Snake Skin (34 page)

"Malignant narcissists have no self-image,
no sense of self without someone else providing it. I'd bet your
guy lost that someone when he started this—"

"He mentioned his mother being sick."

"Yeah, a dominant opposite-sex parent would
definitely fit the bill. He may have first reached out to older
women to fill her role but found they weren't malleable
enough."

"So he worked his way down to a
fourteen-year-old he could brainwash into doing anything. Is that
why she's so valuable? Because of all his time, effort? How far can
I push him before that's negated?"

"You don't understand. The time and effort
make her valuable, yes, but more than that, he needs her. She's his
mirror, he is the reflection in the mirror. He doesn't exist
without her."

"Okay, now you're drifting into mumbojumbo
land." There was a polite tapping at the closet door and she opened
it.

"Burroughs and Taylor are back," John
Greally told her.

"I've got to go." She clung to the phone,
reluctant to hang up, fearful that if she did, something bad might
happen while she was absent from Megan's bedside. But the bitch of
it was, something bad could happen with her right there beside
Megan. And she'd be powerless to stop it. At least there was one
girl she could save. Maybe. "Kiss Megan for me, tell her I'll be
there just as soon as I can."

"Don't forget your promise."

"I won't. I love you."

"Hey, you be careful." His voice dropped,
low and imperative. "Please."

"Always." She hung up and reluctantly
returned to the outside world.

A smattering of applause coming from the
bullpen pulled Lucy and Greally from her office. Taylor stood just
inside the door, a sheepish grin on his face, his arm in a cast and
sling.

Lucy and Greally added their own applause to
the standing ovation. She escorted Taylor to his desk, enjoying the
blush that colored his features.

"Hoo-wah!" Burroughs shouted in a fair
impression of a Marine as the clapping died down.

"Okay, everyone back to work," Lucy said as
Taylor sat down. "Glad you're back, Taylor. You feeling up to
helping out around here?"

"Definitely," he said, still beaming.

"Yeah, you look ready to go," Greally put
in. "No field assignments until the cast's off, but I'll clear you
for desk duty."

"Thank you, sir." Taylor seemed mesmerized
by all the attention. "I wasn't expecting this. It's kind of
embarrassing, I mean all I did was get thrown out of a window."

Greally laughed and clapped a hand on
Taylor's good shoulder. "A rite of passage. Ask Lucy about her
first line of duty injury."

Walden and Burroughs looked up at that.
"C'mon, Guardino, spill," said Burroughs.

She shot Greally a half-hearted glare. "It
was my first assignment after Quantico. We were back up vehicle on
a car stop of a suspected mob enforcer. When we pulled up to the
curb to make the stop, I caught my foot in a sewer grate, tripped
over the stock of the Remington I was carrying and landed flat on
my face. Sprained my ankle and broke my nose."

"Did you nail the guy?"

"The lead car had him before I even hit the
ground. Which I found out as soon as my partner, Special Agent
Greally over there, stopped laughing." Lucy smiled with the memory.
It was in the ER before they took X-rays that she'd discovered she
was pregnant with Megan.

"Hey," Greally held his hands up, "I was
just glad to be alive. If you'd discharged that shotgun, I'd be a
dead man today."

Taylor grinned, bobbing his head, obviously
fascinated by the war stories. "How about you, Walden?"

"Sorry kid. Other than a paper cut filling
out a FD-28, I've never been injured in the line."

"Don't look at me," Burroughs put in. "I
can't even remember the last time I had to draw my gun until I
started hanging out with you guys. Think I'm going to call my union
rep and ask for hazard pay."

"He didn't hurt you any, did he? I mean—touch
you?" The man's voice slowly penetrated the haze clouding her mind.
They were riding in his SUV. She felt as if she'd just woken from a
long winter's nap: exhausted yet energized, hazy yet focused.

Why was she here? What had the man said,
he'd take her someplace safe? She rubbed her torn and swollen
ankle. Safe and sound—where she could lick her wounds and prepare.
For what, she wasn't quite sure, that was too far in the future to
think about now.

