Split Second

CHAPTER 48

Assistant Director Cunningham had commandeered a small conference room for them on the first level. Tully was so excited about having windows—two that looked into the woods at the edge of the training field—he didn’t care that he had to walk up and down stairs, clear to the other end of the building to bring stuff from his cramped office.

He spread out everything they had gathered in the last five months, while O’Dell followed behind him, insisting on putting it all in neat little stacks, lining it up on the long conference table so that it flowed from left to right in chronological order. Instead of being irritated by her anal-retentive process, he found himself amused. So they approached puzzles differently. She liked to start by finding all the corner pieces and lining them up, while he liked to scatter all the pieces in the center, picking and choosing random sections to piece together. Neither way was right or wrong. It was simply a matter of preference, although he doubted that O’Dell would agree with that assessment.

They had tacked up a map of the United States, marking the recent murders in Newburgh Heights and Kansas City with red pushpins. Blue pins marked each of the other seventeen areas where Stucky had left victims before his capture last August. At least those were the ones they knew about. The women Stucky kept for his collection were often buried in remote wooded areas. It was believed there could be as many as a dozen more, hidden and waiting to be discovered by hikers or fishermen or hunters. All this, Stucky had accomplished in less than three years. Tully hated to think what the madman may have done in the last five months.

Tully continued to examine the map and left O’Dell to her housekeeping. For the most part, Stucky had stayed on the eastern edge of the United States from as far north as Boston to as far south as Miami. The Virginia shoreline seemed to be a fertile ground for him. Kansas City appeared to be the only anomaly. If Tess McGowan was, in fact, missing, that meant Stucky really was playing with O’Dell again, bringing her in, making her a part of his crimes. And by choosing only women who she came in contact with, rather than friends or family members, he made it virtually impossible for them to know who might be next. After all, what could they do? Lock O’Dell up until they caught Stucky? Cunningham already had several agents watching her house and following her. Tully was surprised O’Dell hadn’t objected.

Saturday morning and she was already digging in as if it were any other weekday. After the week she had, anyone else would still be at home in bed. Although this morning he did notice that she hadn’t bothered to use makeup to conceal the dark, puffy lines under her eyes. She wore an old pair of Nike running shoes, a chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and the tails neatly tucked into the waistband of faded jeans. Though they were in a secured facility, she kept her shoulder harness on, her Smith & Wesson .38 ready at her side. Compared to O’Dell, he felt overdressed, except when Assistant Director Cunningham stopped by, looking as crisp, spotless and wrinkle-free as usual. That was when Tully noticed the coffee stains on his own white shirt and his loosened and lopsided tie.

Tully checked his watch. He had promised Emma lunch and a total discussion of this prom thing. He had already decided to stand firm on the matter. Emma could call it being close-minded if she wanted to, but he simply didn’t want to start thinking about her as being old enough to date. At least not yet. Maybe next year.

He glanced over at O’Dell who stood over the reports they had received earlier from Keith Ganza. Without looking up at him, she asked, “Any luck with airport security?”

“No, but now that Delores Heston has filed a missing-person’s report, we can get an APB out on the car. A black Miata can’t be that hard to miss. I don’t know, though. What if McGowan just decided to take off for a couple of days?”

“Then we ruin her vacation. What about the boyfriend?”

“The guy has a house and business in D.C., and another house and office in Newburgh Heights. I finally tracked down Mr. Daniel Kassenbaum last night at his country club. He didn’t sound very concerned. In fact, he told me he suspected McGowan might be cheating on him. Then he quickly added that their relationship was a no-strings sort of thing. That’s what he called it. So, I guess if his suspicions are true, maybe she simply took off with some secret lover.”

O’Dell looked up at him. “If the boyfriend thought she was cheating on him, can we be certain he didn’t have something to do with her disappearance?”

“I honestly don’t think the guy cares, not as long as he was getting what he wanted.” O’Dell looked puzzled. Tully felt a surge of emotion and knew this was a touchy subject with him. Kassenbaum reminded him too much of the asshole Caroline had left him for. Still, he continued, “He told me the last time he saw her was when she stayed over at his house in Newburgh Heights Tuesday night. Now, if the guy thinks she’s cheating on him, why is he still having her stay overnight at his house?”

O’Dell shrugged. “I give up. Why?”

He wasn’t sure if she was serious or being sarcastic. “Why? Because he’s an arrogant asshole who doesn’t care about anyone other than himself. So as long as he’s getting his jollies serviced, what does he care?” She was staring at him. He should have known when to quit. “What do women see in guys like that?”

“Getting his jollies serviced? Is that what you call it in Ohio?”

Tully felt his face grow red, and O’Dell smiled. She went back to the reports, letting him off the hook, and evidently not realizing how hot the subject made him. Last night, Daniel Kassenbaum had treated him like some servant he didn’t have time for, scolding Tully for interrupting his dinner. Like the guy didn’t think maybe Tully was interrupting his own dinner by looking for his girlfriend? Maybe Tess McGowan really did take off with some secret lover. Good for her.

