Grade 12 Summative Novel Assignment
Novel: Split Second
Author: Alex Kava
My Character Chart:
Detective Ford: Detective Ford lives in Kansas City, and works for the KCPD (Kansas
City Police Department). He is good friends with his partner, Detective Milhaven, who
he also enjoys competing with when it comes to food, since he has a very big appetite.
Before his years as a KCPD Detective, he went to the University of Nebraska with
former Polive Sheriff, Nick Morrelli.
Detective Milhaven: Detective Milhaven lives in Kansas City, and works for the KCPD,
as well. He is married with no kids, and is also good friends with his partner, Detective
Ford. A good deal of the time, when the two detectives are off work, or taking a break,
they bide their time in food courts, restaurants, or bar and grills, competing to see who
can eat the most.
Del Macomb: Del Macomb worked as a cop for the North Dade County Detention
Center in Miami, Florida. His dad was a preacher, so he was kind of wimpy and naive
when it came to dealing with some of the more hardcore criminals (i.e. serial killers,
rapists, murderers, etc.). Before coming to work for the North Dade County Detention
Center, he used to work as an activist for prison reform. Although he was used to
working with partners, no one made him as jumpy and nervous as his partner, Benny
Zeeks, when he came to the work for the Detention Center in Miami. While en route to
bring murdered Albert Stucky to a more secure prison holding until his trial date arrived,
Stucky broke free of the leather straps that bound him in the back of the truck, and when
Del stoppped to see what was wrong, Stucky murdered him using a wooden crucifix.
Benny Zeeks: Benny was a big, built, muscular, tattoed, veteran of twenty-five years, who
was somewhat of a legend for his work in some of the wings in North Dade County
Detention Center. Benny was Del Macomb's partner, but he also had a major drinking
problem, and was caught by his partner drinking alcohol-laced coffee on the job while
transporting Albert Stuck to a more secure prison holding. He, too, was murderd by
Stucky by the same means, well after Del was murdered.
Jessica Beckwith: Jessica was a friendly, cute, blonde, pizza delivery girl who delivered
pizzas for a franchise called "Mamma Mia's". She had delivered Agent O'Dell's pizza
the same night Albert Stucky managed to lure her (Jessica) to an empty house, where he
murdered her, and after disposed of her body in a dumpster behind Mamma Mia's, while
having removed her spleen and pancreas and disposed of them elsewhere.
Rita: Rita was a redhead, with a small beauty mark above her upper lip, who worked as
a waitress in a Bar and Grill in Kansas City. She waited on Agent O'Dell's table the first
night Maggie was in the city for a conference, and was eating out with a couple of fellow
agents, who were also supposed to look out for her. Since Stucky was following Agent
O'Dell, he was able to see Rita, and caught her that same night when her shift had ended.
After raping and murdering her, he left her stark naked and disposed of her body in a
dumpster. The following day, her right kidney, which had been removed from her body
the same night she was murdered, was delivered to Agent O'Dell's hotel room as part of
a "room service" delivery.
Detectuve Manx: Detetive Manx has dark eyes and buzz-cut hair. He is pushy, bossy,
stubborn, vulgar, arrogant, blatant, belligerent, and impatient. When in charge of an
investigation that involves murder, he only regards the Medical Examiner as an
authority figure, and has a difficult time accepting when a woman is usually right about
the facts on the scene. He holds contempt for FBI Special Agent Maggie O'Dell, and
later on rats her out to Assistant Director Cunningham (her superior) for barging in
uninvited onto "his" crime scene.
Delores Heston: Delores Heston is Tess McGowan's boss, but despite this little fact,
Delores seems to care for Tess like a mother would, and is always concerned where
Tess is involved. Having started Heston Realty ten years before, she managed to make
quite a name for herself, which was quite an accomplishment for a black woman who had
grown up very poor, and because of her background, she has a very generous attitude
towards all of her employees.
Gwen Patterson: Gwen Patterson is Maggie's best friend. Despite always being ten
minutes late, she is always worried about Maggie and is always there for her, as well.
