Kendra gave what I thought was a growl of exasperation into the pillow.
But when she didn't lift her head, I realized she was crying. I held
her and patted her on the back. There was nothing to say.
Once the tears had stopped and she was breathing regularly again, she
wanted details on where the Long Hauler investigation stood.
'Well, you already knew that a girl named Jamie Zimmerman was killed a
few years ago. Her body was found in the Gorge, not too far from
where' I didn't know how to refer to what happened to her with her: Not
too far from where you were dumped? were found? 'from where the
ambulance picked you up. Like the paper says, a couple named Margaret
Landry and Jesse Taylor were convicted of killing Jamie, but they claim
they're innocent. You knew that Derringer's attorney was suggesting in
your trial that whoever did the bad things to you had also killed
Jamie. With these letters, it's starting to look like one person,
someone other than Margaret Landry and Jesse Taylor, killed not only
Jamie but four other women. And he's claiming he was one of the people
involved in what happened to you.'
'Will the police be able to find out who the Long Hauler is?' she
asked. I wanted so much to assure her that they would, that we'd nail
him and justice would be served. But I learned a long time ago that
you should never make promises to victims unless you don't mind
breaking them.
'I know they're trying. They've got the FBI involved. The police
chief and the DA are making this a top priority. The feeling is that
if the guy's writing letters to the newspaper and naming himself, he's
escalating.'
I could tell from the way she looked at me that she didn't know what I
meant.
'The suspicion is that he'll start to kill even faster,' I explained.
'That he'll come up with a signature or something now that he's
interested in notoriety.'
'Oh, so that's why they want to catch him, to keep him from getting to
anyone else. They don't actually care about the people he already
hurt,' she said.
'Hey, you know that's not what I meant. Kendra, the man has killed
five women. Of course they want to catch him. I was just trying to
tell you how much this matters to the police.'
She was quiet while it all sank in. 'I guess I wasn't really thinking
of it like that. That guy killed other people. And he meant to kill
me.' She looked dazed. 'I knew you'd charged him with attempted
murder and all, but I never thought of it as someone trying to kill me.
That I'm lucky I lived through it.'
'Shows you're a survivor, kiddo. You're tougher than him; you beat
him.'
'Do the police know anything yet?' she asked.
'Well, enough to think that this guy did the things he said he did. The
paper didn't mention all the details, but the letter included pretty
specific descriptions of all the attacks. The information he provided
about what happened to you and Jamie was accurate, and it's stuff he
couldn't have taken from a newspaper or something. Also, the police
have found unsolved homicides that match the other murders.'
'Did they find anything when they searched the Gorge?' she asked.
'Yes, I was going to get to that. Again, the paper didn't publish this
detail, so it's important that you keep this between us for now. But
the Long Hauler told police he'd taken Jamie Zimmerman's purse and
thrown it off the side of the road in the Gorge. Using that
information, the police were able to find the purse, and it's
absolutely Jamie Zimmerman's. It even had her fake ID in it.'
'I guess that's another thing that makes her case like mine, huh? That
he left us in the Gorge and took our purses?'
I hadn't thought about that before. Lisa Lopez had had the prescience
to argue that Kendra's case was just like the murder of Jamie
Zimmerman, but what exactly had she said about it?
I went out to the Jetta to grab what had grown into several volumes of
files on the Derringer case. I knew I'd seen the trial transcripts in
a binder somewhere. After Duncan turned the case over to O'Donnell,
O'Donnell must have ordered them so that he and Duncan could get up to
speed. Something was nagging at the forefront of my brain, something
someone had said during the trial. I flipped through the transcript
pages frantically. It was going to be lost if I didn't find a trigger
to pull it forward.
Then I spotted it.
'What's going on?' Kendra asked.
'Wait a second, Kendra.' What else had I missed? I started from the
beginning of the file and reread everything. When I was finished, I
knew exactly where I had gone off track. It wasn't just what someone
had said at trial. I'd also missed the Tasmanian Devil.
