“That doesn’t make much sense, does it? But it’s got to have something to do with Russell Bent feeling worthless, like he didn’t deserve to live.”
“But why did he pick the Lansky family?” “I don’t know. No one reported any gossip about the family, nothing about physical abuse, or the mother neglecting the children. No unexplained injuries with the kids winding up in the emergency room. But you can take it to the bank that Russell Bent thought the two Lansky kids were enough like him and his sister to merit dying. He thought the mother was enough like his own mother to deserve death. Why exactly did he have to gas the children? God only knows. Your explanation is as good as any. Brady will find out, though, with the help of the psychiatrists.”
“Russell Bent coached Little League. The Lansky boy was in Little League. Maybe the Lansky boy got close to Bent, just maybe the Lansky boy told Russell that his mother was horrible.” She shrugged. “It really won’t matter. You know what they’ll do, sir. They’ll dress it all up in psychobabble. Do you know what happened to the Bents’ parents?”
“Yes,” he said. “I know. Sherlock, call me anything but ‘sir.’ I’m only thirty-four. I just turned thirty-four last month, on the sixth. ‘Sir’ makes me feel ancient.”
The three cops erupted into the office. Captain Brady was rubbing his hands together. There was a bounce to his step. There would be a press conference at midnight. Mason and Dubrosky kept giving each other high fives. Brady had to call the mayor, the police commissioner-the list went on and on. He had to get busy.
It took the CPD only two hours to prove that Bent had traveled to Des Moines and to St. Louis exactly a week before each of those murders had been committed there and back on the exact dates of the murders.
Unfortunately, at least in Lacey’s view, Bent was so crazy, he wouldn’t even go to trial. He wouldn’t get the death penalty. He would be committed. Would he ever be let out? The last thing she heard as they were leaving the Jefferson Park precinct station was his sobs and the soft, soothing voice of his sister, telling him over and over that it would be all right, that they were in this together. She would take care of him. She had been two years older and she hadn’t protected him from their mother. She wondered if the sister was really lucky that her brother hadn’t gassed her.
They took a late-morning flight back to Washington, D.C. It didn’t occur to Savich until they were already in the air that Sherlock might not have a place to stay.
“I’m staying at the Watergate,” she said. “I’m comfortable. I’ll stay there until I find an apartment.” She smiled at him. “You did very well. You got him. You didn’t even need the police. Why didn’t you just call Captain Brady and tell him about Bent? Why did you want to go to Chicago?”
“I lied to Brady. I’m a glory hound-even if it’s just a crumb, I’m happy. I love praise. Who doesn’t?”
“But that’s not even part of why you went.”
“All right, Sherlock. I wanted to be in at the kill. I wanted to see this guy. If I hadn’t seen him, then it would never be finished in my mind. Too, this was your first day. It was important for you to see how I work, how I deal with local cops. Okay, it was a bit of a show. I think I deserved it. You’re new. You haven’t seen any disappointments yet, you haven’t lived through the endless frustration, the wrong turns our unit has suffered since the first murders in Des Moines. You didn’t hear all the crap we got about the profile being wrong. All you saw was the victory dance. This has been only the third real score I’ve gotten since the FBI started the unit up.
“But I can’t ever forget that there was Des Moines and St. Louis and twelve people died because we didn’t figure things out quickly enough. Of course Chicago was the key, since that was his focus. As soon as I realized that the neighbors knew one another and watched out for one another, and there hadn’t been any strangers at the Lansky house, then I knew our guy lived there. He had to. There wasn’t any other answer.”