The FBI Thrillers Collection(149)

“The boy and girl in all three families,” Lacey said. “The girl was twelve and the boy was ten.”

“Jesus,” Captain Brady said.

“Why didn’t you just tell us?” Dubrosky was mad. He felt that Savich had made him look like a fool.

“As I said,” Savich said as he rose from his chair, “I wanted you to be certain that no stranger had been near the Lansky home. It was always possible that the guy was having a third dress rehearsal. But he wasn’t. This time it was the real thing for him. I wasn’t really holding out on you. I just got everything in the computer this morning, once Captain Brady had sent me all your reports. Without the reports I wouldn’t have gotten a thing. You would have come back to this. It’s just that I always believed the profile and I had the computer.”



Russell Bent lived six houses away from the Lanskys’ with his sister and her husband and one young son. Bent was twenty-seven years old, didn’t date, didn’t have many friends, but was pleasant to everyone. He worked as a maintenance man at a large office on Milwaukee Avenue. His only passion was coaching Little League.

The detectives had already spoken to Russell Bent, his sister, and her husband as part of their neighborhood canvassing. They’d never considered him a possible suspect. They were looking for a transient, a serial killer, some hot-eyed madman, not a local, certainly not a shy young guy who was really polite to them.

“One hundred dollars, Sherlock, says they’ll break him in twenty minutes,” Savich said, grinning down at her.

“It’s for certain that none of them looks the least bit tired now,” she said. “Do we watch them?”

“No, let’s go to Captain Brady’s office. I don’t want to cramp their style. You know, I bet you that Bent would have killed one more family, in another state, just to confuse everyone thoroughly. Then he wouldn’t have killed again.”

“You know, I’ve been wondering why he had to kill the kids like that.”

“Well, I’ve given it a lot of thought, talked to the Profilers and a couple of shrinks. Why did Bent murder these families with two kids, specifically a boy and a girl, and in each case, the kids were two years apart, no more, no less? I guess he was killing himself and his sister.”

She stared at him, shivering. “But why? No, don’t tell me. You did some checking on Mr. Bent.”

“Yep. I told Dubrosky and Mason all about it in the john. They’re going to show off now in front of Captain Brady.”

“I wish I could have been there.”

“Well, probably not. Mason got so excited that he puked. He hadn’t eaten anything all day and he’d drunk a gallon of that atomic bomb coffee.”

She raised her hand. “No, don’t tell me. Let me think about this, sir.”

She followed him down the hall and into Captain Brady’s office. He lay down on the sofa. It was too short and hard as a rock, but he wouldn’t have traded it for anything at the moment. He was coming down. He closed his eyes and saw that pathetic Russell Bent. They’d gotten him. They’d won this time. For the moment it made him forget about the monsters who were still out there killing, the monsters that he and his people had spent hours trying to find, and had failed. But this time they’d gotten the monster. They’d won.

“The mother must have done something.”

He cocked open an eye. Sherlock was standing over him, a shock of her red hair falling over to cover the side of her face. He watched her tuck the swatch of hair behind her ear. Nice hair and lots of it. Her eyes were green, a pretty color, kind of mossy and soft. No, her hair wasn’t really red, but more red than anything else. There was some brown and a dash of cinnamon color as well. He guessed it was auburn. That’s what he’d thought the first time he’d seen her. “Yes,” he said, “Mrs. Bent definitely did something.”

“I don’t think Mr. Bent did anything. The three fathers Russell Bent shot were clean kills. No, wait, after they were dead, Bent shot them in the stomach.”

“The quick death was probably because to Bent, the father didn’t count, he wasn’t an object of the bone-deep hatred. The belly shot was probably because he thought the father was weak, he was ineffectual, he wasn’t a man.”

“What did Mrs. Bent do to Russell and his sister?”

“To punish Russell and his sister, or more likely, just for the kicks it gave her, Mrs. Bent gagged them both, tied their arms behind them and locked them in the trunk of the car or in a closet or other terrifying closed-in places. Once they nearly died from carbon monoxide poisoning. The mother didn’t take care of them, obviously, she left them to scrounge food for themselves. Social Services didn’t get them away from her until they were ten and twelve years old. Some timing, huh?”