Twisted Triangle Read online

  Margo explained that he would be teaching at the National Academy and encouraged him to go for it.

  “I knew he was very unhappy, and I felt the academic challenge at the academy would channel him in a different direction. But at that time, that wasn’t what he was looking for,” she recalled. “I think he was looking for an environment where he could do whatever he wanted.”

  Margo knew that unlike an undercover operation, where Gene was in charge and could spend time in bars and nightclubs as part of his job, a teaching position at Quantico would seem overly structured and restrictive to her husband.

  “You can’t afford to go out and bounce around and play outside for the entire day, not when you have to be prepared for a four-hour class,” she said later.

  The day before Gene’s interview, he was feeling pretty confident. After talking to Dick Ayers, who was in charge of the Management Science Unit, Gene was expecting an easy afternoon of talking to a panel about himself and his background.

  “Sounds like a piece of cake,” he said.

  But Margo knew better: he was going to have to give a presentation to show his teaching skills.

  “What are you going to talk about?” she asked.

  “Dick Ayers said I can just get up there and wing it,” he said.

  The next day, Gene came by Margo’s office after he’d finished his interview. He was agitated because they’d asked him to give a twenty-minute presentation.

  “Dick told me that I didn’t need to prepare for the presentation, and I feel like I was set up,” Gene said as they walked to their cars.

  Margo was embarrassed about how badly Gene had done in his interview, but she felt she could be honest with John Hess.

  About a week after Gene’s interview, she asked, “Gene didn’t do too well on the presentation, did he?”

  “No, no he didn’t. He just didn’t come in prepared.”

  It wasn’t until a few years later that John Hess told her what John Velier, an instructor who would later replace Ed Tully as their boss, had said about Gene: “He struck me as the kind of guy that you couldn’t trust,” John Velier said. “I would always have to lock my desk when I left the room if he was my office mate.”

  Dick Ayers, who rode with Ed Tully to work every morning for seventeen years, felt the same way.

  Ed later recalled, “Dick Ayers thought he was a complete phony, and he was right on the money. Dick had him pegged from day one. . . . He was a bullshitter, and they don’t really garner a lot of trust.”

  In September 1989, Margo, Gene, and the girls went back to Champaign, Illinois, where Gene was born, to see his widowed mother, Alene, who was dying of breast cancer. Gene returned to Champaign in mid-November and got a temporary transfer to the bureau office there so he could stay and take care of her. Margo and the girls stayed behind in DC.

  Alene was about five feet four inches, and had a soft look about her. Like Gene, she battled with her weight. At one point she’d been heavy, then lost quite a few pounds, evidenced by the loose skin hanging from her arms. A sun worshipper, she baked herself in shorts and tank top whenever possible, so her face was always tanned. The pack of cigarettes she smoked every day only deepened the wrinkles.

  Alene shared a modest lifestyle with Gene’s sister, Linda, in a ranch-style house with three bedrooms and one bathroom, built in the 1950s. Alene operated a child-care business out of their living room, so it was cluttered with baskets of toys.

  Linda, who was three years older than Gene, was an elementary school teacher and spoke in a high-pitched, childlike voice. She had gone away to college, then came home to live with her mother, who treated Linda more like a sister than a daughter.

  Unlike Gene, Alene didn’t use profanity, and although she didn’t go to the local Baptist church while Margo and Gene were visiting, she did attend regularly. Gene told Margo he was raised Baptist, but he never wanted to go to church.

  Alene’s family had grown up poor in rural Kentucky, living in abandoned houses and playing in the woods. She and Hazel, one of her younger sisters, once told Margo they used to climb onto people’s roofs to watch where the road workers put their lunch pails, then stole their food.

  “We were just terrible,” Alene said, nodding.

  “I wonder if they ever figured out where their lunches were going?” Hazel asked rhetorically.

  Alene turned to Margo and said, “We didn’t have any food. That’s how poor we were.”

