Chapter Sixteen

Faith sipped her coffee and sighed with satisfaction as the warm brew suffused her. Next to her, Michael took a heroic bite out of an equally heroic sub sandwich and stared melancholically at the wall.

Turk was napping, a state that Faith envied greatly. She would love nothing more than to sleep right now, but with their case at a dead end, she knew she wouldn't be able to sleep. Besides, it was only lunchtime. Michael had skirted the edge of the law to earn them time to work, and she was going to put that time to good use.

"And therein lies the rub," she muttered.

"Pardon?" Michael said.

"Nothing." She leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. "I was just thinking that I'd like for something productive to happen today."

He shrugged. "I mean, learning that Elena isn't the killer is something."

She rolled her eyes. "Let me clarify. I'd like to learn something that is instead of something that isn't. For example, maybe we find the one person who is the killer and not another one of the eight billion people who aren't."

"I see you're holding hot coffee," Michael replied. "Since I'd prefer you not throw that coffee into my face, I won't remind you that this is how all of our cases go."

Faith glared at him. "Smart man." Her gaze softened. "I just hate that I already broke my promise."

"The one you shouldn't have made to Hector Gonzalez?"

"After your little stunt in Elena's interrogation, you don't have room to talk about what I shouldn't have done," she fired back. "But yes, that one. And I know I shouldn't have made it. I just wanted for once to be able to stop someone before he could kill someone else instead of hopping from body to body and trying to chase them after the fact. I'm tired of always feeling one step behind."

He lifted an eyebrow. "Would this be a bad time to remind you that we have the best track record in the FBI?"

"Yes, it would because that track record is built on a stack of corpses that we avenged but couldn't save."

Michael's eyes narrowed a little. "This isn't about the case, is it?"

West's taunting grin flickered across Faith's face for a moment. She sighed and took another sip of her coffee. The warm liquid cut through her anxiety enough for her to admit the truth. "West told me he'd break me. When the police took him, he…" She took a deep breath, then said, "He had me dead to rights, Michael. Me and Turk. He could have killed us before the police got to us. But he didn't. Instead, he smiled down at me and said he would break me. Then he just gave up. He let the police take him. He could have killed me, but he didn't, and… and I still feel like he's winning. I don't know how or why, but I still feel like he's one step ahead of me. Maybe I'm just going crazy. Maybe it's a little bit of the old trauma with Trammell leaking through to now, but I just can't shake the thought that he's still standing over my shoulder waiting to keep his promise and finish what Trammell started."

Michael nodded. He thought a moment, then said, "Here's another thought: West was caught."

She blinked. "I know he was caught. But some part of me still feels like he let it happen."

"I know. I'm saying he didn't. He was just caught. Sure, he could have killed you. If he had, the police would have shot him dead. Or he could have shot the police, in which case, you would have killed him. He could have gotten one of you, but not both. So he surrendered because that was the only way he didn't die."

She frowned. "I don't know. I don't feel like he would think that black and white about it."

"Of course not. Because—and please don't take this the wrong way—you have him on this pedestal like he's the greatest criminal who's ever lived. In your mind, he's a scheming genius who managed to outwit you and the whole FBI because of his incredible wit and superior intellect. But at the end of the day, he's just a psycho who butchers people for fun. Maybe he's smarter than your average asshole, but he's still just an asshole. Sometimes, things are complicated and intricate, and sometimes, the bad guy gets caught between a rock and a hard place and takes the easy way out. I think West took the easy way out and said that little threat before the cops picked you up because he wanted to get one last jab in. That way, he can think about how he's keeping you up at night while he prepares to spend the rest of his life staring at the sky through a crack in the wall and getting his exercise in a concrete pit."

Faith smiled a little at that image. Her smile widened when she acknowledged the truth of it. Whatever happened, West was caught. He was going to spend the rest of his life in a maximum-security prison. As adept as he was at hand-to-hand combat, there was no way for him to squirm out of the security watching him now.

He had lost. No matter what else occurred, Franklin West had finally lost.

She met Michael's eyes. "You're right. Thank you."

"Of course I'm right. That happens a lot more often than you like to admit."

She rolled her eyes. "Don't ruin it. Now come on. West is in a tiny little cell for the rest of his life. Let's find this killer and put them there too."

Michael grinned. "That's the spirit."