"I'm sorry I didn't get there sooner. I was
trying, as soon as I heard the Amber alert, I knew…"

She said nothing, half unsure that he was
even talking about her. If she tried hard enough she was certain
she could forget everything, just wake up to a new life, new
person, new world.

Her head bounced against the passenger side
window, eyes closed to slits, allowing only a small slice of the
landscape to whirl past like an old time silent movie.

"I guess you're not ready to talk. That's
okay, I understand. Let me tell you my story, there are some things
you need to know."

He laid a hand on her thigh and she didn't
flinch. There was nothing scary about his touch, nothing soothing
either. It was as if her entire body was numb, unable to tell pain
from comfort.

"His name is Bobby, Bobby Fegley," the man
said.

He paused to clear his throat. Her pulse
quickened. She'd known someone named Bobby once upon a time—hadn't
she? Had it all been a dream? A lover, a comrade—until he had
betrayed her. Or had she betrayed him?

"He pretends to be a kid, plays online
games, makes friends with girls." There was a weird noise, like the
man was choking back tears or laughter. "One of the bodies in there
was my girl. I've been looking for her, for him, for over a year.
And when I heard the news about you, saw your picture, I knew he
had taken you. You look just like my Vera."

A long pause as she decided he wasn't
talking about her but someone else, some other girl. Whatever he
was talking about, it had nothing to do with her, she wasn't
there.

Had never even been there.

"I wish I could take you back to your folks,
but there's a problem. Bobby Fegley is a FBI agent—no one would
believe us, we can't go to the cops."

His words bounced off her awareness,
registering only the faintest of impact. She frowned, surely there
was something wrong with what he was telling her?

Anxiety churned through her but she hugged
herself tight, rocking in her seat, the landscape blurring through
her slitted vision. The pain faded and she returned to her limbo of
numbness.

"It's just you and me, Ashley," he
continued, oblivious to the fact that she was barely there, hanging
on only because she needed her body to pump blood to her brain. If
it wasn't for that, she'd be long gone, vanished. "Unless. Do you
want to go back to your parents, to your old life?"

His words hammered at her, breaking the wall
of ice she'd surrounded herself with. She jerked upright, eyes
fully open but unable to focus, darkness around the edges, only the
road stretching out in front of them clear.

"No." The single syllable was all she could
manage as panic seized her vocal cords, clamping them shut. She was
shivering but she didn't feel cold, didn't feel anything—didn't
want to feel anything.

"Well. All right, then. It's just you and
me. I promise I won't let anything happen to you, Ashley. I mean,
Vixen." The truck slowed as he turned to look at her. "My name's
Jim. Jim Fletcher."

She didn't meet his gaze, instead she closed
her eyes once more, rocking herself back into welcome oblivion.

Chapter 29

Sunday, 3:12 pm

"Are we sure it's Fletcher?" Grimwald, the
ICE Special Agent in Charge, was saying. "Look at his record. He's
fucking Mr. Clean. Maybe he has a brain tumor or something."

"It's Fletcher," Lucy answered, resuming her
pacing in front of the conference table. If she kept moving, the
pain stayed steady at a level she could ignore. "What do we have on
him?"

Taylor answered. "He's thirty-four, been
with ICE for eight years. Started as a GS-05, now a GS-06. Local
boy, graduated from Allegheny Institute of Technology with an
associate's degree in computer sciences, this is the only office
he's ever worked, good fit reps, nothing that stands out.
Employment application lists a mother as only living relative. No
sibs, father listed as whereabouts unknown."

"How old are the parents?"

"Let's see. Mother would be, seventy-eight,
father ninety-two." He looked up at that. "That's pretty old."

"Yeah, mom would have been forty-four when
she had him." Burroughs gave a mock shiver. "Would have been in her
sixties when he was a teenager, think how gross that would be."

"Only child, born late in life to his
mother, father out of the picture," Lucy said. Sounded like the
setup Nick had mentioned. She stopped, another thought hitting her.
"Burroughs, work on his early medical records, school, social
services—anything to let me know what was going on in that house
when he was young."

