Mean Woman Blues

charge, she needed all the serenity she could muster.
    Hargett was a distinguished-looking guy, graying, in his early fifties, with a tight set around the mouth. He had been in Dallas less than a year, having recently been transferred from Philadelphia. He looked like a man who didn’t care either for heat or for Texans, a man driven by nightmares about the grassy knoll and Waco, terrified that something equally nasty would happen on his watch.
    Shellmire had faced a major fight to get Skip in on the anti-Jacomine effort. As a general rule, the feds didn’t like letting anyone in, much less some disgraced cop from another city, and Hargett was guarding his fiefdom like it was the Vatican. The easiest thing for Shellmire would have been to cave.
    But he and Skip had worked this case too long together. He knew for a fact that she knew more about Jacomine than any living person in law enforcement. He probably knew, as well, that this was a situation in which fine points weren’t really going to be important. But he had a well-developed sense of fair play. He talked her in as a consultant. The thing that tipped it was the debacle at the television station.
    Hargett was in a fury, mad at himself, probably. Until then, he claimed he’d proceeded cautiously, knowing he couldn’t just go and arrest a popular television personality on her say-so and Shellmire’s. He had to be absolutely sure; he had to set a trap that Jacomine couldn’t wiggle out of, but he’d disappeared before the trap was set. In reality, Skip figured, he probably hadn’t taken the Jacomine sighting all that seriously.
    But boy, he was making up for lost time now, sending those goons out to Jacomine’s house. He had that “poor little wife,” as he called her, at the office already.
    “Good,” Skip said. “Don’t let her go for any reason.” She spoke way too strongly for diplomacy’s sake, especially under the circumstances. She had reasons for saying it— two, at least— but Hargett didn’t ask what they were. He just set his mouth a little tighter and added a frown.
    Seeing her mistake, she tried to get him back. “Look, you can’t overestimate this man. Whatever you think is the worst-case scenario, he’ll up the ante. And he loves kidnapping; he has a history of kidnapping whoever he wants to spend time with— along with whoever he wants to kill.” She hesitated. There was something she needed to get on the table, but she didn’t want to insult the man. “Like Rosemarie Owens,” she said. He only grunted.
    He might be blowing her off, but then again, he might not have read the file. “You know he kidnapped her once before,” she added, thinking it said everything he needed to hear without bludgeoning him. And then she thought,
Hell, bludgeon him
. “I’m sure you’ve already sent someone to her house, but if you haven’t, my advice is to do it immediately.” The man’s balls were not her problem; Jacomine was.
    He didn’t go with them into the interview room, only introduced them quickly to Agent Stirling Pennell and admonished her, “Officer Langdon, you’re sitting in on the interview as an observer only. Please refrain from participating.”
    Pennell said to Shellmire, “We might be barking up the wrong tree here. I don’t think the wife had a clue.”
    Shellmire sighed. “Gotta start somewhere,” and Pennell led them into the room where she waited.
    She wasn’t at all what Skip imagined: someone on whom Jacomine could prey; someone beaten down, poor, vulnerable; someone looking for a hero— even Owens (who was nothing like that now) had been only thirteen when they met. This woman was young, but she looked way too bright to fall for Jacomine’s routine, too privileged to need him. She was pretty, in a Texas kind of way— the blonde hair, nicely styled, the blue eyes, the manicured nails— but she wore no makeup, and that was unusual for a suburban Southern woman, even one who planned to spend the day at home. That could indicate something was wrong, that she was depressed.
    That could be good. Maybe her marriage wasn’t going well.
    Ideally, the way Skip would have conducted the interview would have been to start there, to find out what their connection was, what hooks he had in her.
    And then it came out they’d met on the show; there it was. Karen wouldn’t have been on the show if everything had been going well in her life. She did fit the profile, at least in one way. Usually they were