The FBI Thrillers Collection (150 page)

To Savich’s surprise, Elsa said, “Jon was in the past. And yet he’s here now. Isn’t that strange?”

Savich saw Mr. Bender flinch, heard him say, “I’m not going anywhere,” but Savich had no idea if she understood his words.

“We have children ourselves, Agent Savich, Jon and I. But I can’t talk about what they did to me, I simply can’t.”

“I don’t need you to, Elsa, although I’m convinced it would help you.”

Elsa said, “The fact is, I’ve remembered almost all of it.” She heard her husband’s quick indrawn breath, but didn’t pause. “The girl Claudia called him her sweet pickle. He was a filthy old man with a hacking cough. She tied my hands behind my back in that dirty old van, told me that he wanted to see her with a woman and that he picked me because she’d told him I looked like her, like I could be her mama and wasn’t that the coolest thing? Then he told her to pretend she was diddling her own mama. The old man blindfolded me and then the girl started.” She began to cry quietly. She swallowed hard and whispered, “The oddest thing is that I didn’t feel the pain in my eyes until later, in the emergency room.”

“You were in shock, a good thing.”

“I suppose it was.” She lifted her glasses only enough to lightly daub the edge of a monogrammed white handkerchief to her eyes. She straightened her glasses again and said, “It doesn’t hurt so much anymore when I cry.”

Jon Bender said, “Tell them about the farmer, Elsa.”

“The farmer who found me. He visited me in the hospital every single day, brought me roses. He’d sit by my bed and tell me about how he grows barley and oats. Jon came late that night, and three days later, he brought me back here, to our old home, only I can’t see what they’ve done to it since I left.”

“Ask him, Elsa. Simply ask him.”

Jon Bender looked like he wanted to burst into tears. He said, “I didn’t do anything, Elsa.”

“Good.” For the first time she smiled a little. “I hate fussy things. I’m glad you left it clean.” She let Savich ask her questions for several minutes and gave the best description she could of Moses and Claudia. She agreed to talk to a sketch artist later in the day. She told Savich about how Claudia did indeed look like her daughter. She smiled toward her ex-husband. “Jon, give them that photo of Annie throwing the beach ball. Remember, I sent you a duplicate? The resemblance is really quite striking.”

While Mr. Bender was gone, she said, “Tell me more about your boy, Mr. Savich.” Her hand still rested comfortably between his.

“His name is Sean, and he’s a pistol.” He watched her face as he told her about Sean’s birthday party, where Savich’s sister Lily chased around twenty small children, her feet in gigantic clown shoes. He told her how Sean loved to barrel at him the moment he walked through the front door every evening. Hearing this, she was smiling, breathing easily.

Jon Bender broke in when he returned. “I’ve been trying to talk Elsa into giving me another chance, Agent Savich.”

The hand in Savich’s stiffened a bit, then relaxed. She wasn’t ready to let go of him yet, and that was fine.

“I’ve promised her over and over I won’t ever be an ass-hole again.”

And glory of glories, Elsa Bender laughed. She looked up in the direction of her ex-husband’s voice. “Perhaps you won’t,” she said. “The kids seem to think you won’t. Perhaps.”

Sherlock looked closely at Jon Bender’s face, studied his eyes as he looked at Elsa. “You know what, Elsa? I think this guy of yours has learned what’s important to him.”

Ten minutes later, Savich clasped Elsa’s hands in both of his and pulled her slowly to her feet, letting the afghan pool at her feet. She wasn’t quite steady.

He said, “You’re going to be fine, Elsa. Jon is going to bundle you up and take you for a nice walk, maybe make some hot chocolate when you get back. It’ll put color back in your cheeks.”

IT WAS NEARLY nine o’clock Wednesday night when Savich knocked on Sheriff Noble’s front door. They heard Brewster’s big-dog bark, footsteps running to the front door before it was flung open, Rob and Rafe elbowing each other to be front and center.

“Hello, Special Agent Savich. Hello, Special Agent Sherlock. Did you shoot anyone today?”

“Oh yes,” Sherlock said immediately. “It was all blood and gore. Took me forever to wash it all off.”

“Dude! Really, tell us everything you did. Not just the boring stuff like Dad does, but the cool stuff?”

Savich smiled for the first time since leaving Washington hours before. He hugged both boys quickly, breathing in their excitement, their teenage love of anything gruesome. In ten years or so would Sean be asking the same things?

