‘Must have been a bit of a shock.’
‘I guess. But at least they were smart enough to know something serious was going on and call us immediately. She was mostly in one piece when we found her, except of course for her heart. She’d been dead three, maybe three and a half weeks. Naked. Badly decomposed. We might not have noticed that the heart had been removed except that the breastbone had been cut with a surgical saw and spread.’ There was a pause. ‘You guys check ViCAP for other cases where a heart’s been removed?’
‘We’re waiting on their report now.’
‘We didn’t find anything similar back then, but if it is the same guy, maybe Andersen was his first.’
‘You found Andersen by accident. There could be dozens of others who were never found,’ said McCabe, ‘and never will be. Unless we find the bastard and he leads us to them.’
‘So if it’s the same whacko – and that’s a big if – he suddenly switches MO and dumps her in plain sight. That’s because?’
‘I don’t know. He’s a risk-taker. Maybe, like a junkie, he keeps needing a bigger and bigger hit to get the same high. Just killing them and cutting them up doesn’t do it for him anymore. He’s got to taunt us with them now.’
‘So how do we find him?’ asked Cahill.
‘If he’s itchy to get noticed, maybe he’ll find us. I assume you checked the local hospitals, surgeons, cardiologists, pathologists, nurses with OR experience, and so on?’
‘For weeks. My guys did over six hundred interviews. Anybody and everybody we could think of who might have had the skills and access to the tools to pull this off. All we got is a big fat goose egg. Zero. Not a damned thing.’
‘Anyway, can you find out if any of your local surgeons have since moved to Maine? Or New Hampshire? Or even Massachusetts?’
‘We can take a crack at it.’
‘Tell me about Andersen. How did the guy get his hands on her?’
‘It wasn’t random. He targeted her. She was a local real estate agent. The whole scam was pretty simple. I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Unknown male calls her office. Asks for Andersen by name. Another saleswoman asked who was calling. He says his name is Harry Lime.’
‘Harry Lime? You’ve got to be kidding.’
‘Yeah, I know. The character in The Third Man. Apparently the woman’s not a movie buff, and the name doesn’t mean a thing to her. Anyway, our so-called Harry Lime tells her he’s a potential buyer and Andersen was specifically recommended to him. He wants Andersen to show him a house. So she routes the call to Andersen. Notes on Andersen’s desk indicate the guy also tells her his name is Harry Lime. Said he was looking for a house in the eight-hundred-thousand to one-million range. He asks her to show him a specific house in a new subdivision. She agrees to meet him there. She never returned from the appointment. The house was locked up. Lockbox in place. No fingerprints anywhere. Not even hers. Her car was found in the driveway, but not in the center. Way over to the right. Like there’d been another car parked next to it. My guess is as soon as they go in, he jumps her, knocks her out or ties her up, then loads her in his car and drives off.’
‘Once again the risk-taker. Anybody could have seen him. I gather nobody did.’
‘Nope. All the houses around the one she was supposed to show him were empty. It was the middle of the day, and there wasn’t a soul around,’ said Cahill.
‘Well, that part sure fits with dumping a body in the middle of the city at eleven o’clock on a Thursday night. I assume you did a major search for her before the body turned up?’
‘Full-court press. We even had a couple of hundred National Guardsmen looking for her. Came up with zip.’
‘Did you check to see if his name might really be Harry Lime?’
‘We checked. AutoTrack came up with six Harry Limes. Two in L.A. One in Chicago. One in New York City. One in Georgia. One here in Florida. All came up negative. We think he was yanking our chains with the name.’
‘When did all this happen?’ asked McCabe.
‘More than a month before she was found.’
‘She was dead three to four weeks when you found her. Which means he kept her for what? A week before he killed her?’
‘Based on the fact that she was buried about five feet down and the kind of bugs they found in the body, that’s what the ME figured, but it’s still a guess. You know as well as I do we can’t pin it down exactly, specially when you’re looking at decomposed remains.’
‘Even so, it’s about the same time frame we have here.’ One week. He wondered if that’s all the time they had to find Cassidy. One week. It wasn’t much. ‘What about the phone call?’ he asked.
‘It came from a pay phone outside a 7-Eleven. Nobody there remembered anybody using the phone around the time the call was placed.’
‘Anything else I should know about Elyse Andersen?’
‘What do you want to know?’