was essential.
Most of the time he used a stolen identity only once or twice before shedding it the same way a molting snake discards its skin. As long as he was careful to keep any resulting bills under five hundred dollars, no one paid much attention-not the cops and not the banks, either. The banks quietly wrote off any and all disputed bills, mostly because they didn’t want to let on that their supposedly secure systems were being breached.
At Hertz, Peter had used a phony credit card belonging to Matt Morrison to rent the vehicle he had driven to Sedona. He had done so in hopes of adding another possible suspect to the investigative mix into Morgan’s death. Now that the damage was done, he wouldn’t use it again; he ran the card itself through his shredder.
So far the only major exception to Peter’s use-it-and-lose-it identity philosophy was Manny Wilkins, Peter’s first fully cyber offspring, a fictional creation who was proving to be exceptionally successful in the real world. Manny Wilkins had come into being through a complex trail of fake and official documents it had taken Peter two years to pull together. Known as a canny businesman with a Las Vegas address, Manny was listed as the founder and CEO of Wilkins LLC and also as the bottom-line owner of Singleatheart.com. It was Manny who received all the checks and paid all resulting expenses and taxes before moving any remaining monies to numbered accounts in a series of offshore banks. Other identities came and went. Manny remained because, to Peter’s astonishment, Singleatheart had turned into an inadvertent gold mine, and as long as all resulting taxes were paid on time, no one looked too closely.
The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on Peter. He owed much of his good fortune to Rita-poor, dear departed Rita, who had stupidly refused to give him a divorce-or at least the divorce he had wanted. She had told him once that the only way he would get rid of her was over her dead body, which was exactly how he had done it-by making sure Rita was dead.
Their hike up Camelback Mountain had been part of a carefully orchestrated reconciliation after a period of marital turbulence. There had been no witnesses when Rita fell several hundred feet to her death. She had been so surprised when Peter had turned on her with a drawn weapon in his hand that she’d leaped backward and fallen all on her own. He’d made sure there was no one around to say Rita hadn’t tripped and fallen exactly the way her grieving husband claimed she had.
Had Peter carried a big insurance policy on Rita, things might have been different. That would have given him a motive. As it was, after a fairly cursory investigation, Rita’s death was declared an accident. That was done over the objections of Rita’s mother, who insisted Peter had killed her daughter. The mother-in-law couldn’t prove it, however, and neither could anyone else.
Rita had been gone for ten years now. Peter’s friends at work kept telling him that he needed to get over her and move on. They kept trying to fix him up with someone else, but Peter wasn’t interested in another wife. In fact, he was hung up on something else entirely.
Peter had liked how he felt as he watched Rita go tumbling helplessly down the steep hillside, flopping like a limp rag doll as she flew from one boulder to the next. He had exulted in hearing her fading screams as they melted into the far distance, and he had known right then that he would kill again when the first opportunity presented itself-even if he didn’t know exactly how or when.
In contemplating this new compulsion, and before taking any action, Peter had become a student of murders. He searched out as many cases as he could find and sorted out who got away with it, who didn’t, and all the hows and whys in between. As he researched his newly chosen field, Peter was struck by one recurring theme: how many stupid killers, mostly men lacking in imagination, killed first one wife or girlfriend and then another in exactly the same way. Later, once the hapless killers were caught, they were always astonished that some detective or other happened to pick up on the obvious similarities between cases.
Peter Winter was a doctor. That meant he was smarter than the average bear to begin with. Determined not to make the same kinds of fatal errors, he realized there was no need to kill his own cheating wife when he could always murder someone else’s.
Peter had earned his way through school by being a geek. Putting his well-honed technical skills to work, he set about creating Singleatheart. In doing so, he discovered that the world was full of women just like Rita, all of them admitted cheaters and all available for the taking. Their numbers alone had been an amazing wake-up call. It turned out they were everywhere. As Peter scanned through the various profiles each week, that was what he went looking for-geographically diverse women who looked like carbon copies of Rita and deserved what was about to happen to them. By murdering women who bore an amazing resemblance to Rita Winter, Peter was able to do away with his wife over and over without ever getting caught.
Peter had covered his tracks by working through websites based in Russia. When it became apparent that he’d need a U.S.-based server farm, he had chosen one in Deadwood, South Dakota, for three reasons. For starters, the name appealed to him. Deadwood had a certain ring to it, and that was how he liked to think of cheating women in general-as so much deadwood. He also liked the fact that Deadwood was a hell of a long way from his home and respectable lifestyle in Phoenix, or from Manny Wilkins’s phony condo office just off the Strip in Vegas. As long as Peter was careful to avoid attracting the attention of the feds, crossing multiple jurisdictional lines made things far tougher on the cops and easier for him.
Third, the server’s South Dakota location was attractive for economic, moneygrubbing reasons. With gold mining not exactly booming at the moment, local city and state officials had enacted a series of changes designed to attract and keep new businesses. The resulting tax savings meant that the IP server Manny had chosen was able to do the same job for a lot less money than vendors in other locations.
Securing Singleatheart’s business had been carried out by one of Manny Wilkins’s minions-Peter Winter in yet another cyber guise. Once the site was up and running, all Peter had to do was sit back and rake in the dough and the occasional victim.
On that particular Wednesday morning, Peter turned to his computer with no inkling that something was amiss, not until he went scrolling through the credit-card information from that week’s server-farm data dump. What jumped out at him from the very first listing of the day wasn’t the person’s name, Alison Reynolds, but part of her address-Sedona. The place where Peter had driven on Monday morning. Where he’d used a hammer to beat Morgan Forester’s pretty little face to a bloodied pulp. Where he’d managed to leave the murder weapon in the back of the victim’s husband’s pickup truck.
Was it merely a coincidence that someone else from Sedona was venturing through the Singleatheart website barely two days later?
No, Peter Winter told himself. There are no coincidences.
But there was something about the name Alison Reynolds that was spookily familiar. Just for argument’s sake, Peter went ahead and Googled the name to see what might come up. There was far more material than he’d expected, and none of it was good news for Peter Winter. A former TV anchor, Alison Reynolds now claimed to be a different kind of journalist-a blogger with an extensive following of fans. Over the course of the past two years, she had been involved in several high-profile homicide cases in Arizona and California. She had a concealed-weapon permit, and she was evidently well acquainted with a Yavapai County homicide detective named Dave Holman. And she was remodeling a house with Build It construction-the company owned by Bryan Forester.
The light came on in Peter’s head. That was why Ali Reynolds’s name was familiar: He had seen it mentioned somewhere in Morgan Forester’s computer files.
That’s not good, either, Peter told himself. Not good at all.
Was she nosing around because Morgan had confided in her, or was she doing her snooping on behalf of Morgan’s husband? Either way, Alison Reynolds was a woman who would bear careful watching.
From past experience, Peter knew that often the best way to watch someone like that was through her computer. A less adept man might have unleashed the dogs of war. Peter Winter didn’t need to. Ali Reynolds had unwittingly wandered into the world of Singleatheart, so she had also opened her computer files to the Trojan horse he kept hidden there. The next time Ali Reynolds opened her computer, he’d be there, too, able to follow her every keystroke.
Peter didn’t have a doubt in the world that observing what she said and did there would tell him everything he needed to know. And though he was tracking her activities online, he knew that if he needed to, he’d be able to take her out the old-fashioned way-just like he had Morgan Forester.
After dealing with her mother’s meltdown, Ali had no intention of going back to see Jacky Jackson. When she left the Sugarloaf, she headed for Andante Drive. She had just parked and walked inside when her phone rang.