Rob said, “We waited dinner for you until Dad said he was going to gnaw on his elbows if he didn’t eat. We had bouillabaisse, Ms. McCutcheon brought it over because she knows Dad likes it. It was okay if you like fish.”

“Dillon, come on in the living room,” Ruth called out, before appearing in the doorway, Dix at her shoulder. “We’ve got some delicious tea, some scones that Millie of Millie’s Deli made herself, just for the Feds, and Dix and I had something really interesting happen today, but never mind that just now. Boys, bring in the Federal agents and let’s eat.”

“So how was your day?” Dix asked as he handed out scones.

Sherlock smiled as she took a cup of tea from Ruth. “Actually, our afternoon was great. We took Sean out to build a snowman, poured hot chocolate down his gullet, and listened to him talk nonstop about his grandmother’s new puppy.” She rolled her eyes. “I have a feeling there’ll be barking in our house very soon now.”

“Dogs are good,” Dix said as he gave Brewster a pat. “This little guy keeps my neck warm at night.”

Rob and Rafe finally went off to bed after nearly an hour and four more scones, Savich and Sherlock having filled their ears with horrifying, thoroughly fictional tales of mayhem in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Dix waited another couple of minutes until he was sure it was quiet upstairs, then nodded. “Okay, they’re down for the count. Tell us what really happened in Philadelphia. Could that poor woman tell you anything about Moses Grace and Claudia?”

Savich said, “Yeah, she did. Her name’s Elsa Bender. She’s going to be all right. I mean, I think the future looks pretty good for her.” Savich looked over at Dix and Ruth, who were sitting on the sofa opposite him and Sherlock, Brewster sleeping between them. He pulled a photo out of his shirt pocket. “This is the Bender daughter, Annie. She’s seventeen in the photo—tall, slender, nearly white-blond hair, big blue eyes. Elsa Bender says she looks like Claudia.”

Ruth studied the photo. “She looks like a cheerleader whose biggest problem is deciding who to go out with after the football game on Saturday night. You’ve already got this photo out all around the Beltway, haven’t you, Dillon?”

“Oh yeah.”

Sherlock said, “Elsa said Moses Grace is as old as he sounds, at least seventy. His face is all leathery from too much sun, which suggests he could have spent a good deal of his life on a farm, an oil rig, a chain gang—take your pick. Elsa said he’s lean and wiry, but he didn’t look fit, he looked sort of gray. She said Claudia’s voice was sweet one minute, shrill the next, with a midwestern accent. As for Moses, we’ve heard his deep drawl, the excessive bad grammar that simply doesn’t feel right. Elsa also said he had a hacking cough, and was always spitting up. That was two months ago. He sounds much worse now.”

Dix sat forward, cuddling Brewster in his arms. “You had a productive day—”

Ruth cut in, the enthusiasm bubbling out of her. “But maybe not as exciting as ours. You’re going to love this. I’ll start you off with Ginger Stanford, and then move on to lunch with Chappy and the little rascals.”

“Then,” Dix said, “our
pièce de résistance
—Helen Rafferty.”

“ . . . WHEN WE GOT to Stanislaus, we took Helen Rafferty into the employee lounge. Ruth didn’t give her a chance to settle, to get herself ready. She asked her point-blank about Dr. Holcombe and Erin Bushnell.”

Ruth smoothly took up the tale, as if they’d worked as a team for a very long time. “She actually started crying, and only got ahold of herself after I reminded her how important it all is, now that Erin is dead.”

Dix said, “After she dried her eyes, the first thing she did was ask us if we’d like some coffee. I said yes to give Helen some time to collect herself.”

Ruth said, “She apologized to Dix because she knew Dr. Holcombe was his uncle, but she had thought about it, and had to let it out. The bottom line is, Helen Rafferty admitted she and Dr. Holcombe—that’s how she always referred to him—were lovers for perhaps three months about five years ago. She said it was in the summer, when there weren’t many students around. He broke it off, told her that being with her drained him. You’re going to like this—he said being with her had been sort of like attaching himself to an ancient blessing that had lost its power over the years, and now it was suffocating him and he couldn’t continue to be intimate with her. Fact was, she told us, Dr. Holcombe had this compulsion—she’d known about it since before their affair. He’d slept with a number of very talented young women at Stanislaus over the years, and he seemed not to want to stop. She confronted him with it, and he said he supposed that deep inside his spirit he needed their nourishment, their innocent love of music and life, or he couldn’t create, couldn’t compose his own music, didn’t think he could go on at all. She smiled a little and said she knows what that sounds like, but that he believed it, she was sure of that.

