President Montgomery let go with a slight chuckle. "That"s quite all right. If Letterman and Leno can rank on him, so can you," he said. "I do it myself." He looked across the room. "We all do."
"What I meant," she continued, "is that on the surface it would make sense that the killings had something to do with your brother-in-law, given his...well, let"s just say his notoriety. But that idea changed for me."
"Once you met the killer."
"Yes," said Sarah. "I realized that this guy could"ve killed me if he wanted to. Rather easily, too. But he didn"t. Why? And why would he reveal himself to me in that manner?"
The president"s couch consiglieri couldn"t restrain themselves any longer. They needed in on the conversation.
"Because it"s a game to him, right? He"s playing with you," said Gilmartin, the chief of staff.
"Yes, but it goes deeper than that," said Sarah. "He wants me to be scared, to live in fear, and I can"t do that once I"m dead. Neither can the real John O"Hara."
Amanda Kyle, the press secretary, looked like she"d just solved the puzzle on Wheel of Fortune. "So that"s why he kills a bunch of John O"Haras, because he wants the real one to live in fear."
"That"s what I believe," said Sarah. "It"s also why I think the John O"Haras who are no longer alive-the well-known author, for instance-are irrelevant. These aren"t tribute killings. There are no shades of John Hinckley here."
"But this hasn"t gone public," said Hawthorne, the deputy director of the Secret Service. "Whoever the "real" John O"Hara is, he doesn"t know anything."
"I"m afraid he"s about to," said the president. "The whole country is."
"We could still wait, sir," said Hawthorne. "G.o.d knows how many John O"Haras are out there, not to mention all their family members. Think of the panic."
"Up until this morning I was," said the president. "But if another John O"Hara turns up dead and it gets out we were aware of the threat and didn"t warn anyone, we"ll all be eating from a big bowl of s.h.i.t stew."
Sarah looked around the room. There was clearly something final about the president cursing, because that was the end of the discussion. Period.
"Shall I start preparing a statement, sir?" asked Kyle, already jotting some notes on the yellow legal pad in her lap.
"Yes," he said. "But I"m still missing something." He turned to Sarah. "I still don"t know why my brother-in-law couldn"t be, as you say, the real John O"Hara."
"If I may, I"ll pose it to you this way," she said. "If you were to tell your brother-in-law that he"d somehow managed to inspire a serial killer, no less one who was bent on killing not just him but anyone named John O"Hara, what would be his first reaction?"
The president rolled his eyes. He got it. "Funny, the word fear doesn"t come to mind, does it?" he said. "It would be the biggest thing he"d ever done in his life. He"d be over the moon. Everyone knows that about him."
Sarah nodded. "Including our serial killer."
No one else said anything. No one needed to. Except the president.
"Nice work, Agent Brubaker. I like the way you think."
"Thank you, sir."
"Actually, you should be thanking your boss, Dan, here," he said. "He"s the one who insisted on bringing you here this morning."
Sarah turned to Driesen, who"d barely said a word the entire time. She couldn"t believe it. He"d told her the president liked being briefed from the "front lines," that he had specifically requested her being there.
In other words, he"d lied to her.
And she couldn"t thank him enough.
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 inst.i.tutions, 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.