  After Gene’s mother died in December 1989, he came back to Virginia around Christmastime, planning to return to Illinois to settle the estate after the holidays. On his first night back, he complained to Margo about Linda.

  “I hate her,” he said. “I thought of sneaking back and releasing cockroaches under the house.” Then he laughed and said, “She’s terrified of cockroaches. That would really show her.”

  Gene had told Margo that he’d never gotten along with his sister. “He always felt that she was a goody-two shoes and a stick in the mud,” she said later.

  When he went back to Champaign the first week of January, he immediately sued Linda, accusing her of draining their mother’s bank account. The estate and lawsuit were all settled in a short trial at the end of the month, when the judge ordered all assets to be split between the two siblings.

  All told, the estate was worth about $150,000, including cash and proceeds from the sale of the house. Gene packed up a bunch of his mother’s belongings into boxes, shipped them back to Virginia, and came home.

  Hazel and her husband, Harry, called Gene on his first night back. Apparently, they found Linda in a flutter and the house a mess when they returned from dropping Gene off at the airport in Indianapolis. Linda said Gene was responsible and accused him of taking all kinds of family photographs and other items of sentimental value to her.

  “Can you believe it? That crazy bitch blamed me for trashing the house,” Gene told Margo, laughing.

  He explained that he’d taken Hazel and Harry through the house before they’d gone to the airport, and it had been in immaculate shape. “She didn’t think I would have shown the house to Hazel and Harry. She must have come in, pitched a fit and trashed the house and then blamed it on me.”

  At the time, Margo believed Gene’s story. But years later, she figured that Gene was spinning legends again, that he must have booked a later flight so he could sneak back to trash the house and make Linda look like she was nuts.

  Linda got married, moved to Florida, had a family, and, as far as Margo knows, never spoke to Gene again.

  In mid-1991, Margo started talking to Gene about wanting a third child, which she thought might help her stay engaged in the marriage. But he said no.

  “I want to make sure that we can provide for our kids and ourselves,” he said, explaining that he couldn’t see putting three kids through college. “Having a third child will put a strain on us financially.”

  Margo accepted his answer, but figured it was still up for discussion.

  Around the same time, Gene finally got the new challenge he’d been seeking. He was transferred to the Public Corruption Squad in Tyson’s Corner, an arm of the Washington field office, where he was assigned to ferret out elected officials who were taking bribes, exchanging favors for votes, or manipulating land transactions or rezoning efforts.

  On July 15, he received a commendation letter from Washington’s special agent in charge, Thomas DuHadway, for his recently approved Operation Doubletalk, an undercover case resulting from more than two years of investigative work.

  Gene asked his old Army buddy, Donald Albracht, who had also joined the bureau, to help with the operation. Steve Spruill, who would become a friend, was Gene’s contact agent.

  As Gene was setting up his undercover office in Fredericksburg, Margo began to notice that he was taking their old household items, such as the vacuum cleaner and TV, putting them in his office, and replacing them with new ones at the house.

  She’d never liked his jewelry bus
iness. She didn’t like the way he’d staged the loss of her ring or coerced her into the home relocation scam. And now that he was back working undercover full-time, she was worried that things were going get even worse.

  “I just got the sense that he was using undercover operations as his own personal expense account for clothes, dinner, and drinks, creating a lifestyle for himself,” she said later.

  Like Margo, many bureau supervisors saw undercover work as potentially dangerous for some agents.

  “You’re hanging around with the bad guys, talking the talk. The problem is that you’re trying to act like one of them,” George Murray, Gene’s partner on Nickelride, said recently. “It’s a tricky business that is the reason for many divorces.”

  Margo and Gene’s sex life cooled off after Lindsey was born. As the emotional distance between them widened, Gene became more frustrated and short tempered with Margo, who often went to sleep while Gene watched porn in bed next to her.

  But they really didn’t fight much because Margo had learned how to avoid conflict with Gene and keep the peace between them.

