Jessica gritted her teeth, saying, "Where there's a back-hoe, there's a way."
J. T. joked, "You want to exhume a mattress and box spring?"
"Maybe that'd be a little over the top, huh?" she asked.
J. T. laughed. "Yeah, Jess, just a bit."
They were about to leave when Jessica noticed that the carpet was dirty with grime brought in on shoes. "The carpet hasn't been replaced," she said. "Let's take a section from near the bed, have it analyzed for accelerants." Jessica went to the spot she felt most likely helpful, and taking out a marker from her valise, she created a square some two by two feet where a fire burn had taken out a chunk of carpet now hidden by the new bed. Apparently the owners hadn't been able to get in new carpeting as quickly as everything else.
"Get someone with a carpet cutter to take this square out," Jessica was saying when she noticed a scorched, barely recognizable piece of paper just below the bed. "What's this?" she asked no one in particular.
The two men came closer to watch her dig out her tweezers. Using the tweezers, she lifted the crumpled fleck of blackened paper residue and gently slipped it into a plastic bag, also taken from her valise. The paper measured only a few centimeters.
"What is it?" asked Colby.
"Something overlooked by both authorities and the maids. It may've come from the killer, and it appears to be what's left of a negative."
"A negative?" asked J. T., leaning in for a closer look.
"Could be from our photo guy. He's a mite careless," suggested Colby.
"Seems everyone hereabouts is a mite careless," Jessica sarcastically added. "What kind of camera was your guy using?''
"Minolta, thirty-five millimeters."
"Then this isn't from his camera, I can assure you. It's from an Instamatic."
"You mean he-the killer-takes pictures of them as they burn?" asked J. T.
Again Colby winced. "That's disgusting."
J. T. put a hand on Jessica's shoulder and he leaned in near her, saying, "We need to do a quick check, make sure no one, including insurance agents, has been in the room for photos using a cheap Polaroid with self-developing film."
"No-don't you see, J. T.? This film was in the fire. Proving it was here when she died," Jessica assured her friend.
"We don't have sophisticated enough equipment here to determine what that fleck of paper means," Colby assured them.
"We'll send it back to Quantico for analysis," J. T. informed Colby, and on closer inspection, both she and J. T. felt certain that it represented a remnant of a burning negative from a Polaroid camera, likely belonging to the killer.
Jessica stared at the clue as if it could speak to her.
Outside, in the hallway, Jessica took J. T. aside and said, "It's no accident, his leaving this trail of bread crumbs, here the film, there the footprint."
"Yeah, it's as if he wants to be found and stopped, isn't it?"
"Not an unusual subconscious wish among serial killers, but this time it does appear he consciously wants to see me eye to eye."
"Jess," warned J. T. in a guttural moan, "don't you dare."
"I have no intention of having tea with this bastard."
"Is that a promise?"
"Promise."
"I'll hold you to it."
"Make sure you do."
Interviews with the firefighters, followed by questioning everyone who worked with Muriel Flanders, put together the portrait of a lonely, matronly woman, a woman not without a temper and flaring malice at times, a heavy chain-smoker, but hardly a fraud. Jessica began to realize that the killer knew next to nothing about his victims save their vulnerability.
She and J. T. discussed this aspect of the murderer while en route to the hospital where the remains of Muriel Flanders lay waiting for them. Outside the car windows, the spectacular views of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon winked and smiled at them as the sheriff's car sped along the winding road that hugged the cliffs. All along their route, tourists in cars, vans, and buses crowded in at the overlooks to experience the vistas here.
''I know now that he selects them on the way they carry themselves: troubled, shy, unfocused, confused, weak-looking, vulnerable people. And he labels them whatever his fevered mind imagines them to be by some bizarre scale known only in his fevered brain."
"And he's a poor-assed judge of character," added J. T.
"He just wants them to fit some preset notion-his agenda, if you will, this numbers game of his, this whole number one is number nine thing, calling Chris Lorentian a traitor, this one a fraud, old Martin a violent person when in fact none of them fit his bullshit."
"Agreed," replied J. T. "Hell, one was a runaway barely out of her teens and the other a worn-out waitress who was in a dead-end situation."
"The third a lonely old man."
"Just a lonely soul."
''But this psycho brands the man a violent person. You see just how screwed up this creep is?"
"Projecting."
"What?"
"What shrinks call projecting. The killer may be projecting his own deficient character traits onto his victims, you see?"
"You're getting good at this, J. T.," she replied. "Maybe you have something there."
They rode in silence for a moment, each with his or her own thoughts until Jessica said, ''Back at the El Tovar, he didn't know there'd be no telephone in the room, but by the time he realized this, he was already too far along to start over. And if he did her during a lunchtime break, he didn't have a lot of time."
J. T. swallowed hard, his eyes rolling back in his head. "It's fairly obvious that he's got a time line and a quota to fill."
''Maybe… maybe he does. Kim Desinor called it a twisted religious quest of some sort."
"Maybe the body will tell us more," J. T. hopefully replied.
They were soon at the morgue, and the body was prepared for them. The autopsy was like dйjа vu. Jessica kept wanting to say, "Didn't I just do this yesterday?"
After an exhausting four hours over the charred remains of Muriel Flanders, Jessica and J. T. learned that J. T. was right, that the second victim wasn't Mel Martin but this poor waitress at the El Tovar Hotel in whose room was scrawled-as they pieced it together-this message:
#2 is #8-Malicious Frauds
After the autopsy, J. T., his eyes like slits, asked, "What's our next move, Jess?"
"We fly back to Lake Powell."
"Glen Canyon? Why?"
She went to a map on the wall depicting the western states, including the Grand Canyon and the areas they'd been since leaving Vegas. Using her finger, she mapped out the killer's route thus far. "He took off from Vegas for here, the Grand Canyon, killed number two here, and went from here to Glen Canyon, where he did number three. There are no connections whatsoever among the victims, right?"
"Correct, none that we've found, no-"
"Then the only common thread we have is his route, the direction he is going in. He didn't double back on us to do Muriel-"
"Flanders, right," J. T. said as he followed along.
"He didn't double back; he did her just as the numbers imply, as number two. Now we need to determine where he will strike next… before he does number four."
"How're we going to do that?"
"I'm not sure, but I know we have to get back to Glen Canyon as our starting point."
J. T. considered her logic, staring up at the wall map. "Okay, then, I'm with you." The killer's route so far had taken them farther and farther from Las Vegas. J. T. put his hands together in the prayer position and said, "Let's do it. We've got to stay on his trail."
They taxied out to the airfield, allowing Sheriff Colby to get back to his normal routine, and at the airfield, they argued. Jessica wanted to fly back with the old Pete Morgan, who'd so thrilled them earlier, while J. T. had pointed out a pilot who looked young enough to be his son. Jessica won the argument and they flew back to Lake Powell and Glen Canyon in rip-roaring fashion, the old man giving them a little extra time in the air by flying out to Monument Valley, telling them how he'd once flown over a John Wayne set, ruining a John Ford shot in a film called She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. "I was just a pup kid at the time," he finished with a faraway glint in his eyes.