“Helen still thinks of him as a great man with a sickness, a harmless infirmity, not an old lech. So she bought into it. Because she had to, I guess, because she still loves him and admires him tremendously. She said Erin Bushnell was just another girl in a steady stream of talented young students who found themselves ministering to Dr. Holcombe’s spiritual needs. Again, her words.”

Dix sat forward on the sofa, clasped his hands between his knees. “Then she frowned, said maybe she was wrong, maybe Dr. Holcombe had felt more about Erin than about the others. It was creepy, guys, the way she spoke of him and his philandering, as if it was all right as long as it inspired Uncle Gordon’s music. She forgave all of it.”

Ruth picked up the story. “She said Dr. Holcombe had incredible energy, he composed the most amazing music in the past few months. But now, she said, he is destroyed, a shell of himself, and she is very worried about him. I mentioned he didn’t seem all that destroyed when we told him about Erin’s murder, and she told us he would never want to burden others with his pain.” Ruth snorted.

Sherlock asked Dix, “Did you get the names of the other young girls who ‘ministered’ to Dr. Holcombe over the years?”

“Whoa—” Dix pulled out his notebook, thumbed through the pages. “Okay, over the period of time that Helen has worked for Dr. Holcombe—fourteen years, four months—she thought he had affairs with about eight female students—that is in addition to Helen—both graduate students and undergraduates. I believe that would be up to the advanced age of twenty-three or -four. She gave me some of the names—none of them are at Stanislaus anymore—and said she’d look up the rest.”

Ruth marveled aloud, “Imagine, a man my father’s age believing I was too old to sleep with. She said that when Dr. Holcombe ‘disengaged’—her word—from a student, they didn’t leave Stanislaus, except when they graduated. They all seemed happy to remain, somehow simply taking it as part of their educational experience. Maybe they even enjoyed themselves, knowing they had made the great man shine again, who knows?”

Savich said slowly, “It would seem Dr. Holcombe had very good judgment about whom to pick, an excellent talent for self-preservation. It must also have helped over the years that as director of Stanislaus, he had great influence over their professional futures. I’m surprised other people in the school didn’t know about Dr. Holcombe’s predilections, then certainly there would be gossip, some bad feeling from students who couldn’t compete, maybe even a bit of huff from colleagues who found his behavior inappropriate.”

Ruth said, “Helen told us she actually thought no one except the girls involved over the years knew about it. She certainly never heard any rumors.”

Savich shook his head. “That’s hard to believe. Usually if more than two people know about something illicit, particularly something as juicy as this, it starts coming back to them in embarrassing detail.”

“Helen told us she herself had helped him quite a bit to protect his privacy,” Ruth said. “Translate that to ‘helped him keep his dirty little secret.’ ”

“He lives alone,” Dix said. “And I know he’s owned a place outside of town for many years, converted it into a studio. He may have spent time with them there. And another thing: If Chappy were aware of this, every single soul within a hundred miles would know about it. And the way Chappy would tell it, his brother wouldn’t have had a chance of staying on at Stanislaus. Maybe some of the students know, some of the professors, but no one outside Stanislaus.”

“He must be the smoothest talker around,” Sherlock said. “I hope all those other girls are all right.”

“Yes,” Dix said, “we wondered that, too. We already located two of them, and they’re fine. As soon as we get the rest of the list, we’ll track them all down.”

Ruth said, “We asked Helen not to speak to anyone about our conversation, particularly Dr. Holcombe. We asked her for Dr. Holcombe’s schedule on Friday, and when she last saw Erin. At that point her eyes nearly bugged out of her head—she realized that we might be thinking he killed Erin Bushnell. She started babbling, saying over and over he didn’t have that kind of illness. Dear Dr. Holcombe wouldn’t even bang down hard on a piano key, there was no way he’d hurt anyone, particularly a Stanislaus student. She was sure of that, only told us all this because she didn’t want to lie to the police, and it was probably better for Dr. Holcombe that it come out right away. She knew he didn’t tell us when we talked to him on Monday, and assumed he hadn’t even thought of it because he was so distraught. Then she went on with this sappy spiel about how Dr. Holcombe’s precious students play all over the world, and inspire beauty and understanding, maybe even world peace.”