Page 12 of Mean Streak

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F BI Special Agent Jack Connell climbed the steps of the brownstone, checked the box at the door, and pressed the button beside the name Gaskin. She was expecting him and answered almost immediately. “Mr. Connell?”

“Here.”

She buzzed him in. He opened the main door and stepped into a small vestibule, then went through another door with etched-glass panels set in heavy, carved wood.

She had warned him that the building hadn’t been modernized to include an elevator, but fortunately her apartment was on the second floor.

He rounded the elaborately carved newel post at the landing. Eleanor Gaskin was standing in an open door, through which she extended him her right hand. “You haven’t changed.”

“Can’t say the same for you.”

She laughed with good nature and patted her distended tummy. “Well, there is that.”

Now in her early thirties, she was striking, with widely set brown eyes and straight black hair worn almost in 1920s flapper style.

She had on black leggings, ballet flats, and an oversized shirt to accommodate her pregnancy.

There was no artifice in her smile. After shaking hands, she moved aside and motioned him in.

“Thank you for calling me,” he said. “We leave our cards with people but rarely expect to hear back from anybody. Especially not after so much time.”

“Four years, if I’m not mistaken.”

It had been four years since the mass shooting in Westboro, Virginia. He’d interviewed this young woman two months after that dreadful day but hadn’t spoken to her again until her unexpected call last night.

“Have a seat,” she said. “Can I get you anything?”

“No thanks.”

He sat down on the sofa indicated. The room was awash with sunlight coming in through the bay window that overlooked the street. It was a tree-lined, strictly residential block, situated between two of the busy boulevards of New York’s Upper West Side.

“Nice building,” he said. Apartments like this, which seemed to encompass the entire second floor of the brownstone, came with a hefty price tag.

As though reading his mind, she said, “My husband inherited it from his grandmother. She’d lived here for over forty years. We had to update it, of course. New baths, new kitchen. Best of all, it had a spare room for the nursery.”

“First child?”

“Yes. It’s a girl.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you. We’re excited.”

They exchanged the smile of polite strangers who had something important but uncomfortable to discuss. She launched the conversation. “Did you watch the video I e-mailed you?”

“No fewer than a dozen times. But I’d like to watch it with you to verify that I’m looking at the right woman.”

She went over to a cabinet that housed a stack of audiovisual components.

She turned on the necessary ones, and a recording began playing on the flat screen TV mounted on the wall above the fireplace.

She stood just to the side of it, remote control in hand.

The call letters of a TV station were superimposed at the bottom of the picture.

“I’ve got it cued, so it will be coming up…

there.” She paused the video and pointed out to him a woman, a face in a crowd.

It had been a national news story, broadcast last evening.

Protestors in Olympia, Washington, had marched on the state capitol building over the repeal of a gun law.

The woman in question carried a picket sign.

“That’s who I thought you meant,” he said. “She looks somewhat like Rebecca Watson, but…I’m not a hundred percent.” Jack walked over to the TV to take a closer look. He studied the face, which was in the midst of dozens. “You picked her out of this?”

“The instant I saw her.”

He regarded her doubtfully.

“I knew Rebecca well. I moved to the city straight out of college, wet behind the ears. She took a chance on me. People don’t forget their first employer.

We’d worked together at Macy’s for almost five years before the incident in Westboro, and not just as casual acquaintances. I was her right-hand assistant.

“We spent hours of each workday together. I was single then. She was recently divorced. Sometimes we’d go to her place after the regular business day and continue working, then share a bottle of wine. We were friends.”

She was repeating what she had told him four years earlier, when Rebecca Watson had gone missing and he’d questioned Eleanor about her friend’s sudden disappearance.

The young woman had been upset and concerned.

And truthful. He would stake his career on her veracity.

But she’d had nothing useful to tell him then.

He’d left her his card and asked that if she ever saw or heard from Rebecca Watson again to please contact him immediately.

Last night, she had. But he wouldn’t allow himself to get too excited over this development. Yet. For four years he’d followed leads that had looked promising. All had met with nothing but dead ends.

“She’s changed,” he remarked. Four years ago, he’d also spent time with Rebecca Watson, but they’d never split a bottle of wine.

Their exchanges had been contentious. He’d questioned her at length.

For hours. Days. She had told him from the very start that she would never give up her brother’s whereabouts to him, and she hadn’t.

“Her hair is different,” Eleanor Gaskin conceded. “But that’s easily changed.”

“She wore glasses then.”

“Large, horn-rimmed ones.” She smiled. “She thought they made her look more businesslike and gave her an advantage when driving a hard bargain. And, believe me, she could drive a bargain.”

“I believe you,” he said, remembering Rebecca Watson’s stubborn silence on the subject of her brother. Jack had never worn her down, and that failure still rankled. “I know we covered this territory back then, but maybe I missed something. Would you mind refreshing me?”

They returned to their seats and, with a gesture, Eleanor invited him to ask away.

“Did Rebecca talk to you about him, Mrs. Gaskin?”

“Her brother, you mean.”

Jack nodded.

“She talked about him a lot. Their parents had died, so there were just the two of them. I was almost as worried as she that he would be wounded or killed in Afghanistan. I didn’t think she could bear losing him. They were that devoted.

“When he got home, Rebecca was relieved, overjoyed. They had some really good times together. He doted on Sarah, sort of stepped in as a father figure. She adored her uncle. Then…” She looked at him ruefully and raised her shoulder.

“Westboro.”

“Yes.”

Jack remembered the date of the deadly event. It was stamped on his memory as indelibly as the name of the man he still sought. Then, fifty-five days after the shooting, his sister also had disappeared.

