“Probably not our suspect,” Harrow said.
“No, but when the Oklahoma Highway Patrol got to her house, they found the license plate on her Fusion was actually a Kansas plate, and the woman hadn’t noticed the switch.”
“She hadn’t noticed that her car had a license plate from a different state?”
Pall shrugged. “The OHP discovered that the only plate that had been switched was the rear, and it had just escaped her attention.”
“Was that the plate from the truck Gershon saw?”
“No—the Kansas plate was registered to a Dodge van belonging to an out-of-work female bartender in Pratt.”
“And the license plate on that van?”
“We haven’t found it yet,” Pall said. “The bartender’s ex-boyfriend said she packed up her stuff and hit the road to find work. No forwarding address, no nothing.”
Off-camera, a deputy came in and handed Anderson a fold-out map of the country. The chemist continued to listen while he quietly unfolded the map and compared it to the list of crime scenes.
Harrow was asking Pall, “But she was driving the van when she left?”
“She was.”
Anderson got a Sharpie out of his pocket, then started marking the different towns around the country where attacks had occurred.
Harrow said, “Mr. Gershon said our suspect was likely a man.”
Pall nodded. “We have two puzzle pieces. That they don’t fit together doesn’t mean that we’re not closer to solving the puzzle.”
Anderson looked up at the boss. Even though Harrow knew all this before they went on the air, and the dialogue had been loosely scripted (no prompter, but essentially canned), the host still looked gravely disappointed.
Was that just good acting? Anderson wondered.
Turning to the young chemist, who rose from his chair, Harrow introduced him to the viewing audience.
Anderson tried to keep his breathing even as he did his best to ignore the black hole in the center of the camera. He was also conscious of the hovering boom mike, but managed not to look up at it.
“Chris, have we had any luck matching the tire marks from this crime to the ones Billy Choi sent you from North Dakota?”
“They don’t match—at least not completely.”
Harrow appeared confused (for the sake of the TV audience, anyway). “What do you mean, ‘not completely’? Either they match or they don’t, right?”
Harrow had set this up for Anderson to look good, and the young man appreciated it.
“The tires in North Dakota were nearly bald, Mr. Harrow. Though the tires here in New Mexico show some wear, they’re nowhere near the same age as the Dakota tires.”
“So they don’t match.”
“That’s right, sir—they have the same tread design, which means they’re the same brand, Michelin, and they’re the same size, 275/70R18. It’s possible that the suspect has changed out the old tires for new ones on the same vehicle.”
“Are there other possibilities?”
“Sure. There could be two separate suspects, who both own light pickups that have the same brand tires—one worn, one fairly new. But if you believe that…and remember we have two separate gun matches…then the killer in North Dakota killed a public servant’s family in Florida, and a different killer murdered the families of George Reid here…and yours, Mr. Harrow, in Iowa.”
“That would make one hell of a coincidence.”
“Yes, sir, it would. Particularly since forensics evidence indicates the same gardening implement was used in the removal of the wedding-ring fingers of both Mrs. Ferguson and Mrs. Reid. Distinctive characteristics of one garden-shear blade, and plant DNA, make that conclusive.”
“Thanks, Chris,” Harrow said, moving slightly to let Arroyo get the sheriff into the shot, so the boss could interview him.
With his part finished, Anderson dropped back into the chair, Sharpie in hand, as he went back to the list and the map.
He had something—he didn’t know what—but he had something.
Chapter Nineteen
In his dreary, dusty living room, sitting on the edge of his seat, the Messenger watched Crime Seen! intently. When it had gone off the air with J.C. Harrow’s familiar “war on crime” homily, the man of the house kicked back in the aged Barcalounger and smiled.
Finally!
After years of planning and delivering his messages, and fearing that these fools could never stop him, he finally had someone’s ear—someone who could make everything all right.
Despite a slow start, J.C. Harrow seemed to be the one who could and would put the pieces together…though it did take plenty of help. No matter by what process, however, at last the Messenger’s signals were coming through. Maybe the help Harrow was receiving from his much-vaunted team was the key to making sure the world eventually understood completely.
He had watched the young woman who co-hosted with special interest. What was her name? Carmen Something. He would rewind the tape and get it.
She might prove just the one to help him deliver his next and, he hoped, final message.
His sighed and allowed himself a relieved smile. After all these years, the end was in sight. He had to clean the house, and there was planning to do, one more trip to make, one more message to deliver….
After all, company was coming.
Chapter Twenty
The Crime Seen! viewer tip line had received calls about every single blue Ford F-150 in the United States—or at least so it seemed to Jenny Blake.
As the team’s computer expert, she was the beneficiary of this sort of grunt work, tracking down the vehicles in tips and running checks on them. Funny how they’d all been hired as “superstar” forensics experts, with the media playing that up, the Internet too. But none of the Killer TV team had any underlings to pass off work to.
The chemist, Chris Anderson, had said it best: “We got a great starting line-up, but no bench!”
Still, she wasn’t complaining, though the tip line stuff tended to come to her, and while the team was obviously making progress, she was feeling a very small part of that. She wanted to do more.
