CUTTING ROOM -THE- (45 page)

The most promising lead they had so far was also potentially the most disturbing. A surveillance camera had captured the tag numbers of all vehicles exiting the parking lot of the Hilton around the same time cameras had caught Daria leaving the hotel with a tall, dark-haired, sunglass-wearing stranger. A check of all those tags had been done. Most of the tags belonged to rental cars, and each renter had been tracked down and questioned. All but one had been found.

A black Ford Flex SUV was rented from Hertz out of Orlando airport the Sunday morning of Daria's disappearance to a Reid Smith from Uniondale, New York. It was returned the following day at the same location. Nothing remarkable there. But when Nassau County detectives tried to contact Reid Smith at the address on his DL, they found that he hadn't lived there in years. Even more troubling, though, was where that old address was located — right beneath a long closed and shuttered funeral home that had been the scene of a horrible crime back in 2007.

Kreller's Funeral Home had made news when the young daughter of its owner, John Kreller, told a pre-school classmate some of the gruesome things she had seen in her daddy's basement involving bodies that might not have been dead yet. The four-year-old classmate understandably had terrible nightmares that caused him to wake in the middle of the night screaming. Eventually his concerned mommy took him to a child psychologist, who pried out of the little boy the terrible secret he had sworn to keep, and a criminal investigation was reluctantly opened. As the ME's office worked to identify the owners of the multiple body parts that were subsequently found stored in a plastic tub in the funeral home's basement, and assess how those owners might have died, John Kreller killed his wife and his four-year-old daughter, Eva, with a shotgun before putting a bullet in his own head. Two teenage prostitutes were identified among the tub victims. The remains of another two bodies were found, but never identified.

Reid Smith was the cousin of John Kreller. Although he was never implicated in the funeral home murders, he was wanted for questioning at one time by the Nassau County PD. He had never been found.

Although his eyes were hidden behind sunglasses on the surveillance tape, the picture on Reid Smith's driver's license looked a lot like the dark-haired stranger Daria was last seen leaving the Hilton with. The hotel cocktail waitress who had served the two of them that night agreed. And when Manny pulled out a map of Long Island, he found that Uniondale was only a hop skip and a jump away from Westbury, where Gabriella Vechio's body was found dumped in a construction ditch back in 2006. Reid Smith also matched the general description of the man last seen talking to Gabby Vechio the night she disappeared.

There was now a BOLO out for Reid Smith. A records search of the DL pulled up little information of value. The man had no criminal history, no military history, no medical history. No DL address prior to Uniondale, no forwarding address since. No surviving family members. His name had not appeared on the passenger lists of any flights out of Orlando. Like Daria, his picture had been sent via teletype to every police department in the country. In the BOLO, he was wanted by the Orlando Police Department simply as a ‘person of interest' in connection with the disappearance of Miami-Dade County Assistant State Attorney Daria DeBianchi.

While everyone else in Orlando and Miami law enforcement was getting all excited about finding the dark-haired stranger from New York, Manny continued to unofficially plant himself every night in front of Talbot Lunders's mansion, a pair of night-vision binoculars in his hand, and two six-packs on the seat next to him — one of Coronas and one of Red Bulls. He wanted to drink himself into a stupor, to forget everything his brain had been thinking about for the past 116 hours, but he needed to stay awake and keep watch. Because he knew the man was involved. Despite whatever BS some probation officer had told Vance Collier about Talbot and his hot
mami
innocently spending the night of Daria's disappearance in Daddy's big nine-bedroom mansion, Manny wasn't buying it. There was no such thing as coincidence. Not in his line of work.

Talk had been thrown around that it could be Cupid. That somehow Bantling had found out the conference Daria was going to be speaking at and where she was going to be that night, and he'd waited for her at the Hilton in the lounge. In a bar full of law-enforcement personnel in town for a conference on how to catch predators like himself, he had waited for her, perhaps dressed in disguise. It did, after all, match Cupid's MO. The cocktail waitress wasn't 100 percent sure the man who had chatted up Daria was the man pictured on Reid Smith's DL. She was more like 75 percent sure.

