It wasn’t a letter, though. It was another murder list. This one had a different heading. “Our Murder List” was written on top of the paper, and the Our was underlined several times. The killer had hand-printed this one. All of the names on the list were there, but lines had been drawn through Ms. Patsy’s name and Detective Sweeney’s. There were question marks next to Shields’s name and the references to the two bodyguards.
Another name had been added to the list. Haley Cross. On the bottom, just below her name, he’d written, “You owe me for this one too.”
Alec was on his cell phone dialing Wincott. While he was waiting for the detective to answer, he asked Regan, “Did you know this woman?”
She didn’t pick up on the fact that he’d asked about the woman in the past tense.
“No,” she said. “Alec, we have to warn her. Oh, dear God, the police need to find her before…”
Henry pointed to the paper. His voice was shaking when he said, “There’s a line through her name, Regan, like he’s already… you know… killed her.”
“Henry, we cannot assume just because he’s put a line through her name that she’s dead. He might not have… Oh, God.” She could feel the panic building inside. “There has to be time to save her.”
Wincott answered the phone, and Alec let go of Regan and walked toward the hallway as he explained what Henry had found.
Regan was feeling sick to her stomach. She leaned against Henry’s desk and stared at the wall. “I don’t understand,” she whispered. “Why would he send me this? And what in God’s name does he mean by ‘Our Murder List’?”
“Haley Cross. I swear I’ve heard that name before, but I can’t remember where.”
Alec ended the call and walked back into the office. “Wincott and Bradshaw are on their way over.”
“On Sunday?” Henry realized how foolish the question was as soon as the words were out of his mouth.
“John was at work, but Bradshaw was home.”
“Are they going to look for the woman? Are they…”
Alec put his arm around her. “It’s too late.”
She jerked away. His quick acceptance that the girl was dead infuriated her. “You can’t know that. If they could just warn her… if they could find her and…”
Alec rubbed the knot in the back of his neck while he watched her pace. “They know where she is.”
“Where?”
“In the morgue.”
“Oh, God.”
She sagged against Alec, bowed her head, and closed her eyes. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close. Henry had all but fallen into his chair.
“How did he kill her?” he asked.
Alec was staring at the article on the wall behind Henry’s head. It all suddenly clicked. He didn’t answer Henry’s question, but said, “She was running on the path in-”
“Conrad Park,” Henry blurted. “That’s where I read the name. Regan, don’t you remember? I told you about it. At least I think I told you.”
Alec walked over to read the article again. “You’re quoted here as saying you run there at least three nights a week.”
“Yes, I did.”
“But then the track was finished upstairs,” Henry said.
Alec got Wincott on the phone again. “Where are you?”
“Getting out of the car in front of the hotel.”
“What was the physical description of Haley Cross?”
“I’ve got some copies of the file with me, and I’ve got her photo. Hang on, Alec, I’ll be right there.”
Alec was too impatient to sit and wait. He paced the hall instead. When Wincott jogged around the corner waving the file folder, Alec said, “Would you mistake Haley Cross for Regan?”
“Oh, come on. I wouldn’t mistake any woman for her.” He stopped, opened the folder, and held up Haley Cross’s photo. “Maybe from behind… the long hair, approximate height and weight. I guess it’s possible.”
“What’s possible?” Regan asked. She was standing in the doorway, but she stepped back when Wincott and Alec walked in.
Wincott answered her. “Mistaken identity,” he said. “Where’s the letter?”
A couple of seconds later, he and Alec were staring at the list again.
Wincott read the list and the note out loud. “ ‘You owe me for this one too’? So he’s making Regan take some of the responsibility, isn’t he?” Wincott said. “That’s what I think the note implies.”
“So, make the leap, John.”
“Okay,” Wincott answered. “He thinks Regan should have been there instead of Haley.”
Alec nodded. Then Wincott asked, “You think he was waiting in the park for Regan?”
“If he read the article in the paper, wouldn’t he assume she still runs there?”
“Are you saying he killed that woman by mistake?” Regan asked.
Alec turned to her. “Yes. I think he went there to kill you.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
The police had withheld important details about Haley Cross’s murder, and neither Alec nor Wincott wanted Regan to know what those details were. She was already scared, and the autopsy report alone was enough to make a hardened cop shudder.
Still, there was the possibility that one of those details might trigger a memory that could help them.
Wincott leaned against the office window, one ankle crossed over the other, with a bottle of water in one hand and the autopsy report in the other. Alec sat next to her on the sofa. Regan couldn’t understand how the two of them could look so relaxed while they took turns relating some of the horrific facts of the poor girl’s murder. When Alec told her what the killer had done to her legs, Regan became nauseous and could feel the blood rushing from her head.
Alec noticed the way she was gripping her hands together in her lap, a telltale sign that she was having trouble, and there were tears in her eyes, but she kept it together. He was proud of her, and had they been alone, he would have put his arms around her and told her so.
“You okay, Regan? You want to take a minute?” Wincott asked.
“No, I’m fine,” she said.
Alec opened the folder Wincott had dropped on the table and handed Regan the photo of Haley Cross. Regan was surprised at how peaceful the woman looked in death.
“Do you know her?”
She shook her head. “Was she a student at the university?”
“No,” Alec answered. “She’d already graduated.”
“She lived close to the campus,” Wincott explained. “And according to her friends, she regularly ran the park path.”
“Did she live alone?”
“No,” Wincott said. “She lived with a boyfriend. He was out of town on business the night she was murdered. Evidently she had told him she might go home to visit her parents while he was gone, so he returned to Chicago, and several days passed before anyone knew she was missing.”
Regan took a couple of deep breaths before looking at the photo again. “I don’t understand. Why would he do that to her legs? Why…?”
When she suddenly stopped, Wincott said, “The coroner said her death was due to a blow to the head. Evidently this sicko went for the legs after she was already dead.”
“She fought him,” Alec said. “There was skin under her fingernails, so they have DNA.” He took the photo from Regan and put it back in the folder.
Regan thought he looked worried about her, and so she gave him a quick smile to let him know she was okay
