Spider's Web (16 page)

“Is this the e-mail he sent you in its entirety?” Jacob showed her a printout of the e-mail she’d forwarded to them.

She glanced at the printout. “That’s right.”

“He doesn’t identify himself as the killer here, either,” Jacob said.

Mitchell glanced at his own copy. It was unsigned, and fairly brief. It stated what the messages to the victims were, described the images, and quoted the texts, followed by that creepy sentence about beautiful victims. It had been sent from a temporary mailbox site.

“No,” she agreed, “But he details all the messages, and says that he only selected beautiful young women. The fact that he’s the killer is implied.”

“How did you know it wasn’t a crank call?”

“I have my sources,” she said. “And I’m not going to expose them. Once I had the messages in hand, it was easy enough to validate that they were genuine.”

Mitchell wondered if her sources were on the Glenmore Park police force, or Boston’s. She probably had sources in both, he thought angrily.

“If the killer approaches you again, please let us know immediately,” Jacob said.

“Well…” She grinned at him. “We could both help each other, you know. I can promise to let you know as soon as he contacts me, and you can give me an interview.”

“Go to hell,” Mitchell said feeling a sudden pulse in his forehead. “You’ll let us know, or you’ll be charged with accessory to murder.”

“Fine,” she said, her voice clipped and sharp. Her patronizing look disappeared, replaced with fury.

“Thank you, Ms. Nate,” Jacob said.

She left in a huff. Jacob glanced at Mitchell, his blue eyes disappointed. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Mitchell muttered, knowing very well what was wrong. He felt guilty for causing this. “She got under my skin.”

“You don’t want the press to be hostile,” Jacob said. “She might look like a snotty woman who’s just out to spite you, but she’s a reporter. You don’t fuck with reporters.”

Chapter Fourteen

Detective Hannah Shor was following a trail of hair—the hairs found in the Toyota Camry that had been used to kill Tamay Mosely.

Matt had sent all the hair to the lab for diagnosis, hoping they might contain some rebellious nuclear DNA, so they could find a match via CODIS. The mayor, or perhaps even the governor, had pulled some strings, and their sample had been pushed to the front of the line. And, lo and behold, one of the strands
did
contain some nuclear DNA.

It matched a woman named Beatrice Smith, who lived in West Virginia. She had been arrested twice for theft, three times for prostitution, and once for drugs found in her possession. No one had any idea what her hair was doing in the car. It did not sound likely she was their serial killer, especially considering the fact that she had been incarcerated at the time Aliza Kennedy had been murdered. Jacob had theorized that the Toyota Camry had been hers before it was Rabbi Friedman’s, but a quick investigation found that the Toyota had only had one other owner, a Glenmore Park resident.

There was only one conclusion: Beatrice had ridden in the car as a passenger at some point. Rabbi Friedman vehemently denied ever driving around with a prostitute from Idaho. He was, in fact, fairly specific in his denial; apparently, driving around with prostitutes from someplace other than Idaho might be a different story. He also said, when shown her mugshot, that he didn’t recognize her.

Hannah had decided to talk to Beatrice face to face.

She might have tried using the phone in any other case; Idaho was not exactly nearby. But, hey—unlimited resources, right? She booked a flight.

She was assisted by the local police in Nampa, Idaho, who escorted her to a rundown trailer in which Beatrice was known to serve customers. Beatrice—or Clover, as she was known in the area—refused to go to the police station. She reluctantly agreed to talk to Hannah in her trailer.

Now Hannah sat in the cramped space, the smell of sex and sweat clogging her nostrils. All the trailer windows were curtained by a pink cloth, and the light was dim and bluish. A small mini-fridge stood in the corner, an assortment of bills and a small picture of a family tacked on it with magnets. Hannah had politely refused to sit on the bed, knowing if her pants rubbed the bedsheets by accident, she’d throw them away. She sat on a small stool instead, while Clover sat on the bed.