He stood facing the map again. They had circled possible sites, mostly remote wooded areas. There were way too many to check. The only clue they had was the sparkling dirt found in Jessica Beckwith’s car and in Rachel Endicott’s house. Keith Ganza had narrowed down the chemical concoction that made up the metallic substance, but even that didn’t narrow down the sites. In fact, it made Tully wonder if they were looking in the wrong places. Maybe they should be checking out deserted industrial sites instead of wooded areas. After all, Stucky had used a condemned warehouse in Miami to hide his collection until O’Dell found him.

“What about an industrial site?” He decided to try out his theory on O’Dell.

She stopped what she was doing and came beside him, studying the map.

“You’re thinking of the chemicals Keith found in the mud?”

“I know it doesn’t follow his pattern, but neither did the warehouse down in Miami.” As soon as he said it, he glanced at O’Dell, realizing the subject may still be a touchy one. If it was, she made no indication.

“Wherever he’s hiding, it can’t be far. I’m guessing an hour, maybe an hour and a half at most.” She traced the area with her index finger, a fifty-to-seventy-mile radius, with her home in Newburgh Heights at the center. “He couldn’t drive too far and still keep watch over me.”

Tully watched her out of the corner of his eyes, again looking for any signs of the frenzy, the terror he had witnessed the other night. He wasn’t surprised to find it masked. O’Dell wouldn’t be the first FBI agent he knew who could compartmentalize her emotions. With O’Dell, however, he could see it was an effort. He wondered just how long she could contain them without cracking at the seams again.

“The map may not show old industrial sites that have been closed. I’ll check with the State Department and see if they have anything.”

“Don’t forget Maryland and D.C.”

Tully jotted notes on the McDonald’s brown paper sack that had held his breakfast; a sausage biscuit and hash browns. For a brief moment he tried to remember the last meal he had eaten that hadn’t come from a bag. Maybe he’d take Emma somewhere nice for lunch. No fast food. Somewhere with tablecloths.

When he turned back, O’Dell was back at the table. He looked over her shoulder at the crime scene photos she had sorted. Without looking at him, she said in almost a whisper, “We need to find them, Agent Tully. We need to find them very soon or it’ll be too late.”

He didn’t need to ask who she meant. She was talking about the McGowan woman, and also her neighbor, Rachel Endicott. Tully still wasn’t convinced either woman was missing, let alone taken by Stucky. He didn’t share his doubts with O’Dell, nor did he share with her that he had talked to Detective Manx in Newburgh Heights. With any luck Manx would find it in his stubborn, isolationist pig head to share whatever evidence he recovered from the Endicott house. Though Tully didn’t expect much. Detective Manx had told him the case was nothing more than a bored housewife running off with a telephone repairman.

He hated to think Manx might be right. Tully shook his head. What was it with married women these days? He didn’t like being reminded of Caroline for the second time that morning.

“If you are right about Tess McGowan and the Endicott woman,” Tully said, careful to keep his own doubts aside, “that means Stucky has killed two women and taken two others in a span of only one week. Are you sure Stucky could pull that off?”

“It would be tough but not impossible. He would have had to take Rachel Endicott early last Friday. Then come back to Newburgh Heights, watch Jessica deliver my pizza, lure her to the house on Archer Drive and kill her late Friday evening or early Saturday morning.”

“Doesn’t that seem like a bit much?”

“Yes,” she admitted, “but not for Stucky.”

“Then somehow he finds out that you’d be in KC. Even finds out where you’re staying. Again, he watches you, Delaney and Turner with the waitress—”

“Rita.”

“Right, Rita. That was what, Sunday night?”

“Around midnight…actually early Monday morning. If Delores Heston is correct, Tess showed the house on Archer Drive Wednesday.” She avoided Tully’s eyes. “I know it sounds like a lot, but keep in mind what he’s done in the past.”

She started sorting through the photos again. “It’s never been easy to track. Some of the bodies were found much later, long after they were reported missing. Most of them were so badly decomposed we could only guess at the time of deaths. But the spring before we caught him, we estimated that he killed two women, leaving them in Dumpsters, and that he had taken five others for his collection. That was all in the span of two or three weeks. At least that’s the time frame that the women were first discovered missing. We didn’t find those five bodies until months later, and they were all in one mass grave. The women had been tortured and killed at different intervals. There were signs that he may have even hunted down a couple of them. We found evidence that he may have used a crossbow and arrows.”

Tully recognized the photos. O’Dell had laid out a series of Poloraids that chronicled one victim’s wounds. If the photos hadn’t been marked, it would be difficult to tell that they were all the same woman. This was one of those five victims who had been found in that mass grave. The corpse was one of the rare ones found before decomposition or before animals had ravaged it. It was one of the few that was intact and whole.

“This was Helen Kreski,” O’Dell said without looking up the name. “She was one of the five. Stucky choked and stabbed her repeatedly. Her left nipple had been bitten off. Her right arm and wrist were broken. There was a puncture through her left calf with a broken arrow still intact.” O’Dell’s voice was calm, too calm, as though she had resolved herself to something beyond her control. “We found dirt in her lungs. She was still alive when he buried her.”

