Roses Are Red

or seventh Diet Coke. I’d matched her coffee for Coke. Intermittently, we had revisited the mystery of James Walsh’s supposed suicide and the sudden disappearance of Michael Doud. Szabo had refused to answer any questions about the two agents. Why would he murder the two of them? What was his real plan? Goddamn him!
    “Could Szabo really be behind all this, Alex? Is he that clever? That goddamn evil? That nuts?”
    I pushed myself up from the desk I was working at. “I don’t know anymore. It’s late again. I’m fried, Betsey. I’m out of here. Tomorrow’s another day.”
    The overhead lights were blinding and hurtful. Betsey’s eyes were red rimmed and vacant as they stared up at me. I wanted to hug her some but half a dozen agents were still working in the office. I ached to hold her in my arms, to talk to her about anything but the case.
    “Good night,” I finally said. “Get some sleep.”
    “Night, Alex.”
I miss you,
she mouthed.
    “Be careful,” I said. “Be careful going home.”
    “I always am.
You
be careful.”
    I got home somehow and climbed upstairs to bed. I’d been working too hard for too long. Maybe I
did
need to quit the Job. I hit the pillow hard. At about twenty past two I woke up. I’d been having a conversation with Frederic Szabo in my sleep. Then I’d talked to someone else from the investigation.
Oh, brother.
    It was a bad, bad time to be awake. I usually don’t remember my dreams — which probably means I’m repressing them — but I woke with a clear and very disturbing image of the last couple of minutes.
    The bank robber Tony Brophy had been describing his meeting with the Mastermind; how he’d been sitting behind bright lights and could only see a silhouette of the man. The silhouette he described didn’t match the shape of Frederic Szabo’s head. Not even close. He had talked about a big hooked nose and large ears. He’d mentioned the ears a couple of times.
Big ears, like a car with both doors open.
Szabo actually had small ears and a regular nose.
    But there was someone else who came to mind! Jesus! I jumped out of bed. I stared out my window until my mind was more focused and clear. Then I called Betsey.
    She picked up after the second ring. Her voice was a soft, muffled moan.
    “It’s Alex. Sorry to call you, to wake you. I think I know who the Mastermind is.”
    “Is this a bad dream?” she muttered.
    “Oh, definitely,” I told her. “This is our worst nightmare.”

Chapter 117
    THERE WERE TWO MASTERMINDS.
It sounded crazy to me at first, but then I was almost sure it had to be the answer to so many things about the investigation that didn’t make sense.
    Szabo was one Mastermind, but he’d been given the name as a joke because he was too efficient, too perfect. There was someone else. A second Mastermind. This person wasn’t a joke to his peers — he had no
peers;
he didn’t write hate mail from his room at a veterans hospital.
    It took me a few minutes to convince Betsey that I might be right. Then we called Kyle Craig. We went two-on-one until Kyle was convinced enough to let us move forward — in a whole new and mind-boggling direction.
    At eleven that morning, Betsey and I boarded a plane at Bolling field. Up until a few weeks earlier I’d never been to Bolling, but lately I seemed to be flying out of there more often than out of National, or Ronald Reagan, as it’s now called.
    Just past one o’clock we landed at Palm Beach International Airport in south Florida. It was ninety-five degrees outside, humid as hell. I didn’t care about the heat. I was excited, pumped up about possibly solving the puzzle. We were met by FBI agents, but Betsey was in charge, even in Florida. The local agents deferred to her.
    We got on I-95 North once we left the small, very well run airport. We proceeded about ten miles, then headed east toward the ocean and Singer Island. The sun looked like a lemon drop melting in bright blue skies.
    I’d had time on the flight to think about my theory of two Masterminds. The more I thought it through, the surer I became that we were on the right track, finally. A vivid image kept flashing through my mind.
    It was a photograph of a therapist named Dr. Bernard Francis. The photo had been stapled to Francis’s personnel file at Hazelwood. Two other photos had been hanging on the walls of Dr. Cioffi’s office. I’d seen them there when I interviewed him. Bernard Francis was tall and balding, with a broad