Savich left. This was interesting indeed. Someone like Wenkel, he should have rolled. Something was wrong with that picture.
CHAPTER 14
Hoover Building
Late Friday morning
Coop said, “I gotta tell you, Savich, Inspector Delion was so excited this morning when I called San Francisco and told him the serial killer is Ted Bundy’s daughter, he nearly hyperventilated. I gave him her probable age, sent him the most recent sketch, told him we were betting she lived and attended school in the San Francisco Bay Area since that’s where the murders started. I told him we’d have a name for him soon. He’d already done some work on the first two murders committed in San Francisco, and he said a lot of people in the SFPD would be hyped with this news.
“He called me a couple of minutes ago, said they’d already looked through their unsolved murders but there weren’t any good matches, but he found six unsolved missing persons—all women—who might fit the ticket. None of the six missing women have ever showed up, anywhere, and the young ones they didn’t consider runaways.”
Savich waved Coop to a seat. “Over what period of time?”
“He said the first one was a missing teenager, seventeen years ago, then another missing female every couple of years to the present, when the two women were murdered in their homes in San Francisco and, naturally, found pretty quickly. If Bundy’s daughter is responsible for the missing women, she didn’t want them found.”
Savich punched a couple of keys on MAX, then frowned. “It seems to me if she killed those missing women, what she was doing was working all the kinks out, fine-tuning her craft. But why did she change everything when she took her show on the road?”
MAX beeped.
“Ah, here we go.” Savich typed a couple more keys. “Come here, Coop, take a look at this.”
Both men stared down at a series of high-school yearbook photos of three young women, sixteen or seventeen years old, at three different high schools in San Francisco, eighteen years ago. “Looks like that one, doesn’t it?” Coop said, and pointed to a girl’s photo in the Mount Elysium High School yearbook. “Look at that dead white face. The hair’s blond and the clothes are red, but hair and clothing are easy to change. She’s pretty, but there’s a sort of indifference about her, maybe a remoteness, you know what I mean?”
Savich said, “As if she’s not really plugged into this world, and she doesn’t give a crap about any of its inhabitants.” A couple more key taps and the screen filled with the face of the girl called Kirsten Bolger. Another couple of keys, and her hair became black. “Look at those eyes, Savich, dark as a pit. Black hair looks natural—bet she dyed her hair blond for the yearbook picture.”
Savich made her clothes black, too, set a black beret on her head. “Okay, let’s line her up with the sketch.”
They studied them. “They’re very close,” Coop said.
“Now let’s try her next to Ted Bundy.” Two photos appeared side by side.
Coop whistled. “Would you look at that. Kirsten looks a lot like her daddy.”
“Close enough. Okay, ask Delion to find Kirsten Bolger’s mother.” Savich paused for a moment, tapped his fingertips on his desk. “I want you and Lucy to go out to San Francisco, speak to her mother yourselves. I know it’s the weekend, but ask Delion if he’ll give you and Lucy some time this evening, maybe set something up so the three of you can meet the mother.”
“You think the mom is in San Francisco, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes.”
“You know Delion will take the bait. Bundy’s daughter—who could turn that down? The entire police department will want to come with us.”
“I’ll work with MAX to find out what I can about Kirsten Bolger and her family, and send the info on to Delion. He’ll uncover more about Kirsten with some local phone calls, you can count on it. Vincent’s smart, he’s got a canny sort of intuition, though he likes to play gruff and tough. He’s bald as a shiny egg, and you won’t believe his mustache; it’s his pride and joy. Say hello to him for Sherlock and me.”
“You know the media’s going to get hold of this and go wild with it. It’ll be a sensation—Ted Bundy’s daughter, another serial killer. It ain’t going to be pretty. Every police department in the country is going to get flooded with calls claiming she bags groceries at Food Lion.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it, as usual. We’ll keep forging ahead until it happens, and then we’ll deal with it when we have to.”
When Lucy came into the CAU at noon on the dot, Coop said, “Tell me if this girl dyes her hair.”
Lucy took the photo and looked down at the young face. “Yes,” she said.
“Okay, now we’ve got the expert’s opinion. You wanna go on a honeymoon trip with me?”
She cocked her head. “Don’t you think we should get married first, Coop? Oh, wait, I bet you’ve used that line on a dozen women. Does that one work for you?”
“I should have said pre-honeymoon trip, and it isn’t a line. It’s business. We’re going to San Francisco, Savich’s orders. It could be a line, I guess, but I just made it up, actually. I repeat, Lucy, there aren’t dozens of women waiting to jump me, okay? Interesting idea, though, taking a little trip to San Francisco as a trial run to see if we can last several stress-filled days in each other’s company without physical violence on either side. Actually, a pre-honeymoon might save some parents a lot of money for a fancy wedding.”
Lucy had to laugh, and it felt good for a minute, but then she thought about the three hours she’d spent that morning going through a half dozen rooms at her grandmother’s house, with nothing to show for it except, literally, an aching back. She said as she stretched a bit, “If I end up smacking you, I swear you’ll deserve it.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Oh, my back. My grandmother’s got so much stuff, it’s taking me forever.”
“You need some help with that?”
Are you nuts? Shut up, shut up. “No, that’s not why I said it, merely an observation. The longer you live, the more stuff you collect, I guess.”
Coop, who had grade-A cop radar, wondered why she was doing all that work by herself, but he let it go. The fact was she looked wrung out, not from a hangover from too much wine at The Swarm last night but from grief for her father. The last thing she needed was for him to start questioning her. At least he’d gotten a little laugh out of her, and maybe she didn’t think he was such a loser playboy anymore. He heard himself say, “I told you I’m not a dog when it comes to women.”
She didn’t blink. “We’ll see.”
That was something, he thought. “Okay, like I said, we’re going to San Francisco. Here, let me show you the rest of the photos of Kirsten Bolger, then let’s get packed. Shirley made reservations for the four-o’clock flight to SFO.”
Lucy’s heart leaped when she saw the photos side by side. Kirsten Bolger—was she really the killer? She thought briefly of all the thousands of square feet she still had to search in her grandmother’s house, and the hundreds of books in the study. That all paled in comparison to this. Whatever was in her grandmother’s house could wait. It had already waited twenty-two years; what was a couple more days? Nothing was going anywhere.
She asked, “So, where are we staying in San Francisco?”
“I’ll go butter Shirley up, see if she can’t get us an upgrade from the usual Motel Four and a Half. Hey, what’s the matter?”
“I was thinking about the media.”
“Try not to.”