Clover was incredibly pale and thin. She wore almost no makeup except for very light mascara on her eyelashes. She wore a loose, faded blue t-shirt and a pair of black yoga pants. Her black hair was cut short.

“I ain’t never been to Massachusetts,” she said. “I don’t know where Glimmer Park is at.”

“Glenmore Park,” Hannah said. “Have you ever seen this man?” She showed Clover the sketch they had of the killer.

“Naw.”

“How about this man?” She showed her a picture of Rabbi Friedman.

“A religious Jew, huh? I know someone who specializes in those, maybe you should ask her. I never seen him.”

“Did you ever ride in this car?” Hannah showed her a picture of the car.

“I rode in hundreds of cars. I’ve had sex and given blowjobs in hundreds of cars. Yeah, I might’ve been in this car, who knows?”

“We’ve found your hair in the front seat of the car.”

“Sure, whatever.”

“This car was used to run over a girl and kill her.”

Clover did not seem to be shocked by the news. “That sucks,” she said. “I ain’t never run over a girl in any car.”

Hannah sighed. It was a long way to come just to find a dead end, but that was the way of detective work. She began thinking about the flight back. She hoped she’d manage to sleep a bit on the way. She was tired as hell. They’d been working around the clock for days, and it was wearing them thin. She looked around at the trailer once more, then stood up and inspected the picture stuck on the mini-fridge more closely.

“That your family?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Mount Rushmore, huh?”

“Yeah,” Clover shrugged. “I guess everyone goes there at some point.”

“I’ve never been,” Hannah said.

“Your time will come.”

“You had really long hair,” Hannah said. “It goes all the way down to your waist in the picture.”

“It was even longer after I showered,” Clover said. “It took me hours to brush it.”

“Your hair is really short now, though.”

“Yeah. I don’t like when customers pull it when they fuck me from behind. I’m not a damn horse.”

The little details always penetrated deepest. Hannah bit her lip, trying to dispel the upsetting images in her mind. “So you cut it.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you by any chance sell it?”

“Yeah, sure, how did you know?”

Bingo. “Do you have the name of the place you sold it to?” Hannah asked.

“I have their phone number,” Clover said, pulling out her phone. She located the contact, then showed it to Hannah, who carefully copied it to her own phone.

“Thanks,” Hannah said, standing up. “I think that’s all I need.”

“Cool. Glad I could help,” Clover said, opening the door of the trailer for Hannah.

“Uh… Listen, Clover…”

“Yeah?”

“I think you keep that picture for a reason, you know? Maybe to remind you of better times? You know, there are people who can help.”

Clover nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah. That picture? My dad took it on a family trip, when I was seventeen. I was addicted to crack, and two weeks before that vacation I had just given my first blowjob for a twenty. A few days later I was raped. There was a party, and I was unconscious, but I was bleeding when I woke up. I told my mom and she asked me not to say anything to my dad before vacation, because he was under a lot of stress. You know why I keep that picture?”

“Why?” Hannah asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

“Because I like Mount Rushmore. Goodbye, Detective.”

The trailer door closed behind Hannah with a click. She should have felt victorious; she had a lead. But at that moment, she only felt sad and useless.

He decided to go shopping.

He had already selected his next target. Such a beautiful young girl. He’d watched her the day before, returning home from work. A lowly job, for such a special girl. It was unfathomable. Was he the only one who could see how special she was? How much anticipation she could inspire?

It was time to choose the murder weapon. He knew what he was looking for; he had decided upon it shortly after killing Tamay. That had been such a noisy death. And the way he had lost control and run into that lamppost? It was the closest he had ever come to screwing everything up.

No. This time it would be a quiet death.

But even knowing what he was looking for, there were so many options to choose from! He stood in front of the various samples, touching each one, trying to figure out what would be best for his next endeavor.

He liked shopping.

“Can I help you?” a feminine voice asked. He turned around. Ugh. He would never touch this one. Those pimples, those glasses. Terrible.

“Yes,” he said. “I would like some help.”

