Roses Are Red

think it’s probably a disguise. Our two guys almost lose him again.
    “But they
don’t
lose him. They’re very lucky. They see him go into the Hazelwood Veterans Hospital in D.C. He
doesn’t
come out again. We don’t know what he looks like, but the Mastermind went in there and he stayed. He didn’t come out.”
    Macdougall stopped talking. He let his eyes go slowly down the line from Weiss to Betsey to me.
    “He’s a mental patient, guys and girl. He’s at Hazelwood Veterans Hospital in Washington. He’s on the mental health ward. You just have to find him in there.”

Chapter 96
    FBI AGENTS were immediately dispatched to Hazelwood Veterans Hospital. Files on every current patient, and also the staff, were being pulled and would be evaluated. The Veterans Administration was blocking access to the patients themselves, but that wouldn’t last very long.
    I spent the rest of a very long day cross-checking copies of files on employees and customers of MetroHartford against patient records as they became available from Hazelwood. Thank God for computers. Even if the Mastermind was at the hospital, no one knew exactly what he looked like. His half of the thirty million dollars was still missing. But we were closer to him than we’d ever been. We had recovered nearly all the money from the New York detectives. Only a couple hundred thousand was still missing. All the detectives were trying to play “let’s make a deal.”
    That night around nine-thirty, Betsey and I had dinner in New York at a restaurant called Ecco. She wore a yellow smock, gold earrings and bracelets. It looked good in contrast with her black hair and the tan she still had. I think she knew that she looked good, too. Very, very feminine.
    “Is this, like, a date?” she asked once we were seated at a table in the cozy but noisy Manhattan restaurant.
    I smiled. “I would say this might qualify as a date, especially if we don’t talk about work too much.”
    “You have my word on it. Not even if the Mastermind walks in here and sits down at our table.”
    “I’m sorry about Jim Walsh,” I told her. We hadn’t gotten a chance to talk about it much.
    “I know you are, Alex. Me too. He was a really good guy.”
    “Did it surprise you? That he killed himself?”
    She put her hand on top of mine.
    “It did —
totally.
Not tonight. Okay?”
    For the first time, she opened up and told me a little about herself. She had gone to John Carroll High School in D.C. and been brought up a Catholic. She said that her background was “strict, strict, and more strict. Lots of discipline.” Her mother was a homemaker until she died, when Betsey was sixteen. Her father had been a sergeant in the army, then a fireman.
    “I used to go out with a girl from John Carroll,” I told her. “Cute little uniform.”
    “Recently?” she asked. Her brown eyes twinkled. She
was
funny. She said the sense of humor came from her old neighborhood in D.C., and also the atmosphere in her parents’ house. “If you were a boy in our neighborhood, you had to be funny or you got into lots of fights. My father wanted a boy but got me instead. He was a tough guy but funny, always had a joke. Daddy died of a heart attack on the job. I think that’s why I work out every day like such a possessed little maniac.”
    I told her that my mother and father had both died before I was ten and that my grandmother had raised me. “I work out a lot, too,” I said.
    “You went to Georgetown, then Johns Hopkins, right?” she asked.
    I rolled my eyes, but I was laughing. “You prepared for the meeting. Yes, I have a doctorate in psychology from Hopkins. I’m overqualified for my job.”
    She laughed. “I went to Georgetown. I was
way
behind you, though.”
    “Four years. Only four short years, Agent Cavalierre. You were a very good lacrosse player there.”
    She crinkled up her nose and mouth. “
Oohhh.
Somebody else has been prepping for tonight.”
    I laughed. “No, no. I actually saw you play once.”
    “You remember?” she asked with mild astonishment.
    “I remember you. You
glided
when you ran. I didn’t put it all together at first, but I remember it now.”
    Betsey asked about my Johns Hopkins training in psych, then my three years in private practice. “But you like being a homicide detective better?” she asked.
    “I do. I love the action.”
    She admitted that she did, too.
    We talked a little about people who had been important in our lives. I told