‘Why not?’
‘She wrote them on a women’s forum, a help group for victims of domestic violence. A place to talk, to get up the courage to report the bastards.’
‘What makes you think it’s her?’
‘She says she’s writing a book. Her name is Lucy S.’
‘It’s not enough,’ said Harper.
‘And she says there’s a grocer’s which she can see from her apartment window.’
‘It wouldn’t wash in court.’
‘We’ve got evidence,’ said Gerry Ratten.
‘How the hell did you find it?’
‘You got to know where to look,’ said Gerry. ‘I just got a warrant and got her ISP to release her IP address and browsing history.’
‘They give you the websites?’
‘Yeah. We saw where she’d visited. We tracked a lot of them. I got two interesting things. One, that she was seeing a man that she called X. Two, that he was beating on her. Three, that he was racist and four, that about a couple of weeks earlier, they’d gone on a road trip to Yellowstone Park together.’
‘Why did she call him X?’
‘It’s a domestic violence forum,’ said Denise. ‘You’re not allowed to name the bastards. That would be against the law.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah, seriously. She made over four hundred posts over an eight-month period. Read some of the highlights.’
Harper read what he could. ‘No names.’
‘We can probably glean information, but it’ll take time.’
‘You mentioned Yellowstone,’ said Harper.
‘It’s the one date-posted message that tells us where our killer was for a week last year.’
‘That’s worth following up. Okay,’ said Harper. ‘We’ve got to go through Lucy’s whole electronic history. There’ll be a connection. We find she uses a credit card in some hotel, then we check every other receipt. He’s got to be there. He was with her for eight months, he can’t hide that well.’
Chapter Ninety-Two
The food left out in front of the shed had attracted enough of the local homeless. Not people, but stray dogs. He sat on a high pallet overlooking them. They were frail and needy. He saw the one he wanted. A little beige- brown mutt, about two foot high with a white underbelly and a nice clean snout. It was probably a hybrid of a hybrid, not a pure gene in it.
He climbed down from the pallet, took a biscuit out of his pocket and threw it to the one he wanted. The little dog looked up with big brown eyes, full of expectation and gratefulness. He threw it another biscuit.
As he walked away, the little beige dog followed him. It wasn’t fast or eager, it moved with a tentative stride. He took a third biscuit out of his pocket and held it out; this time, the dog walked across and took it from his hand.
He went inside the lock-up. The little dog followed. He shut the door. He heard Abby move in the small room behind the door. She would get her chance soon enough. The dog stopped and seemed to be aware that somehow it was no longer free. It looked at the door, at the man — and then another biscuit was thrown in its path and it forgot its instincts.
The dog looked up. A line of biscuits ran all the way across the room. It ate and moved and ate and moved, and before long, the small beige mutt was inside the room that the man had built.
The man closed the heavy acoustic door and bolted it. He moved to the Plexiglass window and looked in. The mutt had eaten the rest of its biscuits and was looking up at the window.
The man watched for a minute; there was something appealing in the dog, in its lack of knowledge. He turned, put on large yellow gloves, and opened a big round can using an old-fashioned can-opener. He poured the blue pellets into the plastic bin and then sealed the lid.
He crossed eagerly to the window. The gas was odorless and colorless. He watched for a moment, but nothing seemed to happen. He waited and watched. The dog sat, wagged its tail and barked once.
He moved closer to the window. Then the dog’s muzzle sniffed. The gas must have reached the ground level where the animal was.
The scene was unpleasant to watch, if one watched it emotionally. But if one used the scientific side of one’s nature and observed the effect of the gas, rather than reacting to the perceived pain of the dog, it was fine. Lucy was tied in the chair staring at the window. She was not detached, but then again, she was not supposed to be. He wanted to see the fear in her eyes.
The dog barked, scratched, ran a small circle and jumped up at the window. It was in agonizing pain and showed every sign of terror. But within seven minutes, it was lying on its side, almost dead.
The man raised his hand and pressed his palm to the Plexiglass. The little beige-brown mutt was still and lifeless. A harsh lesson in trusting strangers, he thought, but his experiment had worked.
Chapter Ninety-Three
In the precinct, they reopened the cases: the brown, scratched case-files, the box-files of accumulated evidence, the database that Harper insisted on that hooked up every detail, to find links and matches. They looked back through each case slowly, letting their minds wander over the detail, trying to see what they’d overlooked. They had Lucy Steller’s phone records, Internet records, credit-card statements, bank statements and everything else besides.