She works as a psychologist, and has patients who are some of the elite of Washington
D.C., from the bored wives of congressmen, suicidal generals, and even a manic-
depressed White House Cabinet member. She has a keen intellect, a dry sense of
humour, a remarkable insight into the criminal mind, refuses to think inside the box, and
never hesitates to break any rules while still appearing respectful of authority. Despite
being a woman with a petite and feminine stature, she is a very classy woman:
sophisticated, cultured, talented, and wise. But because he took a different identity that
she does not recognize, she unknowingly becomes Albert Stucky's psychologist, and also
another one of his pawns in his game to get to Maggie O'Dell.
Susan Lyndell: Susan Lyndell is Maggie's new neighbour in Newburgh Heights, where
Maggie bought herself a new home. She was dressed in a black and white knit cardigan
and matching skirt the first time she met Maggie. She wore her dark, shoulder-length
hair down with loads of hairspray so that it would not get ruined outside, wore make-up to
enhance her thin lips and conceal laugh lines. She also wore modest and tasteful, yet
expensive diamond jewelry. When she first came to Maggie's front door, she was
nervous, paranoid, nosy, concerned, and quick to justify and defend the actions of her
friend who had gone missing. By asking questions and giving tidbits of information, it was
revealed that she had cheated on her husband a few times before with various repairmen.
Nick Morrelli: Before he began working for a D.A's office in Boston, he used to work as
a Sheriff, and had worked with Agent O'Dell in Nebraska on a case involving dead little
boys and a Catholic Priest.. During the one week he shared with Agent O'Dell together in
Nebraska, they had a short affair, and in the following months he had been hoping to stop
caring so much for her, but found that he could not. He cares genuinely a graet deal
about Maggie O'Dell, just as he is concerned about her and the way she wants Stuck to
come after her. He is concerned about her in general, just because he cares a great deal
about her.
He is tall and lean with a confident stride, and a smile that reveals dimples in an
otherwise strong, square jaw, he still has the ability to dismantle Agent O'Dell's thought
process no matter how close he is, or even just with the idea that he is in the same city
as her.
FBI Agent Preston Turner: Preston has a 6'3" body, and wears wears blue jeans and a
purple golf shirt that enhances the rich brown of his skin. He is single, and is always the
expert when it comes to finding the hot spots for nightlife in any city that he visits, no
matter who he is with. He helps Agent Delaney keep watch over Agent O'Dell when
there are conferences, since their schedules were purposely schedualed the same, so he
also knows where she stays and is always persistent when it comes to getting her to do
something fun. Although fun and very easy to get along with, Agent Turner is also very
predictable to both Agents O'Dell and Delaney when it comes to ordering drinks, food,
and such.
FBI Agent Richard Delaney: Richard wears a suit all the time, so only a lopsided tie and
an open collar indicates that he is off duty at the end of the day. He is five years older
than both Agents O'Dell and Turner, and helps Agent Turner keep a watch on Maggie
when there are conferences going on. He is a firm believer in marriage, and loves being
married, since he has a wife and two kids. He used to work as a hostage negotiator
before making the decision to become an instructor, instead, for his wife's sake so that
she wasn't resigned to always having to watch TV to be sure that he was safe, and so that
she wasn't so nervous about him all of the time; however, he does get called in on a case
occasioanlly.
William Finley: William Finley is a respectable, responsible, gentlemanly, twenty six
year old lawyer who has never been married. He has a very sweet, sensitive, caring
nature, although he is also easily flustered and embarassed, and can be a bit reckless
and unfaithful at times, too. Despite being engaged to be married in less than a month,
while he was visiting a friend in Newburgh Heights, he had been dared to pick up on
Tess McGowan, who had been too drunk to know what she was really doing. They ended
up having a one night fling, but even after that one night with her, he became emotionally
attached to her, and began to realize the things they had shared in one night, that he had
not shared at all with his fiancee in the four years they had been seeing each other.
