Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [278]
“Well, if this one was on purpose, why bother to clean up the place at all? He never seemed to care before.”
“Maybe he cleaned up because he wanted to use the house again.”
“For McGowan?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. But why bother to leave us a print that doesn’t even belong to him? Just like on the Dumpster behind the pizza place and on the umbrella in Kansas City.”
O’Dell hesitated, stopping her hands from shuffling papers and looking at him as if wondering whether or not to tell him something. “Keith hasn’t been able to find a match for those prints in AFIS. But he says he’s almost certain all three sets of prints belong to the same person.”
“You’re kidding. He knows that for sure? If that’s the case, maybe these murders aren’t Stucky, after all.”
He stared at her, waiting for some kind of reaction. Her face remained impassive, just like her voice when she said, “Jessica’s murder and Rita’s in Kansas City are awfully close together. I know I just said that Stucky could pull it off, but the anal penetration with Jessica is not Stucky’s M.O. Also, she’s much younger than any of his other victims.”
“So what are you saying, O’Dell. You think this one was a copycat?”
“Or an accomplice.”
“What? That’s crazy!”
She buried her eyes in the files again. He could see she was having a difficult time with the theory herself. O’Dell was used to working and brainstorming alone. Suddenly he realized that it probably took a good deal of trust for her to share this idea with him.
“Look, I know you’re serious, but why would Stucky take on an accomplice? You have to admit, that’s out of character for any serial killer.”
In reply, O’Dell pulled out several photocopied pages that looked like magazine and newspaper articles and handed them to Tully.
“Remember Cunningham said he found the name Walker Harding, Stucky’s old business partner, on an airline manifest?”
Tully nodded and began sorting through the articles.
“Some of those go back several years,” she told him.
They were articles from Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, PC World and several other business and trade periodicals. The Forbes article included a picture. Though the grainy black-and-white copy had obliterated most of the men’s features, the two of them could have passed for brothers. Both had dark hair, narrow faces and sharp features. Tully recognized Albert Stucky’s piercing black eyes, which he knew to be void of color despite the poor reproduction. The younger man smiled while Stucky’s face remained stoic and serious.
“I’m guessing this must be the partner?”
“Yes. A couple of the articles mention how much the two men had in common and how competitive they were with each other. However, they seemed to have ended their partnership amicably. I wonder if they might still be in contact with each other. Maybe still in competition with each other, only with a new game.”
“But why now after all these years? If they were to do something like this, why not when Stucky first started his game?”
O’Dell sat down and tucked strands of hair behind her ears. She looked exhausted. As if reading his thoughts, she sipped her Diet Pepsi, which he had noticed was her coffee substitute. This was her third one of the morning.
“Stucky has always been a loner,” she explained. “I haven’t done any research on Harding except for these articles, but for Stucky to have chosen anyone as a business partner is remarkable. I’ve never thought about it before, but perhaps the two men had, and still have, some strong connection, a connection Stucky didn’t realize until recently. Or perhaps there’s some other reason he decided he needed his old friend.”
Tully shook his head. “I think you’re grasping at straws, O’Dell. You know as well as I do that statistically, serial killers don’t take on partners or accomplices.”
“But Stucky is far from fitting any of the statistics. I’m having Keith run a check to see if Harding has ever been fingerprinted. Then we can see if we have a match to the fingerprints being left at the crime scenes.”
Tully looked over the articles, scanning the