Dead Certain - Mariah Stewart [113]
“Okay, then. We all agree.” Miranda looked around the table. “Any ideas on exactly how we’re going to do this?”
“How about this?” Sean was the first to speak up. “We get Bob Benson—he’s the chief down in Carleton—to make a big deal out of having a suspect in the Connie Paschall murder. But he’ll refer to him as Vinnie Daniels, not Vince Giordano, and say that he’s a suspect in Derek England’s murder as well, since the same gun was used. He’d expect us to figure that out. Anyone who watches enough cop shows on TV knows that bullets can be matched through a national database. We’ll have a police sketch done, maybe one that only looks vaguely like him, so that maybe he feels a little more confident. We’ll say he’s been traced to another area—”
“Say the FBI has tracked him to New York or some damned place,” Miranda suggested. “He’ll expect us to be in on this.”
“Won’t he wonder why we don’t know who he really is? He has to know there are fingerprints on file that will match with prints from his room and from Dolores’s house,” Anne Marie said.
“I think he’s going to wait to see if that connection is made, and when it isn’t, he’s going to think that proves he’s smarter than some small-town police department,” Sean told them.
“He’s not that stupid.” Evan shook his head.
Anne Marie smiled. “But I think he is that arrogant.”
“You might be right about that, Anne Marie.” Sean sat back in his seat. “I handled my first homicide investigation when I was in West Virginia. A chimney sweep had murdered and robbed several of his customers. A veteran detective told me to give him a few days and we’d find him walking down a main street in broad daylight, because he really fancied himself to be so much smarter than the police that he thought they’d never catch him even if he was right under their nose.”
“And of course he was picked up on a main street in broad daylight?” Evan asked.
“Sunday afternoon, strolling along through the town park. He was totally shocked when he was taken down.”
“So maybe Giordano will believe that we’re too stupid to figure out that he and Vinnie Daniels are the same person. Or at the very least that we haven’t figured it out yet. I’m sure he thinks that eventually someone will make the connection,” Miranda said.
“So we have to move fast, as fast as we think he’s going to move.” Sean contemplated the options. “How about this? We let Amanda move back into the house. Make it look as if she’s alone . . .”
“But of course she won’t be.” Miranda nodded.
“Right. Now, he’s been looking for her. He knows she hasn’t been around. So it follows that he’s going to be watching her house, waiting for her to come back. So we’ll put her car right out there in the drive, we’ll turn a lot of lights on. We’ll have her coming and going in and out of the house . . .”
“So that if he is watching, he’s going to be seeing a lot of her. He’ll see her moving about the house at night. He won’t be able to resist going for her,” Anne Marie noted thoughtfully.
“How long do you think it’ll take before he makes his move?” Evan asked.
“If he’s watching her? No more than seventy-two hours,” Anne Marie stated. “Maybe he’ll only watch that first day, see what’s going on. He’s going to want to make sure no one is there with her and that the surveillance has been terminated. Miranda, you’re going to have to be way under the radar, and Sean, we’ll have to figure out how to get you in and out without being seen. Amanda’s going to have to make it obvious that she’s gone back to her old routine. My guess is he’ll come after her on the third night. Definitely no later than the fourth,” Anne Marie said.
“You’re the expert on behavior,” Evan said. “I hope he behaves the way you think he will.”
“He will. This guy has a huge ego. He’s going to believe