Agent R.J Tully: He feels that understanding serial killers is much easier than
understanding fourteen year old girls, since he has a fourteen year old daughter who he
can not understand at all, no matter how hard he tries. He was called from Cleveland and
offered a job at Quantico in Washington to temporarily replace Special Agent O'Dell as a
criminal profiler while she has been pulled out of the field. Working on Albert Stucky's
case is his first time working out in the field on any case, so he is not as experienced as
Agent O'Dell, even though he is older than she is, and he is also much more nervous
when it comes to dealing with Albert Stucky's work, since hs has only ever heard of him,
but never encountered his work at all. When they are able to place Stucky as their killer
after Jessica Beckwith is murdered, Agent Tully is the one who manages to get Agent
O'Dell placed back in the field as his partner on the case.
Despite hating change, his being disorganized has never changed at all. He wears
glasses for reading, but finds himself needing them more often than usual, and is also
very claustrophobic.
Doctor James Kernan: James Kernan makes Maggie O'Dell feel like a nineteen year
old college student again, because he is a professor of psychology who easily conjures
up images of the Mad Hatter. He has a talent for disarming people by making them feel
invisible, and he can be cruel at times, but he only does it to provoke people into giving
him a response. He loves playing mind games with peopl, and can lure and trick a person
into them without warning. He is unusually always very accurate in his questions and
assumptions whe evaluating a patient. He challenges Maggie and provokes her to the
point of a completely and total outburst of everything she's felt in the last five months
of Stucky's escape, being pulled out of the field, of all the things she wants to make
Albert Stucky feel, as his way of getting her to blow off all of the steam and pressure.
Doctor James Kernan has hunched shoulders, and trembling hands that are
speckled with brown spots. He has thin, feathery white hair reveals more brown spots on
his forehead and on the top of his head, and there are tufts of white hair protruding from
his ears. He has pale blue eyes, bushy white eyebrows that stick out in every direction,
and wears think, square glasses.
Tess McGowan: Tess is a real estate agent who works for Heston Realty. She is not
stunning or beautiful, but she has a decent figure that she sweats hours for at the gym,
and still needs to monitor her cravings for cheesburgers. She is in her mid-thirties, has
thick, wavy, naturally blond hair, which she dyes brown to buy herself more credibility in
the work world and to avoid sexual advances. She used to wear glasses, but now she
wears contacts, and keeps her glasses around her neck mostly for a prop. She wears
designer clothes, and drives an expensive, black Miata.
Tess hates attention from men who stop and stare at her, and cringes at the
possibility of a wolf whistle, because it makes her feel like a fraud, mostly because she
used to masquerade around as someone she wasn't. She used to be a bartender, but has
a colourful past other than bartending, as well, which is why she tends to keep her
distance from people, and figures the less people know, the better. She accepts and
expects cruelty much more readily than she expects and accepts kindness, because she
is not used to recieving kindness from people, despite always being confided in as
though she were Dear Abby.
Although she can't handle any real committments when it comes to her personal
life, when it comes to her work life, she is very hardworking and commited, but also
cautious. Despite her cautiousness though, she sold a house to Albert Stucky, who she
thought was Walker Harding, and when she was showing him the house, he kidnapped
her and took her out of the D.C. area.
FBI Special Agent Maggie O'Dell: Agent O'Dell is a little on the paranoid side. She is
jumpy and cautious, hates waking up to complete darkness, and keeps her gun close by
at all times. She struggles with nightmares of the last time she dealt with Albert Stucky,
and drinks to chase away the panic that overwhelms her from those nightmares. She
tracked Albert Stucky for nearly two years before finally catching him, but even though
she was pulled out of the field for the second round with him, she feels that she has a
right to his file and everything in it, even if she can't get her hands directly on any
recent updates to it. After the first year of Albert Stuck's first capture, she struggles
to remember what life was like before the sick games he played with her. She couldn't
remember sleeping without nightmares, and couldn't even remember not feeling the
constant need to look over her shoulder. She had almost lost her life capturing Albert
Stucky, and he had escaped before she could even remember what feeling safe felt like.
