He looked straight at me and he finally spoke. "You got the wrong man."
Then Frederic Szabo grinned like the craziest person I have ever met in my life. And I've met some very crazy people.
Chapter One Hundred and Fourteen
Betsey Cavalierre and I returned to Hazelwood and the mountains of grunt work that still had to be done there. Sampson met us. By ten-thirty that night, we'd gone through everything we could find at the hospital. We had managed to identify nineteen staff members who'd spent time with Szabo. The short list included six therapists who'd seen him.
Betsey and I tacked the pictures up on one wall. Then I walked back and forth staring at them, hoping for a blinding insight. Where the hell was the money? How had Szabo actually controlled the robbery-murders?
I sat down again. Betsey was sipping her sixth or seventh Diet Coke. I'd matched her coffee for Coke. Intermittently, we had revisited the mystery of James Walsh's supposed suicide and the sudden disappearance of Michael Doud. Szabo had refused to answer any questions about the two agents. Why would he murder the two of them? What was his real plan? Goddamn him!
"Could Szabo really be behind all this, Alex? Is he that clever? That goddamn evil? That nuts?"
I pushed myself up from the desk I was working at. "I don't know anymore. It's late again. I'm fried, Betsey. I'm out of here. Tomorrow's another day."
The overhead lights were blinding and hurtful. Betsey's eyes were red-rimmed and vacant as they stared up at me. I wanted to hug her some but half a dozen agents were still working in the office. I ached to hold her in my arms, to talk to her about anything but the case.
"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."
Chapter One Hundred and Fifteen
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.