Chapter 2

"The defects and faults of the mind are like wounds in the body; after all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still there will be a scar left behind, and they are in continual danger of breaking the skin and bursting out again." ~ François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld ~

“Yeah, Boss,” Anthony said. I heard him stand up behind me. “Ethan Rushfeldt escaped from the secure hospital.”

The man’s face didn’t change expression at all, to his credit, but the air around him seemed to chill anyway. I was close enough to feel it. He looked calmly at Anthony, then turned his attention to me. “You must be Jennifer Levasseur.”

So help me, it pissed me off. I saw enough of that kind of self-righteous, know-it-all attitude on campus every day. I tossed my hair off my shoulders and straightened out of my ready stance. With proper posture, I was just as tall as he was, and I made the most of it. “Yes,” I said. “And you are?”

He extended his hand. “Jethro Gibbs.”

I shook it once, strongly. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Gibbs. If you’ll excuse me.” I stepped forward, but he didn’t move.

“Going somewhere?” he asked.

“Yes, back out to my car and away from Washington.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” he said.

“I’ve been trying to tell her that,” Anthony said behind me.

“Are you going to stop me?” I asked Gibbs.

He only smiled. Well, that was it. No stranger was going to take liberties with me, no matter who he was. My space was limited, but I knew how to handle myself. I stepped forward again, and when he raised a hand to stop me, I took hold of his arm. Three quick moves, and our positions were reversed: him at the side of Anthony’s desk, and me out in the passageway. He looked completely shocked. I smiled at him, bowed, and turned.

But there were two new people there, a young man and a woman about Anthony’s age, blocking my exit. They had seen me put the slip to Gibbs, and stood in the passageway, staring. “Pardon me,” I said to them.

“Wow, you… Did you really just…” The young man was stammering, and didn’t seem to want to get in my way, but he didn’t move either. The woman also just stood there.

It was her eyes, flickering just over my shoulder, that provided me with the warning. When the hand landed on my shoulder, I reacted. In short order, Gibbs was on the ground, my knee in his solar plexus, his wrist in my hand, and his eyes staring up at my raised fist.

“Jen, Jesus, come on…” Anthony said. He came around in my peripheral, but didn’t touch me. “No one here is trying to hurt you.”

“Then get out of my way,” I snarled. I released Gibbs, stood, and pushed past the other two to gain space. I ignored the elevator, instead finding the stairs and running down them to the main floor. Tearing the pass from my collar and digging into the pocket of my jeans for the receipt, I slapped both on the front counter. The young man looked up at the noise, and opened his mouth, but something in my face stopped him. Mutely, he retrieved my knives and watched as I belted them on. “Have a nice day,” he called out to my back as I left the building. I unlocked the car and got into the front seat, slamming the door behind me. Lane stood up and put his head over the seat as I put the keys in the ignition. Then I leaned my arms and forehead on the steering wheel.

The rage was still smoldering inside me, but it wasn’t the flash burn that had taken me back in the building, and with each breath, it cooled further. Behind me, Lane whined. I leaned back and raised my arms to hug his head into mine. He licked my arm a couple of times, then sighed and pressed against me solidly. I stayed like that until I felt myself fall back under control. Then I lowered my arms. “Come on,” I said to him.

Once more, I took the keys out of the ignition and opened the car door, this time taking Lane’s leash from the passenger seat and putting it in my back pocket. I opened the back door and he hopped out. He sat immediately at my side until I’d closed and locked the car, then paced sedately at my heel as I walked back towards the building.

The man at the desk looked surprised when I came inside, and he eyed Lane as I approached the desk. “Ma’am, your dog…”

He dropped off when I glared at him. “Please call Mr. Gibbs,” I said. “I’ll wait here for him.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He quickly reached for the phone. I walked to the middle of the lobby. Lane followed, and sat down beside me when I stopped moving. I folded my arms across my chest and waited.

Shortly, the tone of an elevator car arriving sounded, and I looked towards it. When the doors opened, Gibbs and Anthony came out. I shifted to first position, hands stacked in the small of my back, feet shoulder-width apart. Lane looked up at me, then turned his attention back to the approaching men.

