Ruth said to Savich, “You baited him again. You thought you could break him down.”
Savich shrugged. “I wasn’t getting anywhere finding out who he really is. There simply hasn’t been a case in which I had to kill a woman. But after the bombing and Moses’s call last night, Sherlock and I think we finally know.”
Ruth sat forward, her elbows on the table.
Savich must have seen something in Sherlock’s eyes because he rose, got a pain pill from the kitchen counter, and held it to her mouth. When she’d swallowed the pill, he sat down again, raised his teacup to toast Ruth. “Are you ready for this? The woman was Tammy Tuttle.”
Ruth froze, said to Dix, “That was before I came into the unit, but I heard all about her, how she had this power to make people see what she wanted them to see.”
“Mass hypnosis?” Dix asked, an eyebrow up. “You sure? That’s pretty out there.”
Savich nodded. “You’re telling me. But we had a real hard time tracking her down even though we had her in our sights on two occasions. Thank God Tammy Tuttle couldn’t trick everyone. When she got close enough to me, for whatever reason, I recognized her. Moses had only one fact right—I did nearly shoot her arm off. She was going to kill two teenage boys she and her crazy twin, Tommy, had kidnapped. I had to shoot her in the shoulder, which led to her losing an arm. She escaped from the hospital when she recovered and came after me. She wanted me real bad, like Moses.”
Sherlock said, “Dillon didn’t kill her, though. His sister was staying with us at the time. Tammy took her right out of our house and drove to the barn on the Plum River in Maryland where it all started. She managed to save herself, killed Tammy. We arrived when it was all over.”
“Your sister,” Dix said to Savich, “she’s all right?”
“Oh yes.”
Ruth took a bite of scone, savored it. “I want to marry the guy who made these.”
Savich said, “Arturo weighs three hundred pounds.”
Ruth grinned. “Okay, so maybe he’s not perfect. So Moses Grace is what? Tammy Tuttle’s grandfather?
”
“Maybe. It’s interesting. Moses hasn’t mentioned Tammy’s twin, Tommy. I wonder why not.”
Sherlock said, “The only family we know of is Tommy and Tammy’s cousin, Marilyn Warluski. She owns the barn on the Plum River, which is how MAX found the Tuttles. Marilyn wasn’t a criminal, simply a bit on the slow side, I guess, and malleable, or she’d simply been beaten down by her cousins. They used her, manipulated her, but she survived. We’re all praying she knows something about him, maybe can tell us what Moses Grace’s real name is.”
Savich said, “I remember asking Marilyn about Tommy and Tammy’s parents, and she told me their mom was dead. She didn’t know who their dad was. I didn’t ask for more because there was too much going on. It makes sense that Moses Grace might be their grandfather. They had to get their crazy genes from somewhere. Moses sure fits the bill.”
Dix asked Savich, “No luck tracking Moses after his call last night?”
“Our guys located where the call came from again—the parking lot of another Denny’s, this one in Juniperville, Virginia, about a forty-minute drive from here. It appears he and Claudia are fond of Denny’
s, but it took too long to identify the phone and triangulate the signal again. They were gone by the time the squad cars got there.”
Savich added, “I’m convinced Moses has a pretty good idea how long it takes us to track him through a cell phone. He keeps using them because it gives him a kick to have cops racing to a particular spot only to find he’s done a vanishing act.”
“Then you’ll have to find him another way,” Ruth said.
“I do have a couple of ideas,” Savich said, but he didn’t elaborate. Sherlock squeezed his hand. “Dillon asked Dane Carver to find Marilyn Warluski. Last we heard she was in the Caribbean, so Dane is checking all the islands first. Unless she’s in hiding for some reason we don’t know about, it shouldn’t be long.”
“There’s another thing,” Savich said as he drank more of his tea. “When I speak to Moses, his grammar can be appallingly bad, but other times it’s perfect. I’m thinking he’s playing a game with me, trying to make me think he’s illiterate, but then he forgets and speaks normally. His Southern accent fades in and out, too. I really doubt he’s the fourth-grade dropout he pretends to be.”
Rafe and Rob came into the kitchen with Sean running between them, Graciella behind them, grinning like a proud parent. Rob said, “Agent Savich, we heard you talking about this Marilyn Warluski person, how she owns a barn near the Plum River and you’re looking for her. We asked Graciella how to spell it, then we googled her on Graciella’s laptop. There’s a Marilyn Warluski who lives in Summerset, Maryland, at Thirty-eight Baylor Street. We called up a map of Summerset, and it’s about ten miles north of the Plum River. We could have dialed her number, but Graciella thought we’d better tell you first. She said it’d be nice of us to leave something for you to do.”
Savich rose, walked to the boys, and hugged them close. They heard him say over Graciella’s laughter, “
You guys better teach Sean everything you know, all right?”
Ruth looked at Dix. “If the boys heard that, then this isn’t exactly what you’d call a private conference. Maybe they’d like to go outside with Graciella. I’m thinking a nice bribe is in order. Okay, Sherlock?”
Ten minutes later, Graciella was out the door, three boys at her heels, headed for the ice cream parlor on Prospect Street.
“Okay,” Savich said, sitting down again, “it’s time for you to give us an update on your Maestro investigation.”
“We’ve had to back off the embalming angle,” Ruth said. “There’s no way to track it to a specific purchase. The fluid is available everywhere, even traded as a street drug. Some people are suicidal or stupid enough to soak marijuana in it as a replacement for PCP.
“As for the BZ gas, I found out that even though they load a chemical like that into conventional bombs for warfare, it’s easily available to the public. Rob and Rafe could order it online. I checked some scientific journals on MEDLINE, and the drug seems to be an industry standard for research on some types of neurotransmitters. Thousands of labs around the world have a supply. Like embalming fluid, trying to track down purchases of BZ to Maestro is daunting.
“I did find out that when I was in the cave I didn’t necessarily have to breathe it in. It’s a contact hazard, too. I could have easily absorbed it through my skin if enough had settled on something I touched.”
Sherlock asked, “So where are you guys going to take it from here?”
“We’re starting to look for evidence of an undiscovered serial killer. We’ve checked a fifty-mile radius around Maestro for persons reported missing over the past five years and found nineteen.”
Sherlock said, “That sounds like a lot. Did you check it statistically?”
Dix nodded. “Yes, it’s almost fifteen percent higher than average for a predominantly rural area in Virginia. Most of them were young, and some of them may have been runaways. We got ahold of Helen Rafferty’s calendars, all safely filed in her office, and tried to match the dates the people were reported missing with Gordon’s out-of-town appointments.”
Ruth added, “Naturally, these are short distances, no overnights really necessary, meaning Gordon could have simply driven to a neighboring town, spotted the victim he wanted, and taken her.”
Dix said, “But we did find half a dozen trips out of town that overlapped with the disappearance of teenagers and young women in their early twenties. Of course, they could be coincidences.”