Second Honeymoon

Chapter 63

HALF KIDDING, DAN warned her about it on the ride back from the White House. “Look out for the letdown,” he said.

“The what?” asked Sarah.

“The letdown,” he repeated. “Just wait.”

She didn’t have to wait long. Within a minute of landing behind her desk at Quantico, she felt it. She’d been flying high, mixing it up in the Oval Office with the commander in chief. POTUS. The prez. And now what? She was back to, well, being herself. Just another FBI agent.

Hanging over Montgomery’s shoulder, she’d noticed, was the original of Norman Rockwell’s Working on the Statue of Liberty. Sitting atop the credenza was Frederic Remington’s iconic sculpture The Bronco Buster. Both were courtesy of the greatest interior designer of them all: the Smithsonian.

Sarah sighed. Here she was, all alone now in her tiny office decorated by the weekly circular from Staples. The only thing hanging on her wall was a scuffed-up dry-erase board, and the closest thing she had to a sculpture was a little magnetic porcupine on her desk that held her paper clips.

In other words, the letdown.

There was something else, too. In front of Sarah, practically taunting her, was the case file on the John O’Hara Killer. On the outside it looked like every other file in her office—an overstuffed manila folder. But on the inside…

There was no escaping the fact that this case felt different, a little more personal. She’d met him face-to-face, shook his hand. Stared him straight in the eyes. They were slate gray. And they were still looking at her, daring her.

Sarah opened the file. For the umpteenth time, she pored over the various police reports and available autopsies. She reread her notes. She logged on to her computer, searching again for anything and everything she could find on Ulysses and You’ve Got Mail.

Next, she worked the phone. She spoke with the manager of Brewer’s supermarket back in Candle Lake. There was no security camera near the Movie Hut. In fact, there were no security cameras at all in the market. “Shoplifting isn’t much of an issue around here,” the manager explained.

She called Canteena’s and spoke with the bartender who had served “Jared” his first beer, the one he had before he conveniently drank from hers.

“Any chance he paid for it with a credit card?” she asked.

She knew that chance fell on the far side of slim to none, but she didn’t care. Sometimes the only way to catch a break is to chase down the long shots.

Speaking of which…isn’t there someone who was supposed to call me back?

Sarah grabbed her phone log and the list of people for whom she’d previously left messages. A sheriff in Winnemucca, Nevada. A detective in Flagstaff, Arizona. The head librarian from the Kern County Library in Bakersfield, California. Everyone had gotten back to her.

Except one.

In the past year, there’d been a total of sixteen escapes from all domestic prisons and mental institutions, this according to the FBI crime database. Of those sixteen escapees, only two remained at large. One was an inmate from state prison in Montgomery, Alabama; the other a patient at Eagle Mountain Psychiatric Hospital in Los Angeles.

The photo accompanying the Alabama inmate’s file ruled him out as the killer. Not unless the “Jared Sullivan” Sarah had met had somehow managed, among other things, to lose two hundred pounds, not to mention the two tattoos of daggers on either side of his face.

The psychiatric patient from L.A., though, was another story. Or, more accurately, no story at all. Sarah had requested a copy of the police report made after his escape, but it hadn’t reached her desk yet. Other than that, the Bureau didn’t have anything on him, which wasn’t too big of a surprise. Most states, California in particular, had a litany of rules and regulations regarding patient privacy.

The best way to cut through them? A good old-fashioned phone call.

Assuming you could get someone to call you back.

Sarah had left two messages for Lee McConnell, chief administrator at Eagle Mountain. Of course, this guy would probably sooner get a root canal than have to discuss a patient who escaped on his watch.

“Round three,” mumbled Sarah as she started dialing.

She couldn’t be sure, but the woman who answered seemed to be different from the one she’d spoken to the previous two times. A temp, maybe? That would certainly explain her announcing chipperly that “Mr. McConnell just walked in; let me patch you through.” What followed was easily ten seconds of dead air, during which McConnell was probably busy chewing out the poor woman for not checking with him first. Finally, he picked up.

“Agent Brubaker? Lee McConnell,” he said. “Talk about timing. I was just about to call you back.”

Yeah, right. And I was just about to elope with Johnny Depp.

Sarah riffled through her notes, checking for the name she’d scribbled down. McConnell’s patient. Or former patient, as it were.

She found it.

“So what can you tell me about Ned Sinclair?” she asked.