LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter Two

      Mike Gerard got back to his office in a thoughtful mood. This newest victim just might have given him a lead the death was supposed to have prevented, and it was certainly worth checking into. But not if it had already been checked, which was the first thing he had to find out.

      Detective Sergeant Rena Foreman sat at her desk, leaning back in her chair while she argued desultorily with her partner, Detective Larry Othar. The two were always arguing about something, a clear sign that as partners they were really close. Rena was tall and slender with auburn hair and blue eyes, and Larry was tall and broad-shouldered with brown hair and blue eyes. They were also good cops, but that hadn’t kept them from being replaced as team leaders of the serial-killings case when the fourth body was found.

      The brass was being screamed at by the press and public alike, so they wanted action and an arrest as quickly as possible. When they hadn’t gotten the arrest by the time the third body was discovered, they’d put Mike in charge instead of calling in the FBI.

      “Hey, you two,” Mike said, approaching Rena and Larry. “I need to ask you about your part of the serial-killings investigation. How much of a background check did you do on each of the victims?”

      “The checks were routine but fairly thorough,” Rena answered. “We knew where the victims came from because of their ID’s, so we checked with the police in those places. Our counterparts confirmed that the victims were who we thought they were, but there was nothing in the way of records or files on the deceased parties.”

      “And that first victim, Don Grail, is originally from around here,” Larry added. “He’d gotten into some trouble as a kid, but his old man managed to get the charges dropped. Something about getting into an argument with a girl, and starting to beat up on her. The argument was loud enough that somebody called the cops, and they got there before Grail did worse than slap her around a little. The girl and her family were the first ones we checked, but they’d all moved away years ago and never came back.”

      “We traced them to Colorado, and the locals checked for us,” Rena continued. “Every one of them was accounted for, including the girl’s present husband. She was in the hospital having her third child, the rest of the family and the husband were there with her, and none of them had left the state for at least two years.”

      “And this is more involved than a simple revenge killing,” Mike said with a nod, showing them he knew they’d realized that. “You did exactly what I would have done—and did do—with the fourth victim, but now there’s something to add to the rest. Victim number five was a private detective brought in by victim number one’s sister.”

      Rena and Larry both exclaimed in surprise over that, and Mike gave them a quick rundown. After telling them what the dead man had said to Tanda Grail, he added, “So that means Saxon saw someone he knew, but not from the city and probably not from his work for the agency. If he’s the only one who could have spotted whoever he did spot, that tells us we have to look into Saxon’s past life. Private detectives are often retired cops. If Saxon happened to be one, where did he live and work? If it was another agency he’d been with, again, when and where?”

      “What makes you think it was a person he saw?” Rena asked. “Maybe he spotted some thing, and was able to recognize it because he came from a small-town area like this one, and everyone else at the agency is city-raised.”

      “That’s a possibility that should be checked, but I don’t think it’s what happened,” Mike answered with a distracted head shake. “Spotting some thing would not have gotten the man killed unless some body went along with the thing, which leads us back to an individual. And there’s one more job that has to be done—take the pictures and prints of all five victims, and have them sent along the network to the entire country. None of the victims have police records where they live, but how about elsewhere? And see if you can find out where they were all supposed to be before they turned up here and dead.”

      “According to his sister, Grail was supposed to be nowhere but here,” Larry offered. “Grail came back here every year on August first, and stayed for the whole month.”

      “Which he’d been doing for five years,” Mike agreed, remembering what Tanda had told him. “Take another look at who he associated with while he was here, where he went and what he did. Your first investigation said he kept to himself, but that doesn’t feel right. People go home to show off for the people they used to know, especially if they make it as big as Grail did. If they go home to hide, they stay longer than a single month. And why hide for just one month of the year? Did August mean something special to Grail? Did his friends know about it back where he came from? If August has nothing to do with the murder, I want to know so we can forget about it.”

      “We’ll get back to you with whatever we find,” Larry said as he reached for the phone, Rena doing the same. “Damn, but it feels good to actually have something to work on with this case.”

      Mike understood how the man felt, so he left Larry and Rena alone to go back to his small office, where he took care of paperwork while he waited for the preliminary report on Roger Saxon. He wasn’t expecting the report to tell him anything he didn’t know, not unless this was the time the killer had made his first mistake. If it was…

      Well, no sense in daydreaming. Mike brought himself back to the present with a shake of his head, then buckled down to finishing that paperwork. It needed to be done before he could leave to interview Tanda Grail again, an interview he was definitely looking forward to. But not because she’d given him his first real lead, and might somehow give him another of the same. Despite knowing better than to get involved with a possible suspect, he realized it was the woman herself he wanted to see. There was just something about her…

      IT WAS STILL DRIZZLING when Tanda reached home, but pulling the van into the carport meant she didn’t have to use her umbrella. Not that the umbrella would have helped. Tanda was already so damp that nothing but a change of clothes would help.

      For once, walking into the house didn’t give Tanda the usual feeling of being safely home. The kitchen, usually so bright and cheerful in yellow and white with touches of red, looked as drab and gray as the weather. Tanda remembered when her father had redone the kitchen for her mother, adding the surprise of a brand-new gas range. He’d been trying to bring some happiness into the life of a woman who grieved endlessly for a missing son, but it hadn’t worked. The heartbroken woman had still grieved herself to death, and the gift had gone unappreciated by anyone but Tanda.

      Now she stood and looked around, finally understanding why a new kitchen hadn’t distracted her mother. She, herself, would give that kitchen and all the rest of the house to find her brother’s murderer and bring that person to justice. She still didn’t know if Don had seriously changed or had been playing some kind of game, and now she’d never know the truth. The chance to find out had been stolen from her, along with the last member of her family; for that she would find the guilty person, even if she had to do it alone.

      Tanda went through the kitchen into the hall, and from there to her bedroom. The large room had originally belonged to her parents, and after her father died it had taken Tanda six months to make up her mind to use it. It wasn’t as if she’d really believed her parents had gone off for just a little while and would return very shortly. It was more that the realization they were gone forever had to be actively accepted, and that had hurt. She hadn’t been able to ease the pain until Don took her to dinner a couple of weeks earlier, and now…

      Rather than going through it all again, Tanda forced herself to drop the subject and change

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