Allison Brennan - Killing Fear

“Not at all, sir. Except-” He stopped.

“Except?”

“I let Frank run with the investigation. If I had been more concerned about the investigation than with Robin, I would have been sitting outside Glenn’s house the night Jessica Suarez was murdered.”

Causey didn’t say anything, and Will worried his honesty may have cost him the head position of the task force. “Will,” Causey said quietly, “I should have pulled Frank long before the Glenn case. If anyone is culpable for that girl being murdered, it’s me.”

“With all due respect, sir, I disagree-”

“I knew Frank had a drinking problem and I relied on you to carry him through retirement. The last thing I wanted to do was pull a once-fantastic cop and destroy his reputation. I’ve known Frank for a long time. We were in the Academy together.” Causey sighed, rubbed a hand over his face. “We also had politics to deal with seven years ago. Between Descario and the perceived reputation of the victims, we didn’t have the man power to devote to the case. And if the crime scene techs hadn’t fucked up the DNA evidence, who knows what would have happened?

“We’d like every case to run smoothly. To do our job, interview witnesses, process evidence, arrest a suspect, earn a conviction. But you know as well as I do that textbook perfect cases are just that-in textbooks. You’re a good cop, Will. Mistakes happen and, unfortunately, sometimes with fatal results. But it’s not all on you, or Frank, or me, or the crime lab. It’s on an imperfect system and the imperfect humans within it.”

“Thank you, sir,” Will said quietly. He’d rarely heard the chief utter more than two sentences together.

“The Feds will be here any minute. Prepare to brief them.”

Putting the conversation with Causey aside, Will reviewed the reports that had come in from the field. Nothing from Theodore Glenn himself in twenty-four hours, since he’d phoned Robin at her loft. No dead bodies, no sightings, nothing. Every patrol that came in at shift change reported to Will where they’d been, who they’d talked to, and all with the same conclusion: No one had seen the escaped convict.

They had two patrols following up full-time on tips from the hotline, which was ringing nonstop with “sightings” of the escaped convict. So far, none were credible, but they had to follow up on each and every call.

“Carina, anything come in from the patrol outside Glenn’s parents’ house?”

“No activity,” she said. “Mrs. Glenn brought them coffee and donuts this morning.”

“He’s not going home. He has no beef with his parents, and he already got what he needed from them: his sister’s address.”

The main bull pen doors swung open and Chief Causey walked in with a Suit, male, in his mid-to-late forties. The Fed was under six feet tall, with the face of a character-the kind of cop who in the movies always played the wise old mentor or sidekick. Someone you’d have fun shooting the breeze with over beers at the bar.

Causey walked over to Will’s desk and introduced the Fed as Special Agent Hans Vigo out of Quantico.

“Quantico?” Will asked. “You’re a long way from home.”

“I go where I’m needed,” Vigo said with a half smile that reminded Will of a leaner Columbo.

Causey said, “Hooper is heading the task force. He worked the case seven years ago, has a good grasp on Glenn.”

Vigo nodded. “Good you’re still here. I’m ready when you are.”

“You in town for a while?”

“However long I can be of help.”

Will pulled in Officer Diaz, who was coordinating the patrols, Chief Causey, and Carina. They met in the makeshift task-force command center.

“To save some time,” Vigo said, “I read the past case files. Your chief was kind enough to fax them to me yesterday so I could review them on the plane, as well as the current reports.”

“Then there’s nothing you don’t know,” Will said. “Glenn has been quiet for the last twenty-four hours. You’re a profiler, right?”

“Correct.”

“What I want to know is what he plans on doing next.”

“I’m a criminal profiler, not a psychic. If you don’t mind, I’d like to listen to the conversation from yesterday-” Vigo glanced at the file in front of him. “The conversation between Theodore Glenn and Robin McKenna.”

Will put the CD in a player and they all listened. Hearing Robin’s strained voice again, and Glenn’s taunting, angered him and made him doubly glad he’d gone to Mario Medina the night before. Robin didn’t have a death wish, but she was far more concerned about everyone else’s safety than she was about her own.

“We’ve warned everyone we can,” Will said, “but that doesn’t mean they’ll be on guard 24/7. The crime lab, the cops working the case, the prosecution, are all on high alert. We’ve contacted the jurors and everyone else who testified. He’s already taken out two people close to the investigation, his own sister, who testified against him, and my former partner.” Will paused. “The prosecution’s primary witness, Robin McKenna, has hired additional security for her business, and we’ve increased patrols in that neighborhood. We’re still tracking down other witnesses.”

Will glanced at Vigo. “You have something new?”

The Fed nodded. “You’ve gone above and beyond. If all jurisdictions were as organized as this one, maybe more than three convicts would be back in custody.”

“Wasn’t that the work of some vigilante?” Diaz asked.

Vigo said, “We think one of the other escapees has been tracking the men and restraining them.”

Causey asked, “A convict is beating up the others? I thought that was media grandstanding. We didn’t hear anything formal about it.”

“It’s not something we’re advertising. Because when we get the guy back behind bars, we don’t want the prison population knowing that he was once a cop. As it is, we’ll probably have to move him and put him in isolation when he’s found, or send him to a federal penitentiary.”

The news sunk in, that one of their own had turned. Yet hadn’t turned so far that he condoned the escape of convicted murderers.

“What do you have on Glenn?” Will asked.

“We’ve been working with the prison authority on seizing all personal property of the escaped convicts,” Vigo said. “We have their journals, their books, their letters. We have sent in a computer expert to pull down all e-mail communication. Prisoners are not allowed e-mail communication, but we know they find ways to access the Internet. We can get everything except privileged communication with their attorneys, but we have a legal team working on that with a federal judge.”

Vigo tilted one side of his mouth up. “We may get in a little hot water for that one, but at this point these men have already given up their rights. Theodore Glenn is not the only one who has killed since the escape. A gang of four are on a robbery spree in San Francisco. Two clerks are dead. You’d think in a city that geographically small we could get a handle on them-” Vigo stopped himself. “But right now we have info on Glenn that can benefit you and I’ll help in any way I can.”

Will appreciated that Vigo didn’t force himself into the case. At this point, he would ask for all the help he could get.

“Give it to me,” he said.

“I work in the Investigative Support Unit, which basically means that I think like the bad guy. I try to figure out his next move. To do that, I look at his past. If you understand why a killer did something, you can predict what he will do in the future.

“I don’t need to tell you all who Theodore Glenn is. You know he’s a borderline genius corporate attorney who, before he turned to murder, received intense thrills through extreme sports-things like skydiving and BASE jumping. I’ve read his transcripts, and concur with what Detective Hooper said on the stand: Glenn is a sociopath with no ability to feel remorse for his actions. He will kill again if it gets him what he wants.