But Manny didn't think Bantling was involved in Daria's disappearance. At least, not in the way the talk was going. And that was what scared him the most. Twisted thoughts of a snuff club returned to his aching head. Images of Gabriella Vechio's vicious murder was what he saw when he closed his eyes, except it wasn't the pretty accountant's terrified face he saw, twisting about, her arms tethered to the ceiling. It was Daria's. Those were the thoughts he wanted to banish with alcohol. What if it was a worst-case scenario? What if Daria had been abducted by a snuff-club member? What if she'd been scouted, and then taken someplace, kept alive and tortured for days by predators that Bantling had called ‘players'? What if she
wasn't
dead yet? What if every day she inched closer to death? What if that was what was happening to her right now while sick men called ‘watchers' watched and he sat uselessly in his car downing beers and Red Bulls? Manny knew the stats. With every day that passed, every minute that ticked by, the odds decreased dramatically of finding Daria alive. If she had been taken by the snuff club that had done those terrible things to Holly Skole and Gabriella Vechio and others, he knew she would wish those days and hours and minutes passed by even quicker. She would welcome death. Yes, he had considered Bill Bantling's involvement. And he, no more than anyone else besides perhaps C.J. Townsend, wanted the psychopath found. Because aside from Talbot Lunders — who was never talking and no longer had any reason to — Bantling was the one person who could lead them to the snuff-club members. He was the one who supposedly knew the names. He potentially held the key to finding Daria alive. And no one knew where he was, either.

He closed his eyes. Now he would beg Vance Collier to make that deal.

He'd spoken with Dom and there was nothing new to report. He had talked to C.J. She had not been contacted by Bantling. There was no indication he was in her area, wherever that was. She was coming back to Chicago in a few days. He was in talks with the federal witness protection program. Dom was hoping that things would turn around for them now.
Good luck with that,
Manny had said.

How ironic. The rapist who had torn Dom's relationship with his wife apart might just be the one responsible for reuniting them. A happy ending of sorts. Manny wasn't sure how happy it would ever be though, given that Bantling was still out there. How happy can one be in witness protection?

The front door opened then. As his mother watched from the doorway, Talbot Lunders walked out, keys in hand, and got into the Benz. The same car that probably still had dust from where crime-scene techs had lifted Holly Skole's fingerprints off the interior door handle. The same car that had driven her to her death. Manny gripped the steering wheel hard. It took all his strength not to get out of the car and beat the information he knew was in that piece of shit's good-looking head while his weird mother watched. The mother who he suspected Daria was right about all along. The anonymously emailed video clip of Gabby Vechio's murder was a ruse. A diversion to get them to start looking in other directions at other possible suspects. A perfect set-up for a reasonable doubt argument if the case went to trial. The fact that it had led to a Brady violation and Talbot's release on bond was a bonus. There was just no way to prove it.

As the gates opened and the Benz slowly backed out of the long driveway, Manny started up his car and popped a Red Bull. He waited until Talbot had zipped off down the block and the front door had closed before heading out behind him, hoping, as he had for the past five sleepless nights, that the bastard might eventually lead him to Daria.

It must be an omen, Bill thought, looking up at the sky.

The stars were gone. The black night sky was just … black. Or more like smoky gray. The thick clouds had moved in early and had stolen all the light from the sky. Heaven, it seemed, had shut down early for business tonight.

How appropriate.

He crouched in his spot in her backyard, dressed in black and hidden by the thick shrubs and tall trees, a brand-new bag of tricks at his side. A brand-new smiley face to wear when they finally met once again, up close and personal.

