Chapter 22
To Do:
- Research interrogation methods
- Final approval for Dr. Weaver proposal
Birds tweeted noisilyoutside the West Haven Police Department. A suspiciously cheery sound for such a grim setting. It must have been Claire’s lucky morning, because the media that had camped out in front of her apartment building for the last three days had vacated the premises. Claire stuffed her phone back into her purse, mind still buzzing with ideas for the escape room-themed proposal that had passed their final test that morning. Sawyer probably would have had a fit if he saw her walk from the car to the station with her head buried in her phone. But surely no one would abduct her at a police station.
She pushed her way through the heavy double doors. What was she getting herself into?
“Claire Hartley,” she said to the cop behind the desk. He glanced at the calendar on his desk, and then at Rosie, who was panting happily, tongue lolling out of her mouth on one side. She wasn’t about to leave her alone in her apartment with a stalker on the loose.
“Special Agent Hartley is expecting me,” she added. Anything to move this trash heap of a day along. She pointed to Rosie. “She’s with me.”
“Sure. Follow me,” the officer said, leading her back through a row of cubicles to an interrogation room. “Coffee? Tea?”
“Coffee, please. One cream, two sugars.”
She shivered as she slid into one of the unforgiving stainless-steel chairs. The door remained open, but the walls seemed to be closing in. She inhaled deeply and pulled out her newly revamped notebook.
She ran a finger over the Self-Defense and Interrogation Tactics label she had printed the night before. The flowery writing was definitely leaning slightly down to the right. And one of the rhinestones was a millimeter off. She’d have to do it all again.
Rosie, on the other hand, wasn’t bothered at all by the interrogation room. After sniffing every corner of the room, she wound herself around Claire’s chair twice and settled at her feet.
Claire checked her phone again, but there was no service in the interrogation room. Mindy was covering the client calls, but what if there was an emergency?
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Jack said brusquely as he rushed into the room, wheeling a large whiteboard.
“It’s fine.” Claire didn’t look up. She carefully put her phone away and folded her hands on the desk before facing him.
Her father took the seat opposite her, fluorescent lights shining on his salt-and-pepper hair.
“The FBI extends their thanks for your cooperation.”
Claire bit the inside of her lip. If one more phony statement came out of his mouth, there would be a record-shattering eye roll.
“Our purpose here today is to teach you some techniques you can use when you visit Mr. Windsor at the penitentiary.” He cleared his throat. “Please stop me if you have any questions. Thank you, Officer Jordan.”
The front desk officer dropped off two steaming mugs of coffee, both the same beige color.
Claire and Jack both took their spoons, stirred counterclockwise, and tapped twice against the rim of the cup before taking the first sip. Ugh. If Jack noticed, he didn’t say anything.
“Sorry about this, by the way.” Jack waved a hand at the room. “They’re having a meeting in the conference room.”
“It’s fine.” Claire glanced at her reflection in the two-way mirror. She shuddered. How many times was she going to reassure her absent father that things were “fine?” Things hadn’t been fine for months. Years, really, if she wanted to count her daddy issues.
He cleared his throat. “The first thing we wanted to ask was if we could photograph your neck wound.”
“Oh. Sure.” She took off her blazer and scrunched her sleeveless top to the side.
Jack waved to a cop in the hallway, who came in with a digital camera.
Claire craned her neck, trying to get her face as far as possible from the mark in the photograph.
When the man with the camera left, she put her blazer back on. There was a darkness in Jack’s eyes. He seemed more determined as he flipped to a new page in his own (poorly decorated) notebook, all business.
“The first thing I want to talk about are some interrogation tactics.” His chair screeched on the tile floor as he slid it back from the table. He rose and walked to the corner of the room, where he had parked the whiteboard. At least he knew the value of a good whiteboard.
He wrote DECEPTION on the board in capital letters. Claire copied the word down.
Jack clasped his hands behind his back and paced. “We have an advantage over Mr. Windsor. He is trapped in a cell for twenty-three hours a day. His news sources are limited, and his connection to the outside world has been largely fragmented since the prison reports only his lawyer and his mother have visited him.”
Shit. She had nearly forgotten about the treacherous, pinch-faced litigator that her mother had nearly assaulted. Damned Rachel. Was she going to be even crueler to Claire in court now that she and Luke had broken up? Maybe she would double down on her hatred for Claire and become Wendy’s lawyer too.
