Red Dragon - Thomas Harris [122]
“You can't see this side of the house from the woods.”
Crawford nodded. “He waits in the woods. They go to bed and he moves in with his bolt cutter and finds the new door with the deadbolts.”
“Say he finds the new door. He had it all worked out, and now this,” Graham said, throwing up his hands. “He's really pissed off, frustrated, he's hot to get in there. So he does a fast, loud pry job on the patio door. It was messy the way he went in - he woke Jacobi up and had to blow him away on the stairs. That's not like the Dragon. He's not messy that way. He's careful and he leaves nothing behind. He did a neat job at the Leedses' going in.”
“Okay, all right,” Crawford said. “If we find out when Jacobi changed his door, maybe we'll establish the interval between when he cased it and when he killed them. The minimum time that elapsed, anyway. That seems like a useful thing to know. Maybe it'll match some interval the Birmingham convention and visitors bureau could show us. We can check car rentals again. This time we'll do vans too. I'll have a word with the Birmingham field office.”
Crawford's word must have been emphatic: in forty minutes flat a Birmingham FBI agent, with realtor Geehan in tow, was shouting to a carpenter working in the rafters of a new house. The carpenter's information was relayed in a radio patch to Chicago.
“Last week in April,” Crawford said, putting down the telephone. “That's when they put in the new door. My God, that's two months before the Jacobis were hit. Why would he case it two months in advance?”
“I don't know, but I promise you he saw Mrs. Jacobi or saw the whole family before he checked out their house. Unless he followed them down there from Detroit, he spotted Mrs. Jacobi sometime between April 10, when they moved to Birmingham, and the end of April, when the door was changed. Sometime in that period he was in Birmingham. The bureau's going on with it down there?”
“Cops too,” Crawford said. “Tell me this: how did he know there was an inside door from the basement into the house? You couldn't count on that - not in the South.”
“He saw the inside of the house, no question.”'
“Has your buddy Metcalf got the Jacobi bank statements?”
“I'm sure he does.”
“Let's see what service calls they paid for between April 10 and the end of the month. I know the service calls have been checked for a couple of weeks back from the killings, but maybe we aren't looking back far enough. Same for the Leedses.”
“We always figured he looked around inside the Leeds house,” Graham said. “From the alley he couldn't have seen the glass in the kitchen door. There's a latticed porch back there. But he was ready with his glass cutter. And they didn't have any service calls for three months before they were killed.”
“If he's casing this far ahead, maybe we didn't check back far enough. We will now. At the Leedses' though - when he was in the alley reading meters behind the Leeds house two days before he killed them - maybe he saw them going in the house. He could have looked in there while the porch door was open.”
“No, the doors don't line up - remember? Look here.”
Graham threaded the projector with the Leeds home movie.
The Leedses' gray Scotty perked up his ears and ran to the kitchen door. Valerie Leeds and the children came in carrying groceries. Through the kitchen door nothing but lattice was visible.
“All right, you want to get Byron Metcalf busy on the bank statement for April? Any kind of service call or purchase that a doortodoor salesman might handle. No - I'll do that while you wind up the profile. Have you got Metcalf's number?”
Seeing the Leedses preoccupied Graham. Absently he told Crawford three numbers for Byron Metcalf.
He ran the films again while Crawford used the phone in the jury room.
The Leeds film first.
There was the Leedses' dog. It wore no collar, and the neighborhood was full of dogs, but the Dragon knew which dog was theirs.
Here was Valerie Leeds. The sight of her tugged at Graham.
There was the door behind her, vulnerable with its big glass