Cindy carefully set her wineglass down on the coffee table, kicked off her ballet flats, and curled up in a corner of the couch. I sat across from her in Joe’s big leather chair.
“What’s going on?” I asked her.
“You’re going to kill me,” said Cindy, “but I wish you wouldn’t.”
I read her face and saw something that looked like guilt in her eyes. I felt a stinging shock of alarm. What the hell could Cindy have done to tick me off?
I said, “Only one way to find out.”
And then she told me.
“When you said Morales had been seen in Wisconsin? In a town near Lake Michigan? I tracked her there.”
“You’re joking. You didn’t do that, Cindy.”
“Randy Fish’s father had a house on the lake that still belongs to his estate. I thought Morales might be there. I brought cops with me when I went. I wanted to be in on the takedown and write about her, you know. Get an exclusive. But—she was already gone.”
“You took something I said to you as a friend—”
“I know, I know. But you weren’t working the case, Lindsay. She was in Wisconsin. Not on your patch.”
“And so you went out on this, this story, using my private information without asking me? Do you realize how that could come back on me?”
Cindy picked up her glass, drained it, and said, “You know, I figured I’d turn the information over to you and Richie and you’d nail her and she would be prosecuted here and we’d all win. Look, I don’t blame you for whatever you think of me. I was wrong. I’m really sorry. Thanks for dinner, Linds.”
She put down her glass and toed around for her shoes. I didn’t think Cindy was actually steady enough to make it through the front door. And there was no way she could drive.
“I’m not going to beg you, Cindy. But if you don’t spit it out, I will come over there and smother you with a throw pillow.”
She laughed and said, “Please don’t hurt me.”
“We’ll see.”
She grinned, sat back on the couch, and said, “Okay. So when we got to the house, Morales was gone. But she had wired the house with explosives. Yeah! To blow up. I have that on excellent authority.”
“How do you know it was Morales who did that?”
“Off the record—her prints were found under a layer of dust. Anyway, the FBI is watching the house. Hoping she’ll go back to it so they can nail her. Personally? What do I think? I think she’s out of that house for good.”
“Because?”
Cindy took a deep breath and let it out as a long sigh.
“Earlier this week, a female fitting Mackie’s description robbed a bank in Chicago. She killed two people—a guard and a bystander. I just flew out there and talked to two customers who had fled before the cops locked them down. The way they described her, Linds, get this: five foot six to five foot eight. Athletic. Could be Hispanic.”
I said, “That’s a description? I call that a vague generality that could fit too many people to be useful at all. But listen, Cindy. Please look at me. Let’s say you’re actually onto Morales. Thank God you didn’t confront her. Are you kidding me? She’s on the FBI’s top-ten most-wanted list. Number five. You know better than almost anyone how dangerous she is.”
Cindy said, “I’m a crime journalist, Linds. A damned good one, as it turns out.”
That was indisputable. Cindy had helped me solve more than one case with her doggedness, and she had some kind of intuition that couldn’t be put down to luck. She had told me once that she was one killer story short of national acclaim. I understood what Morales meant to her.
But that didn’t mean she should be trying to get close to her. I nodded my head in agreement and said, “I know how good you are. I know.”
Cindy said, “So—may I have some coffee now? I’m not done telling you what’s going on.”
Chapter 37
I kept my eyes on Cindy while I brewed the coffee. She was tapping on her phone, looking as distracted as she had seemed over dinner.
Joe came into the kitchen and I whispered to him, “She’s tracking Morales.”
His eyebrows shot up to his hairline.
“By herself? You gotta love her,” he said.
“And—why?” I said dubiously.
“She’s a lot like you.”
“Come on,” I said. “You really think that?”
He grinned, gave me a swat on the behind, poured coffee for himself, and went back to his office.
I called out, “Cindy, come get your mug.”
She sugared and milked her java, after which we took our mugs to the living room and assumed our former positions. She swiped at her cell phone with her thumb, and just when I was ready to scream, she got up and brought her phone over to me.
“I just got an e-mail with these attachments about three hours ago,” Cindy said. “Sometimes a picture is actually worth a thousand blah-blah-blahs.”
“What am I looking at?” I asked her.
The first photo was of three State of Wyoming Highway Patrol cars, flashers on, clumped up along the side of a highway.
The second shot showed traffic cones across the lane and a half-dozen khaki-uniformed troopers standing around what looked like a female body lying in the ditch off the shoulder of the road.
“You’re saying that’s Mackie?”
“No,” said Cindy. “Keep flipping through.”
The next photo was a tighter shot of the corpse. I thought that I was looking at a hit-and-run, but by the fourth photo, it was clear that the victim had been shot through the left temple.
“Who sent these to you?” I asked.
“Off the record,” Cindy said, “they’re from a cop friend of mine who got the pictures from an undisclosed source. There’s no ID yet on the victim. I don’t know her, Linds,” Cindy said, “but she looks familiar.”
I looked at the close-ups of the victim. She was pretty, in her twenties, long dark hair, pale skin, slender build.
The gunshot wound to the temple made me think that if she had been a passenger, the driver could have shot her and dumped her out of the vehicle.
Or, if she had been driving and stopped her car for someone and rolled down her window, the person standing outside the car could have popped her, dragged her out, and stolen her car.
Then I came to the close-ups of the victim’s hands. All of her fingers had been cut off at the first joint—and that changed everything.
Cindy said, “Remind you of something?”
Yes. It reminded me of Randy Fish, a sexual sadist who had used different methods to kill and torture his victims. He had cut the fingers off one of his last kills with a pair of pruning shears—while the girl was alive. He’d told me all about that.
Randy Fish was dead. I was a witness to that.
But his soul mate was still alive.
Cindy said, “How could this be a coincidence? This murder looks to me like an homage to Randy Fish. And that makes me think Mackie did it.”
Might. Could be. Definite maybe. But there was no evidence that Mackie Morales was connected to this crime at all.
I asked Cindy a lot of questions: Had any ID been found on or near the victim? Were there any witnesses? Any missing persons report leading to the victim? Any anything?
Cindy said, “Linds, I’ve told you everything I know and everything I’m thinking.”
I wasn’t buying it.
Cindy was looking straight at me with her big round baby blues, but I wasn’t sure she was seeing me. Maybe she was inside her head, working on her killer story about a Mackie Morales murder spree.
Or maybe it was something else.
I said, “What is it, Cindy? What aren’t you saying?”
Chapter 38
Conklin showed up at our work space at half past nine, which was late for him. He hadn’t shaved or combed his hair, and he’d missed a couple of shirt buttons. Either he’d taken a tumble in the clothes dryer or I was looking at the hallmark of new love: late nights, morning delight.
“I just made coffee,” I said, tipping my chin toward the break room.