I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
—William Blake, “A Poison Tree”
Cat checked in at the office, found David Binder on the telephone. Seeing her, his eyebrows shot up. She could hear him hurry to get off of what was, from the sound of it, a personal call.
“Yeah, I’ll pick up something for dinner on the way home.”
He said nothing, listening to a response.
“You don’t have to cook. I’ll grab some takeout Chinese.”
Silence for a short while again.
“How does Pick Up Stix sound? All right then. It’s settled. I’ll be home around seven.” He blushed, glancing Cat’s way. “I love you too,” he whispered into the receiver and hung up. “Sorry about that, recently married. You know how that goes. Can’t stand it when I’m gone, can’t wait for me to get back. Calls the office five times a day. All the guys do around here is give me sh—” David caught himself. “Uh, I mean, grief about it. They call me the newlywed, how do you like that?”
“It’s all right. My life was once like that.” Saying it, Cat realized it had been like this for her a long time ago. It had been a long time since she let anyone get inside her head, much less her heart.
Now the only object of her affection was Joey. As tired as she had been last night, she called him. He had been half asleep, with the three-hour time difference, almost midnight his time, but he had still managed to relay an interesting story about a lizard he had caught, named Charlie. Cat told him that she would love to meet Charlie when she returned home, though at this point she didn’t know when that might be. With the lack of physical evidence, a shortage of fingerprints, bodies turning up, it was likely she would be here for a long time. Nevertheless, she assured Joey that Mom would be home soon.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she apologized, only now realizing she’d been staring into space. “Have we checked to see if there’s a pattern to these cases? Do they correlate with anything from any other offices? Maybe this guy is more than what he seems… more than just after mutilating pretty girls with acid, in a city full of them.”
“Huh?” David gave her a blank stare. Maybe he was a rookie.
“Maybe this guy’s done this elsewhere. The most recent victim shows evidence of an escalation of his violence. Maybe there were others before Nancy Marsh, just not in Orange County. Perhaps there’s more to his MO than there appears.”
“You sure are obsessing over this, aren’t you?”
Cat could hardly control herself, feeling the blood rush to her head. She got down in the young agent’s face. “What I am doing is not obsessing. We have three unsolved murders here, all horrible, none of them giving us much of an answer. Certainly not giving us anything remotely concrete that could narrow the killer down from, let’s say, half the population of the United States,” she said, breathing hard, “and nothing so far that would make the FBI look good under the circumstances.”
“I’m sorry.”
“The police here have called us in to help them out. FBI’s got the best crime lab backed up by the best behavioral specialist in the world. We’ve got nothing to go on right now. You hear me? Nothing. How do you think it will look if we can’t stop this guy? You think it’ll be good for you? For me? Hell, if we can’t bring this guy in we might as well…we might as well apply for a job at the takeout Chinese place you were just jabbering about.”
“Shit.” David’s eyes were wide; he shook his head.
“Now why don’t you get up off your ass and make some calls. I want calls into the San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago, and Miami field offices. Find out if they’ve got anything similar to our case, any multiple slashing or stabbing of young women along the same lines. Also check if they have any cases involving acid, anything homicide or not. Then check on sulfuric acid in particular. Go back twenty years if you have to.”
He had picked up a pen and was scribbling the instructions on a pad.
“Check the same with Euronet and Interpol. Anything fitting this guy’s MO. Twenty years again.”
He took a long, aggravated breath, still scribbling.
“One other thing. I want a rundown of all the uses of sulfuric acid. I know you can get hold of it in medicine, but where else. Where could someone get it, and in what concentrations?”
His note-taking continued.
“You got that?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
“And while you’re at it, why don’t you pick up some lunch. I saw a decent looking Italian place across the street. Any good?”
“Yeah, but it ain’t cheap.”
Cat handed him forty bucks. “Don’t worry about it. I’m paying.”
His frown warmed up just a bit as he walked out.