“If they’re old, wouldn’t she throw them away?”
Tony closed the last file cabinet. “They’re definitely not here.” He went back to the kitchen where Bridget was making coffee. “Ms. Weber, where did your sister store her old reporter notebooks?”
“The attic. A firetrap, I always told her.” She sighed heavily. “Do you need them?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“If it’ll help, please. Though I doubt you’ll be able to read her odd shorthand.” She pointed to the staircase. “Turn right at the top; the door leads to the attic. The light switch is on the left.”
Suzanne followed Tony up two flights of narrow stairs. She looked around the attic, which was piled high with clear plastic forty-gallon bins holding hundreds of long, narrow reporter steno pads.
“Holy shit,” Suzanne said. “Please tell me I don’t have to read all these.” She opened a box and flipped through one of the pads. “It’s in a foreign language.”
Tony took the pad from her and laughed. “Shorthand. There are people at the Bureau who can decipher these.” He scanned the boxes. “All labeled, which is a plus.”
“I assume you want the year when her first book came out, the notes from the file that was missing at the library.”
“The year before the book came out would most likely have the notes from her research,” Tony said. “That, and the year Rachel McMahon disappeared, up through Kreig’s trial.”
“Why wait years to kill her?” Suzanne asked as she looked at the dates on the bins. Each box covered six months of notes from Weber’s reporter days.
“Opportunity, a stressor, a change in the killer’s status-for example, if he recently got out of prison. But one thing is clear to me, above all else.”
“What’s that?”
“Her killer stalked her for weeks, if not months or even years. He knew her routines; he knew her friends; he knew what was important to her and under what circumstances she would meet someone alone. She was a risk taker by nature-just look at the types of crimes she reported and who she spoke with. She didn’t feel threatened because she always felt that she was on the side of truth. Here-I found the years we’re looking for. Help me with these.”
Suzanne moved some of the boxes and Tony pulled out four. “We’ll start here.”
“This is going to take a shitload of time,” she said.
“You sound skeptical.”
She was. “It seems like a long shot.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and the information Rob Banker is going to leak for us will yield a suspect. But we can’t count on it. The fact that the McMahon files are gone from the archives tells me that the killer doesn’t want those found, because something inside points to him.”
“Or he’s misleading us,” Suzanne said. “Sending us in a completely different direction.”
“I never used to be a fan of joint task forces,” Tony admitted. “But they have one key benefit. It’s much easier to run investigations in different directions when you have multiple agencies focusing on what they do best. Let your friend Joe DeLucca handle that investigation, and I’ll work on the background. And you do what you do best.”
At this point, Suzanne didn’t think she was needed.
“What is it?” Tony asked.
“You’ve taken over my case.” That sounded ridiculous. “I mean, you’re probably right, you have the experience, but you’re leading.”
He shook his head. “I’ll do this part. This will help me come up with a profile that you can work with. You are tenacious, Suzanne. You know who’s lying and you get answers. I have no doubt that you’ll find who did this through smart police work. And the best way to do it is gain the advantage by understanding the psychology of the killer.”
“And do you have anything yet?”
“If I’m right, the killer is patient, meticulous, and driven by a higher purpose. Rosemary Weber was not his first victim, nor will she be his last.” Tony picked up two of the boxes and motioned for Suzanne to pick up the others. “I want to brief the analyst who will be going through these about what to look for; then I have a flight to catch. Something has been bugging me, and I’m hoping after Lucy and I go through my notes I’ll figure it out.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FBI Academy
Lucy wanted to shower after she finished reading Sex, Lies, and Family Secrets. Tony had said that the facts were accurate, but it disgusted her how Weber sensationalized every aspect of the investigation, from digging into the investigators’ private lives to vilifying the parents and martyring young Peter McMahon. A collection of color pictures in the center of the book showed family portraits, pictures from the orgies taken by guests, investigators, and the trial. One particularly gut-wrenching picture showed the young Peter McMahon at his sister’s grave site, tears on his face, holding a stuffed dog.
Peter would have been fourteen when this book came out, a difficult age for anyone, but that year he’d also lost his grandmother. Even if he’d changed his name to Peter Gray and didn’t live in the same state, he might not have been able to escape his past. And even if no one knew who he was, he did. In his heart, he knew that he was that crying child, that his family had been deeply flawed, and that his sister had been raped and murdered.
There was no way of knowing if Peter had gotten help as a child, if he grew up with any semblance of normality, or if he had become twisted and vengeful over the years. She sent Sean an e-mail, hoping he had some news for her about Peter. Sean responded immediately.
I confirmed what you already knew or suspected. And it appears that while he never legally changed his name to Peter Gray, he used that name when he registered as a freshman at a Newark high school. He moved back in with his mother when his grandmother died, but ran away a year later. Pilar McMahon remarried and relocated to Houston, Texas. Aaron McMahon has lived in Seattle from one month after Kreig was convicted. That’s all I have now-still working on it.
Lucy had a list of every person mentioned in the book and how they were portrayed. The parents, Aaron and Pilar McMahon, would likely be the most upset by what Weber had written. It would be easy enough for the authorities to find out if one or both of them were in New York when Weber was murdered.
Still, why now, ten years after the book was published? Lucy had checked the publisher’s Web site and while the book was still in print, there was no new version or reissue.
Weber had both condemned and commended the police investigation by being critical of how the local police first responded to the missing-person call, and because they did not immediately question the parents’ story when they found evidence of a party at the house, but she also highlighted the methodical police work that went into disproving the McMahons’ statements and gathering physical evidence from Rachel’s bedroom. Fifteen years ago, forensics had seen a surge in importance, and the FBI used all their available resources to help local police figure out what had happened. A rookie cop, Bob Stokes, had been the first to the scene after the 911 call, and Weber had written that his concerns about the McMahons had been “dismissed” by his superiors until the FBI arrived.
Tony had been mentioned throughout the book because he was the lead agent, but he was never directly quoted. All FBI quotes were attributed to the media information officer, Dominic Theissen.
It was obvious to Lucy, after reading Tony’s notes, the reports, and the book, that any delay in finding Rachel’s murderer was directly related to the misinformation the McMahons had given police in the first critical twenty-four hours. However, evidence later proved that none of that mattered-Rachel had been killed hours after she was taken from her bedroom, likely before anyone in the house woke up.
Except Peter McMahon.
If Peter knew the facts of the case, he knew that his sister was alive when he didn’t find her in her bedroom at three in the morning. But every way Lucy thought about how the investigation could have gone even if the police were notified at 3:00 a.m., she didn’t see how they would have figured out Benjamin Kreig had kidnapped her or where he was holding her until after he’d taken her to the woods and killed her.