FBI Special Agent Maggie O'Dell is one of the FBI's top criminal profilers. She is
in her early thirties, appears to have an aloof and secret manner that seems to carry over
from her occupation to her personal life because she figures the less people know, the
better, and she also has an excellent memory when it comest to remembering names,
faces, and dates. She is excellent at analyzing crime scenes on the spot immediately,
and noticing more small, helpful details as she investigates further after her analysis, and
is therefore respected by a great many people. She is so loyal to her job as an FBI
Agent, that she chose it over her lawyer husband of ten years, which resulted in a very
messy divorce between them.
Although she dresses mostly in ratty University T-shirts and threadbare jeans,
she is still a natural beauty. She has smooth and creamy skin, short, dark hair, rich brown
eyes, high cheekbones, and a shapely athletic body. But despite deserving to be ogled by
men, who still respect her, she is oblivious to all of their attention to how beautiful she
really is.
Albert Stucky: Albert Stucky is a hardcore criminal, and an all-around bad-guy, whose
soul is pure evil. He is nicknamed "The Collector" by the FBI for his ritual of collecting
his victims before disposing of them in the most heinous ways possible. He is intelligent,
crafty, and savvy enough to charm an alligator out of its own skin, then reward it by
slicing it up and feeding it to the other alligators, which makes it easier for him because
he knows how to be charming enough to win over the women he'll rape first, then murder.
His pleasure in killing comes from psychologically breaking down his victims, and owning
them body, mind, and soul. He enjoys breaking their spirit and turning it into fear, and
then he rewards his victims with a slow, and torturous death.
He is obssessed with Agent Maggie O'Dell , and plays sick games with her. He
will include clues, personal clues that come as notes with a token finger, a dissected
birthmark, or even a severed nipple slipped into an envelope. The second time around,
after he escaped and murdered two cops on Halloween, he began to kill everyone that
Agent O'Dell came in contact with. It was his way of making her feel involved...by
making her feel that she was choosing his next victim all the time...almost as if she was
his partner or something. He considers it to be simply another challenge to his game
with Agent O'Dell to show up in a hotel where hundreds of cops, sheriffs, detectives, and
FBI agents from all across the country are staying for conferences, and sending an organ
up to her hotel room as part of a "room service" delivery for her.
He was thrown out of Yale for almost burning down a women's dormitory,
although he also had other offenses such as attempted rape, assault, and petty theft...
although all charges had either been dropped, or were never pressed due to lack of
evidence. He had also been questioned on the accidental death of his father in a freak
boating accident, even though the man had supposedly been an expert yachtsman.
Six or seven years previously, Stucky took up a business partner, and the two of
them succeeded in creating one of the Internet's first stock-market trading sites. Stucky
became a respectable businessman, and a multimillionaire, but had also murdered his
business partner and taken his identity. By using Walker Harding's identity and having
taken his fingerprints, as well, made things much easier for him to evade the police and
FBI.
Albert Stucky is a tall, lean, muscular man with sharp features and black eyes.
He reminds some people of a vulture, perched with black wings pressed patiently against
its sides, cocking its head, staring, waiting for its prey to stop struggling, to give in to the
inevitable. He is disgusted with his body, because he has type two diabetes, and it is
causing him to go blind, which is why he acts a little bit faster the second time after he
escapes.
The Setting in "Split Second"
The time in the novel “Split Second” is current day. The events take place in March, from the twenty-seventh and beyond, exactly five months after Albert Stucky’s escape while en route to a more secure prison holding. We are told that it is current day because of the programs in use to help the FBI identify criminals and match fingerprints to see who they belong to. Programs such as AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) that are networked with local, state, and federal agencies.
The place is in Northeast Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. But the one place that is a main setting in the story is Agent O’Dell’s new home in Newburgh Heights. There is a lot of fresh air and open space, as well as plenty of seclusion with the huge pine trees that line her yard like a fortress. From the windows looking out, it is easy to see that the backyard sloped down only to be met by a densely wooded area that lined a steep ridge. Below, a rather shallow stream trickled over rocks, providing a natural boundary, a perfect barrier that was reinforced by a line of huge pine trees standing guard like sentries, tall and straight, shoulder to shoulder. The stream had been a nightmare for the previous owners, but their problem had become Agent O’Dell’s safeguard and potential trap.
