Hidden Order: A Thriller (23 page)

Harvath had seen pictures of the ravages meth could visit upon people. Some of the before-and-after photos of young women were particularly heartbreaking. Not only did the drug rob them of their good looks, but it rapidly aged them, with some looking like they were seniors when they were only in their twenties and thirties. It was described as a high so irresistible that it hooked nearly everyone on the first try.

Despite being exposed to them all the time growing up in Southern California, Harvath had never been a drug guy. The only better-living-through-chemistry he allowed himself was from the three B’s—beer, bourbon, or the occasional Bordeaux. You always knew what came out of a bottle. Not many alcohol companies got nailed for “stepping” on their product.

Walking up to the two ladies from South Boston, Harvath immediately noticed their overabundance of nervous energy. It had been drilled into him to look at people’s hands and they were both doing oddball things. If he had been working a rope line as a Secret Service agent, he would have bounced both of these two. One was scratching her thighs raw while the other touched the tips of the fingers of her right hand to her thumb and then reversed the process and did it again.

The closer he got, the more makeup he noticed they were wearing. Skin lesions were a nasty side effect of the drug and they were both covering up some big problems. You’d have to be out of your mind to pay either one of these women for sex. He could only imagine what their teeth looked like. “Meth mouth,” as it was known, was a rapid decay of tooth and gum and a hallmark of crystal meth abuse.

Cordero introduced herself to the two officers and then to the two young women. They appeared to be in their mid-twenties. One was tall, but skinny as a rail, with stringy blond hair. Her name was Agnes. She looked like a local college girl who gone away on spring break, partied every night with no sleep, and was now home looking for the party to continue.

The other girl, Brittany, was shorter and still had a little bit of meat on
her. Now that Harvath could see her up close, he realized her skin wasn’t that bad. She just wore a lot of makeup because that was her style. She had hair blacker than Cordero’s—undoubtedly made possible only by some very serious dye. She complemented it with black nail polish, black lipstick, and lots of eyeliner and mascara. It was the full-on Goth look and she had a short black miniskirt, tight black top, and vintage flea market jewelry to match.

Right away, it was obvious that Agnes was the talker. She was so loquacious Cordero almost couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Normally, standard procedure with witnesses was to split them up so they didn’t pollute each other’s stories. Agnes, though, was the only one who had seen the deceased with her customer last night. Brittany hadn’t seen anything and Harvath favored keeping them together. Cordero had explained what she was going to ask and he wanted to study how Ms. Piss and Vinegar reacted.

Cordero was amazing. Not only was she an excellent interrogator, she was also a pro at understanding the Southie dialect, much of which was like a foreign language to Harvath’s ear—all except the F-word, which this young woman dropped with abandon. She used it as a verb, a noun, an adverb, and an adjective. Not even in the military had Harvath heard someone’s speech so peppered with it. Cordero was old-school and didn’t care for it and warned the young woman to clean it up. To her credit, she did, though it was obviously difficult for her and she still slipped up from time to time.

Eventually, Cordero brought the conversation around to a description of the john.

“He was average,” said Agnes. “Not too short, not too tall. You know.
Average
.”

For her part during the interview, Brittany kept her mouth clamped tight as she ground her teeth back and forth. Harvath couldn’t tell if it was from nervousness or the meth. Considering her eyes were dilated, he figured she’d recently used, which only made her harder to read.

He had been trained in the Secret Service to watch for micro-expressions: small, almost imperceptible facial cues that indicated when a person was lying or under a tremendous amount of stress because they
were concealing the truth or intent upon doing harm. It was a great tool to use in interrogation, but considering the condition of their current subjects, it might just be a waste of time.

That changed, though, when Cordero asked about the man’s hair. “He was wearing a skally,” Agnes replied, “but you could still see his whiffle.”

Harvath had no idea what a
skally
or a
whiffle
was, but Brittany did, and even in the midst of her drug-induced fidgeting, he saw her shudder.

“Hold on a second. What the hell is a whiffle and what does it have to do with whatever a skally is?” he asked the detective.

“A skally is a type of cap,” she replied.

“Like a baseball cap?”

“No. More like a driving cap.”

“And a whiffle?”

“It’s a tight haircut with clippers. Kind of like a military crew cut.”

The revelation took Harvath aback and his silence encouraged Cordero to continue the interview.

He waited until Cordero was done and then suggested they speak with Brittany alone. Agnes, of course, was keen to keep on talking. The patrol officers humored her and moved her toward the street so Harvath and Cordero could talk with Brittany.

Cordero went from good cop to bad cop so fast that Harvath almost got whiplash. She’d been downright congenial with Agnes, but then again Agnes was cooperative. The moment Brittany refused to engage, Cordero went nuclear and it scared the hell out of the young woman.

“You want to see what he did to your friend Kelly?” she pushed. “Let’s go now. C’mon. They just fished her out of the Charles. She’s still lying on the dock under a plastic tarp. He’s got a special signature, this guy. You haven’t eaten breakfast, have you?”

Brittany shook her head.

“Good, ’cause I don’t want you puking all over your shoes. We’ll take my car. You’re okay with that, right? Kelly was your friend. You want to say goodbye, right? Even if somebody comes up with the money, it’s going to have to be a closed casket service. This’ll be more personal for you. Friends should say goodbye, right? Face-to-face, as it were.”

Brittany continued to shake her head and Harvath saw her jaw tighten as she ground her teeth harder.

Cordero moved closer, deeper into her personal space. “If you think Kelly’s going to be this guy’s only victim, you’re wrong, sweetheart. She’s not even his first. You want Agnes to be next? Better yet, how about if it’s you?”

