From Potter's Field - Cornwell Patricia (читать книги онлайн бесплатно полностью без .txt) 📗

I pressed the elevator button, boarded and went down to the lower level. Several profilers were in their offices, and they nodded at me as I walked by. Wesley's secretary was on vacation, and I passed her desk and knocked on the shut door. I heard Wesley's voice. A chair moved and he walked to the door and pulled it open.

'Hello,' he said, surprised.

'These are the printouts you wanted from Lucy.' I handed them over.

'Thank you. Please come in.' He slipped on reading glasses, reviewing the message Gault had sent.

His jacket was off, a white shirt wrinkled around woven leather suspenders. Wesley had been perspiring and he needed to shave.

'Have you lost more weight?' I asked.

'I never weigh myself.' He glanced at me over the top of his glasses as he seated himself behind his desk.

'You don't look healthy.'

'He's decompensating more,' he said. 'You can see that from this message. He's getting more reckless, more brazen. I would predict that by the end of the weekend, we will nail his location.'

'Then what?' I was not convinced.

'We deploy HRT.'

'I see,' I said dryly. 'They will rappel from helicopters and blow up the building.'

Wesley glanced at me again. He placed the paperwork on the desk. 'You're angry,' he said.

'No, Benton. I'm angry with you, versus being angry in general.'

'Why?'

'I asked you not to involve Lucy.'

'We have no choice,' he said.

'There are always choices. I don't care what anybody says.'

'In terms of locating Gault, she's really our only hope right now.' He paused, looking directly at me. 'She has a mind of her own.'

'Yes, she does. That's my point. Lucy doesn't have an off button. She doesn't always understand limits.'

'We won't let her do anything that might place her at risk,' he said.

'She's already been placed at risk.'

'You've got to let her grow up, Kay.'

I stared at him.

'She's going to graduate from the university this spring. She's a grown woman.'

'I don't want her coming back here,' I said.

He smiled a little, but his eyes were exhausted and sad. 'I hope she'll be back here. We need agents like her and Janet. We need all we can get.'

'She keeps many secrets from me. It seems the two of you conspire against me and I'm left in the dark. It's bad enough that…' I caught myself.

Wesley looked into my eyes. 'Kay, this has nothing to do with my relationship with you.'

'I would certainly hope not.'

'You want to know everything Lucy is doing,' he said.

'Of course.'

'Do you tell her everything you're doing when you're working a case?'

'Absolutely not.'

'I see.'

'Why did you hang up on me?'

'You got me at a bad time,' he answered.

'You've never hung up on me before, no matter how bad the time.'

He took his glasses off and carefully folded them. He reached for his coffee mug, looked inside and saw it was empty. He held it in both hands.

'I had someone in my office, and I didn't want this individual to know you were on the line,' he said.

'Who was it?' I said.

'Someone from the Pentagon. I won't tell you his name.'

'The Pentagon?' I said, mystified.

He was quiet.

'Why would you be concerned that someone from the Pentagon might know I was calling you?' I then asked.

'It seems you've created a problem,' Wesley simply said, setting the coffee mug down. 'I wish you hadn't started poking around Ft. Lee.'

I was astonished,

'Your friend Dr. Gruber may be fired. I would advise you to refrain from contacting him further.'

'This is about Luther Gault?' I asked.

'Yes, General Gault.'

They can't do anything to Dr. Gruber,' I protested.

'I'm afraid they can,' Wesley said. 'Dr. Gruber conducted an unauthorized search in a military database. He got you classified information.'

'Classified?' I said. 'That's absurd. It's one page of routine information that you can pay twenty dollars to see while you're visiting the Quartermaster Museum. It's not like I asked for a damn Pentagon file.'

'You can't pay the twenty dollars unless you are the individual or have power of attorney to access that individual's file.'

'Benton, we're talking about a serial killer. Has everybody lost their minds? Who the hell cares about a generic computer file?'

The army does.'

'Are we dealing with national security?'

Wesley did not answer me.

When he offered nothing more, I said, 'Fine. You guys can have your little secret. I'm sick and tired of your little secrets. My only agenda is to prevent more deaths. I'm no longer certain what your agenda is.' My stare was unforgiving and hurt.

'Please,' Wesley snapped. 'You know, some days I wish I smoked like Marino does.' He blew out in exasperation. 'General Gault is not important in this investigation. He does not need to be dragged into it.'

'I think anything we know about Temple Gault's family could be important. And I can't believe you don't feel that way. Background information is vital to profiling and predicting behavior.'

'I'm telling you, General Gault is off limits.'

'Why?'

'Respect.'

'My God, Benton.' I leaned forward in my chair. 'Gault may have killed two people with a pair of his uncle's damn jungle boots. And just how is the army going to like it when that hits Time magazine and Newsweek?'

