James Patterson - Roses Are Red

"Goodnight," I finally said. "Get some sleep."

"Night, Alex." ," miss you, she mouthed.

"Be careful,” I said. "Be careful going home."

"I always am. You be careful."

I got home somehow and climbed upstairs to bed. I'd been working too hard for too long. Maybe I did need to quit the job. I hit the pillow hard. At about twenty past two I woke up. I'd been having a conversation with Frederic Szabo in my sleep. Then I talked to someone else from the investigation. Oh brother.

It was a bad, bad time to be awake. I usually don't remember my dreams, which probably means I'm repressing them but I woke with a clear and very disturbing image of the last couple of minutes.

The bank robber Tony Brophy had been describing his meeting with the Mastermind; how he'd been sitting behind bright lights and could only see a silhouette of the man. The silhouette he described didn't match the shape of Frederic Szabo's head. Not even close. He had talked about a big hooked nose and large ears. He'd mentioned the ears a couple of times. Big ears, like a car with both doors open. Szabo actually had small ears and a regular nose.

But there was someone else who came to mind! Jesus! I rolled over out of bed. I stared out my window until my mind was clearer and more focused. Then I called Betsey.

She picked up after the second ring. Her voice was a soft, muffled moan.

"It's Alex. Sorry to call you, to wake you. I think I know who the Mastermind is."

"Is this a bad dream?" she muttered.

"Oh, definitely," I told her. "This is our worst nightmare."

There were two Masterminds. It sounded crazy to me at first, but then I was almost sure it had to be the answer to so many things about the investigation that didn't make sense.

Szabo was one Mastermind, but he'd been given the name as a joke because he was too efficient, too perfect. There was someone else. A second Mastermind. This person wasn't a joke to his peers he had no peers; he didn't write hate mail from his room at a veterans hospital.

It took me a few minutes to convince Betsey that I might be right. Then we called Kyle Craig at Quantico. We went two-on-one until Kyle was convinced enough to let us move forward in a whole new and mind-boggling direction.

At eleven that morning, she and I boarded a plane at Boiling Field. Up until a few weeks earlier I'd never been to Boiling, but lately I seemed to be flying out of there more often than out of National, or Ronald Reagan as it's now called.

Just past one o'clock we landed at Palm Beach International Airport in south Florida. It was ninety-five degrees outside, humid as hell. I didn't care about the heat. I was excited, pumped-up about possibly solving the puzzle. We were met by FBI agents, but Betsey was in charge, even in Florida. The local agents deferred to her.

We got on 1-95 North once we left the small, very well-run airport. We proceeded about ten miles, then headed east toward the ocean and Singer Island. The sun looked like a lemon drop melting in bright blue skies.

I'd had time on the flight to think about my theory of two Masterminds. The more I thought it through, the surer I became that we were on the right track finally. A vivid image kept flashing through my mind.

It was a photograph of a therapist named Dr. Bernard Francis. The photo had been stapled to Francis's personnel file. Two other photos had been hanging on the walls of Dr. Cioffi's office. I'd seen them there when I interviewed him. Bernard Francis was tall and balding, with a broad forehead and a hooked nose. He also had large ears, floppy ones. Like a car with both doors open.

Francis had been Frederic Szabo's therapist for nine weeks in '97, and then for five months last year. Toward the end of the year he had transferred to Florida, supposedly to work at the veterans hospital in north West Falm. Once I'd established a link to Francis, several other connections followed. According to the nursing notes, Dr. Francis had accompanied Szabo off the grounds on at least three occasions last year. The trips weren't unusual in themselves, but under the circumstances they were very interesting to me.

During the plane ride to Florida, I reread the actual notes Dr. Francis had made about Szabo in '97, and then last year.

One of the very insightful early notes posed the question, Did pt actually spend the past twenty-some years wandering the country performing odd jobs? Somehow, this doesn't ring true. Suspect pt has a very active fantasy life and may be withholding from us. What really precipitated pt's stay at Hazelwood this year?

Betsey and I knew the answer to that question, and we suspected Francis had found out, too. In February of '96, Frederic Szabo had been fired from his job as head of security at First Union. There had been a series of unsolved robberies at First Unions in Virginia and Maryland. Szabo had blamed himself for the lapse in security, and then, so had the bank. They finally fired him.

Soon after that he had a nervous breakdown and checked himself into Hazelwood, which was where the fun and mind games began.

We set up a round-the-clock surveillance post outside Dr. Francis's condominium on Singer Island. The place was a sprawling four-bedroom penthouse with a roof deck; it was right on the water. It seemed beyond the means of the average therapist at a veterans hospital. Of course, Dr. Francis didn't consider himself an average therapist.

Francis was spending the evening entertaining a blonde woman who looked to be about half his age. To give him his due, he was a slender man of forty-five and appeared to be in good shape. She was a stunning beauty, though; she wore a black string bikini with high-heeled black pumps. She was constantly rearranging her cleavage and pushing her long blonde hair out of her eyes.

"Very fetching," Betsey said and frowned. "Looks like she's caught herself a real killer date."

Betsey, two other agents, and I camped out in a Dodge van in a parking lot behind the condos. The lot was nearly full and the van blended in. It had a periscope that followed us to watch Francis and his guest as they barbecued steaks on his deck. The FBI had already identified the blonde woman as a dancer at an 'upscale topless steak house' in West Palm. She had previous arrests for soliciting and prostitution in Fort Lauderdale. Her name was Bianca Massie and she was twenty-three years old.

We watched the good doctor as he frequently hugged and fondled the blonde woman while cooking dinner. Then the two of them disappeared inside for about ten minutes. They came out again and, during the meal, they played footsie and stroked each other. They finished a second bottle of Stag's Leap Cabernet, then disappeared inside again.

"What can we see in there? "Betsey asked one of the agents," I need a picture."

"Our man on the other roof can see inside the condo through several of the southern-exposure windows," one of the agents reported.

"It's an easy-sleazy bachelor pad. Expensive furniture, lots of etchings. Bose sound system, free weights. The doc has a black Lab he probably uses to pick up more ladies on the beach."

"I don't think he picked her up," I said. "More likely, he leased her for the night."

"He and the young lady are intimately involved at the moment. The black Lab seems to have taught the doc a few things. He knows some doggy tricks. Our lookout says that his ears and nose are much larger than a certain other part of his anatomy."

That got a laugh from the group. It also eased the tension. We were a little fearful for the girl, but we were close enough to get inside in a hurry.

The lookout continued to report on what he saw. "Oops, the doc would appear to be a premature ejaculator. The young lady doesn't seem to mind. Awhh, she kissed him on the top of his head, poor baby."