LITMIR.BIZ

      The sun was fresh to the blue eastern sky as Harry Nautilus pulled into the white sand drive of Evangeline Prowse’s cabin. He had been an idiot yesterday, letting Jeremy Ridgecliff’s photo stun him into stumbling from her cottage without taking the photo. Carson would want to see the thing. And the picture wasn’t the sort of item to be left for anyone to find.

      Maybe the Doc had some kind of strange relationship with Ridgecliff, but after twenty-plus years as a cop, Nautilus realized when it came to vagaries of the heart, anything was possible.

      When he entered Prowse’s cottage the place felt more haunted than yesterday, something jingling Nautilus’s alarm system. He opened a closet by the front door to see a shiny, store-bought sign saying, DO NOT DISTURB, red letters over black. Helen Pappagallos had for-sure seen a sign.

      He tossed it back into the closet and went to the office, rolling up the Ridgecliff photo. Something continued to register on his alert system, faint, like the pulsing of a distant siren.

      Nautilus checked out the window behind Prowse’s desk. He turned to see a red light blinking on her answering machine. Blip, blip, blip. The message was setting off his alarm; he didn’t know how these signals worked, was glad they did.

      Nautilus sat in Prowse’s chair – comfortable, a Herman Miller – and pressed the Play button. The phone beeped and dated the phone call as having arrived last night at eight. A voice appeared in the air.

      “Doctor Prowse, this is John Wyatt. It’s been a few months and I was wondering if you found everything you needed in the files I sent. I guess I’m also wondering if you’re working on something related and interesting. Hell, everything you do is interesting, at least to folks like me. Anyway, keep me cued in and if you need anything else, just give me a yell.”

      An interesting message. Nautilus dialed back.

      “FBI …” an assured female voice said. “Behavioral Sciences Division.”

      “This is Detective Harry Nautilus with the Mobile Police Department. I’m returning John Wyatt’s call.”

      “One moment please.”

      The phone picked up seconds later. “This is John Wyatt, Detective Nautilus. I don’t recollect calling you.”

      “You didn’t. I’m returning the call you made to Dr Evangeline Prowse. I’m in her office and just found your message. I’m very sorry to have to tell you that Dr Prowse is dead.”

      A three-beat pause as the information was absorbed, contemplated, accepted.

      “My God. What happened?”

      “She was murdered in New York six days ago. No one’s sure why, but there’s a suspect in mind. I’m looking into things on the Southern end and found your phone message. Might I ask what you sent the Doctor?”

      Wyatt sounded rattled. “Let me get my head back. What a tragedy … she was a great lady, brilliant. Uh, let’s see if I can give you a chronology. Dr Prowse called me about a month back and asked for information on the DC snipers. You know of the pair, of course.”

      “John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo. Killed ten people back in 2002. At random.”

      Nautilus saw a mind-picture of the fortyish, good-looking Muhammad with his arm around the much younger Malvo, a bright grin on the kid’s face, like he’s about to float away into Joyland.

      Wyatt said, “Doctor Prowse wanted everything the Bureau had on the pair, especially psychological work-ups and personal histories – how they met, ages at the time of meeting, relationship with one another …”

      Nautilus one-handedly slipped a notepad from the pocket of his lime-green jacket, began taking notes.

      “Just Muhammad and Malvo?” he asked.

      “Yep. Oh, and she wanted the information ASAP.”

      “That was unusual?”

      “Very. Dr Prowse generally needed Bureau info for a scholarly article or a presentation at a symposium, that kind of thing. It was always ‘Send it when you find a spare moment.’ But she wanted me to send the DC snipers material as fast as I put it all together.”

      “Which you did.”

      “Anything Dr Prowse wanted, she got. She came as close to understanding psychopathic minds as anyone I’ve ever known; an empath.”

      “She say why she was so interested in the pair?”

      “I took it she was studying the hold John Muhammad had over Malvo. How it got started, how strong the hold was. She did mention something about ‘looking into someone’s past’. I thought she was referring to one of the snipers, but in retrospect, maybe not.”

      Nautilus wrote looking into someone’s past in his notepad, paused, underscored someone’s.

      “The kid, Malvo, was what age at the time of the shooting rampage – sixteen?”

      “Seventeen,” Wyatt said. “Muhammad was forty-two. An ex-Marine with the highest classification in marksmanship. He passed the sniper skills on to Malvo.” Wyatt sighed. “My father taught me to hunt rabbits.”

      “The kid take to the skills willingly, or was there coercion?”

      “Willingly. But Lee Malvo was under a bad star from the git-go, lived poor in Jamaica, no steady male influence in his childhood. His mother abandoned him regularly. Muhammad befriended Malvo’s mother, stayed with Mommy and son a while in Antigua. Muhammad probably seemed a stable influence in the kid’s life. An authority figure.”

      “A drifting kid finds an anchor,” Nautilus said.

      “Fast-forward a decade to Bellingham, Washington. Muhammad enrolls Malvo in high school, telling everyone he’s the kid’s biological father.”

      “Muhammad’s closing the deal.”

      “The little lost boy finally has a daddy, big and strong and protective. I figure Lee Malvo was so desperate for a father he would have let Charles Manson put him on a leash and walk him on hands and knees over broken glass, as long as he could call Manson ‘Papa’.”

      “Unfortunately, Daddy’s a psychopath.”

      “A big drawback. When Muhammad and Malvo got caught, they were planning to murder a cop, plant an IED at the funeral, make more corpses. The ultimate plan was to blackmail the government – they’d stop the

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