Midnight Rambler_ A Novel of Suspense - James Swain [58]
“Enough of that,” Saunders said.
Kevin muted the clip with the remote. Soon the segment ended, and the camera pulled back. I could see Bash standing beneath the shade of an enormous oak tree off to the side. With him were four men, their faces masked by shadows.
“Freeze it,” I said.
Kevin froze the clip. I stared at the four faces, as did Saunders.
“Any of them look familiar?” Saunders asked.
I stared hard. Then I shook my head. The resolution on the clip was poor, and the faces were indistinguishable.
“I need this blown up and lightened,” I said.
“Your wish is my command,” Kevin said, popping the cassette out.
We followed him down a long hallway to an editing room, which was windowless and quite chilly. A black male technician was on duty, and Kevin explained what we needed. The tech inserted the tape into a deck, then had us go into the next room, a brightly lit soundstage with a giant video monitor hanging on the wall.
“I'd like to watch football on that baby,” Saunders said.
The frame we'd just been watching appeared on the monitor. Now, Bash and the four men looked larger than life.
“Would you look at that,” Saunders said.
Standing next to Bash was the history professor who'd molested his student. The teacher wore a baseball cap pulled down low, but it didn't hide enough of his face. It was definitely him.
“Do you recognize any of the others?” Saunders asked.
I stared at the other three men. They were smiling and looked like a bunch of guys having a barbecue in someone's backyard.
“Can you make the faces lighter?” I asked the tech.
“Sure,” the tech said from the other room.
The faces turned a few shades lighter. The guy to Bash's left wore shades and a leather bombardier jacket and was trying to look cool. He bore more than a passing resemblance to Skell, and I looked at his hands. Fingers were missing on both.
“That's Skell,” I said.
“Jesus, are you sure?” Saunders said.
“I'd bet my life on it.”
“What about the other two?”
The third man's face was partially turned. Hispanic, broad-shouldered, with an ugly facial scar. It was the guy who'd pumped three bullets into my car on 595.
“This guy tried to kill me the other day,” I said, pointing.
Saunders shouldered up beside me.
“What about the fourth one? Do you know who he is?”
The fourth man in the photograph was ten years older than the rest. He had meticulously styled blond hair and a beach-ball stomach. A thick gold necklace hung around his neck, and his watch looked like a Rolex.
“Never seen him before,” I said.
Saunders looked at Kevin.
“How hard would it be for us to get prints of this?” he asked.
Kevin walked into the next room and spoke with the tech. A minute later Saunders and I were holding color prints done off a laser printer. As I stared at Bash and Skell and the other members of the gang, my hands started to tremble. Finally, after six months of scratching my head, I was beginning to understand what I was dealing with.
“I need to talk to Ken Linderman,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I have a theory I want to share with you,” I told Linderman.
We'd driven back to the FBI building on Gray Street and were sitting in Saunders's office, talking on a squawk box.
“I'm listening,” Linderman said through the box's speaker.
“I think Skell is part of a gang of sexual predators,” I said. “Skell, a shock jock named Neil Bash, a high school history teacher, and two other men lived in Tampa three years ago, and if my hunch is correct, they preyed on underage girls. When the history teacher got busted and went to jail, the remaining members moved on to greener pastures.”
“You mean Fort Lauderdale,” Linderman said.
“That's right,” I said. “They came to my town and started abducting young women and having their way with them. They picked women who had no families and wouldn't be missed. They also chose women who were emotionally immature, so they could pretend