No answer.
'If you want to eat, you need to talk to me.'
Walter waited. Minutes passed. She wouldn't speak.
Walter stormed upstairs and paced around the kitchen, hands shaking. When he'd calmed down, he went to the closet to pray to Mary for guidance.
His Blessed Mother's voice was faint; he could barely hear her. Mary's voice grew fainter, as though she was dying, and finally she stopped talking.
He needed to go to Sinclair. He needed to pray in front of Mary – the real, true Mary, the one who had saved him. He needed to get down on his knees, press his head against the chapel floor and with his hands clasped together and tucked against his stomach, pray until his Blessed Mother spoke and told him what to do.
75
'I don't believe Sam Dingle killed Hale and Chen,' Darby said in greeting.
Commissioner Chadzynski sipped coffee from a fancy china cup. She was wearing a sharp Chanel suit. The lights in her office were dimmed. A radio set up on a bookcase played soft jazz music.
Darby gripped the back of a chair and leaned forward as she spoke. 'Dingle's sister said he left New England after his release from Sinclair. Then he came back once to collect his portion of the sale of his parents' estate, and while he was here he abducted Jennifer Sanders and brought her to that room next to the chapel, where he raped and eventually strangled her to death.
'Now, twenty-something years later, Fletcher wants us to believe Dingle's come back to his original hunting ground, only instead of strangling and raping women, Dingle is now abducting female college students, keeping them for weeks before shooting them in the back of the head and dumping their bodies with a statue of the Virgin Mary in their pockets. I'm not buying it.'
'Tell me why,' Chadzynski said.
'Margaret Anderson and Paula Kelly were strangled and dumped along the road like trash. Jennifer Sanders was strangled, raped and tortured and left to die. Emma Hale was kept alive for six months. Judith Chen was kept alive for several weeks. We also know that at some point the killer went back into Emma Hale's home to retrieve her necklace. In addition to being a considerable risk – he could have been easily caught – it shows a remarkable degree of empathy, even love.'
'From my understanding, serial killers evolve. Isn't it possible Dingle -'
'Strangling someone is an intimate, sexual act,' Darby said. 'Hale and Chen weren't strangled. They were shot in the back of the head. The first method is intimate, the second distant. Shooting the victims in the back of the head suggests the killer felt shame at having to kill them. A psychopath doesn't evolve into a killer who develops empathy for his victims. Dingle may very well have murdered Anderson, Kelly, and Sanders, but I don't believe he killed Hale and Chen. I believe we're dealing with a distinctly different killer.'
'I just got off the phone with the Saugus detective in charge of the Anderson and Kelly cases,' Chadzynski said. 'He's retired now, but he remembers management brought in a profiler to help build the cases against Dingle – Malcolm Fletcher. He supposedly visited Dingle at Sinclair.'
'Bryson believed that Fletcher was trying to throw us off the scent.'
'Tim also lied to us. I heard a copy of his confession. There may be some truth to it.'
'Fletcher called me again.' Darby told the commissioner about the phone call. 'I think Dingle is a smoke screen.'
'Do you think Fletcher will come after you?' Chadzynski asked.
'He's had plenty of opportunity.'
'Do you think he'll harm you?'
'No.'
'Did he threaten you in any way?'
'No,' Darby said.
'I'll keep the traps on your phones, but at some point, we'll have to pull your surveillance.'
'I think you should put them on Jonathan Hale.'
'Every expert I talked to says Malcolm Fletcher works alone.'
'Your FBI contact said Fletcher murdered the killers he hunted,' Darby said. 'I wouldn't be surprised if Fletcher already found Dingle.'
Chadzynski stared at the blinking lights on her phone for a long moment.
'If you want to find Fletcher,' Darby said, 'you need to put people on Jonathan Hale.'
There was a knock on the door. Chadzynski's secretary came in and placed the court order on the edge of the desk.
The commissioner waited until the door was shut before she spoke. 'The Herald reporter has decided to run the story about the remains being found at Sinclair.'
'Did you remind him it might cause Hannah's abductor to panic and kill her?'
'I did. The story will be on the front page of tomorrow's paper.'
Darby picked up the copies of the court order. 'If there isn't anything else, I'd like to get to work on this.'
'Where are you going to start?'
'The Shriners Burn Center,' Darby said. 'Coop and Woodbury are going to hit the dermatologists' offices before they close for the day.'
'I'll see if I can locate Jonathan Hale,' Chadzynski said, reaching for her phone. Malcolm Fletcher had traded his hotel room for a safe house in Wellesley, a suburb twenty minutes outside of Boston. Ali Karim had made all the arrangements.
The place was fully furnished. Fletcher sat at a small antique desk reading a computer printout of Walter Smith's patient file from Shriners. He had managed to hack his way past the hospital's firewall and into the patient database. Once Walter's file was printed, Fletcher deleted it from the hospital's computer system.
Walter's last corrective surgery took place in 1987, when he was eighteen. The address listed in the file was an apartment building in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Fletcher had checked the address earlier in the day. Walter had moved out in 1992. The forwarding address was a studio apartment in the Back Bay. The landlord had faxed Karim a copy of the rental agreement. Walter didn't leave a forwarding address, but his social security number was listed on the application.
The quickest way to find Walter's current address would be through tax records. That meant hacking into the IRS's computer network.
At the moment, a UNIX program was running, quietly searching for a back door past the IRS firewall. To slip in and out without leaving a digital footprint or, worse, triggering an alarm, required a tremendous amount of patience and skill. One wrong move and federal agents would be standing on his doorstep.
Malcolm Fletcher picked up the Virgin Mary statue he had removed from inside the cardboard box at the Sinclair chapel and moved it between his fingers as he reached for the phone.
'Have you changed your mind about meeting Walter, Mr Hale?'
'No.'
'Make sure your phone is charged,' Fletcher said, watching the computer screen. 'I'll have Walter's address tonight, tomorrow at the latest.'
76
The hospital director for the Shriners Burn Center, Dr Tobias, sat behind his cluttered desk and watched Darby over his bifocals. He hadn't read the court order. He had handed it off to the hospital's legal counsel, who took his sweet goddamn time reviewing it. Jesus Christ, hurry up. Finally, the lawyer gave Tobias the go-ahead.
Tobias, round and bowlegged, escorted her through gleaming white hallways. Behind the closed doors Darby
