Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [277]
“It would be tough but not impossible. He would have had to take Rachel Endicott early last Friday. Then come back to Newburgh Heights, watch Jessica deliver my pizza, lure her to the house on Archer Drive and kill her late Friday evening or early Saturday morning.”
“Doesn’t that seem like a bit much?”
“Yes,” she admitted, “but not for Stucky.”
“Then somehow he finds out that you’d be in KC. Even finds out where you’re staying. Again, he watches you, Delaney and Turner with the waitress—”
“Rita.”
“Right, Rita. That was what, Sunday night?”
“Around midnight…actually early Monday morning. If Delores Heston is correct, Tess showed the house on Archer Drive Wednesday.” She avoided Tully’s eyes. “I know it sounds like a lot, but keep in mind what he’s done in the past.”
She started sorting through the photos again. “It’s never been easy to track. Some of the bodies were found much later, long after they were reported missing. Most of them were so badly decomposed we could only guess at the time of deaths. But the spring before we caught him, we estimated that he killed two women, leaving them in Dumpsters, and that he had taken five others for his collection. That was all in the span of two or three weeks. At least that’s the time frame that the women were first discovered missing. We didn’t find those five bodies until months later, and they were all in one mass grave. The women had been tortured and killed at different intervals. There were signs that he may have even hunted down a couple of them. We found evidence that he may have used a crossbow and arrows.”
Tully recognized the photos. O’Dell had laid out a series of Poloraids that chronicled one victim’s wounds. If the photos hadn’t been marked, it would be difficult to tell that they were all the same woman. This was one of those five victims who had been found in that mass grave. The corpse was one of the rare ones found before decomposition or before animals had ravaged it. It was one of the few that was intact and whole.
“This was Helen Kreski,” O’Dell said without looking up the name. “She was one of the five. Stucky choked and stabbed her repeatedly. Her left nipple had been bitten off. Her right arm and wrist were broken. There was a puncture through her left calf with a broken arrow still intact.” O’Dell’s voice was calm, too calm, as though she had resolved herself to something beyond her control. “We found dirt in her lungs. She was still alive when he buried her.”
“Christ, this is one sick son of a bitch.”
“We need to stop him, Agent Tully. We need to do it before he crawls back into a hole someplace. Before he runs off and hides and starts playing with his new collection.”
“And we’ll do that. We just need to find out where the hell he’s hiding.” He didn’t want to notice that she had used the word stop instead of catch.
He left her side and checked his watch again.
“I need to leave around eleven. I promised my daughter we’d have lunch together.” O’Dell had moved back to the reports they had received from Ganza. She had the fingerprint analysis and was reading it over for the third time. He wondered if she had even heard him. “Hey, why don’t you join us?”
She glanced up, surprised by his invitation.
“I still think the print was left by someone who looked at the house earlier,” he said, referring to the fingerprint report and taking her off the hook if she really didn’t want to accept his invitation.
“He wiped down everything in the bathroom,” she said, “but he missed two clean and whole fingerprints. No, he wanted us to find these. He’s done it before. It was how we finally confirmed who he was.”
He watched her rub her eyes as if the memory brought on a whole new fatigue.
“At that time, we had no name, no idea who The Collector was,” she continued. “Stucky evidently thought we were taking too long to figure it out. I think he left us a print on purpose. It was so blatant, so careless,