returned to their beds or their late-night snacks or their mind-numbing TV. But their vigilance didn’t flag; the moment they stepped inside, every one of them locked their doors and windows carefully — to make certain that the strangler would not wreak his carnage in their homes.
Though in Clara Steading’s case, her diligence in securing the deadbolt and chains had a somewhat different effect: locking the Hunter inside with her.
“Jesus,” Altman muttered. “That’s just what happened in the Kimberly Banning case, how the perp got inside. He set fire to a car.”
“A convertible,” Wallace added. “And then I went back and found some passages that’d been marked. One of them was about how the killer had stalked his victim by pretending to work for the city and trimming the plants in a park across from her apartment.”
This was just how the first victim of the Greenville Strangler, the pretty grad student, had been stalked.
Wallace pointed out several other passages, marked with asterisks. There were margin notes too. One said, “Check this one out. Important.” Another jotting was “Used distraction.” And: “Disposing of body. Note this.”
“So the killer’s a copycat,” Altman murmured. “He used the novel for research.”
Which meant that there could be evidence in the book that might lead to the perp: fingerprints, ink, handwriting. Hence, the reporter’s
Altman stared at the melodramatic dust jacket on the novel — a drawing of a man’s silhouette peering into the window of a house. The detective pulled on his own latex gloves and slipped the book into an evidence envelope. He nodded at the reporter and said a heartfelt “Thanks. We haven’t had a lead on this one in over eight months.”
Walking into the office next to his — that of his assistant, a young crew-cut detective named Josh Randall — he instructed the man to take the book to the county lab for analysis. When he returned, Wallace was still sitting expectantly in the hard chair across from Altman’s desk.
Altman wasn’t surprised he hadn’t left. “And the quid pro quo?” the detective asked. “For your good deed?”
“I want an exclusive. What else?”
“I figured.”
Altman didn’t mind this in theory; cold cases were bad for the department’s image and solving cold cases was good for a cop’s career. Not to mention that there was still a killer out there. He’d never liked Wallace, though, who always seemed a little out of control in a spooky way and was as irritating as most crusaders usually are.
“Okay, you’ve got an exclusive,” Altman said. “I’ll keep you posted.” He rose then paused. Waited for Wallace to leave.
“Oh, I’m not going anywhere, my friend.”
“This’s an official investigation—”
“And it wouldn’t’ve been one without me. I want to write this one from the inside out. Tell my readers how a homicide investigation works from your point of view.”
Quentin Altman argued some more but in the end he gave in, feeling he had no choice. “All right. But just don’t get in my way. You do that, you’re out of here.”
“Wouldn’t think of it.” Wallace frowned an eerie look into his long, toothy face. “I might even be helpful.” Maybe it was a joke but there was nothing humorous about the delivery. He then looked up at the detective. “So whatta we do next?”
“Well,
“But—”
“Relax, Wallace. Investigations take time. Sit back, take your jacket off. Enjoy our wonderful coffee.”
Wallace glanced at the closet that served as the police station’s canteen. He rolled his eyes and the ominous tone of earlier was replaced with a laugh. “Funny. I didn’t know they still made instant.”
The detective winked and ambled down the hall on his aching bones.
Quentin Altman hadn’t run the Greenville Strangler case.
He’d worked on it some — the whole department’d had a piece of the case — but the officer in charge had been Bob Fletcher, a sergeant who’d been on the force forever. Fletcher, who’d never remarried after his wife left him some years before, and was childless, had devoted his life to his job after the divorce and seemed to take his inability to solve the Strangler case hard; the soft-spoken man had actually given up a senior spot in Homicide and transferred to Robbery. Altman was now glad for the sergeant’s sake that there was a chance to nail the killer who’d eluded him.
Altman wandered down to Robbery with the news about the novel and to see if Fletcher knew anything about it. The sergeant, though, was out in the field at the moment and so Altman left a message and then dove into the cluttered and oppressively hot records room. He found the Strangler files easily; the folders sported red stripes on the side, a harsh reminder that, while this might’ve been a cold case, it was still very much open.
Returning to his office, he sat back, sipping the, yeah, disgusting instant coffee, and read the file, trying to ignore Wallace’s incessant scribbling on his steno pad, the scratchy noise irritatingly audible throughout the office. The events of the murders were well documented. The perp had broken into two women’s apartments and strangled them. There’d been no rape, sexual molestation or postmortem mutilation. Neither woman had ever been stalked or threatened by former boyfriends and, though Kimberly had recently purchased some condoms, none of her friends knew that she’d been dating. The other victim, Becky Winthrop, her family said, hadn’t dated for over a year.
Sergeant Fletcher had carried out a by-the-book investigation but most killings of this sort, without witnesses, motive or significant trace found at the scene, are generally not solved without the help of an informant — often a friend or acquaintance of the perp. But, despite extensive press coverage of the investigation and pleas on TV by the mayor and Fletcher, no one had come forward with any information about possible suspects.
An hour later, just as he closed the useless file, Altman’s phone rang. The documents department had blown up images of the handwriting and was prepared to compare these to any samples found elsewhere, though until such specimens were found the officers could do nothing.
The techs had also checked for any impression evidence — to see if the killer had written something on, say, a Post-it note on top of one of the pages — but found nothing.
A ninhydrin analysis revealed a total of nearly two hundred latent fingerprints on the three pages on which the marked paragraphs appeared and another eighty on the jacket. Unfortunately many of them were old and only fragments. Technicians had located a few that were clear enough to be identified and had run them through the FBI’s integrated automated fingerprint identification system in West Virginia. But all the results had come back negative.
The cover of the book, wrapped in print-friendly cellophane, yielded close to four hundred prints but they too were mostly smudges and fragments. IAFIS had provided no positive IDs for these either.
Frustrated, he thanked the technician and hung up.
“So what was that about?” Wallace asked, looking eagerly at the sheet of paper in front of Altman, which contained both notes on the conversation he’d just had — and a series of compulsive doodles.
He explained to the reporter about the forensic results.
“So no leads,” Wallace summarized and jotted a note, leaving the irritated detective to wonder why the reporter’d actually found it necessary to write this observation down.
As he gazed at the reporter an idea occurred to Altman and he stood up abruptly. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Your crime scene.”
“Mine?” Wallace asked, scrambling to follow the detective as he strode out the door.
The library near Gordon Wallace’s apartment, where he’d checked out the novel