'Don't threaten.'

'I most certainly will. I will do more than threaten if people don't do the right thing. Tell me about the general. I already know his nephew inherited his eyes. And the general was a bit of a peacock, since it seems he preferred being photographed in a splendid mess uniform like Eisenhower would have worn.'

'He may have had an ego but was a magnificent man, by all accounts,' Wesley said.

'Was he Gault's uncle, then? Are you admitting it?'

Wesley hesitated. 'Luther Gault is Temple Gault's uncle.'

'Tell me more.'

'He was born in Albany and graduated from the Citadel in 1942. Two years later, when he was a captain, his division moved to France, where he became a hero in the Battle of the Bulge. He won the Medal of Honor and was promoted again. After the war, he was sent to Ft. Lee as officer in charge of the uniform research division of the Quartermaster Corps.'

'Then the boots were his,' I said.

'They certainly could have been.'

'Was he a big man?'

'I am told that he and his nephew would have been the same size when General Gault was younger.'

I thought of the photograph of the general in the dress mess jacket. He was slender and not particularly tall. His face was strong, eyes unwavering, but he did not look unkind.

'Luther Gault also served in Korea,' Wesley went on. 'For a while he was assigned to the Pentagon as the assistant chief of staff, then it was back to Ft. Lee as the deputy commander. He finished his career in MAC-V.'

'I don't know what that is,' I said.

'Military Assistance Command - Vietnam.'

'After which he retired to Seattle?' I said.

'He and his wife moved there.'

'Children?'

'Two boys.'

'What about the general's interaction with his brother?'

'I don't know. The general is deceased and his brother will not talk to us.'

'So we don't know how Gault might have wound up with his uncle's boots.'

'Kay, there is a code with Medal of Honor winners. They are in their own class. The army gives them a special status and they are stringently protected.'

'That's what all this secrecy is about?' I said.

'The army isn't keen on having the world know that their Medal of Honor-winning two-star general is the uncle of one of the most notorious psychopaths our country has seen. The Pentagon is not exactly keen on having it known that this killer - as you have already pointed out - may have kicked several people to death with General Gault's boots.'

I got up from my chair. 'I'm tired of boys and their codes of honor. I'm tired of male bonding and secrecy. We are not kids playing cowboys and Indians. We're not neighborhood children playing war.' I was drained. 'I thought you were more highly evolved than that.'

He stood up, too, as my pager went off. 'You're taking this the wrong way,' he said.

I looked at the display. The area code was Seattle, and without asking Wesley's permission I used his phone.

'Hello,' said a voice I did not know.

'This number just paged me,' I was confused.

'I didn't page anybody. Where are you calling from?'

'Virginia.' I was about to hang up.

'I just called Virginia. Wait a minute. Are you calling about Prodigy?'

'Oh. Perhaps you talked to Lucy?'

'LUCYTALK?'

'Yes.'

'We just this minute sent mail to each other. I'm responding to the gold foil query. I'm a dentist in Seattle and a member of the Academy of Gold Foil Operators. Are you the forensic pathologist?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Thank you so much for responding. I'm trying to identify a dead young woman with extensive gold foil restorations.'

'Please describe them.'

I told him about Jane's dental work and the damage to her teeth. 'It's possible she was a musician,' I added. 'She may have played the saxophone,'

There was a lady from out here who sounds a lot like that,'

'She was in Seattle?'

'Right. Everyone in our academy knew about her because she had such an incredible mouth. Her gold foil restorations and dental anomalies were used in slide presentations at a number of our meetings,'

'Do you recall her name?'

'Sorry. She wasn't my patient. But it seems I remember hearing she was a professional musician until she was in some terrible accident. That was when her dental problems began,'

The lady I'm talking about has a lot of enamel loss,' I said. 'Probably from overbrushing,'

'Oh absolutely. The lady out here did, too,'

'It doesn't sound to me as if the lady out there was a street person,' I said.

'Couldn't be. Someone paid for that mouth,'

'My lady was a street person when she died in New York,' I said.

'Geez, that makes me sad. I guess whoever she was, she really couldn't care for herself,'

'What is your name?' I asked.

'I'm Jay Bennett,'

'Dr. Bennett? Do you remember anything else that might have been said during one of these slide presentations?'

A long silence followed. 'Okay, yes. This is very vague,' He hesitated again. 'Oh, I know,' he said. The lady out here was related to someone important. In fact, that might be who she lived with out here before she disappeared.'

I gave him further information so he could call me again. I hung up the phone and met Wesley's stare.

'I think Jane is Gault's sister,' I said.

'What?' He was genuinely shocked.

'I think Temple Gault murdered his sister,' I repeated. 'Please tell me you didn't already know that.'