“I don’t think so, but . . . you’re humming.”
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you. I’ll stop.”
“No, you’re humming the same song he was whistling.”
Amelia smiled and squeezed her eyes shut for one blissful moment. “How weird is that, huh?”
CHAPTER 54
“I’ve found it!” Li shot up from her chair, signaling to the entire team. “Yep. You heard it right. Detective Vera Li has cracked the code.” Everyone gathered in to hear as Li read from her notebook, holding court. “Silva’s missing year. She was last on staff at Mayo. Before that, Johns Hopkins. That’s all squared away, no problems; then she drops a year before she comes here.”
“Her sabbatical,” Foster said, “according to Gershon.”
Li shook her head. “Stillman-Gates, the Westhaven of Baltimore or maybe a half step up. But the question, my friends, is not how she got to Stillman but why she left Mayo.” Li waited. All the tired cop eyes in the place were on her; no one was in the mood for a magic show.
“Consider the question asked?” Symansky said, the bags under his eyes large enough to carry a week’s worth of groceries.
Griffin, who’d come out of her office for the details, stood with her arms crossed, looking at least a year older than she had the day before. “Li, do not make me come over there.”
“Buzzkills, all of you. Turns out Silva got into a little trouble,” Li said. “She was censured and then outright fired by Mayo for reportedly getting ‘too close’ to a patient. But not just any patient, a killer infamously dubbed the Beltway Slasher. Silva, being a big cheese psychoanalyst affiliated with an elite institution, had been brought in to get inside the Slasher’s head.”
“Did she try busting him out?” Kelley asked. “Because that would make one helluva movie.”
“Not sure,” Li said. “I don’t think so. Anyway, whatever went down, Mayo kept it close to the vest and cut ties with her as fast as they could, but enough got out so that some people knew about it and talked about it, at least in Baltimore. Quite the stain. Anyway, Silva’s locked out, and literally everything dries up for her. The fall is steep and humiliating as hell.”
“Betcha it’s sex,” Symansky said. “It’s always sex.”
Kelley frowned. “She’s in her sixties.”
Symansky sat up and glared at the younger man. “News flash, buckaroo: sex don’t stop when the AARP card shows up in the mailbox.”
“So she landed at Stillman, then at Westhaven,” Foster said, hoping to get back on track. “Where Gershon didn’t care about the ‘too close’ thing? Where she then glommed on to Morgan?”
“Maybe she wanted to get ‘too close’ to him, too, and he wasn’t having it,” Symansky said.
Kelley tossed a grungy-looking hacky sack up in the air, caught it, and repeated the toss. “That might explain her shoving him under the bus. A woman scorned.”
Foster scribbled notes, thinking about the connection, wondering what it said about Silva’s motives or her game plan. She looked up and over at her partner. “How’d you find Stillman-Gates?”
“I started at Westhaven and worked backward,” Li said. “It seemed odd to me that she would jump from hospital to hospital, especially at her level, so I checked, found the gap, and made a list of other psychiatric facilities in Baltimore and started calling. I also had an old boyfriend in the city. He’s a psychologist now, married with kids, but we had a cordial conversation. His move to Baltimore broke us up, but I harbor no hard feelings.” The room quieted. “Right. Not important about the breakup. I get it.
“So Caleb, my ex, told me the whole thing never made the papers because everybody involved, especially Silva, clamped down on it super hard. The Slasher case was huge there, so you can imagine the heat Mayo would have gotten. If their donors and benefactors got a whiff of the scandal, there’s a good chance a lot of the hospital center’s funding would have dried up, so they dropped Silva like she weighed a million pounds, locked the castle up tight, and raised all the drawbridges so she couldn’t get back in.” Li snapped her fingers. “It was like she was never there.”
Foster turned back to her computer, her fingers tapping away. “The Beltway Slasher, a.k.a. Alvin Keyes. He killed eight women. Slashed them from ear to ear. He copped to eight murders. They only found five bodies. He got more than two hundred years in prison. Obviously, he’s still there.”
“Till he shrivels up and blows away,” Li said. “Wicks was slashed from ear to ear.”
Lonergan laughed. “You think Silva did that?” He stood up from his chair. “What are we doin’， writin’ a screenplay? Look, she’s a quack lookin’ for her fifteen minutes, right? She was high, now she’s low, and she can’t deal with it, so whatever attention she can get, she’ll take. This Morgan’s an odd duck, so she throws him at us, we take a dive down the rabbit hole, or Li does, and then she gets to play savior.”
“Or some Slasher rubbed off on her,” Kelley said. “Her and Morgan can be tag teaming. He does his; she does hers. The lovers’ spat could be an act to mess with our heads.”
Lonergan threw up his hands. “And it gets worse.”
“Check them both, but do it fast,” Griffin said, turning for her office. “Good work, Li. Keep it up, everybody. Kelley? You’re a twisty SOB. Keep that up too.”
The team waited for Griffin’s door to close before they continued. Foster asked about Lonergan and Bigelow’s conversation with Wicks’s friend Fahey.
“She had nothing more to add,” Bigelow said. “She’s a mess, though. This was supposed to be a fun girls’ trip; now Wicks is going home in a box. The whole thing doesn’t make us—or the city—look too good, that’s for damn sure.”
“So we look closer at Silva and Morgan? See if there’s more there than what they’re saying?” Foster asked.
“We hit Morgan’s neighbors,” Symansky said. “Somebody knows all his business, his comings and goings.”
“Same for Silva,” Bigelow said. “There’s nothing that says she couldn’t have worked a knife or dragged a body in a tarp.”
“Seriously, what is she?” Kelley said. “Sixty-one, sixty-two?”
Symansky reeled on him. “God damn it, Kelley. I’m sixty-one. Do I look dead yet?” Symansky was two years shy of mandatory retirement age, but it didn’t appear to Foster that Kelley wanted to mention that or respond to the direct question. Instead, he went back to tossing the hacky sack.
“And why not Silva?” Li said. “Women kill all the time. Half the people we bring in here in cuffs are female. I’m sure at one point your wives have thought about doing you all in, especially you, Lonergan.” She winked at him playfully as he grumbled back.
Symansky raised his hand. “I know mine has. She told me so straight to my face.”
Li cocked a thumb toward Lonergan. “See?”
Foster was getting used to the team’s banter, though not comfortable enough yet to join in. She was still the new kid and had to ease in, make a place for herself. “So Silva’s at the top of our list along with Morgan.”