He was right. I would have noticed if someone had been watching. 'Any
possibility that Derringer did it all and then wrote to the paper as
the Long Hauler when he got caught on the Martin rape?' Clearly
Derringer was benefiting from these letters, and given what he did to
Kendra, he certainly had it in him to rape and kill other women.
But O'Donnell was already shaking his head. 'Doesn't look like it. No
way he could've sent them himself. The jail reads all outgoing
prisoner mail. There's always the possibility that he could sneak a
letter to a visitor or something, but it doesn't look like he could be
the guy. We've already got him solid in Oregon during two of the
out-of-state murders. He had a parole meeting with Renshaw during one
of them and was doing time on the Clackamas County attempted sod for
another.'
It looked like we had a serial killer on our hands. 'Any other cases
in the Cold Case Database that match?' I asked. The computerized data
bank was a partnership among law enforcement agencies in the Pacific
Northwest and included details of all unsolved homicides.
'Nope, nothing obvious,' he said. 'Our guy's MO seems to be street
girls, strangled and dumped outside so it takes awhile to find them.
Looks like he copped to all of them in his letter.'
Duncan hung up the phone. 'Governor's office,' he said, by way of
explanation. 'They're all over me. Jackson's under pressure to pardon
Taylor and is looking for something to hang his hat on. Fucking pussy.
He won't admit it's because of the death penalty. Doesn't want to lose
eastern Oregon.'
Bud Jackson was a Portland liberal who managed to win a statewide race
only by sending his wife, the daughter of a prominent local ranching
family, on the campaign trail throughout conservative rural Oregon.
'If he can say Taylor might be innocent, he could do the pardon and
save face.' Duncan stopped, seeming to register my presence for the
first time since I sat down. 'This OK with you, Tim?' he asked,
tilting his head toward me.
'Yeah, I'm going to need some help with the Martin family. I was just
giving Sam what we got out of the letters.'
'Well, it's nice to see you two sharing the sandbox again. So where
are we this morning?' he asked, folding his arms in front of him. 'I
see we weren't able to keep the Gorge search quiet.'
'No, sir, we weren't,' O'Donnell said, laughing at the obvious
understatement.
'They find anything?' Griffith asked.
'Yes, miraculously.' Tim turned toward me. 'To get you up to speed,
Kincaid, the Long Hauler said he threw Zimmerman's purse from his car
past a bend in the road up the Gorge, about a quarter mile from the
freeway, so we sent the Explorers out there yesterday to dig around
along the road out there.' He turned back toward Griffith. 'They
spent all day searching yesterday, but no luck. The bureau was about
to call everybody in, but they wanted to make sure they didn't screw it
up. Don't want to pull a Washington, DC have some old guy's dog dig it
up next year from right under their noses. Anyway, the detective
supervising the search pulls out a park map and talks to every Explorer
to make sure he marks off where they've searched. Turns out there's a
monster patch of blackberry bushes no one wanted to touch. About a
quarter of a football field, four feet high. Now most people would've
let it slide, thinking no way a purse can get in there.'
I nodded. Blackberry bushes are dense and woody. You can't get
through them without a hatchet. I knew from the countless golf balls
I'd lost to them that a purse thrown on a blackberry bush would bounce
off.
'But this guy is ex-military, total sphincter boy. He checked with the
parks department and found out they started letting those bushes grow
two years ago, meaning they weren't there when Zimmerman was killed. So
he gets everybody clearing out blackberry bushes all night. They found
it early this morning,' he said, sounding more excited. 'They actually
found Jamie Zimmerman's purse, and it's pretty much where the guy said
it would be. Still has a bunch of stuff in it. Cigarettes, makeup,
and, most critically, a fake ID issued to one Jamie Zimmerman. A
detective told me he got chills when he found it. Her real ID was in
the pocket of her jeans along with a condom and a lipstick, and we
figured that was all she carried. We never even knew to look for a
purse.'
'So we've got him tied to everything now,' Duncan said. 'Jesus, five
dead women, Sam's vie, God knows how many others. Do the police have
any leads on this guy?'
'No. Whoever he is, his luck is unbelievable. Crime lab says there's
no DNA on either letter. The Cold Case Databank entries for all four
of the other cases indicated there was too much deterioration for
testable DNA samples, just like with Zimmerman. I had IA call the
hometown police agencies to verify the computer information, and I
heard from them right before I came down. Nothing.'
'Were there any other strangling cases in the database without DNA
evidence?' I asked.
