“We need to stop him, Agent Tully. We need to do it before he crawls back into a hole someplace. Before he runs off and hides and starts playing with his new collection.”
“And we’ll do that. We just need to find out where the hell he’s hiding.” He didn’t want to notice that she had used the word
He left her side and checked his watch again.
“I need to leave around eleven. I promised my daughter we’d have lunch together.” O’Dell had moved back to the reports they had received from Ganza. She had the fingerprint analysis and was reading it over for the third time. He wondered if she had even heard him. “Hey, why don’t you join us?”
She glanced up, surprised by his invitation.
“I still think the print was left by someone who looked at the house earlier,” he said, referring to the fingerprint report and taking her off the hook if she really didn’t want to accept his invitation.
“He wiped down everything in the bathroom,” she said, “but he missed two clean and whole fingerprints. No, he wanted us to find these. He’s done it before. It was how we finally confirmed who he was.”
He watched her rub her eyes as if the memory brought on a whole new fatigue.
“At that time, we had no name, no idea who The Collector was,” she continued. “Stucky evidently thought we were taking too long to figure it out. I think he left us a print on purpose. It was so blatant, so careless, it had to be on purpose.”
“Well, if this one was on purpose, why bother to clean up the place at all? He never seemed to care before.”
“Maybe he cleaned up because he wanted to use the house again.”
“For McGowan?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. But why bother to leave us a print that doesn’t even belong to him? Just like on the Dumpster behind the pizza place and on the umbrella in Kansas City.”
O’Dell hesitated, stopping her hands from shuffling papers and looking at him as if wondering whether or not to tell him something. “Keith hasn’t been able to find a match for those prints in AFIS. But he says he’s almost certain all three sets of prints belong to the same person.”
“You’re kidding. He knows that for sure? If that’s the case, maybe these murders aren’t Stucky, after all.”
He stared at her, waiting for some kind of reaction. Her face remained impassive, just like her voice when she said, “Jessica’s murder and Rita’s in Kansas City are awfully close together. I know I just said that Stucky could pull it off, but the anal penetration with Jessica is not Stucky’s M.O. Also, she’s much younger than any of his other victims.”
“So what are you saying, O’Dell. You think this one was a copycat?”
“Or an accomplice.”
“What? That’s crazy!”
She buried her eyes in the files again. He could see she was having a difficult time with the theory herself. O’Dell was used to working and brainstorming alone. Suddenly he realized that it probably took a good deal of trust for her to share this idea with him.
“Look, I know you’re serious, but why would Stucky take on an accomplice? You have to admit, that’s out of character for any serial killer.”
In reply, O’Dell pulled out several photocopied pages that looked like magazine and newspaper articles and handed them to Tully.
“Remember Cunningham said he found the name Walker Harding, Stucky’s old business partner, on an airline manifest?”
Tully nodded and began sorting through the articles.
“Some of those go back several years,” she told him.
They were articles from
“I’m guessing this must be the partner?”
“Yes. A couple of the articles mention how much the two men had in common and how competitive they were with each other. However, they seemed to have ended their partnership amicably. I wonder if they might still be in contact with each other. Maybe still in competition with each other, only with a new game.”
“But why now after all these years? If they were to do something like this, why not when Stucky first started his game?”
O’Dell sat down and tucked strands of hair behind her ears. She looked exhausted. As if reading his thoughts, she sipped her
“Stucky has always been a loner,” she explained. “I haven’t done any research on Harding except for these articles, but for Stucky to have chosen anyone as a business partner is remarkable. I’ve never thought about it before, but perhaps the two men had, and still have, some strong connection, a connection Stucky didn’t realize until recently. Or perhaps there’s some other reason he decided he needed his old friend.”
Tully shook his head. “I think you’re grasping at straws, O’Dell. You know as well as I do that statistically, serial killers don’t take on partners or accomplices.”
“But Stucky is far from fitting any of the statistics. I’m having Keith run a check to see if Harding has ever been fingerprinted. Then we can see if we have a match to the fingerprints being left at the crime scenes.”
Tully looked over the articles, scanning the text until something caught his eye.
“Looks like there’s a slight problem with your theory, O’Dell.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s a footnote to this
“Right. I saw that.”
“But did you finish reading it? This part is blurred at the bottom from the copier. Unless Walker Harding found some miracle cure, he can’t be Stucky’s accomplice. It says here he was going blind.”
CHAPTER 49
Maggie waited until Tully left to meet his daughter. Then she began unearthing every scrap of information she could find on Walker Harding. She pounded the computer’s keys, searching the FBI’s files and other Internet sites and directories. The man had virtually disappeared after announcing his ambiguous medical problem almost four years ago. Now she realized Keith Ganza might never find a fingerprint record, either. Perhaps it was simply a gut instinct, but she felt certain Harding was still connected to Stucky, helping him somehow, continuing to work with him.
From what little she had read, she knew Harding had been the brains of their business, a whiz with computers. But Stucky had been the one who had taken all the financial risk, investing a hundred thousand dollars of his own money; money he had joked about winning one weekend in Atlantic City. Maggie couldn’t help noticing that the investment capital and the start-up of the business happened the same year Stucky’s father died in a freak boating accident. Stucky had never been charged though he had been questioned in what looked like a routine investigation, and only because Stucky had been the sole beneficiary of his father’s estate, an estate that made that hundred thousand dollars look like pocket change.
Harding appeared to have been reclusive long before his business venture with Stucky. Maggie could find nothing about his childhood, except that he—like Stucky—had been raised by a single, overbearing father. One directory listed him as a 1985 graduate of MIT, which made him about three years younger than Stucky. The state
