Maggie glanced at the magnified image. “Do you see something?”
“I’d like to scan it into the computer and break it down. Sometimes those liners have the brand imprinted on them.”
Maggie thought about what Ganza had said about Edmund Kemper. Kemper was a textbook case every profiler hoped they never ran into. Nicknamed the Co-ed Killer, the giant of a man had murdered his grandparents when he was only fifteen. He would hang around university campuses and pick up female hitchhikers in the Santa Cruz area. He murdered and dismembered six of them. It wasn’t until after he killed his mother and her friend that he turned himself in to authorities.
She looked over at Ganza just as he glanced up. The lines on his forehead bunched together in a frown when he saw something in her face that prompted him to ask, “What is it?”
She shook her head. “Nothing,” she said, but felt a sudden chill as she thought about the dead woman’s battered face. “I was just thinking of Edmund Kemper. He used a claw hammer to beat his mother to death while she was asleep.”
She didn’t add that she was also thinking of Albert Stucky, another serial killer whose signature was to put dismembered pieces of his victims into take-out containers and leave them to be found on café tables, truck-stop counters, and hotel room service trays.
As if he could read her mind, Ganza said, “Let’s hope we don’t have another psycho bastard like Kemper on our hands.”
CHAPTER 39
Sam told herself it wasn’t a lie she had told to Special Agent R. J. Tully. It was simply omitting the truth.
Jesus! Jeffery had taught her some bad habits. But he’d call them survival tactics. With the types of assignments and the caliber of assholes they dealt with on a regular basis, lying—and being good at it—was an asset, not a bad habit.
Sam had insinuated that she and Jeffery were in the warehouse district when the fire started. But the truth was, Sam had been home for several hours. She had tucked in her son and shared a cup of tea with her mother. She had been fast asleep when Jeffery’s phone call woke her.
Now she tried to remember if he had told her how he’d found out about the fire. Usually she didn’t bother to ask. The man had more contacts and informants than the CIA. She just presumed he’d been tipped off.
Although she had told Agent Tully that Jeffery had a police scanner—and he did—Sam knew he couldn’t have heard about the fire that way. She knew because she didn’t think the police or fire department had even been called yet by the time she and Jeffery arrived. Her own film footage seemed to verify that. Hell, the street people were just crawling out of their cardboard boxes and stumbling from their warm corners.
So how did Jeffery know so early?
Sam didn’t really care, or maybe she didn’t want to know. Same thing with Jeffery’s decision to do absolutely nothing about the story Otis P. Dodd had shared with them. It wasn’t her call. She needed to concentrate on doing her job, a job she loved and wanted to keep. The way Sam looked at it, Jeffery helped put a roof over her family’s head and food on the table. That’s all she needed to know. Jeffery had made that happen. Better than that, he had made sure she was rewarded with bonuses that she stashed away for her son. If things continued to work out the way she planned, her son would never have to struggle the way Sam and her mother had all those years without Sam’s dad.
She wasn’t too stubborn to realize that her success and financial stability depended on Jeffery Cole’s success and financial profitability. He was one of the top paid investigative reporters in the country and would become even more famous when Big Mac gave him his own show. So when things got a bit crazy, Sam reminded herself that she had attached herself to his star and had to be ready for the journey. Maybe her mother was right. Maybe she had sold her soul to Diablo.
She pulled her car off Interstate 66 and immediately found the diner where Jeffery had asked her to meet him. As far as she could tell, it wasn’t anywhere on the way to their next interview, but again, rather than question Jeffery, she simply followed instructions.
Sometimes he liked to eat at out-of-the-way dives, once driving them down the Virginia back roads to what looked like a two-room clapboard shanty on the river. One side sold bait and tackle, the other side served some of the best barbeque pulled pork Sam had ever eaten. Of course, there were also those places that ripped up Sam’s stomach, like the bamboo hut in Jinja, Uganda, overlooking Lake Victoria. Never again would she let anyone talk her into eating monkey.
Today’s diner looked a bit too commercial for Jeffery, but Sam found a table by the window and waited for him.
When he came in, his face was flushed and his shirt wrinkled, the sleeves shoved up instead of neatly rolled up. He must have left his tie and jacket in the car, even though the day was a bit chilly. Sam thought he looked out of breath.