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“The evidence techs didn’t find a usable fingerprint,” Sam told Roger Bernsen a couple of hours later. “But they did find a partial shoe print. Looks like a running shoe; I’m trying to get a make on the brand by the tread pattern.”
Detective Bernsen said what Sam already knew: “He broke in intending to kill her, and trashed her place instead when she wasn’t there. You got a fix on the time?”
“Between eight P.M. and midnight, roughly.” Mrs. Holland kept a close watch on the street, and she said she hadn’t seen a strange car or anyone unknown to her before Sam himself had arrived home. After dark, everyone was inside.
“Lucky she wasn’t at home.”
“Yeah.” Sam didn’t want to think about the alternative.
“We gotta start running down those personnel files at Hammerstead.”
“The C.E.O. is my next call. I don’t want anyone else knowing that we’re checking the files. He can have them pulled without anyone questioning him. Maybe they can be copied to our computers so we don’t have to risk going there.”
Roger grunted. “By the way, the M.E. has released Ms. Dean’s body. I’ve contacted her sister.”
“Thanks. We need to have someone videotaping the funeral.”
“You think he’ll be there?”
“I’m betting on it,” Sam said.
twenty-three
Corin hadn’t been able to sleep, but he didn’t feel tired. Frustration gnawed at him. Where had she been?
She would have told him, he thought. Sometimes, most of the time, he didn’t like her at all, but sometimes she could be nice. If she had been feeling nice, she would have told him.
He didn’t know what to think about her. She didn’t dress like a whore the way Marci Dean had, but men always looked at her anyway, even when she was wearing pants. And when she was being nice, he liked her, but when she cut people to shreds with her tongue, he wanted to hit her and hit her, and just keep hitting her until her head was all soft and she couldn’t do those things to him anymore …. But was that her, or Mother? He frowned, trying to remember. Sometimes things got so confused. Those pills must still be affecting him.
Men looked at Luna, too. She was always sweet to him, but she wore a lot of makeup and Mother thought her skirts were always too short. Short skirts made men think nasty thoughts, Mother said. No good woman ever wore short skirts.
Maybe Luna just acted sweet. Maybe she was really bad. Maybe she was the one who had said those things, and made fun of him, and caused Mother to hurt him.
He closed his eyes and thought of how Mother had hurt him, and a tingle of excitement went through him. He ran his hand down his front, the way he wasn’t supposed to, but it felt so good that sometimes he did it anyway.
No. That was bad. And when Mother had hurt him, she had just been showing him how bad that thing was. He shouldn’t enjoy it.
But the night hadn’t been a total waste. He had a new lipstick. He took off the top and twisted the base so the vulgar thing slid out. It wasn’t bright red like Marci’s, it was more of a pinkish color, and he didn’t like it nearly as well. He painted his lips, scowled at his reflection in the mirror, then wiped off the color in disgust.
Maybe one of the others would have a lipstick that suited him better.
Laurence Strawn, C.E.O. of Hammerstead Technology, was a man with a boisterous laugh and a knack for seeing the big picture. He wasn’t good with details, but then, he didn’t need to be.
That morning he had received a call from a Warren detective named Donovan. Detective Donovan had been very persuasive. No, they didn’t have a warrant to search Hammerstead’s personnel records, and they preferred to keep this as quiet as possible. What he was asking for was cooperation in catching a murderer before he could kill again, and they had a hunch he worked at Hammerstead.
Why was that? Mr. Strawn had asked, and was told about the phone call to T.J. Yother’s cell phone, whose number he wouldn’t have known was hers unless he had access to certain information about her. Since they were fairly certain Marci Dean had known her killer and that the same man was the one who had called T.J.’s cell phone, then it followed that they both knew him, that, in fact, all four of the friends knew him. That made it highly probable that he worked at Hammerstead with them.
Mr. Strawn’s immediate reaction was that he didn’t want this leaking to the press. He was, after all, a C.E.O. His second, more thought-out reaction, was that he would do whatever possible to stop this maniac from killing more of his employees.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
“If we have to, we’ll come to Hammerstead to go over the files, but we’d prefer not to alert anyone that we’re looking. Can you access the files and attach them to an E-mail to me?”
“The files are on a separate system that isn’t online. I’ll have them copied to a CD for my files, then send it to you. What’s your E-mail address?” Unlike a lot of chief executive officers and corporate presidents, Laurence Strawn knew his way around computers. He’d had to become proficient just to understand what the loonies on the first two floors were doing.
“T.J. Yother works in human resources,” he added as he copied down Detective Donovan’s E-mail address, another talent he had, that of doing two things at once. “I’ll have her do it. That way we know there won’t be a leak.”
“Good idea,” said Sam. With that accomplished with surprising ease—he thought he’d like Laurence Strawn—he turned his attention to the partial shoe print the techs had lifted from Jaine’s bathroom floor, where the bastard had stepped in the ruins of her makeup and left a pretty good imprint behind. He just hoped it was enough to identify the style. O. J. Simpson aside, when they caught this guy, it would help if they could prove he owned the type of shoe that had made the print, and in the same size. It would be even better if there were still little clumps of makeup caught in the treads.
