23

Half an hour later, they were ready. They had read the files on the two old murders, asked more questions, and prepared an approach. Kenzie would lead off and when she hit a wall or got tired, Scott would come in. Scott cautioned her, “He’s shackled and cuffed to the chain on his waist. But he’s got nothing to lose, so watch it. Crow and I will be right outside.”

“OK.” Kenzie straightened her suit jacket, brushed a stray hair out of her eyes, and pushed open the door to the interview room.

Immediately the smell of stale tobacco and unwashed skin hit her. The odor seemed almost feral.

When the prisoner saw her, he grinned and began rhythmically clanging the waist chain his cuffs were secured to. “Well, lookee what they sent me!” he said in a rough, raspy voice. “Lookee, lookee.” His graying hair looked scruffy and unkempt. He had a two- or three-day beard and he was missing an eye tooth on the right side. His creased skin held a large scar from his eyebrow down across his temple.

But it was his eyes that nearly did Kenzie in. They were blue, light ice blue, and when he fixed them on her, his gaze assaulted her. It felt like he was undressing her. Her skin crawled.

Resolutely, she sat down across from him and put a file folder on the table in front of her. The point of the interview was to find out if Lee Waller had abducted Zoe Grable. To do so, she needed him to open up.

If Waller was a psychopath, or had psychopathic tendencies, he would have no conscience. Appeals to a sense of fair play, or justice, or compassion for the survivors would go nowhere. He would also be quite narcissistic. Appeals to his ego, to his grandiose sense of self, might work. She had talked Scott into taking that approach.

“Mr. Waller,” she said, staring right into those pale blue eyes, “you are amazing.”

An expression of surprise passed momentarily over his face, then Waller started laughing the wheezy, phlegmy laugh of a man who’d spent over half his life smoking. “How’d you guess?”

“Five years we’ve been looking for the person who killed little Wendy Williams. Seven for Catherine Jones. We’re usually pretty good at finding people . . . how’d you keep us from identifying you?”

“What do you do for the Bureau?” he asked.

“I’m an agent.”

“I never did think much of women in that job.”

“I study people like you. Not very many can do what you did.”

“I guess not.”

“Talk to me for a minute about Catherine Jones. Was she your first victim?” Under the table, Kenzie’s knee shook. Waller looked at her as if he was inspecting her, or recalling that crime and thinking of her along with it. It gave her the creeps. “What about Catherine Jones, Mr. Waller?”

“Lemme see, which one was she?”

Kenzie reminded him of a couple of details and put a photo of the dead child in front of him. “How did you do that?” she asked him with intense interest.

Waller began talking about his crime, step-by-step recounting the details, the same way some people talk about their vacations. He seemed to relish the memories, and Kenzie knew he had gone over this many, many times in his own mind in the intervening years. Why he had chosen that girl; how he had gotten into the house; the tools he’d brought with him; and most disturbing, the pleasure he’d taken in killing her.

Then he started again, with Wendy Williams.

All the time Waller talked, Kenzie noticed his arms and shoulders moving. She couldn’t see his hands, but she could tell the man was letting off tension by tugging at his cuffs. Sometimes she could hear the chain rattling as he moved.

So many of the details of both crimes fit Zoe’s case: the chloroform, the entry into the house, the shaving of their heads. But why would Waller pick a house in Georgetown? Most of them were alarmed. Had he known only the nanny would be there with Zoe? And so many of the indicators in the Grable case pointed to someone trying to get at Grable. Did Waller have any reason to do that? Did he even know Grable? Had he worked on their house?

For the next hour, Kenzie asked questions. Waller denied taking Zoe, denied even being in Georgetown. “I ain’t been down there in twenty, thirty years,” he said.

Kenzie moved the interview a different direction, intending to come back to Zoe from a different angle. Waller explained some of his methodology to Kenzie, sending cold chills down her spine.“I like to shave their heads, you know? Makes ’em crazy. And then . . .” He laughed hoarsely and began rattling his chains again. Then, suddenly, his right arm flew back, and a look of startled surprise filled Waller’s face.

Grinning, he held up his hand. He’d slipped the cuff.

Crow cursed. He moved toward the door of the interview room.

“Hold it!” Scott commanded, reaching out and grabbing Crow’s arm. “Wait. Get the chief.” Crow stared at him like he was crazy.

Adrenaline poured through Kenzie when she saw Waller’s freed hand and the maniacal look on his face. He stared at Kenzie, and smiled, and his smile became a leer.

Kenzie looked into his eyes and realized how empty they looked, like a shark’s eyes—devoid of expression, vacant. It was like looking straight into the Abyss. A loud buzzing began in her ears. Her throat tightened. Somehow, she knew from his expression exactly what he was thinking. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and fear, cold as steel, gripped her.

Her mind raced. Could Waller sense fear?

Just then, the chief and two detectives walked into the interview room. “All right, Waller, let’s stop playing games,” the chief said.

“Are you all right?” Scott asked Kenzie as she emerged.