The young woman said nothing.

“See this man next to me?” the detective asked, nodding at Harvath. “He came to Boston to stop this guy. But that’s not going to happen unless you cooperate.”

Brittany’s gaze shifted to Harvath.

“Nobody needs to know you told us anything,” he said. “You’re not in any trouble here. You’ve got a chance to do something right. You can help us catch the person who killed your friend.”

“I don’t want you to catch him,” the young woman stated.

Harvath tilted his head to hear her better. “You don’t?”

“No. I want you to kill the motherfucker.”

“What did I tell your friend about that language?” Cordero interjected.

Brittany shot her daggers, while Harvath held up his hand for the detective to back off. “I understand how you feel,” he told Brittany. “There are quite a few people who’d agree with you, but we need to focus on finding this guy. Anything you can tell us, no matter how small, will help.”

The woman shifted nervously from her left foot to her right, looking back and forth between Harvath and Cordero. Finally, she settled her eyes on him and began to tell her story about the man who had photographed her yesterday in the cemetery.

Cordero took copious notes while Brittany recounted her tale. The F-bomb got dropped multiple times, but the detective was smart enough to let it go. Now that the young woman was cooperating, interrupting her narrative would have been a mistake.

It was obvious that Brittany cared not only about what had happened to Kelly Davis, but about stopping Kelly’s killer. She hadn’t seen the john who picked her up that night, but the man described by Agnes sounded exactly like the man who had assaulted her. Neither Harvath nor Cordero
had reason to doubt the young woman. She had been incredibly forthright, even admitting to having solicited the would-be killer.

Cordero asked her several follow-up questions. When she was done, Brittany asked, “You’re not going to bag me for the solicitation, are you?”

“No,” the detective replied. “I’m not. I appreciate your cooperation. Is there anything else you can think of, anything at all?”

The young woman was quiet for a moment and then responded. “That’s pretty much it.”

Cordero looked at Harvath. “Anything you want to add? Any questions I missed?”

Harvath’s eyes had drifted down to Brittany’s hands again. “I do have one question.” Looking up at the young woman, he asked, “You’re right-handed, correct?”

The young woman nodded.

“So when you tried to slap him, you did it with your right hand, which is when he caught you by the wrist and twisted your
right
arm behind your back?”

“Yes,” she replied.

Harvath removed a wedge of cash from the pocket of his trousers and peeled off two hundred-dollar bills. Brittany’s eyes widened at the sight of the money. Pointing at the tarnished metal cuff on her right wrist, he said, “Detective Cordero could seize that as evidence, but I’d like to rent it from you. I only have one condition.”

The young woman looked at the cuff and then back up at Harvath. “What is it?”

He peeled off two more hundreds and held all four bills out for her. “You and Agnes stay off the street until Detective Cordero and I catch this guy. Deal?”

The wheels were turning in the young woman’s head. She was undoubtedly doing some sort of calculation and it wasn’t about how many holy candles she and her pal could purchase with that kind of money. Finally, she replied, “Deal.”

After tucking the money away, Brittany removed the cuff and placed it into the handkerchief Harvath had retrieved from his jacket.

He then let her rejoin her friend, while Cordero phoned her department
to make sure they had the young woman’s complete arrest record in the system.

Satisfied, Cordero asked the ladies for a few more details, including contact information, and then gave each of them her business card along with her cell phone number on the back. With that, the patrol officers were asked to drive the women back to South Boston.

“You’re definitely not a cop,” the detective said to Harvath, as they watched the cruiser pull away from the curb and head toward Southie.

“Why’s that?”

“Because outside of a drug buy, no one hands over that kind of cash for something the law empowers them to take.”

Harvath shrugged. “Just because something is legal, doesn’t always mean it’s the right thing to do. Trying to keep those kids off the street for a couple of days was the right thing to do.”

Cordero shook her head. “They’re junkies. They’re going to burn through your four hundred dollars in the blink of an eye. But hey, if it buys you a good night’s sleep.”

Having seen what he had of this killer, Harvath doubted he was going to be able to sleep well anytime soon. Even if the money kept Brittany and Agnes off the street for only one night, it would be worth it.

Though he didn’t yet have physical proof that the woman pulled from the Charles River had been killed by the same person as Claire Marcourt and Herman Penning, his gut told him that he was right on the money. It also told him something else. The killer was losing control.

F
ORT
B
ELVOIR

V
IRGINIA

B
ob McGee had spent the better part of his career engaging in risky operations, but the minute Lydia Ryan explained her plan, he told her it was off-the-charts stupid. It was one thing to screw up and have Phil Durkin triangulate on them that way; it was something entirely different to openly invite him to come kill them, and that’s what he had felt Ryan was doing.

Just as the porch light came on, and just in case she hadn’t internalized it the last one hundred times he had said it, he stated, “This is going to go down as the mother of all bad ideas.”

“You’re overestimating your prowess in this category,” she replied as someone inside unlocked the door.

“Like hell I am” was the last remark McGee made before the door opened. He had decided to stand behind Ryan not so much because he didn’t want to appear imposing, but because if the person on the other side was armed and the rounds began flying, Ryan would suffer the fate she so rightly deserved for this idea and function as his bullet sponge while he took off running. He turned out to be wrong, but not about the being armed part.

Colonel Brenda Durkin had opened the door with her Beretta M9 pistol just out of view. One of the last people she ever expected to see on her doorstep, much less in the middle of the night in a bathrobe, was Lydia Ryan. “What in God’s name are you doing here?”