A flicker entered his eyes. “A lot of corn died, though, didn’t it? What if this isn’t really about killing but is somehow about ‘taking,’taking life?”
“What’s the difference? I don’t follow.”
“What if, on August 8 of every year, she has to somehow ‘take life,’ steal it, feed off the energy, maybe to sustain herself?”
Fogel laughed. “What? Like a vampire or something?”
“Like something, yeah.”
“Now I know you’re drinking again.”
He shrugged and crossed to the stack of file boxes on the far wall with an awkward limp. “All I’m doing is following the evidence. I’ve been through every one of these coroner reports a dozen times. Aside from the gunshot victims at the house, they all died of the same thing. They weredrained. Every ounce of liquid gone from the body, every cell dried out, every bit of lifegone,until we’re left with nothing but a dried out husk.”
Fogel was staring at the wall again. “Okay, let’s suppose you’re actually right and not just some crazy old man—”
“Thanks for that.”
Fogel went on. “Aside from the first year, we’ve got single victims from ’79 through ’92, then in ’93 we get the shit show at the house on Milburn, twenty-one bodies in total but only seven burned but not burned, fitting her pattern. What was that?”
“I think somebody went in to put her down, and she used the opportunity to get out.”
“Our man in the black GTO.”
“Yeah.”
“And Brier got caught in the crossfire.”
Stack nodded. “Seems so.”
The two of them went quiet for a long while as all of this sank in. Then Fogel returned to the map. “The blue tacks are cash withdrawals, right? Look at this. He’s been all over the country.”
“From what I can tell, he never spends more than a few weeks in the same place,” Stack replied.
“Has he been back to Pittsburgh?”
“He hasn’t withdrawn any money in or around Pittsburgh, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been here. That attorney of his would probably know, but he’s not going to tell us,” Stack said.
“Where was the most recent withdrawal?”
“A small town in Nevada called Fallon—last night at 10:38.”
“And we’ve got two days until August 8.”
“Yep.”
Fogel stared at the map. Thatch is chasing the girl. Fogel’s chasing Thatch; had been for years. The definition of insanity is repeating the same thing and expecting a different result. If she wanted to solve this, she needed to get ahead of it. “I’ve got some airline miles saved up, and I haven’t called in sick for three years.”
Stack took the bottle of Aleve from his pocket and swallowed two pills with a sip of Diet Coke. “That’s my girl.”
2
In July of 1998, one week before Fogel would meet with Stack, I woke to a kick in the shin and a not-so-friendly gruff voice coming from an even unfriendlier face staring down at me. “Hey, kid. You can’t sleep there.”
That statement wasn’t altogether true, because Ihadslept right there. I picked up at least three hours of uninterrupted z-time in that very spot before he came along. I considered telling him that, but the fact he wore a uniform zipped my lip. Only a Bryant Park police officer, but a police officer all the same, and in New York the only place worse than spending the night on a bench in the park was spending a night in a cell surrounded by crackheads, drunks, and assorted homeless.
I almost grinned at that particular thought, but grinning would hurt too much. I had no business thumbing my nose at those people. After all, they weremypeople and had been for some time now.
I swung my legs off the side of the bench and pinched my eyes shut against the sharp sun poking through the trees, and the little movement hurt, too. A tiny hammer inside my head gave my temple an exploratory thump, then followed through with a hard-handed pound, another after that. My stomach rolled, followed by a guttural noise that left my mouth tasting like rancid pork and whiskey.
