Mac nodded.
"Far more compound and longer sentences in the first three books," said Kindem, looking at the screen. "Casual reader might not be consciously aware of these things, but subconsciously… you'd have to go to someone in the Pysch Department."
"Anything else?"
"Everything else," said Kindem. "Vocabulary. For example, the word 'reciprocated' appears on average eleven times in each of the first three books. It appears in none of the others."
"Couldn't the change after the first three books be a decision to change style or a honing of the author's skills?"
"Not that big a change," said Kindem. "And I think I'll turn up more if you give me another few hours."
"The formula in all the books is pretty much the same," said Mac. "Woman is a widow or not yet married though she's in her mid thirties. She has or is responsible for a child who turns out to be in danger from a vengeful relative, the mafia, a serial killer. Police don't help much. Woman has to protect herself and the child. And somewhere in the last thirty pages, the woman confronts the bad guy or guys and prevails with a new man in her life who she's met along the way."
"Which means that whoever wrote those books followed the formula," said Kindem. "Not that it was the same person."
Mac was sure now. Louisa Cormier had written the first three books. Charles Lutnikov had written the rest.
But why would she shoot him, Mac thought. An argument? Over what? Money?
"You want printouts?" asked Kindem.
"E-mail," said Mac. "Address is on my card."
"Are you going to need me to testify at a trial?"
"Possibly," said Mac.
"Good," said Kindem. "I've always wanted to do that. Now back to the works of the now-exposed Louisa Cormier."
Stella sat in the car, drowsy and aching, while Danny drove. For the eighth time, Stella went over the Alberta Spanio file, which was in her lap.
She looked at the crime-scene photographs- body, bed, walls, side table. She looked at the bathroom photos- toilet, floor, tub, open window over the tub.
Something tickled at her brain. Something wrong. It felt like trying to remember the name of an actor or writer or the girl who sat next to you in a calculus class in high school. You should know, were sure it was inside you. You could go through the alphabet ten, fifteen times and not come up with the name and then, suddenly, it would be there.
She turned to the testimony of the two men who had been guarding Alberta Spanio, Taxx and the dead Collier.
Then as she continued to read, it struck her. She went back to the photographs of the bathroom, her photographs.
Collier had told Flack that he had stood in the tub to check and look out the window. If the killer came through the window, he or she had to have pushed the pile of snow blocking the window into the tub. There should have been some melted snow in the tub when Collier stepped in it. But there was no sign of moisture in the tub in Stella's photographs and no footprints from Collier's shoes, even though the bottoms of his shoes should have been wet from standing in the melted snow.
Why, she thought, had Collier lied?
Sheldon Hawkes sat at the desk next to Mac, looking at the videotape on the monitor in front of him.
"Once more," said Hawkes, leaning closer to the screen.
Mac rewound the tape and sipped coffee while Hawkes watched the twenty-minute tape again, sometimes fast-forwarding and halting.
"Let's hear the interrogation tape again."
Mac rewound the tape he had made of the interview of Jordan Breeze and played it again.
"You want to see him in his cell?" asked Mac. "My guess is it will confirm what we already know."
Hawkes stood and said, "You're right."
Mac listened while Hawkes told him what he had observed.
"Sure," said Mathew Drietch.
He was wiry, about forty, with sparse yellow hair and a boxer's face. He had answered Aiden Burn's request to see the.22 Louisa Cormier had used for target practice on the firing range, which was just outside the door to the office in which they now sat.
"You like the sound of gunfire?" Drietch asked.
"Not particularly," she said.
"I do," he said, looking past her at the glass-paneled door through which he could see the stations of the hand gun range. "The crack, the power. You know what I mean?"
"Not really," said Aiden. "Now, can you show me the gun?"
He got up slowly, hitching up his black denim slacks.
"When was Louisa Cormier last here?" she asked.
"A few days ago," he said. "Day before the storm I think. I can check."
He went to the door of his office, opening it to the cracking sound of gunfire. He held it open for her, then stepped out in front of her, and crossed behind the five people at the small-arms firing range.
"Cold brings them out," Drietch said. "They get a little stir-crazy and want to shoot something. This gets it out of their system."
Aiden made no response. Drietch went to a door next to the check-in desk. A man, stocky, balding, reached under the desk, pushed a button, and the door opened.
"I've got a key," said Drietch, "but Dave's almost always here."
The room was small, bright, with small wooden boxes on shelves from floor to ceiling and a small table with no chairs in the middle of the room.
"We've got almost four hundred handguns in here," said Drietch, moving to one of the shelves as he pulled a ring of keys from his pocket. "Master key opens them all."
He pulled down a box and placed it on the table in front of Aiden. Aiden looked at the box and then at the shelves.
"Some of the boxes have padlocks. Some don't," she said.
"No gun in the box, no lock," he explained.
"This box has no lock," she said, looking at the box on the table.
"Must have forgotten to put it back on," he said. "It's probably in the box."
Aiden concluded that Drietch ran a very loose ship.
"Ammunition's in a safe," Drietch said, reading her look of disapproval.
Aiden said nothing. She reached down and lifted the lid of the metal box. There was a gun inside, a Walther.22 exactly like the one Louisa had in the drawer of her desk.
"Target gun," said Drietch.
"It can still kill," said Aiden, inserting a pencil in the barrel and lifting the gun from the box.
It took her a few seconds to determine that the gun had been cleaned recently.
"Did Louisa Cormier clean this gun?"
"No, Dave does that," he said.
Aiden bagged the gun and turned to Drietch.
"I'll need a receipt for that," he said.
She took out her notebook, wrote a receipt, signed it, and handed it to him.
"Does Ms. Cormier open the box and get the gun herself?"
"No," he said. "Stands and waits. I've got the key. I take it out, check to be sure it isn't loaded, hand it to her. I bring the ammunition to her at the range. When she's done shooting, she gives the gun back and I lock it up."
"She never touches the lock or the drawer?" asked Aiden.
"She doesn't have a key," he said patiently.
Aiden nodded and checked for prints on the box. She lifted four clean ones.
Aiden put her gloves into her kit. She'd have to check the toilets, garbage cans, trash containers outside for the missing lock. It wouldn't be fun, but it would beat digging for that bullet in the elevator pit.
The search took twenty minutes, during which time she also checked and double-checked the pay parking lot next door.
When she went back inside, Drietch was standing next to an open stall on the range, a gun resting on the platform against which he was leaning. He pointed at the gun.
As she approached, he stepped back, giving her space.
Aiden fired. The targets, familiar black on white circles, were about twenty feet away. She got off five rounds and handed him the gun. Something on the floor of the range caught her eye.