“Fine, except for my heart, which stopped beating a couple of minutes ago.” She shook her head. “If I believed in demons, I’d say I was just in a room with one.” Kenzie shivered involuntarily.

“I thought Crow would jump right through the window. He had to go outside to cool off.” Scott ran his hand through his hair. “What did you think?”

“Waller’s all over the map. Some of the methodology fits but none of the linguistics does. He’s very bright, despite the way he talks, but Scott, he’s weird.”

The police chief appeared down the hall and called Scott. Kenzie stood still, trying to recover. Crow suddenly appeared beside her. “What did you think?” she asked him.

He didn’t answer her at first. She could see the tendons in his neck were as tight as bowstrings. He glanced around as if making sure they were alone. He took a deep breath. “There are witches among the Diné,” he said quietly, “evil people with empty eyes. People who my grandfather would say have given themselves over. I’ve seen the same thing myself. This man,” he said, nodding toward where Waller had been sitting, “is evil.”

Kenzie shivered again.

Ten minutes later, Scott, Kenzie, Crow, and the chief met to discuss their progress. “Honestly,” Kenzie said, “I don’t think Waller is the man who took Zoe.”

“What makes you say that?” the chief asked.

Kenzie explained her psycholinguistic analysis of the ransom note, and how the language and the profile it suggested didn’t fit Waller. Midway through her explanation, she saw the chief’s eyes glaze over—he wasn’t buying it.

She turned to Scott. “I want to pursue the other lead.” By that, she meant Grayson Chambers, but she didn’t want to reveal his name.

Scott understood. “Have you called Alicia? Has there been any other Internet activity?”

Kenzie grimaced. “No. I checked with her a few minutes ago.”

“So it all stopped right about the time the police picked up Waller.”

She had to admit that it had.

“And he’s pretty facile with computers. More facile than his occupation might suggest,” Scott added.

“He’s got three computers, loaded with porn, plus an iPod, wireless network, the whole bit,” the chief said.

Crow had been standing with his back to the group, staring out of the window. He turned around. “I think you should let her go back,” he said to Scott. “I’ll stay with you. Let her go.”

Scott looked at him curiously. “What are you thinking?”

“She knows what she’s talking about. Waller’s not the guy. Let her go. You and I can stay and break him down.”

Kenzie studied Crow. He looked tense. Was he buying the profile she’d created or simply protecting her?

“I don’t know how much more support we can give you,” the chief said, looking at his watch. “Overtime is killing us.”

“If we need another agent, we can bring one in,” Crow retorted.

Scott’s cell phone rang. He looked at the number and said, “Hold on.” Standing up and moving to the edge of the room, he spoke quickly, quietly, and then clicked the phone off with authority. He looked straight at Kenzie. “Grable’s complaining to the director. He doesn’t believe the other lead is valid.”

Kenzie sighed with exasperation. “It’s ridiculous to allow him to affect the course of an investigation, even if he is a senator.”

Scott frowned.

An officer opened the door of the room, came in, and spoke quietly to the chief, who then turned to the group and said, “Waller wants to show Kenzie something near his house.”

“Waller wants a field trip,” Crow said.

Scott took a deep breath. “He’s not going to call the shots. Let’s you and I go, Crow, and Kenzie, you go on back. Pursue whatever you want to pursue. Finding Zoe is more important than placating Grable. And if this turns out to be a dead end, we won’t have invested all our resources here.”

All the way back to Grable’s house, Kenzie rolled over the evidence for her premise in her mind. Chambers had motive: To avenge what was in his mind poor treatment by the senator. He had means: He’d been in the third-floor bedroom, knew Zoe, and knew how to observe the goings-on in the house. And he had opportunity: Surely, he would know about Mrs. Grable’s mah-jongg night.

But where was Grayson Chambers now? Kenzie had to answer that question. More specifically, where was he the night Zoe was abducted? But a deeper, unstated question knotted her stomach: Would her understanding of psycholinguistics and her application of it in this case be accurate? Or would her work just give the naysayers, from her boss on down, more evidence it was voodoo science?

Grable had said Chambers taught at some college in California. So, Kenzie started with Pepperdine University in Malibu, and worked her way up the coast to U.C.-Santa Barbara, checking faculty lists on websites and making phone calls. No one had heard of a Grayson Chambers. She thought perhaps he may have published an academic paper, so she searched for one but found nothing. She got other agents working on accessing California driver’s license records and other public information—even newspaper archives. Then she went back and called colleges north of Santa Barbara and inland toward the San Joaquin Valley.

Still empty-handed, she called the senator’s secretary. “Did he have his doctorate?” she asked Louise.

“I don’t think so,” she responded. “Just a masters. As far as I know.” She chuckled. “I’m sure I would have heard about every step of his progress if he’d been working on a doctorate.”

Masters only. If that were the case, he’d probably be teaching at a community college, Kenzie reasoned. So she began calling all she could find in California, starting with the area north of L.A. “There are an awful lot of community colleges in California,” she muttered as call after call produced nothing. One hour went by, then two.