Jack had spent the past four years exploring every possible avenue in trying to locate Rebecca. Because, as Eleanor had said, the siblings were devoted. Finding Rebecca would bring him one step closer to finding her brother. Unfortunately, each seemed to possess an uncanny talent for vanishing.

Rebecca had been a buyer of housewares for Macy’s, a well-paying position with incentive bonuses.

Without giving notice, not even so much as a voice message, she had abandoned her job.

She had vacated her apartment overnight, leaving a check in the super’s mailbox that bought out her lease.

That was the last check she’d written on the account.

As of today, it still had over two thousand dollars in it.

She had taken her daughter and pulled a David Copperfield, proving herself to be as elusive as her brother.

“She didn’t show up for work one day,” Eleanor said in sad reflection. “I called her all day, left messages that went unanswered. I thought maybe Sarah was sick.”

Following her divorce, Rebecca Watson had retained full custody of her daughter.

After their disappearance, the ex-husband had made some noise, put out feelers of his own, but he gave up the search after only a few months.

In Jack’s opinion he hadn’t tried all that hard.

By then he’d remarried. His new wife was pregnant. He had other priorities.

“I got nowhere with Rebecca’s ex,” he told Eleanor now. “And I followed up with him for years. I knew he wouldn’t care much about Rebecca’s exit from his life, but I couldn’t believe he would let his daughter go so easily.”

“He’s a self-centered bastard, and an ass.”

Jack smiled over her candor. “I couldn’t agree more. His child was gone, but he seemed more concerned about how much a private detective would cost him to track her.”

“He was relying on you to find them.”

“Hmm, not exactly. He told me I couldn’t find a stinking pile of shit on a white rose.”

“Charming.” After a beat, she said, “The brothers-in-law hated each other. Did you know that?”

“Rebecca told me as much.”

“It was a mutual and passionate dislike.”

Jack had soon eliminated the ex-brother-in-law as a person to whom a seasoned war veteran and sharpshooter would turn for help. They’d been hostile toward each other from the outset of Rebecca’s marriage.

Jack said, “Eleanor, tell me true. After her brother disappeared, while I was chasing my tail trying to track him down, did Rebecca know where he was?”

“She swore to me she didn’t. I told you that four years ago. I also told you that I believed her.”

“Everybody lies,” he said gently, as though dispelling a myth to a child.

“They lie to good friends. They lie especially to the authorities, and particularly when they’re trying to shield someone they love.

And Rebecca’s sudden abandonment of her life here didn’t earn her any marks for trustworthiness. Not in my book.”

“No, I’m sure it didn’t.” The mother-to-be gave him a small smile. “But where her brother was concerned, she was trustworthy to the extreme, wasn’t she?”

***

When Jack Connell arrived at the Bureau’s Manhattan office after his visit with Eleanor Gaskin, he bypassed anyone looking for conversation, went straight to his cubby, and shut the door.

At his desk, he replied only to the e-mails and phone calls that were time-sensitive but did nothing that wasn’t mandatory to catch him up on a typical Monday morning.

Putting everything else on hold, he opened the desk drawer reserved for a file with a well-worn cover, on which was stamped a name in red ink.

As he dropped the file onto his desk, he cursed the name and the man who bore it, then opened the file and, after some rifling, located a photo of Rebecca Watson that had been taken four years ago by Jack himself, while surveilling her apartment, hoping her brother would show himself there.

The resemblance to the woman in the broadcast video was remarkable, but he couldn’t be positive they were one and the same, and he didn’t believe that Eleanor Gaskin could be either, although he didn’t doubt her conviction.

He was still comparing the two faces five minutes later when someone tapped on his door and then his associate, Wes Greer, a data analyst, poked his head in. “Now okay?”

“Sure, come in.”

He’d called Greer to ask a favor on his walk between the brownstone where the Gaskins lived and the nearest subway station. Greer was soft, pale, undistinguished looking, but brilliant. And he could keep his mouth shut, which, in Jack’s estimation, was a major asset.

He sat down across from Jack. “I called the TV station in Olympia and talked to the reporter who covered the story. Hundreds of protestors formed the picket. But that particular group was bussed to the capitol from Seattle. Reason they made it on camera? He said they were the most vocal and demonstrative.”

“Did you follow up in Seattle?”

“Found one Rebecca Watson in the county. She lives in a nursing home. Born 1941. Making her—”

“Too old. Dammit! ”

“I’ll keep trying. Widen the net.”

“Thanks, Wes.”

He got up and made it as far as the door. “Oh, almost forgot. Late Friday—you’d already gone for the weekend—I got more info on the soccer coach in Salt Lake City. He’ll walk, but he’ll never kick another soccer ball. Coaching days are history.”

“The coach tell you that?”

Greer shook his head. “I tracked down the osteo specialist who pieced his femur back together. Took a lot of Super Glue, he said.”

“Was he being euphemistic?”

“I’m not sure. He said the bones were splinters.”

“What did the coach have to say?”

“Nothing. Soon as I identified myself, he hung up. Just like the others.”

Jack looked down at the file. “Can’t blame them. They’re afraid to talk.”

“I would be, too.”

“Any idea who’s next?”

“Working on it,” Greer said. “But you know, things stack up.”

“For now, stay on Seattle.”

Greer left him. Jack stared absently at the closed door for several moments, then his eyes moved down to the folder. Pushing aside the photo of Rebecca Watson, he looked at the one beneath it, the one of her brother.

The picture had been taken before the man had grown angry and bitter and had lost his will to smile.

In the photograph, there was a suggestion of a grin at the corner of his mouth.

But if one studied it as often and as closely as Jack did, one would detect the faint lines already there, bracketing his lips, virtually foretelling the curse he would place on himself at Westboro.

Jack muttered the question he’d asked a thousand times. “Where are you, you son of a bitch?”