"Who cares if he wet the bed or flunked gym
class?" Grimwald said. "You still don't have any proof besides an
undocumented phone call. Maybe Fletcher is the victim here."

John Greally leaned forward from his seat at
the head of the table. "Shut the fuck up and let her work, why
don't cha?"

He went heavy on his Chicago accent, his
expression hardened as if he'd grown up on the Southside instead of
Round Lake Beach. Grimwald frowned, shot Lucy a glare, but sat back
and was silent.

"He talks about his mother constantly," she
continued. "What do we know about her?"

"Alicia Moore Fletcher," Taylor supplied.
"Resident of the Golden Years nursing home last three years, prior
to that resided at the same address as Fletcher."

"The house he blew up?" Walden asked. "That
surprises me, that he'd torch his history like that."

Lucy glanced at Walden. "Good point. Did
they live somewhere before that? We need a list of all known
addresses. Any property in either of their names."

Somewhere Fletcher had a hole he'd run
to—and thanks to Taylor and Bobby, he was definitely on the
run.

"Here's something," Taylor put in, looking
up from his computer monitor. "There's no marriage certificate for
Alicia. Nothing I can find puts the father in the picture at all.
He's not listed on tax records, work records, census, nothing. Just
Fletcher and the mom."

That felt right. She grabbed the rubber
snake from her desk, stretching and pulling it, coiling it, using
it to keep her hands occupied as she took another lap of the room,
thinking, imagining Fletcher and the forces that had created
him.

"I'll bet that's been a driving force all
his life—father unknown, a mystery. And mother either badgering him
to live up to the expectations of a ghost or condemning him for
it."

"Now this is weird," Taylor said, eyes
focused on his computer while Walden stood and began adding more
info to the profile on the whiteboard. "County records list a James
Madison Fletcher as deceased on October 10, 1974, cause of death
homicide."

Burroughs looked up at that. "That's
our
James Madison Fletcher Junior's birth date."

Taylor continued, "His body was partially
burned, but with evidence of stab wounds and a fractured skull.
Along with him were the remains of an approximately twenty-year-old
woman that they never ID'd."

"Cause of death?" Lucy asked, twisting the
snake into a knot. It immediately bounced free.

"Multiple stab wounds."

"Why didn't we find that during Fletcher's
security check?" John asked.

Grimwald flushed. "Not my department.
Besides, just because his father was a homicide victim doesn't
mean—"

"The father also had a record for numerous
misdemeanors," Taylor added, typing furiously. "Tons of arrests,
mainly for fraud and petty theft, only one conviction for
trespassing. Multiple jurisdictions. Lots of aliases listed."

"Sounds like Fletcher Sr, was a grifter,"
Burroughs said.

"Did he ever work with an accomplice?" Lucy
asked, her back to the men as she stared at the board with its list
of apparently random dates and facts. Fletcher the high-strung but
genial computer clerk was only a façade. Finding the man behind the
mask would mean digging through his past.

"Record goes back decades. Looks like he had
a girl working with him back in the late 1940's, name of Alice,
Alisha or sometimes—"

"Alicia," she filled in for him. "Let me
guess. About ten years later there's no mention of Alicia but of
other women helping Fletcher instead. All young."

"Yeah, looks that way."

"What are you thinking, Lucy?" John
asked.

Lucy held up her hand for a moment, still
absorbing the details. "We need to look at the mom before we look
at Fletcher. How old was she when she was first mentioned in the
record?"

"Hmm...fourteen."

"Look for missing girls around the same
time. Last name Moore, first name probably Alice." She began pacing
again, energized as the pieces fell into place. "Alicia is
fourteen, hooks up with a charismatic grifter who's twice her age.
Becomes his accomplice, his common law wife. The grifter, who likes
his women young, tires of Alicia and drifts around. But he always
returns to her, maybe even brings his girlfriends along for the
ride. Uses Alicia as a safe haven when the heat is on, uses her
when money's short, basically uses her."

"This is ludicrous speculation," Grimwald
protested. "You can't possibly—"

"Hush," John told him, nodding for Lucy to
continue. "Okay, fast forward, how does this help us find
Fletcher?"