She headed for Trig. After that, lunch, then Tilson, then meeting with Thacker to tell him she wasn’t going to do that speech.
An afternoon chock-full of things to look forward to.
I was at the drive-through window of Billy Bongo’s Burger Hut when Ralph called to bring me up to speed.
I handed over my credit card and waited for the food while he filled me in: “The background checks on people named Loudon or Caribes didn’t give us anything. It doesn’t look like Basque has used that alias before — at least not in renting or buying any apartments, condos, homes within a hundred miles of here. Nothing on the other iterations of ‘cannibal’ either. Cassidy did find where Basque purchased the lock, however. I’ll send you the location so you can add it to your geoprofile.”
“Anything else?”
“Nothing major. I’ll e-mail you everything we have.”
“Ralph”—I had a thought—“I’d like us to take a closer look at the location where that car was when Basque stole it. Maybe there’s a video camera from a nearby business that might have caught someone walking toward that parking garage or frequenting the area.”
“It might be in his awareness space.”
“Spoken like a true geographic profiler.”
“I’ve been hanging around you way too long.”
“There could be worse fates.”
“Name one,” he said.
“Having to watch baseball with Tessa.”
“Good point.”
We ended the call, I picked up the food and aimed the car for the hospital.
31
Saundra Weathers went to the basement and unlocked the trunk where she kept the newspaper articles.
The conversation with Patrick Bowers last night had gotten her thinking about when she was a senior in high school and that eleven-year-old girl had been murdered.
She never allowed Noni to see what was inside this trunk, so thankfully her daughter was in kindergarten for the day.
Saundra tipped the lid open.
When Mindy Wells was killed, Saundra had followed the story in the papers every day and had clipped all of the newspaper articles about it.
Now she paged through them.
There weren’t any crime scene photos or anything like that, but there were several pictures of Mindy — reproductions of the school photographs taken at the beginning of the year, one of the tree house where her body had been found, one of the school, one of the girl’s mother at the courthouse, and one of the tire impressions in the muddy road that led along the edge of the marsh.
That was the road the killer had used to get to the tree house when he took Mindy Wells out there so that he could be alone with her.
The man did unspeakable things to her before he killed her. Things that had seared the consciousness of that small town for years.
Last Christmas, Saundra had been back to visit her parents and she’d found out that, for a lot of people in Horicon, the memory of Mindy’s death still hadn’t healed.
A little girl with her whole life ahead of her.
Patrick Bowers’s name was mentioned in the articles, but there wasn’t much about him.
Saundra remembered him, though, since he was the starting quarterback of the football team and Mindy had disappeared during the week leading up to the state semifinals.
She was a senior, he was a junior, but everyone at the school knew Patrick Bowers.
Based on how well he played that year, he probably could have played college ball, but he didn’t go out for the team his senior year.
No one knew why, but back then people speculated that it was because of finding that girl’s corpse right before the state semifinal game, that it had been too much of a shock and had turned him away from football.
Saundra let her finger graze across the photo of Mindy Wells.
Someone’s daughter.
She shuddered to think what the girl’s parents went through.
Eight years ago her husband had left her after she found out she was pregnant. He’d said he wasn’t ready to become a dad; however, she’d pointed out that since she was pregnant he was already a dad and by leaving, he was just showing that he wasn’t man enough to face the responsibilities of being one.
When she miscarried her baby girl, it almost destroyed her.
Two years later, while adopting Noni, she’d learned a lot about all the hoops people have to jump through for overseas adoptions. In fact, it took nearly a year and two trips to Ethiopia before she got approval and was finally able to bring Noni home.
Since her second book had just hit the New York Times bestseller list, money hadn’t been a big hurdle for her, but being a single mom and battling depression had been.
But the journey to adoption wasn’t as rocky for her as it was for most adoptive parents.
The wait time for getting your child was typically twice as long as her wait and for most families who wanted to adopt, it was cost-prohibitive. That’s why Saundra had started her foundation — to provide money for parents who wanted to do overseas adoptions from Africa.
But lately Saundra’s books hadn’t been doing as well — with the emergence of online booksellers and e-publishing, publishing houses weren’t giving big advances anymore, even to authors like her who had a track record. Money might have been down, but the need for would-be parents hadn’t gone away, and neither had her passion to help them adopt orphans from Africa — kids who would likely starve to death if they weren’t adopted.
It broke her heart to think about the fact that in Africa more than ten million children were growing up without parents. It was almost as if the future had been ripped out of an entire continent by war and disease.
No, admittedly, she wasn’t able to make a big dent in the problem, but every adoption was one more life saved.
One.
More.
Life.
A plan began to form in her mind.
She carefully placed the newspapers back in the trunk.
Now there was another killer on the loose, one even more twisted than the one who’d taken Mindy Wells’s life.
And Saundra realized that it was very possible that he had taken a special interest in her.
It was strange, really, the thoughts she was having, about the children who needed to be adopted and how expensive it is to get started, how it’s so hard to afford your dream of raising a child, about what her foundation did in giving grants to prospective parents to bring adoption into reach, and in the process, rescue children just like Noni.
One more life.
Despite how ridiculous it sounded, Saundra found herself hoping that this man, Richard Basque, would somehow try to contact her. If he did, and the news media caught hold of the story that a serial killer was stalking a crime novelist, it would be a national story.
The exposure would give her a natural platform to talk about protecting her daughter from the man. And here was the thought that was unfolding in her mind: she was good enough at interviews to bridge the conversation to her foundation to help other children who were in danger of losing their lives.
It wouldn’t be easy financially, but maybe she could donate the proceeds from her book sales from her next royalty check to the foundation. If she could get on the right talk shows, that could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars for the foundation. And that could mean saving the lives of thousands and thousands of children.
Yes, literally saving their lives.
Agent Bowers had intimated that Basque might try to contact her somehow.
If that happened, it would set everything in motion.
How could you even think this?
But she was and she couldn’t put the thoughts aside.