cabin and they’ve confirmed everything we thought. I talked to one of them today and he said there was no sign of accelerants, which tilts it toward an accident rather than a homicide, but in my mind it isn’t convincing. The place was old and dry to begin with and built with logs. Those kinds of buildings go up like a box of matches, especially when there is spilled alcohol on the floor to help it along. The guy said the fire spread normally from right in front of the open woodstove throughout the room.”
Cody said, “Has anything else been found by the crime-scene techs? Hair, fiber, anything like that?”
“Nope. It looks like whoever did it literally left no fingerprints. But more likely, he spent the whole evening in the living area and didn’t venture into the kitchen. There are some latents in the bedroom, as you know, but we don’t have any hits on them yet.”
“Damn,” Cody said. “Call me if anything comes of that.”
“Yeah,” Larry said. “I’m thinking the bad guy knew the best way to cover his tracks was to burn everything down around him when he was through.”
Cody nodded. “I agree. It accomplishes a couple of things. The fire not only destroyed any latent evidence, the fire itself points us away from homicide.”
“Speaking of,” Larry said, “the three victims other than Hank Winters I found through ViCAP all died within the last month. There might be more and there could be other methods of death, but for now that’s our universe, okay?”
Cody nodded as if Larry could see him. He could hear Larry shuffling papers.
“The first was a William Geraghty, sixty-three, of Falls Church, Virginia. The police report on him says he was a midlevel Democratic political consultant. He was found at his beach house three and a half weeks ago. His cottage was burned down and his body was found in the wreckage. The police there initially called it an accident but a few days later a witness said they saw a vehicle coming from the place in the dark shortly after it was established the blaze took off. No good description of the vehicle or driver, but because the cottage was located on a dead-end road and it was the middle of the night, the car was considered suspicious. The autopsy of Geraghty sounds real similar: blunt-force head injuries and lack of smoke in his lungs. The cops there list it as a possible homicide and the case is open. I spoke to the lead detective in Falls Church and he basically said there has been no progress in the case; no further leads at all.”
“Sounds familiar,” Cody said.
“Yes. But in this case the fire damage was total. They didn’t have rain to stop it. Which means no hair or fiber, and no DNA to run.”
While Larry talked, Cody Googled the name “William Geraghty” and found items including his death notice in the local paper and older references to his involvement in political campaigns throughout the country. He would study the items later, when Larry was done.
“What do we know about him besides his job and his death?” Cody asked.
“I’m getting to that, but let me do this in my own way.”
Cody knew better than to try and get Larry to cut to the chase.
Larry said, “The second victim identified by ViCAP is Gary Shulze, fifty-nine, Minneapolis. This was two weeks ago. He was a professor of literature at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. His body was found at his cabin near a place called Deer River in the northeast corner of the state on Lake Winnibigoshish. Same thing we’re getting used to: burned cabin, body inside, head injuries. The difference here is it appears there was a deep puncture wound into his brain as opposed to bludgeoning. The wound was initially explained away as a postmortem injury caused by glass shards driven into his body by falling timbers, but the coroner doesn’t rule out the possibility it was caused by a knife blade driven into his skull and withdrawn. Obviously, the locals initially thought it was a suicide or accident, but Shulze’s wife Pat convinced them her husband had recently cleaned up his act and had undergone some kind of conversion. She said he was loving life. There was no way he’d do himself in, she said. Of course, we’ve heard that kind of thing before from loved ones, but the detective told me she was so convincing that they listed the case as open even though they have their doubts.”
Cody opened another window on the browser and Googled the name “Gary Shulze.” In addition to his participation on various literature councils and a personnel listing for the U of M faculty, there were death notices in both the Minneapolis
“Same total crime scene devastation as Geraghty,” Larry said. “No traces of evidence have been found that point to anything other than an accident involving a single victim.”
Larry sighed. “The last one before Hank Winters is the one we know about, the close one in terms of time and mileage.”
Cody said, “Karen Anthony.”
“Yeah, her,” Larry said. “Forty-six-year-old hospital consultant living in Jackson Hole and Boise. She’s a little different because her place in Jackson-actually Wilson, Wyoming, outside of town-was some kind of historic home she’d refurbished. Like Geraghty’s, the place is pretty remote and only accessible by a two-track through the trees. A neighbor saw a vehicle come down their shared road about a half hour before he noticed the flames up on the hill and called the fire department. The Teton County Sheriff told me they got a partial on the vehicle: dark blue or black SUV, single driver, light-colored license plates, which apparently means out-of-state but the witness couldn’t tell which.”
“That’s no help,” Cody said. “Finding an SUV in Wyoming is like looking for a fly at the dump-they’re everywhere.”
“I know,” Larry said.
“So,” Cody said, opening another window and typing in Karen Anthony’s name, “we’ve got three victims who basically died the same way, burned in their homes long before the fire could be put out. And the victims are all roughly middle-aged and professional. And alone. That’s a string of similarities but really not much to build on.”
“Exactly,” Larry said. “I spent half the day reading and rereading all of the police reports, trying to find something that linked them beyond the obvious and trying to find a connection to Hank Winters.”
“And?” Cody said.
“Nada,” Larry said. “The cops I talked to couldn’t come up with anything either. When I told them about the other cases, they were surprised there were similar incidents. So nobody has been looking into this as a pattern, including the FBI.”
“So,” Larry said, “I took a flyer and called Geraghty’s wife in Falls Church. I told her who I was and what I was investigating, and you know how that goes. She was falling all over herself trying to help. My guess is she hadn’t heard from the locals since shortly after the fire because they didn’t have anything to tell her. So she was excited I was working it.”
Cody nodded, then said, “Hmmm,” so Larry would know he was listening.
“I asked the usual. Any enemies, ex-wives, business problems or rivals, financial problems, et cetera.”
“Hmmm.”
Larry said, “What she told me was almost too good to be true. She said they’d had some real rough patches in their marriage but that Geraghty had straightened up in the last few years and everything was fucking wonderful. She said that was the worst part about it all-that things were going so well when it happened.”
Cody felt a jangle in his chest. He said, “Didn’t Shulze’s wife say kind of the same thing?”
“That hit me, too,” Larry said. “So I kept asking Mrs. Geraghty questions. She was a little reluctant at first, but she finally spilled the beans. Geraghty was a big drinker for a long time. A good-time-Charlie type who spent a lot of time on the road with other political types. Between the lines, I got the vibe he was abusive to her when he was on a toot. But she said after he got a DUI he finally entered a twelve-step program and cleaned up his act. She said he’s been stone-cold sober for the last two and a half years.
“So I called Pat Shulze,” Larry said. “After a while, I got the same story. Shulze had checked himself into rehab three years before because the university made him, and it took. She said it was like having the guy she married back. He was writing a book about his recovery and doing speaking engagements at faculty association meetings around the country, I guess. He even had a Web site on recovery where he answered questions and such.”
“Damn,” Cody said. “So what about Karen Anthony?”
Larry said, “I called her sister in Omaha. Same deal. She said Anthony was a hard partier all her life until the last five years, when she found Jesus and AA. So it looks like our guy is targeting ex-alcoholics.”
