Stalked - By Allison Brennan Page 0,8
way to the cafeteria—”
His eyebrows arched up and amusement lit his face. “By way of the basement?”
“It’s nothing.”
He waved her in. “I was going to call you anyway. Sit down.”
“What about?” She took the chair across from him.
He closed the file he was reading and put it aside.
“Special Agent Madeaux called me. Told me she’d spoken to you about Rosemary Weber’s murder.”
“Yes.” All thoughts of Laughlin and Kate vanished. “She’d called me about the book she was writing.”
“Suzanne said you didn’t share anything with the reporter.”
“I told her to leave me out of it. My involvement was never supposed to be public.”
“Suzanne is tracking down how Weber got your name, but the case wasn’t classified. She could have learned of your involvement fairly easily.”
Lucy bit her lip. She didn’t want anything she did to be in the public eye. She needed her anonymity.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“About what?”
“What’s bothering you.”
“I don’t know.” She did, but how did she tell Tony that she was worried her past would haunt her for the rest of her life? She’d believed time would erase her history, but it only made it permanent. “Did you know Weber?”
He nodded. “She wrote her first book while she was a crime reporter in Newark. It was one of my cases. A screwed-up case from the beginning, a true tragedy. Eleven-year-old girl kidnapped from her bedroom, raped and murdered. The parents lied about nearly everything, until we had enough evidence to catch them in their lies.”
As he spoke, his voice deepened and he held the edge of his desk, knuckles white, anger about the old case still evident.
Kidnapped from her bedroom.
In a low, emotion-filled voice, Tony said, “It was one of those cases that stay with you because it was senseless and so many lives were ruined.”
“Did you catch the killer?”
“Benjamin John Kreig. He’s serving life without parole.” Tony rolled his shoulders and leaned back in his chair, purposefully relaxing. Lucy had often done the same thing. If she could relax her body, she could relax her mind.
But Lucy was focused on what Tony had said.
Kidnapped from her bedroom and murdered.
“Lucy?” Tony prodded.
“You know my nephew was killed when I was seven.”
By Tony’s expression, he had known. Lucy didn’t expect that her life was private, however much she tried to keep her past to herself. Just one more reminder that she’d never escape.
Lucy continued, “Justin was a few days younger than me, and sometimes I made him call me Aunt Lucy just to tease him. I was closer to him than my brothers and sisters, who were all older than me. My sister, Justin’s mom, grieved so long, she couldn’t stay in San Diego. She moved to Idaho and became a hermit for more than a decade. She called our mom once a week, but Mom was always so sad afterwards, because Nelia wasn’t really living. Justin’s murder changed all of us. Dillon, for example, changed his focus from sports medicine to forensic psychiatry. When I asked him why, he said he wanted to understand what happened to Justin.”
“Is that what drives you? Answers?”
“Maybe.” No.
“Justice?”
Maybe. “I can’t sit by and let bad things happen.”
“If we can save one, we have succeeded.”
But there would always be evil in the world, and there would always be victims. “If it was just saving one person, I don’t think I would be here,” Lucy said truthfully. “Putting killers and rapists in prison saves all their potential victims. It’s not so much justice I crave as protecting innocents.”
Lucy asked, “Did you talk to Weber about your case?”
“No. She wrote most of the articles about the investigation and trial, and I didn’t like how she sensationalized the tragedy. The parents deserved to be exposed, but they had lost their daughter, and they realized they were culpable.”
Her stomach turned at all the awful possibilities of parental involvement in the girl’s death. “How so?”
“The McMahons were swingers. They had a party the night their daughter Rachel was killed. They lied about the nature of the party. The critical hours that Rachel was missing immediately after she was abducted were wasted because they misled first the responding officer, then the FBI. Their nine-year-old son was the one who finally told me about the party.”
Lucy frowned. “He knew what was going on?”
“Unfortunately. Once we confronted the parents and interviewed witnesses, we learned that Krieg hadn’t been invited to the party but two guests saw him. At first he denied being there, so it was easy to bring