Acts of Mercy (19 page)

“We can see the guard at two o’clock back at the prison,” she told him after she completed her call. She turned her wrist to check the time. “Which doesn’t give us too much time.”

“We’ll eat fast.”

She could feel his eyes on her, and finally asked, “What?”

“You look like someone.”

“Like who?”

“I don’t know. It will come to me, though. I guess if you’d lived in Nebraska at some time in your life, you’d have mentioned it by now.”

She smiled.

“So where are you from?” he asked.

“Kansas, originally.”

“And after that?” He tilted his head. “You said Kansas originally, which means you’re from somewhere else after that.”

“I grew up in California.”

“One of my favorite states. Which part?”

“Around L.A.”

Sam appeared to be studying her face. “You don’t really strike me as an L.A. type of girl.”

She merely smiled and leaned back as the waitress served their drinks.

“So,” Fiona said as she added sweetener to her tea, “have you given any more thought to what Annie said, about maybe the killer being someone from your past?”

“I’ve thought about nothing else, but I just can’t see anyone. Unless it’s something really overt, you just don’t think about someone holding a grudge for that long. What could be that important?” He shook his head. “You know, you could look back on your childhood, your teen years. Is there someone there who’d wish you harm or who’d want to repay an old debt? Someone so unhinged that they’d kill to get even with you? I’ll bet you wouldn’t even know, couldn’t name them if you tried.”

Bet I could. In a heartbeat …

Aloud, she said, “Maybe you should consider hypnosis. Maybe something will come to you that way.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Their sandwiches came and they ate with one eye
on the clock. At one forty-five, Fiona said, “We need to go.”

They made it back to the prison with three minutes to spare. By the time they went through their checkpoints and waited for George Cranshaw, the assistant warden, it was twenty past two.

“Lee’s waiting for you in the conference room,” Cranshaw told them as he led them down a short hall.

“Lee?”

“Lee Watkins, the guard you wanted to talk to.” He stopped in front of a closed door. “Right in here, folks.” He opened the door and stepped inside. “Lee, the people from the FBI are here.”

To Fiona’s eye, Lee Watkins looked to be no more than twenty years old, but she was pretty sure he had to be older than that.

“Sam DelVecchio.” Sam introduced himself without bothering to correct the assistant warden. “How are you, Lee?”

“I’m okay.” Watkins looked from Sam to Fiona and back. He was clearly not okay about being there.

“Did you need me to stay?” Cranshaw had one hand on the door handle, as if ready to flee.

“No, I don’t think so. We’ll be fine.” Fiona smiled at Watkins who looked as if he was about to bolt. She patted the young guard on the shoulder as she passed behind him, glancing down at the backpack that sat at his feet. It bulged all the way around, the contents squaring the material.

She sat directly across from him, the better to maintain eye contact with him.

“Lee, how old are you?” she asked.

He glanced at Sam before answering. “I’m twenty-six.”

“You’re young to have such a responsible position here,” she said.

“Not really.” He still appeared leery.

“How long have you worked here?”

“Seven years.”

“Seven? So you were nineteen when you started?”

He nodded.

“Have you been on the night shift all that time?”

“No, ma’am. I started out first on one of the medical wards, the afternoon shift. I didn’t get the night shift until I went on the tower.”

“Was that a promotion?” She continued to question him in a conversational tone, holding his eyes, making it difficult for him to look away without seeming evasive.

“Sort of. Well, actually, I asked for it.”

“You wanted to work at night?”

“Yes, ma’am. I wanted to go to school during the day, so I could only work at night.”

“Working a full-time job and going to school at the same time?” Fiona raised one eyebrow. “Very impressive, Lee. That’s a rough way to get an education. I admire your determination.”

“Thank you.” He seemed to relax slightly.

“Where are you going?”

“Eastern Virginia College.”

“What are you studying?”

“I want to be a history teacher.”

“Excellent. We always need good teachers. Good luck with that.” She smiled. “So, are those your books there in your backpack?” she asked.

He glanced down at his feet, then nodded.

