“Were you close to him?”
“Most of the time.” I didn’t have to think about it. “But in the last few months, no. . . It had happened before. It was kind of cyclical. We’d get along and then we’d get sick of each other.”
“Was he older or younger?”
“Older.”
“How much older?”
“Three minutes. We were twins.”
“I didn’t know.”
I nodded and she frowned as if the thought that we had been twins made the loss all the more hurtful. Maybe it had.
“I didn’t catch that in the reports.”
“Probably not important.”
“Well, it helps explains why you. . . I’ve always wondered about twins.”
“You mean like did I get a psychic message from him the night he was killed? The answer is no. That kind of stuff never happened with us. Or, if it did, I never recognized it and he never said anything about it.”
She nodded and I looked back out the window for a few seconds. I felt good being with her, despite the rocky start of the day before. But I was beginning to suspect that Rachel Walling could put her worst enemy at ease.
I tried asking her questions about herself to turn it around. She mentioned the marriage I already knew about from Warren but she didn’t say much about her former husband. She said she had gone to Georgetown to study psychology and was recruited in her last year by the bureau. After becoming an agent in the New York field office, she had gone back to school at night at Columbia for a law degree. She freely admitted that being a woman plus having a law degree put her on the bureau’s fast track. The BSS was a plum assignment.
“Your folks must be very proud of you,” I said.
She shook her head.
“No?”
“My mother left when I was young. I haven’t seen her in a long time. She doesn’t know anything about me.”
“Your father?”
“My dad died when I was very young.”
I knew I had strayed beyond the bounds of routine conversation. But my instinct as a journalist was always to ask the next question, the one they don’t expect. I also sensed that she wanted to say more but wouldn’t unless I asked.
“What happened?”
“He was a policeman. We lived in Baltimore. He killed himself.”
“Oh, man. Rachel, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
“No, it’s okay. I wanted you to know that. I think it has everything to do with what I am and what I’m doing. Maybe it’s that way with your brother and this story. That’s why I wanted to tell you that if I was harsh with you yesterday, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Thanks.”
We were silent for a few moments but I sensed the subject wasn’t closed yet.
“The suicide study with the foundation, is that. . . ?”
“Yes, that’s why I started it.”
Another void of silence followed but I was not uncomfortable and I don’t think she was either. Eventually she got up and went to a storage area at the back of the cabin and got everybody sodas. When Backus was through joking about what a fine stewardess she made she sat down with me again. As the conversation began again I tried to move the subject away from the memory of her father.
“Do you ever regret not being a practicing shrink?” I asked. “Isn’t that what you first went to school for?”
“Not at all. This is more satisfying. I’ve probably had more firsthand experience with sociopaths than most shrinks have in a lifetime.”
“And that’s only the agents you work with.”
Her laugh came easily.
“Boy, if you only knew.”
Maybe it was only the fact that she was a woman, but I sensed she was different from the other agents I had known and dealt with over the years. She wasn’t as sharp around the edges. She was a listener, not a teller, a thinker, not a reactor. I was beginning to feel I could tell her what I was thinking at any given time and not worry about the consequences.
“Like Thorson,” I said. “He seems like he’s got his top screwed on a little too tight.”
“Definitely,” she said and then an uneasy smile and shake of the head followed.
“What’s with him, anyway?”
“He’s angry.”
“At what?”
“A lot of things. He’s got a lot of baggage. Including me. He was my husband.”
It didn’t really surprise me. There had been the visible tension between them. My initial impression of Thorson was that he could be poster boy for the Men Are Pigs Society. No wonder Walling had a dim view of the other side.
“Sorry I brought him up, then,” I said. “I’m batting a thousand here.”
She smiled.
“That’s okay. He leaves that impression on a lot of people.”
“Must be hard to have to work with him. How come you’re both in the same unit?”
“We’re not exactly. He’s in Critical Incident Response. I float between Behavioral Science and CIR. We only have to work together at times like this. We used to be partners before we married. We both worked on the VICAP program and spent a lot of time on the road together. Then we just came apart.”
She drank some of her Coke and I didn’t ask any more questions. I couldn’t ask any of the right ones so I decided to cool it for a while. But she continued on unbidden.
“When we divorced I left the VICAP team, started handling mostly BSS research projects, profiles and an occasional case. He switched over to Critical Response. But we still have our little meetings in the cafeteria and on cases like this.”
“Then why don’t you transfer all the way out?”
“Because, like I said, assignment to the national center is a plum. I don’t want to leave and neither does he. It’s either that or he just stays around to spite me. Bob Backus talked to us once and said he thought it would be better if one of us transferred out, but neither of us will blink. They can’t move Gordon because he’s got seniority. He’s been there since the center started. If they move me the unit loses one of the only three females and they know I’ll make a beef about it.”
“What could you do?”
“Just say I’m being moved because I’m a woman. Maybe talk to the Post. The center is one of the bureau’s bright spots. When we come to town to help the local cops we’re heroes, Jack. The media laps it up and the bureau doesn’t want to dim that. So Gordon and I get to keep making dirty faces at each other across the table.”
The plane pushed over into a descent and through the window I could look up ahead. On the far west horizon were the familiar Rockies. We were almost there.
“Were you involved in the interviews of Bundy and Manson, people like that?”
I had heard or read somewhere about the BSS project to interview all known serial rapists and killers in prisons across the country. From the interviews came the psychological data bank the BSS used to create profiles of other killers. The interview project had taken years and I remembered something about it having taken its toll on the agents who faced these men.
“That was a trip,” she said. “Me, Gordon, Bob, we were all part of that. I still get a letter from Charlie every now and then. Usually around Christmas. As a criminal he was most effective in manipulation of his female followers. So I think he thinks that if he is going to get anybody to sympathize with him at the bureau, it will be a woman. Me.”