Best Laid Plans(126)

“Yes, what happened?”

“I know why they left the drugs at the shooting. There was a bomb inside. Tobias just blew up the DEA evidence locker. I don’t know how many guards were inside. At least two, but it’s shift change. Not to mention the desk sergeant. Do you know how many cases are still pending? It’s a total clusterf*ck.”

“How’d you know? It just happened.”

“I’m in the office—as soon as I heard the explosion, I knew. I had to make sure you and Sean were okay. It’s my fault.”

“It’s not your fault, Brad.”

“There was a specific reason for them to plant the bomb,” Sean said. “It couldn’t have been just to cause havoc.”

“Why not?” Lucy said. “Tobias seems to live to cause problems for the DEA. Wait—I thought SAPD had the case.”

“They did, until ATF took it over. We share office space with ATF’s field office, and—”

“And an evidence locker,” Sean said. “Maybe SAPD was the target.”

“No. It was us—most drug cases fall under the DEA. With that much heroin on scene we would have normally been the lead. And even if we weren’t, we work closely with SAPD on all major drug busts.”

“I’m sorry, Brad. Don’t blame yourself,” Lucy said. “You couldn’t have known.”

Brad didn’t seem to hear her. “I have to go,” he said. “Sam’s talking to Juan now, they’re going to sweep all evidence lockers, police stations, the FBI office, you name it. It was a f*cking Trojan horse. There could be more.”

“Call us later,” Sean said.

“Tell your brother. He needs to be extra careful.” Brad hung up.

Lucy said, “I need to talk to Elise.”

Sean looked pained. “No.”

“Sean, I can do this.”

“But that girl—”

“I know exactly what she is. I’ll be okay.” She kissed him. “I have you to come home to.”

*



Elise was in solitary and it took Lucy two hours of waiting before they brought her to the interview room. Without her makeup, she looked younger than her sixteen years. But her eyes were old. Old and calculating.

Elise hadn’t talked, and they knew nothing about her that they hadn’t already known. Elise had called Tobias her “big brother” but Lucy was skeptical. Tobias was at least forty. Elise was sixteen. More likely that he was her father—if they were related at all.

“I knew you’d come and see me,” Elise said.

“Tell me why your brother set a bomb in the DEA evidence locker.”

Elise’s eyes sparkled. “I thought I heard the big boom. Toby is so f*cking smart.”

“What case did he want to destroy?”

Elise smiled and bit her lip. She stared at Lucy and raised an eyebrow. “All of them,” she whispered. She tilted her chin up, as if daring Lucy to question her.

“He’s too smart for that.” Lucy’s heart was pounding, but she kept her voice flat and even. She hadn’t been trained to deal with sociopaths like Elise Hansen. Lucy had faced many killers, some as cold and confident as Elise. But none of them had been sixteen. None of them had been so elusive. Without knowing who Elise was in the past made it twice as difficult to understand her now.

“You think you’re smarter than we are?” Elise grinned. “We had you going all week.”

“Did your brother have those eight gang members killed—and a child—just to disguise the C-4 as heroin?”

Elise didn’t answer. She attempted to look bored, but it was clear she was enjoying this conversation. She certainly wasn’t scared. While intellectually Lucy knew that Elise had lied to them and manipulated them throughout the entire investigation, this moment was the first time she believed it.

The revelation chilled her all the way to her soul.

She said, “There was no guarantee that it wouldn’t have been discovered before he set it off.”

“But. It. Wasn’t.” Elise leaned forward as if she were going to share a secret. “I know what you want. You want to fix me.”

Lucy raised an eyebrow. “No, actually, I don’t. Some people are permanently broken. Like Humpty Dumpty, no one can put you back together.”

“Hmm. Maybe you’re smarter than I gave you credit for. But I’m not broken. I’m exactly the way I want to be. I won’t be in here long.”

One of the more philosophical arguments in criminal psychology was whether psychopaths were born or created through their environment. Most experts believed that sociopaths were born—individuals with no innate ability to form attachments or feel empathy toward others—but not all sociopaths turned into psychopaths. Were psychopaths—those with a predisposition to cruelty—curable? Were psychopaths created because of chemical imbalances in the brain? Were they created by their environment? Or were they mistakes of nature?

Lucy and her brother Dillon had argued about the subject many times. Dillon believed that some people were born cruel. Lucy believed that environment played a bigger role in the formation of a psychopath. Maybe they were both right, and both wrong.

Two things were clear to Lucy as she and Elise stared, each of them assessing the other. Elise was most certainly a sociopath. And there was no doubt in Lucy’s mind that Elise had been cold, cunning, and cruel from the moment she had her first complex thought. Her environment might have expedited her journey from sociopath to psychopath, but it was a road Elise Hansen had always traveled.