Can you please help me choose a murder weapon
? He wanted to say.
I need something that can kill
. He nearly laughed out loud at the thought.

“I really have no idea what to choose.” He smiled at the homely woman, thinking of his next victim with anticipation.

The trail of hair was now really easy to follow. It was practically a highway of hair.

Hannah had called the phone number of the woman Clover had sold her hair to. That woman had given Hannah the wig manufacturer’s name, and managed to find the receipt for the date of the shipment that contained Clover’s hair.

Since the wig manufacturer was in Nebraska, Hannah decided to first make sure the hair didn’t come from a wig that belonged to the rabbi’s wife. If she was anything like many Orthodox Jewish women, Mrs. Friedman had several wigs in her possession. Hannah called Jacob, and asked him to check if it was possible the hair belonged to Mrs. Friedman. A couple of hours later, a very testy Jacob Cooper called her back to say that it did not match any of Mrs. Friedman’s wigs, and did she want to hear what he just went through to ascertain this? Hannah told him that she did not.

The wig manufacturer was a bit trickier. They didn’t want to share. She had to get the local district attorney over there to issue a search warrant, and then had to enlist the local police to assist with her search. It was a hassle. Any other time, it would have taken weeks, maybe months. This time, one phone call to Captain Bailey, and she was knocking on the wig manufacturer’s front door with a search warrant and four patrol officers in uniform to back her up.

She saw a lot of hair and hair-related paperwork in there.

It took her almost all day to understand the way they filed their paperwork, to track the shipment with Clover’s hair, to figure out which wigs it was probably used for. She would never have managed it if it weren’t for one of the clerks that worked there. She was a bright girl, and helped Hannah connect all the dots. Hannah suspected the girl had a crush on her.

There were over fifty wigs that might have used Clover’s hair, and no real way to narrow that number down. The wigs were then sold to several wig distributors, because apparently that was a real job.

Two days. It took her two days to trace those wigs. Two days of calling costume shops, cancer treatment centers, wig salesmen. Thirty-seven of the wigs were traced to various men and women around the country. Five wigs were still on the shelves of various stores. Eight wigs had been sold to unknown individuals whom Hannah could not locate.

Of the thirty-seven names she had, she managed to make sure that thirty-one had tight alibis for at least one of the murders, if not more. That left six names. One of them was an eighty-year-old woman; one was a woman who was going through severe cancer treatments and could barely lift her own purse, let alone strangle and bury Kendele Byers. Three of the remaining four names belonged to middle-aged women; the last was a fifty-year-old man. She filed them under “unlikely suspects.”

All she was left with were the eight missing wigs. One had been sold in Boston. It seemed wise to start there.

It took the owner of the costume shop an incredibly long time to find the receipt for the damn wig. It had been bought along with thirteen other wigs, four fake beards, and three fake mustaches. The entire sum of the purchase was $3,452.

It had been paid in cash.

The owner remembered the purchase. It wasn’t every day a customer forked over three thousand dollars in cash. However, he couldn’t tell Hannah a single thing about the customer, besides the fact that he had a ridiculously thick wad of cash. Apparently, the cash had erased from his memory any trace of the customer’s appearance. He gave Hannah a catalog in which he marked all the wigs, beards, and mustaches that the customer had bought. One of the other wigs matched the hair in the sketch that had been made with Rabbi Friedman’s help.

Using the catalog and the previous description from Rabbi Friedman, the police sketch artist created several dozen images of how the killer might look with the different props. They now had a mugshot book of how the serial killer could look.

Bernard had finally finished investigating the crimes in Boston, and was back in Glenmore Park. He and Hannah started interviewing relatives of the murder victims, showing them the mugshot book.

Tamay’s boss identified one of the pictures. He said a man similar to the one in the pictures had been in the pub twice, just a week before Tamay had been killed. The man had seen Tamay’s band perform, and stayed until the bar closed. They’d had to ask him to leave. Yes, he was sure this was the guy. He was a bit different than the picture, but the hair was unmistakable.