'Your FBI contact said Fletcher murdered the killers he hunted,' Darby said. 'I wouldn't be surprised if Fletcher already found Dingle.'
Chadzynski stared at the blinking lights on her phone for a long moment.
'If you want to find Fletcher,' Darby said, 'you need to put people on Jonathan Hale.'
There was a knock on the door. Chadzynski's secretary came in and placed the court order on the edge of the desk.
The commissioner waited until the door was shut before she spoke. 'The Herald reporter has decided to run the story about the remains being found at Sinclair.'
'Did you remind him it might cause Hannah's abductor to panic and kill her?'
'I did. The story will be on the front page of tomorrow's paper.'
Darby picked up the copies of the court order. 'If there isn't anything else, I'd like to get to work on this.'
'Where are you going to start?'
'The Shriners Burn Center,' Darby said. 'Coop and Woodbury are going to hit the dermatologists' offices before they close for the day.'
'I'll see if I can locate Jonathan Hale,' Chadzynski said, reaching for her phone. Malcolm Fletcher had traded his hotel room for a safe house in Wellesley, a suburb twenty minutes outside of Boston. Ali Karim had made all the arrangements.
The place was fully furnished. Fletcher sat at a small antique desk reading a computer printout of Walter Smith's patient file from Shriners. He had managed to hack his way past the hospital's firewall and into the patient database. Once Walter's file was printed, Fletcher deleted it from the hospital's computer system.
Walter's last corrective surgery took place in 1987, when he was eighteen. The address listed in the file was an apartment building in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Fletcher had checked the address earlier in the day. Walter had moved out in 1992. The forwarding address was a studio apartment in the Back Bay. The landlord had faxed Karim a copy of the rental agreement. Walter didn't leave a forwarding address, but his social security number was listed on the application.
The quickest way to find Walter's current address would be through tax records. That meant hacking into the IRS's computer network.
At the moment, a UNIX program was running, quietly searching for a back door past the IRS firewall. To slip in and out without leaving a digital footprint or, worse, triggering an alarm, required a tremendous amount of patience and skill. One wrong move and federal agents would be standing on his doorstep.
Malcolm Fletcher picked up the Virgin Mary statue he had removed from inside the cardboard box at the Sinclair chapel and moved it between his fingers as he reached for the phone.
'Have you changed your mind about meeting Walter, Mr Hale?'
'No.'
'Make sure your phone is charged,' Fletcher said, watching the computer screen. 'I'll have Walter's address tonight, tomorrow at the latest.'
76
The hospital director for the Shriners Burn Center, Dr Tobias, sat behind his cluttered desk and watched Darby over his bifocals. He hadn't read the court order. He had handed it off to the hospital's legal counsel, who took his sweet goddamn time reviewing it. Jesus Christ, hurry up. Finally, the lawyer gave Tobias the go-ahead.
Tobias, round and bowlegged, escorted her through gleaming white hallways. Behind the closed doors Darby heard the steady beep of machinery and murmured conversations. Some doors had small windows built into them. Most of the patients lying in the beds wore pressure-garments over their faces and arms. It was impossible to tell if they were male or female. Many of the burn patients were children.
Some patients wandered through the hallways. Darby looked away from their mangled faces and limbs.
The hospital pharmacy had a computer system which allowed searches based on a patient's name or the name of a particular medication. Darby searched for 'Samuel Dingle.' No one named Dingle was listed in the pharmacy database.
The list of male patients using Lycoprime totalled 146.
The man who had Hannah Givens would be young, white and probably in his late twenties to early thirties. Physically, he would have to look and appear young. A college student would be reluctant to climb inside the car of an older man, but they might be more inclined to do so if they believed the person appeared to be a college student too, possibly one who said he was attending the same college. Darby believed the killer was local. He wouldn't want to live too far from Sinclair. She would pay close attention to those who had criminal records.
For that she would have to rely on Neil Joseph, who was sitting at his desk waiting for her to call. Neil could easily find a criminal record provided it wasn't a juvenile offence. Those records were sealed and couldn't be accessed without a court order. Darby hoped that wouldn't be the case.
'Can you sort the Lycoprime list by the patient's age?' she asked Tobias. 'I'd like to review the younger patients first.'
'I can't print out a single, definitive list starting with age – you'd have to examine each file to find that information. We could, however, print out the list of all male patients using Lycoprime.'
'What about patients using Lycoprime in conjunction with Derma?'
'The problem is you won't get an accurate sampling. We stopped selling Derma, oh, I'd probably say at least four years ago. It's no longer a prescription item.'
'If a patient is using Derma, would it be listed in their file?'
'In the older files, yes,' Tobias said. 'We recommend Derma to all of our patients. It's an excellent product. We give out trial samples to our patients to see what colour best matches their skin tone, and then they can order the particular shade over the company website.'
Meaning there's no way to track recent Derma orders from the pharmacy records, Darby thought.
'I know you're anxious to get to this,' Tobias said, 'so in the interest of saving time, I'd recommend Craig – that would be the gentleman to your left, Craig Henderson, our pharmacist – I can have Craig send the Lycoprime patient files to my office printer. They'll start alphabetically by the patient's last name. You can use my office computer to access the actual patient files. You can't access the patient database through the pharmacy's computer. The patient files are on a separate system.'
Tobias' laser printer was dreadfully slow. Each pharmacy file contained the patient's name, date of birth, address and health insurance information. The patient's entire prescription history was listed.
It took an hour to print Lycoprime patients A through H. The ages ranged from five to fifty.
Dr Tobias helped her sort the patients into two piles – one for ages up to fifteen, the other pile for ages sixteen and older.
Most of the patient records were of young male children or teenagers who had been burned in a house fire caused by a parent falling asleep with a lit cigarette. Some had been accidentally scalded by boiling water left on a stove. One boy, a ten-year-old, had decided for some ungodly reason to light firecrackers near a plastic gas jug in his parents' garage. The fire was so severe he couldn't breathe without the aid of a ventilator. He later died.
And then there were the other files, the ones dealing with parents who had dumped their screaming infant or meddlesome toddler into a tub of scalding water; parents who, in a moment of anger or drunken rage, shoved their son into a fireplace or wood stove. Jesus, here was a file on a father who, wanting to teach his eleven-year-old a lesson about the dangers of fire, lit a match and held it to up to his son's hand. The flame caught on the boy's polyester pyjamas. They melted against his skin, covering him with permanent burn scars.
One patient seemed promising: a twenty-nine-year-old white male named Frank Hayden. In 1996, at age seventeen, Hayden was jumping a faulty car battery when it exploded. The battery acid burned his face. His patient file listed the dozens of reconstruction surgeries Hayden had endured over the past decade.
Hayden also had a criminal record. In 2003 he had been arrested for attempted rape. He served two years in Walpole. After his release, he went back to live with his mother in Dorchester.