James Patterson - Private

“Something else you should both know,” Nora went on. “Mr. Fitzhugh is in the hospital under police protection. He hasn’t seen a lawyer, but we’ve explained to him what we’ve just explained to Mr. Crocker. Ms. Hunt, you know the drill.

“You can take a chance with a jury. Or. You have a very small window of time to get ahead of this before Mr. Fitzhugh flips on your client and makes his own deal.”

“I saw Mr. Fitzhugh this morning at the hospital,” Justine said. “He understands that picking up a fifteen-year-old girl with intent to kill isn’t going to play well with a jury.

“Professionally speaking, I don’t think Mr. Fitzhugh has the stomach to wait on death row for the needle. He’s a sensitive and very logical person. And logically, that’s too much stress for him. Frankly, he’s on the verge of cracking wide open. If he hasn’t already.”

Justine felt a little giddiness lifting her voice, but it didn’t matter, so she went on. “The district attorney wants to try both of you,” Justine said to Crocker. “But Michael Fescoe, my good friend and chief of police, wants to keep things simple. The first confession wins.

“So you decide,” Justine said, clasping her hands on the table in front of her. “Who gets life? Who gets death? Right now, it’s up to you, Rude.”

Justine felt wired and almost high as she left her office for the meeting at city hall. She touched up her lipstick, took the elevator down to the street, and got into the backseat of the fleet car.

Jack was at the wheel, Cruz in the passenger seat.

“You okay, Justine?” Cruz asked her.

“Yeah. Why do you ask? Because the mayor wants to see us now and didn’t say why? Or because my brain has been permanently polluted by a serial killer?”

“Tell him, Justine,” Jack said with a big smile. “I haven’t had a chance.”

Cruz turned his head and grinned at her. “Yeah, Justine, tell me everything.”

“So okay. After Crocker fires his attorney, he tells us about killing Wendy Borman in this grandiose, halfway laughing, private-school voice of his.

“Here’s a quote, Emilio,” Justine went on. “‘It was a game, and I want credit. Why else would I have done all this planning and, you know, execution?’ ”

Cruz whistled. “You’ve got to be kidding me. He actually said that?”

“He was shooting for the top slot,” Jack said. “Or the bottom-depends on how you look at it.”

“Exactly. ‘Rude’ wants to be known as the most atrocious piece-of-crap serial killer in his ‘age bracket’ in the history of LA,” Justine said.

“Like it or not, I guess he’s going to have to share that honor with Fitzhugh. As for the fourteen victims we knew about? Crocker hints maybe there are more. He may even have some information for us on Jason Pilser’s so-called suicide. Then he asks to speak to the DA.”

Jack picked up the story from there. Justine put her head back and closed her eyes as Jack told Cruz that Bobby Petino had made a deal with Crocker: no death penalty for a full confession to the other killings, whatever number there were.

After that, Bobby had left the interrogation room as cool as ice. He didn’t care why the kid was a psycho-killer.

But Justine had to understand why these privileged kids had become monsters. Crocker and Fitzhugh reminded Justine of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, another pair of brilliant teenagers who killed a schoolmate in the early 1900s, to see if they could get away with it. Smart as they thought they were, they made a rookie mistake and were sent to prison for life. It came out later that those boys had had an acted-out but unacknowledged homosexual attachment.

Crocker and Fitzhugh had tortured their female victims, but none of the girls had been sexually assaulted. Were Crocker and Fitzhugh Leopold and Loeb all over again?

There were more questions than answers about the nature of their psychoses, and many different bags to choose from: genetic predisposition, trauma, brain physiology, and the ever popular “who the hell knows, because we’re all different, right?”

As a potential witness against him, Justine couldn’t spend any more time with Crocker, but she wished she could. That reptile would have told her anything she wanted to know-as long as it was about him.

Jack pulled into the garage behind city hall, opened the door for Justine, and gave her a hand.

Justine got to her feet, lowered her sunglasses, and said, “I’m just warning you, Jack. If the mayor tries to kick our butts for roughing up those bastards, I’m gonna kick back.”

Mayor Thomas Hefferon was a wiry man with thick gray hair and a hanging left arm from an injury he’d taken in Desert Storm. Chief Fescoe, at a muscular six-three, looked like a bodyguard standing next to him, but Hefferon could handle himself just fine.

Hefferon motioned all of us-Justine, Cruz, Fescoe, Petino, Cronin, and myself-to join him at the glass conference table with its long view of the skyline.

He said, “I’m glad all of you could make it on such short notice. Chief Fescoe has news.”

Fescoe folded his hands on the table. “Eamon Fitzhugh made a deal with Bobby and confessed to his part in killing Wendy Borman. We’ve got his computer at the lab now. Turns out this sick SOB must have obsessive-compulsive disorder,” the police chief said. “He saved every file, every text message back to 2006. It’s going to take weeks to figure out the wireless eavesdropping program he used to bait the victims. That freak is kind of a genius, I’ve been told.”

Justine said, “That’s interesting, Mickey. Crocker thinks of himself as the genius. He calls Fitzhugh a tool.”

Cronin said, “Both of them are tools. So that’s it, huh? I get my life back after two years? Hey, now I don’t know what to do with myself.”

After the laughter stopped, Hefferon said, “You folks did a tremendous job. Chief, it took guts to bring Private in on the case. Jack, hope to see you again.

“Justine, Nora, all those hours, and years, more than paid off. You too, Emilio. I hear you scared the snot out of Fitzhugh. Fact is, LA is a safer place because of your dedication. Thank you.”

Damn, but that thanks felt good. Whatever brain chemical it released made my whole body happy. No amount of money could compare to the high of taking out the trash and slamming down the lid, knowing it was nailed shut for good.

We were sipping champagne and joking around as we had our pictures taken with the mayor, when my phone signaled me from my inside breast pocket.

It was a voice mail message transferred from my office phone and marked “urgent.” The caller was a Michael Donahue.

I knew the name but couldn’t place it-then it came to me like a punch to the face. Donahue was the owner of the Irish pub Colleen frequented.

I hit a button, listened to Donahue speaking gravely in his heavy Irish brogue. I replayed the message so I could be sure of what he had said.

“Jack. It’s bad. Colleen is at Glendale Memorial Hospital. Room four eleven. You need to come there quickly.”

I tore up the freeway north, heading toward the hospital.

I tried to reach Donahue, but my calls went straight to voice mail.

I was scared, preoccupied, and the exit came up too fast.

I twisted the wheel hard and lost control. The car fishtailed, came to a stop, and stalled out five inches from a concrete divider.

Horns honked as freeway traffic flashed by me at seventy. My hands shook as I restarted the engine and finally made it safely down the off-ramp. Jeez, I’d almost totaled my car, and maybe myself.