Next Victim Read Free Page A

her to take risks. She only hoped a cop didn’t pull her over. The FBI badge in her wallet would probably save her from a ticket, but a traffic stop would slow her down.
    She reached the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica. Not far from Westwood now. The dashboard clock read 9:58.
    She wondered if Andrus had been called. If he had been, then they must be really sure. It was March 29—Friday on Easter weekend—and although she didn’t think of Andrus as particularly religious, she knew they wouldn’t disturb an assistant director on Good Friday without cause.
    On impulse she removed her cell phone from her purse and speed-dialed the field office’s switchboard, then asked for Larkin. "This is McCallum again," she said when Larkin came on. "I’m five, ten minutes out. What’s going on?"
    "Nothing that can’t wait till you get here." As always, Larkin treated her with supercilious disrespect. It wasn’t possible to hear a man smirk over the phone, but Tess could swear she heard it anyway.
    "Just give me the rundown," she said.
    He sighed, perturbed at this misuse of his time. "The guy’s name, address, DL, and SSN all check out. No priors. They haven’t read him his rights yet." It was legal to obtain preliminary information on a suspect without a Miranda warning. "Right now we’ve got him cooling his heels."
    This was standard procedure. Some suspects lost their nerve after as little as ten minutes alone in the bare institutional setting of the interrogation room. Then the Stockholm syndrome would kick in, and they would cooperate with their interrogators, sometimes even confess. The downside was that often these confessions were false.
    "Are Gaines and Michaelson there?" she asked. Gaines was a profiler working the case. Michaelson was the squad supervisor, experienced at interrogation.
    "Gaines just arrived. We’re expecting Michaelson any second."
    "Who made the bust?"
    "Tyler, Hart, and DiFranco. They’re in the surveillance room. Michaelson and Gaines may want Tyler in on the questioning at some point."
    "And me? Do they want me in?"
    "I don’t think that’s such a good idea."
    She hadn’t asked for his opinion. "We’ll talk about it. How about Andrus?"
    "He’s here."
    So they had called him. "I guess he looks good for it, this guy?" she said, holding her voice steady.
    "It’s still preliminary."
    Obviously Larkin would tell her only the bare minimum. She ought to be angry, but all she felt was nervous tension. "Try to hold off the interview till I get there."
    "Michaelson’s the case agent. He’s the one in charge."
    Tess knew that. "Just take your time briefing him, okay?" She clicked off without waiting for an answer and dumped the phone back into her handbag.
    She hated talking to Larkin. Hated talking to any of them, really, except Andrus. The others treated her with a mixture of pity and scorn. Pity for what had happened in Denver. Scorn because they liked to think they would have handled it better. They were men, after all. They didn’t let things get to them. But she was a woman—and women, well, they got emotional about these things.
    Of course, they didn’t know the whole story. Only Andrus knew, and she had prevailed on him not to share it with the others. It was irrelevant to the case. It was her private life. She had given enough of her life to the bureau—more than enough. There were some things she meant to keep to herself.
     
    She was in Westwood now, coursing down the wide corridor between rows of high-rise apartment buildings. Ahead, on her right, was Westwood Village, a cluster of movie theaters and T-shirt shops crowded with UCLA students.
    Her destination lay to her left, at the southwest corner of Wilshire and Veteran—the twenty-story Federal Building that housed the Los Angeles field office of the FBI.
    On most homicide investigations, local law enforcement authorities had jurisdiction and took the lead, and the bureau was brought in, if at all, only to provide