that’s what the ME figured, but it’s still a guess. You know as well as I do we can’t pin it down exactly, specially when you’re looking at decomposed remains.’
‘Even so, it’s about the same time frame we have here.’ One week. He wondered if that’s all the time they had to find Cassidy. One week. It wasn’t much. ‘What about the phone call?’ he asked.
‘It came from a pay phone outside a 7-Eleven. Nobody there remembered anybody using the phone around the time the call was placed.’
‘Anything else I should know about Elyse Andersen?’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘What was she like? I saw her picture in the Sentinel. Good-looking woman.’
‘That she was. Twenty-six years old. Blond. She was a competitive triathlete. She’d been training for an upcoming event.’
‘That’s interesting.’ McCabe said. ‘Dubois was young, blond, and an athlete. High school soccer player. Prospect for all-state this year.’
‘Could be a coincidence,’ said Cahill.
‘Maybe,’ said McCabe. ‘Or maybe he likes blonds with firm muscles and healthy hearts.’ McCabe told Cahill about the disappearance of Lucinda Cassidy. A blond and a runner. Training for a 10K. Andersen. Dubois. Cassidy. Three young blonds. Three athletes. Coincidence? McCabe didn’t think so. Neither did Cahill.
‘I’ll e-mail you the case files, but I want you to promise to keep me in the loop. Specially if you find something. I’ll reopen this case in a minute if I think you can give us something to go on.’
‘That’s a deal.’
All of McCabe’s detectives plus a few others on loan from the Crimes Against Property unit were crowded into the small fourth-floor conference room. Some were standing against the wall, others sitting. Most were sipping coffee from paper cups, eating bagels and doughnuts, and basically bullshitting when McCabe arrived. Bill Fortier was hunched silently at the head of the table with a worried look on his face. Tom Tasco was reading the Press Herald coverage of the Dubois murder. A detective from the other side of the building was peering over his shoulder. McCabe’s picture, taken at the press conference, was on the front page next to images of Shockley and Katie Dubois. The photographer had caught him off guard, a questioning scowl on his face. He seemed to be looking into the distance, and McCabe guessed it was snapped just as he had seen his mystery woman take off. Maggie, who was leaning back in her chair, long legs propped against the side of the table, quipped, ‘Nice shot, McCabe. Makes you look like you not only want to catch the bad guy, you want to eat him for lunch.’
‘Yeah, Mike, you’ve gotta learn to smile for the camera,’ added Bill Bacon.
Ignoring the hazing, McCabe poured coffee for himself from the urn just outside the door before sitting down.
Fortier began. ‘Okay, let’s start with Dubois. What leads do we have? What leads was Shockley talking about?’
‘Shockley was mostly blowing smoke for the media, Bill,’ said Tom Tasco. ‘The only thing that remotely qualifies as a lead is a surveillance video of a vehicle that arrived in the right place at what we think may be the right time.’ He filled the others in on what the moving company’s security camera had recorded and what Starbucks had built from it.
‘I’ve got the DMV reports.’ Eddie Fraser was waving a batch of printouts with one hand and eating a chocolate-covered doughnut with the other. There were bits of chocolate around his mouth.
‘That was fast,’ said McCabe.
‘That’s ’cause we’re good,’ said Fraser. ‘Like we agreed, we covered all of Maine, all of New Hampshire, and we threw in Massachusetts north of Boston as a wild card. Owners of late-model Lexus or BMW SUVs who are doctors, surgeons, pathologists. We added biologists at the high school and college level, figuring they ought to be good at cutting up frogs and mice, if not people. We came up with four hundred and sixty-two names.’
‘If we’re talking about people who’re good at cutting up animals,’ asked Will Messing, ‘why not check butchers? They cut up animals all day.’ The others looked at Messing as if he’d descended from another planet.
‘Butchers?’ said Maggie. ‘You mean like grocery store butchers? You think a butcher could have done this?’
