me.”
“How’d you do that?” Victor’s voice loud in the small room.
“I found out my daughter was talking to this guy on the Internet. He sent her stuff—an MP3 player, earrings —“
Laura thought about Endicott’s evidence list. She had been right. It was Lundy. She looked at Buddy, who was still talking. It took her a moment to catch up with his words.
“… decided to intercept his messages. I knew he was a bad guy, a sexual predator. I’d been on the chief to let us start our own Internet sexual predator task force, but he wouldn’t go for it. This guy was out there, and I couldn’t just let him get away. So we set him up.”
“Set him up how?” Victor asked.
“I took over for my daughter. Pretended I was her.”
Victor whistled.
Laura said, “We? You said we set him up.”
“Me and Duffy.”
Duffy? Jesus.
Buddy slung himself into a chair. Now that he was talking, it all came out. How he and Heather Duffy had planned a sting, setting up a meeting with Lundy in City Park. “But he never showed. I think he saw something that tipped him off.”
Laura thought: Duffy would look like a cop even in a negligee.
“He made you,” Victor said. “He made you and he bolted, and on his way out of town, he saw Jessica Parris. And you kept this secret all this time? What about Lehman?”
“I thought it could be him.”
“That’s a huge coincidence, man.”
“Hey, his prints were on her lipstick.” For a moment, the arrogant Buddy was back. “It could have been an unrelated crime.”
“Come on! You expect us to believe that?”
“Where’s Lehman now?” Laura asked.
“First place I called. He’s at his house. He would have had time to get her to Bisbee. He had three hours.”
“But he didn’t,” said Laura.
Buddy looked at her defiantly.
“You didn’t go to his place, because you knew it wasn’t him.”
Buddy didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. Laura asked, “Did he send her a picture?”
He nodded. Didn’t look at her.
“What were you trying to do? Throw us off the track?” Victor again.
Buddy stood up and the plastic chair clattered, hit the wall. His fists clenched, he stepped toward Victor.
“Wait a minute!” Laura said, getting up to stand between them. “This isn’t doing us any good. We’ve got to find this guy.”
Buddy sat back down, passed a hand over his face. “Shit.”
Laura cleared her throat. “We’ve got to compare notes. We know a lot more than we think.” She looked at Buddy. “I know stuff about this guy now. The good news is, Jessica Parris was an anomaly. He keeps his victims for a while.”
Buddy Holland shot her a look of gratitude.
She ran down what she’d learned, her belief that he was reliving some kind of relationship with Misty de Seroux. “That could work for us.”
“Are you telling me he’s looking for girls that looked like this Misty?” Victor asked.
“I know—weird, but you’ve seen weirder.” She looked at Buddy. “I don’t think he’s going to kill her—not yet. I think we have some time.”
Buddy’s gaze locked with hers. “Then what are we doing hanging out here? We’ve got to get moving.”
“Where would we go? It’s better if we figure out a few things first.”
“He rapes and kills,” Buddy said bitterly. “We already know that. He’s probably already … oh shit.”
“If we recover her,” Laura said to Buddy, “we can work with that. Get her counseling.”
She reached into her briefcase and removed photographs of Alison Burns, Jessica Parris, and Linnet Sobek. And then she added a couple of candid photos Lundy had taken of Misty de Seroux.
She watched Buddy’s face. He drew in a quick breath.
“Look at them, how much they look alike,” Laura said quietly. “He wants a relationship. He wants someone like Misty.”
