“Yep.”
“Where was he before that?”
Stack went back to the table and leafed through the pages in the folder. “Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He took out one thousand on August 9.”
“So he was in Florida when those people died?”
“I suppose he could have flown, but yeah, probably.”
Stack hobbled back to the map. “There’s more. This one here.” He indicated another red tack. This one in Iowa. “We’ve got two hundred acres of corn that went bad overnight, on August 8, 1995.”
“Corn?”
Stack nodded. “According to the local sheriff, the entire field looked like someone covered it in gasoline and struck a match. Every stalk was black.”
“But not really burned.”
“But not really burned,” he agreed.
Fogel’s eyes narrowed as she stared at the map. “It’s always been people.”
“Unless we missed something, yeah.”
“And where was Thatch?”
“Texas, on August 6. He got to the cornfield on August 10.”
“Too fast for a bus, too slow for a plane. He’s driving,” Fogel pointed out.
Stack pointed at yet another red tack. “August 8, 1996, Chicago. A suspected mugger is found in Grant Park.”
“Burned, but not really burned.”
“Yep.”
“And Thatch?”
“Last withdrawal was nearly a week earlier in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Then another withdrawal on the 9th in Chicago,” Stack told her.
Stack went to the last red tack. “Last year. Rye, New Hampshire. A homeless man in Odiorne Point State Park. Body found, same as the others. He had three different wallets on him, so probably some kind of thief. He’s still a John Doe, though. Thatch got there two days later. Prior to that, he was in Philly.”
“He’s chasing these events.”
“He’s chasingher,” Stack said.
Fogel turned to him. “You really think it’s the girl? All of this?”
Stack turned to the wall with all the past victims. “Every one of these killings happened here in Pittsburgh. Then we got that massacre and house fire in ’93. From there on, they’re scattered around the country. All these random places.” He pointed at the picture of the house in Dormont. “It started here in ’78, our first three victims.”
“You said yourself, she would have been a baby. One or two, at most. How is that possible?”
Stack ignored her and went on. “Someone snatches her when she’s a baby, killed her parents and took her, kept her in that house, here in Pittsburgh. Until that fire. Now she’s on the run.”
“But she can’t stop killing?”
Stack rubbed his chin. “Something about that date. Always August 8.”
“How do you explain the cornfield? Nobody died that year. That we know of, anyway.”
