The Society by Michael Palmer Page B

seat. Still the clamor continued. Roselyn Morton took the microphone and thanked the audience and participants, but it was doubtful anyone heard through the noise. The forum was over. Will sat for a time until he felt reasonably confident his legs would hold him, then descended the steps to the main floor, where he was mobbed. Gordo, Jim, and their wives hugged him. Susan squeezed him tightly and whispered something about his making the whole profession proud. Several members of the Society pumped his hand and said no one had ever done so much for their cause so quickly.
    As the crowd began to disperse, Will’s attention was drawn to a woman standing off to the side, wearing tight-fitting jeans cinched with a heavy-buckled belt, a tan silk blouse, and a black vest. Her face was fascinating—vibrant and intelligent—with scattered freckles across the bridge of her nose and wide, emerald eyes that seemed possessed of their own light. For a time, she just stood there, eyeing him curiously until the last of the well-wishers had departed. Then, her gaze still fixed on him, she approached and handed him a business card.
    “Please give me a call,” she said, punctuating the request with the tiniest wink.
    Before he could speak a word, she turned and was gone. Her jeans highlighted an athletic, totally appealing behind. She moved with confidence and perhaps even a bit of swagger. Will watched until she had disappeared down the stairs. The vacuum she created in front of him was immediately filled by a few lingering fans, each anxious to tell him how his spontaneity and emotional sincerity had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. When at last he was alone, the woman’s face still dominating his thoughts, he took a look at her card.
     
    Patricia Moriarity
    Detective Sergeant
    Massachusetts State Police

CHAPTER 8
    Patty woke from a troubled sleep at ten after three. Her dream this time—what she remembered of it—featured multiple burned and bloodied body parts interspersed with varying images of Dr. Willard Grant. The two homicides she had handled before the managed-care murders were exercises in police and crime-scene procedure, not in detective work. In the first, the victim had taken out a restraining order against her violent boyfriend, and half an hour after she had returned from court he kicked in her door and stabbed her twenty-five times. The second, a lover’s quarrel between two gay men, had ended in a single impetuous gunshot to the heart.
    The shooting death of Ben Morales, CEO of Premier Care, was the first murder she had been assigned where the suspect wasn’t ready-made. Now, that one case had grown to three, and no one doubted that a serial killer was at work. On paper, she was still part of the team from Middlesex working the case, but thanks to Wayne Brasco, she was justifiably feeling more and more like an outsider. Meetings were being held that did not include her and were called nothing more than impromptu discussions when she found out. Consultants were being called in without her knowing about them. The profiler she had originally lined up—a young, talented woman—had been replaced by a more experienced, though in her mind far less capable, man.
    Tired of having her ideas demeaned and brushed off, Patty had decided on her own and on her own time to attend the Faneuil Hall debate. It just seemed to her like a charged setting where something might possibly happen. And something had, only not at all what she had expected. Wrapped in the darkness of her room, she sat on the edge of her bed and wondered about Grant and why he was occupying so much of her thoughts.
    There was no question he appealed to her. His looks were hardly classic Hollywood, but she had never been attracted to square jaws and dimpled chins. His face was narrow and angular, almost gaunt, but there was a gentle vulnerability to it that brought her images of the man curled up on a couch, glasses perched on the tip of his nose,