Jack was still talking. “He doesn’t know what we know or what we don’t know. When you speak to him, I recommend you suggest that we know more than we actually do.”
He paused mid-pace and gestured at the word on the board. “Deception may be our best tactic here. When you speak to him, you want to deceive him. Trick him into giving something away. He doesn’t know that you’re aware of the group’s existence. He won’t know for sure that we sent you. My suggestion is that you come right out and tell him you already know about his group because someone from it has already implicated him on a larger scale in exchange for immunity. Get him to turn on them.”
Her head was already spinning. She scribbled down another note. Her stomach had twisted into one of those metal brain teaser puzzles Jack had left behind when he’d abandoned the family. Barney had evaded capture for so long. The FBI couldn’t crack him in person. Would he really be undone simply by a bit of deceit from one of his victims?
“And here’s what we know about this group so far,” Jack said, erasing his first word and scribbling more down.
“We know that this particular group targets women.” He wrote WOMEN on the board and underlined it. “All the known victims with this mark have been women. All different ages, different stages of life. Several were powerful executives or business owners, stockbrokers or lawmakers,” Jack said, ticking them off on his fingers. “This suggests some kind of?—”
“Fear of powerful women? Of women in control?” Claire interrupted.
“Yes, exactly. We can’t be sure, of course. Some of the marked victims, like Ariel, were waitresses or retail employees. We suspect the outliers are victims of personal vendettas, potentially unrelated to the group’s mission.”
“When he—that night.” She still couldn’t say the words. “He did make it seem like it was purely a personal vendetta. All because I shot him down in college. Same with the other girls.”
“You took the control from him,” Jack suggested and wrote CONTROL on the board. “And you bruised his ego, which is probably worse to him.”
Claire exhaled deeply and buried one hand in her hair. This was such a bullshit reason to end someone’s life. If she killed everyone she couldn’t control, Wendy and Jason’s corpses would be sprawled on the sidewalk outside her apartment right now. Luke’s too.
Jack capped the marker and returned to the table. He leaned toward her, both elbows on the table.
“I know what you’re thinking. This is bullshit. And it is.” He tapped his thumb against the stainless-steel table. “Control is a huge motivating factor in many serial killer cases.”
“Fabulous,” she said flatly. “Is there anything else you can tell me about the group?”
“We—well, I, technically, believe that we’re dealing with some sort of cult. The geographic disparity, the symbol, the similarity in victims all point toward a wide-scale organization with a disciplined rule set and mission. Ordinary people with ordinary troubles who are fed up and swept up in hating the world that hated them. There must be a leader, and they must have some way to communicate.”
“So, what do you need me to find out?” She flipped to a fresh page in her notebook, pen poised at the ready. What she wouldn’t give to be writing out a list of décor for that escape room proposal. Every time she thought her detective days were over, some homicidal maniac decided to ruin everything.
“We don’t know what he’ll give you, or if he’ll give you anything at all. But we want to know the name of the organization, who is the leader, what is their end goal, how many members there are, whether this is a domestic or international organization, how they find and recruit members, how they select their victims. Everything.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they were international,” Claire said as she scribbled away. “They managed to send me flowers in Paris on my second day.”
Jack pursed his lips. He tugged at his collar but didn’t comment.
She exhaled again, trying to stay calm. Footage of police dramas she had watched flooded her mind. “How do you think I should approach this? Should I act large-and-in-charge like the type of woman he hates and wants to destroy to set him off? Or should I act the victim, meek and mild, to fool him into a sense of security?”
Jack looked pleasantly surprised, almost pleased, at the question. “That’s a great question. Ultimately, that choice is up to you and what you feel you’re able to handle that day. If you act confident, you may provoke anger and encourage him to give something up. If you show him how little his attempt affected your life, that would really set him off. Or, if you act like a victim, you may lull him into a monologue where he’ll reveal more information. Either way, he said he will only speak to you. He barely even speaks to his lawyer—whom I have heard you already know.”
“Of course he doesn’t. She’s a powerful woman.” A contemptible crone, too, but powerful woman nonetheless. “Why would he want a woman arguing for his fate?”
He nodded deeply and leaned forward. “I suspect he knows your connection to her and did it to get under your skin. It’s the only thing he can control from prison. Unless, that is, he still has some pull with the group. Additionally, you may want to aim for a few personal questions to get him talking. Serial killers typically have troubled childhoods, bed wetting behavior, aggression toward animals, and profound hatred for either their mother or father.”
