‘Oh yeah? From where?’
‘From Annie Belinsky. She’ll be back in a minute.’
Gino opened his mouth just as the door opened behind him. He turned and stared as Annie Belinsky breezed in on a cloud of orange.
‘You tryin’ to catch flies with that thing, sugar?’ She put a long orange nail under Gino’s chin and closed his mouth, then sauntered over to Magozzi and looked straight at him. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘You’re welcome. But it was a conditional reprieve.’
‘I know the rules.’
‘Uh, excuse me for living.’ Gino was scowling. ‘How the hell did you know she was coming back? And what the hell are you talking about? You two got some psychic thing going here or what?’
Annie snagged her purse from where she’d tucked it under her chair and held it aloft with one finger. ‘This is how he knew I was coming back, and as for some psychic connection, well’ – she smiled at Magozzi and her drawl deepened – ‘your friend here’s got some dynamite eyes, haven’t you ever noticed that?’
‘Oh, sure,’ Gino said. ‘Every day I sit across from him and wish I had peepers that special.’
‘Well, you should. He talks with them just as clear as snowmelt runnin’ into a creek, and that’s how we made our agreement. He lived up to his part, now I’m here to give him my tit for his tat.’
Gino blinked several times, rapidly, then decided not to touch that one.
Annie sighed sharply, all business now, and the drawl faded a bit as the tempo of her speech increased. ‘I’ve got about five minutes before one of them figures I’ve been spirited away to the drunk tank or something and comes runnin’ to save me, so tell me what you want to know about Atlanta.’
‘I want to know what you didn’t want me to ask Ms MacBride.’
‘Well.’ She took a breath, let it out slowly. ‘That would be just about everything. For starters, the Atlanta murders were totally different than what’s going down here, which is one of the reasons we aren’t thinking it’s the same killer. I don’t have to tell you how rare it is for a serial killer to change the way he kills; in particular, the weapon he uses.’
‘It could happen.’
‘Yes, of course it could,’ she said impatiently, ‘but rarely, like I said. Especially when there’s some sort of ritual involved, which seemed to be the case in Atlanta. That animal used an X-Acto knife.’
‘I don’t remember reading about that,’ Gino said.
‘It was one of the things the cops held back. He cut their Achilles tendons first, so they couldn’t get away . . .’
Oh Jesus, Magozzi thought, feeling sick. That’s why she always wears the boots.
‘ . . . and then he slashed the femoral arteries. They bled out. It took a while.’
‘Christ.’ Gino looked a full shade paler than he had a minute ago.
‘Grace found Kathy and Daniella – those were her roommates – when she came back to her room after a night out. She was a smart girl. She didn’t go in. Just opened the door, turned on the light, then ran like hell. But there was a lot of blood, and she had to have seen that.’
‘Shit,’ Gino grumbled. ‘That would have put me right in a rubber room.’
Annie looked at him. ‘She had a tough childhood. It made her strong. And the Valium didn’t hurt either. The school brought in a psychiatrist, and he put her on what he called a maintenance dose.’
‘Why the hell didn’t she just pack up and leave?’ Magozzi asked. ‘I would have.’
‘And go where? Back to a string of foster homes that had been their own nightmares? We were all the family any of us had, and we stayed together.’ She looked off to the side briefly, frowning. ‘A better question is why the rest of us were so goddamned stupid we didn’t drag her out of there right then, before the other murders. We’ve been kicking ourselves for that ever since, but none of us knew what was coming.’ She took another deep breath and dug in her purse for a cigarette and lighter. ‘I’m going to smoke in a government building, fellas. You want to stop me, you’re going to have to wrestle me to the ground.’
‘Tempting,’ Gino said, handing her a cup to use as an ashtray.
‘Thanks.’ She took a long drag and made the task force room smell the way it had in the old days. ‘Marian Amburson and Johnny Bricker were killed a few days later, and the FBI came down on us like a swarm of locusts. While the rest of us were locked up in interview rooms for damn near two days, they had Grace to themselves. That’s when they set up the trap with Libbie Herold.’
‘The FBI agent.’
‘Right. What they did was put them both in a little house off in the corner of the campus, away from the high traffic of the dorms. Easier to stake out, they said, easier to protect. Grace was scared to death. She was a kid, you know? And they were asking her to play bait for a killer. She didn’t want to do it. All she wanted was to get the hell out of there, and I think if we’d been able to get to her, we would have all taken off right then and there.’
‘What do you mean, if you’d been able to get to her?’ Gino asked.
Annie pursed her lips and frowned hard, looked out the window. ‘Even after they let the rest of us go, they wouldn’t let us see her. They said she was in “protective custody” and no one could see her; no one could talk to her. We didn’t even know where she was.’ She smiled bitterly at the memory. ‘What they were really doing, of course, was isolating her, taking away her support structure so the only ones she had left to depend on were them.’
Jesus, Magozzi thought.
‘And then they started hammering on how if anyone else got killed it would be on Grace’s head unless she helped them nail the killer, and pretty soon they had her believing it. So they’ve got Grace locked away in this house with a very well-armed agent, and there’s nothing to worry about, they said, because Libbie always wore a wire and help was always just outside the door.’ She paused, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. ‘But somebody fucked up, big time. Maybe Libbie’s wire didn’t work, maybe the guys staking out the house looked away at the wrong time – who knows what really happened? One morning Libbie didn’t check in when she was supposed to, and when the agents went in after them, they found Libbie’s body in the bedroom, lying in a lake of blood, her legs nearly sawed off. They found Grace in the closet, all scrunched up against a back corner. She scratched those agents up pretty good when they tried to get her out, but she didn’t say a word. Didn’t scream, didn’t cry, nothing. She was in the psych ward at Atlanta General for a week. Then we took her away.’
Gino was leaning against the wall by the door, looking down at the floor. Magozzi was watching Annie look around aimlessly, as if she’d misplaced the thread of her thought and hoped to see it somewhere in the room.
Finally she took a last drag off her cigarette and dropped it in the coffee at the bottom of the cup. ‘Anyway, that’s what happened in Atlanta.’ She slid her eyes sideways to look at Magozzi. ‘We don’t ever talk about this; not in front of Grace.’
Magozzi nodded, watched her slip her purse strap over her shoulder and head for the door. Gino stepped aside and opened it for her.
She turned back at the last minute. ‘Your computer guy, Tommy What’s-his-name.’
‘Espinoza.’
Annie nodded. ‘He’s good. He was making all the right moves trying to hack into that sealed FBI file.’
‘What makes you think he’s trying to do that?’
Annie shrugged prettily. ‘He left us in the room for a minute. And don’t blame the boy. He locked up his computer first, and it was a very sophisticated lock. Would have stopped all but about three people in the world.’