rasp of her panty hose rubbing against itself momentarily distracted him from his rant. "Yes, I'll keep my voice down," he volunteered, "but most of all, it's terrible for you. You're in the chute. You've got Major Thefts and Violent Crimes, the branch with the second-highest visibility in New York! This Doomsday asshole gets caught on your watch, you move up. You're a woman, you're ethnic, a few years you're an assistant director at Quantico, maybe a Supervisory Special Agent in D.C. The sky's the limit. Don't fuck it up by involving me, that's my friendly advice."

She gave him a stare to freeze mud. "I certainly appreciate this reverse mentoring, Will, but I don't think I want to rely on career advice from a man who is sliding down the org chart. Believe me, I don't love this idea, but we've gone over it internally. Benjamin and Ronald refuse to move anyone from Counterterrorism, and there's no one else in White Collar or Organized Crime who's done this kind of case. They don't want someone parachuting in from D.C. or another office. It makes them look bad. This is New York, not Cleveland. We're supposed to have a deep bench. You've got the right background--the wrong personality, which you're going to have to work on, but the right background. It's yours. It's going to be your last big case, Will. You're going out with a bang. Think of it that way and cheer up."

He took another run at it. "If we catch this guy tomorrow, which we won't, I'll be history by the time this thing goes to trial."

"So you'll come back to testify. By then the per diem will probably look pretty good."

"Very funny. What about Nancy? I'll poison her. You want her to be the sacrificial lamb?"

"She's a pistol. She can handle herself and she can handle you."

He stopped arguing, sullen. "What about the shit I'm working on?"

"I'll spread it around. No problem."

That was it, it was over. It wasn't a democracy, and quitting or getting fired were not options. Fourteen months. Fourteen fucking months.

Within a couple of hours his life had changed. The office manager showed up with orange moving crates and had his active case files packed and moved out of his cubicle. In their place, Mueller's Doomsday files arrived, boxes of documents compiled in the weeks before a sticky clump of platelets turned a few milliliters of his brain into mush. Will stared at them as if they were stinking piles of dung and drank another cup of overstewed coffee before deigning to open one, randomly plucking a folder.

He heard her clearing her throat at the cubicle entrance before he saw her.

"Hi," Nancy said. "I guess we're going to be working together."

Nancy Lipinski was stuffed into a charcoal-gray suit. It was a half size too small and it pinched her waist enough to force her belly to bulge slightly but unattractively over the waistband. She was pint-sized, five feet three inches in stocking feet, but Will's assessment was that she needed to drop some pounds everywhere, even from her rounded soft face. Were there cheekbones under there? She wasn't the kind of hard-body grad Quantico typically spit out. He wondered how she'd passed muster at the academy's Physical Training Unit. They busted it down there and didn't cut the gals any slack. Admittedly, she wasn't unattractive. Her practical collar-length russet hair, makeup, and gloss were all put together well enough to complement a delicately shaped nose, pretty lips, and lively hazel eyes, and on another woman her cologne would have done the trick for him. It was her plaintive look that set him off. Could she really have become attached to a zero like Mueller?

"What are you going to do?" he said rhetorically.

"Is this a good time?"

"Look, Nancy, I've hardly cracked a box. Why don't you give me a couple of hours, later this afternoon maybe, and we can start talking?"

"That's okay, Will. I just wanted to let you know that even though I'm upset about John, I'm going to keep working my tail off on this case. We've never worked together but I've studied some of your cases and I know the contribution you've made to the field. I'm always looking for ways to improve, so your feedback's going to be extremely important to me..."

Will felt he had to nip this kind of wretched talk in the bud. "You a fan of
Seinfeld
?" he asked.

"The TV show?"

He nodded.

"I mean I'm aware of it," she replied suspiciously.

"The people who created the show made the ground rules for the characters, and those ground rules set it apart from all the other sitcoms. Do you want to know those rules? Because they're going to apply to you and me."

"Sure, Will!" she said brightly, apparently ready to absorb a lesson.

"The rules were--no learning and no hugging. I'll see you later, Nancy," he deadpanned.

As she stood there, looking like she was deciding whether to retreat or respond, they both heard quick light footsteps approaching, a woman trying to run in heels. "Sue alert," Will called out melodramatically. "Sounds like she's got something we don't have."

Around their shop, information endowed the bearer with temporary power, and Sue Sanchez seemed to get a jazzy rush from knowing something before anyone else.

"Good, you're both here," she said, shooing Nancy inside the cube. "There's been another one! Number seven, up in the Bronx." She was giddy, borderline juvenile. "Get up there before the Forty-fifth Precinct screws it up."

Will threw his arms into the air, exasperated. "Jesus, Susan, I don't know a goddamned thing about the first six yet. Gimme a break!"

Bang. Nancy chimed in brightly, "Hey, just pretend this is number one! No biggee! Anyway, I'll catch you up on the way."

"Like I said, Will," Sue said, cracking an evil grin, "she's a pistol."

Will picked up one of the department's standard-issue black Ford Explorers. He pulled away from the underground garage at 26 Liberty Plaza and navigated the one-ways until he was pointing north, heading up the FDR Drive in the fast lane. The car was detailed and running smooth, the traffic wasn't bad, and usually he enjoyed a nice run out of the office. If he'd been alone, he would have tuned in WFAN and satisfied his sports jones, but he wasn't. Nancy Lipinski was in the passenger seat, notebook in hand, lecturing him as they passed under the Roosevelt Island tramway, its gondola slowly gliding high above the choppy black waters of the East River.

She was as excited as a perv at a porn convention. This was her first serial murder case, the champagne of homicides, the defining moment in her prepubescent career. She pulled the assignment because she was Sue's pet and had worked with Mueller before. The two of them got along famously, Nancy ready and willing to fortify his brittle ego.
John, you're so smart! John, do you have a photographic memory? John, I wish I could conduct an interview like you.