“I guess you need to study whenever you can, right? Coffee breaks, that sort of thing?”

He nodded again, his eyes shifting to one side.

“It must be hard to keep up with all the reading.” Fiona rested her elbows on the table as if chatting with a friend. “I used to tape-record the lectures so I could listen to them later. Have you tried that?” Before he could answer, she continued, “Of course, you wouldn’t use a tape recorder. The technology is so much better these days, isn’t it?”

“I guess,” he mumbled.

“Sam, did you have any questions for Lee?” She pushed her chair back from the table.

“About the night that Kenneth Wilke was murdered out there in the field.” Sam paced off to the left.

Fiona slid her phone from her pocket, pretended to look at the screen and said, “Will you excuse me for a moment? I have to return a call …”

Sam nodded and turned back to Watkins. “You were about to say …?”

“What did you want to know?”

“I want to know what time you first noticed the car in the field,” Sam told him.

“I never saw the car.” Watkins shook his head. “I told the cops, I never saw the car, I never heard anything.”

“How is that possible? You were sitting right there, maybe a hundred feet from where the car was parked. How could you not see or hear what was going on down there?”

Watkins shrugged. “He must have not had the lights on. I don’t know.”

Fiona activated the Internet connection on her phone, and opened a search engine, and typed in the name of the college Lee Watkins said he attended. When she found what she was looking for, she closed the phone and returned to the table, where Sam was still interrogating Watkins.

She listened quietly to his questioning for a few moments, then said, “Sam, you can ask him the same questions fifty different ways, but if Lee didn’t hear or see anything, that isn’t going to change, regardless of how many times you ask.”

Sam turned to look at her for a long moment, then nodded slowly.

“You’re right, Agent Summers.” Sam sighed deeply. “All right, Lee. Unless you have something else to add, I suppose we’re finished here.”

“I don’t have anything else to add.” He shook his head firmly, side to side. “I don’t know anything.”

“Thanks for your time, then.” Fiona opened the door and held it for Sam. “And good luck with school.”

They checked out at the front desk and walked through the automatic doors to the visitor’s parking lot.

“Okay, so what did you find out that made further questioning unnecessary?” Sam asked as they walked toward her car.

“Eastern Virginia College video-records many of their professors’ lectures and makes them available to their students on the college website,” she told him. “So if you miss a class, or get distracted, or come in late, or whatever, you can still catch the entire lecture
online. You can watch them at any time that’s convenient for you.”

“So while Watkins is sitting in the tower, he’s catching up on the day’s class work on his iPhone.”

“Sure. He had the phone in his shirt pocket. I saw it when I walked behind him. He probably has to leave the back pack in his locker, but I’ll bet no one’s ever questioned him about the phone. Can’t you just picture him sitting in his chair, maybe with his feet on the desk, the earplugs in, listening to a lecture, maybe playing certain parts over several times to make sure he’s getting it right, maybe taking notes?”

“So he isn’t lying when he says he didn’t hear or see anything in the field that night,” Sam nodded.

“Right,” Fiona agreed, “because he wasn’t looking. So at least we know he wasn’t lying.”

As they left the parking lot, she asked, “Do you want to go back the same way we came?”

“No.” Sam shook his head. “But thanks for asking.”

When they arrived back at Fiona’s, she asked, “It’s too late to go in to the office. Want to come in for a beer?”

“You must have read my mind.” Sam followed her up the front walk. “I could seriously use a beer right now.”

She unlocked the front door and walked straight through to the kitchen and went right to the refrigerator. She took out two bottles and put them on the counter.

“I’m afraid I can’t offer you anything to snack on with that,” she told him. “I don’t keep much food in the house.”

He was staring at the open refrigerator. “It looks like you don’t keep any food in the house. I haven’t seen a cupboard that bare since I read about Old Mother Hubbard.”

Fiona laughed. “I never know what time I’m going to get home. I did used to try to buy stuff to make for dinner, but it always went bad because I was too tired to cook once I got home. So I started doing takeout.”

“You do takeout every night?”

She nodded. “It works for me.”

