Roses Are Red

Chapter Eighty

At noon the next day, the case seemed to take another terrible, and unexpected twist. I was in an interview at Metro Hartford when Betsey broke in. She asked me to please come out into the hallway. Her face was ashen.

"Oh no, what?" I managed to say.

"Alex, this is so creepy that I'm still shaking. Listen to what just happened. Last night, a twenty-five-year-old woman was raped in her apartment in a suburb outside Hartford. The rapist told her he wanted her to have his baby. After he left, she went to a hospital and the police were called in. In their report, it states that the rapist wore a Clinton mask like the one worn at the first bank robbery, Alex and also, that he called himself a mastermind."

"Is the woman still at the hospital? Are the police with her?” I asked. My mind was racing, already filled with possibilities, rejecting the notion of coincidence out of hand. A mastermind in a Clinton mask, just outside Hartford? It was too close.

"She left the hospital and went home, Alex. They just found her dead. He warned her not to tell anyone, and not to abort. She disobeyed him. She made a mistake. He poisoned her, Alex. Goddamn him."

Betsey Cavalierre and I went to the dead woman's apartment and the scene was beyond horrifying. The woman lay on her kitchen floor, grotesque and twisted. I remembered the bodies of Brianne and Enrol Parker. The poor woman had been punished. FBI technicians were all over the small garden apartment. There was nothing Betsey or I could do there. The bastard had been right there in Hartford maybe he still was. He was taunting us.

This was as stressful as any case I'd ever worked. Whoever was

behind the robberies and gruesome murders was impossible to trace, to figure out in a meaningful way.

Who the hell was the Mastermind? Had he really been here in Hartford last night and this morning? Why was he taking chances like this?

I worked at the Metro Hartford offices until almost seven. I was trying not to show it, but I was close to a burnout. I interviewed several more employees, and then I went to the personnel office and read nuisance mail aimed at Metro Hartford There were stacks of it. Generally, the hate mail came from grieving and angry family members who had been denied claims or felt the process was taking too long which it usually did. I talked for an hour or so with the head of the building's security, Terry Mayer. She was separate from Steve Bolding, who was an outside consultant. Terry gave me the procedures for mail surveillance, bomb threats, e-mail threats, and even a widely distributed form on how to be alert for possible letter bombs. "We were prepared for a lot of potential disasters," Mayer told me, 'just not for the one that happened."

I was just going through the motions all day. I kept seeing the poisoned woman. The Mastermind had wanted her to have his baby. That probably meant that he didn't have any kids of his own. He wanted an heir, a tiny piece of immortality.