I looked at Gibbs, really seeing him for the first time. He belonged to the desk kitty-corner to Anthony’s, that much was certain. My age or slightly older, his features were a little world-worn, but his eyes were clear and keenly intelligent. His posture and motions were exact, incongruously so for his attire. Despite the neatness of his blazer, slacks, and shirt, the combination didn’t suit him well. I could see the deference that Anthony showed him, walking slightly behind him. I remembered that he’d called him “Boss,” and had immediately told him what was happening, with no dissembling. It spoke volumes for the respect he had for the older man. Anthony didn’t give his loyalty lightly.

They stopped in front of me. I could see that Anthony wanted to speak, but he kept his silence. After all, I had asked to see Gibbs, not him. So I ignored him, keeping my attention focused on Gibbs. And Gibbs, it seemed, was waiting for me. It was a power play; who would be most uncomfortable with the silence and break it first? I waited long enough that he realized I wouldn’t fall into his ploy. His eyebrow rose slightly. Then I spoke.

“I owe you an apology, Mr. Gibbs,” I said formally. “I allowed my anger to get the best of me. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

He looked at me critically. I could almost follow his thought process. I was not, after all, apologized for pinning him. I was apologizing for being in a mental state where I allowed myself to pin him. “Special Agent Gibbs. What belt?” he asked.

“Second degree black,” I answered immediately. “Karate.”

“I underestimated you.”

“Yes. Twice.”

“Three times.” I thought back, trying to find the third. A smile twitched at his mouth. “I knew who you were, Ms. Levasseur. That should have been warning enough.”

“Doctor Levasseur. I suppose you’re right.”

“Do you still intend to leave?”

“No. At least, not immediately.” I looked at Anthony. “I also suppose I’ve allowed Rushfeldt to force me into reacting rather than thinking. I have to stop doing that, or he wins.”

Anthony smiled as Gibbs nodded. “Come back upstairs. Gorbin, give Doctor Levasseur back her pass.”

The young man at the desk, who had been watching the exchange avidly, jumped at being addressed. “Uh, yes sir. What about her dog?” Slowly, Gibbs turned his head. Gorbin quailed. He suddenly became busy writing. “I’ll need your knives again, ma’am,” he said.

“No, you won’t.”

“But, Agent Gibbs–”

“Doctor Levasseur is going to give her knives to me.”

“Am I now?” I said softly. Beside me, Lane shifted, the tags on his collar jingling together. There he went again, making assumptions, taking liberties. This was going to be difficult. I tended to make people aware of the boundaries of my relationships with them fairly quickly. Anthony had been a fast study, though he seemed to have forgotten where some of them lay. Gibbs, on the other hand, was just waltzing all over them, and he didn’t seem to care. I didn’t want a power struggle, but it looked like that was what I had.

I dropped my hands from their respectful position behind me. One ended up resting on the butt of one of the knives, and the other fell and touched Lane’s head, settling him. Gibbs turned back to me, and I saw that my change in position was not lost on him, in any of its interpretations. He looked at me calmly. “Doctor,” he said, “please give me your knives.”

Behind him, Anthony stared in obvious surprise. I wasn’t sure why; the request was polite, well phrased, and courteous. It satisfied me, at any rate. “Certainly,” I said. I took off the knife belt, rolled it up, and handed it to him. He took it and slipped one of the knives out of the sheath. He examined it with a practiced eye, then slid it back in. That done, he held his empty hand out to Lane. My dog sat there impassively until I touched his head and said, “Greet.” Then he got up and walked forward. He sniffed Gibbs’ hand thoroughly, then went over to Anthony. Anthony knelt down, and Lane sniffed him, then licked his face, his stub tail wagging. He might not have remembered Anthony exactly, but he knew a familiar scent. Anthony smiled and rubbed Lane’s ears. “Lane, return,” I said, and Lane left off, trotting back over to me and sitting down at my side. Anthony stood back up.

“You’ve really done a good job with him,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“Lane’s kind of a funny name,” Gibbs said.

I was about to take offense, but then I realized he was just curious. “It’s short for Coriolanus.”

