As the Wicked Watch(114)

I hadn’t even noticed the people behind us. But when I saw Pamela reach into one of the bins at the end of the table, then heard her scream, I recognized Robin Okoye.

“Excuse me! Excuse me! That’s mine!” Robin said.

I looked over Pamela’s shoulder to see she was holding a red lacquered pendant in her hand. It was in the shape of a heart with a gold rose in the center, like the one Masey wore in her high school picture.

*

“You’ve heard of serial killers collecting trophies, haven’t you?” Dr. Chan posed the question to the graduate student lecture hall. “Jewelry in particular.”

The pendant was a family heirloom. It had belonged to Pamela’s grandmother. Her grandfather bought it in the Virgin Islands and had My love, Sarah, inscribed on the back. There wasn’t room for much more than that.

“Now, some serial killers, usually psychopaths, gift people who are close to them with their trophies. Why?”

“It’s a source of pride,” I blurted out. “And they get to relive it all over again.”

Robin Okoye testified she found the pendant in a drawer at Terrence’s office and she took it. “But he knew I had it,” she testified. “I wore it around him.”

Terrence’s DNA swab matched the semen in the condom but not in Tania’s rape kit. She wasn’t one of his so-called protégés. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t involved in her murder. I’d come to the conclusion that as useful as Louise’s monster story had been at connecting the dots, it didn’t put Terrence and Brent in the proper context. I’d come up with a better story. They were more like the man-eating Lions of Tsavo, two males that did something male lions never do: they hunted together and killed for sport, terrorizing African railway workers until they were themselves hunted and slain. The lions, maneless, were actually on display here in the Field Museum. With Terrence so irrevocably ensnared, Brent was beleaguered and alone for the first time in a long time. It wouldn’t be long before he went back to a place that was familiar to him, where he could do no wrong.

“Got the wiretap!” Joey texted me for the twenty-fifth time today. Later he told me he was subpoenaing Louise’s cell phone records. If anyone subpoenaed my and Joey’s phone records, we would be guilty as charged, with the barrage of text and phone calls between us these past few days.

Law enforcement hadn’t been listening in on Louise’s phone calls even twenty-four hours before Brent called.

“Hey, Mama Lou,” he said.

“Alec, you all right?”

“Anybody been around asking about me?”

“No,” she lied.

“Yeah they did. The police been over there, haven’t they? And reporters?”

“Boy, those people came here to talk about me, not you.”

Joey played the surveillance tape he recorded on his cell phone while we sat in an unmarked car outside police headquarters.

“It sounded like she called him Alec,” I said.

“Remember his first name is Alexander. Alex, maybe Alec, sounds better to her. She said it again. Listen.”

“Alec, just stay low for now, baby, okay? Nobody’s got nothing on you.”

“This is gon’ come back on me!” he said, growing upset.

“Not if you do what I tell you.”

“Okay, Mama Lou.”

“Call me tomorrow.”

Joey was right about the ick factor.

“What now?” I asked him.

“We’re holding steady,” he said. “We need her to slip up. But when he calls, he’s always on the move and we haven’t been able to lock in a location.”

We both looked at each other, trying to get our nerves up to do something that could potentially blow up both our careers. To get the Band-Aid entered into evidence, I was going to have to come clean with Bartlett, who was about to have some serious troubles of his own. A potential career-ending reckoning and degree of scrutiny he had never experienced before. He knew it, too, and I used it as leverage against him.

It was just the three of us in Bartlett’s office when I told him about the physical evidence and Brent’s alleged assault of Monique, whom Joey found out was his half sister, the daughter of his estranged father who abandoned him to the foster system after his mother passed away.

“This blood evidence will exonerate the boys. If I wasn’t sure of that, I wouldn’t be here,” I told Bartlett. “You’ve got one more chance to get it right. A little less than three days.”

“What’s happening in three days?” he asked.

“I’ll be back on the air.”

It was a veiled threat meant to scare the crap out of him. Bartlett was someone I used to hold in high esteem, for a man in his position. Now I realized he was a tool of the system, ineffective and weak, which was ironic for a man with so much power. Even under the threat of media exposure, he didn’t use his position to expedite the bureaucratic process to get the charges dropped against the boys, and neither did O’Brien. They were minuses, canceling each other out, a latent distrust now between them over what the other might say or do, and the boys were paying the price with their freedom.

Self-preservation was the infinite barbed-wire fence between the truth and lies. That was why I trusted and followed the science. DNA I could count on, but when it came down to people doing the right thing, it was a toss-up. Here, once again, the science prevailed. Brent’s medical records identified his blood type to be the infrequent AB negative, and his fate was set in motion.