“I’m impressed. Most people who do a lot of takeout are overweight. You certainly are not.” He opened both their bottles and handed one back to her. “You look terrific.”

“Let’s go sit out back on the steps,” she suggested, trying not to read anything at all into his comment.

She unlocked the back door and they went outside. There was a landing that could not be considered a porch, but the stairs were wide enough to serve as comfortable seating. They sat side by side on the top step, the distance between them not enough to keep them from bumping arms or shoulders from time to time.

“I sit out here every night,” she told him. “Rain, snow, whatever. I like to watch the trees turn with the seasons.” She pointed to a wooded area at the end of her long narrow back yard. “The deer come out most nights, if I time it right.”

She pointed to a tall pine at the side of her garage. “There’s a pair of hawks who sit up there, watching the bird feeders. I had to take mine down. They were picking off the little ones that came to eat.”

She turned to him. “You must have a lot of wildlife out where you’re from.”

Sam nodded. “Bears, deer, elk, raccoons, prairie dogs, bobcats, mountain lions, coyotes, antelope, big-horned sheep, depending on the part of the state you’re in.”

“Stop.” She laughed. “You had all those animals living near you?”

“Pretty much, yeah. I’m from an area close to the western part of the state. It’s still pretty much the way you might picture the Old West in some places.”

“You ever think of moving back there?”

“Not in this lifetime.” He shook his head. “My family farmed. It isn’t for me. My brother and sister are still there, wouldn’t live anyplace else. They’re always trying to get me to come back. They have families, though, and I understand the appeal of raising your kids in a place like Blackstone.”

“Blackstone?”

“The town where I grew up.” He laughed softly. “Town is a bit of a stretch. We do have a grocery store, a bank, a feed store, a café … that sort of thing. Not much more, though. I guess it’s not as bad with the Internet—you can buy anything and have it shipped to your door, which is great for people who have no stores nearby, but we didn’t have anything like that when I was growing up. If we needed to shop for almost anything, we’d have to go to Henderson Falls. That’s the nearest big town. The regional junior high was there—we only had a grade school in Blackstone.” Sam grinned. “And they have a library. My mom spent a lot of time there in the afternoons. She’d have to come in to pick me up from football practice
every day, so she’d meet my sisters at the library every day and they’d do their homework and mom would read all the latest magazines and pick up the latest novels. She loved mysteries, romances, thrillers. She still spends a part of every afternoon reading.”

He paused, as if remembering.

“And Henderson Falls has several streets with houses on them.” When she laughed, he turned and explained why that was worthy of note. “Blackstone was mostly a farm community. There were a few houses in town, but not many. We only had about five different streets.”

He was so close she could feel his breath on her cheek. When he turned toward her, they were almost eye to eye. She held his gaze, wondering who was going to look away first. She might still have been wondering if her phone hadn’t started to ring.

“I should get that.” She went inside and looked for her phone, found it at the bottom of her purse.

She listened for a long time, asked a few questions before saying, “All right. We’ll be there.”

Fiona turned off the phone and stood in the kitchen, wondering how she was going to tell Sam what she’d just been told. Moments later she heard the back door open and close, and she looked up to see Sam come into the room.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Fiona cleared her throat. “There’s been another killing. Same MO. There’s no question it’s our guy. We need to go. John’s having a plane sent for us in less than an hour.”

“Where this time?”

“Henderson Falls, Nebraska.”

He stared at her for what seemed to be a long time, the color draining from his face.

“Who’s the victim?”

“They don’t have a name just yet.”

He took his phone from his pocket and speed-dialed a number.

“Kitty. Hey, it’s Sam. Yeah, everything’s fine. Listen, can I speak to Tom …?” He stared out the window, his eyes focused on something she could not see. “Do you know when he’ll be back? Would you have him call me? No, no, nothing’s wrong, Kitty. I just need to ask him something. Just tell him to call … he has the number.”

He hung up the phone and turned his face to Fiona’s. “My brother went into Henderson Falls to pick up a part for his tractor,” he told her. “He isn’t back yet.”