“Christ, this is one sick son of a bitch.”

“We need to stop him, Agent Tully. We need to do it before he crawls back into a hole someplace. Before he runs off and hides and starts playing with his new collection.”

“And we’ll do that. We just need to find out where the hell he’s hiding.” He didn’t want to notice that she had used the word stop instead of catch.

He left her side and checked his watch again.

“I need to leave around eleven. I promised my daughter we’d have lunch together.” O’Dell had moved back to the reports they had received from Ganza. She had the fingerprint analysis and was reading it over for the third time. He wondered if she had even heard him. “Hey, why don’t you join us?”

She glanced up, surprised by his invitation.

“I still think the print was left by someone who looked at the house earlier,” he said, referring to the fingerprint report and taking her off the hook if she really didn’t want to accept his invitation.

“He wiped down everything in the bathroom,” she said, “but he missed two clean and whole fingerprints. No, he wanted us to find these. He’s done it before. It was how we finally confirmed who he was.”

He watched her rub her eyes as if the memory brought on a whole new fatigue.

“At that time, we had no name, no idea who The Collector was,” she continued. “Stucky evidently thought we were taking too long to figure it out. I think he left us a print on purpose. It was so blatant, so careless, it had to be on purpose.”

“Well, if this one was on purpose, why bother to clean up the place at all? He never seemed to care before.”

“Maybe he cleaned up because he wanted to use the house again.”

“For McGowan?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. But why bother to leave us a print that doesn’t even belong to him? Just like on the Dumpster behind the pizza place and on the umbrella in Kansas City.”

O’Dell hesitated, stopping her hands from shuffling papers and looking at him as if wondering whether or not to tell him something. “Keith hasn’t been able to find a match for those prints in AFIS. But he says he’s almost certain all three sets of prints belong to the same person.”

“You’re kidding. He knows that for sure? If that’s the case, maybe these murders aren’t Stucky, after all.”

He stared at her, waiting for some kind of reaction. Her face remained impassive, just like her voice when she said, “Jessica’s murder and Rita’s in Kansas City are awfully close together. I know I just said that Stucky could pull it off, but the anal penetration with Jessica is not Stucky’s M.O. Also, she’s much younger than any of his other victims.”

“So what are you saying, O’Dell. You think this one was a copycat?”

“Or an accomplice.”

“What? That’s crazy!”

She buried her eyes in the files again. He could see she was having a difficult time with the theory herself. O’Dell was used to working and brainstorming alone. Suddenly he realized that it probably took a good deal of trust for her to share this idea with him.

“Look, I know you’re serious, but why would Stucky take on an accomplice? You have to admit, that’s out of character for any serial killer.”

In reply, O’Dell pulled out several photocopied pages that looked like magazine and newspaper articles and handed them to Tully.

“Remember Cunningham said he found the name Walker Harding, Stucky’s old business partner, on an airline manifest?”

Tully nodded and began sorting through the articles.

“Some of those go back several years,” she told him.

They were articles from Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, PC World and several other business and trade periodicals. The Forbes article included a picture. Though the grainy black-and-white copy had obliterated most of the men’s features, the two of them could have passed for brothers. Both had dark hair, narrow faces and sharp features. Tully recognized Albert Stucky’s piercing black eyes, which he knew to be void of color despite the poor reproduction. The younger man smiled while Stucky’s face remained stoic and serious.

“I’m guessing this must be the partner?”

“Yes. A couple of the articles mention how much the two men had in common and how competitive they were with each other. However, they seemed to have ended their partnership amicably. I wonder if they might still be in contact with each other. Maybe still in competition with each other, only with a new game.”

“But why now after all these years? If they were to do something like this, why not when Stucky first started his game?”

O’Dell sat down and tucked strands of hair behind her ears. She looked exhausted. As if reading his thoughts, she sipped her Diet Pepsi, which he had noticed was her coffee substitute. This was her third one of the morning.

“Stucky has always been a loner,” she explained. “I haven’t done any research on Harding except for these articles, but for Stucky to have chosen anyone as a business partner is remarkable. I’ve never thought about it before, but perhaps the two men had, and still have, some strong connection, a connection Stucky didn’t realize until recently. Or perhaps there’s some other reason he decided he needed his old friend.”

Tully shook his head. “I think you’re grasping at straws, O’Dell. You know as well as I do that statistically, serial killers don’t take on partners or accomplices.”

“But Stucky is far from fitting any of the statistics. I’m having Keith run a check to see if Harding has ever been fingerprinted. Then we can see if we have a match to the fingerprints being left at the crime scenes.”

Tully looked over the articles, scanning the text until something caught his eye.

“Looks like there’s a slight problem with your theory, O’Dell.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s a footnote to this Wall Street Journal article. Stucky and Harding ended their partnership after Harding was diagnosed with some medical problem.”

“Right. I saw that.”

“But did you finish reading it? This part is blurred at the bottom from the copier. Unless Walker Harding found some miracle cure, he can’t be Stucky’s accomplice. It says here he was going blind.”