Inside the house, the walls of windows in each room in the house (excluding the bathroom!) had been the thing to cinch the deal on the house for Agent O’Dell, despite them being a security nightmare. Each individual window was set in a narrow frame that “not even Houdini could squeeze through”. The living room opened into a sunroom with more windows that made up three walls of the room, stretched from the ceiling almost to the floor, and were also thin and narrow. The sunroom extended into, and looked out over the lush green backyard. It was a “colourful, wooded fairyland” with cherry and apple blossoms, sturdy dogwoods, a blanket of tulips, daffodils and crocus.
The atmosphere in the story is one of tension, and that is the only atmosphere portrayed in the novel right up until the very end of the story, when relief takes over the tension. Tension is the main atmosphere in the story because everyone mentioned in the story who is constant in the plotline is so concerned about catching Albert Stucky since he escaped Halloween five months before, also because they are so intent on protecting Agent O’Dell and keeping her out of the field, away from Stucky. With the strain of both, everyone is so wound tight, mostly Agent O’Dell though because of the mind games that Stucky plays with her, because he knows that she is obsessed with catching him. Eventually, though, she does get placed back in the field, where the tension skyrockets.
The social conditions of the novel are basically all about security and feeling afraid and vulnerable. What proves this is that when Agent O’Dell bought herself a new home of her own, she made sure that both security systems, inside and out, rivaled those at Fort. Knox. She had also purposely made certain that there wasn’t a stitch of carpet in the house because footsteps are too easily muffled by floor coverings. Ever since her first encounter with Stucky and the games he played with her, Agent O’Dell has been living in a security nightmare, and feels that the more precautions she takes to avoid another encounter with Albert Stucky, the better, because he struck fear and vulnerability into her heart the first time before he had been caught.
The Climax
The climax of the story arises when Agent RJ Tully and Agent O’Dell find Albert Stucky’s house out in the woods across the river, and go into the building the investigate. At about the same time they begin the find pieces of Maggie’s missing belongings strewed all over the place, they also begin to smell smoke. It is when they realized that they are trapped every which way except for the window that Agent O’Dell realizes that Stucky is in the house. When she sees his shadow walk by, she begins to panic even more than she already had been. At first she believes that she is beginning to hallucinate, but when Stucky shoots her partner (Agent Tully) in the thigh, she realizes she is not and manages to bring herself somewhat out of her daze to help Tully. Despite everything still moving in slow motion, she manages to get Agent Tully out of the burning house through the window. It is after help finally arrived on the scene that two bodies are pulled out of the house, and one is identified as Albert Stucky, that things begin to get a little more tense because after this incident, there had been more sightings of Stucky, and his body had been discovered missing from the morgue.
Antagonist
Agent Maggie O’Dell is the major main protagonist in the novel, “Split Second”. She is introduced as the protagonist in the story when it begins to talk about how Albert Stucky had been captured. It opens with a nightmare she is having, having fallen asleep in the armchair. But when she wakes up and realizes that it was just a nightmare, it talks about how it had been over eight months since Albert Stucky had trapped her in an abandoned Miami warehouse. She had chased him for almost two years, learning his patterns, studying his depraved habits, performing autopsies on the corpses he left behind and deciphering the bizarre messages for the game he, alone, had decided the two of them would play. It talks about how on one hot, August evening, he had won, trapping her and making her watch. How he had had no intention of killing her, but he just wanted her to watch.
Protagonist
Albert Stucky is the protagonist and that is made most definitely clear by the way he operates. The women he kills and leaves behind for the FBI to find, are merely for sport. Those are the women he rapes and then murders, and in the end slices out a piece of their insides (i.e. a kidney, even once a pregnant woman’s uterus, etc…) and leaves them in take out containers outside of restaurants for people to pick up. He also leaves their bodies in places mainly like dumpsters, in such a fashion that a civilian will find them first, and then later on end up calling the FBI or police. The women he collects, however, he tortures first before he kills them, and they are the ones he does not leave for anyone to find as easily as the others. He will dig shallow graves for these women, and bury them in the forest ground so that when they are finally found, their bodies are nothing more than a heap of rotting flesh.
