Oliver picked up on his distress. “You need to rest too by the look of it.” Or maybe he’d just picked up on the wrinkled clothes.
Lincoln snapped his back straight, brushed both hands down his shirt, and glared. “Fuck you.” Even if it were true.
Oliver’s stern face vanished, the smile returning. “There he is.” He clasped Lincoln’s shoulder and aimed him for the door.
Annoyance simmered but so did amusement. His mentor knew him too well, knew he needed the former to keep going, to keep putting one foot in front of the other after the too-long week. To do what O’Shea had summoned him up here for. “Is Beverley here?” he asked as they made their way down the hallway.
“Still in DC, working with the federal prosecutors to get the complete list of charges drawn up and the transport orders signed. He’ll be here by morning.” They stopped outside the imaging suite. “Now, shall we go interrogate our serial killer?”
“Ah, so now the real reason you’re here comes out.”
“You didn’t think I was going to miss this, did you?”
They flashed their IDs for the guards, then entered through the control room and into the imaging room. Ryan sat in a chair beside the exam table, his ankles cuffed to the table’s legs, his wrists likewise cuffed and attached by a chain to the ankle restraints. A far cry from Clyde Weathers’s custody and questioning of several days ago. But then Weathers had merely been a pawn in this serial killer’s game.
A murderer who looked a ragged version of his former selves, as Dr. Fear or Chancellor McCullough. A bandage was taped over his broken nose, a bruise was forming near his temple, his gray beard was half-matted, and his suit and dress shirt were splattered with blood.
“Mr. McCullough,” Oliver started as they took their seats across the table from him. “You have the right?—”
“I already waived my rights. Ask me your questions.”
“You’re mighty cooperative for having dodged law enforcement for so long.”
“No sense lying at this point. There’s a church full of witnesses. I am who I am. And no one else is me either.” Still smarting from Baxter’s attempt to steal his identity. Lincoln intended to get to that, but first he had a more basic question.
“Why me and Carter?”
“I needed someone to stop Jeff, and Senator Kirk and you were my best bets. Agent Warren was just a happy accident.” Smug satisfaction infused Ryan’s small smile, and Lincoln had to curl his ankles around his own chair legs to stop from lunging across the table.
As if sensing that Lincoln had tipped over from annoyance to anger, Oliver slid forward to the end of his chair, taking over the interrogation again and putting himself in a position to block any sudden movements by Lincoln. Wisely done. “Why now?” he asked.
Ryan’s eyes cut from Lincoln to Oliver. “I was doing better, going longer. I could handle the pressure, the ties to this place. It took a while, but I was beginning to accept that maybe this was where I belonged. I just needed a final release, to work out the last of the pressure from the appointment to chancellor and Larry moving in, then I could accept being here for good. And then Jeff had to go and ruin it.”
“How did he find out about Dr. Fear?”
“He got into a fight with Glen Morrow in a diner twelve years ago.”
Lincoln bit back a gasp. “Baxter was the student involved in that altercation?”
“Larry kept his name out of the record. Courtesy for a student. I met him in the hospital that night, and I’ve been stuck with the parasite ever since. He found my research on Glen and my hair dye. Was under my feet all the time, trying to get me to notice him, following me. He stole my paper, my hair, my work. I didn’t realize how obsessed he was, that he knew, until Larry and I dragged him out of that meth house where he was picking his victims. I made sure he didn’t get into the grad program here, got him out of town, but he just kept coming back. He bought that property in the hills, and Larry kept it from me the entire time. Until it was too late.” He slumped back in his chair and sneered. “And he wasn’t even doing it for the right reasons.”
“Why not just kill him?” Oliver asked.
“Because that’s not what it’s about,” Ryan snapped.
“Escape,” Lincoln said. “Like you said, it was a pressure release. A valve of sorts. An escape from your fear of being stuck here, in Apex. That diagnosis taped to the door of Barry’s house was as much yours as his.”
“That’s what I was trying to provide, for myself and for the couples I helped, like Barry and Trudy, like you and Carter.”
“Helped?” Lincoln scoffed, the anger resurging.
“Escape their fears.”
Lincoln shot to his feet and banged a hand on the table. “They all died! Carter could have died.”
Ryan didn’t flinch. “But he didn’t.” He waited for Oliver to tug Lincoln back down before continuing. “Once the FBI was on the case, I was going to go on to DC, finish my work, but the day I met you two at the lab, I thought maybe you’d be the ones. That I could finish things here. So I stayed. And for a minute there, I thought I was wrong. That Carter would succumb to his fears, that it wouldn’t really be over, that neither of us belonged, but in the end, I was right about the both of you.”
“And yet you were going to blow the church anyway?”
