Burning Time

33

“Newton, honey. You got to do something about that dripping tap.” That was the last thing Rose said to him as he walked out the door that morning. You got to do something about the faucet. It left a bad taste in his mouth as he headed to work. She had been saying the same damn thing for weeks, and she knew she could get it done just as easy as he could, maybe easier.

Sometimes he couldn’t understand why she didn’t see he had something on his mind—didn’t sleep the whole night, worrying—and leave him alone about faucets.

He didn’t like got-to-dos.

If Milt got a match on that body, and it turned out to be that girl from New York, then he’d have a big got-to-do. She died in his jurisdiction. That made it his case. He couldn’t just close it up because there was no physical evidence. He’d have to investigate it. But hell, there were not really enough of them to start running around asking questions. Shit.

Newt half hoped Milt and his friend, the coroner from Twentynine Palms, would get together on this and find the same MO on the two bodies. Then they could inform the FBI at VICAP and let them deal with it as a serial murder thing. Never mind that it was just two. More than one was good enough. Those guys had the experts and the computers. They were used to checking and cross-checking every kind of killer and every kind of bizarre twist the human mind could think of.

But even though Milt and his friend agreed there was a striking resemblance between the injuries on the chest, even though the two girls did appear to have been tortured and were found in similar circumstances, that’s all there was. They had not been murdered in the usual way. For homicides, you needed more than a body. You needed a murder weapon. You needed a place of death, some indication someone else was there.

Newton Regis certainly couldn’t go to the FBI and say he had a serial killer. Yes, sir, and by the way, sir, the desert did it.

Maybe the guy hadn’t worked his way up to killing them yet. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. In any case, at the moment it was some kind of sex crime thing. And they certainly didn’t have a Sex Crime Unit in Potoway Village. So Rose should understand he had a problem, if the girl Milt had on ice was the girl from New York.

Newt got in at eight and sat at his desk gloomily until ten, when Milt finally called him. They had a positive ID.