The Conflict
Man Vs Man
The “Man Vs Man” conflict in this novel is present toward the end of the story, when Agent O’Dell finally comes into contact with Albert Stucky. At first, Albert Stucky believes that his job is all too easy when he climbs the trellis to Agent O’Dell’s second floor bedroom, because at first glance, he believed the curled up bundle of pillows to be her…his ‘supposed’ sleeping victim. However, Agent O’Dell had been sitting in a dark corner of the room, waiting for him to come to her, expecting his attack. She only allowed her presence to be known by him after he had crawled through the window and pulled the scalpel from its sheath. Only then did she say anything to him, and even so, after that, he continued to try and play mind games with her to try and torture her once again. After he had been shot a couple of times in his legs, and yet he still kept going, Agent O’Dell panicked, and at first believed that he had actually had his way with her. She had begun to believe that he had been the one to win, but once he had her cornered and she felt like she was being strangulated by the fear, her superior (Director Cunningham) burst onto the scene and shot Stucky from behind, killing him, and getting Agent O’Dell free from beneath the corpse.
Man Vs Himself
The Man Vs Himself conflict in the story is kept steady throughout the course of the entire novel. Man Vs Himself, because Maggie O’Dell is constantly battling her inner feelings of mistrust, panic, and constant paranoia…all which had been caused by merely dealing with such an evil man as Albert Stucky. She is so obssessed and intent on catching him once again, even though she had been pulled out of the field off the case, that she mistook a foreigner who did not understand a word of English, for Albert Stucky. Although one of the agents she had been visiting with in Kansas, for the conference which she would be teaching at, had chased after the man, she followed anyways and almost shot him between the eyes because she believed him to be Albert Stucky. She is so at odds with her inner feelings that it drives everyone to believe that she has lost her edge, and is possibly going insane, which is almost entirely believable but is also understandable.
Man Vs Nature
Man Vs Nature is not too frequent in the story, if anything it is only mentioned once. Man Vs Nature comes into the story when real estate agent Tess McGowan unknowingly almost sells a house to Albert Stucky, who had come to her under the name of “Walker Harding”. Because he had also come to her and made her believe that he was a blind person, his job of abducting her from the house was too easy. At first, she is locked away in some shack, which she manages to escape from and runs through the forest at first. But then she falls into a hole in the ground, where she meets Agent O’Dell’s next door neighbour, Rachel Endicott who had also been abducted by Albert Stucky. After falling into the hole and seeing Rachel Endicott die in front of her own eyes, she knew that it was a matter of survival, and it took her days to get out of the forest…although not unharmed. Despite managing to survive, she was badly beat up and in very bad health after her ordeal in the forest.
Split Second Summary
“The fine line between good and evil can be crossed in a Split Second”
The novel “Split Second is about an FBI Agent who was once one of the FBI’s best criminal profilers. However, some have been saying that she has lost her edge. Since capturing one of the most hardcore murderers that the Washington D.C area has ever seen, she has been walking a tight wire, battling nightmares and guilt over the victims that she could not save. The FBI had dubbed him “The Collector” for his ritual of collecting victims before disposing of them in the most heinous ways possible. FBI Special Agent Maggie O’Dell had been the criminal profiler on the case and spent two years tracking him, therefore she felt qualified enough to say that no one knew him better than her. After those two years, however, she finally ended their game of cat and mouse when he got her alone in an abandoned Miami Warehouse where he tortured her by making her watch while he killed three women right before her own eyes. That was where it all ended.
