The man was in his early twenties. Dark, handsome, wearing casual but expensive clothing. He stood before a clapboard house on stilts. Scribbled across the bottom, barely legible in the photocopy, was a note.
“Forever True, James.”
This was the guy the Riverside Sheriff’s Department believed had corresponded with Alison Burns via the Internet. Unfortunately, they had no more information since Alison Burns didn’t have a computer. Endicott believed she had been contacted by this man during her time on the computer at the public library.
Laura stared at the man, putting herself in Alison Burns’ shoes. He did not look like a child molester. He looked like a gorgeous, rich, young guy who could fit the bill in the Prince Charming department.
The kind of guy who could lure a precocious twelve-year-old.
Laura looked at the house. The fact that it was on stilts indicated ocean-front property—a beach house? The house was clapboard, a light color, and a saw palmetto grew near the steps. The Gulf Coast? And the man’s tanned beauty, the professional quality of the photograph—this could be a photo from a model’s portfolio.
She grabbed her notebook and jotted these new developments down.
There were serious differences. The age difference, the method used to kill the victims, the fact that Alison was kept and raped for days and Jessica was alive only a few hours and raped postmortem.
Jessica Parris’s pubic area had been shaved. The dress the killer brought was too small—the ME saying that Jessica was an immature fourteen-year-old. Laura wondered—could he have realized his mistake after he picked her up? And would the fact that she was older than he expected ruin it for him?
If it did, he might take it out on her. He might strangle her instead of “ease her into sleep,” as Endicott had described it.
Laura was even more impressed by the similarities. She had always felt that the answer to this problem was on the Internet.
If the guy who killed Jessica also killed Alison, it would be easy enough to eliminate Chuck Lehman. All they had to do was verify where he was at the time of Alison’s death.
Despite her doubts about Lehman, Laura added him to her list.
It was like looking at two different pictures. A strong case could be made either way.
Frustrated, she closed the notebook and stared out at the desert beyond her window. The answer, she knew, was in the cyber world.
She picked up Jay Ramsey’s card and made the call.
24
Wrought iron gates set into a seven-foot-high stone wall marked the entrance to the Alamo Farm on Fort Lowell Road. The last time she’d been here, the stone wall was waist-high and there were no gates. The trees beyond the wall were the same, though mature mesquite and Arizona walnut. As lush and healthy as she remembered.
As she approached the speaker set into the pole underneath the security camera, Laura buzzed her window down, looking at the wall. She couldn’t tell where the old section left off and the new one began. She did notice the embedded glass across the top.
The speaker crackled. “May I see some ID?” a voice asked.
Laura held up her badge toward the camera. She heard a whirr inside the camera, didn’t know what that was about. She waited for what seemed like eons before the gates rolled back and she could drive through.