He wondered if she'd found his present yet. A tuft of hair cut from the latex clown mask that he'd picked up at a Party City. He'd spread it out underneath her sheets, so that when she climbed into bed she'd know he'd been in it. She'd feel it, tickling her skin. Like in that fairytale,
The Princess and the Pea
, the pretty little princess with the golden hair just can't seem to get comfy because someone had hidden something in her bed. Or, maybe the scene would be more like one ripped from the
Godfather
, when the movie producer wakes up in horror to find himself awash in blood and his beloved horse's head under the covers with him. It was funny that, after all she'd been through, she sent her big, bad and mean doggie off to camp to play every day, leaving the castle without any defense except a useless alarm that a street-kid with a pair of pliers could outsmart. The dog was probably more like the kid she couldn't have than the guard dog it was intended to be. Maybe, Bill hoped, she'd get up to go to the bathroom and find her sexy legs covered in strands of flaming orange polyester hair when she flicked on the light. That would be something to see. While Bill would've loved to have left the ex's bloody head under her sheets as a token of his love for her, former Special Agent Falconetti had skipped town before he could get him alone. Chloe must have shooed him out of her life once again. The poor fellow must have signed those very public papers, papers she'd filed in that very public courthouse back in Chicago, asking for a divorce. Sad.

If she hadn't caught on yet that he was in town, finding the clown hair would surely send her over the edge. And that was exactly what he wanted to see — his old Chloe, walking that fine line between the rest of the world and sheer madness. Going crazy because she knew he was near. Because she knew that he had found her. His fingers went to the knife in his pocket and waited for a sign from Grandma's house. But the house stayed dark. Maybe she was sitting on the couch with a gun on her lap waiting for him to crawl through her window. Maybe the stress had already gotten to her. Maybe she had used a bullet on herself.

When he worked at Sal's Pizzeria in Bayside, New York, so many years ago, he would watch her from the kitchen when she'd come in with her friends or her boyfriend. Flirty, giggly, sexy. And so, so pretty. He knew that she went to law school from the books she carried around and the sweatshirt she wore, and he knew that she must be smart, too. She was the whole package. Everyone wanted to be around her — even the waitresses wanted to wait on her. She was magnetic and Bill was drawn to her. Then one day he'd delivered a pie to an apartment on Rocky Hill Road and she'd opened the door. He was so taken by her, seeing her up close, that he couldn't speak. Couldn't even say thank you when she'd tipped him three dollars and flashed him a smile. He'd gone back to the car and jerked off with her tip money in his hand.

He'd often wondered if they would've gotten together the old-fashioned way if he'd ever summoned up the balls to ask her out. If he'd asked her to dinner, would she have said yes? Would they have dated? Would they still be together? Would they be married? Would his life be any different?

But he hadn't. So much for asking questions that could never be answered.

She was so pretty and nice and so perfect that she was unapproachable. No man could ask her out. No man would have the balls. And that was really what had pissed him off.

So he had taken her.

Then he'd watched as her life floundered and the fear consumed her. She wasn't pretty anymore, or sexy, or flirty, or fun, or smart, or anything. She never went out, she didn't become a lawyer, the boyfriend dumped her. She broke apart. And that, Bill had realized with amusement, had been real fun to watch. Almost more fun than fucking her had been.

Then she up and disappeared one day. He went by her apartment and she was gone. Just gone. When he saw her again, twelve years later, she was a different woman. Brown hair and glasses, frumpy suits and a bitchy attitude. She was a hard-ass prosecutor and she was hellbent on revenge. She'd turned the tables on him, yes. But not for long.

He was out now.

And he was here.

He checked his watch. It was after one. He reached for his smiley face. Then the garage door quietly slid open. The light did not go on. If he hadn't been watching the house, he might have missed it.

But he hadn't.

He looked down in his bag where the small silver beeper had sprung to life, flashing red, like a ticking bomb, counting down the seconds and minutes until time ran out. Then he watched in the darkness as her car backed out of the driveway ever so slowly with its lights off and drove past him into the gray, starless night.

C.J. turned on to Cathedral Oaks Drive, heading toward State Road 154. The side streets were quiet, but SR154, also known as San Marcos Pass, was completely deserted. And pitch-black. A two-lane highway cutting through the Santa Ynez Mountains and the Los Padres National Forest, SR154 was a true mountain pass. There were no traffic signals or street lights to illuminate the roadway; no homes or businesses around for miles. The highway was a relatively narrow swath of asphalt that cut through a thick green forest and an intimidating mountain range. C.J. had driven that way many times — there were dozens of desolate trails she and Luna had hiked that sprouted off the back roads that snaked through Los Padres. It was also the scenic route that ran through the rural Santa Barbara wine country and into Los Olivos — home to Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch.