So some questions were raised as a result of this tidbit of info: was Marsha Bradley the girl Stanley had been referring to? Or had it been Sara Hunt? And if it had been either one or the other, why would he rape and murder them both? And twenty-some years later, no less?
Again, no rational connection could be established between the two murders. The only optimistic aspect of this new information was the remote possibility that perhaps Stanley Jenkins had murdered all he was going to murder-if indeed he’d been referring to either Marsha or Sara in his conversation with his roommate. At least it seemed now that Ann was more or less safe-Sam knew for a fact that she had never so much as spoken a word to Stanley Jenkins back in high school or she would certainly have mentioned it to him by now.
As he reached the outskirts of Smithtown, Sam had to force himself to get his mind off the murder investigation and on to something less troubling, like Shelley Hatcher. He didn’t want to think about Stanley Jenkins or Ann or anything else negative in his life right now. All he wanted to do was focus on Shelley and the great time he was going to have with her once this fucking debate thing was over.
It wasn’t very easy to do.
CHAPTER 18
Six weeks earlier, Stanley Jenkins stood beside a tree and gazed down at Cindy Fuller’s sprawling split-level home. The hillside afforded an excellent vantage point-a virtually unobstructed view of the entire southeast area of her house including the two-car garage, which was perhaps only seventy-five yards away from where Stanley was standing now. The nearest neighbor’s house was dangerously close by-not over fifty feet to the east-but the house was all but obscured from view by the dense stand of Douglas fir running along the boundary between the two homes.
He checked his watch again. It was 8:06. In another ten minutes Cindy would pull into her driveway, engage the garage door opener and pull inside. Then she would get out of her car and head for the door that led into her kitchen, pausing only long enough to press the garage door button mounted on the wall beside the door before entering her impressive home.
Once inside, she would head straight for the kitchen pantry where she kept her copious stock of liquor and take out a brand new bottle of Johnny Walker Red. (She’d just finished off the rest of the old bottle the night before.) Then she would proceed to fix herself her usual drink: two ice cubes, a few ounces of scotch and a splash of soda water. Next, she would take the drink along with her into the den, turn on the television and sit down on the sofa while she nursed her drink, thinking much of the time of how relieved she was that her mother had taken the kids for the night. It was Wednesday again, and that meant another romp in the hay with the mayor, whom she would be meeting at his rented chateau on Buena Vista Lane in another hour.
Tonight, however, Cindy was going to miss her appointment with the mayor. And it was a downright sacrilege that the mayor’s wife would most likely never find out that he had been having a torrid affair with the city prosecutor for God only knew how long.
A smug grin came to Stanley’s face as he stared down at the dimly lit oval-shaped pool in the back of Cindy’s home. He could still picture her on that hot sticky August night, swimming laps, naked, and totally unaware that she was being observed. He remembered thinking to himself how well Cindy’s body had held up over the last twenty years. Back in college, he’d only seen her naked once, and that had been one hell of a major undertaking in itself. He had managed to shimmy up a tree outside of her dorm in the wee hours of the morning and caught her (by sheer luck, really) when she’d gotten out of bed to take a piss. He had a hunch that she always slept in the raw (she just seemed like the type) and he knew for a fact that she almost always had to get up some time in the middle of the night to relieve herself. This he had learned by watching her dorm room for the past week or two and seeing a light go on for a couple of minutes on any given night and then go off. Fortunately for Stanley, not only had he been right about her sleeping in the buff, he’d even had a halfway decent vantage point at the critical moment and been able to get a pretty good look at her.
God, had he ever been stiff and sore after waiting in that awkward position thirty feet above the ground for nearly three hours! And just to get a glimpse of Cindy Fuller nude! But it had been well worth it, really, even if it had been for only a fleeting moment…
He’d come a long way since those days, in more ways than one. One of his greatest accomplishments had been the simple realization that people were predictable as hell. They were all creatures of habit to a degree and had their little routines that they performed day in and day out. The challenging part was getting close enough to them without getting caught so that you could observe those routines. And that took more than mere stealth, he’d eventually learned. It took brains, too. Intelligence, patience and careful planning: that was the key to success. And once you had all of these elements working together there wasn’t a thing you couldn’t achieve.
Locating Cindy Fuller’s whereabouts had been a fucking cinch, for example. All he’d needed was a computer, internet access and knowing all the ropes of using search engines to the max. The abundance of information one could acquire about someone was staggering. Hell, you could practically access their entire life history as long as you knew what to input and where to input it! In a matter of a few minutes he had learned, among other things, that Cindy Fuller presently lived in Portnoy, Colorado, that she was recently divorced from Gregory Martin, was mother to two kids, made over 95K a year, and was leasing a red Mercedes coupe.
Stanley shook his head slowly from side to side, wondering how far he could have possibly gotten in this life if it weren’t for computers. How else could he have become the man he was now if it weren’t for those little beige boxes of power? It was truly mind-blowing!
If only his mother could see him now, he thought. She would be proud of him. And she would realize that he had been right all along-that getting good grades and studying all the time just wasn’t enough to get by in this world. How many times had he told her that girls don’t want to go out with a fucking egghead-that they want to be with someone who is fucking cool-one who wears the right clothes, knows the words to all the latest hits on the radio and knows all the right things to say at the right time.
Jesus! he thought. She wouldn’t even let him ditch those ugly horn-rimmed glasses that he’d hated so much! Why couldn’t she ever get it through her thick skull that it was bad enough to be intelligent and on the straight-A honor roll all the time but to be ugly in the process made it fucking impossible to get any chicks! It was almost as if she’d wanted him to strike out all the time by making him wear those hideous dorky clothes she kept buying for him, always insisting that he keep his hair short and neatly parted on the left side by slapping a ton of Brylcreem on it! And where in the holy horse fuck was the old man all this time? Why, he was sitting there in his Lazy Boy recliner, smoking his pipe and reading his fucking newspaper and telling him to mind his mother-that’s where. Thanks for coming to my defense, Pop, you pussy-whipped, hen-tied shitfuck!
His parents had never been able to understand him. That was because they’d been too nearsighted to see past his 165+ I.Q. Their son was a genius, they figured, so let’s push him to excel in school so he can leave the rest of the students in the rear of the class eating his dust. It was all they had ever cared about: straight A’s and scholarships. They had no idea what it was like to be walking down the hall and having everyone laughing at you behind your back. Or to be in class and have the teacher always calling on you to give him the right answer to a question that no one else could answer. Or to have all the guys in gym class flip you on the ass with a wet towel and facetiously ask how many girls you’d screwed over the past weekend.