Her drive to succeed, to please, and her loyalty to Harrow and his cause, kept her going. The Wyoming crime lab had provided her plenty of tough cases, but never a challenge this great.
At least being with new people gave her a new chance to overcome her shyness. So far she hadn’t been able to take much advantage of the new start; if anything, she felt more isolated, living on the road with strangers.
The rest of the team, though they all seemed nice enough, were obviously out of their comfort zones as well. Everybody seemed vaguely on edge, not only because of the life on the road—motel, work, eat, ride the bus, motel, work, eat, ride the bus—but because of the complicated job at hand.
And not the least of the complications was having the leader of the team so emotionally vested in the case, not that Harrow had slipped up in any way or shown the emotions that must have been churning beneath the surface.
Jenny knew all about such emotions.
With the bus rolling south now, heading for Pratt, Kansas, where the halved team could reunite, she had a little quiet time in the back by herself. Today, she wore a PETA T-shirt and her usual jeans with canvas tennis shoes, her normal work clothes at both the Wyoming crime lab and on the bus. The only time she wore anything else was on those painful Friday broadcast nights, when they dressed her up like a Barbie doll.
This bus was set up with only a dozen regular seats up front, six rows of two seats on either side, and another half dozen in back, beyond the restroom. Behind the front seats was a work area with a pair of compact desks and bolted chairs. Before you got to the bathroom were two facing chaise lounges, windows blacked out, the lounges mostly used for catching naps. They were equipped with seat belts, but Jenny didn’t have hers on as she sat back there in the dark, her computer on her lap providing the necessary light.
She knew she sho
uldn’t be bitching. The tip line stuff was culled before she got it—PAs back in LA were battling under Everest-sized piles of mail, e-mail, text messages, and phone calls, an onslaught that had begun right after the first show.
When Crime Seen! made the connection that Harrow was former law enforcement and Ferguson current—implying the families of lawmen might be targets—the tip lines exploded with everything from actual leads to communiqués insisting the Killer TV team investigate the death of all family members of every former or current law enforcement official that had not died in their sleep at 101 or over, and in the sight of a dozen eyewitnesses.
After the second show, when the victimology moved from strictly law enforcement to public servants in general, the deaths of every federal, state, and local government employee and their families going back a quarter century seemed to have been dredged up.
Those tips joined the sea of information flowing into the show. The show’s staff, from showrunner Nicole Strickland to the lowliest PA, believed that everyone in America knew someone whose death could somehow be tied to the murders of the families of Harrow and Ray Ferguson.
Six degrees of J.C. Harrow, Billy Choi put it.
The vehicle tips had been forwarded to Jenny in the field, because she was right on the front lines, if she got a hit. Tons of other messages and questions were being sifted through thoroughly at UBC in LA.
As for the rest of the team, Billy Choi and the cameraman Maury Hathaway were riding in the trailer of the semi behind them, Choi working in the lab, Hathaway picking up “B roll” of Billy, whatever that was. Billy roll, maybe?
On the bus, in the rows beyond the restroom, Carmen Garcia was going over notes from the previous show while lanky Laurene Chase sat across the aisle, her overhead light out, arms folded, catching a nap. Way in back, Nancy Hughes was in a little puddle of illumination, lost in a sudoku puzzle.
Jenny continued running down dead leads on the pickup, knowing that once she got through them, next up would be running down the tips on the missing bartender’s van.
That van was the reason they were headed for Pratt, Kansas. Though the trail was a week old, this would be the closest they’d been to the killer. The missing van had generated nearly as many viewer tips as the myriad F-150s. Police departments in Oklahoma, Kansas, and surrounding states were searching for both vehicles, but no one was having any luck finding either.
Feeling overwhelmed, Jenny yawned, set her laptop aside, rose, and went into the bathroom. She locked the door and looked at her face in the tiny mirror over the minuscule sink. The toilet was normal size, seeming an oversized fixture in this tiny closet—a full-sized chair in a dollhouse.
She had to rest a knee on the stool’s lid just to study her face in the postage-stamp mirror, which was just large enough to show her how limp her blonde hair was looking. She had scrubbed the yucky makeup off after the show and not worn any since, making it easy (she knew) to see the black circles under her red-filigreed eyes. Not normally a vain person, she nonetheless recoiled from her image—she looked like a homeless person with the flu.
She grabbed the rim of the stainless steel sink and tried to wrestle it free of its mooring as she yelled, “Goddamn son of a bitch shit!”
The string of epithets, which included various forms of the fabled F bomb, continued for a good ten to fifteen seconds, after which—muscles sore, chest heaving, a sheen of sweat on her forehead and upper lip—she stood staring at the sick homeless person in the mirror for a good minute more, trembling.
After taking in a deep breath through her nose, she let it out through her mouth. She repeated the action three more times, splashed a little cool water on her face, and used a paper towel to dry off. Feeling much better, she stepped out of the bathroom, into the aisle of the bus at her agape co-workers.
Jenny gulped. “I, uh, figured the engine noise would cover that.”
Still wide-eyed and open-mouthed, the trio shook their heads in unintended unison.
She forced a smile. “Hey, girl’s gotta let off steam sometime, right?”