A year after, he escaped from prison on Halloween while being transported to a more secure prison holding to await his trial, and murdered the two cops that had been responsible for taking him there. Five months later, Maggie O’Dell, who was also going through a nasty divorce with her lawyer husband, has been taken out of the field…and forced to teach at conferences in cities like L.A., and Kansas City, while a new FBI Agent has been called from another district to temporarily replace Agent O’Dell as a criminal profiler. Assistant Director Cunningham has made it almost near impossible for her to get her hands on any of the inside information on the case, however, Maggie’s best friend Gwen Patterson, who used to work as a psychologist for the FBI, is able to get inside and get information for Maggie on the case.
Despite being taken out of the field, Maggie is still stuck dealing with her paranoia, and is constantly looking over her shoulders. She gets herself into a lot of trouble with her superior (Assistant Director Cunningham) when she uses her credentials to get herself onto a murder scene, and from then on, she basically manages to work “unofficially” on the Albert Stucky case. Maggie’s new neighbor, Rachel Endicott, is the first to go missing, as she is the first person that Maggie had come into contact with when she moved into the house next door to the woman.
Only nights after barging onto the scene at Rachel’s house, Maggie is sent to Kansas City for a conference. While out for a little bit of fun with a couple of the other Agents who have been placed purposely on every conference that Agent O’Dell is on to keep an eye on her, she sees a man standing outside of the restaurant, dressed in a black, who she believes to have been Albert Stucky. Although the other two Agents had told her it is impossible for him to be in two different places at once, she still believes it was him. This suspicion is only confirmed after they leave the Bar and Grill, to see a crowd gathered around the dumpster, and the police already on the scene. When the three FBI Agents take a look into the dumpster, Maggie realizes her suspicions may have been correct. After seeing a man at the back of the crowd who looked like the same man she had seen earlier outside of the Bar and Grill, Agent Turner takes off after him to prove Maggie wrong, that it was not Stucky. Maggie follows him, only to nearly shoot the man in the head, having mistaken his identity for that of Albert Stucky.
It is only after this incident in Kansas City that she is called back into Cunningham’s office, and placed back on the Albert Stucky case as Agent RJ Tully’s partner, as was Agent Tully’s request. She is placed back on the case, although she is forced to go through counseling, and to report everything to Agent Tully, as the conditions that cannot be changed or removed.
The following day that she is put back in the field, the Real Estate Agent that had sold her the house she now owns in Newburgh Heights goes missing because she unknowingly had an appointment to show a house to Albert Stucky, who was using his partner’s name, Walker Harding, to improve his chances of not being caught. She is taken to a shack in the middle of the forest, where she is tied up and kept, though she manages to escape. After getting out of the shack on her own without getting caught, she runs through the forest with bare feet, and falls into a hole in the ground, where she is forced to remain with Maggie O’Dell’s neighbour, Rachel Endicott, who dies after only one night of being in Tess’ company.
From this point forward in the story, Maggie chases down clues, and even goes as far as to attend autopsies with the local Medical Examiner to get them. She becomes all about catching Albert Stucky, even more so than she had been before when she had been pulled off of the case. After trusting O’Dell’s instincts, Agent Tully goes with her into the forest, where they find the place that Stucky has been hiding out, taking the SWAT team with them to investigate things in the house and make sure it is safe for the two of them to be inside. However, while they are investigating upstairs, the house is lit on fire, the flames trapping them inside. Maggie’s paralyzing fear of fires holds her in spot, so when she sees who she believes to be Stucky standing in the hallway with a gun pointed at Agent Tully, she is able to do no more than just warn him. It is only after the gunshot that Agent Tully goes down, having been shot in the thigh that Stucky disappears and Maggie is able to get past her fear enough to get the two of them safely out of the burning house. When two bodies are carted out of the basement of the completely obliterated house, everyone just assumes that Albert Stucky had met his death in the fire. This assumption is proved wrong when days later, his body is discovered missing from the morgue and the FBI begin to realize he had faked his own death, and that his next move would be going after Maggie’s best friend, Gwen, who was supposed to have been staying at Maggie’s house.