  “Gene was very controlling, and I realized I had slowly evolved into having a household where I was doing my best to keep the kids quiet and behaved,” she recalled later. “I didn’t argue with Gene; I did pretty much whatever he wanted. . . . If I did anything that he didn’t like he gave me the cold shoulder. Things had to be his way. I gave up trying to be my own person at home. I was highly successful at work and was a good mother, but I was getting nothing from my relationship with Gene. Frankly, I wasn’t putting anything into it either. I gave up trying. I was sleeping for a couple of years, going through the motions. Days turned into months. I just was numb, thinking I could live my life like that.”

  But she couldn’t stay quiet when she saw Gene disciplining Allison in a way that she thought was too harsh. Remembering the premeditated spankings her father had given her and her siblings, Margo was determined not to let Gene do the same thing to their daughter.

  When Allison was about two years old, he gave her a spanking that Margo saw as far too hard for such a small child. About ten minutes later, Margo checked the girl’s bottom and found the red imprint of his four fingers and top of his palm still on her right butt cheek. She carried Allison downstairs and showed Gene the marks.

  “Don’t ever do this to her again,” she said.

  Gene just looked blankly at Margo.

  Margo had finally begun to admit to herself that her marriage wasn’t going to work, but she still thought she could tolerate the situation until the girls were older. Like her mother, she didn’t want to go through a divorce, she didn’t want to disappoint her family, and she certainly didn’t want to bring on Gene’s wrath.

  “I knew how he was when people turned against him.”

  Chapter Five

  Prolonged Embraces

  Margo and John Hess developed an even closer professional and personal relationship after Lindsey was born. Together, they rounded out a trio with instructor Ed Sulzbach, who had worked as an undercover agent and as a serial-killer profiler in the Behavioral Sciences Unit.

  The three of them were kindred spirits, sharing many of the same views on life and the bureau, although Margo and John used to tease Ed for being such a Pollyanna. While Margo and John taught Interviewing and Interrogation to new agents, Ed waxed poetic about the history and soul of the FBI, about fidelity, bravery, and integrity, as the bureau’s motto goes.

  “We’d just shake our heads,” Margo recalled fondly. “He’s a patriotic God-fearing man who believes there’s goodness and nobility in everyone, even though he’s seen horror through profiling crimes.”

  By 1991, Ed had transferred back to the field office in Richmond, but he stayed in touch with his buddies, for whom the admiration and respect was mutual.

  “Margo was willing to speak up if something was wrong,” Ed said recently. “She’s also extraordinarily intelligent.”

  On June 17, 1991, Ed showed up at Quantico with a couple of boxes of books and his friend, an up-and-coming novelist named Patricia Cornwell, who, like Margo, had grown up in the South. She went by the nickname Patsy.

  Ed had met Patsy a decade earlier in Richmond, when she was a data processor at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, trying her hand at writing crime novels. Hearing about Ed through the grapevine, she’d called to pick his brain and gain some insight into the criminal mind. They became close friends, and he introduced her to his profiler colleagues. Because she’d spent a good bit of time with them doing research for her novels, she wanted to repay them with some free books.

  Ed had been talking up Patsy to Margo for six months. He told her a week beforehand that Patsy was coming to Quantico, so she went out and bought Patsy’s first two forensic thrillers, Postmortem and Body of Evidence, so that she could get them signed.

  Ed introduced the women to each other in an empty classroom, where Patsy had been autographing books.

  “This is my great and good friend, Patsy Cornwell,” Ed said.

  Patsy gave Margo a firm handshake. Margo thought she’d probably never see this woman again, but she did notice that Patsy was attractive and about the same age as she. Patsy’s light-blue eyes were inquisitive, and she had a pretty smile with straight white teeth. She was about five feet five inches, slightly shorter than Margo, with short, highlighted blond hair.

  “It’s great to meet you,” Margo said, handing her the novels. “Ed has talked so much about you.”

