PrivateSector

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Anne Carrol hadn’t yet hit the news. Yet he was sure that within an hour her name would be the topic du jour in country stores, old ladies’ knitting groups, and police stations nationwide. Unbelievable what that monster did to her, folks would say, wagging their fingers and looking plainly horrified.

If Fiorio garnered attention because of her fame and popularity, the pain inflicted on Anne Carrol’s fiercely punished body would cause an entire nation to clench its teeth and cry for the murderous bastard to be caught.

Distasteful, but she had to be done in just that way. He sprayed another dose of Windex on the mirror and rubbed with enough vigor to purge every last trace of toothpaste or spit that might’ve splattered the surface. It was the sixth cleaning. But after all, he had spent a lot of time at the mirror, and there was no sense making a mistake at this stage. Modern techniques being what they were, DNA could be collected off a pinhead these days. The living room was done, every last surface scrubbed and rescrubbed with the best solvents money could buy. The closet-spotless. The kitchen sparkled. He had even rented a vacuum, for four hours running it back and forth and sucking up every particle and dustball. He had dumped the bags in a garbage receptacle at a mall three miles away. The clothes he’d worn over the past three weeks, the sheets he slept on, the pillows, everything had been hauled off and incinerated. The bicycle was buried in a seven-foot hole in some thick woods.

A spanking new briefcase rested on the spotless table in the living room, and the final two profiles were inside. His next kill wouldn’t be done in this city, however. He had planned all along to ratchet up the heat here, and do her elsewhere. Her death would be different and no connection to the awful killer in D. C. would be imagined or construed. This wasn’t her hometown anyway, was it? That she’d come here wasn’t in his plans and he regarded it as a terrible inconvenience. Well, he’d just have to find a way to draw her out.

He’d heard on the morning news that the corpse of a twenty-year-old GW student named John Negroponte had been discovered twelve miles outside D. C. on the canal towpath. From the damage to his bike and the catastrophic dent in his head, the police were assuming he’d been biking too fast, lost control, and slammed into a tree. A tragic accident; he probably hit a rut and somehow his helmet slipped off. A memorial service was scheduled at the GW University chapel, and the public was invited to attend.

Two of the three rental cars were parked in the lot that bordered the hotel, freshly scrubbed and detailed, doors unlocked, keys tucked under the driver’s mats. In three hours, two associates would appear to drive the cars back to Philadelphia and their rental agencies. He’d be long gone, on the far side of Baltimore, driving the last rental car north to Boston for the next kill.

The city of Washington would hold its breath for two or three days, and wonder where he’d strike next. After a week, the FBI and cops would be scratching their heads. On the corpses’ palms he had contracted for ten victims. The L. A. Killer promised five and delivered five. Their profilers had told them that he treated this as a wicked game of wits and would stake everything on winning.

They conditioned themselves with their own procedures and techniques, and were always astonished when the killer didn’t play by the very rules they’d assumed he’d set.