‘Why not? They’re good at cutting meat, and who says a butcher can’t be a freak?’
‘It’s a hell of a leap from a surgeon to a butcher,’ said Tom Tasco.
‘Use your imagination,’ Messing persisted. ‘My brother-in-law’s a butcher. You should see him butterfly a leg of lamb. It’s like an art form.’
‘C’mon, Will, for Christ’s sake, we’re talking about a teenage girl here. Not a leg of lamb,’ said Carl Sturgis.
‘You want to make your brother-in-law a suspect?’ Tasco laughed.
‘I think we’re getting a little off track,’ said Maggie.
‘Okay, okay.’ Messing shrugged at them. ‘Just trying to think outside the box.’ Clearly he felt the others didn’t recognize creative thinking when they heard it.
‘Anyway,’ Eddie Fraser continued, ‘I cross-checked the DMV list with AutoTrack. Numbers went up to four ninety. Obviously we’ve got to run down that list. Separate the probables and possibles from the impossibles and the unlikelys. We’ve already started, but with four hundred and ninety names we’re going to need some help.’
‘Well, you should be able to disqualify a lot of them right off the bat,’ said McCabe. ‘Bill, can you assign some additional detectives and patrol officers to help Tom and Eddie run down the list?’
Fortier nodded. ‘No problem. Anything else?’
‘Yes,’ said Tasco. ‘We’re reinterviewing Katie’s friends at school. Plus her teammates on the soccer team. We want to see if any of them remember anything they didn’t want to tell us when they thought she was still alive. Sometimes kids hold stuff back they think their friends wouldn’t want cops to know.’
Maggie said, ‘I’m sorry, but that whole scenario just doesn’t work for me. I don’t buy that the kids she was with had anything to do with this. My bet is talking to them won’t get us anywhere. So let’s start with what we do know. We’ve got a sixteen-year-old high school girl. No Goody Two-Shoes, but not a bad or a wild kid either. Good athlete. Okay student. Anyway, Wednesday night she’s out cruising around the Old Port with a group of friends. She has a fight with her boyfriend and storms off. The others figure she’s just blowing off steam and they’ll run into her later — ’
‘Which they never do.’
Maggie continued. ‘So is she heading for home? We don’t know. If so, how does she plan to get there? We don’t know. She doesn’t have a car, and Jack’s checked every taxi company in town and come up empty. It’s three or four miles to her house. Walkable but still a pretty good hike. Plus she never got there. So what the hell happened to her?’
‘Somebody grabs her off the street, shoves her into his car, and off they go,’ said Tasco.
‘Unlikely in the Old Port,’ said McCabe. ‘Too many people around. Maybe farther out, or maybe she hitches a ride.’
‘Only if she knew the guy,’ said Maggie. ‘Her mother insists she’d never get in a car with a strange guy, assuming her mother knows what she’s talking about.’
‘Her parents told you they were home from 6:00 P.M. on, so they would’ve heard her if she ever arrived?’ asked Fortier.
‘Yeah. It’s the same thing they told Tom and Eddie. We have no reason to doubt it.’
‘Okay,’ said McCabe, ‘let’s say she knew the guy at least well enough to accept a ride from him. So who does she know who also has the skills to be the freak? Her doctor, maybe?’
‘I got the name of their PCP from Katie’s mother,’ said Maggie. ‘It’s a female doc at the family health place on India. Dr. Annabelle Blum. We haven’t had a chance to interview her yet.’
‘Okay,’ said McCabe, ‘let’s scratch Dr. Blum. At least for now. How about a biology teacher at the high school?’
‘Portland High has three biology teachers,’ said Fraser. ‘The department head’s a gray-haired sixty-one-year- old woman named Angela Kovaleski. Katie was in her class last year. Got a B. Teacher number two is younger but also female — ’
Sturgis interrupted. ‘We seem to be excluding people because they’re female. Do we know for sure the killer’s
