He handed King a file with all the particulars. They shook on it, and Harry turned to Michelle and took her hand. “And I have to say that finally meeting this charming young woman was well worth any price you might charge.”
“You’re going to make me blush, Harry.”
“I’ll take that as quite a compliment.”
As they left Harry and walked outside, Michelle said, “I love that man.”
“Good, because meeting him may be the only positive thing that comes out of this.” His cell phone rang. A minute later he clicked off. “That was Todd. Let’s go,” he said.
“Where to?” asked Michelle.
“A real fun place called the morgue.”
Chapter 8
The pale blue 1969 VW puttered down one of the feeder roads leading to downtown Wrightsburg. The man driving was dressed in jeans and a white button-down shirt with loafers on his feet. He also wore a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, and heavily tinted sunglasses covered his eyes. It was probably overkill, he knew. Most people were so self-absorbed they couldn’t describe anything about anyone they’d seen in passing ten seconds before.
Coming in the opposite direction was a Lexus convertible. As Sean King and Michelle Maxwell passed by on their way to the morgue, the man didn’t even glance at them. He continued on his way in the VW that had over two hundred thousand miles on its odometer. The Bug had come off the assembly line a canary yellow. It had been painted many colors since it had first been stolen years ago and had gone through at least ten sets of license plates. Along the way its VIN had been expertly altered. Like a cleansed gun, it was now virtually untraceable. He loved it.
Serial murderer Theodore “Ted” Bundy had also favored VW Bugs in killing sprees that took him from coast to coast before he was executed. He often referred to the amount of “cargo” he could carry in the Bug with the backseat removed, cargo that had once been living, female and human. Bundy also applauded the Volkswagen’s incredible gas mileage. He could slaughter and flee easily on one tank of fuel.
The man made a right-hand turn and pulled into the parking lot of the upscale shopping mall frequented by many of the people who lived in tiny yet very affluent Wrightsburg. It was said that Bundy and other serial killers of his ilk spent twenty-four hours a day plotting their next murders. It must have seemed easy to men like that. Bundy reportedly had an IQ of over 120. Well, the man behind the wheel of the VW possessed one north of 160. He was a member of Mensa, he did the New York Times crossword puzzle every Sunday with ease; he could have made a small fortune on Jeopardy! answering the questions before host Alex even finished asking them.
However, the truth was, you didn’t need to be a genius to hunt up suitable victims; they were everywhere. And these days it was far easier than in Bundy’s time for reasons that might not seem so obvious to most people but which were abundantly clear to him.
He watched the old couple totter out of the supermarket and ease into their Mercedes station wagon. He wrote down the license plate number. He would run it later on the Internet and get their home address. They were doing their own shopping, so they probably had no live-in help or grown children nearby. The make of the car was relatively new, so they weren’t surviving solely on Social Security. The man wore a cap with the logo of the local country club. That was another potential gold mine of information he might later tap.
He sat back and waited patiently. More prospects were sure to come in this busy shopping center. He could consume all he wanted without ever once taking out his wallet.
A few minutes later an attractive woman in her thirties came out of a pharmacy carrying a large bag. His gaze swung to her, his homicidal antennae twitching with interest. The woman stopped at the ATM next to the pharmacy, withdrew some cash and then committed what should have been classified as a mortal sin for the new century: she tossed the receipt into the trash before climbing into a bright red Chrysler Sebring convertible. Her vanity plate read “DEH JD.”
He quickly translated that to be her initials and the fact that she was a lawyer, the “JD” standing for Juris Doctor. Her clothes told him she was fastidious about her appearance. The tan on her arms, face and legs was deep. If she was a practicing lawyer, she probably had just come back from vacation or else had visited the tanning booth over the winter. She was very fit-looking, her calves particularly well developed. She probably worked out regularly, perhaps even ran the trails in the woods hereabouts, he further deduced. His gaze had fixed on the gold anklet she wore on her left leg as she climbed in her car. That was intriguing, he thought.
She had a current-year American Bar Association bumper sticker, so the odds were she was still practicing law. And she was also single—there was no wedding ring on her finger. And right next to the ABA bumper sticker was a parking permit for a very expensive gated residential development about two miles from here. He nodded appreciatively. These stickers were very informative.
He parked, got out of the Bug, walked over to the trash can, made a show of throwing something away and in the same motion plucked out the ATM receipt. The woman really should have known better. She might as well have tossed her personal tax return in the trash. She was now naked, completely open to any probing he wanted to do.
When he got back to his car, he looked at the name on the account: D. Hinson. He’d look her up in the phone book later. And she’d also be in the business listings, so he’d know which law firm in town she worked at. That would give him two potential targets. Banks had started leaving off some of the numbers of the account because they knew their customers stupidly disposed of their receipts where they were easy pickings for people like him. Still, he didn’t want her money; it was something far more personal that interested him.
He kept trolling under the warming sun. What a nice day it was shaping up to be. He reclined slightly in his seat only to perk up when off to his right a soccer mom started loading groceries in her van. He wasn’t guessing there: she wore a T-shirt that announced this status. An infant rode in the car seat in the rear. A green bumper sticker announced that the woman was the mom of an honor roll student at Wrightsburg Middle School for the current school year.
Good to know, he thought: seventh or eighth grader and an infant. He pulled into the space next to the van and waited. The woman took the cart back to the front of the store, leaving the baby completely unguarded.
He got out of the Bug, leaned into the van’s open driver’s side window and smiled at the baby, who grinned back, chortling. The interior of the van was messy. Probably so was the woman’s house. If they had an alarm system, they probably never turned it on. Probably forgot to lock all the doors and windows too. It was a wonder to him that the crime rate in the country wasn’t far higher what with millions of idiots like her staggering blindly through life.
An algebra book was in the backseat; the middle school child’s, no doubt. Next to it was a children’s picture book, so there was at least a third child. This deduction was confirmed by the presence of a pair of grass-stained tennis shoes in the rear floorboard; they looked to be those of a five- or six-year-old boy.
He glanced in the passenger seat. There it was: a People magazine. He looked up. The woman had just slammed the cart back into the rack and had now paused to talk to someone coming out of the store. He reached in and drew the magazine toward him. Name and home address were on the mailing label. He already had her home phone number. She’d helpfully put it on the For Sale sign on the window of her van.