Frustrated, Kenzie turned another direction. She Googled KickerG, Chambers’s online screen name. And she got two hundred thirty-seven hits.

“Awesome,” she said.

“What did you find?” Alicia asked. They were in the Grables’ dining room. Alicia was monitoring the High Stakes message board, while Kenzie searched for information on Chambers.

“ ‘KickerG’ is the screen name Grayson Chambers used for political blogs,” she explained, keeping her voice low. No sense running the risk of having Grable hear her suspicions about Chambers. He and his wife were upstairs, but Kenzie wasn’t taking any chances. “I’ve got two hundred thirty-seven hits on that name on Google.”

“All right!”

“I want to read through these as fast as I can,” Kenzie said. “I want to see if I can find any correlations, any patterns.” She wiped her hands on the tactical pants she’d changed back into. “Will you back me up on this? Google KickerG, and make a file of everything he’s posted.”

“Will do.”

“And then e-mail it to me and print it. Be sure you have URLs, times . . . everything we’d need to get back to each posting.”

“Grayson, I have to go to the store! Look at this refrigerator! It’s empty!” Sandy motioned toward the open door.

She stood toe-to-toe with him and he didn’t like that. He didn’t like being challenged, especially by a woman. This wasn’t her plan. It wasn’t her house. And it certainly wasn’t her money soon to be sitting in an offshore bank.

Grayson hit the door so that it slammed shut. Eyes glaring, he snapped at her. “You will do as I say, or I swear . . .”

“But Gray, we need the food! Just let me go. I’ll be real quick. Then you can have the car and go anywhere you want. C’mon,” her voice softened. “Gray, honey. If you leave now, me and Zoe, we’re gonna get hungry.”

He backed down. He sure didn’t want her doing something stupid, like ordering out for pizza. Over at the kitchen table, Zoe sat on a chair. She seemed to be studying them, her hand to her chin. Good grief. She looked like her old man.

Grayson turned back to Sandy. “All right. Go. You have one hour.”

“I’ll need money.”

He swore and pulled two fifty-dollar bills out of his wallet and handed them to her. “Take her with you,” he said, nodding toward Zoe.

Sandy remained very quiet.

“What?” he prompted.

“Last time? When we went to the mall? I had a hard time with her. She kept telling everybody her name: Zoe.”

“What? What?” Rage poured through him. His blood pounded in his head and his anger felt like a white heat in his body. He pointed his finger in Sandy’s face. “Can’t you control her? What’s the matter with you?” He stood very close to her, close enough to see the fear in her eyes and something in him liked that. “If you blow this, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .” And then he did something he’d never done in his whole life. His hand flung out, and he slapped her, slapped her hard across the face.

“Oh!” she said, reacting to the blow. When she looked back up at him, she had tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she whimpered. A red handprint marked her cheek.

“You go,” he hissed, “and get back here pronto. You understand? ASAP.” He threw his car keys down on the floor. Sandy picked them up, and scurried out of the door.

An odd mixture of anger and satisfaction filled Grayson. He’d stayed in control of the situation. He’d kept that woman in her place. He’d made his point. He turned and looked at Zoe. The little girl stared at him, those blue eyes, so like the senator’s, fixed on his face.

And suddenly, he felt helpless again. He raced to the door and yelled out, “What does she like to do?” His question unanswered, he came back inside. “Hey, want to watch some TV?” he asked Zoe.

“No.”

“Want to play with your toys?”

“No.”

“Want to read a book?”

“No.”

The kid was a brat. “What do you want to do?”

“See my daddy.”

“You will. In a while.”

“You stole-ed me,” she said, “and I hate you.”

He flew into a rage. “What are you talking about?”

“My daddy’s gonna get you.”

“He told me to take care of you!”

“No. You stole-ed me.”

Grayson looked around for a distraction. He threw some paper at her. “Here. Draw.” And he left the room.

When he peeked in a few minutes later, the little girl had her head down, focused on the paper, drawing. Great. Now he could do what he wanted.

He went out to the living room, booted up his laptop, and started working on blog entries. He couldn’t access the Internet, but he could write offline and copy and paste it later. Most people on the Hill still weren’t getting it. They just didn’t understand politics! Amazing that the most powerful country in the world had such an incompetent legislature. They just weren’t grasping the issues correctly. He had his arguments ready. He rubbed his hands together like a baseball player about to grip the bat. He still had game. And he would let people on the Hill know it.

Grayson got lost in his work. When he looked up fifteen or twenty minutes later, Zoe had left the kitchen and was tiptoeing through the living room. When she saw him, she shrank back against the wall. “I got to go to the bathroom,” she said.

“Well, go on!” he responded. What was he, her nanny? She disappeared down the hall.

Much later, he realized he hadn’t seen her come out. Much, much later he realized it probably wasn’t a good idea to leave her alone. Much, much, much later he got up to find her.