  “Maybe you can teach Scarpetta a thing or two,” Patsy said.

  Margo laughed. “I doubt it, but I look forward to it,” she said.

  Later, Margo recalled, “When Patsy shook your hand and she looked you right in your eye, you knew you had all of her attention.”

  Back in her office, Margo flipped open the covers to see what the author had written.

  In Postmortem, she’d written, “To Margo, A real character. Such a pleasure meeting you at Quantico. Warmly, Patricia D. Cornwell.”

  And in Body of Evidence, she’d written, “To Margo, Perhaps you can give Scarpetta and Benton a few tips! Warm Regards, Patsy.”

  Margo took them home to read, then brought them back and put them on a shelf in her office.

  In January 1992, Ed told Margo that Patsy was coming back to Quantico, this time to audit her first weeklong National Academy course, where authors were rarely allowed. Ed asked Margo to make her feel welcome.

  Margo found Patsy during a morning break in the Hall of Honor, a squared-off area with a sunken floor, built-in brick benches with seating pads, and walls lined with bronzed plaques of agents killed in the line of duty.

  “Hi, I’m Margo Bennett. I don’t know if you remember me,” she said.

  “Yes, of course, I remember you.”

  “Ed Sulzbach called and asked me to touch base with you to see if you needed anything while you’re here.”

  They talked for a few minutes before Patsy had to go back to class. She seemed far more interactive and animated than when they’d met back in June.

  One night that week, Margo was working as the on-duty agent, which meant she had to stay in her office until midnight and in the dorm overnight, so that she could respond to any crisis or medical problem.

  Patsy stopped by around nine that night, and they hung out in the Ant Farm, getting to know each other better.

  But with all the electricity in the air, this was not ordinary girl talk. As they sat in chairs next to each other, Patsy kept swiveling around and touching Margo’s leg with the toe of her shoe. With only some of the fluorescent lights on, it was about as intimate as an office at night could be.

  Margo saw Patsy as a commanding figure in her pants, tweed jacket, leather closed-toe shoes, and neck tie, which she wore in a Windsor knot. Margo had on her typical work uniform—a long-sleeved blouse, a skirt, nylons, and pumps.

  Patsy talked mostly about Patsy. She told Margo she’d gone to Davidson College in North Carolina,
where she’d met Charles Cornwell, one of her professors, who was seventeen years her senior. They were married, then he left academics to join the seminary and, at one point, was offered a job in Texas.

  “She was interviewed by a group of wives from the church, and she told them, ‘I’m not a preacher’s wife,’ and that’s kind of what set her on the path to divorce,” Margo said later. “That’s what made her realize that her life was not heading where she wanted.”

  Formerly a police reporter for the Charlotte Observer and a police department volunteer, Patsy told Margo that she’d published a biography on Ruth Bell Graham, the wife of evangelist Billy Graham, before she’d started writing crime novels. She’d failed to get her first few published, but then took someone’s suggestion to try a female protagonist. The new formula worked, and since then, her career had really taken off. She was learning to enjoy success and the luxuries that came with it, buying a nice house and a Mercedes for herself, and also leasing Mercedeses for her staff.

  Patsy said she loved Ed dearly, explaining that she’d drawn on his vast knowledge and experience as an agent and profiler to create two of her male characters. Some of his qualities showed up in Benton Wesley, an FBI profiler who worked with her protagonist, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Virginia’s chief medical examiner; others ended up in Pete Marino, the gruff but endearing homicide detective who smoked, drank, and solved crimes with Scarpetta.

  As they talked, Margo felt the blood coursing through her veins, very aware of the close proximity of her body to Patsy’s. It felt dangerous. Wrong. Thrilling.

  But at the same time, Margo also respected and admired Patsy for what she’d accomplished, and that feeling seemed mutual. That part of it didn’t feel wrong at all. In fact, it was quite seductive.