Faith sipped the rest of her coffee and said, "Okay. So we need a new lead. I'm thinking maybe we try looking at the victims again."

"I'll take anything at this point," Michael said. "What were you thinking?"

"I'm thinking that having super hearing probably sucks."

He lifted an eyebrow. "What makes you say that?"

"You made me think about it actually, when you mentioned the way those two students reacted to the loud noise in Dr. Tate's study. They were in pain. If that's what they lived with every day, then their lives must have been constant discomfort with only isolated moments of peace. That could explain why they went to figure out where the killer's noise was coming from. They were killed in or near their homes or in their businesses—places where they would ordinarily have sanctuary."

"So we're looking for someone who wanted to take away their safety?"

"Well, yes, but that's focusing on the killer. I want to go back to focusing on the victims. What would our victims do to try to alleviate the constant pain and discomfort they suffered?"

"Go see a doctor?"

Faith grinned. "Bingo."

Michael nodded. "Ah. You think that a doctor might have seen all three of our victims and might also be interested in a little moonlighting as a serial killer."

"I think it's an angle worth exploring," she replied. "Let's look up their medical records and see if anything pops up."

Ordinarily, finding someone's medical record was as difficult as learning someone's confession history from their priest. But when the people in question were violently murdered and that medical record could tell the FBI who might have done it, medical providers were a little more willing to cooperate. Faith and Michael were quickly able to compile a list of doctors who saw each of the women for complaints related to sensitive hearing.

Rebecca, somewhat surprisingly, had only seen a few doctors and no one after her sophomore year of college when she began studying sound engineering. She, apparently, had decided to put her hearing to good use rather than try to reduce it.

Maria had seen quite a few more, but again, her visits stopped years before. The last appointment was with a doctor hired to develop a special set of ear plugs she could wear in concert to prevent the noise of the other instruments from bothering her. That was when she was twenty-five. Evidently the earplugs worked because for the last six years of her life, she never complained about her hearing again.

Emily was the outlier. She had seen no fewer than sixteen specialists complaining about her sensitive hearing and explored treatments ranging from mundane to borderline pseudoscience. That made sense. She was a linguist, and since most people didn't have super hearing, languages weren't developed with a degree of nuance that would require exceptional hearing to understand and analyze. She was the only one of the three to whom super hearing wouldn't provide an advantage.

One name showed up on all three lists: Dr. Lucas Hammond.

"I guess we know who we're talking to next," Faith said.

"I don't know," Michael demurred. "He hadn't seen Maria or Rebecca in years. He saw Emily ten months ago. Why would he suddenly decide to kill them now, and why would Emily be the last one he killed? I think we might just be looking at another coincidence."

"First of all," Faith countered, "if that's the case, then we should talk to him to rule that out just like we talked to Elena. Second of all, it looks like Emily sued him for malpractice."

Michael lifted an eyebrow. "You don't say?"

"I do say. Evidently, she accused him of fraudulently claiming to be able to mitigate sensitive hearing. She claimed that his very expensive and very invasive treatment—including a full-body exam—did absolutely nothing to improve her condition and claimed he was simply taking advantage of vulnerable people to earn money that would be difficult to recover since experimental treatments are usually taken at the patient's own risk."

"Did she win the lawsuit?"

"No," Faith admitted, "but I can't imagine that the publicity was good for his career."

"Probably not," he agreed. "So we have a motive for Emily. What about the other two?"

"Let's say for the sake of argument that Dr. Hammond is guilty of malpractice. He might want to eliminate anyone who might look at Emily's case and say, ‘Hey, yeah, he did that to me too.'"

"But why not Emily first?"

"Probably to remove suspicion. He already won the lawsuit, but it would look bad if she died right after the suit was dismissed. If, on the other hand, two other victims who don't have an obvious connection to the third go first, maybe we think exactly what we thought, that it's some psycho."

Michael nodded. "All right. I'm convinced. Let's go talk to this guy."

Faith felt better as the three of them drove toward St. Christopher's Medical Center. Some of that had to do with the discovery of a new lead only a few hours after their last one dried up. Most of it, though, had to do with Michael's encouragement regarding West.

He was in jail. She was free. Turk was alive. So were David and Michael. He hadn't broken her. He had failed.

And when Faith finished with this case, she was going to go home and watch him get sent away.

A smile spread across her face. You lose, West.