I had him. He stared blankly at me. “Which means?”

“According to Plutarch, or Shakespeare? Either way, an ancient Roman warrior who was very good at fighting.”

“What’s wrong with Rex?”

“What, Latin for king? That’s boring.”

I had made him laugh. Not loud or long, more a single breath expelled through smiling lips than anything else, but it was a laugh. Some of the tension in the air dissipated.

“Your pass, ma’am,” Gorbin said. He was holding it out to me from behind the desk.

I went over, Lane following, and took it from him. “Thank you,” I said. I turned back to the other two. “Shall we?”

Anthony fell in on my other side, and Gibbs preceded us to the elevator. Anthony touched my hand and laced his fingers through mine, apologetically. I squeezed his hand. I could forgive him. It had been years since he’d seen me. We had both changed.

I saw Gibbs notice our entwined hands, but he said nothing. The elevator went up smoothly, and opened once again on the sedate cube-farm. We all followed Gibbs back to their desks.

“Hey Gibbs, I contacted…” The woman trailed off when she saw me accompanying them. Then she saw Lane, and her brow furrowed in confusion.

“You contacted?” Gibbs prompted.

She refocused. “I contacted Records with Baltimore PD. They’ve scanned their old case files to microfilm, so they’re going to email it to me by the end of the day.”

“Good,” Gibbs said. “In the meantime, we have all the information we need right here.” He turned back to me. “Special Agent Kate Todd, Special Agent Timothy McGee, Doctor Jennifer Levasseur.”

“How do you do. Nice to meet you,” I said. They murmured their own greetings.

“All right, Tony, bring everyone up to speed.”

“Sure, Boss.” Anthony dropped my hand and went over to his desk, quickly calling something up. I stationed myself at the outside corner of his desk, making Lane lie down at my side with a quick hand signal. Then a face that I would never forget popped up on the two large screens.

“Ethan Rushfeldt,” Anthony said. “Successful entrepreneur, rich, powerful, brilliant, and completely psychotic. Catching him was my big break as a detective in Baltimore.”

“What did he do?” McGee asked, stepping towards one of the screens.

“Tortured five women over the course of three years. Killed four of them.” He looked over at me. I nodded. “We managed to find Jen before he got finished with her.” McGee and Todd both turned to look at me. I was used to the shock and the pity, so I let it pass. “There was little similarity between Rushfeldt’s victims, which was part of the problem with profiling and catching him,” he continued. “Two were married, one had children. One was an artist, two were professional women, one was a homemaker with extensive volunteer activities. They were physically different, and ranged in age between twenty-two and fifty-one. There was no discernable pattern to the crimes either. The first two happened within two months of each other, then there wasn’t another one for sixteen months, and the fourth was ten months after that. In fact, the only similarity at all between the crimes was the extent of the torture, and the fact that all the women, without fail, were described to detectives as ‘strong’ by their friends and colleagues.”

“Women with authority,” Todd said. “Ones who wouldn’t back down?”

“Exactly. I’d just come to Baltimore in March of 2000, and my lieutenant had me looking over some old cases. The SS case was one that I really dug into. I had this feeling that something had been missed.”

“SS?” McGee asked.

Anthony shrugged. “The original detective was older. He thought the torture was kind of like the things the Nazis used to do, so he called it ‘SS.’” McGee nodded, so Anthony continued. “Anyway, I kept going over and over the files, and I re-interviewed the witnesses, until finally I came across a connection. I went further back in the timelines for all the victims, and I found that all of them, at some point in the three months prior to their abduction, had attended a high-class charity event. I got the guest lists and started to interview attendees. Many of them didn’t remember much. They were Baltimore’s high-class, and attended several of that kind of shindig a year, but I managed to get a pretty clear picture of the nights altogether. And the one thing that stood out, for all the victims, was that they were seen getting in some kind of verbal dust-up with Ethan Rushfeldt.”

“Did you interview him?” Todd asked.

