Carl nodded. “I’ve been sitting here thinking about Hazel Ligetti. Why kill her unless she’s an accomplice, unless she’s started making noise about blackmail? But a woman who meant to blackmail someone wouldn’t list him as a beneficiary.”
“She’d write a letter,” Tess said, remembering how she once did the same when she feared Luisa O’Neal and her husband might harm her. “Put it somewhere safe.”
“He got rid of her because she knew him. Really got rid of her- burned her place to the ground, wiped her off the face of the planet.”
“Which also took care of any incriminating paperwork she might have taken home with her from work,” Tess pointed out. “Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“The first time I went to Sharpsburg, I looked for Hazel’s grave. She was Jewish, which isn’t something a casual friend would have known. The name is a classic Ellis Island screw-up, Italian by way of Hungary. But someone had been to her grave, left a small stone.”
“A stone?”
“Jewish custom. At the time, I thought it was just a passerby, someone who felt sorry for one of the few Jewish headstones in the cemetery.”
Carl understood. “He was marking the trail for you. He wanted a day to come when you would make that connection.”
“But why does he want me, Carl? I don’t look like the other girls. I’m not working in a convenience store, waiting for Prince Charming to sweep me off my feet and set my life right. My life is fine.”
They both looked north, to where bulldozers had begun ripping up a huge portion of the parklike campus. As Dr. Armistead had told Tess at their first meeting, Sheppard Pratt could survive only by selling off its one asset, its land. The mentally ill no longer spent their lifetimes here; the hospital no longer needed all this acreage. But the trees that were being uprooted had long screened the hospital from the world. Now the world was looking back, if one could call this exposed fringe of suburbia a world.
“Did you see anything in the cemetery that day?” Carl asked. “Another person, a car? It would sure help if we knew what he drove. Even a partial description-”
“He doesn’t have a vehicle. His last car was titled to his last girlfriend. Remember? Mary Ann Melcher bawled just thinking about him putting that van in her name. The state police ran all his identities through the computer. Nothing came up.”
“Still, he’s gotta have a car. And it would be risky, titling and retitling a vehicle to himself. Creates a paper trail of links, which he’s managed to avoid. He’s never put two of his names in the same place. You had to make that leap, when we were looking at the rental car records in Spartina.”
“Are you suggesting he has yet another identity, one that he uses exclusively for vehicle registration? Or an out-of-state car?”
“None of the above. Did you notice that Drey Windsor lives in a pretty swanky retirement home for a waterman’s widow? Someone’s paying her bills. Someone’s taking good care of her. I bet she returns the favor, however she can.”
“So his mom buys him a car,” Tess said, saying it out loud, testing it. Then she shook her head. “No way. The first time he gets stopped- and everyone gets stopped eventually-he’s hosed. How’s he going to explain he’s driving a car titled to some strange woman?”
“Well, here’s where having been a Toll Facilities cop comes in handy.” Carl smiled, and Tess realized it was his way of showing he had forgiven her that insult. “All he needs is a letter, signed by Audrey Windsor. Something like, To Whom It May Concern, so-and-so has my permission to drive this automobile. As long as the insurance is current and the vehicle doesn’t come up as stolen, no one’s going to raise an eyebrow. If someone had ever gone so far as to call her, she would have vouched for him.”
“Let’s go,” Tess said, getting to her feet and pulling him out of the deep-seated chair. His knee was still giving him trouble; he winced when she brought him to his feet too fast.
“Motor Vehicles Administration?”
“No, I want to visit my friend who does computer work for me. Because even if we confirm your hunch that Drey Windsor has more than one car titled in her name, where are we going to go from there? I want someone who can hack her way through all the state’s databases if necessary.”
Technically, Dorie Starnes worked at the Beacon-Light as a systems manager. But finding reporters’ lost stories and tinkering with the company’s balky e-mail software took up only 50 percent of her time- and brought in only 30 percent of her income.
The rest of the time Dorie used the powerful machines at her disposal to do computer-assisted reporting for a few select customers-clients such as Tess-who could be trusted not to betray her hobby to her employer of record. Dorie had a few cards up her sleeve if the Beacon-Light ever turned on her. On a regular basis, she hacked her way into the company’s e-mail system. Her stash of private correspondence conducted by several high-level managers provided her all the job security she needed.
Still, she wasn’t happy when Tess breached their usual protocol and showed up at Beacon-Light downtown headquarters.
“You know you’re supposed to call me on the cell if you want something.”
“But I’m not sure what I want. I don’t know everything you can do, and I didn’t want to wait.”
“Who’s the guy?” Dorie was not shy about pointing, and she all but poked Carl in the nose with her stubby index finger. Round, with an upper body that appeared to be all chest, and short hair that was full of cowlicks, Dorie looked like a pigeon who had been caught in the rain.
“My new partner.”
She offered this explanation because it was less complicated than the truth. But Carl smiled as broadly as if she had just given him an equity stake in Keyes Investigations. Well, he was welcome to it. There was no money in this enterprise. The only thing at stake was Tess’s life.
Dorie took them into her office, an almost eerily neat space hidden in an alcove far from the newsroom. The Beacon-Light had undergone an expensive renovation since the last time Tess had crossed its threshold, but the building had an innate shabbiness that no decor could defeat. Newspaper people were notorious slobs, and the reporters had quickly trashed their shiny new spaces, piling papers and files around their desks, leaving food and drinks out to rot.
“Do you still have mice?”
“Yeah,” Dorie said. “They’re getting better at poisoning them, but the mice have a bad habit of crawling off into these little crannies to die, and they can’t find them until they start to stink.”
It took her less than ninety seconds to establish the fact that Audrey Windsor currently had two cars in her name: the black Buick that Tess remembered from the driveway and a van, a blue one, that had been purchased two years ago.
“So he got a new van after he left Mary Ann,” Tess said. “Maybe he gets a new van after every relationship. Because the vehicle created his alibi with Tiffani and Lucy, he wouldn’t risk using the same one twice.”
“He needs a van,” Carl said. “It’s perfect for transporting your girlfriend’s body after you’ve chopped off her head.”
“Who is this guy?” Dorie asked in an uncharacteristic fit of curiosity. Information was just something she sold, and the facts she dug up might as well have been in Hebrew. “He chopped a woman’s head off and he’s still at large? Get out.”
“He’s just some guy who’s killed at least five people,” Tess murmured absentmindedly.
“Six,” Carl corrected. “The five on your original list, plus Becca Harrison. Seven if you count Eric Shivers, and what do you want to bet he had a hand in that, too? Serial killers start young.”