Girl, Forgotten (Andrea Oliver 2)

A low-level hum filled the restaurant as older out-of-towners raked fried foods into their mouths. Andrea’s stomach ached as she spotted Catfish Bible sitting at the far end of the counter. It was way too early for supper, but she hadn’t eaten anything since the orange peanut butter crackers this morning. When she saw the hamburger and fries waiting for her at the empty bar stool beside Bible, she had to wipe the saliva from the corners of her mouth.

“Started without you,” Bible said, chewing tiny bites around his hamburger like a kid. “Good place. I’ve been here before. Figured you’d want the special.”

Andrea didn’t bother to answer. She sat down and pushed the burger as far into her mouth as it would go. She sucked down some cola to help it travel. Then she scowled at the unexpected taste.

“Right?” Bible said. “All they got is Pepsi.”

Andrea shook her head, because that wasn’t right.

“So how’d you get into law enforcement?” Bible asked.

Andrea felt her throat stretch like a python’s belly as she swallowed the glob of meat and bread. Every cadet had a story at Glynco—an uncle who had died in the line of duty, a family full of officers going back to the turn of the last century, a burning need to protect and serve.

Andrea could only offer, “Worked at my local police station.”

His nod had an air of suspicion, and she wondered how deep the background check in her file had gone. For instance, did they make a distinction between being a uniformed cop in the streets and being a 911 operator who worked nights and zonked out like a vampire while the sun was up?

Bible said, “I was in the Marines. Stubbed my toe at the start of the Gulf War. Got sent home to recuperate. My wife, Cussy, made it clear she was gonna punch me in my soft bits if I didn’t get the hell outta the house. Ended up joining the Marshals.”

Andrea watched him shrug, but of course he was leaving out a hell of a lot, too.

He dabbed some fries in catsup. “You go to college?”

“In Savannah.” She wedged more burger into her mouth, but was disappointed to see that he was waiting for her to continue. “Dropped out six months before graduation.”

He chewed along with her. “I served in the Southern District my first go-round. They gotta real pretty HQ down there on Bull Street. You wouldn’t be talking about the Savannah College of Art and Design, would you?”

She finished the last of her burger. Andrea had learned early on at Glynco that there was no elegant way to tell a Marshal that she’d washed out of a Production Design degree at SCAD after flunking Illuminating the Narrative without them turning slackjawed like they were watching butterflies shoot out of a unicorn’s asshole.

She told Bible the settled-on narrative. “I got a job in New York. I lived there until my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. I moved back home to take care of her. I worked at the local police department. I saw the posting for the USMS on the job board. I spent a year and a half hitting reload on the website until my application was accepted.”

Bible cut through the deflection. “What kind of art did you do?”

“The not-good-enough kind.” Andrea needed to change the subject and, other than her life story, there was only one thing Bible had shown any real interest in. “Why did you ask Chief Stilton about suicides in the area?”

Bible nodded as he finished his Pepsi. “If they’re homicidal, they’re suicidal.”

At Glynco, they loved their rhymes almost as much as they loved their acronyms, but Andrea had never heard the phrase before. “What do you mean?”

He said, “Adam Lanza, Israel Keyes, Stephen Paddock, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Elliot Rodger, Andrew Cunanan.”

Thanks to a steady diet of Dateline reruns, she recognized the names of the spree killers and mass murderers, but she had never put together a theme other than monstrous. “They all killed themselves before they could be taken into custody.”

“They were what’s called intropunitive, which is a fancy way of saying they turned their anger, blame, hostility and frustration against themselves. There’s documentation of homicidal and suicidal ideation in their pasts. They don’t kill on a whim. They gotta work their way up to it. Write about it, dream about it, talk about it, land in the hospital over it.” Bible wiped his mouth and threw his napkin on his plate. “Five years ago, there were maybe a thousand threats against judges every year. Last year, we were at over four thousand.”

Andrea didn’t ask for a reason. Everybody was pissed the hell off right now, especially with the government. “Any of them follow through with it?”

“There’s only been four successful murder attempts on federal judges since 1979. One of ’em don’t exactly fit the criteria because he happened to be at the Safeway where a congresswoman was targeted.”

Andrea peppered her Dateline diet with true crime podcasts. “Gabby Giffords.”

“I like that you’re paying attention,” Bible said. “All of the murdered judges were men. All the killers were men, which we know because we caught ’em. All but one judge was a Republican appointee.” Bible paused a beat to make sure she was keeping up. “There are only two known cases where family members of a judge were murdered or badly wounded. In both those cases, the judges were women, and they were both the primary targets. Both were Democratic appointees. The assailants in each case were middle-aged white men. Both were suffering from debilitating depression—both had lost their careers, their families, their money. And they both ended up killing themselves.”

“Homicidal and suicidal.” Andrea could finally see where this was going. Another thing she had learned at the academy was that law enforcement loved their statistics. “Okay. Generally, past behavior predicts future behavior. That’s why the FBI studies serial killers. They look for patterns. Those patterns are generally duplicated in other types of serial killers.”

“Correct.”

“That’s why you asked Chief Cheese to notify you of any possible suicides in the area. A suicidal, middle-aged white male fits the profile of a person who might try to murder a female judge.” She waited for Bible to nod. “But that seems like a wide net. I mean, how many guys matching that description who don’t wanna kill a judge attempt suicide in any given day?”