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“Do you think he killed Cody?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
Lucy closed her eyes and leaned back. “Neither do I. When I went in there I was so certain that he’d done it. And now…if Cody killed himself, I can’t blame anyone but him. And I don’t want to.”
“They’ll know for sure by tomorrow whether it was suicide or murder,” Sean said.
“Will they?” she asked.
“You know Forensics better than I do, but Noah said they are prioritizing this and hope to have a definitive answer in the morning. What do you think?”
“With ballistics, they know for certain more than ninety percent of the time—but it still could be inconclusive.”
“I’ll go with the odds.” He kissed her on the forehead. “You’ll have the answer tomorrow. Don’t beat yourself up about it now.”
“What about Fran?”
“She’s in jail for the night. So is David Biggler. Armstrong said they don’t have anything on his sister, but told her not to leave town. Mallory didn’t give her up, so maybe she really wasn’t involved.”
“Or he’s trying to protect her because she’s a young woman. She’s my age.” Lucy hated Mallory, hated what he’d done, what he’d perverted in his twisted sense of right and wrong. That she’d somehow been the impetus for his decisions sickened her.
“You’re exhausted, Lucy. Let’s go.”
“I am tired,” she agreed.
Sean stood, pulling her up with him and wrapping an arm around her shoulder. “There’s nothing more either of us can do tonight.”
When Noah and Hans arrived at Mallory’s house, it was after eight at night, below 30 degrees, with the promise of blizzard-like conditions by Thursday morning. The search team was done, but SSA Lauren Cheville had asked Noah to come out.
“I wanted you to see this,” Lauren said. “Pictures simply won’t do it justice.”
He and Hans walked with Lauren toward the kitchen. “I thought the search was a bust,” Lauren explained. “We found nothing to implicate Mallory in any crimes. But I remembered what you said, Hans.”
“That he will have kept his guns.”
“Exactly. I just didn’t imagine that he’d have made it so easy for us to trace them—just hard to find them.”
They followed Lauren into the basement, accessed by a door in the kitchen. The basement was damp with a moldy scent that made Noah sneeze. There was full fluorescent lighting and several workbenches, tools hung meticulously on peg-board lined walls, and canned goods lined a metal shelf. “We checked the basement earlier, did a complete sweep, but nothing jumped out. After we came up empty, I walked through the entire place again, thinking about where I would have hidden a gun collection. I knocked on walls and tables, and then found it.” She motioned to an agent who was standing by a workbench. “Show them, Carl.”
Carl knocked on one of the two six-foot-long workbenches. It was solid wood. He knocked on the other. It sounded hollow. “Watch this,” he said. He extended his arms as far as they could go and reached under both front corners of the bench. “There’s a special release—you have to press both at the same time and—voilà!”
The top of the bench popped open on a spring. Inside on the felt-lined hidden compartment were dozens of handguns—mostly nine-millimeters and .38s. Three rifles—an M21 and two M24s—were secured on the underside of the workbench lid. Several knives were also on display.
Each firearm had a name painted on the barrel in white.
“My God,” Hans said. Even he appeared surprised, although he’d predicted that Mallory would have kept the weapons he used. “How many are there?”
“Seventeen nine-millimeters, ten .38 revolvers, and two Glock .45’s,” Lauren said. “This is a fortune in guns to be tagged and left for souvenirs.”
“But it makes each murder that much harder to prove when the ballistics don’t match up with anything else,” Hans said.
Noah read the names. Most he didn’t recognize. Then he saw Roger Morton next to Robert Ralston. “See those?” He gestured toward the guns.
“Can’t miss them. Did you notice what’s under each gun?”
“File folders.”
“My guess? It’s his justification for each murder—a list of their crimes, sentences, parole information. Mallory doesn’t want anyone to think he’s a monster, so he convinces himself that he’s a savior.”