“Well, he already confessed to murdering his dad, so that should be easy enough.” Claire added a bulleted list to her notes. “Why aren’t you guys concerned about that case? Surely that should be easier to prove than a national serial killer ring.”
“It’s on the To Do list. Do you have any other questions for me?” he asked, closing his notebook and sliding it into his briefcase.
“Why didn’t you ever call? Or write? Why did you never come back?” Claire blurted out. She hadn’t even intended to bring up her family history, but the questions poured out of her.
He froze. “Claire, this isn’t really the time to talk about it.” He crossed the room and nudged the door closed.
“When will be the time, Jack? In case you forgot, I’m being targeted by a network of serial killers.” She yanked a copy of the latest note from her murder binder and slapped it down on the table. “I could be abducted and stuffed in a trunk tomorrow. Again.”
“I would never let that happen.”
“Really? Because you didn’t do anything about it the first time. You only bothered to contact me, to come into my life at all, because you saw this,” she said, gesturing to her scar. “You only wanted to talk to me when I could do something for you. You’re just as bad as they are.”
Her temper flared like a match striking a rock. Every thought she’d had for the last twenty years was threatening to pour out.
She jabbed a finger into the metal table. “We had a yard sale to get rid of you. Did you know that? We sold your ties, your vintage record collection. We used the money for a security deposit on a crappy apartment because that was all we could afford when you abandoned us. I was in our front yard, six years old, haggling with people who wanted to take pieces of you away from me.”
He leaned against the wall in the corner of the room, arms folded, and painfully silent.
“Thank god Mom married Roy. He was there for every father-daughter dance, every field hockey game, even though I wasn’t biologically his. He loved me as he would have loved his own daughter. He’s a real man.”
Jack’s face was flushed, and his hands had curled into fists. “Do you want to know why I never came back, Claire? Your mother never allowed it. She threatened restraining orders. Returned every birthday card I ever sent. She got full custody of you and denied any visitation rights, claiming abuse.”
“Bullshit.” Claire slapped the table. “You left because you got another woman pregnant. You started a new family and wanted nothing to do with your old one. Were the words ‘till death do us part’ just a suggestion to you? Marriage is a promise, a binding, lifelong commitment. Or were we just practice while you waited for your real family to start?”
Rosie stood rigid at Claire’s side, growling softly.
“No, Claire. I loved your mother, but we had our problems. Most of them were my fault. I was trying to make my way into the Bureau, so I was never home. I didn’t give our marriage the time it needed. And your mom had to stay at home with Charlie and never got to finish school. We fought almost every day, over all kinds of things, but especially money. I was so tired of the fighting. I sought solace outside of our marriage, and that’s on me. But don’t blame me for being gone all those years. I tried to be a part of your life.”
She paused. Was any of this the truth? She hadn’t inherited Alice’s psychic abilities, but she could tell a very uncomfortable conversation with her mother was coming.
“And how about after I turned eighteen? When I sent you an invitation to my wedding last year?”
Jack sighed. “It had been too long. I didn’t know what to say. I knew you wouldn’t believe me, that you assumed I was just some deadbeat who went out for a pack of smokes and never came back.”
“That is the prevailing narrative.” She crossed her arms rigidly in front of her.
“How is your mother?” he asked quietly.
“She’s good. She’s happy.”
“I’m glad. Listen, Claire. Tanya—my wife—would really like to have you over for dinner. She wants to meet you.”
Claire froze. Unbelievable. Dinner with the deadbeat and the home-wrecker. Who could turn down that invitation?
“And I’d like to talk more about this all in a more appropriate setting.” He gestured to the interrogation room.
There was probably a small battalion of cops on the other side of the glass, taking bets and passing tubs of popcorn. But that was the least of her worries.
“I’ll think about it. But I have a meeting to get to. Goodbye, Jack.” She hurried out of the room, Rosie following in her wake.
Claire plowed through the front door like she had stolen something. Her fists were clenched so tightly they hurt.
How dare he show up after a decade of absence and just expect her to welcome him with open arms? That dinner invitation had only been extended because Tanya had requested it. Not because Jack wanted to get to know his estranged daughter. Claire nearly banged her shin against a metal bench as she hustled to her car. With all the pent-up rage threatening to erupt, she was pretty sure she could have ripped it straight out of the concrete. She forced herself to breathe and hurried to her car, mouth clamped shut. The scream trapped in her throat would have shattered windows. Jack wasn’t worth the spike in her blood pressure.