“I tried, but he wasn’t home, and his butler said he was on a business trip. That was when I heard about Jen.” He looked over at me, and I could see in his eyes he was remembering. “A missing University of Baltimore English professor, female, didn’t show up for her Tuesday morning classes, didn’t call in. I was walking by another detective’s desk when I heard him tell someone else that every one of her colleagues said that she was fighter. I had them go back in her history. Turned out, she gave a reading at a fundraiser for the University five weeks prior, which Rushfeldt had attended, and at which she had intellectually stomped on his knowledge of classical literature.”

“If I’d only known then,” I added.

Anthony smiled at me, a little sadly. “Anyway, I convinced my lieutenant, and he convinced the brass, and we put everything we had on the case. We subpoenaed all his records, and after twenty six hours of digging, our forensic accountants found a shell company, which owned another shell company, which owned another, which owned a warehouse in the industrial district, though for the life of us we couldn’t figure out why, unless it was his own private torture chamber. An hour later, we went in with a warrant. Rushfeldt wasn’t there, but Jen was, and still alive.”

“Where did he go?” Todd asked.

“Out to get more salt,” I said, before Anthony could. “He ran out, and he wanted to save the peroxide for later.”

I wasn’t sure what was more shocking to her: the idea of what kind of pain the man wanted to inflict, or the fact that I was speaking about it so calmly.

Anthony cleared his throat, bringing everyone’s attention back to him. “Anyway, Rushfeldt never came back to the warehouse. He must have seen all the activity and split. The case was a media blitz, and my face was all over the news. Then, two days later, I was driving home when I was rear-ended. I got out to give the guy a piece of my mind, and it turned out to be Rushfeldt. He kept his face turned away from me until he was in reach, so I didn’t recognize him. He…” His mouth worked, as though he tasted something unpleasant. “He stabbed me, but I put two bullets in him before I passed out. There was a marked car two blocks away, and they came directly when the shooting was called in, so Rushfeldt was arrested. And charged, since both Jen and I were alive to testify against him. But his lawyer managed a decent defense by reason of insanity, so Rushfeldt was confined to a secure psychiatric facility rather than jail, where he belonged.”

“If he’s confined, why are we looking at him?” Todd asked.

“Because he escaped,” I said. In brief sentences, I sketched out my conversation with Helen and everything she told me.

Todd looked thoughtful. “And you’re sure he’s going to come after you and Tony?”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “Yes,” I said. “Look, here you’ve got a rich, powerful man with a deep-seated rage against women in authority. When one challenges him to an extent he cannot take, he kidnaps, tortures her for several days, and kills her, ergo reducing her authority and absorbing it into himself. He does this on occasion as he feels he needs to for three years. I make a fool out of him in public, so he waits and plans and takes me five weeks after the fact. Then a young, upstart detective figures it all out, and finds his hideout before he’s done with me, leaving his absorption of my authority unfinished, because he hadn’t yet broken me, though he tried very, very hard.” I couldn’t quite suppress a shudder. “So he tries to kill the detective, to take away the authority that he’s usurped, and fails to do that. Not only fails to do that, but is captured in the process. And then neither of us have the good grace to die from our injuries. So there he is, captured, convicted, incarcerated, and the two people who took his authority away from him are still out there, wandering around, laughing at him. I even managed to sue him and his companies for reparations, and bankrupted all the ones we could find. And now, he’s got three months left to live. Tell me, Agent Todd, what would you do in his situation?”

“You seem to know a lot about this man,” she said.

“Of course I do,” I said. “Some primitive cultures believe that a photograph contains a person’s soul. Some believe in the all-encompassing power of the true name. The best way to have power over something or someone, Special Agent, is to know it, to have its image firmly planted in your mind, with all its minute and disturbing details. So yes, I know Ethan Rushfeldt, in ways I doubt he knows himself. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about him. I’m an ivory-tower academic, after all. Thinking is what I do.”

“And acting is what we do,” Gibbs said, and I noticed the way all their gazes turned to him immediately when he spoke. He was looking at me, but I had the feeling not much happened in this room that he didn’t know and absorb. “So, people, let’s come up with a plan of action. There’s a killer out there, and he’s coming this way. Let’s get him before he gets anyone else.”