1st to Die - James Patterson [48]
“What did he say to you?” I said.
She massaged her brow, straining to recall. “He said, in the weirdest way, that they were lucky.”
“Who was lucky?”
“Melanie and David. I may have said, ‘Aren’t they lucky?’ Meaning the two of them. They were so stunning. And he replied, ‘Oh, they’re lucky.’”
She looked up with a confused expression on her face. “He called them something else… chosen.”
“Chosen?”
“Yes. He said, ‘Oh, they’re lucky…. You could even say they were chosen.’”
“You say he had a goatee?”
“That’s what was so strange. The beard made him seem older, but the rest of him was young.”
“The rest of him? What do you mean?”
“His face. His voice. I know this must sound strange, but it was only for a moment, as I came off the dance floor.”
We got as much as we could from her. Height, hair color. What he was wearing. Everything confirmed the sparse details that we already had. The killer was a man with a short, reddish beard. He had been wearing a tux—the tux jacket he had left behind in the Mandarin Suite.
A fire was building inside me. I felt sure that Laurie Birnbaum was credible. The beard. The tux. We were piecing together his appearance. “Is there anything more, anything at all that stands out to you? Some physical characteristic? A mannerism?”
She shook her head. “It happened so quickly. It was only when I saw the drawing of him in the Chronicle…”
I looked at Chin, conveying that it was time to call down an artist to firm up the details. I thanked her, made my way back to my desk. We’d get a sketch from her to use along with the one from Maryanne Perkins at Saks.
The murder investigation had entered a new phase. It was very hot. We had a stakeout operational outside the Bridal Boutique at Saks. One by one, we were contacting the names on the store’s list, anyone who had ordered a wedding dress in the past several months.
My heart was pounding. The face I had imagined, my dream of the red-bearded man, was starting to fill in. I felt we had him contained.
My phone rang. “Boxer,” I answered, still shuffling through the names in the Saks wedding folder.
“My name’s McBride,” a deep, urgent voice said. “I’m a homicide detective. In Cleveland.”
Chapter 53
“I GOT A HOMICIDE HERE that fits the pattern of what you’ve been dealing with,” McBride explained.
“GSWs,” McBride continued, “both of them. Gunshot wounds right between the eyes.” He described the quick but grotesque deaths of Kathy and James Voskuhl, killed at their wedding at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This time the killer hadn’t even waited for the wedding to end.
“What kind of weapon your guy use in Napa?” McBride asked.
“Nine millimeter,” I told him.
“Same.”
I was reeling a little bit. Cleveland?
A voice pounded inside me. What the hell was Red Beard doing in Ohio? We had just made the breakthrough, found out where he was casing his victims. Did he know that? If so—how?
Cleveland was either a copycat killing, which was entirely possible, or this case had just broken wide open and could lead anywhere.
“You have crime-scene photos there, McBride?” I asked.
McBride grunted, “Yeah. Got them right in front of me. Nasty. Sexually explicit.”
“Can you get me a close-up of their hands?”
“Okay, but why the hands?”
“What were they wearing, McBride?”
I heard him shuffling through photos. “You mean rings?”
“Good guess, Detective. Yeah.”
I was praying that it wasn’t our guy. Cleveland…it would shatter everything that made me feel we were close to him. Was Red Beard taking his killing act across the country?
A minute later, McBride confirmed exactly the thing I didn’t want to hear. “There are no wedding bands.”
The bastard was on the move. We had a stakeout going where we thought he might show up, and he was two thousand miles away. He’d just murdered