Maggie is ready at home for him, and places a bunch of pillows in the bed to make it look as though Gwen was lying there, and she hid in a dark corner, waiting for Stucky to come. Only when he does creep through the window and is at the bedside does she make her presence known, and even so, she is still very afraid. Despite having been shot three times in the legs, he keeps moving toward Agent O’Dell until he has her trapped against the wall, where she unable to do anything because her fear finally got the better of her and prevented her from trying to do anything to protect herself. Just when she believes that Stucky would finally win this round and just kill her, Assistant Director Cunningham bursts onto the scene and shoots Stucky from behind, pulling the murderer’s corpse off of Agent O’Dell and making sure that she was not harmed.
At the very end of the novel, Tess McGowan (the Real Estate Agent) was found and placed in the hospital in very bad shape and health, where she begins to slowly recover from her experience in the woods. Maggie attends Stucky’s funeral, just to be sure that he was really dead, that things were really over and that he was buried sixty feet under ground so that she could be comforted that he was never going to come back, and so that she could finally move on with her life.
Journal #1
I thought that this story dealt quite a bit with the graphics of what Albert Stucky had done to some people. In some parts of the novel, his work was so “graphically” described, that it painted pictures in my mind and totally grossed me out. No one should have to deal with seeing another person’s internal organs being cut out and left for someone else to find in a take out container.
All of these occurrences made me feel really badly for the main character, Maggie O’Dell. I felt bad for her because she was forced to watch him do these things to innocent women, and each time she flinched or turned away from the sight, he would only bring out another woman to do the same things to, until she no longer flinched or turned away. If I had been in her place, I would not have been working for the FBI any longer than I had to after dealing with someone like that, who would do such things to innocent citizens.
Personally, it makes me really glad to be living in Canada…where we do not have murderers who slice out the internal organs from a dead person’s body. That, in my opinion, is truly wrong, no matter how many illegal things the person has done. You would almost have to be completely satanic to want to do such things, and to actually enjoy hearing the screams coming from the other person’s mouth. It makes me glad to know that these things just do not happen here in Canada, and better yet, that I don’t have to put up with seeing such horrible sights J.
Journal #2
Towards the middle of the novel, Albert Stucky abducts the real estate
Agent, Tess McGowan. She is tied up in some shed in the middle of the forest, which she
does manage to escape from, yet somewhere in the forest while she is running, she falls
into a deep hole that has been dug.
If that had been me, I would never have made it out alive. First of all, I hate falling into holes in the first place, never mind deep ones that have been dug in the middle of the ground. Add to the fact that I would never be able to handle sitting in that hole with a woman who has been raped and beaten, and thrown into the pit to die, and does. I would never be able to hack watching another woman, or person for that matter, die right in front of my eyes. That alone would be enough to traumatize me probably for the rest of my life.
I really admired her courage and strength in the face of that kind of danger. I thought that she really showed a lot of courage, mostly, because she knew and understood the risks she was taking, despite her fear that Albert Stucky would find her in the hole. I really thought that she was going to die, as well…but was thoroughly surprised the first time I read that book that she even managed to survive such a horrendous event.
Journal #3
I was really happy when Maggie found love with an old comrade of hers whom she had worked on a case in Nebraska with. Despite her not being able to really move forward with this person because of what Albert Stucky had done to her, and her need to put it all to rest by seeing Albert Stucky die at her own hands, the reassurance of someone loving her was most definitely a welcome relief in the story. After reading through pages worth of nothing but the feelings of grief and tension, the feeling of love was the first feeling to take over and break the tension.
I was glad when she found this other person; because I believe that everyone deserves to be loved…no matter what experiences you have been through in your life. Even if it is not possible right away to move forward in a relationship, at least being loved is enough in life to get by any grief caused. Although I could understand that small insecurity, as well, because getting into a relationship is not easy after going through a huge event that can affect the way you think, feel, and operate.
The only thing I didn’t really like though, is that Maggie just let the guy go for the second time. After being through a divorce, the support must have been really nice…but to just let go of the man you finally realized you really love, is a concept I just do not understand…and probably never will, because I will never have those kind of intentions.
