Cutting Edge

CHAPTER TWENTY

Nora had never seen so much blood at a single-victim crime scene.

Blood coated Leif Cole as if he’d bathed in it. The beige carpet under the chair where he was strapped down was soaked, as blood from multiple shallow wounds from his wrists to his shoulders had dribbled down his arms and onto the floor. The chair was slick with it, where he sat soaked, the brown denim material nearly black where the blood had seeped for more than eight hours, according to the coroner.

Cole was naked. Evidence showed he might have been getting out of the shower when confronted by his attacker. What small areas of skin weren’t coated in blood were extremely pale. His wrists had been crudely but efficiently duct-taped to the chair. His feet were unrestrained. How anyone could have incapacitated him without a struggle, Nora didn’t know-unless he’d been drugged.

“Any sign of him being drugged?” she asked.

“He had whiskey last night-there’s an empty glass in the bathroom that smells of it,” Sanger said. “It’s bagged into evidence. He told me he wouldn’t drink.”

“Excuse me?”

Sanger turned his red-rimmed eyes from Cole to her. “I should have stayed.”

“You couldn’t have known he was a target. Leif Cole doesn’t fit-” Then she realized she had no idea why or how the killer was selecting his-or her-victims.

All the evidence pointed to the mysterious Maggie O’Dell. No driver’s license, no records, no photo.

Nora and Duke had found Cole’s body after Nora couldn’t reach him on any phone-house, cell, or the college. She called Sheriff Sanger and confirmed that Cole had gone home the night before, leaving his car at Rose College. At first she wasn’t concerned-he could be sleeping late, a common sign of grief. But when he didn’t respond to knocking or the doorbell, she’d searched the property and discovered the garage door unlocked.

Cole had given them Maggie’s name, but Nora didn’t see how Maggie could have found out. Did she fear he would lead them to her? Did Cole know more about Maggie O’Dell than he said last night?

She looked back at Cole, and the wall that separated her cop mind from her emotions faded. She’d known Cole. She’d talked to him just last night. Seeing him like this … it was more than a tragedy. Nora wasn’t going to forget.

Duke put a hand on the small of her back. Subtly and discreetly, but the simple gesture supported her and helped keep her focus on the crime scene.

There was very little blood spatter on Cole’s body, the chair, or the wall, as far as she could tell. Each cut seemed to have been made slowly, carefully-at least four dozen incisions. There was some cast off from the knife on the carpet and the side table, suggesting the killer was right-handed.

Keith Coffey was grim. “I think he bled to death. There’s little or no clotting. Someone check his medicine cabinet for warfarin or another anticoagulant. In fact, grab all medicines.”

“These cuts look the same as Payne’s. Can you run tests on heparin?”

Keith looked at Nora. “I was thinking the same thing, but Payne’s body was clean.”

“Clean?”

“There wasn’t blood like this.”

“Would the fire have taken care of that?”

“Not necessarily. And his back would have been stained. There would have been smearing and his unexposed skin-under his arms and back-would have had dried blood. Since he’d been dead for several hours, even brief exposure to water from the fire hose wouldn’t have cleaned him so effectively.”

“On the surface, it looks too similar to discount a connection to Jonah Payne’s death,” said Nora. “We’re going to assume it is until proven otherwise. I just don’t know why.”

“A college professor seems an unlikely target for this killer.”

Nora said, “Not to Maggie O’Dell.”

Duke raised his eyebrow and Sanger was about to speak, but Nora put her hand up. “Bear with me a minute. I might be making a stretch, but if we believe what Cole said yesterday, Anya was calling it quits with BLF. She was highly distraught when she heard about Dr. Payne, and at the time she thought it was an accident.

Maggie didn’t want them to quit, but she couldn’t trust that they’d keep quiet.”

“So she poisons them?”

“Convenient. Take out all three witnesses. Maybe she thought Cole would expose her.”

“He did,” Sanger pointed out. “Last night.”

“He was the only other witness to her involvement in the arsons,” Nora said. “A good attorney could block his statements without the ability to cross-examine.”

“What if she was angry?” Duke motioned toward the corner of the bedroom where Cole’s computer monitor was shattered, a deep gouge in the wall.

“Angry at Cole?” Nora said.

“For talking to us last night?” Sanger asked. “How would she know?”

“Could she have followed him?”

“I would have noticed someone following me,” Sanger said defensively.

One of the deputies walked in with a clear bag of evidence. A wet gob of multicolored hairs. “This came from the shower drain and tested positive for blood. Bloody female clothes were found in the bathroom.”

“She came prepared,” Nora said.

“Why didn’t she take the clothes with her?” Sanger asked.

“I think she’s deranged,” Coffey mumbled.

He might be right. Nora couldn’t reconcile the methodical, vicious way Maggie O’Dell had killed her friends and a man Nora doubted she even knew, Jonah Payne. “She’s young,” Nora said. “Early twenties. Impulsive.”

“She’s going to be caught.”

“Either she doesn’t care or she doesn’t think we’ll find her. She’s an anarchist-we know that from BLF activities. She’s learned to be sly, sneaky, live off the grid. She was probably raised that way.” The similarity to Nora’s upbringing was unsettling.

“Why these people? Why now?” Sanger asked.

Nora had been wondering the same thing. “Maggie left for nearly a year, dropped out of college and disappeared, then came back. What was she doing during that time?”

She glanced at Pete. He said, “I know what you want. I’m on it.”

“You need her college transcripts. We have to know who she is. Maggie O’Dell isn’t popping up anywhere we’ve looked. If we had an address or financial aid information, anything to point us at least to her parents.”

Pete was already on the phone with Rachel as he left the crime scene.

Another deputy came in. “We have footprints coming to and from the house, leading across the field. We lost them in the grass meadow, but there’s a street only a quarter mile from here. I sent two men to check it out and canvass the neighbors.”

There was something else they weren’t seeing. Nora glanced at the broken monitor, then at the chair. “She was enraged about something. Look-she stabbed the chair. Not Cole-she has some control-but the chair has three … five, six holes.”

One of Steve Donovan’s ERT, Agent Chow, stepped in. “The killer got in through the garage door. The kitchen door was unlocked, but the garage door leading to the back has a flimsy lock. Someone jimmied it. A novice might take five minutes, an expert five seconds.”

“She needed help with Payne because she moved the body, but not with Professor Cole,” Nora said. “If he was drugged he might have passed out. Or maybe he wasn’t drugged, and just drunk.”

Coffey said, “I’ll rush the tox screens and alcohol test.”

“You’re on the right path,” Duke said. “Only, there has to be something else in common between Payne and Cole. Another reason they were targeted.”

“They did something to Maggie.”

“What?” Sanger said, irritated. “You think they did something to her? Like what?”

“Something personal. They probably didn’t even know what. She was slighted, and she made them pay in the only way she knew how.”

“But she’s so young,” Duke said in disbelief.

“They start younger and younger,” Nora said. “Duke, do you have the background check on the three kids?”

“It should be done by now,” he said.

“Let’s go back to headquarters and take a look. There is a common factor between all these victims. We just have to find it.”

As they walked out, Duke whispered, “I could find out about Maggie O’Dell faster.”

Nora was very tempted. “Let’s give Rachel one more hour to get the warrant. I don’t want this case thrown out because of a technicality.”

Duke stood in front of the driver’s door of Nora’s car with a concerned expression. “You want to drive?” she asked.

“You said something inside-that maybe Maggie O’Dell grew up off the grid.”

“It explains why we’re having a hard time getting any information on her. No license, no-”

He interrupted. “You grew up the same way.”

Nora shifted uneasily on her feet. “Your point?”

“What if she’s targeting you because she sees you as a traitor?”

“Our analysts are going through all my cases, looking for a possible connection. Maybe a relative or friend-”

“She doesn’t seem to need much of a reason to kill,” Duke said hotly. “It could be as simple as you being raised the ‘right’ way in her mind-fighting the ‘Establishment’-and then doing a complete one-eighty and becoming a cop.”

“That was my mother’s fight, not mine,” Nora snapped. She didn’t want to talk about her upbringing here.

“Maggie doesn’t know that. She could think that you’d infiltrated the anarchy movement because you had personal knowledge of them and could pass for one, then you had them all arrested. Maybe she’s targeting you because of your job, and she doesn’t even know you from Adam.”

“I’m a hypocrite,” Nora said.

“No!” Duke said emphatically. He reached for her, glanced at the cops all over the place, and barely grazed her arm before running his hand over his head. “I didn’t mean that, I don’t think-”

“Not you, but Maggie. Hypocrite or traitor, they’re one and the same to people like her. But you’re right about one thing. She is deranged, and if she can set her sites on Dr. Payne, Professor Cole, her best friend, and an FBI agent because of perceived slights against her personally, or a political cause, she can justify killing anyone. We have to find her damn quick or anyone who gets on her bad side is at risk.”

They didn’t have to wait an hour. Thirty minutes later, Duke and Nora were back at FBI headquarters, and Rachel followed five minutes later, breathless.

“I got Maggie O’Dell’s file!”

They brought the surprisingly thin college transcript file to the conference room. Nora opened it.

There was no photograph; there were just admissions records, grades, and a disciplinary report. There was an emergency card.

Margaret Love O’Dell. Nora had to look twice at her middle name, but it was clearly “Love.” Her birthplace was Paso Robles, a little town near San Luis Obispo on the central coast.

Nora had lived in SLO during the year before she turned FBI informant against her mother. It was where Lorraine had met Cameron Lovitz. A chill ran through her, as if her life was coming full circle. She hadn’t spoken to her mother in nearly twenty years, since the trial. She was in prison, and because a federal agent died during Lorraine’s terrorist act, she would be in prison the rest of her life.

Nora rarely thought about it, but these last few days she couldn’t avoid it.

Establishment.

It was a word her mother used regularly. Along with Industrial Complex, which had sounded so out of place in Maggie’s letter. And the questions. Don’t you care?

“Paso Robles,” Duke muttered.

Nora swallowed uneasily. “That mean something to you?”

“Russ lived there for most of his childhood.”

One more connection to the area. “Which would give him a good reason to meet with her and not think that something was unusual,” Nora said.

She looked back at the forms. “Father, David O’Dell, sixty-four. Mother, April Plummer, fifty-nine.”

April Plummer. It had to be a coincidence.

But even as Nora thought that there was no way in hell that Maggie O’Dell’s mother was the same April Plummer that Nora had known most of her childhood, Nora knew that it was.

Paso Robles, so close to where April had lived for years in SLO. Same age as April would be.

She remembered April at her mother’s trial. She wasn’t pregnant. She’d always been rail-thin. Nora would have noticed if she were pregnant, the hearings and trial went on for months and months … maybe April got pregnant after the trial. Though that would make Maggie a little young for college.

But there had been one pregnant woman at the trial.

“When was she born?” Nora cried out, a bit too loudly. “Dammit, where do they put the birthdays on these stupid forms?” She sounded panicked.

Duke pointed to a box near the top of the form.

December 12. Maggie would be twenty in December.

The timing was right.

Nora dropped the file, a hand to her stomach. She swallowed bile as she realized the unthinkable. This couldn’t be, but there wasn’t any other explanation.

She shoved the file toward Rachel. “Call the SLO field office and have them send a pair of agents to talk to David O’Dell and April Plummer about Maggie. And find out where her sister is-the one she mentioned in the letter she wrote to Anya Ballard.”

Rachel took it, looking at Nora as if her head was about to spin around. “Anything else?’

“Just that. For now.”

With Rachel gone, she breathed marginally easier.

What if she was wrong? They could be going down the wrong path. They could be wasting time. Only, she didn’t think she was wrong. She knew she wasn’t wrong.

Her mother had lied. Lying sounded exactly like something her mother would do.

Nora hated Lorraine. She squeezed her eyes shut, willing away the waves of pain and anger that washed over her like the ocean hitting rocks during a storm.

For seventeen years Nora had lived without a home, without a place to belong. For seventeen years Nora had tried to understand her mother, had wanted to please her, had done things she knew were wrong but didn’t know how to say no to the woman who’d raised her.

Until Quin was in trouble; then Nora turned. When it was Quin in danger, Nora put herself on the line. And Lorraine went to prison. But that didn’t make the pain go away. It took years before Nora was able to truly make her own path. Quin never understood why Nora refused to let her visit Lorraine in prison, why Nora didn’t visit her. They’d often argued about it, but Nora had always won.

Nora was determined that Quin would not be corrupted by their pathological liar mother.

Duke put his hands on her shoulders and made her look at him. “Nora, what’s going on?”

She took a deep breath and the truth spilled out. “When my mother went to trial, she asked for leniency because she was pregnant. I didn’t even know until the pretrial motions, but it was confirmed-she was five months pregnant by that time. She had the baby right before the trial, in December, and the judge told me that the baby was put up for adoption.

“I didn’t want anything to do with it. I didn’t want to see it, I didn’t want to feel any connection to the baby. I asked for no details, because as long as my mother didn’t raise the baby, he’d have a decent life.”

“He?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t know if the baby was a boy or girl. I didn’t ask. I never told Quin because there was no reason to. She didn’t have to testify at the trial, why should she be dragged into everything? She was a little kid. I didn’t want that for her. I didn’t want her to live with the pain and guilt I did for so many years.”

Nora didn’t realize tears were running down her face. She was so angry-furious! — and emotionally wrung-out. Remembering the trial, what she said on the stand, the way her mother had looked at her. As if she’d cut her heart out. Betrayed her.

“April Plummer was a friend of my mom’s. Single then, as far as I knew. April was truly a flower child. She took way too many drugs in her youth and ended up kind of simple, but very sweet. We lived with her for a while-a few weeks here, a month or two there. I always thought my mother used her, manipulated her. April would do anything you wanted her to, especially for my mom.”

“And you think that this April adopted your mother’s child?”

Nora nodded, wiping away the tears. She took a deep breath. She had to do this. She had to face the truth. “Fifty-nine-I don’t know how old she was, but my mother is fifty-seven. When Dr. Vigo said that the killer was pulling out only my old cases, those were cases my mother might have known about. At least the first two. I was an informant at Diablo Canyon. That’s where her boyfriend was killed, where she was arrested.” Her boyfriend, Cameron Lovitz. The father of Lorraine’s child, the father of Nora’s half sister.

The father of Maggie O’Dell. And he was a psychopath, just like her.

“The second case she mentioned in the letter I worked as an informant against Lorraine’s friends. They were planning to set oil wells in Kern County on fire.”

Nora looked at Duke. “That was twenty years ago. Maggie O’Dell is nearly twenty now. April came to my mother’s hearings, I saw her several times, and I never saw her pregnant.”

“It should be easy enough to find out,” Duke said.

“I know I’m right.”

“We need confirmation.”

Duke was right, they had to confirm the facts, but Nora knew in her heart and soul that Maggie was the daughter of Lorraine and Cameron. Her life was being ripped apart and trampled. She’d have to tell Quin, and that hurt just as much. But the truth would get out as soon as Maggie O’Dell was caught, and Nora didn’t want Quin hearing about it from anyone but her.

Nora would find Maggie O’Dell and stop her.

“My past-it’s coming back. I thought it was over, but now-” She didn’t finish. What could she say? “I’m sorry.”

Duke grabbed her by the arms and gave her a firm shake. “You had nothing to do with this. Nothing! Don’t even think for a minute that just because you share blood with someone that it means you’re guilty.”

He pulled her into a tight hug. She accepted his embrace, needed it. Needed him.

“You call your contacts, I’ll call mine,” Duke said, talking over her head. “We’re going to get to the bottom of this, Nora. I promise.”