Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.
We're Off to See the Wizard
One would think that a federal agency would find it easy to profile a serial killer, or even predict his next victim, if all previous victims had exactly one thing in common: they had all dated or worked closely with the same man at one time or another.
Unfortunately, when the man in question was Lee Stetson, the pool of potential victims was a massive one. Half the female agency staff had to go to the meeting about the issue, and then they had to contact all the ones who hadn't been there. Then, Lee had told both her and Amanda that they had to contact his non-agency "friends".
"Books," he had said, when questioned about his black book.
"Books?" Amanda had asked, with just a suggestion of scolding.
"I have four of them," he had answered, strangely apologetic, as he looked at Amanda with pleading in his eyes.
She felt dirtied just by looking through the black book Lee had handed her in the Q Bureau. The man had systematically worked his way through a good percentage of the inhabitants and visitors of the D.C. area. She saw many, many names she knew. The dates were sporadic — one or two a week at the beginning; farther and farther apart over the last two years.
She scoffed every time she came across a new note to help him keep his stories straight on what backstory he had told each particular conquest. The moon. Music notes. A car.
She sighed and turned a page.
Randi's name and phone number, followed by three dates, all in January, and the letter "M" that Lee had told them stood for "military".
Leslie O'Connor. A phone number. Two dates, both in September, nearly a month ago. "IFF" was scrawled next to the entry.
A thick, dark line underneath, in permanent marker that bled through the page.
This, then, was the most recent one. She flipped through the rest of the pages in the book, noting that they were completely blank. There were no more names, no more pictures, no more dates.
At least there was an end in sight, she thought, and reached for the phone.
Lee was going insane. He was jumping, Amanda-style, to conclusions that the evidence didn't support.
He suspected Paul Barnes.
He started seeing Dorothy, his long-lost first love — difficult to do, seeing as she had been dead for ten years.
He started obsessing over Serdeych, the Soviet responsible for Dorothy's death.
"Keep an eye on him," said Billy.
She meant to.
She followed him, much more unobtrusively than Amanda did. He wasn't doing well. He yelled at Paul Barnes in the hallway and almost started a fistfight.
He ran desperately after a bus because he was convinced Dorothy was on it.
He took Amanda to lunch and spent a long time hunched over a table with her, his eyes tortured and his breath coming in uneven gasps, confiding in her.
Francine could have gotten close enough to hear their conversation without Lee or Amanda seeing her, but she didn't. Some things were better left unheard. Confession, after all, was sacred.
She hung back, just observing, as he walked Amanda to her car and took both her hands in his. He listened to her ramble for a while before an indulgent smile crossed his face as he looked down at her.
When they parted, Francine followed him back to the agency. And then he voluntarily went to Dr. Pfaff, the agency psychologist.
He was still there when the call came. Amanda's windshield had been blown out of her car by a man in her back seat wearing a mask like the one Serdeych had worn, and suddenly Lee's insistence that there was something more at work here didn't seem quite so insane.
Billy didn't believe Lee that Paul Barnes was at the bottom of this (and, frankly, neither did Francine), but it did at least look like there was more to it than mere revenge on Lee Stetson for his success with the ladies. He still refused to allow Lee to do his own investigation, though.
"You don't exactly appear to be humming with mental health," said Billy, with the understatement of the century. "You're seeing people, remember?! You need rest."
It wasn't something Lee had ever done: rest. He didn't know how.
"Take Amanda home and then get some sleep; that's an order!"
Lee leaned across her as if she didn't exist, his hand outstretched to Amanda. She took it, and they walked out hand in hand.
Francine did not follow.
She didn't need to. He was in good hands.
In retrospect — a sentence starter that never ended well — she should have followed him. He did crazy, stupid things when he let his heart and his emotions get the better of him. At least Amanda's crazy, stupid things balanced him out.
Francine and Billy were heading out to check on things when a message came through from Francine saying that Mrs. King was going to Silver Springs Airport. She thought that Lee would be meeting Paul Barnes there.
She hoped and prayed that Billy wouldn't explode right there and then.
"How did Amanda get your clearance?" he asked instead.
"I, uh, I gave her my card to check addresses in Data."
"Well, it seems she's found some other uses for it."
She nodded and held her breath. "Yeah. Seems so."
"Well, I'm glad because we're headed in the wrong direction!"
She breathed a sigh of relief as he turned the car and they headed off to the airport.
They arrived to find Lee scrambling all over an airborne plane, doing his best to destabilize it while another man — Serdeych, after all — tried to knock him off.
It was all over pretty quickly after that, after the car cut off the plane's escape and Serdeych jumped off and tried to run. Unfortunately for him, he had miscalculated how efficient a vengeful Lee Stetson could be; he was tackled and overcome in moments.
"Get him outta here, will ya?" Lee asked, practically throwing him at Billy and turning to the hangar.
"I'll drive," Francine said. She needed something to focus on other than the fact that the man who sat behind her in the agency car had killed so many women in cold blood.
But the thought that pulsed through her mind, over and over on the way back, was something quite different: we are going to have to fill out an incredible amount of paperwork.