1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,86

sure the two of us weren’t done with each other yet.

CHAPTER 93

IT TOOK ME several days to get all the info I’d been dying for, but there was finally an unofficial team meeting on my first shift back at work.

We had it in SAC Gruss’s office, marking the first time I’d been invited to the top of the pyramid like that. Not bad. She had a killer view of the harbor, a private bathroom, and the kind of imposing mahogany desk you might expect. She seemed to fit perfectly behind it. Audrey Gruss wasn’t afraid to lead, and I admired that about her.

I sat on one of Gruss’s two couches, listening to the debrief and looking over the file of materials Keats had passed around.

The killers in this case were Aaron and Michael Dion, legitimate biological brothers, ages seventeen and twenty-three. They’d been left behind by two very wealthy parents whose double murder had never been solved—until now.

Back at that time, the brothers had been separated by the foster system, both passed from home to home, until the older one, Michael, had aged into his trust fund at twenty-one.

The younger one, Aaron—the Poet and the Engineer, as it turned out—was a bona fide genius in his own right. He’d been a prodigy all his life, graduating high school at age thirteen, well ahead of my own accomplishments.

He’d also been in and out of psychiatric care, until the system lost track of him. In classic fashion, his known file was hip-deep in reports on his inability to attach to anyone beyond his brother. It all tracked with everything I knew about him from our brief time together.

Michael was dead, I knew by now. But Aaron was going to pull through.

“I think Hoot put a permanent dent in his head,” Keats said, trying not to smile. “What did you use on him, anyway?”

“Brute strength,” I said with a straight face. Several of the others, including Gruss, seemed to approve.

The truth was, none of it sat entirely well with me. Aaron had been right about one thing: he and I shared some common ground. I know what it’s like to live inside a crowded mind like that. It can manifest in all kinds of ways, but history is littered with the miserable lives of brilliant people. It was tragic, in a way.

“So what happens to him now?” I asked.

“He’ll be in psychiatric custody at least until he’s eighteen, and then his case can be retried,” Gruss reported. “Let’s just say my hopes aren’t too high for this kid.”

Mine weren’t, either. But in a way that I never could have predicted, some small part of me was pulling for him. He was all alone in the world now, and nobody deserves that.

No exceptions.

Then, as the meeting was breaking up and I was turning to go, Gruss called my name.

“Angela? Got another minute?” she said.

Of course the answer was yes. I sat back down while she closed the door and resituated herself across the desk from me.

I couldn’t help getting a little case of nerves. Unlike most people, Ms. Gruss intimidated me.

“So tell me,” she said. “You’ve been through quite a lot in a short time. What are your feelings about continuing on?”

Oh, man. Here it came.

“I’d like to finish out the internship very much,” I said. “If you’ll have me, I mean.”

“Actually, I was asking about the longer term,” Gruss said. She took a packet of some kind out of her drawer and slid it across to me. “So when your six months is up, I’d like you to consider our training program at Quantico.”

I coughed out a little laugh before I could help myself.

“I’ll be honest,” I told her. “That’s not what I thought you were going to say.”

“I can tell,” she said.

I tried to maintain eye contact with her, but it was hard not to jump into that packet right away. It looked like some kind of pre-application.

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said. “Thank you very much. I’ll be filling this out the first chance I get.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said. “Just make sure you’re ready. This training program isn’t the easiest thing you’ll ever take on.”

“Considering the last few weeks, I’m pretty sure it won’t be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, either,” I said. “With all due respect.”

She smiled then, as briefly as ever, but warmly, and dismissed me back to my desk.

As I headed out of the room, I could feel my thoughts turning toward the future in