Laurene said, “If you want to borrow my Midol, just say so, sugar.”
That made Jenny and the other two women laugh, and the computer expert returned to the chaise lounge area, where Carmen, Laurene, and Nancy joined her.
Perching across from Jenny, sitting Indian-style, Laurene said, “We have been going at it a little hard.”
Next to Jenny, Carmen said, “You think? Trying to stop a serial killer while putting on a weekly network show?”
Nancy, next to Laurene now, said, “Goes way beyond ‘let’s put on a show in the barn.’”
“All righty, then,” Laurene said, doing a Jim Carrey impression so dated Jenny barely understood it. “Time for a girl’s night out!”
“You wish,” Carmen said.
Laurene patted the air. “No, no, for real. We’ll get to Pratt fairly early, right?”
Nobody argued the point. They had, in fact, left Rolla yesterday and driven ten hours to Omaha, Nebraska, where they’d spent the night. That left today’s trip of about six hours. They would meet up with Harrow’s group, compare notes, then call it a day.
“Once we finish work,” Laurene said, “look out Pratt!”
Carmen and Nancy whooped and clapped, but Jenny sat silently.
Finally Laurene asked her, “Are you in?”
“I’m pretty swamped. All these tip-line…tips.”
“Don’t you know girls just want to have fun?”
This, too, was a reference that only rang distantly for Jenny. “We can do that?”
“What?”
“Have fun?”
“Hell yeah!”
“…In Pratt, Kansas?”
This got some unintended laughs, though Jenny nonetheless felt like she’d been vindicated, and Laurene had the expression of a wiseass who’d just been topped.
Laurene leaned forward, looking straight at Jenny. “I suppose you’ve got something else planned tonight. And I don’t mean tip-line tips.”
“Well…”
“Got a date, maybe? With that cute chemist with the nice buns, maybe? Or our well-seasoned firearms man with the guns.” Laurene made like a muscle man.
“No!” Jenny’s cheeks were burning.
“Didn’t think so. You know what I think? I think it’s time we got that bony ass of yours out of them jeans and into a dress.”
Jenny shook her head, nervous now, fear rising. “No! I don’t even own a dress.”
Next to Jenny, Carmen said, “You know, I’ve got the cutest little black dress—you would look so hot in it.”
“I don’t think so.”
Nancy said, “We’ve all seen the looks our Southern-fried Beach Boy sneaks at you.”
“What? Who?”
Laurene said, “The cute chemist. Talk about chemistry! I don’t even dig men, but he’s worth looking at, coming and going.”
“He was never looking at me,” Jenny insisted.
“He sneaks peeks all the time, sugar.”
“Why would he do that?”
Carmen said, “Looking to hook up.”
“Hook up what? I’m wireless.”
The laughter of the other girls took a while to die down, before Jenny removed her blank expression and let a smile form.
“Got you,” she said. “I’m quiet, not…inexperienced.”
She guessed they didn’t know she used to fish for child molesters online, and that she knew a lot more than she let on, much of it disgusting and revolting.
They sat and chatted the rest of the way to Pratt, Jenny feeling more at home with these strangers—these new acquaintances—than she had with her co-workers back in Wyoming.
Maybe here, on this bus, with these women, she could find the freedom to be herself, not the Jenny that she was always expected to be back home. Out here, she was Jenny Blake, computer guru.
Whoever the hell that was.
Chapter Twenty-one
Now they wer
e on his trail for real.
Still, he’d had to practically spoon-feed them, to get them this close. Using the same gun in New Mexico that he’d used at Harrow’s seemed at the time heavy-handed, too obvious a clue; but the so-called superstar Killer TV team had proved only slightly better at deciphering his messages than the myriad police departments and state police around the country, where he’d made deliveries over the years.
The gun had told them it was him. Trading license plates along his route gave them the road map they needed to get close. That damn female bartender in Pratt driving off into the night threw a slight monkey wrench into his plans.
But they would have to figure that one out for themselves. He could deliver messages to help them understand, but he could not simply hand himself over on a silver platter—they had to earn it.
Didn’t they know nothing was free in this life?
The license plate he’d placed on the bartender’s van in exchange for the original was from his hometown, but most certainly wasn’t his own plate. Hell, it didn’t even belong to the monster who’d turned him into the Messenger!
No, it came from the dark blue Ford F-150 of that yahoo down the street with the dog that wouldn’t shut its yap. He’d asked the guy to keep his dog quiet, but the thoughtless asshole had laughed at him and told him to buzz off.
Would have been sweet to see how the yahoo liked it when the Crime Seen! team, the Kansas State Police, the FBI, and God only knew what other law enforcement agencies crawled up his hiney, thinking he was the one delivering messages. Would have been a hoot to watch, from just up the street. He’d have been laughing his ass off at how close they’d come to him while striking out.
If he’d been feeling really cocky, he’d have driven to the grocery store for a quart of milk while all those cops were right on his block tearing the yahoo’s house to hell and gone. Could have driven right through all the cars, parked haphazardly on the street, their lights blinking, so consumed with the yahoo that they’d never have even seen the real Messenger among them.
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