where. He called a second night just to tell me that everything was fine, but I sort of knew from his voice that it wasn’t. And then I didn’t hear from him again.”
Jonathan agreed that the circumstances were strange. “But there’s just been so little time. Even if he’s in imminent danger, we don’t even know where to look.”
“But you could find that out, couldn’t you?”
“You’re talking a lot of resources, Ellen. If it turns out to be a dead end-”
“If I was the one missing, would you be able to do something?” Ellen used the question with the skill of a surgeon using a laser, cutting straight to his soul.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
Chapter Six
The basement murders and the yard murder were officially two crime scenes, at least for the time being, and now that the State Police technicians had arrived, Gail Bonneville tried her best to stay out of everyone’s way. Preferring fresh air, she decided to hang out near the spot where the girl had fallen.
Staying quiet and passive was not her long suit, hoyelled to him just as he was tipping the pitcher to take a mold of what appeared to be a wheel print out in the grass, about fifty feet from the burned van.
The technician, a youngster who had a certain computer-geekiness about him, responded angrily. “What!”
“Have you photographed that print yet?”
“Of course.”
“From a high angle or a low angle?”
“Both,” he said.
Gail gave him a hard look, judging his sincerity, and then nodded. “Go ahead then.” It had been a trick question, and he’d given the right answer. Gail couldn’t count the number of latent fingerprints, footprints, and tire prints she’d seen ruined over the years when the transfer process went awry. Without the backup of good photographs, they’d be left with nothing.
Besides, the Indiana State Police loved to snatch command of major incidents away from local authorities, and Gail knew that if she didn’t continually piss on the fire hydrants, the territorial lines could easily become blurred. Her thirteen years with the Bureau had taught her volumes about snatching command.
The charred van, they’d found, was registered to Lionel Patrone, whose DMV record had confirmed that he was one of the corpses in the basement. Another DMV search had found brother Barry. The inside of the van reeked of chemical lachrymator-tear gas-and one of the techs easily found the source, a CS canister that had apparently been tossed in through a broken window in the back door.
Beyond that, the charred vehicle produced little else but rolls of duct tape, singed junk food wrappers, and the twisted, melted remains of a five-gallon gas can. The crime scene techs would continue to search, but the fire damage was so complete that Gail doubted they’d find much of substance. Their best bet for usable clues, she thought, lay with the van’s engine block, which had mostly escaped damage from the fire. She wouldn’t know for sure until the ballistic analyses were completed, but it looked as if the shooter had thought to load armor-piercing ammo. At least two of those bullets had done their work to kill the van.
Unlike the bodies in the house, Christine Baker appeared to have been killed with a rifle. Her belly wound was through-and-through. They were still scouring the woods looking for the source-indicating something high-velocity, which was entirely consistent with the 5.56 millimeter shell casings they’d found in the yard. The second wound- probably non-fatal in and of itself if it had received prompt medical attention-had made a hell of a mess of the girl’s shoulder. All of it was consistent with Gail’s theory that the shooter was a professional. Young Christine Baker, however, was not.
Gail sat on a deadfall out of the way and opened the newest of the black-and-white speckled composition notebooks for which she was famous among her colleagues. Identical in every way to the notebooks she’d carried with her through elementary school, they were her favorite means by which to document cases. If you shopped carefully, you could buy them for less than a buck at Staples or Office Depot, and they were nearly indestructible. She liked the way the pages were securely stitched into the cardboard binding. Even more, she liked the way the wide-ruled paper accommodated her loopy and admittedly girlish handwriting.
Every case, no matter how small, got its own notebook, into which went every name, phone number, thought, and intuition. Some cases filled four, five, six volumes-he on, and if we turn out to be wrong, that would be a hard one to cover.”
Jesse nodded. “Yeah, okay, but it’s the theory that makes the most sense to me, and it’s been bothering me all day. Why would he wait till the worst possible moment to make his entry?”
A scenario started to form in Gail’s mind. “That’s where the shears come in. They forced his hand by threatening the victim.”
“No, before that. I think shearing the victim is why he didn’t wait any longer. The question I’m asking is why did he wait as long as he did?”
Gail’s eyes traveled to the spot where the girl’s corpse had lain. “He was waiting for her.”
Jesse clapped his hands together. “Bingo. Which meant that she was part of the plot in the first place.”
Gail let that simmer.
Jesse nearly vibrated with excitement. “Clearly he did his homework, and clearly he had good intel. He watched and waited so long because he was waiting for Christine. When the shears came out, the wait had to end. Bang-bang, time to go. I’m figuring that just happened to be when Miss Christine Baker pulled up in her van. Really, really bad timing on her part.”
Gail weighed his words and nodded. She liked the theory.
Jesse continued, “Judging from the tire tracks in the driveway, I’m guessing that she pulled up on all of this and got spooked. She panicked and spun her wheels trying to drive away, and our shooter had to stop her. That explains the bullets in the engine. Then she tried to shoot back.”
“Problem was, she wasn’t very good.”
“Not as good as our guy, anyway.” Jesse let a beat pass. “I’ve got to tell you, I’m finding it harder and harder to think bad things about this guy.”
Gail scowled. “Don’t go there, Jesse, please. This isn’t Tombstone, Arizona, and it isn’t 1870. People are dead, and it all looks premeditated. That makes it homicide, and last time I checked, juries are the ones who get to determine guilt or innocence. Our job is to find this guy, and to give him a chance to tell his story.”
Jesse looked uncomfortable. “You think he should have called us-called the police-before taking on a job like this.” His eyes narrowed and he dropped his voice. “If he had, do you really think we could have done this good?”
Gail’s eyes grew hot as she tried to determine her deputy’s intentions. Her memory still ached with the images from Waco, where she’d been an HRT shooter, and it had been an issue in the early days of their campaign against each other.
“What we need to do,” she said, changing the subject completely, “is find out more about these victims. If our theory is right, our best shot is to find out who he was trying to rescue. To get there, we need to find out what links Christine Baker and the Patrone brothers to whoever they tied up in the basement with duct tape. Once we find a link, we’ve got a case.”
Chapter Seven
Jonathan was thankful that Ellen didn’t want to stick around after she dropped him off at home. Every moment he spent with her was an exercise in agony; not because of the divorce, per se, but for the loss of the life he believed they could have had together.
After he’d agreed to help, he’d spent a solid half hour on the t was awkward talking in front of Ellen-a fact
